'Modern Jewish Women's Dilemmas, Grace Aguilar's Bargains' argues that Victorian Jewish women were the first Jewish women anywhere in the world to begin publishing books in a thoroughgoing way. Grace Aguilar, by far the most prominent spokesperson for English Jews during the period, attempted to strike bargains, both with Christians and with Jewish men. If Christians would tolerate Jews, Aguilar agreed that Jews would keep their different practices within the domestic sphere. Similarly, if Jewish men would provide women in the community with the education they lacked, women would agree to restrict their use of this education to training children in the home. Aguilar's bargains, articulated in romances, domestic fictions, and midrashim, enabled her to break centuries' old exemptions on women's participating in the intellectual life of the Jewish community, and enabled her to create a new Jewish novelistic tradition from scratch. In London several years ago, my attempts to recover materials relating to women's experience of Jewish modernity were frequendy fruitless. As it turned out, I was sometimes luckiest when I wasn't trying. One afternoon I walked into the Jewish Museum of London with no other intention than to see the famous engraving of Moses and Judith Montefiore. Since the curator seemed amenable to talk, I happened to mention that I was interested in the writings of the Victorian Jew, Grace Aguilar, not expecting him to have heard of her. But on the contrary, his eyes ht up, and he told me that, as it happened, the Museum had been in possession of all of Aguilar's tributes, diaries, and unpublished poetic and fictional manuscripts since the early part of this century. The papers had been donated by a historian, Rachel Lask Abrahams, who had received the material directly from Aguilar's mother Sara. Nothing I had read had even suggested that this material existed. Unfortunately, the curator continued, from the time the documents had come to be housed in the Museum, they had been inaccessible to scholars, because the institution did not have facilities for scholarly research. Just three © Oxford University Press 1997 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Fri, 13 May 2016 07:02:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 MODERN JEWISH WOMEN'S DILEMMA months before I arrived, however, the Museum had arranged to transfer the documents to the Manuscript Library of the University College of London, where if I was so inclined I might go directly that afternoon. The curator said he would be happy to write me a note of recommendation, if I cared for one. More than once I found that on such slim circumstance the recovery of Jewish women's literary history often rests. The poet James Wright once wrote that "history must deal with what was here," but articulating what was here is a function of finding out what is here, what material objects remain extant from the past. In the case of Jewish women's literary history, archival resources are more limited and exhaustible than in other areas, women having been exempted from participating in the intellectual life of Jewish communities for most of Jewish history. Yet much more of the past remains extant than scholars of Jewish modernity generally recognized until the last ten years or so. Because earlier historiographical paradigms banished, trivialized, neglected, or forgot the differential effect of Jewish modernity on men and women, the substantial wealth of nineteenth century fiction and periodical literature dealing directly with that subject remained unexplored. This neglect of basic sources in turn meant that larger synthetic studies purporting to tell the story of Jews' modernization repeated the absence of gender as an analytical category. Over the last ten years or so—in studies of French, German, American, and English Jews—there has been a recognized need among feminists and other scholars interested in gender to return to the archives and redo the basic groundwork. Such a renewed emphasis on recovering source texts may be particularly necessary in studies of Victorian Jewish women, since by far the most work done to date on the Victorian period has concerned the ways in which Christians represented Jews, Judaism, Jewishness, or Hebraism rather than the ways in which English Jews represented themselves. In literary critical studies of Jews in the 19th century, the images of Rebecca, Fagin, and Daniel Deronda, the person of the convert Benjamin Disraeli, and the notion of Hebraism put forward by Matthew Arnold have preoccupied scholars' atten tion. Those few scholars who have turned their eye to texts by English Jews have almost invariably discounted the work of women, even though Victorian Jewish men themselves reluctandy recognized that women were producing the most significant literary work in the community. Today I'm going to begin to redress this neglect in the scholarship by focusing on the string of novels Anglo-Jewish women produced during liberalism's ascendancy—that is, during the late 18th and early nineteenth century, when Jews were undergoing a transformation in legal and social status from aliens to citizens. In the terminology of liberal Christian novelists of the period, under this new status Jews would no longer be subject to coercion, but would instead be subject to "toleration"—a term that in this This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Fri, 13 May 2016 07:02:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MICHAEL GALCHINSKY 29 context meant they could be fully accepted as English citizens as long as they could be persuaded to convert. One of the stakes here will certainly be to understand the persuasive tactics Christian novelists used to fulfill this new compact. But for the greater part of my paper I will explore the other side of the dialogue and ask what the new compact looked like when articulated by liberalizing Jews. What changes did Jewish novelists ask for from the dominant culture, and, in complementary fashion, what changes did they demand from their own subculture? Focusing on the novels of Grace Aguilar, whom most Christians and Jews alike considered to be the spokeswoman for the Anglo-Jewish community in its movement into the modem world, I will argue that liberalizing Jews criticized "toleration's" requirement that all the nation's citizens be converted to a fundamental sameness—i.e., Christianity. But I will show that in setting out to convince Christian liberals to quit their tactics of toleration, Aguilar agreed to a trade-off: Jews would in tum restrict their expressions of differentness to the domestic sphere. While Aguilar was thus negotiating the terms of Jews' increasing participa tion in the Victorian world, I will show that she was also negotiating terms for women's increasing participation in the Jewish world. "My wish," she wrote, "was to portray a Jewess, with thoughts and feelings peculiar to her faith and sex, the which are not in general granted to that race, in Tales of the present day" (my emphasis). For Aguilar, gender and ethnicity were intertwined categories of identity—sometimes supporting one another, at other times at odds. I will argue that in regard to gender, too, Aguilar produced a trade-off: if Jewish men would provide women with education, women would in tum restrict their sphere of influence to the home. Because she balanced demands with concessions, both in relation to men and in relation to the dominant culture, she became the most lauded Jewish woman writing in Victorian England.