Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin

Deborah Hertz (Author)

9780815629559

Paperback / softback, published 28 June 2005

326 pages, 25 black and white illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.567 kg

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

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.