A woman within Zionism: the path of Myriam Schach (1867-1956).(Biography)

Women have a hard time of it going down in history independently of men. Myriam Schach's career is a striking case in point. Her singular career in the Jewish nationalist movement notwithstanding, she has been deemed worthy of no more than a few passing remarks in works on Zionism. She is likewise all but absent from gender history, despite her lifelong commitment to gaining proper recognition for women's role in society. The reason is that Schach did not conform to any of the stereotypes of her day, even if she is a figure who sheds light on the career of many other Jewish women who were her contemporaries.

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Had political Zionism been obliged to choose a female figurehead, Myriam Schach could well have filled the role. Once her early experiences in the ranks of the Lovers of Zion (Hibbat Zion) movement had made her aware of the importance of a Jewish national renaissance, she participated unfailingly, down to the 1920s, in all of the Zionist Congresses, attracting attention as a forceful speaker. Although her intellectual and personal career may appear quite conventional at first glance, it was in fact the difficult and altogether admirable career of an emancipated woman living in a conservative men's world and operating in a movement with an essentially male-oriented doctrine. Notwithstanding her excessive inclination to self-effacement, Schach deserves a place in the pantheon of the great Jewish feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Women have a hard time of it going down in history independently of men. Myriam Schach's career is a striking case in point. The Encyclopaedia Judaica devotes a few lines to her only because she was the sister of Fabius Schach (1871-1930), one of the founders of German Zionism, and she has been deemed worthy of no more than a few passing remarks in works on Zionism. She is likewise all but absent from gender history, despite her lifelong commitment to winning proper recognition for women's role in society. From this point of view, Schach labors under a severe handicap: she threw in her lot with the losing camp in the history of Zionism, by defending the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and his closest intellectual companions.

It was, however, their opponents, the partisans of immediate colonization, who gradually gained the upper hand in the Zionist movement. What is more, while Schach was a feminist, she never contemplated urging women to reject the place they traditionally occupied; rather, she stressed its usefulness for the national movement. Thus, she sought a third way that would not be degrading for women, yet was not inherently revolutionary.

Although Schach does not conform to any of the stereotypes of her day, many aspects of her career nevertheless recall, and help us better understand, the political commitments of countless other Jewish women active in the early twentieth century, among them such celebrated figures as Rosa Luxembourg (1870-1919), Anna Kuliscioff (1857-1925) and Emma Goldman (1869-1940). The political choices of these women diverged, yet they had much in common: They all came from the Pale of Settlement, (1) achieved emancipation through emigration and studied at west European universities open to women and Jews. (2)

Born and raised in Jewish Lithuania, an environment in which Jewish ethnic consciousness was predominant, Schach became a feminist before becoming a nationalist. She left her family at the age of sixteen to move to Germany and then to France, where she emancipated herself by means of higher education. (3) This professional success went hand in hand with an abiding involvement in Jewish nationalism; Schach held a position in the Jewish national movement of the kind usually reserved for men. Yet it was not this sort of role that she envisaged for the new, nationally minded Jewish woman, to whom she assigned maternal virtues before all else. Schach was an emancipated woman who did not advocate the emancipation of women.