During the three decades leading up to World War I, a strange phenomenon transpired in the Austrian province of Galicia. Adolescent Jewish girls began disappearing by the dozens from their parents’ homes on the eve of their intended marriages and seeking refuge in Kraków's Felician Sisters’ Convent. Between 1873 and 1914, over 300 Jewish daughters ran away in this fashion, all of them from Orthodox or hasidic families. Most converted to Roman Catholicism and many eventually married gentiles. The lives of these runaways are the subject of Rachel Manekin's fascinating monograph, The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia. Manekin reconstructs the motives, goals, and implications of these individual acts of resistance, placing the singular decisions of female apostates in the broader tapestry of modernizing Jewish culture, ethnoreligious tensions, and Habsburg legal reforms. Most importantly, she sets out to untangle the causality behind this mysterious and very local phenomenon. What was it about Jewish Galicia that prompted this series of mini rebellions of mostly underage girls?
Manekin's narrative unfolds in the unique atmosphere of Galicia, the southeastern province of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was annexed to the Habsburg Empire in the late eighteenth century. This was a region densely populated by Orthodox and hasidic Jews. It was home to some of the most prominent hasidic dynasties, a place that fostered little intimate contact between Jewish families and their Christian neighbors, where ethnoreligious tensions regularly spiked into popular violence. Though Jewish conversion was increasingly common in liberal urban settings, the large-scale disappearance of small-town Orthodox girls was shocking to contemporaries and caused a media sensation. Manekin's explanation for what drove these young women to leave home is couched in the specifics of the Habsburg context as well as the broader modernizing atmosphere of fin-de-siècle east-central Europe. Late nineteenth-century Austrian legal reforms mandated four years of schooling for both boys and girls. Jewish families willingly complied with these decrees by sending their daughters to secular schools, but they preferred to tutor their sons at home or keep them in religious kheyders. Manekin thus shapes her tale of runaway girls around “the Daughters’ Question,” the predicament whereby Jewish girls were exposed to secular knowledge and increasingly acculturated into Polish norms, while their male counterparts received mainly religious training. Many young women resisted arranged marriages to less worldly youths, hoping instead to continue their education in Kraków. The Austrian setting also provided an odd legal loophole that permitted those aged fourteen and older to make their own decisions about religious conversion even as twenty-four remained the formal age of majority. Thus, once adolescent girls turned up at the convent asking to be baptized, their parents were legally unable to force their release.
Manekin's genius in solving the mystery of these disappearances lies in the way she situates the plight of the runaways within changing educational norms. The specific phenomenon of Jewish runaways ends abruptly after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, when Polish law eliminated the legal framework that allowed minors to take refuge in convents. But Manekin also attributes the end of the “lost generation” of Jewish girls to the advent of a school system specifically designed to educate girls from Orthodox families. The Beis Yaakov schools founded in Kraków in 1917 offered religious training to Jewish females for the first time while also celebrating Yiddishkeit, thus diminishing the allure of secular culture and taming potential adolescent rebellion. This is a complex argument that presents a new spin on Sarah Schenirer's thriving school network, seeing it as partially a response to the generation of rebellious daughters. Yet, in truth, Beis Yaakov schools explicitly discouraged higher education for their charges by refusing to prepare them for university entrance exams. And despite the new Orthodox primary schools, thousands of Jews continued to convert during the 1920s and 1930s or simply attended secular educational institutions against the wishes of their families. Clearly, school reform was but one solution to conversion. It did not completely staunch the wave of apostasy.
Manekin takes a granular approach to her story, digging into the demographics of her subjects and fitting them into broader cultural trends. She focuses closely on three runaways, each from different socioeconomic backgrounds: two the daughters of affluent hasidic families and a third the offspring of a village tavern-keeper. Some ran away to continue their formal education, while others simply sought personal independence, the right to marry non-Jews, or the possibility of working in Christian households. The beauty of Manekin's story is that she uncovers a vivid record of female activism in a realm that is both personal and political—namely the choice of a marriage partner. Her close attention to betrothal practices reminds us how enterprising females could carve out a sphere of personal agency simply by leveraging resistance to a marriage contract. She gives us access to the voices of otherwise unremarkable Orthodox and hasidic women as they navigated these tumultuous experiences. Her account offers a rare glimpse into how such actors experienced their situations and what motivated them to take the risks they did. This is not the usual Galician story of financially desperate young women caught up in false marriages or trafficking schemes in order to escape a life of penury. Rather, it is a middle-class Jewish tale, but one told from the periphery of the empire and from within households that tend to be shut off from the historian's gaze. Manekin offers up a wealth of surprises within the world of Galician Jewry, including evidence of the relative permeability between Jewish and Christian worlds, a setting where hasidic girls could go on evening strolls with Christian suitors and Jewish businessmen could turn to Austrian counts and even the emperor for help. In the end, the story of the runaways is about both more and less than Christian conversion. It is also an account of the ways Orthodox girls cleverly manipulated their environment to increase their range of personal choice. And most importantly, it is an investigation into what it meant to be a pious Jewish female in a modernizing moment.
