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The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature
For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial.
In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.
In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.
- GenresJudaism
368 pages, Hardcover
Published June 22, 2016
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April 29, 2019
I’ve always had a fantasy of being a shadchan, a person who knows who is seeking what love, and who magically matches one with another, to produce endless happy marriage after happy marriage. Never mind that I have none of the extroverted, community facing, shmoozing-with-all characteristics required of such a character. The idea of making marriages excites me. People should be happy, and why shouldn’t I be able to be an agent of their joy?
For this reason and others I have read with fascination Naomi Siedman’s The Marriage Plot. Centering her work in queer/gender studies and working as a cultural historian, Siedman documents through literature the collision of Eastern European Jewry’s sexual/social mores in the 19th century with Western European culture. Writes Siedman:
From this vantage point, Jewish modernization, Europeanization, and embourgeoisement emerge as an encounter between two radially asymmetrical sex-gender systems; On the one hand stood the traditional Ashkenazi structure, with roots in rabbinic Talmudic culture and rich embodiment among the East European Jewish masses; on the other hand appeared the bourgeois European sexual system, with roots in Greco-Roman, Christian and heroic-chivalric culture formations, in which modernizing Jews aspired to participate. As I discuss elsewhere, the Jewish romance with Europe was notoriously unreciprocated: In the judgment of the dominant European cultures into which Jews were (imperfectly) integrating - a perspective thoroughly internalized by aspiring Jewish citizens of Europe - Jewish men were unmanly cowards and effete hysterics, while Jewish women were hypersexual, coarse, and unfeminine. Jewish “queerness,” then, is a symptom of Jewish modernity as cultural mismatch, category crisis, incomplete integration, and colonial mimicry. It is no coincidence, as Sander Gilman and others noted, that “the invention of homosexuality” coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie, an entry productive of and complicated by the sexual stigmatization of Jewish men. Psychoanalysis, in a variety of related readings, was a primary effect of this stigma, while also providing tools for its diagnosis and “cure,” but it was not the only such effect. Among the other significant reverberations of this sociosexual crisis was Zionism, as both the collective internalization of Jewish sexual stigma and treatment for the wounds of modern Jewish masculinity. (pp. 15-16)
Seidman nonetheless also questions the queer studies approach, embodied in the above paragraph, and redefines queerness and her conceptual architecture in her own terms. I would leave it to someone who is more versed in the intricacies of queer studies to pass judgment on the modified conceptual apparatus that she applies. For the non-expert reader, the results of her close readings of familiar authors (Sholom Alechem) and many less familiar Haskalah writers are simply fascinating. She introduces such notions as “homosociality”, contra homosexuality, and explores its role in heterosexuality and homosexuality. She brings in Foucault to masterful effect, identifying the interplay between the social control functions and the eroticizing functions of sexual segregation. She turns questions of sexuality and culture, matchmaking, yichus, extended family networks versus nuclear family structures, over, and then over again, reconstructing a process of cultural change and capturing an alternative way of being as it intersected and ramified within the prevailing European chivalric model of sexuality.
While I cannot adequately sum up this masterful review of literature and theater (and later film) as windows on and creators of 19th century Jewish culture as it was transforming and mutating into 20th century modernity, I will quote a partial summary of the work from Seidman’s own self-aware afterward, as she considers what she has done, and what it all means.
In 1888, S.Y. Abromovitsh declared to Sholem Aleichem that Jews had a distinct sexual culture, that "the circumstances in which a Jew can love are entirely different from those of other people. The Jewish people today have their own character, their own Jewish spirit,with its distinctive customs and habits, different from other peoples’.” What was this difference? And if Abromovitsh was correct in diagnosing Jews as sexually different, even after secularization and the abandonment of halakhic practice, has this difference persisted?
Persisted where and in whom? More than just the ordinary passage of time separates the traditional and post-traditional Ashkenazi Jews of the nineteenth century from their dispersed descendants; any cultural after effects of their secularization are similarly fractured, prismatically separating into different components or turning back to “recover” elements of the Eastern European past apparently jettisoned and forgotten. The very notion of describing “Jewish culture” is rightly viewed with skepticism in contemporary academic discourse as retrograde, nostalgic, “essentializing,” liable fall into the “booster/bigot trap.” David Hollinger, who identifies this trap, insists on recognizing “the internal diversity of ethno-racial groups and the contingent, historically specific character of the culture these communities present to the larger society at any given moment.” Evidence that I risked such pitfalls is the entirety of this book; my main defense is that I stand in a line of diagnosticians of Jewish sexual culture, and in presenting their notions along with mine, I hope to relativize my own (explicit and implicit) theories along with theirs. This is a book about Jewish discourse around sex and marriage rather than about Jewish sex itself. Nevertheless, the very structure of my book, in which each chapter concludes with a section that describes the recovery of traditional sexual practice ostensibly overthrown in the Haskalah (arranged marriage, pedigree, the extended family, sexual segregation), suggests that the distinctive sexual character of Ashkenazi culture (whatever that might be) either “persists” in diasporic expression or ”returns” through conscious reclamation and memory construction.
Although this book begins with a sociological-literary analysis of modernization as embourgeoisement, most of the examples for the recovery of traditional Jewish practices and customs are literary. There is some logic to this. This recovery was often literary, and just as in the Haskalah, literature did not reflect realities but served “compensatory” functions; for example, Bernard Malamud depicted a marriage broker in “The Magic Barrel” without ever having met one in the flesh. The view of tradition as filtered through absence, loss, and nostalgia represents secularization as the uncontested norm, failing to recognize that traditional Jewish practices also simply “continued” (although not “unbroken”). With these warnings in full view, I nevertheless cautiously address the question in this afterword: what persists of the traditional Ashkenazi sex-gender system in the post-Ashkenazic cultures of our own time? (pp. 295-296)
For this reason and others I have read with fascination Naomi Siedman’s The Marriage Plot. Centering her work in queer/gender studies and working as a cultural historian, Siedman documents through literature the collision of Eastern European Jewry’s sexual/social mores in the 19th century with Western European culture. Writes Siedman:
From this vantage point, Jewish modernization, Europeanization, and embourgeoisement emerge as an encounter between two radially asymmetrical sex-gender systems; On the one hand stood the traditional Ashkenazi structure, with roots in rabbinic Talmudic culture and rich embodiment among the East European Jewish masses; on the other hand appeared the bourgeois European sexual system, with roots in Greco-Roman, Christian and heroic-chivalric culture formations, in which modernizing Jews aspired to participate. As I discuss elsewhere, the Jewish romance with Europe was notoriously unreciprocated: In the judgment of the dominant European cultures into which Jews were (imperfectly) integrating - a perspective thoroughly internalized by aspiring Jewish citizens of Europe - Jewish men were unmanly cowards and effete hysterics, while Jewish women were hypersexual, coarse, and unfeminine. Jewish “queerness,” then, is a symptom of Jewish modernity as cultural mismatch, category crisis, incomplete integration, and colonial mimicry. It is no coincidence, as Sander Gilman and others noted, that “the invention of homosexuality” coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie, an entry productive of and complicated by the sexual stigmatization of Jewish men. Psychoanalysis, in a variety of related readings, was a primary effect of this stigma, while also providing tools for its diagnosis and “cure,” but it was not the only such effect. Among the other significant reverberations of this sociosexual crisis was Zionism, as both the collective internalization of Jewish sexual stigma and treatment for the wounds of modern Jewish masculinity. (pp. 15-16)
Seidman nonetheless also questions the queer studies approach, embodied in the above paragraph, and redefines queerness and her conceptual architecture in her own terms. I would leave it to someone who is more versed in the intricacies of queer studies to pass judgment on the modified conceptual apparatus that she applies. For the non-expert reader, the results of her close readings of familiar authors (Sholom Alechem) and many less familiar Haskalah writers are simply fascinating. She introduces such notions as “homosociality”, contra homosexuality, and explores its role in heterosexuality and homosexuality. She brings in Foucault to masterful effect, identifying the interplay between the social control functions and the eroticizing functions of sexual segregation. She turns questions of sexuality and culture, matchmaking, yichus, extended family networks versus nuclear family structures, over, and then over again, reconstructing a process of cultural change and capturing an alternative way of being as it intersected and ramified within the prevailing European chivalric model of sexuality.
While I cannot adequately sum up this masterful review of literature and theater (and later film) as windows on and creators of 19th century Jewish culture as it was transforming and mutating into 20th century modernity, I will quote a partial summary of the work from Seidman’s own self-aware afterward, as she considers what she has done, and what it all means.
In 1888, S.Y. Abromovitsh declared to Sholem Aleichem that Jews had a distinct sexual culture, that "the circumstances in which a Jew can love are entirely different from those of other people. The Jewish people today have their own character, their own Jewish spirit,with its distinctive customs and habits, different from other peoples’.” What was this difference? And if Abromovitsh was correct in diagnosing Jews as sexually different, even after secularization and the abandonment of halakhic practice, has this difference persisted?
Persisted where and in whom? More than just the ordinary passage of time separates the traditional and post-traditional Ashkenazi Jews of the nineteenth century from their dispersed descendants; any cultural after effects of their secularization are similarly fractured, prismatically separating into different components or turning back to “recover” elements of the Eastern European past apparently jettisoned and forgotten. The very notion of describing “Jewish culture” is rightly viewed with skepticism in contemporary academic discourse as retrograde, nostalgic, “essentializing,” liable fall into the “booster/bigot trap.” David Hollinger, who identifies this trap, insists on recognizing “the internal diversity of ethno-racial groups and the contingent, historically specific character of the culture these communities present to the larger society at any given moment.” Evidence that I risked such pitfalls is the entirety of this book; my main defense is that I stand in a line of diagnosticians of Jewish sexual culture, and in presenting their notions along with mine, I hope to relativize my own (explicit and implicit) theories along with theirs. This is a book about Jewish discourse around sex and marriage rather than about Jewish sex itself. Nevertheless, the very structure of my book, in which each chapter concludes with a section that describes the recovery of traditional sexual practice ostensibly overthrown in the Haskalah (arranged marriage, pedigree, the extended family, sexual segregation), suggests that the distinctive sexual character of Ashkenazi culture (whatever that might be) either “persists” in diasporic expression or ”returns” through conscious reclamation and memory construction.
Although this book begins with a sociological-literary analysis of modernization as embourgeoisement, most of the examples for the recovery of traditional Jewish practices and customs are literary. There is some logic to this. This recovery was often literary, and just as in the Haskalah, literature did not reflect realities but served “compensatory” functions; for example, Bernard Malamud depicted a marriage broker in “The Magic Barrel” without ever having met one in the flesh. The view of tradition as filtered through absence, loss, and nostalgia represents secularization as the uncontested norm, failing to recognize that traditional Jewish practices also simply “continued” (although not “unbroken”). With these warnings in full view, I nevertheless cautiously address the question in this afterword: what persists of the traditional Ashkenazi sex-gender system in the post-Ashkenazic cultures of our own time? (pp. 295-296)
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June 4, 2025Once again I find myself unable to rate theory books outside of my field - this is fascinating in how it depicts the narrative of love in literature as mapping, reflecting, and shaping the way so many of our cultures talk about love and the love match.
There's also something really interesting here in thinking about the role that early marriage played in Judaism, specifically in the halakhic literature but as discussed in the maskilic literature, and the general way that the past is seen and depicted as creating itself a new past.
I definitely should go back through this with a highlighter because the things that are most important to me in my halakha hat are kind of ancillary to the literary work that Seidman is doing, even as I appreciate the trajectory that she traces.
There's also something really interesting here in thinking about the role that early marriage played in Judaism, specifically in the halakhic literature but as discussed in the maskilic literature, and the general way that the past is seen and depicted as creating itself a new past.
I definitely should go back through this with a highlighter because the things that are most important to me in my halakha hat are kind of ancillary to the literary work that Seidman is doing, even as I appreciate the trajectory that she traces.
April 21, 2017
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