The Women of Israel
By: Aguilar Grace
New York, D. Appleton & Co: 1851
Singerman: 1171
The First Comprehensive Study of Jewish Women by a Jew.
This work, by Grace Aguilar (1816-47), contains a history of Jewish women from the Biblical period through the contemporary age. She published it for her own co-religionists and lamented in the preface that the authors of previous works on the subject “are Christians themselves, and write for the Christian world… the characters of the Old Testament are so briefly and imperfectly sketched, compared to those of the New.” Aguilar’s secondary motive in publishing this work was to counter the charge “that the law of Moses sank the Hebrew female to the lowest state of degradation, placed her on a level with slaves or heathens, and denied her all mental and spiritual enjoyment. The word of God at once proves its falsity.” Aguilar believed that the spiritual state of a Jewish community was dependent on the nation in which it existed, and in her survey of the contemporary period she distinguished between the communities of southern and eastern Europe from those in the Protestant north. Only in the latter were the Jews free of persecution and able to reach spiritual heights. The freest community, she observed, was the one in America-”The Hebrew advantages in that land, more numerous even than in England, consist in perfect freedom”-and American Jews had the greatest opportunities to cultivate the Jewish spirit
Grace Aguilar (June 1816 – September 16, 1847), an English novelist and writer on Jewish history and religion, was born in Hackney of Jewish parents of Portuguese descent. She was delicate from childhood, and early showed great interest in history, especially Jewish history. The death of her father threw her on her own resources.
When she died in 1847 at the age of thirty-one, Grace Aguilar enjoyed a reputation as a poet, historical romance writer, domestic novelist, Jewish emancipator, religious reformer, educator, social historian, theologian, and liturgist. A Jewish woman in Victorian England, Aguilar produced a body of work that appealed to both Jews and Christians, women and men, religious traditionalists and reformers.
By age fifteen she had started writing a historical romance set during the Spanish Inquisition, The Vale of Cedars; or, the Martyr. Written in reaction against Scott’s (1771–1832) Ivanhoe, this romance took her four years to complete and was published only posthumously in 1850.
In 1840 Aguilar began to launch herself into the British and American literary worlds. She asked the young Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), a fellow member of the Sephardic community, to carry a letter to his father, Isaac, in which she requested that the elder D’Israeli help her find a publisher. He eventually secured her an introduction to an editor at R. Groombridge and Sons, the firm that produced most of her work for the English market.
She contacted Isaac Leeser the editor of the American Jewish periodical, The Occident, who agreed to publish The Spirit of Judaism, Aguilar’s first major work, as the initial offering of his new series, The Jewish Publication Society of America. Unfortunately, the manuscript was lost at sea; but Aguilar rewrote it from her notes, and Leeser published it in 1842. When her copy arrived, Aguilar was angry to find that Leeser had attached an editorial preface and footnotes to her text in which he set forth “the chief points of difference between Miss Aguilar and myself.” A traditionalist himself, Leeser disliked Aguilar’s tendencies toward religious reform. Despite his critical notes, Spirit was well received by many Jews and Christians on both sides of the Atlantic, and was used as a teaching text in some synagogues and even Protestant churches until the 1950s.
The book brought Aguilar into a steady association with Leeser. Beginning in 1843 and continuing throughout the remainder of her life, he published over thirty of her poems in The Occident, including “Vision of Jerusalem” and “The Wanderers,” the latter a midrash on Hagar and Ishmael generally recognized as her most successful poem. It was not long before she was listed as the highest paid writer among the magazine’s contributors. This steady publishing relationship also enabled her to develop her own poetic style, a fascinating compound of romantic nature poetry, sentimentality, midrash, and prophecy.
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