Jewish Woman, The.
“Ought Not This History Of Judaism, Which Awakens The Most Ardent Interest In The Non-Jewess,
Find A Ready Sympathy In The Jewess?”
[Judaica]. Remy, Nahida. The Jewish Woman. Authorized Translation by Louise Mannheimer. With a Preface by Prof. Dr. Lazarus...Cincinnati: Press of C.J. Krebbel, 1897.
8vo.; frontispiece portrait of Nahida Remy; brown uncoated endpapers; burgundy cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt; faintly cocked, some edgewear; a handsome, fresh copy.
Second American edition; the first American edition appeared in 1895, following on the heels of the original German edition (Das Judische Weib, 1893). In addition to English, Remy’s study was printed in a Hungarian and a Hebrew edition. A lovely copy of an early and serious work of feminist-Judaica scholarship; this copy inscribed by the translator, herself a significant figure in Jewish women’s history: With Compliments of Louise Mannheimer. Four page long publisher’s advertising leaflet, featuring contemporary press notices and a picture of Remy, loosely inserted.
Nahida Remy was born in Germany in 1849. From an early age, Remy, the product of a strict Prussian Christian upbringing, was uncomfortable with her religion and interested in other beliefs. She gravitated toward Judaism, in part because her instinctive feminism rebelled against the patriarchal and anti-female tenets of the Christianity she had been taught as a child. In 1892 Remy published her first book, a meditation on the Talmud (available only in German); her second book, Das Judische Weib, appeared the following year. The landmark study surveyed “Jewish women of the Bible and of post-Biblical ages, and stated that Jewish tradition was always more favorable to women than was Christianity” (UJE, Vol. 6, p. 572). It was translated into English in 1895, the same year that Remy formally converted to Judaism under the tutelage of her future husband, the philosopher and Jewish spokesman Maritz Lazarus; Lazarus also penned the glowing preface to Remy’s volume.
The Jewish Woman is a thoughtful and intellectually rigid inquiry into the history and cultural representations of Jewish womanhood; among the subjects covered in the 258 page work are “Jewish Authoress” (pp. 213-233); “Jewish Benefactresses” (pp. 233-242); and “The Modern Jewess” (pp. 252-259); in addition the book includes extensive footnotes and a lengthy bibliography. It is scarce text, particularly inscribed—the NUC notes only two library holdings of this edition, none inscribed, and only a handful more of the uncommon first American edition. The American translator Louise Mannheimer was born in Prague in 1845 and came to the U.S. some twenty years later. Mannheimer contributed prose and verse to German and English periodicals; this translation is her only book-length work. She was married to the educator Sigmund Mannheimer, librarian for nearly thirty at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. (For more on the Mannheimers see UJE, Vol. 7, pp. 333-4.)
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