The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment movement has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. This highly original study, based on analysis of the correspondence and literary works of a group of educated Jewish women, demonstrates their intellectual proclivities, feminine awareness, and social activities, as well as their attitudes to marriage, traditional family frameworks, and religion. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to German Jewish history as well as to gender studies.

A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonnière and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.

The Berlin Jewish community was both the pioneer in intellectual modernization and the first to experience a crisis of modernity. This original and imaginative book connects intellectual and political transformation with the social structures and daily activities of the Jewish community. Steven M. Lowenstein has used extraordinarily rich documentation about the life of Berlin Jewry in the period and assembled a collective biography of the entire community of Berlin Jews. He has examined tax lists, subscription lists, genealogical records, and address lists as well as kosher meat accounts to give us a vivid picture of daily life. On another level in detailing the complexity of Jewish life in Berlin during this period, this book illuminates the connections between the "peaceful stage" of enlightenment and the crisis that followed.

The process of secularization, which is one of the sources of present-day democracy, has its radical origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Criticism of religious norms and discipline, institutions and ideology led to the movement known as the Enlightenment. Its Jewish protagonists (the maskilim), a young intellectual elite, undertook the role of culturally revolutionizing eighteenth-century Jewish society. They aimed at overturning the monopolistic control of rabbinic scholars over education, publications, and social behaviour in favour of secular intellectual values. They sought to promote political rights and religious tolerance, embraced humanism, rationalism, and freedom of opinion. In turn, the end of Jewish isolation brought about a significant contribution to philosophy, science, and art, and participation in the culture of modern European society.This introduction to the emergence of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in Germany pays special attention to its most famous figure, Moses Mendelssohn, who was active at the centre of the Enlightenment in Berlin. The volume is richly illustrated with images of eighteenth-century manuscripts, books, and pamphlets, some of which are published here for the first time, and which derive from a collection assembled by the famous nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz. This is an attractive book providing an excellent guide to the major cultural metamorphosis represented by Jewish Enlightenment.

During the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few wealthy, cultivated Jewish women to discuss the events of the day. Princes, nobles, upwardly mobile writers, actors, and beautiful Jewish women flocked to the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past.

A biography of a Jewish woman, a writer who hosted a literary and political salon in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, written by one of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals, Hannah Arendt. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though not published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, passionate woman, and an important figure in German romanticism. Rahel Varnhagen also bore the burdens of being an unusual woman in a man’s world and an assimilated Jew in Germany. She was, Arendt writes, “neither beautiful nor attractive . . . and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality.” Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel’s life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which assimilation defined one person’s destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.” Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Arendt observes, “did she find a place in the history of European humanity.”

"At the end of the 18th century, German high society is on the precipice of enlightenment. Rachel Levin, the restless daughter in a successful family of merchants, forms a strong and lasting connection with Henrietta and Dorothea – each of them a member of known and well-respected Jewish families. Yet the three of them are far from respected, or free. In a society where a woman’s value is measured by the man in front of her, the three independent-thinking women set out to make their own paths in life – as Berlin’s most popular Salonnières. United by their passion on the backdrop of rising German nationalism, where being born Jewish, not to mention a woman, is far from advantageous - Rachel, Henrietta, and Dorothea each face challenges of the mind, soul, and heart. Finding their place in history will not only put them at risk. They will soon find their dreams can cost them far more than their status." -- Back cover.