EMERGENT LIBERAL JUDAISM AND LILY MONTAGU’S PROTO-FEMINIST PROJECT: EXPLORING THE PRECURSIVE AND CONCEPTUAL LINKS WITH SECOND AND THIRD-WAVE JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGIES

Abstract

Lily Montagu was the founder of Liberal Judaism in England. Because of Montagu’s groundbreaking proto-feminist efforts women in Liberal Judaism can become rabbis, be called up to read the Torah, they are equal in divorce law, they can study the sacred texts, they can form a minyan, and can assume communal and religious positions of authority over men. Montagu was an author, theologian, and social worker; she was the driving force behind the development of Liberal Judaism. However, this biographical overview does not match up with the extant historiography that has instead preferred to focus on the male leaders of the Liberal movement to the extent that Montagu’s intellectual and theological contribution has been marginalized and even completely ignored. In this paper we will siècle Anglo-Jewry that would otherwise be forgotten; even more, we will see in Montagu’s essays, monographs, and novels some of the English foundations of contemporary Jewish feminist theology. In the process, the biography and memory of Lily Montagu will be restored to its rightful place. Lily Montagu was the founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism, but the extant scholarship has not been forthcoming in acknowledging the extent of her role in the expansion of the movement. In fact, Montagu’s part in the formation and development of Liberal Judaism into an established denomination, and her contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and theological underpinnings of the movement, have been marginalized, downplayed, and even ignored, with analyses of her involvement even bordering on the derogatory. However, the historiographical picture does not marry up with the primary sources, including Montagu’s innumerable speeches, lectures, prayers, and services to the Liberal congregation, and her countless monographs, novels, sermons, essays, letters, liturgies, and papers for Liberal Jewish Monthly, the Jewish Quarterly Review, and as part of the Papers for Jewish People series. Instead Anglo-Jewish historiography, with few exceptions, has preferred to focus on Claude years. Importantly, Montagu not only challenged contemporaneous Jewish stereotypes tradition along proto-feminist lines to develop religious praxis, liturgical, and theological discursive that is more resonant of Second-Wave Jewish feminism than it is of earlytwentieth-century, First-Wave feminist discourse.1 This is important as the Montagu corpus * Lecturer at University of Worcester. Email: l.devine@worc.ac.uk 1 By First-Wave feminism I refer to the period of activism between 1792 and 1918 (other scholars will differ) that resulted in women gaining the franchise in 1918 in England. Alternatively, the locus of Second-Wave Jewish 2 MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES reveals an Anglo-Jewish forerunner to the Second and Third-Waves of feminist activism. In this paper we will explore the links between the stages. Indeed, by examining the feminist elements of Montagu’s own understanding of Liberal theology, particularly in the immanent experience of the divine presence, we will draw out some of the spiritual and conceptual links with contemporary Jewish feminist theology. In the process, we will see not only another element to the gendered history of Anglo-Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and religious through the analysis of rarely seen literary works by Lily Montagu, some of the precursory and theoretical foundations of current feminist exposition on the divine.2 Lily Montagu was born December 22, 1873 into the upper-class, Anglo-Jewish Montagu family. Despite the family’s wealth, and their acculturation, Lily’s father, Samuel Montagu, was intent that the household remain strictly Orthodox. But Lily was never convinced; although she enjoyed the observances and the festivals she was concerned that attention to ritual, or ritual for ritual’s sake, was usurping spiritual intention (kavanah). Montagu could not relate any type of spiritual experience with these festivals; they seemed vacuous. Years later, she confessed in retrospect: I was not conscious of any personal spiritual experience stimulated by the Sabbaths and festivals, but I could become very enthusiastic over the symbols, and if asked, should have unhesitatingly said that their preservation was required by God. . . . experiences connected with Passover . . . I remember rushing up to my eldest brother . . . and expostulating. “I feel ashamed,” I said, “at the behavior of many of the people. How dare they think they are praying? If that is religion, I hate it.”3 But this is not to say that Montagu did not appreciate the importance of rituals and observances; she would later recall: “I adhered to my Liberal Jewish point of view that ceremonials which are aids to holiness, which, in fact, assist ordinary people to render which, alas, has usurped the place of life-giving religion, I felt to be acceptable.”4 Montagu complained that the Orthodox services were inadequate as the prayers were in Hebrew and incomprehensible and she felt peripheral as a woman being sequestered to the gallery, feminism was in the United States and began in the 1970s. The multi-denominational emphasis of the loosely Conservative movement. Jewish feminists were seeking women’s equal access to all aspects of Jewish communal and inequality in family halakhot (laws), the removal of the mechitza curtain that separates the sexes in the synagogue, and the inclusion of women in the all male minyan (prayer group). Reform feminists complained that women were not being called up to read the Torah, while Orthodox feminists questioned the exclusion of women from the study of the sacred texts as well as the legal restrictions on women initiating divorce. With regard to theology, the Reconstructionist movement was integral, and continues to be, particularly in its rejection of classical theology, halakhah (law), hierarchy, and Jewish particularity, and in its humanism (Luke Devine, Second-Wave Jewish Feminism, 1971–1991: Foundational Theology and Sacral Discourse (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011), 19–20). In general, the Second-Wave was a drive for gender inclusionism, in one way or another, across the Jewish denominations. 2 See Luke Devine, From Anglo-First-Wave Towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism: Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the Writing of Amy Levy (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010) and Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First Wave Feminism . 3 Lily Montagu, The Faith of a Jewish Woman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943), 8–9. 4 Lily Montagu, My Club and I: The Story of the West Central Jewish Club (London: Herbert Joseph Limited, 1941), 43. EMERGENT LIBERAL JUDAISM AND LILY MONTAGU’S PROJECT (LUKE DEVINE) 3 among other discriminatory gender differentiations. Believing that Orthodoxy was denying both her intellectual self-expression and the development of her inner-spirituality, Montagu the authority of her father and his uncompromising Orthodoxy and the restrictions on her personal liberty.5 As a young adult, Montagu was troubled by her family’s unthinking acceptance of halakhah: “We did not rebel. We believed that we were acting as Jews must, and there was no court of appeal against the strict laws. There was no question of degree. All the regulations were part of the fence, built up to defend the Divine laws as given to Moses, and we accepted them.”6 It was the Reverend Simeon Singer, the Minister of the New West End Synagogue, who Montagu credited with awakening her to the Hebrew prophets and to the importance of religion.7 Singer encouraged her to ask questions that would not have been countenanced by her father. According to Montagu they discussed the prophets at length and she gradually became infused with prophetic concerns for social justice. Nellie Levy describes the sense of moral mission that became central to Montagu’s life: A young girl dreamed and behold a vision appeared and she saw her sisters, and they lacked much that had been bestowed on her, some needed guidance and friendship, some to be lighted out of squalor and shown the light; some seemed mere children forced to become breadwinners; some ran to and fro to snatch at pleasures that were transitory and left bitterness and disillusionment; some cried “Give us opportunities denied us, we too need light, space, knowledge”; others sat and waited to enter the world of literature and art, and again, others feared to tread, for the path seemed strewn with giants, who could be overcome only by strength which they lacked, and still others groped towards those frailer than themselves and longed to hold out a helping hand but knew not how. . . . “To this vision I [Montagu] consecrate myself, and its fruition I will labor unceasingly. I will break down barriers, establish friendships and give opportunities. I will share, bind up those who are broken, and I will set before them light and good through a Faith in Judaism, so that they have strength wherewith to live.”8 religion. She became convinced that her role was to bring social “amelioration”; she was determined to help those less fortunate than herself, particularly in London’s socially disadvantaged East End Jewish community.9 For Montagu, it was God’s will that social justice would prevail over inequality: I was deeply shocked by the inequalities which prevailed in large cities, the terrible injustice which allowed me to have such an easy, happy, protected girlhood while there was, in some districts, a monotony of misery. But I felt convinced that God did not desire such injustice to continue. My faith in His righteousness was never affected, but I was worried by the apparent inability of God to stem the tide of injustice. I was convinced that man, with God’s help, could set things right if he wished to, but how was he to be made to realise his obligations?10 5 Eric Conrad, Lily H. Montagu: Prophet of A Living Judaism (New York: National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, 1953), 35–36. Se