A PRICE BELOW scholarly elite. Viewed as intellectual Rosa Luxemburg, born in Poland, RUBIES: JEWISH inferiors and sexual threats to the became a prominent Marxist theorist WOMEN AS REBELS studious Jewish male, women at the and leader of the failed Sparticist same time assumed much of the prac- (German communist) uprising in AND RADICALS tical and financial responsibility for Berlin. Anna Kuliscioffmoved to Italy thesurvival oftheir families and com- from Russia, by way of England, Naomi Shepherd. Cambridge, Mass.: munities. As energetic business- France and Switzerland, and played a Harvard University Press, 1993. women or members of the working major role in the Italian Socialist Party. class, women often had closer con- The Zionist Manya Shochat relo- tacts with the host cultures than men. cated from Russia to Palestine. Seek- This, alongwith Jewish women's tra- ing financial and technical assistance Jewish women played prominent roles ditional exclusion from the world of for rural collectives in her new coun- in the movements for radical social try, she made frequent visits to Eu- change that arose in Eastern Europe rope, the U.S. and Canada (where and radiated outward in the late nine- she was much impressed by the model teenth century. They thereby chal- of the Dukhobor communes). lenged their traditional status within In Western Europe, where Jews Jewish family and communal life. were better assimilated into the domi- Shepherd's engrossing book offers nant culture ofthe middle class, Jew- sustained studies of some half dozen ish women were more likely to be of these women radicals, along with reformers than radicals. Bertha briefsketches of many more. It is het Pappenheim, known as "Anna 0"to view that they have been inadequately readers of Breuer and Freud's Studies served by both Jewish and feminist in Hysteria, moved from Vienna to historians. Jewish historians have Germany, where she founded the failed to consider the distinctive na- Jiidischer Frauenbund, a social wel- ture oftheJewish woman iexperience fare and educational organization. of her culture and how this differed Campaigning publicly against the from that of the Jewish man. Conse- traffic in women, she visited brothels quently, they have been insensitiveto in Eastern Europe and the Middle the separate motivesanimatingwom- ideas, prepared them to be more re- East to learn about the conditions of en's endorsement ofradical ideas and ceptive to secular literature and to the Jewish prostitutes and pimps there, to the fact that, in rejecting the norms radical ideas that were flourishing in and to seek help from community of their community, Jewish women the world around them. In fact, dur- leaders who often preferred not to rebels were not rejecting the same life ing the nineteenth century, prosper- acknowledge the problem. that was being offered their brothers ous Jewish merchant families often (Pappenheim described the biblical and lovers. Feminist historians have provided a better secular education verses evoked and subverted by Shep- failed to examine Jewish women in (especially in languages, like French herd's title-"A woman of worth, the context ofJewish society and his- and Italian) for their daughters than who can find? For her price is far tory, and so have been unable to for their sons, who continued to study above rubiesn-as "a lovesong with appreciate their true social and intel- Hebrew and the Talmud. gefiihlte fish.") Rose Pesotta went to lectual contributions. In tracing the lives of her protago- the U.S. from the Ukraine and be- Intent to right the balance, Shep- nists, Shepherd offers a grand tour of came the sole woman on the execu- herd begins with a richly informed radical thought and movements in tive of the International Ladies Gar- account ofJewish history and culture Europe from the late nineteenth cen- ment Workers Union. She organized and of women's place in it from bib- tury through the early twentieth. workers from coast to coast as well as lical times to the Diaspora. She viv- Anarchism, communism, socialism, in Puerto Rico and Montreal (where idly illuminates Eastern European the Bund (Jewish socialist party), the Catholic church urged her depor- Jewish communal life as it persisted Zionism, trade unionism-all appear tation from Canada). Emma essentially unchanged from the Mid- here, refracted through the lives of a Goldman moved from Russia to New dle Ages to the mid-nineteenth cen- series of remarkable, courageous- York, where her anarchist and paci- tury, when the ideas ofthe Enlighten- women. She is sensitive to distinc- fist ideas led to her deportation back ment finally reached the Jewish tions of class as well as gender and to to Russia. Disillusioned with the masses. Shepherd stresses the exclu- the differences in Jewish life in West- Revolution she moved on, spending sion ofwomen "from the intellectual ern, Middle, and Eastern Europe. time in England, Spain, and Canada, inheritance which was the mainstay Particularly striking is the peripatetic where she died in Toronto. of Jewish life," and hence from the history of many of these women. None of the women Shepherd dis- CANADIAN WOMAN !jTlJDIESILES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME cusses achieved her goal, or at least bate: was French Canadian national- sites, the one absolute good, the other not in the way she envisioned. All ism then, and is Quebec nationalism absolute evil: Groulx also maintained were seeking to reconfigure the pri- now, exclusive, xenophobic, and anti- a profound contempt for French vate as well as the public world. They Semitic?lIts author, Esther Delisle- Canadians who he regarded as Trai- shared a "desire to appropriate the who at one point was publicly con- tors committed to modernity and its world of ideas--hitherto, in their demned as an intellectual Vychinsky, concomitants, pluralism, individual- communal tradition the world ofmen in reference to Stalin's show trials ism, liberalism, democracy and capi- alone-and to build a new and egali- prosecutor-rightly likened the con- talism. In Groulx's world, watching tarian relationship with men." Their troversy to caricature. Indeed, look- a hockey game, or listening to jazz most enduring legacy, Shepherd ar- ing beyond the controversy,one finds (that "Negro-Semitic cocktail"), were gues, can be appreciated only when in Delisle's thesis not a vituperative fundamentally acts of treason. In they are seen in the context of Jewish attack against Quebec nationalism, 1935 he concluded, "The great mis- society and history. "Their efforts to but rather an intelligent, well re- fortune of French Canadians, I must create a new identity for themselves searched analysis of right-wing na- dare to say, is that there are no French as women, in defiance of the norms tionalist thought in Quebec dur- Canadians." The Traitor and the Jew, of their own society, made them pio- ing the 1930s. writes Delisle, fell "into the same neers ofwomen's liberation." A Pricc Translated into English, and pub- vortex of hatred." Behw Rubies tells a fascinating story lished by Robert Davies Publishing Despite his abiding nihilism GrouLr and is an important contribution to of Montreal with a preface by the did not drift into despair. Taking his women's history, Jewish history, and historian Ramsay Cook, The Traitor cue from the European dictatorships the history of radical movements in and the /nu: Anti-Smitism and the ofthe 1930s, Groulxsought salvation modern times. Delirium of Exhemist Right- Wing for French Canada in millenarian Nationalism in French Canada fiom Fascism. "Weak minds which believe 1929-1939, thoroughly documents in democracy at the expense of the the vicious anti-Semitism inherent to Church and Christ react with horror the nationalism of Abbe Lionel to Fascism in all its shapes and forms," Groulx, Le Dcvoir, IXction nationak Groulx argued in 1937. "This despite and the youth organization, Jnrne the fact that certain nations are cur- Canada. Although Delisle states very rently very content, experiencing the dearly that "nowhere in my thesis is most glorious kind of rebirth under there any mention of French Cana- this political system." Towards real- THE TRAITOR AND THE dian anti-Semitismn (emphasis not izing a Fascist utopia, wherein French JEW: ANTI-SEMITISM mine) she also states very clearly that Canada "would reconcile itself with AND THE DELIRIUM OF her subjects were neither marginal the soil and its ancestors," solutions EXTREMIST RIGHT- nor insignificant. For example, were required for the Traitor prob- WING NATIONALISM IN Claude Ryan once honoured Lionel lem and the Jew problem. FRENCH CANADA Groulx as "the spiritual father of Inspired by Hitler's early answer to modern Quebec." the "Jewish question," writers at FROM 1929-1939 Moreover, the anti-Semitism of 1Action nationa&including Andre Groulx, Le Dcyoir, IAction nationak Laurendeau who would eventually Esther Delisle. Montreal: Robert and jeune Can& was not isolated, become co-chair of the Royal Com- Davies Publishing, 1993. nor was it merely mischievous as mission on Bilingualism and Andre Laurendeau would later de- Biculturalism-argued that because scribe it; it was essential to their na- pogroms do not work, "government tionalism. The Jew, as a symbolic measures" were required. A euphe- Highly specialized, often burdened construct, represented liberalism, de- mism, "government measures" meant with impenetrable vocabulary, and mocracy, capitalism, and modernity, the building of ghettos, the imposi- aimed at small, academic audiences, all threats to the French-Canadian tion of quotas at educational institu- Ph.D. dissertations, even published nation. Indeed, the Jew remained the tions, the repeal of voting rights, dissertations, rarely attract national ultimate negative Other, defined by deportations to Palestine, mandatory media attention. Yet a 1992 political Michel Foucault as "that which, for a identification cards and the institu- science dissertation from Laval Uni- given culture, is at once interior and tion of economic boycotts.