The Woman in Reform Judaism 133
ried on at the meetings, but the answers, at least in their Hebrew version, were carefully worded to reflect halakhic concerns.
A new type of woman had emerged in the salons of Berlin and elsewhere in the enlightened atmosphere of upper-class Berlin and other cities. These were bright Jewish women, now educated in a western fashion while their husbands were engaged in trading and business ventures with scant attention paid to western culture. The educated wives led salons in which the leading intellectuals of their time met; the salons were gathering places for Jews and non-Jews who assembled to discuss philosophy, literature, science, and art. They represented an initial step into the broader intellectual world.> We must remember that these women often became estranged from both their husbands and Judaism and sometimes left Judaism. * The numbers of this elite group were very small, and there seemed to be no pressing need for organized Judaism to deal with them. They were, in any case, a group on the periphery of Jewish life, far from the centers of Judaism . Contemporary rabbinic scholars were probably unaware of them or felt that they could be ignored as, after all, they were only women.’
The initial steps in the direction of women’s equality came from the Reform movement and its founder , Israel Jacobson , who established the first modern Jewish school for both boys and girls in the small Jewish community of Seesen (Westphalia) in 1801 with a new ceremony, Confirmation, which represented graduation and coming of age.® The establishment of this school represented a policy decision of Jacobson and his coworkers and was undertaken without any halakhic discussion or any rabbinic participation. The reaction to this effort was mixed, but the opposition also did not base itself on halakhah. The effort lapsed with the fall of the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1813; after that no further experiments in religious or Jewish educational reform were possible there. We know nothing more about the education of girls in this period and may presume that none was available.
Somewhat later in Hamburg, we know that the service of the new temple dedicated in 1818 was designed in part to appeal to women, who knew little Hebrew but who could participate in the service, which included some vernacular as well as a German sermon. Forty-three percent of the seats were for women, a much