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Jewish Women, Identity, and the Aufklärung: 
The German-speaking Enlightenment around 1800 
 
Josephine Porter 
University of St Andrews 

 
Abstract 
 
This paper poses the question, “how enlightened was German-speaking central Europe 
around 1800?” The initial idea was to explore how marginalized groups accessed the 
German Enlightenment. During the process of writing, it developed into a wider exploration 
of female Jewish identity. This revised and lengthened paper, therefore, has become a critical 
analysis of civil society’s perception of Jewish female participants and their unique identity 
in nineteenth-century Germany.1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1 I would like to thank Dr. Claudia Kreklau for always encouraging me to develop my ideas and for 
suggesting I submit my work to the Yearbook. I would also like to thank Professor Meyer Weinshel and the 
entirety of the Central European Yearbook for giving me the opportunity to publish my work and be a part 
of this journal. And I would like to thank Tom and my parents for supporting me in everything I do. 

133 



 

 
 
Introduction 
 

Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a salonnière of the German-speaking Enlightenment, often 
contemplated her female Jewish identity and questioned her place in society. How did 
someone who was both Jewish and female, and thereby doubly marginalized, internally 
remedy these contrasting components of identity? Jay Geller deciphers this comingling of 
identities, presenting the “Jewess,” a separate identity projected onto female Jews.2 This 
unique character allowed Jewish women to hold specific roles in the German-speaking 
Enlightenment. The nineteenth-century Enlightenment was inherently paradoxical, 
professing freedom and liberty for humanity while simultaneously excluding large swathes 
of the population. People of color, women, lower classes, and other marginalized groups had 
no access to the position white male philosophers held. Yet, some groups could access these 
higher echelons of society – as long as they conformed to specific conditions. This paper 
explores one marginalized group’s role in the Enlightenment. 

 
German-speaking Jewish women had active roles in the German-speaking 

Enlightenment. However, these parts did not evolve into the utopian, egalitarian society that 
scholars such as Brian Vick and Hannah Ardent would like to purport.3 The teleological 
assumption that marginalized groups were working for some larger historical development 
conflicts with the actions of those marginalized individuals who successfully entered and 
participated in civil society. There is little to no evidence to suggest, for example, that 
salonnières were ardent feminists in the way twenty-first-century activists may imagine. 
The German-speaking Enlightenment, then, was a place that involved more diversity than 
one may expect, but by no means was it a utopia fostering diverse, egalitarian thought. So, 
how exactly did German-speaking Jewish women participate in the Berlin Aufklärung, and 
how could they do so through both their gender and religious identities? 

 
Jewish identity is a complex concept to deal with. Geller, for instance, chooses to use the 

term “identification” rather than “identity” when examining the Jewish Question. 
“Identification” instead alludes to a process that an agent undertakes rather than the 
complex concept of “identity.” He argues that “no single conventional criterion is sufficient 
for determining an individual’s Jewishness,” so the process of “identification” aptly reflects 
this multiplicity.4 Weir further complicates this by identifying the myriad of “Jewish 
Questions” to deal with; there is not one singular issue concerning Jewish identity, but 
rather a plethora of questions and issues that have existed throughout history.5 “Identity” is 
always a difficult concept to grapple with, but especially so when dealing with Jewish 
identity. This paper takes “identity” (specifically in relation to upper-class Jews) as their role 
and participation in the civil sphere. While “identification” may be a more accurate and less 
abstract term, this paper uses both terms for ease in order to discuss the unique position of 
Jewish women. 

 

5 Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late 
Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 46 (2014), 815–849. 

4 Geller, Jay, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham 
University, 2011). 

3 Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 152; Hannah Arendt, The Origins 
of Totalitarianism (Schocken Books, 1951), 77. 

2 Geller, Jay, “Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation,” in 
Judaism since Gender, eds. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (Routledge, 1997). 

134 



 

The question of Jewish women’s unique status within Enlightened Germany 
immediately raises a query: What was the Enlightenment? Such a simple, four-word 
question has stumped scholars for centuries. The Enlightenment was such a vast movement 
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it surely cannot be reduced to a single 
definition. Lester Crocker addresses this first problem. He discusses how definitions 
“impose a restrictive order on phenomena,” forcing authors to live within their prescriptive 
interpretations. Instead, he pulls on the concept of “descriptions,” which can interpret 
phenomena more broadly. Describing not what something is but what it did displays the 
phenomena and accepts its wide-reaching nature.6 What did the Enlightenment do, then, 
and how can we describe it? Crocker presents it as so: 

 
A diverse intellectual movement whose general direction was to use free, 
critical reason, untrammeled… by authority and tradition, in order to 
understand the universe, man’s place in it, human nature and interaction, to 
improve the economic and political institutions of society.7 

 
Crocker’s definition is simultaneously valuable and limiting. His open-ended definition 

allows an unrestricted interpretation of the Enlightenment, but it also leaves us wondering 
where the Enlightenment began and ended and who it involved. Perhaps the Enlightenment 
was not something that had a beginning nor end. We cannot point to a date and declare it 
the beginning of modern thinking. It, like so many other things in history, emerged slowly 
until, all at once, it was there. To simplify Crocker’s idea, we can infer that the Enlightenment 
was an extensive concept primarily characterized by critical thinking and the advancement 
of society. It was a diverse movement throughout Europe, with a plethora of intellectual 
thinkers, all theorizing about human existence, knowledge, logic, reason, and so much more. 
This diversity meant that the Enlightenment manifested differently in various regions. The 
most common connotations of the Enlightenment period stir up ideas of France, equality, 
fraternity, and liberty. These images, while characterizing the French Enlightenment – and 
others such as America – cannot be said to characterize every region’s movement.  

 
German history has been presented in historiography as “peculiar” and “exceptional” 

compared to the main trends of Western European history.8 This is also said of Germany’s 
Enlightenment (Aufklärung), which has been presented highly differently throughout 
historiography to that of Britain and France. The Aufklärung has been illustrated as tedious, 
timid, unoriginal, and overall “little there to compare with the best of contemporary writing 
in France and Britain.”9 Marx, following this line of thought, argued that a failed bourgeoisie 
was to blame, who “had sunk to the level of a type of estate, as clea§rly marked off from the 
people as from the Crown.”10 They supposedly didn’t have the same urgency in their actions 
or demands, seeing the state as a partner in Enlightened thinking.11 To be sure, the 
Aufklärung differed from France and Britain, but these differences weren’t necessarily 
disadvantages. Following Crocker’s idea of descriptive rather than prescriptive 
interpretations of the Enlightenment, we can argue that the movement was not monolithic, 

11 Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Allen Lane, 2006). 

10 Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, (Allen Lane, 1973), 192-4. 

9 H.B. Nisbet, “‘Was ist Aufklärung?’: The Concept of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” 
European Studies, xii (1982), 77; Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 
(Cornell University Press, 1996). 

8 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 
Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 1984). 

7 Ibid, 341. 

6 Lester G. Crocker, “The Enlightenment: What and Who?,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17, no. 1 
(1988): 336. 

135 



 

“dull,” or “tedious.” Both understudied and unfairly presented, the German-speaking 
Enlightenment was rife with discussions, debates, and social events. One of the busiest 
arenas of the Aufklärung were the sitting rooms of the Berlin elite. These spaces, called 
salons, welcomed a range of people, including women and Jews, allowing them to contribute 
to the Aufklärung effectively. 

 
There is, however, no exhaustive description of the Aufklärung, as recent trends in 

scholarship show; Hull, Blackbourn and Eley, Nisbet, and others have revised this portrayal 
of German history. Germany’s Aufklärung may not fit the model of France and Britain’s, but 
that does not mean it was a failure nor any less “enlightened.”12 To write another paper 
looking deeply into the nuances of German enlightened thinking – or comparing Germany to 
France and Britain – would be iterative and formulaic. As historiographic trends have 
shown, Germany’s differences should not be minimized nor derogated.13 As such, this essay 
accepts Germany’s differences and moves to ascertain how enlightened it was through the 
scope of the movement. 

 
This brings us to our second query. How does one measure the Enlightenment? 

Historical studies are not a scientific discipline; try as we may, we cannot give a scale on 
which to objectively mark enlightened thinking. A concept as abstract as the Enlightenment 
can, however, be measured in a plethora of abstract ways, using print media, legislation, civil 
society groups and clubs, or even the presence of a revolution. This paper uses different foci, 
such as gender and religion, to demonstrate how active the Aufkläung was, and how large 
the scope of the movement was. Using these foci, we can examine how far enlightened 
thinking permeated into German-speaking society. Looking at the gendered and religious 
aspect of Jewish women’s participation in the Aufklärung, we can ask not only what the 
Enlightenment did but also whose it was. Jewish women were practitioners of civil society 
but were marginalised on two counts – for their gender and their religion. “Civil Society” 
here refers to the people and community that engaged in enlightened thinking – usually the 
public sphere but also incorporated into the private. 

 
Using this term, and Hull’s idea of “practitioners of civil society,” this paper will revise 

and reinterpret an old-school question, giving it a modern-day twist. Primarily focusing on 
Prussia and Berlin around the turn of the century, circa 1800, we will look more closely at 
how Jewish women were active and involved in the Aufklärung. These women were far 
more involved in civil society than one would first believe, yet they were still markedly 
different from the principal practitioners and philosophers. This essay will first examine 
how Jewish women entered the civil sphere as women, particularly in their gendered roles 
as salonnières. Secondly, we will turn to religion and how women as Jews, and the Jewish 
community more broadly, participated in the Aufklärung through the Haskalah. Finally, this 
paper will present the concept of the “Jewess” where Jewish women’s gender and religion 
coalesced into a unique identification. This study uses excerpts of letters and biographies 
from Jewish women who contemplated and examined their identities. Letters, at this time, 
were a literary form deemed acceptable for women, so the ones still in existence offer a 
window into Jewish women’s emotions, ideas, and reflections at the time. 14 From this, I 
posit that German-speaking central Europe was a society moving towards an enlightened 
age, incorporating large swathes of society in its movement; however, its scope was still 
sorely limited by gender, religion, and class conditions. Indeed, this civil society was a 

14 Liliane Weissberg, “Writing on the Wall: Letters of Rahel Varnhagen,” New German Critique, no. 36 
(1985), 157-173. 

13 Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History. 

12 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany. 

136 



 

“developing” one, where enlightened thought and liberation benefited only the 
upper-classes of both Christians and Jews alike. This essay focuses on upper-class Jewish 
women who experienced the inner circles of the Aufklärung. 

 
“Berlin Landmarks”: Jewish Women 

 
Using a gendered lens, we can find that Jewish women, as women, were able to 

access civil society despite their role in the inferior sex. Fanny Lewald commented 
on the legacy of these women’s contribution to the Aufklärung in the 1830s. 
 

It seemed to me as if I found myself at King Arthur’s Round Table when I 
looked at these old, weathered faces… Once they had all been at the 
forefront of the movement. These frail women had overcome the barriers of 
the caste spirit with their Bildung, and they had conquered the violence of 
prejudice in Berlin by means of their own powers.15 

 

Fanny Lewald, a young salonnière, had lunch with Henriette Herz and Sara Levy – two 
famous salonnières in their seventies. She admired and revered their legacy, likening them 
to knights, even calling them “Berlin landmarks.” While this conveys them as having 
overcome the discrimination and prejudice in Berlin to become part of civil society, it 
suggests there was still a marked difference between them and the practitioners of civil 
society – they had prejudice to overcome in the first place that their male counterparts did 
not. 

 
Salons were a critical space for civil society at this time. Practitioners of civil society 

gathered in the living rooms of Berlin elites to share and discuss ideas. Despite salons’ 
fundamental role in the Aufklärung, there is no concrete, steadfast definition for them. 
Indeed, such a term was emerging during this period – Hahn, in fact, describes “salons” as a 
word for “what we do not know about social life around 1800.”16 Rather, the term provides 
an umbrella definition of female-led activities around 1800, an emerging and gendered term 
in German-speaking Europe. These salons were held in the homes of Berlin notables and 
invited a diverse group of people to join in discussion and conversation: men, women, 
Christians, Jews, middle classes, nobility, professors, poets, and others. The female hosts, 
known as salonnières, were wealthy elites with education in the humanities – often Jewish 
too. Through salons, Jewish women were active in the Aufklärung; they facilitated 
discussions and were educated in enlightened thinking. Their roles as women were 
fundamental to the character of salons; their marginalized social statuses meant they could 
promote these meetings full of diverse people. Hannah Arendt, a twentieth-century 
philosopher and Jewish woman, wrote an autobiography about her predecessor, Rahel Levin 
Varnhagen – a nineteenth-century forerunner of Jewish, female philosophy.17 She illustrates 
salons as a utopian, transformative space: “The charm of the early Berlin salons was that 
nothing really mattered but personality and the uniqueness of character, talent, and 
expression.”18 From both Lewald’s and Ardent’s depictions, it’s clear these women were 
important parts of the Aufklärung, even years later. 

 

18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 77. 

17 Hannah Ardent, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Institute, 1957). 

16 B. Hahn, “Die Salons der Rahel Levin Varnhagen,” in Berliner Romantik, Orte, Spuren und Begegnungen, 
ed. H. Gärtner and A. Purfürst (Berlin: Trescher Verlag, 1992), 106. 

15 Fanny Lewald, Meine Lebensgeschichte, Volume 3 of Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Verlag von Otto 
Janke, 1871); 116–17, 123–24. 

137 



 

Henriette Herz, in her later years, also described how transcending gendered barriers in 
salons had its difficulties. Even when mixing socially in these interstitial spaces, women 
were not on equal footing. However, she does admit that these differences in status were 
somewhat overcome: 

 
The relationships changed within our circles soon enough. The mind is a 
powerful equalizer, and love, which now and then does not refrain from 
meddling, often entirely changes pride into humility.19 

 
Herz’s experience exemplifies that women could be accepted into the salon community 

as equals, but not without a struggle. She posits the mind as an “equalizer,” an organ capable 
of overcoming gendered barriers. Her intellectual contribution to enlightened thought and 
discussion allowed her to transcend this barrier. This comment reveals a very vulnerable 
and human thought from Herz in relation to her challenges in life. To find a woman of this 
time so openly commenting on the power of intellect to overcome gendered hurdles is 
powerful to read. 

 
This egalitarian utopia illustrated by Ardent, Lewald, and Herz, however, was not all it 

seemed. Jewish women, while having these facilitatory roles, were not fully incorporated 
into civil society. The salons provided them with a space they could enter to participate in 
the Aufklärung, but this space was not wholly within the public civil society. As Vick argues, 
“salons bridged the boundary between private and public.”20 During this time, the 
dichotomy existing in a society where women inhabited the private, domestic sphere meant 
they struggled to access the masculine, public sphere. As Carol Pateman argues, “women are 
incorporated into a sphere that both is and is not in civil society. The private sphere is part 
of civil society but is separated from the ‘civil’ sphere.”21 This is an apt illustration of how 
women slotted into civil society during the Aufklärung; the salons allowed them to 
participate in civil society and enlightened thinking but were not able to fully permeate the 
boundaries. As Hedwig Staegemann – Jewish daughter of a Prussian official and a 
salonniére, despaired: 

 
O, truly, women are not suited to these times! They are suited, but they are 
made unsuited. …The soft education of the female sex makes their spirit as 
undecided, wavering, and weak as their body. … My heart rises up against 
this. It hammers and pounds forcefully and wants to fly boldly out of this 
petty sphere.22 

 
She describes how women have been weakened by society, which forces them into a 

specific sphere, limiting and controlling their education. Brian Vick argues women were able 
to participate more publicly and politically than historiography would have you believe.23 
But from Hedwig’s description, the middling sphere created by salons was as similarly 
imprisoning as the private one, tying this confinement to her sex. While they could engage 
publicly and politically, they were expected to limit and soften their interests and 
engagement with society. It was thought that women did not understand politics and to 
become too politically active in their endeavors was unseemly. The Austrian statesman 

23 Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 125. 

22 Hedwig Staegemann, quoted in Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 126. 

21 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11. 

20 Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 149. 

19 Emily Bilski and Emily Braun, The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons (Yale 
University Press, 2005), 27. 

138 



 

Metternich is recorded to have told his wife, the Duchess of Sagan, that he “would love [her] 
a little less still if [she] were political.” The Duchess, thereafter, subdued her political 
interests with humor and apologies to suit her husband.24 Men were open to female political 
participation, “with certain limits.” They could not be wholly political, needing to soften 
their opinions for the men around them. It is interesting to view Metternich’s censorship of 
his wife’s politics in the context of his censorship in Austria more broadly. His regulations in 
1810 set out guidelines for censors to restrict and redact media and texts, guidelines which 
divided texts into academic scholarship and popular entertainment – the latter of which was 
susceptible to more rigorous censorship.25 Texts, then, intended for the masses and lower 
orders were more heavily restricted by the state. When looking at Metternich’s censorship 
of his wife, we can see a mirroring of similar restrictions of lower orders. Men in scholarship 
and science who made new discoveries spoke more freely and could access more texts. Texts 
that were mildly censored were available only to scientists and academics, while women 
and the lower orders were censored and restricted from accessing them. Tamara Kamatović 
describes how these censorship regulations were paternally justified,26 implemented to 
protect the wellbeing of the Emperor’s subjects, stating that His Majesty was:  

 
Fully conscious of his foremost duties as ruler and father, which encompass 
the intellectual and moral education [of his subjects], as well as their 
physical well-being, and which no more allows that the subjects’ spirits or 
hearts be corrupted than that their bodies be corrupted.27 

 
Austria’s censorship regime under Metternich, while not Prussia, demonstrates the role 

of Germanic states in the proliferation of printed Enlightenment thought. The paternal 
hierarchy of state censorship is mirrored in Metternich’s approach to his wife’s participation 
in political thought and discussion. In encouraging her to soften her political tendencies, he 
is censoring her role as a practitioner of civil society, just as he similarly censored the 
literature of the masses. In salons, however, women were able to participate in enlightened 
discussions, although their politicization was still curbed. Here, discussions were seen to be 
calmer and more civil due to the presence of women;28 in fact, salons were one of the only 
places women could participate in civil society. Spaces like coffee houses were seen to be too 
impolite, public, or consequential to let women participate in. Salons, then, were shaped by 
women to keep civil society civil. Jewish women were certainly practitioners of civil society, 
but not in the same manner as men. They were fragmented from the main movement, 
allowed only to participate in certain settings or with certain conditions. The Enlightenment 
was theirs – but only in specified circumstances were they allowed to be active participants 
in it. 

 
‘The foreskin of your heart:’ Jewish Women as Jews 

 

28 Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 129. 

27 Marschke, Ben (trans.) “Guidelines for Administering Censorship and for the Conduct of Censors” 
(1810), published in German History in Documents and Images. Available at: 
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/the-holy-roman-empire-1648-1815/ghdi:document-3567. (Accessed 
15/11/2024). 

26 Tamara Kamatović, “Metternich’s Censors at Work: Philosophy and Practices of Censorship in the Early 
Nineteenth Century,” Romanic Review 109, no. 1-4 (2018), 103-26. 

25 Marschke, Ben (trans), “Guidelines for Administering Censorship and for the Conduct of Censors” 
(1810), published in German History in Documents and Images. Available at: 
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/the-holy-roman-empire-1648-1815/ghdi:document-3567. (Accessed 
15/11/2024). 

24 Metternich, quoted in Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 130. 

139 

https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/the-holy-roman-empire-1648-1815/ghdi:document-3567
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/the-holy-roman-empire-1648-1815/ghdi:document-3567


 

Jewish women, and Jews more broadly, were similarly able to access the civil sphere. 
The Jewish elite of Berlin learned Enlightenment thinking just like that of Christian Berlin 
intellectuals, and salons allowed the comingling of all religions and classes – Jews were part 
of civil society in this way.29 But they also had their own Enlightenment movement – the 
Haskalah. They read and debated new Enlightenment philosophy in their own communities 
and critiqued orthodox Jewish teachings – all fostered by the Jewish tradition of learning – 
from there, the Berlin Haskalah, a movement specific to the Jewish elites of Berlin – “was 
born and thrived.”30 For Jews, the Haskalah meant questioning orthodox practices and the 
religious elite, reinterpreting Judaism through enlightened thought.31 Clark discusses the 
Haskalah and argues its presence demonstrates the distinctive nature of the Aufklärung; it 
marked an important moment for German and Jewish-German sociability. Further than this, 
civil society provided an “interstitial sphere of enlightened trans-confessional conviviality.”32 
Similarly to salons for women, the civil society provided a space for Jews to participate in 
the public sphere alongside Christians. And Jewish women were a large part of this, as 
salonnières they were able to further bring together a mixed group of people. 

 
However, Jews were still fragmented from the center of civil society, being perceived as 

markedly different from their Christian counterparts due to contemporary legislation. In 
1750, Frederick II issued a General Code dividing Prussian Jews into six classes. Wealthy 
Berlin Jews sat in the upper class – generally privileged. But still, people of this class were 
rarely granted full citizenship, and citizenship itself was not instituted for Jews until 1812. 
The majority of Prussian Jews were modest people living under restrictive laws in Berlin.33 
Additionally, Weissberg describes how Jews were markedly different from the rest of Berlin 
through their homelessness. The concept of heimatlos comes from the German word heimat 
– an indefinable term with no English equivalent. It loosely equates to the German 
homeland or ancestral lands, and during the Enlightenment period, it was utilized by 
practitioners as a regional identity, a concept used in the midst of German states lacking 
territorial and political cohesion. Minsky finds that heimat became a central discourse 
“about place and belonging” in these spaces.34 Heimatlos was utilized conceptually to 
reference the topos of the “Wandering Jew.” Woolf describes this motif as so: 

 
He is, to a degree, the ultimate cosmopolitan: restrained by no borders 
and, often, able to speak all languages. He resides within time and beyond 
it, belongs nowhere and everywhere. He is human but condemned to live 
forever until the Second Coming of Christ releases him.35 

 

As a group suffering from heimatlos, Jews were constructed as cosmopolitan beings who 
drifted from city to city, borders not restricting their movement. The motif of the 

35 Michael Woolf, “The Wandering Jew,” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 30, no. 1 
(2018), 21. 

34 Amir Minsky, “Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in German Late 
Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Life 45, no. 3 (2021), 106. 

33 Ibid, 257-269. 

32 Clark, The Iron Kingdom, 263. 

31 Ulrike Wagner, “On Dialogical Writing, Self-forming, and Salon Culture: Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette 
Herz, and Fanny Lewald,” Hegel Bulletin 43, no. 3 (2022), 441.  
The Berlin Haskalah was highly characterized by Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewish scholar whose writings 
and use of Hebrew in the public sphere were widely admired. 

30 Liliane Weissberg, ‘Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited,’ in 
Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, eds. Shelia Jelen, Michael Kramer, and Scott 
Lerner (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 29. 

29 Geller, “Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity.” 

140 



 

“Wandering Jew” was utilized antisemitically, pursuing the narrative that Jews had no home, 
residing across Europe unattached to specific nations. This unattached status was seen to be 
a part of a larger Jewish conspiracy where Jews were aiming for world dominance.36 In the 
context of Berlin’s civil sphere, Jewish homelessness (heimatlos) marked Jews with a distinct 
status. Expelled from their homeland, they were visitors in German-speaking central 
Europe, with no native land, nor any civic rights or citizenship to take advantage of. They 
were granted the privilege to live in Berlin, rather than the right their Christian counterparts 
enjoyed. They were seen as homeless in both a philosophical and legal sense, pushed to the 
edges of society due to their historical status.37 

 
Their distinct status was also evident in salons. Salons were not solely secular places for 

reasoned debate and discussion; they acted as places for religious sociability also.38 The 
Jewish salonnières who, being socially marginalized themselves, were able to “suspend 
boundaries” and allow the intermingling of multiple faiths.39 After hosting in their homes, 
however, Jewish women could not expect invitations in return from their Christian visitors. 
While salons allowed the mixing and mingling of so many people in civil society, it still 
conserved markedly different statuses. The salon meant more privileged visitors – 
Christians with civic rights – could keep their homes off-limits to Jews, while still socializing 
and interacting with them in the civil sphere.40 Jewish women, and Jews more broadly, were 
participants in civil society, but degrees of separation had to be maintained – such as 
preserving Christian homes as Jewish-free spaces. Salons, while centers of enlightened 
thinking and discussion, acted like halfway homes for the heimatlos Jews of Berlin, providing 
an interstitial sphere but still stifling women and Jews’ full involvement in the public civil 
sphere. 

 
Even without the restrictive legal impositions, Jews felt symbolic differences between 

themselves and Christians. Rahel Levin Varnhagen expresses the conflict she endured over 
her Jewish identity; she articulated her Jewish identity through “figures of circumcision,” 
referring to the removal of the foreskin that physically marked Jews from non-Jews. 
Varnhagen, as a woman, was not circumcised but she talked of her phantasmal circumcision 
that, while not real, still left her feeling physically marked and removed from society. The 
Bildung that elite Jews were educated in was supposed to transcend this difference, but 
Varnhagen argued her (imagined) circumcision “could not be removed.”41 Even Hebrew 
scripture argues circumcision is not a physical condition but a fundamental difference Jews 
are born with. Deuteronomy 10:16 comments that one should “circumcise therefore the 
foreskin of your heart,”42 finding that Jewish observation required an internal alteration, 
demarcating Jews from Christians and therefore removing them from the center of civil 
society – and larger society as well. Jews were a part of enlightened thinking and civil 
society but were denied full and central involvement due to their lesser statuses. 

 
‘Eroticised and exoticized beauties:’ Jewish Women as the ‘Jewess’ 
 

The Jewish salonnières, such as Henriette Herz, Fanny Lewald, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, 
Hedwig Staegemann, and Sara Levy, held their gender and religion as two intermingling 

42 Deuteronomy 10:16, Hebrew Old Testament. 

41 Geller, “Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity,” 175-178. 

40 Ibid, 32. 

39 Clark, The Iron Kingdom, 264. 

38 Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 113. 
37 Weissberg, “Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800,” 27. 

36 Ibid. 

141 



 

parts of their identities. Not isolated attributes, these qualities mutually shaped each other. 
This is the definition of intersectionality according to Collins and Bilge who present it as 
categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and others, all “mutually shaping one 
another.”43 Gender and religion are two such entities intersecting within people’s identities. 
The Berlin salonnières experienced the intersectionality of their gender and religion in 
Prussia during the Aufklärung. They were agents of civil society and enlightened thinking 
that brought together feminine and Jewish aspects. These women were still a part of the 
Enlightenment, but these intersecting entities affected Jewish women’s place and 
involvement within it in a unique manner. 

 
In her letters and autobiography, Varnhagen discusses being a “Jewess.” The term “Jew” 

is a gender-neutral category, but Varnhagen interpreted her Jewish identity as gendered. 
She was not born Jewish but as a “Jewess.”44 As we have seen, Jewish women had a uniquely 
different experience from their male and female counterparts in the Enlightenment. They 
were not able to participate in the Haskalah which was reserved for Jewish men who had 
been brought up with an intellectual education. While elite Jewish women had also been 
educated, it was not learning in the traditional Jewish way, but a flawed and defective form 
of Jewish Bildung. Jewish women, therefore, could not access the Haskalah in the same way 
as their male counterparts.45  

 
The Jewish women’s experience differed from Christian women’s also; as Jewish 

women, society projected a sense of being foreign and exotic onto them, viewing them as 
“eroticised and exoticised feminine [beauties].”46 This perception of the “Jewess” objectified 
Jewish women; their gender and religion were merged into an exotic form of beauty and 
morbid curiosity. This was, however, dependent on these women being objectively 
“beautiful.” Varnhagen had expressed that being an “ugly” woman made their lives and 
efforts that much harder.47 Varnhagen was described by her visitors as a plain, middle-class 
girl – a contrast to the great beauty of Henriette Herz. She was, however, praised for her 
intelligence, wit, and friendship – qualities that were seen to compensate for her lack of 
wealth and beauty. These Jewish women, then, had to make up for their deficiencies as 
women and Jews with some impressive outstanding quality, whether that would be beauty, 
wit, or charm. They were not, however, allowed to exist as women in their own right. The 
topos of the “beautiful Jewess,” or as a charming and witty acquaintance, allowed female 
Jews to enter the civil society as objects of curiosity and desire. 

 

47 Wagner, “On Dialogical Writing, Self-forming, and Salon Culture,” 450. 

46 Marjanne Goozé, “Posing for Posterity: The Representations and Portrayals of Henriette Herz as 
‘Beautiful Jewess’,” in Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe, ed. Marianna Henn and Holger A. Pausch 
(Leiden; Brill, 2003), 80. 

45 Weissberg, “Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800.” 

44 Geller, “Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity,” 175. 

43 Patricia Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1. 

142 



 

 
 

The salonniére Henriette Herz was renowned for her great beauty and she defined 
herself through this beauty. In later years she reminisced, explaining that “guests spoke a 
great deal with me since they assumed I was intelligent because I was pretty.”48  In fact, her 
looks determined her place in society from a young age. As Marjanne Goozé describes, she 
was painted as the goddess Hebe at fourteen years of age, a common style for the upper 
class of eighteenth-century Europe.49 Despite being fourteen, she is sexualized; with her 
gown half off her shoulder revealing a hint of an areola, her small smile, and straight-on 
stare, she is displayed in a sexual manner. Perhaps this speaks more widely to the archetype 
of the “Jewess.” This sexualization could speak to Jewish women’s experience of 
eroticization from a young age, not just within the civil sphere but society at large. Despite 
this, Herz herself admitted that her perceived beauty made her an object of interest at 
salons, aiding her role as a Jewish salonnière. 

 
Jewish women had specific experiences that were unlike those of Christian women or 

Jewish men. Not just because of their gender and religion but because of the way these 
entities mutually shaped and entangled with each other, creating unique identities. But 
these individuals – Jewish men, women, Jewish women – were all tied together by their 
challenges to entering civil society. Jay Geller ties Jewish identification to the body, 
specifically beschneiden (circumcision). He finds that Beshneidung was an act “performed on 
objects that already served, respectively, as iconic and indexical markers of difference,” such 

49 Goozé, “Posing for Posterity,” 71. 

48 Bilski and Braun, The Power of Conversation, 26. 

143 



 

as the penis marking gender and sexuality.50 Women’s genitals were doubly marked as the 
inferior gender, lacking circumcision which was said to be what made a Jew a Jew. 
Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte made a remark to this effect in 1811, commenting that if 
one is not circumcised, then “one is not a Jew.”51 

 
Women, Jews, and Jewish women, however, did not share a cohesive experience as one 

and it is important not to over-romanticize this. As Wagner argues, social endeavors at this 
time “were not tied to specific ends that we can either admiringly endorse or expose as 
failures.”52 Their individual involvements in enlightened thinking were not smaller parts of a 
larger Jewish emancipation movement or feminist campaign. These people had prejudices 
to overcome, which they did – but not to any full extent. Neither were their intentions to 
form a part of an overarching Jewish movement. On the contrary, these “Jewesses” made up 
a privileged group of the Berlin Jewish elite, an elite group not solely concerned with 
furthering Jewish civic equality, but with their own penetration into the Berlin upper class. 
As Geller asserts, they “considered themselves different from their poorer, more traditional 
brothers and sisters.”53 The consequence of this was a middling group. Jews who were not 
entirely accepted into the Christian upper class but were distinguished from the everyday 
Jew in Berlin. It is important, then, to remember that the Enlightenment was an upper-class 
possession, a movement the general, unprivileged Jews and Christians alike could not claim 
to belong to. It is easy to draw up a narrative of a great campaign forming at this time, 
especially if we look to sources written by the likes of Lewald who presents salonnières as 
unsung heroes of the Aufklärung. These women may have held some greater, societal value 
in their assimilation into the Berlin elite, but ultimately, they participated in civil society for 
their own interests and ambitions. But who can blame them? These women were scaling the 
glass ceiling and smashing it open for themselves. 

 
The Enlightenment was accessible to them, and it was their movement too, despite their 

differences and disadvantages. However, they were markedly different from the other 
enlightened thinkers of the time. They were fragmented from the main sphere, on the edge 
looking in. Geller epitomizes this paradox well: 

 
Because she is a Jewess, she can never be accepted fully as such an individual. 
Being a Jewess is not just a birth defect. Rather, the birth defect recalls the 
biblical circumcision of the heart.54 

 
Conclusion 

 
There was a great diversity in enlightened thinking across Europe. This is true not only 

transnationally, but within borders too; the Aufklärung and enlightened thinkers in 
German-speaking central Europe varied greatly themselves. Women and Jewish 
Enlightenment thinkers, while involved in the movement, were fragmented from the main 
sphere. The famous Berlin salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 
bridged between both the private and public spheres, creating a space for women to 
participate and even lead enlightened thinking. Similarly, the Haskalah was an abstract place 
allowing Jewish participation in the Enlightenment. Gender and religion entangled with 

54 Ibid, 179. 

53 Geller, “Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity,” 176. 

52 Wagner, “On Dialogical Writing, Self-forming, and Salon Culture,” 438. 

51 Ibid, cited in Geller, 15. 

50 Geller, The Jewish Question, 7. 

144 



 

each other in a dynamic manner within Jewish women, forming unique identities in the 
form of Jewesses.  

 
This paper has, while proving Jews and women had access to the German-speaking civil 

society of the later 18th and early 19th centuries, revealed how Christian men shaped and 
molded this sphere to their liking. There was an implicit contract in place for these 
suburban citizens of civil society that placed conditions on their existence in the Aufklärung, 
regulating how they participated within it. Women were allowed to partake in 
Enlightenment discussion while in the salons and correctly presenting themselves as polite 
and appeaseable beings, avoiding offending the traditional traits expected from women. 
Likewise, Jews, while being afforded certain privileges in the upper classes, were not 
recognized as citizens (just as women weren’t) and, in fact, were often perceived as 
foreigners. They could not access Bildung or education in the same manner, nor be guests in 
Christian homes as Christians were guests in their homes.  

 
The main condition of enlightened contribution was class. Most women and Jews would 

never have the chance to access civil society; debate and enlightened discussion was a 
privilege for the elite that the bulk of society would never have an opportunity to access. 
Being of high class was the key to them accessing the higher tiers of society while being tied 
to disempowered identities. These marginalizations of women and Jews led into the 
combined identity of the “Jewess.” These Jewish women experienced civil society uniquely, 
sitting in a “painful chasm between social power and racial prejudice.”55 They endured the 
Enlightenment movement under dual non-citizenship, marginalized on two counts, which 
coalesced into their identity as a Jewess. Jewish women, while not physically circumcised, 
experienced the phantasmal, biblical circumcision described by Rahel Levin Varnhagen that 
doubly marked them as outsiders of the Enlightened world. These physical and anatomical 
differences covertly manifested in social marginalization in civil society and salons. A 
marginalization that could only be overcome by class. 

 
For Jewish women, class was enough to just get through the door. To truly participate in 

the Aufklärung and prove their worth they had to compensate for their Jewish identity 
through beauty or intellectual prowess. Women were expected to conform to feminine 
norms, Jews remained outside of Christian society, and Jewish women were to be objects of 
curiosity for others to marvel at. 

 
This study begs the question, can a society excluding large portions of the population be 

enlightened? This is anachronistic to consider, but the question at hand provokes 
anachronistic thinking. Women and Jews were markedly different at this time. This was the 
natural hierarchy of eighteenth-century society; women and Jews were not invited into the 
public sphere. The Enlightenment principally belonged to Christian men. Rather than a time 
of civil society, this period could perhaps be termed civilising society; the Enlightenment 
was a process for all areas, different for each place and person, developing in fragments in 
Germany. These fragments were connected, involving many types of people in society, but 
some people were on the edges, marked as different and separate from the center. As Kant 
argued, this was an age of Enlightenment, but not an enlightened age.56 This is illustrated by 
Moggach and Stedman-Jones, who describe the 1848 revolutions as a “slow unfolding of 
freedom and reason,” a historical process more than anything.57 Elite Jewish women 

57 Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman-Jones, eds. The 1848 Revolutions and European Political 
Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1. 

56 Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), 3. 

55 Bilski and Braun, The Power of Conversation, 4. 

145 



 

experienced this slow unfolding of freedom through the meeting of conditions set out by 
civil society. A combination of their class, looks, wit, and hostess skills coalesced to combat 
their existence as Jewish women – a class that was set apart from any other in 
nineteenth-century Berlin. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

146 



 

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