Integration Through Segregation: Swedish-Jewish Emancipationists and the Jewish Girls’ School in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

Abstract

This article analyses the only Jewish girls’ school in nineteenth-century Sweden, Sophiaskolan, and the discussions about girls’ education and Bildung that emerged within the community – including regarding Judaism's ‘Oriental heritage’. The community meetings were a male sphere in which men discussed women's role within Jewish tradition. This implied the ‘de-orientalization’ of Jewish men and how the girls’ school's mission was to shape well-educated mothers that could preserve Judaism and not convert to Christianity, and in doing so shape their children, especially their sons, to become exemplary citizens and thus improve the chances for full political emancipation for Swedish Jews.