Women, Love, and the Reform Jewish Mission: Jewish-Christian Marriage in Emma Wolf's Other Things Being Equal and its Literary Successors

Abstract

Women, Love, and the Reform Jewish Mission:Jewish-Christian Marriage in Emma Wolf's Other Things Being Equal and its Literary Successors1 Jessica Kirzane (bio) In her 1892 debut novel Other Things Being Equal, Emma Wolf depicts a romance between a Jewish protagonist, Ruth Levice, and a white Protestant man, Dr. Kemp, culminating in their decision to marry. Despite Ruth's father's initial disapproval, he comes to assert that "mentally, the woman was of the same stratum as the man. Physically, both were perfect types of pure, healthy blood…Religiously, both held a broad, abiding love for man and God."2 The father's description of the union between these two individuals as one between equals is at the heart of the novel's utopian premise: that equality between (white) Christian and Jew, man and woman, can be conceived of as possible through a liberal, universalizing perspective, and within the privileges of the shared bourgeois society in which the protagonists find themselves. Wolf's novel proclaims this marriage as evidence of the progress that women have made in the era of New Womanhood, as Ruth exceeds her frail mother's capacity and becomes a partner in her marriage. This evolutionary approach toward woman's growing independence mirrors Wolf's attitude toward interfaith relations in the novel. Wolf's narrative is not only one about a young woman's growing independence. It is also a story about a marriage between a Jewish woman and a Christian man, using that [End Page 289] union as a model for the American public sphere, a potential future of equality between Jews and Christians and between men and women.3 In 1896, in direct response to Wolf's novel, Dr. Friedrich Kolbenheyer, a prominent Austrian-born obstetrician, penned a novella, "Jewish Blood," in opposition to Wolf's optimistic stance on marriage between a Jew and a Christian. He intervenes as a voice of male, and medical, authority to warn against what he sees as the tragic loss of Jewish reproductive capacity should Jewish men choose Christian women as their mates. Utilizing a racialized conception of "blood," he participates in a broader American discourse that "trumpeted the grave dangers of interracial sex" as something deleterious to human fertility, a material iteration of a "broader cultural fear of generational discontinuity."4 He makes a case for the preservation of Jewish "blood" through endogamous Jewish marriage and reproduction. In 1908, Bettie Lowenberg, a contemporary of Emma Wolf and a fellow member of the San Francisco Jewish women's literary community, offered another response to Other Things Being Equal in the form of a long novel, The Irresistible Current. Going beyond the marriage Wolf envisions for Ruth and Dr. Kemp, Lowenberg paints a portrait of a cast of characters yearning for and predicting a kind of universal monotheistic utopia. Through her idealistic portraits of romance, she collapses the bounds of Protestant Christianity and Reform Judaism through mutual love and shared universal faith. Placing Kolbenheyer and Lowenberg's responses alongside Wolf's Other Things Being Equal, this essay demonstrates that Wolf's work was central to a national literary conversation about Jewish racial and religious identity within a white Christian American public sphere. Examining these works together uncovers a turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary conversation about white Jewish-Christian romance centered on how new scientific and social movements might revolutionize Jewish life in relation to their Christian neighbors, and the role of Jewish women [End Page 290] in particular in shaping Jewish religious and societal norms and futures in a turn-of-the-twentieth century American context.5 The models of pluralist integration and the potential for assimilation outlined in Wolf's, Kolbenheyer's, and Lowenberg's narratives are predicated upon the perspectives and experiences of "middle-class Jews who have achieved economic stability, and, with that, a degree of social equality," in Lori Harrison-Kahan's description. The readers, writers, and protagonists of these narratives are Jews who do not merely have the "potential to become Americans" through assimilation, but who "can pass effortlessly" proving that they "already are."6 It is precisely the problem of a difficult-to-pinpoint Jewish difference that occupies these narratives...