“Actually, It Is Not A Book I Wish to Tell You About”: The Journalist Bertha Badt-Strauß and the Yiddish ‘Frauenlitertur’

• In Event: German-Jewish Women in Journalism and the Visual Arts, 1918–1938

Abstract

The search for “Jewish authenticity,” which characterized the Jewish Renaissance of Weimar Germany, brought with it an unprecedented interest in Eastern European Yiddish culture. It also led to a renewed interest in Old Yiddish literature, which enjoyed great popularity in the German-Jewish communities in premodern times and up to the late eighteenth century. One of the Old Yiddish texts which attracted considerable attention among German-Jewish scholars and intellectuals of the Weimar era was the ‘Tsene-rene’, the best-known and most beloved book of this corpus. Composed around the end of the sixteenth century, it was used primarily by women as reading material on the Sabbath and holidays, and with time became known as the “Women’s Bible” (‘Vayber-khumesh’).
The German-Jewish discourse on the ‘Tsene-rene’ began already in the nineteenth century, and some of its main notions regarding the book – for example, that it was primarily ‘Frauenliteratur’, or literature for women – persisted during the Weimar era. Yet, the first decades of the twentieth century also saw the expansion of the discourse on the ‘Tsene-rene’ in Germany, as Jewish women, too, joined the fray. One of the prominent voices in this discourse, and in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance more broadly, was the German-Jewish intellectual, journalist, and literary scholar Dr. Bertha Badt-Strauss (1885–1970), who stands at the focus of this paper. By analyzing her various essays and reviews on the ‘Tsene-rene’, published in 1919–1936 in the journals ‘Neue Jüdische Monatshefte’, ‘Menorah’, ‘Blätter des Jüdischen Frauenbundes’, ‘Israelitisches Familienblatt’, and others, the paper highlights the distinctly feminine perspective that Badt-Strauss brought to the discourse that was, until then, exclusively male. It also explores how Badt-Strauss employed her position as a journalist, as well as the specific medium of the German-Jewish press, to promote her own agendas regarding the Old Yiddish ‘Frauenlitertur’ and the questions of gender, tradition, and nostalgia it brought to the fore.

Author

• Aya Elyada, Hebrew University of Jerusalem