During the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few wealthy, cultivated Jewish women to discuss the events of the day. Princes, nobles, upwardly mobile writers, actors, and beautiful Jewish women flocked to the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past.

About the Author
Deborah Hertz is Professor of European history and Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California at San Diego.

Reviews
A welcome surprise... [Hertz] asks questions that have generally have been ignored about the origins and social significance of this curious phenomenon and the reasons why it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared; and because she then answers them on the basis of a staggering amount of reading on virtually every aspect of the history of the last phase of the old regime in Prussia." - New York Review of Books

"An enlivening study of the era.... Its special appeal is to cover a neglected area of women's emancipation that has been both regretted and admired, since the role the salonieres carved out for themselves was so precarious and transitory." - Jewish Book News and Reviews



Book Information
ISBN 9780815629559
Author Deborah Hertz
Format Paperback
Page Count 326
Imprint Syracuse University Press
Publisher Syracuse University Press
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm