German Jews in Love: A History by Christian Bailey (review)

Reviewed by: German Jews in Love: A History by Christian Bailey Sarah Wobick-Segev Christian Bailey. German Jews in Love: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 304 pp. German Jews in Love: A History explores how Jews experienced and practiced love over the course of a century. Divided into four central chapters, End Page 253 according to the commonplace periodization of modern German history (i.e., the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist dictatorship, and postwar West Germany), Bailey's monograph is an ambitious and well-rounded study. Beginning with the 1870s, a time when romantic love had become, at least theoretically, a private affair, Bailey convincingly argues that "the private spaces where Jews and other Germans practiced love became testing grounds within which the possibility for integration and for the maintenance of a distinctive culture acquired its most intimate and emotional expression" (3). This was true, as Bailey notes, not only in the case of heterosexual marriages between Jews, but also in interfaith partnerships and marriages (made possible through legislation passed in 1875), and even in lesbian and homosexual relationships. As Bailey demonstrates, romantic love became a tool for individuals to find meaning in life and guide them through its various challenges. Narratives of love also allowed individuals to create new identities and emotional roles within the family. For example, in the first chapter, Bailey explains how although the Kaiserreich was a time of important gains in the professional world for Jewish men, discrimination against Jews remained. Married life, now anchored on a story of romantic and self-chosen love and staged primarily within the family home, served as a refuge from these challenges. Jewish women, for their part, were the enablers, those who made the family home into a sanctuary through their "passionate and selfless" love (22). Jewish women were also tasked with helping their husbands navigate the process of acculturation. Contrary to narratives that depict companionate marriages as inherently emancipatory, Bailey shows that these love myths could benefit men more than women and required that men make fewer radical breaks in their life trajectories. The awareness of the significant practical and emotional burden placed on the shoulders of women meant that freedom for several women Bailey investigates became the "freedom not to fall in love," an important distinction when compared to heterosexual and homosexual Jewish men who could express their desire through romantic scripts and act upon it (39–40). For those familiar with the contemporary discourse against arranged marriages, it bears noting that companionate marriages did not solve the problem of women's status (or lack of agency) in marriage. Bailey offers an important corrective to this view by demonstrating that the seemingly modern (read, progressive), individually focused discourse on love did not necessarily improve the situation of women. In the context of these developments in the marriage market, it is perhaps not coincidental that religious leaders, sexologists, and intellectuals devoted considerable effort to naturalize the role of women as mothers and participate in a larger discourse that sought to ennoble the role of women in the home. Such potential burdens notwithstanding, Bailey shows that a high number of individuals, including many women, continued to engage in this new story of romantic love and find personal meaning in it. The malleability of love narratives made this all the easier. This becomes particularly clear through Bailey's discussion of the interwar era, which, as he stresses, offered a "diversity of pathways" for Jewish women and men to take, which allowed "young Jewish women and men to have the freedom, and burden, to chart out their own courses" (67). By this time, young Jewish individuals found significant avenues for self-affirmation and End Page 254 growth within love-based relationships, a pattern that largely, and perhaps surprisingly, continued during the National Socialist era. As Bailey shows, National Socialism's racist ideology would not succeed in supplanting the existing discourse on romantic love with their own nor would it alter how German Jews practiced love. The fourth chapter explores how the postwar Jewish community living in West Germany altered the emotional scripts about love (certainly in comparison to the otherwise stable set of love scripts that...