Curious Daughters: Language, Literacy, and Jewish Female Desire in German and Yiddish Literature from 1793 to 1916

This dissertation examines the interplay of language politics and romantic politics in German and Yiddish literature confronting the challenges faced by Judaism in the long nineteenth century. The project brings into dialogue both German and Yiddish texts, from West Yiddish farces to the literature of a new German Jewish elite to the popular stories of Tevye the Dairyman. This diverse body of literature uses a concern with the sexual purity and loyalty of the Jewish daughter to encode anxieties toward Jewish assimilation into the non-Jewish world. Yet these works also share another layer of the daughter’s subversion: an act of rebellion in the form of a linguistic or cultural departure from tradition. Each of these texts depicts how the Jewish daughter’s adoption of European language and literacy operates in conjunction with her romantic transgressions. I read these works in conversation with the gendered discourse on Jewish language and the history of Jewish women in Europe; these dynamics create a framework for understanding an ambivalence toward new modes of Jewish life. By bearing the onus as cultural gatekeeper, the daughter figure blurs the lines between religious and social categories or explodes these dichotomies altogether.