In typical Jewish Studies courses, you find yourself reading the Big Men of German-Jewish history, from Moses Mendelssohn and Martin Buber to Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin. It’s a boys’ club, but recent writers have attempted to reclaim the hidden work of “the Jewesses,” the German-Jewish women forbidden from the tree house of Jewish letters. Barbara Hahn’s The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too A Theory of Modernity is a rare academic work of art. Composed of a series of short essays on the fragmented lives of German Jewesses, Hahn poetically recaptures the dignity, majesty and tragedy of these forgotten Esthers.
The title refers to the “network of references” in German literature to the Jewish woman as “Pallas Athena” whose warrior goddess image “accompanies German-Jewish history, from its start in the middle of the eighteenth century.” The “Theory of Modernity” evokes the claim that Jewish women of the intellectual elite were more thoroughly modern in managing the pressures of assimilation by preserving their ethnic particularity. In early modern times, as Jews began to have more options within German society, our heroines found that they were doubly trapped: as women, and as Jews.
As Jews, they couldn’t mingle in high society or easily hobnob amongst the higher educated. As Christians, however, they would be afforded protection, status, and an independence that would allow for new forms of social and literary freedom. For the ambitious and intelligent women who desired such a life, Baptism was their entry ticket.
Hahn describes the dour duality of their new positions. As converts, their in-between status allowed them to cavort with famous intellectuals and participate in salon culture. In spite of leaving the Jewish community, these women preserved their Jewishness as a badge of honor that culturally distinguished them from their gentile friends and interlocutors.
By World War I and the firm establishment of Reform Judaism and cultural assimilation, Jewish women no longer needed to convert to enter the German world of letters, and some gentile women even started writing passionately about Jewish subjects. Jewish-born radicals like Rosa Luxemburg, philosophers like Hannah Arendt and writers like Margarete Susman could find success and serious audiences in thoughtful publics who welcomed their voices. Hahn reclaims their voices, foregrounding their meditations on Jewish-German identity. Yet tragically, their intellectual romances with German culture were unrequited loves, “monologues without an echo” ending definitively with the Holocaust.
Hahn shows how the surviving thinkers, Arendt and Susman, honored the women of their German Jewish pasts. Arendt, among our greatest Jewess-Athenas, stands strong as the most readable, insightful, and fascinating figure of this drama. Along with her accomplishments in philosophy and journalism, Arendt wrote a highly regarded biography of the 19th-century salonière Rahel Levin Varnhagen whose life story encapsulated the quandaries of her community. Hahn devotes a number of well crafted, but unfortunately incomplete, chapters to Arendt’s correspondences with other German philosophers.
Though Hahn’s claim that the European salons were merely exaggerated wishful memories is widely disputed by other sources, her reweaving of diaries, letters, unfinished pieces and unread books is artful and profound. By calling attention to these Jewess-Athenas and their extraordinary endurance in “dark times,” Hahn suggests that the boy’s club of the German-Jewish experience was always standing on the shoulders of giantesses.
