| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dianne Ashton. Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America. (American Jewish Civilization Series.) Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press. 1997. Pp. 329. $39.95.

This lively and intelligent biographical ode to Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) of Philadelphia, one of the most influential Jewish women of the antebellum era, is primarily about Jewish organizational life in America's first major industrial city and, secondarily, about the interesting Gratz family. Unmarried, like a great many middle and upper-class antebellum Philadelphians, Gratz's closest ties were with her unmarried brothers, with whom she lived throughout her life, and the greatest fulfillment in her life came from her more than sixty years of communal service. Indeed, her institutions (Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, Hebrew Sunday School, and the Jewish Foster Home) were her real legacy, and they thrived, thanks in great part to her extraordinary organizational abilities, long after her death. A member of the emerging leisure class, this very intellectual woman made a career of managing organizations, and she convinced two or three generations of Jewish women that they, too, could manage institutions and make a place for themselves (and for Judaism) within American culture. Shut out of the family business by American law and circumscribed in her religious activities by a patriarchal Jewish tradition, Gratz found a rewarding life in benevolent societies. . . .

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