Proudly Authentic
The "salon" has a long and powerful history in Jewish culture. Jewish salons flourished in Paris, London, Vienna, St. Petersburg and New York. From their debut in Berlin in the 1780s to their emergence in 1930s California, Jewish women’s salons served as welcoming havens where all classes and creeds could openly debate art, music, literature, and politics. Emancipated Jewish women used the salon as a vehicle to enter cultural life in other countries, creating venues in which Jews and non-Jews met to study philosophy and enjoy "freely exchanged ideas". They represent the fabulous synthesis of the muse and the creator.
Salon is much more than a showcase of charm, it had very progressive function. For a biblical nation "wandering in exile" and deemed "rootless" by host countries, the salon granted the sense of belonging. Salons were the centres of cosmopolitans, who, like the hostess, came from other lands and try to find their own place. Salon trafficked the innovation and distributed wide range of cultural forms. The Jewish salonières became courageous modernists. Within the salon these women created a space for self-achievement... state within state.
The first Jewish salonières were ambassadors for their people. They have hosted such noted artists as Mozart, Goethe, Proust, Picasso, Hemingway, and Brecht. The salon women fostered the careers of Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Klimt, Marcel Duchamp, Greta Garbo, and others. Genevieve Straus’s Paris salon was the launching ground for the defence of Dreyfus, and Ada Leverson in London welcomed Oscar Wilde to her salon even after his arrest, and fetched him home from prison. Some of the women are familiar to us — Rahel Varnhagen, about whom Hannah Arendt wrote a dissertation. Rahel Levin was long a cult figure in German cultural life. Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is widely known as well. Amalia Beer and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel of Berlin, Fanny von Arnstsein and Berta Zuckerkandl of Vienna, the Stettheimer sisters of New York City, Ann Kuliscioff of Milan, Margherita Sarfatti of Rome, and Salka Viertel of Los Angeles. The most influential salonières were extraordinary charismatics. They had one unique feature in common - the power of conversation, i.e. the ability to shape consensus, to unite in a dialogue those who would not formally meet.
The reasons for the phenomenon of the Jewish salonières are many. The jewish daughters of ambitious fathers were schooled at home, learning languages and mathematic. In addition to the superior home education, the Talmudic tradition influenced the jewish woman’s way of thinking. Many depended on parental money, long after they left home and rejected patriarchal authority. Many have been divorced or have been in lesbian relationships. Besides all Jewish woman did not dismiss her role as a mother. She united the feminism with the virtues republican parenting.
Jewish salonières symbolized the ultimate outsiders on the inside. They were exceptional women and exceptional jews. As arbiters of change, they were an easy target for pretty jealousies antagonisms and ethnic jokes. This is quite expected - there is nothing the Jews cannot achieve. But they just wanted to live freely, refuse the disavow of own essence and to find the place in the history of European humanity.
This phenomenon brings us to the touchy question of the women’s Jewish identities. To say «accept me with all of my otherness» was personally and historically impossible for any woman. They were doubly marginal—as Jews and as women. The Jewishness of these women was subsumed by their status as women of ideas. Immersing ourselves in the past can prove a wonderful therapy for pains in the present…
Leterature Review
Jewish High Society In Old Regime Berlin by Deborah Sadie Hertz
The Berlin Jewish Community : Enlightenment, Family and Crisis by Steven M. Lowenstein Levine
The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform by Michael Galchinsky