Private Letters
This chapter discusses the role of personal correspondence as a vehicle for circulating ideas and opinions of enlightened Jewish women. The network of correspondence they sustained with many people in many cities in the German lands and even further afield constituted from their point of view a crucial means of participating in cultural discourse. Personal letters were an important channel through which these women could not only expand their horizons and acquire knowledge, but also demonstrate their intellectual abilities and participate in public discourse on literature, theatre, politics, and religion, among many other subjects. Thus, a study of their correspondence enables one to assess the involvement of these Jewish women in the contemporary world of culture — an involvement at times hidden from the public gaze and partly revealed in their epistles. Women also employed the epistolary form in order to participate in the intellectual activity of the Haskalah, but this happened only in a later period.