User:Shulamit S Magnus

Shulamit S. Magnus is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History at Oberlin College, where she helped establish and Chaired the Program in Jewish Studies, having previously taught at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University.

She earned her doctorate in Jewish history at Columbia University, under the guidance of Professors Fritz Stern and Paula Hyman. The courses she has taught range over all periods of Jewish history, from antiquity to contemporary times, in the Middle East, Europe (west, central, and east), and the US, using the comparative approach that was a hallmark of the approach of Salo Baron, who established the doctoral program in which Magnus earned her degree. Magnus has also taught courses on Jewish thought.

Magnus is a devoted teacher who thrives on intellectual engagement and exchange with her students, whom she teaches using informed discussion. Among the most common student comments about her as a teacher is that “she changed my life.”

Magnus lives in Jerusalem, Israel.

Magnus is a social and cultural historian of the Jews, specializing in Jewish modernity in Europe. Her scholarship focuses on identity and cultural change in Jewish modernity; on the workings of gender in Jewish societies; the history of women; and the construction of feminist Judaism.

She is the author of four scholarly books and scores of articles, as well as topical essays published as Op Eds in Tablet, Forward, The Times of Israel, and the Jerusalem Post.

Magnus’ first book, Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798-1871 (Stanford University Press, 1997), approached the question of Jewish integration into German society during the nineteenth century in novel ways. While treating legalities, the book departs from this traditional focus in studies of Jewish emancipation to concentrate on social and economic processes and their cultural and political concomitants. It treats emancipation as a dynamic process in both Jewish and non-Jewish societies, since integration necessarily involves both insiders and outsiders and speaks equally about both. As Magnus puts it in her Introduction to the book, “I study Jewish emancipation as a chapter in German history and the German context as an integral part of the Jewish story, not as mere backdrop to it,” and argues for focus on “how the majority of Jews and non-Jews” and not just elites, experienced the transformation that was Jewish emancipation.

The broad scope of this inquiry necessitated focus on one German locality as a case study, with no claim that the specifics there—Cologne-- were representative of what occurred in Germany as a whole; but rather, that they were characteristic of the process in Germany in the era when the ancient “rules of the relationship” between Jews and non-Jews were being rewritten.

Cologne served these purposes well because its history regarding Jews was particularly dramatic. As an autonomous city, the largest and economically most important on the German Rhine, Cologne expelled its ancient Jewish community in 1424 and excluded Jews rigidly thereafter for nearly 400 years, until troops of the French Revolution annexed it and the rest of the left bank of the Rhine in 1797. The French not only allowed admission of Jews to the city; they imposed the full legal equality that the Revolution had decreed for French Jews there and on the rest of the left bank, which, until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, were fully part of France. There could be no more dramatic example of the passage from Old Regime to new era than the transition from a society excluding Jews as pariahs to having to treat them as full and equal citizens.

This sudden and radical change, and its foreign imposition, was resented by the City’s governing classes, which would see Jewish rights not only as a question in its own right but as symbolic of political control—or lack of it. A major power struggle between the City and Prussia, the German state that took control of the Rhine after 1814, developed and raged for decades about the City’s Jewish question, until Prussia won decisively at mid-century. Smaller economic interests, wishing to limit competition by petty Jewish merchants, also sought to limit Jewish rights, using discriminatory legislation introduced by Napoleon, which required Jews to have special licenses in order to do business and which stayed on the books on the Prussian Rhine until 1848.

Magnus went behind anti-Jewish statements by City authorities and this discriminatory legislation to chart the actual record of Jewish immigration and economic integration and mobility in the city. She found that this was substantial and corresponded not to official anti-Jewish proclamations or even anti-Jewish legislation but to the larger economic fortunes of the city and region—clear indication both of vigorous Jewish striving, despite official resistance, but also of actual receptivity by the environment. The Jewish record in Cologne exemplified the disparity between laws and “the facts of life,” in Ernest Hamburger’s distinction, and demonstrated the value of comprehensive social history as a means of enriched understanding of the complex process which was Jewish emancipation.

Many of Germany’s leading liberals came from Cologne and their record about Jewish rights was far from uniform. Magnus discerned several types of liberals regarding the question of Jewish civic status. Some rigorously opposed Jewish civil equality on the basis of the fundamental liberal principle of democracy: their constituents hated Jews and did not want them accorded equal rights. Some liberals personally disliked Jews but understood that withholding civil rights from them would subvert their broader liberal vision for Germany, and faced the need for Jewish civic equality with reluctant resignation. Yet another group of liberals supported Jewish rights wholeheartedly and passionately, seeing the German and Jewish causes for liberation as inherently linked.

In the end, Magnus asserts, “In less than a century, Cologne [went] from being a provincial bastion of xenophobia to an economically modern and politically forward-looking metropolis, with a relatively wealthy and well-integrated Jewish community,” whose new synagogue building the architect of the City’s famous Cathedral designed, and which was featured alongside that Cathedral and Cologne’s City Hall on souvenir postcards for the new Rhine river travel industry. Cologne “was a great success story in the troubled history of Germans and Jews. Why and how this came about is instructive… for the larger study of German-Jewish relations in modernity.”

Magnus’ parents were both immigrants from Eastern Europe; her mother, the sole survivor of her family. Magnus’ interest in studying Jewish emancipation in Germany, in particular, stemmed from a compelling desire to come to grips with this family legacy and its effects on her, a subject she took up in her essay in Tablet magazine, “On Self-Emancipation: Finding Freedom in a German Archive,” Tablet Magazine, March 27, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jew-licenses-of-cologne

Magnus’ next project was Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, vol. 1, 2010; vol. 2, 2014); (Memoiren einer Grossmutter: Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19. Jahrhundert ( 2 vols.) (Berlin: Poppelauer, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1919, 1922).

Three books and numerous articles would eventuate from this project.

Magnus did an unabridged translation of Wengeroff’s two-volume memoir, with extensive Notes and Commentary, in particular, to the first volume. Her extensive Introduction to that volume contributed to it winning the National Jewish Book Award in 2011. Her critical edition of Wengeroff’s second volume won the Hadassah-Brandeis Translation Award.

In 2016, Magnus published a biography of Wengeroff and of her writing—a biography of the woman and of her book and how it came to be:  A Woman’s Life: Pauline Wengeroff and Memoirs of a Grandmother (Littman Library, 2016). This book focuses on Wengeroff’s adolescence and adulthood, in particular, on her marriage and children, Magnus’ having treated Wengeroff’s childhood and its cultural and historical background in her Introduction to vol. 1 of Wengeroff’s Memoirs

Wengeroff’s life (1833-1916), spanned the era of Russian Jewry’s transformation from insular and wholly traditional to rocked by convulsive currents of modernity: the Haskalah, the Jewish “enlightenment” movement, which took off during her childhood and had run its course by the end of her life; tsarist policies intended to erode the cohesion of Jewish society and Jewish responses to these; and, by the end of the nineteenth century, an array of secular Jewish movements: Jewish socialism, variants of Zionism, modern Jewish literature expressed in Yiddish and Hebrew; Jewish journalism in those languages, as well as in Russian; Jewish sculpture, theater, music.

Wengeroff’s title for her Memoirs is deceptive; the full scope of her intention and execution in the work is seen in her subtitle, coupled with the title, because this is no mere telling of a “grandmother’s” life (Wengeroff does not mention a single grandchild, though she had quite a few—and omits three of seven children from her narrative). Wengeroff’s Memoirs refract a tumultuous age in the life of what was then the largest Jewish community in the world through her life and that of her family of birth and that of the family she created with her husband. She weaves the personal and the historical inextricably in her narrative—the first time in the history of Jewish literature that a woman does this, much less in a full-length narrative intended for publication from the start. A most ambitious Wengeroff achieved this latter goal spectacularly, her work published in Berlin, garnering dozens of stellar reviews in both the Jewish and non-Jewish press, and being republished numerous times in the original.

Wengeroff’s narrative places women at the center of her tale and highlights what we today call gendered differences in the experience that women and men had of modernity. Her memoirs are a full counterpart to the famous, male-centered autobiographies of her contemporaries, the maskilim, differing from them also in presenting traditional Jewish life nostalgically, if far from uncritically; and certainly, in the precious, detailed description she gives of the religious and spiritual lives of traditional Jewish women from a highly sympathetic, even adoring, perspective.

Wengeroff, thoroughly a modern, bemoans the loss of Jewish tradition in modernity and blames this on the rash and reckless behavior of modernizing Jewish men, who, she claims, robbed women, who were capable both of maintaining Jewish tradition and of accepting the best of modernity, from playing any role in transmitting this combination to their children. Devastating cultural loss in Jewish society, she claims, was the result of this unjust displacement—which she experienced in her own marriage, as she details in her second volume.

By the end of her life, Wengeroff took cheer in the upsurge of interest in things Jewish by young Jews of her grandchildren’s generation who, Magnus claims, were the real “grandchildren” to whom Wengeroff directed her Memoirs.

Wengeroff was a brilliant social observer and writer and her tale is both gripping and of first-rate historical significance. In Magnus’ work, we have both the original text in translation and scholarly unpacking of its context, creation, and significance.

Magnus is also a social activist on behalf of Jewish women’s issues. She was a founder of Women of the Wall and read torah at the Kotel in the first women’s group tefilla (prayer service) there, in December, 1988. She is the first-named plaintiff on a case before the Supreme Court of Israel asking that the Court enforce its own ruling (2003), which upheld the legality of such prayer, and void a directive by the rabbi appointed to administer the site which bars bringing a Torah scroll to the site while he simultaneously denies Jewish women access to any of the dozens of scrolls kept there.

Magnus has been a core member of the group, Original Women of the Wall (OWOW), which pursues the founding goals of independent, meta-denominational Jewish women’s group prayer at the “national holy site” of the Jewish people, the Western Wall (Kotel), with the same possibilities for religious expression there afforded men. OWOW accepts no alternative site for this prayer and specifically, rejects the “Kotel deal” which a split-off group, Women of the Wall, negotiated for the Reform and Conservative movements, which would trade Jewish women’s recognized right to full prayer options at the Kotel in exchange for State recognition and funding of those movements as the administrators of a long-existing site of egalitarian prayer at Robinson’s Arch. That tradeoff would also change the status of the Kotel from “national holy site” and make it both a synagogue, and one run according to haredi (ultra-Orthodox) practice, from which women’s prayer would be barred as a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment and heavy fines.

Magnus has published numerous Op Eds and participated in panels on this issue, in which she exposes the details of the deal that have been withheld from public knowledge, claiming that the Kotel deal (on which Netanyahu reneged after authorizing its implementation), is anything but progressive, or feminist.

Magnus is very engaged with efforts to publicize and end Jewish marital captivity—the “chaining” of women (agunot) in marriages against their will because of the unilateral manner of sexual transaction through which traditional rabbinic marriage is enacted (kinyan and kiddushin), and the failure of rabbinic establishments to use available halakhic means to end this and the associated abuse of mimzur: labeling as outcast-untouchables children born of unions when the woman has not received a rabbinic divorce (gett). The threat of this consequence is a major factor that keeps women, including secular women, in chained marriages.

Magnus serves on the Committee for Ethics in Jewish Leadership. With Dr. Rafael Medoff of the Committee, she has authored numerous Op Eds proposing policy to prevent sexual abuse in Jewish communal and professional life and to set standards of transparency and representativeness in Jewish communal organizations.