During the nineteenth century, Jews of all denominations became increasingly
urbanized, as rapidly growing Jewish communities appeared in virtually every
major European city. By mid-century, there were large Jewish communities
in Paris and London. Once emancipated, the Jews of central Europe began to
settle in large numbers in Vienna, Budapest, and Warsaw. By the end of the
nineteenth century, the Jewish communities of these communities would
exceed 100,000. Warsaw Jewry would increase from around 5,000 in 1800 to
more than 400,000 by the end of the century. The Jewish population of Óbuda
and Pest – which were later amalgamated with Buda to form Budapest – num-
bered less than 2,000 in 1800 but exceeded 200,000 by 1900.
At the same time, the removal of restrictions precipitated a shift in the
Jews’ occupational profile. This shift was not in the direction that proponents
of emancipation had envisioned. Few emancipated Jews became farmers or
artisans, for the simple reason that agriculture and crafts were in sharp decline
during the nineteenth century. Instead, Jews moved vertically up the ladder
of commerce from petty merchants and pawnbrokers to shopkeepers, insur-
ance brokers, and small-scale industrialists; and horizontally from commerce
into now accessible free professions such as medicine, law, and teaching.
All of this added up to the embourgeoisement of central European Jewry.
Ironically, the transformation that led to the entry of Jews into the
European middle class preserved certain elements of an earlier traditional
Jewish way of life, especially with respect to division between public and pri-
vate. In traditional Jewish life, communal life was the domain of men; women
were largely excluded from synagogue and school. In bourgeois society, while
most Jewish women received a first-rate general education, they were still
confined to the home, by bourgeois domesticity rather than a traditional divi-
sion of labor. Similarly, weddings in traditional Jewish society were often
arranged by the parents or a professional shadchan(matchmaker); love and
compatibility were seldom taken into consideration. Although bourgeois
society regarded love and compatibility as important features of marriage,
nonetheless marriages were still arranged, in this case between members of
wealthy Jewish families for commercial rather than personal reasons. The
upshot is that the processes of change that transformed European Jewry dur-
ing the nineteenth century were, at least initially, a lateral step for Jewish
women, who still found themselves living in a male-dominated society and
Jewish community.
These demographic and occupational shifts were elements of the embour-
geoisement of Jews in western and central Europe. By 1880, Jews were
increasingly an urban, educated, politically liberal, increasingly secularized
commercial and professional caste. These changes, moreover, cut across
denominational lines. Even the Jews who were ardently and ideologically
opposed to acculturation embraced some measure of acculturation, as evi-
denced by the Hungarian- rather than Yiddish-speaking Ultra-Orthodox
Jews of Hungary.
164 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880