While numerous studies have been published on nineteenth-century German-Jewish theology and religion, relatively little has been written on the role of gender in the theology and religious practice of Judaism during the same era. In his innovative study, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870, Benjamin Maria Baader investigates changes in religious practice in the synagogue and home; in liturgies and worship practices; in sermons and educational materials; in the conduct of rabbis, cantors, preachers, and congregants; and, especially, in Judaism's religious mood. With care and precision, he traces the emerging prayer books, ethical chapbooks, and reforms in liturgy and synagogue worship, while noting the increased attention to domestic Jewish religious practice under the control of women. He argues that a new kind of Judaism emerged as a result, one emphasizing a “feminine” religiosity that replaced, he claims, the hierarchically gendered and male-regulated Judaism of the premodern era: “Jewish men and women together shaped a novel religious culture in which the differences between the sexes were significantly less pronounced than they had been in pre-modern Judaism … hierarchical division between men and women that had characterized the gender order of Jewish culture for centuries subsided” (p. 2).

One example arises from the dramatic changes in synagogue worship accompanying the rise of liberal reforms that gave rise to a new role for women. Sermons were delivered in German rather than Hebrew and provided moral edification for women and men rather than elucidating obscure aspects of Jewish law that were known only to men. Unlike the old-fashioned worship that was led by male members of the congregation while women sat passively in a separate section of the synagogue, the formal public worship in the new, large synagogues was led exclusively by the rabbi and cantor, so that men as well as women played a passive role, thus equalizing their status, Baader argues (p. 143).

At the same time, as other historians have noted, women formed new charitable organizations within the Jewish community and took leadership positions within the Sunday School movement. As Marion Kaplan has demonstrated, men attended synagogue services less frequently, and observance of Judaism was increasingly focused on the household. Women, Kaplan argues (and Baader concurs), “appear to have held on to Jewish piety longer than men” (p. 5) by maintaining kosher kitchens and preparing festive family meals to mark Jewish holidays. The presentation of Jewish women as the most loyal of Jews has become a common marker of feminist scholarship, but it fails to account for the possibility that women's appropriation of Jewish observance was precisely what enabled their husbands to abandon the synagogue in the first place. Adherence to a domestic Judaism may reflect women's assertions of their Jewish commitments, but it may also reflect the kind of deeper ambivalence that characterizes most commitments; after all, German Jews were known as “Weihnachtsjuden” for having both Hanukkah menorahs and Christmas trees in their homes.

Baader does an excellent job of pointing to parallels between the feminization of Judaism and analogous developments within both Catholicism and Protestantism during the same era, though, understandably, he cannot treat developments in the Christian community with the same degree of detail. He notes, however, that all three religious communities demonstrate the same sort of increased attention to women's expressions of faith and a more widespread “feminization” of religiosity. Since the late eighteenth century, Christian and Jewish clergy glorified women as icons of moral virtue and as custodians of religious teachings, and increased attention was paid to cultivating women's piety. Evidence of the changes is culled by Baader from published and unpublished texts, particularly liturgical materials, including small prayer books published for women in which cultural values are expressed and ideologies of gender set forth. For example, a little-known 1832 collection of prayers for women, Tehinot benot yeshurun, includes a prayer for an unhappy wife in which she is to ask herself about her responsibility for creating her own misery. Baader has discovered many such obscure or unknown sources for women's history. In calling attention to the prayer books, for example, he leaves some questions to future historians, including how many copies were printed, how widely such volumes circulated, whether they were read by Orthodox women or more broadly by liberal women as well (Judeo-German, for example, would not have been widely known by mid- to late-nineteenth-century assimilated German-Jews). Baader concludes that such texts are evidence that “prayers center on emotions and social dimensions of family life” (p. 107) and hence demonstrate, as he claims, that a new kind of Judaism emerged in Germany during the nineteenth century. Baader's strokes are broad of necessity, leaving it to future scholars to investigate whether differences existed between urban and rural areas, and any changes that may have occurred during the period between 1800 and 1870, as Jews migrated from rural to urban areas and back again.

Interpretations of Baader's material will undoubtedly be debated by historians. The new Judaism that he claims emerged in the nineteenth century may have been less a consequence of changes in the synagogue and in the rise of the cult of domesticity and far more a product of the widespread, powerful influence of German romanticism. Yet romanticism, while a major factor in the valorization of the feminine, did not lead to women's empowerment but to men's appropriation of the feminine. Religion became religiosity, as Baader notes, just as music became musicality, and subjectivity and emotionality became new sources of knowledge. Was it good for women? For Jews? Women were not, after all, accorded the right to vote in Jewish communal elections until female suffrage was finally guaranteed by German law, so women's “empowerment” had its limits. Women may have been equal to men in synagogue passivity, and glorified for their supposedly more natural religiosity, but women's political and economic power within the family and community were not realized. Furthermore, the political consequences of romanticism within Germany led to horrendous results, at least according to some scholars of fascism, so that the very movement that may have helped to glorify Jewish women also contributed to the ultimate destruction of European Jews, a point Baader might consider.

Finally, the feminine religiosity he identifies did not arise solely as a consequence of romanticist influence; Jewish mystical and spiritual writings had long advocated a feminization of men. The kind of piety and prayer advocated in the nineteenth century had long been described in Jewish pietistic literature. Men were urged to attain heightened states of religious awareness through techniques of feminization, such as weeping, physical self-abasement, viewing themselves as vessels to be penetrated, and so forth. Rabbinic literature even describes the feminization of the male body through acquisition of lactating breasts, and Jewish liturgy has long described the corporate community as female in relation to God. The “feminine” religiosity Baader identifies in nineteenth-century Judaism may not have been altogether new when seen in the longue durée of Jewish spirituality.

Baader's book is an excellent addition to the growing field of women's and gender studies and will certainly stimulate new research and theorizing about the complex and often intractable problem of Jewish women's quest for equality.