The Woman’s Voice in Zionism: Disentangling Paula Winkler from Martin Buber

Abstract

This article calls for a reassessment of the thought of Paula Winkler (1877–1958), paying renewed attention to her contributions to the cultural Zionist movement in her work on the domestic space as a site of Jewish cultural renewal. Criticizing the trend in modern Jewish scholarship of focusing on Winkler’s biography and her relationship with her husband Martin Buber at the expense of appreciating her innovations as a Zionist thinker, it proposes and demonstrates a close reading of her work as a corrective. Focusing on Winkler’s 1901 essays on Zionism and the Jewish woman, this article illustrates the important challenges Winkler leveled to Buber and the young Zionist intellectual community by awarding the Jewish woman and the private sphere an active and positive role in the Zionist transformation of Jewish life. It concludes that questions of Winkler’s identity are best approached through her own careful navigation of her liminal status in the Jewish and Zionist communities, and the way that she engages the perspective awarded to her as a woman and a non-Jew to formulate her arguments.

1. Introduction

“The only pretty girl in the small colony”; “a substitute for the missing nurturer”; “the Jewish woman […] returned to a silent place” (Lessing 1969, p. 366; Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 115; Hahn 2005, p. 66). Scholarship on Paula Winkler (1877–1958) far too often and easily resorts to characterizations rooted in perceptions of her in men’s eyes or to simplified reflections upon her apparent relationship as a wife, supporter, or substitute mother to Martin Buber.1 Winkler’s religious and gender identity is certainly a source of both intrigue and challenge: a self-confessed ‘philo-Zionist’, a convert to Judaism, a woman working in a largely male intellectual circle, and an author who published under a male pseudonym. In this article, I will argue that undertaking close readings of her work is the most productive route to studying Winkler in a way that doesn’t reduce her to the sum of her relationships with men or risk ungrounded speculation about her identity. By focusing on her two essays on Zionism and Judaism from 1901, I will model this approach, demonstrating her unique contributions to Zionist thought by placing her articles in dialogue with contemporaneous writing, and considering her own careful reflections upon her identity and what it meant for her role in the Zionist movement. In so doing, I will not neglect considerations of her gender and the important relationships in her life, but will award her agency as a careful negotiator of her own status and unique perspective. Far more than an accessory or a footnote to Buber, Winkler was a Zionist writer worthy of scholarly attention, whose thought is influenced by but not reducible to the biographical details of her life.

2. Background

Paula Winkler was born in Munich in 1877 to a Catholic family. After her education at a higher girls’ school and teacher training college in Munich,2 in 1897 she joined a mystical colony residing in South Tyrol, led by Omar al-Raschid Bey, a German Jew who had converted to Islam and convened the group in order to study the “wisdom of the Orient”, including mystical teachings from Indian, Buddhist and Islamic tradition.3 In his memoirs, Theodor Lessing, a fellow member of the colony, defined their goal as “the mystery of knowledge itself” (Lessing 1969, p. 363).4 He describes Winkler as not only beautiful but “uncannily bright and imperiously willful”, and able to quickly pick up and surpass the community’s techniques. Alongside teaching Lessing Latin, Winkler transcribed al-Raschid Bey’s work, quickly becoming “indispensable” to him (Lessing 1969, pp. 366–67). The following year, with the financial support of the colony and al-Raschid Bey’s wish that she would become independent, Winkler relocated to study languages at the University of Zurich. Retaining her spirit of adventure, as a student she became one of the first women to cross the Alps on a bicycle.5 In a seminar on German literature in the spring of 1899, she met Martin Buber. Their personal and intellectual relationship blossomed, and they had two children, Rafael and Eva, in July 1900 and July 1901, before marrying in 1907, shortly after Winkler’s conversion to Judaism.

Judith Agassi-Buber, the granddaughter of Winkler and Buber, later described Winkler as less than enthused about her conversion to Judaism, implying that it was motivated by the difficulties she and Buber encountered in living together as a Catholic and a Jew, rather than by any desire to observe the Halakah (Jewish law). Recalling how in her later years Winkler would describe herself as a “pagan” when asked about her religion, Agassi-Buber nevertheless also notes that Winkler willingly helped Buber observe the Jewish holidays, and did not object to her (grand)children receiving a Jewish education (Gordon 1988, pp. 21–22). Winkler’s commitment to Judaism was no mere gesture to convenience, however. In 1934, Winkler converted to Judaism for a second time, rendering her Jewish in the eyes of the Nazi authorities and barring her from being published in Germany, in a defiant assertion of her identification with her Jewish family and community, and a demonstration of the ineluctable importance of this identity to her (Sadeghi 2015, p. 322). As her Jewish identity was not premised on religious conviction or halakhic recognition, the formal religious conversion ceremonies may perhaps most productively be seen not as watershed moments of transformation, but as expressions of a long-standing and deeply personal relationship with Judaism. I will demonstrate how the beginnings of this relationship are documented in her 1901 articles.

Winkler and Buber’s intellectual partnership was dynamic from the beginning of their acquaintance, as they collaborated on each other’s work and shared their academic ambitions with one another. Winkler was a year older than Buber, who immediately deemed her academic influence to be of decisive importance for him. Their early correspondence contains letters from her offering praise and criticism of his work,6 and many examples of him seeking her opinions on his developing ideas. In a letter from August 1900, he shared his nascent ambition to collate old legends from different cultures and bring them to life in new articulations, an idea which later evolved into his collections of Hasidic tales.7 In this letter, he describes the “wholly new strength” that he had discovered in Winkler’s company and from her intuitive understanding of his way of working (Buber et al. 1991, p. 72).8 Paul Mendes-Flohr argues that Winkler’s influence can also be credited as the stimulus for Buber’s interest in mysticism and Hasidim, as she “introduced him to the world of Oriental wisdom [and] mysticism”, in which she had been immersed during her time in al-Raschid Bey’s mystical colony (Mendes-Flohr 1991, p. 93).

Winkler’s support and collaboration remained critical as Buber’s collections of Hasidic tales evolved, as he relied on Winkler to refine his language and edit or re-write his work. As Buber was not a native speaker of German, he turned to Winkler for linguistic guidance.9 Letters he sent to her in December 1906 whilst finishing his work on Die Legende des Baalschem [The Legends of the Baal Shem] contain multiple requests that Winkler assess and elaborate upon his versions of the tales. He invites her to use her own judgment and “make something out of” the draft manuscripts he sends, to “brighten up” and “enhance them”, by letting her “own nature” flow over and enliven them (Buber and Schaeder 1972, p. 250). Buber’s enduring admiration of Winkler’s poetic and narrative gift is clear from the foreword he wrote for a collection of her stories that he published after her death, entitled Geister und Menschen [Spirits and People] (1961). Crediting both her innate nature and her experiences in al-Raschid Bey’s colony with teaching her that narrative was the only medium that could truly report human encounters with the spiritual, Buber wrote, “she was a narrative human, one of those, for whom images become events, and events become the sequences of a narrated life” (Munk 1961, p. 8).10

Despite her work towards Die Legende des Baalschem, Winkler was not named as an author or editor when the volume was published.11 Buber’s request that Winkler animate stories with her “own nature” is particularly striking in contrast to the claims he made about the project in the 1907 introduction: “I have received it [the Hasidic legend] and told it anew…I bear in me the blood and the spirit of those who created it, and out of my blood and spirit it has become new” (Buber 1956, p. x). Nevertheless, in a poem inscribed in Winkler’s copy of Buber’s collected Tales of the Hasidim four decades later, Buber referred to this process as one that they undertook together: “Remember how in youth we set our sails/Together on the ocean of these tales?” His early personal ambition of collecting ancient legends and bringing their symbols to life is now reconceived as a process that they shared in together: “How image fitted image in our hearts!/Each kindling each, with each one adding parts/To new descriptions, a new entity/Came into being between you and me” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 12).12

The intellectual influence was reciprocal, with Winkler also crediting Buber with introducing her to ideas on Zionism. Her commitment to the movement and critical engagement with its ideas preceded her conversion to Judaism by eight years. A few months into their partnership, Winkler wrote to Buber that she had been moved to defend Zionism during a conversation where a friend attacked Zionists as wishing to discard culture and return to a “primitive” condition.13 She describes how she built her argument with “all the things I have learned from you” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 67); in a very early instance of her voicing her developing commitment to Zionism, which would continue to evolve across the following years. Winkler articulated this in private letters to Buber, writing within the space of a few days in October 1901 both “I would like to be active with you in the cause of Zionism,—no, I will be”, and “I am growing toward your cause; you must and will see that. It will be mine and also that of our children” (Buber et al. 1991, pp. 78–79).14

Despite Winkler’s suggestions in such remarks that Zionism was Buber’s cause, she was concurrently developing her own independent thoughts on it, which whilst similar to Buber’s, differed in several important ways, as this article will show. It is important to remember the reciprocity of their intellectual influence, and that Winkler was Buber’s interlocutor, colleague and critic, and not just a nurturer of his talents. As such, I resist the scholarly tendency to primarily characterize Winkler by her intimate relationship to Buber and by emphasizing her maternal status. Biographers of Buber point to the fact that his mother left him when he was three as being of decisive importance for his relationships, with Gilya Gerda Schmidt writing that in Winkler “he sought a substitute for the missing nurturer” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 115). Grete Schaeder cites a note that Buber wrote to Winkler in 1902: “when I found you, I found my soul. You came and gave me a soul. Therefore is not my soul merely this: your child?”15 Schaeder suggests that this note is given “more meaning” by the fact that “Buber was separated from his mother in his third year” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 11). Maurice Friedman similarly points to a Buber letter from October 1901 that describes how he was sustained by Winkler’s letters and knowing that “there is a mother in you…Now I know: ever and always I have been seeking my mother” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 79).16 Friedman concludes that this statement “powerfully confirmed the connection between Paula’s greater maturity and the need for a mother that had marked his life ever since his own mother left him” (Friedman 1991, p. 28).

Whilst biographers of Buber have argued compellingly for the impact of his early separation from his mother upon his life and thought,17 such isolated examples of his engagement of mother imagery to describe Winkler in this period following the birth of their children do not justify portraying her as a substitute mother to him or making this a decisive element in their relationship. Buber used imagery of motherhood to refer to other things, describing for instance his changed relationship to the Jewish festivals as like a child’s return to its mother.18 He also addressed Winkler in other ways, such as with the name of the child in the Jungle Book, “Mowgli”, an affectionate moniker that they used for one another in their correspondence.19 The scholarly emphasis on Winkler as mother risks obscuring the significance and mutual edification of their intellectual exchange, and does not do justice to Winkler’s multifaceted character. This tendency is furthermore not limited to biographers of Buber.

In her work on German-Jewish women writers The Jewess Pallas Athena, Barbara Hahn reads Buber’s declaration to Winkler that he had always been seeking his mother as a reply to Winkler’s statement of a week earlier, “I would like to be active with you in the cause of Zionism,—no, I will be” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 78).20 Hahn argues that in so doing, Buber “directs her however to a different position and assigns her a different task”, of motherhood, the success of which is evident in the fact that Winkler ceased publishing on Zionism after 1901 (Hahn 2005, pp. 65–66). Hahn suggests that because she was un-credited in Buber’s publications of Hasidic tales and because she used a male pseudonym in her later literary works,21 Winkler’s own life represents the failure of her vision for the Jewish woman. She concludes, “the Jewish woman, for whom Paula Winkler attempted to speak, is returned to a silent place—someone else, a man, speaks for her” (Hahn 2005, p. 66).

I will return to Hahn’s reading of Winkler’s theory of the Jewish woman, arguing that it both mischaracterizes Winkler’s argument and imposes an inappropriate criterion of success onto it. For the moment, it will suffice to note the dangers of uncritically moving from discussion of Buber’s description of Winkler as mother into discussion of Winkler as a theorist. Not only is Winkler’s model for the Jewish woman distinct from any conception of Winkler as a (Jewish) mother that Buber may have held, but judging the success of Winkler’s theory by her own actions assumes an equivalence between her and the Jewish woman about whom she wrote, that does not hold up to scrutiny. Before turning to Winkler’s writing on the Jewish woman and my criticism of Hahn, I will consider an article that Winkler published earlier in 1901, which both raises key themes in her developing Zionist thought and offers insight into how she viewed her involvement with the movement.

3. ‘Reflections of a Philo-Zionist’

Winkler published ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’ [Reflections of a philo-Zionist] in Theodor Herzl’s weekly Zionist paper Die Welt on 6 September 1901. Die Welt was a primary channel through which Herzl and his intellectual community shared Zionist ideas, and from 1906 featured the subtitle ‘Zentralorgan der Zionistischen Bewegung’ [Central organ of the Zionist movement]. The edition featuring Winkler’s article was the first during Buber’s four-month spell of editing the paper at Herzl’s invitation. Buber had accepted the invitation in order to help Die Welt become “the organ and spearhead of the intellectual and cultural movement among Jewish youth”, and to support and help bring together the “many talented young people struggling to make their mark” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 74).22

This youth intellectual and cultural movement came to prominence during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 in Basel, and was known as the “Democratic Faction”.23 A few days earlier, the group had held a conference24 where they prepared to disrupt the typical Congress focus on political and financial matters by making the case for cultural Zionism, arguing that an investment in a Jewish national cultural development was a necessary prerequisite for any successful Jewish life in Palestine. Buber was a core member of the group, and summarized their position and the events of the Congress in an article of a few weeks later, ‘Ein Wort zum fünften Congress’ [A word on the fifth Congress]. Arguing that “the yearning for a Jewish culture is the soul of the Zionist movement” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 93), they proposed that Jewish national culture could only develop by an organic outgrowth from “many small projects” and the “slow uninterrupted collaboration between many organizations” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 91).25 When their opportunity came to present, they urged the Congress to begin to focus on “cultural amelioration, that is to say, the national education of the Jewish people”, by supporting institutions such as a national library in Jerusalem, a Jewish college, and a Jewish publishing house (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 96). Feeling that their proposals had not been taken seriously, the group walked out of the session in an unplanned expression of frustration that they were “no longer able to participate in the work of the Congress” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 99). After Herzl’s intervention and vocal support of their aims, they returned to the session, and their proposals were passed, with the exception of securing funding for the Jewish publishing house.26

Although Winkler did not attend the fifth Congress, staying at home with the children, she wrote to Buber that she had been closely following his movements in the preceding weeks by reading Die Welt,27 and received regular updates from him about how the Congress had proceeded. Her letters to Buber show her critical engagement with the thought pieces in Die Welt, and her commitment to and contribution to the young movement’s ideas about sponsoring Jewish cultural development through media and art institutions.28 In ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, she uses her first publication in the paper to negotiate her simultaneous passion for and initial distance from both the Zionist movement and the Jewish people. By deeming herself a ‘philo-Zionist’, she signals her love for the movement but draws short of claiming that she is (yet) a Zionist herself. The largely autobiographical article describes various encounters, direct and mediated, with Jewish communities and Zionism, culminating in a passionate and poetic description of her adoration of the Jewish people. A month after the publication of this article, Winkler declared her desire to be active in the Zionist movement (Buber et al. 1991, pp. 78–79), although she had been engaging with and defending Zionist ideas across the previous two years. The article is thus born from a turning point, where Winkler remains conscious of and explicit about her status as external to the movement, but is at the brink of committing to joining it as an activist. By publishing in Die Welt and entering into dialogue with its intellectual community, she was taking her first steps in doing so.

3.1. Experiences of Judaism and Zionism

Recounting her experiences at the third Zionist Congress in 1899 in Basel, Winkler admits that although she had already received some exposure to Zionist ideas, at that time she still knew little about the movement. Describing Buber’s speech, she recalls both the intimate experience of “a human voice speaking to me with wonderful force”, and the almost elemental power he channeled: “this was no longer an individual human being; with primordial violence the tremendous longing, wishes, and will of a whole people poured over me like a raging torrent” (Winkler 1901a, p. 5).29 Despite doubting whether “it would have sense, value, or meaning for the movement, for people like me to belong to it”, Winkler recounts how her emotional experiences banished these intellectual concerns as she was carried away by Zionist ideas (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). As she continues, noting the occasional opportunities that she had since found to publically commit to Zionism and receive encouragement from members of the movement, Winkler does not explicitly define what she means by “people like me” (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). Yet, candid reflections elsewhere in the article about her non-Jewish status and her degree of separation from the Jewish community contextualize this remarkably vulnerable public expression of doubt about her place in the Zionist movement.

Describing herself as “so lucky” to have been awarded the opportunity to develop a different relationship to and understanding of Judaism than is granted “to the majority among us”, Winkler at once acknowledges her membership of a community distinct from Jews, and claims a special relationship to them. She admits that she did not always hold a nuanced understanding of Judaism, yet distinguishes herself from her fellow non-Jews,30 whose ignorance extended to finding it remarkable that one could not identify Jews by appearance alone (Winkler 1901a, p. 4). Winkler credits two sources of proximity to Jewish communities with her education about Judaism, both of which are mediated in a way that simultaneously underscores her separation from them.

First came the stories that her mother Fanny Winkler (née Pichler) shared with her as a girl, of the “peculiarly strong and enduring impressions” that Fanny had formed of the local Jewish community when she herself was a child.31 In typical girlhood experiences of loneliness, Fanny’s “agile spirit” had for a while found refuge in this “small foreign island in the sea of her everyday life”. Despite classing her mother’s experiences as born of an immaturity, Winkler warmly remembers the colorful picture that her mother painted; a crude sketch of “well-cared for children”, “comforting, generous women” and “well liked husbands and fathers”, who received “abundant earnings” from their “peddling”. Yet, behind the wonderful “allure of the peculiarity” hovered “the dark background of a painful colorful past”. These stories sparked Winkler’s interest in Judaism, granting her an opportunity to glimpse something elusive, “like a child, who manages to cast a glance into a seldom opened dark chest” before it “closes again”. Just like such a child, for whom the memory takes upon a life of its own as they dream about it, stood Winkler “before that small bright piece of Jewish life, that ascended from the old stories” (Winkler 1901a, p. 4).

This romanticized picture of a Jewish community was formed and re-formed by the youthful imaginations of both mother and child, with Fanny’s distance to the community as an external observer only magnified as the stories were transmitted to Paula a generation later. The motif of encounter from a distance is repeated in Winkler’s account of observing a Jewish community in Zurich as a young adult.32 Echoing the temporal chasm between her mother’s experiences and her own narrative receipt of them, Winkler’s personal observations are formed through the physical barrier of a window. She describes how from within her home she watched a “sweet black-eyed little boy” play in the sand outside, before another child approached, tried to steal his toys and taunted him, calling him “Jew-child”. A group of children then formed, verbally and physically harassing him and reducing him to tears, before his sister arrived and skillfully defended him by returning such “well-targeted abuse”, that it was clear to Winkler that this was a daily occurrence. Clearly moved and disturbed by witnessing this event, Winkler describes it as a “terrifying” instance of her growing perception of “the special place of the Jews amongst us” (Winkler 1901a, p. 5).

3.2. The Jewish Homeland

Moving away from autobiographical recollections, Winkler expands on her understanding of Judaism with further reference to children, who represent something essential about Judaism: “in the eyes of the youngest child a thousand-year old pain burns as a hidden fire”. In hyperbolic poetic prose, Winkler declares her love for this community (“how I love you, people of pain!”), calling on them to remain strong in their status as a separate people; “you should not perish in the maze of foreign peoples. All of your beauty, all happiness and all earthly joy lies in difference” (Winkler 1901a, p. 6). This articulation recalls the letter she wrote to Buber several years earlier, describing one of her earliest opportunities to promote and defend Zionism, in response to her critical friend.33 To the friend’s claim that cosmopolitanism rather than nationalism was the future, Winkler had responded that contrasts produced the “highest and ultimate and finest stimulants in life”. Suggesting that there was a moral imperative to preserve and protect both personal and national identities, Winkler argued that compromising them for the cosmopolitan goal would not only rid human life of its richness and color, but would also “kill the souls of peoples”. Cosmopolitan thought inevitably invited both the “oft-decried ethnic stew” and an erasure of individuality that would even promote the denial of gender differences in favor of a third “sexless sex, as among bees” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 68). This early expression of Winkler’s desire to protect and perfect both national and gender characteristics recurs throughout her contributions to Die Welt, as she promotes an essentialist definition of the Jewish people and the Jewish woman.

On several occasions in ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, Winkler refers to suffering and pain as characteristic of the Jewish national identity, such as when observing the torment of the “sweet black-eyed little boy” led her to a realization of the “special place of the Jews amongst us” (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). Her characterization of Jews as a “people of pain” is not based on their cruel treatment by others, however, but upon their “ancient longing for the ancient land”. It was in this land that the greatest strengths of the Jewish national character could finally be rediscovered. Because “the land resides at the bottom of every [Jewish] heart”, for Winkler, “every Jew is a Zionist”, although they may not know or admit it (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). In this article Winkler signals her growing commitment to Judaism, and the Zionism that she views as inextricably connected to it, although she does not signal what form of action her commitment would take. Yet, in her claim that a return to the “ancient land” would lead to the flowering of the Jewish community, she raises two interrelated themes that would become central to her later arguments: narratives of Jewish history and the relationship between physical space and understanding.

In the familiar Zionist trope that the Jewish exile represented a suspension of Jewish history that would only resume as Jews regained national status in the homeland,34 Winkler addresses the Jewish community: “when you again become men of your land, a book of your history will be written”. With the final chapter in Jewish history having commenced, the great brackets of Jewish occupation and re-occupation of the land would close around the time in exile, the miseries of which could finally be recorded and understood, from the security of their cessation (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). The Jewish people would thus become “strong in remembrance”, leading even the peoples who presently “deeply hate” Jews to love them. Both Jewish self-respect and their respect in the eyes of other nations were made possible by this process of historicization, which had remained impossible in exile. Even the centuries of torment that presently haunted Jewish life with a “crown of thorns” would ultimately crown the collective brow with a “wreath of mayflowers”, once recorded in a historical narrative (Winkler 1901a, p. 5).

To derive a positive self-understanding from this newly coherent Zionist historical narrative, Jews had to view history with the correct perspective. Describing the process of educating the Jewish child about their history, Winkler writes, “the wonderful book of your history will unfurl before you, your young child will kneel upon your lap, and you will show him the dark pictures of exile”. As the parent turns the darkest pages of Jewish history the child would viscerally encounter the past: “there narrow alleys will be established…there people will arise…there diatribes will ring out and thrown stones will fly”35 (Winkler 1901a, p. 6). Winkler—perhaps deliberately—does not specify the spatial axes across which this animation of history would occur, whether “there” refers to physical location of the homeland, the space that the parent and child occupy as they sit together, or the plane of the open book. Yet, as she continues, the child’s vantage point from within the security of the land seems to be a prerequisite: “but see—it [the child] looks over all the pictures of wrath and shame, it looks beyond [them] with golden eyes. The decay of ancient narrow alleys no longer stands before it, nor the terror of pursuit and atrocity of betrayal—in your pledged land it beholds with blessed eyes”. As she continues, describing corresponding experience of the “scent of the vines” and the blue color of the sky, Winkler evokes the sensory, physical qualities of the land (Winkler 1901a, p. 6).

Elsewhere in the article, however, Winkler suggests that such qualities could also be accessed in the imagination, arguing that the “longed for land, an invisible kingdom” resides in the heart of every Jew, who “must only grasp it, focus upon it, and it is there”. The “fragrance of its soil” would ascend, and heal primal Jewish wounds, as “a tremendous miracle-worker” (Winkler 1901a, p. 5). Imagination could thus be a vehicle to accessing the perspective that would allow a productive engagement with historical narrative, suggesting that a physical presence in the land was not necessary for gaining the “blessed eyes” that it bestows. Despite the pain of longing for it, Jews in exile retained a transformative inherent and internal tie to the land.

Although Winkler suggests that the imaginative construct of the homeland could sponsor this perspective on historical narrative, she does not explain whether imagination alone was also sufficient to institute the final chapter of history that sponsored the historical narrative in the first place. ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’ thus concludes with an unresolved question about the necessity of a physical Zionist state to instigate the healing process of community self-education about Jewish history. It does however underscore the importance of storytelling and narrative to sponsor a rich understanding of Judaism, whether as a Jew or a non-Jew like Winkler. By exploring questions of the relationship between place, physical or emotional state, and perspective, Winkler lays the foundations for her next article, ‘Die jüdische Frau’, where she would go on to articulate the role of the domestic space and the Jewish mother in sponsoring meaningful understandings of Jewish history. Moving away from autobiographical reflections, this article describes how the Jewish mother could prepare narratives and a home environment that would sponsor a historically conscious and rich mode of Jewish life, which would itself function as a foretaste of the homeland. Yet, in so doing, Winkler develops a Zionist theory that transposes her own personal experiences of standing before “that small bright piece of Jewish life, that ascended from the old stories” bequeathed to her by her mother (Winkler 1901a, p. 4).

4. ‘The Jewish Woman’

Two months after the publication of ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, Winkler published her two-part article ‘Die jüdische Frau’ [The Jewish woman], in consecutive editions of Die Welt, on 8 and 15 November 1901. Although an editorial note deems it to be “in a certain sense” a “continuation” of the former piece, ‘Die jüdische Frau’ differs in several significant ways (Winkler 1901b, p. 2). No longer framing her arguments with admissions of hesitance about her status as an outsider to Zionism and Judaism, Winkler authoritatively delineates the power and potential of the Jewish woman to perform a crucial role in the Zionist movement. Having expressed her intention to become active in the Zionist movement, she was now confidently contributing to its intellectual development.

Broadly, in the first part (‘Die jüdische Frau [I]’), Winkler offers an essentialist characterization of the Jewish woman and argues that the failures of Jewish assimilation into German culture have had a particularly damaging impact on the Jewish woman, by suppressing several of her important innate qualities. Calling upon the Jewish woman to re-actualize the great potential lying dormant within her, Winkler describes the various ways that she could then divert her attention from German concerns and serve her community, by organizing events and stimulating and celebrating Jewish art with her “wide open heart and house” (Winkler 1901b, p. 4).36 The second part of the article (‘Die jüdische Frau [II]’) stresses the importance of Jews developing “national feeling”, a consciousness of and commitment to nurturing what was particular about the Jewish people and culture. She describes ways that the Jewish woman could aid her community in achieving this, by educating children in Jewish history and nurturing young Jewish thinkers and artists, by providing them a with safe and stimulating home in which to develop their craft. The Jewish woman would cultivate this culturally rich and secure Jewish space as a proleptic “homeland” that would serve the community before they returned to the “old ancestral soil” (Winkler 1901c, pp. 6–7).

4.1. Defining the Jewish Woman

Several major themes from ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’ recur in the article, including the importance of historical narrative and perceiving it from within an appropriate environment, and the motif of children as both the recipients of stories about the Jewish past and as representatives of something essential about Judaism. With a nod to the “sweet black-eyed little boy” whose torment Winkler had previously recounted observing, ‘Die jüdische Frau [I]’ opens with a metaphor for the Jewish woman as a child: “from the garden of a noble house a child escaped, arrived on the street and exchanged its delicate pearl jewelry for a shard of glass, with which it saw another child playing on the way. That is the Jewish woman” (Winkler 1901b, p. 2). Mourning the assimilatory desire that robbed the Jewish woman of her innate riches, furnishing her instead with the “exchanged frippery” gained in her attempt to become a “good European”, Winkler calls her to once again “be herself”. “Everything” would thus be given to her: she would become “a helper to her people, a savior, a pioneer of the path to the new, old homeland” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). This dynamic of “new” and “old”, which applies to both the narratives and the home that the Jewish woman would create, is the first of two major orienting structures in ‘Die jüdische Frau’ that I will survey. The second is the related notion of the Jewish woman as mediating facilitator of connections within the social, temporal, and spatial domains, which would return the Jews to community amongst themselves, with their history, and with their homeland.

As revealed by the anti-assimilatory imperative to the Jewish woman to simply “be herself” by rousing the “wonderful gifts” that “slumber in her soul”, Winkler views the potential of the Jewish woman to serve her people as grounded in innate qualities, rather than learned behaviors. Describing one such quality, the ability to stimulate discourse, Winkler writes, “she is created [geschaffen] for the finest and most inspiring sociability” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). This essentialist sketch is offered not in contrast to Jewish men, but to the German women that Winkler distinguishes as fundamentally different from Jewish women. Claiming knowledge of both groups, Winkler writes scathingly of the “cumbersome impression that the German women has invariably made upon me”, always seeming to “sit on needles” within society groups and wishing to retreat to “wash her children” or “go for a walk”, unlike the clear thinking and incisive Jewish woman for whom participation in the society life is “natural”. Acknowledging that the women’s movement has begun to significantly change the role and behavior of women in Germany, Winkler deems it to offer a corrective that only German women need. It had “very laboriously and yet only slightly trained” German women to attain something that Jewish women had possessed “from the beginning”: “the courage to emerge from the covered mass” (Winkler 1901b, p. 2).

As Winkler supports this claim by sharing how she has observed Jewish women roused without inhibition in “assembly halls, lectures and protests”, she claims the rightful place of Jewish women in movements like Zionism. Of course, as a German and non-Jewish woman herself, Winkler’s participation in the intellectual Zionist community did not fit into this scheme. Although publishing this article entailed Winkler behaving in a manner she deemed uncharacteristic of German women, I will argue that Winkler does not explicitly claim Jewish identity. She rather negotiates her liminal status carefully, in a way that allows her to draw observations formed by her exposure to and intimate knowledge of both groups. To have explicitly claimed Jewish status would have undermined her essentialist binary between Jewish and German women.37 I will return to the question of Winkler’s status, after observing how she weaves personal identifiers into later sections of her argument.

As Winkler articulates her vision for the Jewish woman, she describes her task as at once active and passive. In order to re-animate her dormant essential traits, the Jewish woman was to become “conscious of herself”. Describing how in so doing, she could aid the Jewish people in their struggle to “arm themselves for homecoming”, Winkler asks, imploringly: “will the courage and love of their daughters leap up before the people, will they shine out to them through the darkness and waves of enemies like the pillar of flame?” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). It is not the “daughters” themselves, but the characteristics they channel that will provide this guiding light to the people. The result of the Jewish woman becoming actively “conscious of herself” is her transformation into a vehicle for the qualities that lay latent within her.

This dynamic of channeling dormant essential characteristics rather than actively producing them is captured in Winkler’s use of two verbs for creativity: schaffen and schöpfen. Schaffen is the verb used for original divine creation in the German biblical tradition,38 and is used by Winkler with reference to the original design of the Jewish woman, who was, for example, “created [geschaffen] for the finest and most inspiring sociability” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). The word schöpfen is associated more with artistic creation, literally meaning ‘to scoop’. Describing the Jewish woman, Winkler says that although “a creativity [Schaffen] of her own is denied to her”, she possesses “the veritable creative [schöpferische] endowment, of bringing forth from herself that which is most innate to her and bestowing it with its own form” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3).39 The Jewish woman is thus called to re-form and re-create herself in her own original image, and let the qualities with which she was first endowed shine out through her to her people, in a process that is at once active and passive.

For Winkler, this process always had to be motivated by the Jewish woman’s dedication to her community. Celebrating instances where Jewish women had blossomed in prior chapters of Jewish history, Winkler cites examples including the “quiet heroic virtues of [the Jewish woman’s] soul, that arose in the ghetto” and the “primordial mother in the exile” who shone in the “magic of her own being”. In such cases, the Jewish woman had turned her attention to her community and was not tempted by the assimilatory desire to “rush out into the foreign garden”, whose “new soil bears her no blossoms and no fruits” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). By contrast, the “full spirited and fine” Jewish women of 19^th century Germany invested their dynamic energies into promoting German romantic culture in the salons. Calling for the present generation of Jewish women to avoid repeating such behavior, Winkler asks, “can the Jewish woman today be for her people what she was then to the foreign [people], to whom “she extravagantly scattered the best of what she possessed?” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). As she re-creates herself, the Jewish woman is called to be continually attentive to her community, to ensure that she channels her essential qualities towards their needs.

4.2. The Jewish Woman as Narrator

In ‘Die jüdische Frau [II]’, Winkler continues to describe the tasks of the Jewish woman with reference to re-forming and the verb schöpfen. Describing how it is essential for the Jewish community to attain a healthy self-understanding and to value and protect their group identity, Winkler calls for “a return to national thoughts of a higher level”. These “national thoughts” would not be like “the old, from which we once fled”, but would be “brighter, finer and more deliberate” and excised of prior tendencies towards “parochial and terrible limitedness” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6). This description of a mode of national thinking that is simultaneously “a return” to the past and a departure from it exemplifies the recurring dynamic of “new, old”. This refined manner of thinking was rooted in Jewish history and drew on the most productive aspects of past thought, but took on a new form, clarified by Zionist values.

Once again recalling Winkler’s earlier passionate defense of Zionism as protector of the beauty of national individuality, unlike the “oft-decried ethnic stew” of cosmopolitanism, and her corresponding call for the perfection of gender identities (Buber et al. 1991, p. 68),40 Winkler here identifies the transformed Jewish woman as the sole agent who can and must aid her community in achieving these refined national thoughts. Her people demand from her a “self-education on bodily and spiritual beauty and strength” and “a young, strong, capable generation”. By meeting these demands, she could ascend to the “unequalled woman’s fortune” of becoming a “constructor and Schöpfer of the new homeland and the new national character” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6). Both the use of the term “constructor”, from the root aufbauen, meaning to establish, arrange or construct,41 and the term schöpfen with its associations of re-creation, reflect how the Jewish woman’s task of bringing the community to awareness of this new homeland and national character is not to produce something entirely novel, but engage existing paradigms anew.

The Jewish woman’s first task in cultivating her community’s national consciousness is to gently bring children to awareness that they are different to those around them, and that they belong to a separate people, whose fate, “after long sorrow and long humiliation is again in proud flight”. Secure in this confidence that they can receive from “the mother, and only the mother”, the new generation would no longer desire to be like other peoples. To achieve this, the mother can use the “great treasure trove in the mighty history, in the ancient legends of her people” (Winkler 1901c, pp. 6–7). Like the renewed national thoughts they were to sponsor, these legends needed refining, in order to remove the “great heaviness and sadness, that adheres to the old conventions”. Whilst remnants of the “distress and worry” of exilic times had petrified and clung onto the “old pages”, the mother should carefully select elements and bestow them “softer, more childlike forms, […] gathering and shaping children’s stories, children’s pictures, simple Volk melodies”. Whereas in times of hardship Jews were unable to do this and had to “borrow from strangers”, the Jewish woman could now create new narrative forms from exclusively Jewish history and legend, and thereby “bestow a great, joyful homeland to her homeless children” (Winkler 1901c, p. 7).

The homeland that the Jewish woman as “constructor and Schöpfer” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6) would bequeath to her children was thus a narrative one, that unfolded out of the stories she pieced together. Like the child on the parent’s lap in ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, the child conceived in ‘Die jüdische Frau’ would develop a new perspective on and relationship to history, mediated by its new narrative form. Whereas in the former article, Winkler suggests that the new “book” of Jewish history would be formed at the instigation of the Zionist state (real or imagined), she now emphasizes the Jewish woman as the agent who would construct the new articulation of history, from within her home in exile. This articulation would itself provide the security and joy of the state, as a homeland for her children. By framing historical narrative as prolepsis, rather than reflection, of the Zionist state, Winkler uses ‘Die jüdische Frau’ to depart from her previous rather more abstract reflections and outline a program of action for the Jewish woman within her community.

By suggesting that the Jewish homeland could be constructed in a narrative realm, Winkler also moves further away from her emphasis in ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, on the physical qualities of the land and the transformed status of Jews as a national-political body upon returning to it. She instead evokes the affective qualities of the homeland, defining homeland as an emotional state of rootedness in Jewish history that was mediated by a form of creativity and an intimate social dynamic. Winkler contrasts the ability of the mother to successfully facilitate connections with history to the failures of other traditional forms of Jewish historical narrative. Figures from the Jewish past had previously merely been “awarded a place in the history books of school children, and to the present day thus help breed boredom in schoolrooms”. Whilst past heroines, for example, might inspire marvel in readers, their “great words and ample mighty gestures are nevertheless foreign to us, even when the poet becomes a mediator [Mittler] between her and us”. By contrast, the Jewish woman as Schöpfer, can be “in the middle [Mittel]” in a manner that is “wonderful” and “constructive [aufbauend]” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6). By constructing new historical narratives, the Jewish woman constructs the affective state of the homeland.

4.3. The Jewish Home

Whereas Winkler’s Jewish woman was to bequeath her children an experience of the homeland by narratively mediating the past, the young intellectual Zionist community required something else from her: a domestic environment that could anticipate the social, intellectual and cultural dynamics of the future Jewish state. This “host of young people” was “full of thoughts, full of plans, full of stimulation”, but were vulnerable to the “frost of loneliness”, where social isolation and the lack of intellectual interlocutors would lead their delicate nascent ideas to “become fruitless”. The Zionist movement would be damaged by the loss of such thinkers. To become “more courageous and more confident”, they needed “a house, where one liked to listen to them, where one likes to exchange discourse on what concerns them” (Winkler 1901c, p. 7).

Buber and his fellow cultural Zionists were presently discussing how the young Zionist community would be strengthened by accessing stimulating spaces for cultural exchange and discourse. Buber had taken on the editorship of Die Welt to help bring together the “many talented young people struggling to make their mark” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 74), and called for other similar projects in a comprehensive Jewish arts program, with facilities including “a free theater […], anthologies, an art show, an art publishing house, a book publishing house, journals, and other projects” (Buber et al. 1991, p. 77).42 Yet, these facilities were all within the public sphere. Nuancing and contributing to this discussion, Winkler emphasized the community’s needs within the private sphere, and the nourishment that they could gain from carefully curated physical spaces and social dynamics within it. This required an adaptation of Jewish domestic custom to serve “the young Jewish movement, the new Judaism”; as whilst “there may be many houses full of venerable customs, enduring tradition and significance […] the old forms do not satisfy the goal, they thirst thereafter to be fulfilled with fresh life”. Just like the power of the new narratives, finding new forms for Jewish domestic custom would bring “endless” benefit: “how wholly different, how much more worthy and natural would the domestic life and sociability become”. The subsequent “stimulation, excitement, animation and security” would provide a private, domestic “presentiment of the homeland”. Whilst Winkler does not dispense with the idea of an eventual return to the land, describing “the recovery of the old ancestral soil” as the ultimate “goal”, she does not promote any means of achieving this remote goal. She instead focuses on how the Jewish woman could presently assist the Jewish community, particularly through her work in creating a Jewish home, which in exile “must […] alone form the homeland of the Jewish people” (Winkler 1901c, p. 7).

By tasking the Jewish woman with creating this domestic environment, Winkler suggests an application for her naturally endowed skill of “sociability”. Jewish women could now benefit their own community with the skills that the 19th century salon hostesses had “scattered”, and could thus ascend to the role of “the great understander, the great stimulator”, who “understands how to hear, to listen”, and “who has the gaze that prompts discourse” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3). As the “beloved confidante” and facilitator of discourse, Winkler’s Jewish woman would not participate as an interlocutor or active contributor to the intellectual exchange, however. Her primary task was to create the conditions for dialogue, encouraging speech and becoming a Mittler of social relations, just as she was a Mittler of transtemporal historical relationships between the child and the national past.

To fashion an inspiring and particularly Jewish domestic environment for the community, the Jewish woman was also to nurture and embrace Jewish art, which could “help to give the house a national character”, and furnish it with “dignity and beauty”. Once again, Jewish tradition bequeathed “ancient motifs and symbols”, which needed to be re-formulated and developed by the artist into the “fine, new application” demanded by the times. Although this description could well apply to the Jewish woman’s work as a storyteller, Winkler does not include this task under the banner of Jewish art, the examples of which are limited to visual works and artifacts. The Jewish woman’s contribution to art is limited to facilitating, supporting and understanding artists, who would be encouraged by knowing that “the woman of their people will prepare a loving state in her home for their pictures” (Winkler 1901b, p. 4). Despite the creative aspects of the Jewish woman’s role as Schöpfer and storyteller, Jewish art is deemed the domain of men.

The dynamics of “new” and “old” thus recur through all the activities of Winkler’s Jewish woman, as she constructs original applications of ancient symbols that suit the contemporary community, in the feminine Jewish self-actualization, storytelling and the Jewish home that reflects the new Jewish art and culture. Bridging the new and old requires the Jewish woman to function as a mediator, sponsoring relationships between the past and present, a skill that she also demonstrates in facilitating social discourse. In all cases, her attentiveness to the community and ability to understand intellectual and creative currents around her is key. The Jewish woman is thus the constructor of two private prolepses of the homeland: the realm of historical narrative, and the socially, culturally and intellectually rich domicile. These tasks are of paramount importance to the Zionist movement, but set the Jewish woman apart from the young Jewish thinkers and artists who themselves generate the Zionist art and thought.

4.4. Winkler’s Liminal Status

By acting as a Zionist thinker in proposing this model, Winkler sets herself at some distance from the Jewish woman of her article. Although the article lacks the autobiographical elements of ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’, her occasional use of the collective first person hints at her perception of her own role within this Zionist community. In ‘Die jüdische Frau [I]’, Winkler uses it only once, in describing the Jewish woman’s ability to be “the beloved confidante”. Continuing, Winkler writes: “she has more—she is ingenious. Something for which we have to envy her. She is created [geschaffen] for the finest and most inspiring sociability” (Winkler 1901b, p. 3).43 Numbering herself amongst those not thus geschaffen, or originally created, Winkler deems herself to lack these essential qualities of the Jewish woman; presumably on account of her not having been born Jewish. Winkler does not explicitly elaborate on the identity of the “we” that she numbers herself among, but by writing as a Zionist thinker and joining in conversation with the (primarily male44) contributors to Die Welt, she implies that she is part of the intellectual community of young Zionists from whom she distinguishes the Jewish woman.

In ‘Die jüdische Frau [II]’, Winkler uses the collective first person more extensively. This first occurs in a cluster discussing the remoteness of historical Jewish heroines: “when we turn back the pages…we marvel, but her great words and ample mighty gestures are nevertheless foreign to us” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6). By writing herself into the experiences of the group for whom the past needed to be mediated more effectively, Winkler claims identity with the Jewish community who suffer a disjointed national-historical consciousness. It is also important for Winkler’s argument to assert a deep understanding of the past failures of national thinking, by naming it as “the old, from which we once fled” (Winkler 1901c, p. 6), so that she can develop her own model for a distinct and renewed mode of historical consciousness sponsored by storytelling and art. In a parallel argument about the need to move away from domestic customs that don’t serve the present time, Winkler similarly uses the collective first person to claim intimate knowledge of their failures: “it is indeed clear to us: the old forms do not satisfy the goal” (Winkler 1901c, p. 7). Nevertheless, in both parts of ‘Die jüdische Frau’, Winkler also refers repeatedly to the Jewish community as “her [the Jewish woman’s] people”. Using this articulation, rather than “our people” or “us”, means that Winkler does not consistently write herself into identity with the Jewish community, but maintains some distance as a detached observer, as in ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’.

Across the two parts of ‘Die jüdische Frau’, Winkler thus both invokes distance between herself and the Jewish community, and claims some degree of shared experience with them. This makes her personal status hard to pinpoint, and highlights her liminality. It is important to note that even when she claims a share in Jewish experience, it is not in the experience of Jewish women. In fact, by stating that she is amongst a group who can envy the Jewish woman for her innate characteristics, Winkler differentiates herself from the Jewish woman; instead claiming identity with and engaging in behavior characteristic of the young Zionist intellectuals, from whom the Jewish woman is distinguished. It is for this reason that I disagree with Barbara Hahn’s assessment of Winkler’s work. Arguing that “Winkler ventures a definition of the ‘Jewish woman’, which at the time allows her to present herself as a Jewess, inasmuch as she speaks to Jewish women about their mission”, Hahn draws a false equivalence between Winkler as theorist and the object of her theorization. This allows Hahn to charge Winkler with failing to “take up the tasks she here outlines”, and suggest that this undermines her intellectual project (Hahn 2005, pp. 63–65). However, by observing that Winkler was not claiming identity with the Jewish woman but rather implicitly numbering herself as a member of the Zionist intellectual community, no such charge of failure is necessary.

Winkler admits to and carefully negotiates her liminal status within the Zionist, Jewish and German communities, using her knowledge of each to build her arguments against assimilation and to make claims about the essential character and skill set of the Jewish woman. This feature of her work demands careful analysis, and an awareness of the distance between Winkler and those about whom she wrote; necessitating a mode of scholarship that takes account of the markers of her personal identity, but does not compromise analysis of her work with ungrounded speculation about its relationship to the biographical details of her life. Liberating analysis from judgments about Winkler’s failure as a Jewish woman or pathologizing claims about Buber’s fixation with her as mother, Winkler’s thought can be explored as a significant contribution to the young cultural Zionist movement, and a challenge to her colleagues, to begin to account for areas of Jewish domestic life and women’s experience that they had previously ignored.

5. Winkler in Dialogue

To demonstrate Winkler’s contributions to Zionist thought, I will compare her arguments on the Jewish woman to those of Buber in his article ‘Das Zion der jüdischen Frau’ [The Zion of the Jewish woman], published in Die Welt earlier in the same year. Buber’s article is similar to Winkler’s in many ways; offering an essentialist description of the Jewish woman and awarding her roles, such as sponsoring “the living study of Jewish history and literature”, “the cultivation of a truly Jewish sociability” and developing a Jewish household (Buber 1901a, p. 116).45 Overemphasizing the degree of similarity, however, risks obscuring Winkler’s innovations, and portraying her work as a mere re-statement of Buber’s, as Barbara Schäfer does by suggesting that Winkler’s ‘Die jüdische Frau’ “reflects the exact same perspective” as Buber’s article. Schäfer argues that their articles can be seen as the “product of intense mutual exchange”, leaving open the question of “who was absorbing the ideas of whom” (Buber et al. 2001, p. 400).46 Although the intellectual exchange between Buber and Winkler was significant and mutually edifying, I will argue that far from sharing the “exact same perspective” as Buber, Winkler was using a perspective bestowed to her by her unique status in the Zionist movement, as a woman and non-Jew. Grounding her arguments in observations gleaned from this perspective, and engaging with cultural Zionist ideas independently and critically, Winkler awards the Jewish woman a positive role in Zionism that differs markedly from the role that Buber awards her, leaving their articles far from indistinguishable.

5.1. Buber’s ‘Das Zion Der Jüdischen Frau’

Buber’s article was published in Die Welt in April 1901, several months before his editorship of the paper commenced, and was based on a lecture he had just delivered to a group of teenage Jewish women in Vienna (Buber 1901a).47 The article followed a short piece by the then editor, Berthold Feiwel, which was prefaced with a call to attention on the topic of the Jewish family: “we hereby open the discussion about the question of the Jewish family and hope that our readers will join in vigorously” (Feiwel 1901, p. 2). Feiwel acerbically described the Jewish woman as “the representative of the most diseased modernity”, whose assimilation led to her husband’s and children’s alienation from Jewish tradition (Feiwel 1901, p. 2). He called for proposals on how to sponsor women’s returns to Jewish consciousness, and for a multi-disciplinary approach to analyzing this pressing problem; ending his piece with a gesture to Buber’s article as the beginning of further reflections and discussion on the topic (Feiwel 1901, p. 3).

Neither Buber’s article nor Winkler’s, which followed six months later, met Feiwel’s exact prescription of reflecting upon the tools that could be engaged to return Jewish women to national consciousness. Although Buber dwells more on describing the damage that Jewish women had done to the family than Winkler, he also stops short of the open hostility towards Jewish women that Feiwel displays, such as in suggesting that those who assimilate could be deemed “Jewish-anti-Semitic” (Feiwel 1901, p. 2). Buber frames his article within the aims of the Zionist movement, focusing on how women could help. Arguing that in general, “Zion has to be born in the soul before it can come into existence in visible reality”, he defines “the Zion of the Jewish woman” as the “transformation that must occur in the soul of the Jewish woman so that Zion can become a reality” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 112).48 Although the contribution of the Jewish woman to the movement is thus deemed as greatly important, Buber describes the transformation that it is predicated upon as a correction of her recent failings.

Buber romanticizes ghetto times as the occasion of the Jewish woman’s “greatest importance” to Jewish life, as she raised her children to be “courageous and committed Jews”, and encouraged her husband’s intellectual development and commitment to Judaism by relieving him of distracting mundane tasks. These “motherly and strong” women simultaneously “brought a wonderful, natural freshness to the home, which replaced the lost young green of the homeland” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 113). This domestic idyll was however shattered by the dual forces of Jewish persecution and “so-called Emancipation”, which led to the “degeneration of peoplehood, of the home, and of the personality”. This was in no small way due to the women, “who adapted themselves most easily to their environment and adapted its ways, [and] participated in a most lively manner in the evolving fanaticism of assimilation” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 114). The destruction of familial unity and Jewish culture swiftly followed, as “the Jewish woman’s royal desire for beauty became distorted into tasteless and unhealthy gaudiness”, and she lost her “heartfelt, self-sacrificing trust”, replacing the traditional “exhausting rituals” with a few quickly carried out “simpler” ones that failed to “provide a sense of the sacred”. The Jewish woman’s “degeneration” thus wounded her family, as “under the influence of this pedantic and empty passivity the Jewish male loses more and more of his high minded zeal and lives primarily in his work”, and the new generation, “our life and future”, grow up “without direction and without concern for the future” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 115).

To reverse this damage, Buber calls for the Jewish woman to transform herself, so that she can in turn restore the Jewish home to its crucial role of grounding Jewish life and providing a home for the nation in exile. She must first self-educate, and “realize that she can become a whole and living personality only when she honors the peculiarity of her people, when she nurtures and develops that which is intrinsically Jewish” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 116). Once “whole” again, the Jewish woman could return to the paradigm of supportive and inspiring wife and mother, encouraging her husband and children to develop strength and courage in their Jewish identity.

5.2. Gendering Zionism

As Buber describes the nature of the Jewish woman’s contribution to the Zionist movement, he initially claims that she can serve her people by doing “the same things that the man does: by being active in word and deed in the dissemination of the national idea, by calling for self help, and by working untiringly”. However, significant differences emerge when Buber turns to the ways that men and women can channel these efforts: “when he works for the idea of national unity, she can renew the living Volkstum [national identity and character49] through her love and her Jewish soulfulness” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 116). Returning to this division of labor, where men contribute to Zionism intellectually and women attend to the community, Buber writes, “for it is the man who will find and theoretically develop cultural ideas, but only the woman can realize them, only she can create living, continuous culture” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 118). Whilst Buber does not justify the exclusion of women from the intellectual realm, his repeated assertions of feminine traits such as “the warmth of her nature and her vigor” and “her love for her people” suggest that it is these qualities that Buber sees as making the Jewish woman suited to nurturing people, rather than ideas (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 116).

By contrast, Winkler’s article ‘Die jüdische Frau’ describes the Jewish woman’s nature and behavior with no explicit reference to the Jewish man. When Winkler draws on another group to illustrate the essential qualities of the Jewish woman, she cites German women instead, arguing for example that German spheres will not provide the Jewish woman with the unique stimulation and support she needs. Although Winkler describes the Jewish woman as distinct from the young Zionist intellectual community, she does not gender this community or develop her account of the Jewish woman’s nature in contrast to it. Winkler thus only positively describes the Jewish woman’s abilities, and deems no areas of Jewish or Zionist life inaccessible to her or as the exclusive domain of men. This is significant for Winkler’s article in two main ways.

Firstly, and most simply, although she describes the primary role of the Jewish woman as an external facilitator of Zionist thought, she does not explicitly exclude women from intellectual Zionist pursuits; leaving open the possibility for non-Jewish women like herself, or perhaps even young or non-parent Jewish women, to contribute. It is clear that to avoid undermining the authority of her articles, Winkler could not portray the intellectual Zionist sphere as exclusionary of (non-Jewish) women like herself. However, by not defining this sphere as the sole domain of Jewish men, she also allowed for the possibility of building Zionist theory with insights awarded to her by her status as a woman and a non-Jew. Thus, by rejecting Buber’s gender binary, Winkler lays the foundation to productively engage her liminal status.

Secondly, whereas Buber describes women’s contributions to Zionism as a secondary stage that implements the preliminary work of men, Winkler describes the Jewish woman’s work in isolation. This awards the Jewish woman greater agency and independence, as demonstrated by her work as a storyteller. Far from merely realizing the “theoretically develop[ed] cultural ideas” of men (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 118), Winkler’s Jewish woman as narrative Schöpfer independently assesses the “mighty history” and “ancient legends” of Jewish tradition, to extract and re-formulate the ideas within it that she identifies as suitable for cultivating her children’s national consciousness (Winkler 1901c, p. 7). As the Jewish woman re-animates Jewish domestic customs and re-creates the Jewish home, she displays similar autonomy, independence and skill.

Although Winkler ultimately offers a gender-essentialist definition of the Jewish woman and awards her a limited range of responsibilities, she nevertheless makes significant departures from Buber. Her scheme both celebrates the potential for the Jewish woman’s domestic achievements, and avoids engaging a gender binary that makes her dependent on the work of men outside the home. By choosing not to explicitly exclude women from other spheres as Buber does, Winkler also makes room for her own voice and the potential voices of other women to use their own perspective and experience in intellectually contributing to Zionism.

5.3. Elevating Domestic Innovation

Through the simple act of using Die Welt as a forum to discuss the contributions of women to the Zionist movement and the importance of the domestic space for Jewish cultural development, Winkler brought these questions to attention and placed them in dialogue with the contemporary Zionist intellectual currents. By focusing on the Jewish woman as an independent agent and active contributor, Winkler demonstrated women’s potential positive value for the movement, rather than framing their task as to neutralize the damages of assimilation, as Buber did. Buber peppers his article with suggestions that the Jewish woman’s most important work was to simply resume the female behaviors of ghetto times. By doing this, the Jewish home could become what it “once was”, the family could “once again” draw the same strength from it, and the woman herself could “once again” become queen (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 116). When Buber describes the Jewish woman’s responsibility to “create culture”, he defines this process as merely the recovery of something ancient: “it means this—just as more and more stretches of the once rich, but now decayed soil will be snatched from death and returned to life, so new areas of the once so productive national soul [Volksseele], in ruin for thousands of years, will be snatched from death and returned to life” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 118).

Despite his consistent focus on the past as a model for the Jewish woman’s behavior and the source of all her cultural resources, Buber also invokes novelty, citing, the “new Jewish house”, the “new Jewish woman”, and the “new fatherland of the soul” that her love would generate for her people (Buber and Schmidt 1999, pp. 116, 118). Yet, by describing each of the Jewish woman’s activities as rooted in ancient paradigm and awarding her no genuinely creative role, Buber leaves the only possible source of novelty in these new elements of Jewish life as the Zionist “cultural ideas”, that the men of her community develop and she merely realizes (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 118).

For Buber’s Zionist thought in this period, the notion of innovation that maintained continuity with the past was essential. In an article published several months later entitled ‘Jüdische Renaissance’ [Jewish renaissance] (Buber 1901c), he compares the Zionist movement to the 14th century Renaissance, as art, thought, and social exchange were transformed for both, when “bathed in young light, the old earth sees with new eyes” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, pp. 31–32).50 Jews would be awarded a new perspective by Zionism, leading to “no return, [but] re-creation [Neuschaffen] from ancient material” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 33). Even the articulation of Jewish experiences and emotion would be transformed by the new language of Modern Hebrew, which would sponsor their entry into “a covenant that is the ancient one yet new” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 34). Jewish art was essential for Buber, as an embodiment and symbol of this process of transformation. In another essay from this period, Buber describes the Zionist renewal of Jewish customs with the simile of artistic creation: “the artist creates visible works from the resources of the earth into which he pours his soul’s experience and which once again turns into a soul experience for the recipient” (Buber and Schmidt 1999, p. 19).51 In an iterative process, ancient matter is re-created in light of the perspectives of new experience, which then provokes further new experiences in turn, preserving the delicate harmony of “new” and “old”.

In ‘Das Zion der jüdischen Frau’, Buber invokes no such process in the Jewish woman’s work, however. Her tasks are to implement ideas given to her by the Zionist intellectuals, and to fulfill the paradigms set for her by history. Whilst the home and experience of the fatherland she produces may be deemed “new”, she is not personally responsible for any creative and transformative innovations. By contrast, Winkler employs several motifs to elucidate the relationship between new and old in the Jewish woman’s own work. As noted, by using the verbs schaffen and schöpfen, Winkler describes her tasks as not original creation but the re-creation or new construction of ancient elements, a notion strongly akin to Buber’s “Neuschaffen [new-creation] from ancient material” in ‘Jüdische Renaissance’. As Winkler describes the new historical narratives that the Jewish woman is to produce, she describes how the woman’s sensitivity to the situation and the needs of her family allow her to produce original story forms that can gently educate her children. A similar process was to occur with domestic customs, the present forms of which were unsuitable for the present Jewish community and thirsted “to be fulfilled with fresh life” (Winkler 1901c, p. 7). Winkler therefore develops her own vocabulary to engage contemporary ideas of the interplay between present experience and the re-engagement of Jewish tradition, and argues for the Jewish woman’s share in this crucial Zionist task. Where Buber’s description of the Jewish woman’s work as recovering the ancient while somehow producing something new leaves a gap that can only be filled by men, Winkler portrays the Jewish woman herself as an agent of this “new, old” transformative process.

Winkler thus awards both the Jewish woman and the Jewish home a substantial role in cultural Zionism and characterizes the Jewish woman’s work in a similar manner to Buber’s accounts of Jewish artistic and intellectual processes elsewhere. In so doing, Winkler elevates the domestic sphere as a site of Zionist innovation, implicitly placing it alongside the public artistic and cultural institutions that Buber and the “Democratic Faction” were promoting as the means for Jewish cultural renewal. Challenging Buber’s relegation of the private sphere to a secondary role, that merely implemented the new ideas developed outside of it, Winkler celebrated both the Jewish woman’s work in personally facilitating intellectuals and artists within her home, and her own innovations in producing historical narratives and domestic customs that bridged the past and the demands of the present. Far from representing the “exact same perspective” as Buber’s article on the Jewish woman (Buber et al. 2001, p. 400), Winkler’s ‘Die jüdische Frau’ subtly yet substantially departs from it, re-framing the Jewish woman and re-conceiving the nature of her role in Zionism, whilst simultaneously making room for her own voice and that of other liminal figures in the Zionist intellectual community.

6. Concluding Reflections

I have argued that Paula Winkler’s 1901 articles on Judaism, Zionism and the Jewish woman make a notable contribution to the young cultural Zionist movement, which should not be obscured by reducing Winkler to her identity as a wife or substitute mother to Martin Buber. A close reading of her articles and a comparison to Buber’s work from the period reveals that Winkler’s arguments diverged from Buber’s in several key ways, incorporating ideas from cultural Zionism to elevate the role of the Jewish woman and home to a significance not anticipated by Buber. Winkler’s critical engagement with and contribution to the developing ideas of Jewish cultural renewal also challenges Buber’s description of intellectual Zionist pursuits as a male domain. Although she awards the normative Jewish woman a restricted role in society, of exercising her (re-)creative52 powers in childrearing and facilitating the young intellectuals and artists to whom she remains separate, Winkler reserves the possibility of liminal women such as herself intellectually contributing to Zionism.

For Winkler, the positive contribution of the Jewish woman is predicated on her investing her skills and efforts into the Jewish community, so she can develop the private environments that would nurture the people and ideas that represent the future of Zionism. Once again blurring the lines of distinction between Winkler and the Jewish woman about whom she wrote, Barbara Hahn cites Winkler’s later use of the literary pseudonym Georg Munk and the fact that she published no theoretical Zionist writing after 1901, suggesting that this reflects the failure of Winkler’s model for the Jewish woman: “for a woman, there remains literary writing under an assumed name, and a maternal existence—for husband and children. The Jewish woman, for whom Paula Winkler attempted to speak, is returned to a silent place—someone else, a man, speaks for her” (Hahn 2005, p. 65). Yet, this very “maternal existence” is, for Winkler, part of the “unequalled woman’s fortune” of being able to sponsor her community’s renewed national consciousness (Winkler 1901c, p. 6). By suggesting that a lack of published recognition under her own name represented a “silencing” of the Jewish woman that was at odds with the goal of Winkler’s project, Hahn misreads her work. Far from championing the public male domain as the locus of culture and art like Buber and his colleagues, Winkler argued for the significant value of the Jewish woman’s private contributions to Zionism, elevating the private sphere as a site of cultural innovation. Imposing a masculinist criterion of success for a Jewish woman that hinges upon her recognition within the public sphere is thus inappropriate. Whilst Hahn is correct in highlighting the problematic nature of Buber failing to credit Winkler for her contributions to his work on Hasidim, her suggestion that Winkler’s apparent relegation to the private sphere represents the failure of her intellectual project does not hold up to a close reading of Winkler’s articles.

As Mark Gelber demonstrates in his book Melancholy Pride: Race and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism, Winkler was not alone as a woman Zionist writer in this period. Other Jewish and non-Jewish women contributed to Zionist debates on topics such as the Jewish family and the relationship between Zionism and the women’s movement, although consideration of their work is largely absent in Zionist historiography (Gelber 2000, p. 162). The neglect of women’s contributions is to the detriment of scholarship, as this study of Winkler demonstrates, by showing how both the substance of her arguments and the way that she marshals her unique perspective make important interventions in the conversations between her male colleagues. I have argued that to avoid the pitfalls of drawing false equivalences between Winkler and the subjects of her writing and to resist the temptation of projecting ideas about Winkler’s life onto her work, scholars should begin by examining her writings closely. This is a methodological approach that can also be used to sponsor a productive exploration of the work of other little-known women writers from Zionist history.

Winkler’s personal status as a non-Jewish woman in the Zionist movement was complicated, and has invited scholars to speculate on her biography, not least her relationship with Buber, as they consider her work. Yet, from the autobiographical elements of ‘Betrachtungen einer Philozionistin’ to the references to her own perspective in ‘Die jüdische Frau’, Winkler sets an example of carefully and critically engaging with the questions, challenges and innovative approaches that her liminal status generated, which scholars investigating her life and work would be well advised to follow.