Other Things Being Equal

For Jewish Ideas Daily, a new aggregator of Jewish things from around the web, I will be surveying the history of American Jewish fiction, one book at a time, from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the present.

The series gets going this morning with my review of Other Things Being Equal, a romance of intermarriage by Emma Wolf. Published in 1892 not by a Jewish house but by a mainstream trade publisher—A. C. McClurg of Chicago—Wolf’s was the the first novel written by an American Jew on a Jewish subject that was intended for an interreligious audience.

Wolf’s theme is that, since Jews and Christians “all dance and talk alike,” since they receive “the same schooling, speak the same language, read the same books, are surrounded by the same elements of home refinement,” there is no meaningful difference between them that prevents love and intermarriage.

What will probably strike contemporary readers the hardest is Wolf’s hostility toward traditional Jewish views on intermarriage. The editor of American Jewess, a magazine which described itself as the only one in the world “devoted to the interests of Jewish women,” clearly understood this as her novel’s claim to originality:It is perhaps for the first time that an American writer ventures in a romance to attack the racial and religious prejudice of the Jews, trying to establish a closer social relationship between Jews and Gentiles. This is done by pure and simple motives, without violating existing faiths. Matrimony is freed from religious environments and placed plainly on social grounds. . . . Orthodoxy finally yields to the power of humanity. Without sensationalism or sentimentality the climax of the story is reached. Jewish religious scruples crumble into dust when attacked by the strong impulses of the human heart.In short, Emma Wolf’s novel offers the alibi of love for cutting Jewish ties and loyalties. And in that sense, Other Things Being Equal was not merely ahead of its time, but also spelled out the ideology for an age in which nearly half of American Jews would abandon their people through marriage.

Other titles to be reviewed in the series will be selected from this complete-as-I-can-make-it list of American Jewish fiction from 1892 to 1948.