The remarkable phenomenon of Jewish women or women of Jewish origin presiding over salons in Berlin, from the 1780s onwards but mainly in the first decade or so of the 19th century, is quite well known, and it is part of the story told in this excellent and lavishly illustrated book. But that story set in a much wider context. There is first a fine chapter setting out the nature and importance of the salons in 18th century France. The women who presided over these were not Jewish, but here, as later, they opened up cultural discourse away from conservative learned institutions, created a private place where there was civility and freedom of speech, where progressive ideas were entertained, where an "egalitarian sociability" was practised and where a sphere was created in which women were able to escape the subordinate role which the prevailing legal system still assigned to them.
For Jewish women the salons did all that for them, and more: not only were they able to escape from social and gender prejudice but, to some extent, from religious prejudice also. They believed in acculturation and shared the German aspiration for "Bildung"; and they were undoubtedly helped by the fact that their fathers and/or husbands were for the most part wealthy bankers who had already been granted the status of Privileged Jews, who had been able to mix with gentiles and who provided the expenses associated with often lavish hospitality (especially where this involved hosting musical or theatrical events). Enlightened circles in Germany met them half-way; even so, most of these women felt that they would become more acceptable if they converted to Christianity. Only one of the famous German salonnières, Amalie Beer, remained true to Judaism. Conversion did not lay all prejudices to rest: in 1811 even some of the people who had frequented their salons joined the Christian-German Dining Club, which excluded "women, Frenchmen, Philistine and Jews", the latter including any converts back to the third generation; and soon after that time, as religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the German-Jewish salons faded out.
The book goes on to tell, in ever more detail as it moved from the early to the late 19th and 20th century, of Jewish salonnières in other countries, though without any analysis of why, after emancipation, Jewish women were still so prominent. There was as much concentration of them in Paris at the end of the 19th century as there had been in Berlin at the century's beginning. For all the antisemitism that was rife there, there were several prominent Jewish salonnières (some of whom inspired characters in Proust's work). Madame Armand de Caillavet had a literary and political salon. Edith Wharton describes the salon of Comtesse Rosalie de FitzJames as "the most prestigious in Paris"; Madame Guillaume Beer had a salon like the one that had been held in Berlin by Amalie Beer (her husband's great-grandmother). But the most famous of them was Geneviève Straus, daughter of the opera composer Fromental Halévy and widow of Georges Bizet (Émile Straus was her second husband), who "drew more titled nobility to her salon than did any other hostess in Paris", and also Debussy, Gounod, Fauré and Hahn. Even the antisemitic Goncourts could not stay away. It became a stronghold of the Dreyfusards, but that would also lead to the "dénouement" of her and other Jewish salons, as the aristocrats and right-wing writers closed ranks with the the anti-Dreyfusards. But then after around 1906 the American-born Gertrude Stein's salon would "again put a Jewish hostess at the apex of Parisian society".
In London Ada Leverson hosted a salon known for its wit and dandyism: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent were among its habitués as well as people from the acting world like Mrs Patrick Campell.
There is a chapter on the doughty Russian-born revolutionary Anna Kuliskioff, who left Tsarist Russia and eventually ended up in Milan where she lived with the Socialist leader Filippo Turati and from the 1890s to her death in 1925 presided over a radical salon for anyone from the left and of whatever class. Her visitors "arrived in shifts, twice daily, after lunch and in the evening before dinner".
Other Jewish salonnières were champions of Modernism in art: Felicie Bernstein in Berlin promoted Impressionism, Berta Zuckerkandl in Vienna the Sezession, Margherita Sarfatti in Milan the Futurists and, later, Novecento school of neo-classicism - both schools closely allied to fascism. Sarfatti was, from 1913 to 1933, in all senses, an intimate of Mussolini and an influential political figure. When Mussolini adopted racial laws in 1933, she fled Italy. She returned after the war, but was then treated as a pariah.
In the United States there was the witty American-born artist Florine Stettheimer in New York, and the émigrée Salka Viertel from Vienna in California, whose salon was one of the most star-studded in the book (film people, musicians, literary giants like Thomas Mann and Berthold Brecht and others who represented "the true Fatherland."
The book ends with three thought-provoking essays: Barbara Hahn stresses the strains experienced by hostesses of Jewish origin (and points out that the word salon was first applied retrospectively in the 1840s to the gatherings over which they provided); Leon Rotstein is very interesting about Wagner's antisemitism which associated domestic music-making and the music he disliked with femininity.
One might get the impression from this book that, after the 18th century, the salons were a purely Jewish phenomenon. Doubtlessly their number was disproportionate (and that would have merited an explanation), but salons hosted by non-Jewish women make no appearance at all. Yet the Wikipedia article on salons lists a number of them. Of course they are not the subject of this book; but their total omission is a slight drawback to this fascinating book.
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