Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin, (Hardcover)

During the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few Jewish women such as Rahel Varnhagen and Henrietta Herz to discuss the events of the day, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past. In this book, Deborah Hertz offers the first detailed history of these salons, interweaving rich narrative with analytic social history to explain why such an institution arose and what it meant to those involved.