Description
Book SynopsisDuring the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few wealthy, cultivated Jewish women to discuss the events of the day, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past.
Trade ReviewA welcome surprise... [Hertz] asks questions that have generally have been ignored about the origins and social significance of this curious phenomenon and the reasons why it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared; and because she then answers them on the basis of a staggering amount of reading on virtually every aspect of the history of the last phase of the old regime in Prussia." -
New York Review of Books"An enlivening study of the era.... Its special appeal is to cover a neglected area of women's emancipation that has been both regretted and admired, since the role the salonieres carved out for themselves was so precarious and transitory." -
Jewish Book News and Reviews