In a sense that the Jewish culture and religion were the basic premise for the preservation of the Jewish identity, the Jewish family has taken an important role in preserving the Jewish religion and culture. Moreover, for Jews who set a high value on ...
In a sense that the Jewish culture and religion were the basic premise for the preservation of the Jewish identity, the Jewish family has taken an important role in preserving the Jewish religion and culture. Moreover, for Jews who set a high value on their religious activities, family meant an important space for community building and religious activities. The rigid observance of table rule(Speisegobot) as well as the observance of the Sabbath, and the performance of religious festival was a factor that ruled their family. The children who were too young to take religious class had acquired the traditional Jewish emotional mood at home. The close relationship between family and religion has made it possible for Judaism to exist for thousands years.
Taking these kinds of religious roles, Jewish women also tried to transform their families with the values of middle-class civil family. The Jewish families have experienced a rapid change for the nineteenth century. The liberation of Jews, the cultural transformation(Akkulturation), and the upgrade of the socio-economic status of Jews have made the civil family and its value to be the typical factors of the Jewish families. The construction and function of family changed after their social upgrade. Now Jews no longer live only within their own socio-cultural world, but, maintaining their own unique group identity with the acquired legal equality, try to devote themselves to the integration of the whole Germans. Thus, the Jewish family took tow kinds of function. Family is still an important space for the maintenance of the Jewish identity, and at the same time is an area which, by accepting the cultural value of Christianity and the behavioral rules of citizen, enabled them to upgrade into a civil class.
The role of Jewish women and the importance of their family were very crucial for maintaining the Judaism within the system of modern society. The Jewish families and women, in the second German imperial period in which tradition and modernity were mixed together, had shown a double attitude of conserving the traditional values, and accepting actively the modern values of civil society. However, this kind of double standard was not looked upon as contradictory to Jewish women. In this sense, while, due to their socio-economic upgrade and through their frequent contact with Christian society, Jewish men's traditional roles at home have been reduced since the latter period of the nineteenth century, Jewish women, by way of accepting the civil values within their family circle without giving up their Jewish tradition, were able to overcome the crisis of Jewish identity in the midst of the secularization process and under the threat of anti-semitism.