By the time that she was forty-two, Rahel Levin had lived a rich, exciting literary life on the margins of established society in Berlin, during the years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. She had hosted a literary circle when she still lived at home with her mother and her brothers, all the while rebelling against Jewish tradition and the traditional Jewish marriage choices. One of her past love affairs was with a Prussian nobleman, and another with a Spanish diplomat. Just as the Vienna Congress of 1814 was about to begin, Rahel converted to become a Lutheran, and married her longtime lover, the writer and diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. After five years living in an obscure court town in Baden, the couple returned to Berlin, where they hosted a celebrated circle of dissidents and writers until Rahel died in 1833.

We learn Rahel’s life story and the story of seventeen other Jewish salon women in a new exhibition, aptly titled The Power of Conversation, which has been showing for three months at the Jewish Museum in New York City and is soon to move to the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston. The show and its catalogue, which will keep its lessons alive long after the exhibition closes, is a great gift, which begins to satisfy our curiosity about this neglected episode in women’s history. A stroll through the delicately assembled rooms of the exhibit or a perusal of the catalogue introduces us to a lucky handful of wealthy, educated Jewish women in modern Europe and America, who enjoyed that rare chance to truly influence high culture and high society.

Paris has long been considered the premier city for salons. But as this exhibition teaches us, Jewish salons also flourished in London, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome, St. Petersburg, New York, and even Los Angeles, from the seventeenth century until at least World War II.

The theme of Jewish women in salons is particularly urgent, because the conflict between domestic joys and public activity is experienced intensely by so many Jewish women. There is of course a fabulous renewal of Judaism by activist spiritual women who organize Seders, become rabbis, and write poetry, novels, music, and history books exploring the hidden world of women in the Jewish tradition. And certainly feminism has been a wonderfully creative movement for Jewish women. Many accumulate graduate degrees and achieve high career goals. Yet these very accomplishments make some Jewish women yearn for the lively family life our grandmothers took for granted.

More is at stake here than a delightful antiquarian tour of the women lucky enough to host salons.

Emily Bilski and Emily Braun, the curators, use the history of the Jewish salon to highlight the wider theme of the role of Jewish women in modern high culture. Their enterprise took considerable courage, because it is definitely not politically correct to reveal the role of wealth in creating culture or to show how women could be influential without a paid career. Moreover, to speak of how Jews of either gender were influential behind the scenes, especially in modernist high culture, risks confirming anti-Semitic stereotypes that can be wrong and dangerous indeed.

Some of the salonières featured in the exhibition are rather well known. Rahel Levin was long a cult figure in German cultural life. Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is widely known as well. But Bilski and Braun have done a marvelous job of introducing us to salonières until now known mainly to a few scattered historians, including Amalia Beer and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel of Berlin, Fanny von Arnstsein of Vienna, Ada Leverson of London, Geneviève Straus of Paris, Berta Zuckerkandl of Vienna, the Stettheimer sisters of New York City, Ann Kuliscioff of Milan, Margherita Sarfatti of Rome, and Salka Viertel of Los Angeles.

Bilski and Braun’s search for material artifacts to document past salons was rather daunting, but here they succeeded remarkably well. We feast our eyes on paintings of the women, their families, their guests, and their cities; samples of the furniture and clothing of the period, guest books and invitations, and notebooks and manuscripts of the music and literature created by salon participants. We also are able to hear the salons, for in the space dedicated to the musical salons of early nineteenth century Berlin, we listen to the music composed by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and her brother Felix. Two extraordinary films made for the exhibition by Andrea Simon illuminate the Parisian salon of Geneviève Straus at the time of Alfred Dreyfus and Salkia Viertel’s California salon.

The central device they have created to introduce us to the personalities who attended the various salons is literally a gallery of “talking heads” in each of the seven rooms of the exhibition. While gazing upwards at a particular face, visitors can simultaneously tune in to the audio tape to hear short quotations from that guest’s letters describing a particular salon.

Of late, salons have been the subject of a considerable amount of high theory speculation. It would be unfair to expect an exhibition to elaborate such esoteric interpretations of the salon experience. Nevertheless, Bilski and Braun have done their best to place each of the seven types of salons in a wider historical context. We learn how  war, revolution, fascism, homophobia and anti-Semitism shaped particular salons. Ada Leverson and her husband cared for an isolated Oscar Wilde at the time of his London trial in 1895. During the same years in Paris, conflicts over the Dreyfus trial caused huge rifts between the guests at Geneviève Strauss’s salon. Anna Kuliscioff hosted an explicitly leftist salon, where she sat on a divan and helped working-class women solve their daily life problems. Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Berta Zuckerhandl, and Margherita Sarfatti all were forced to change their residences during the late thirties and early forties as life for Jews was becoming impossible. Sarfatti’s is a particularly complicated story, for she helped prepare Mussolini’s fascist coup of 1922, and was his lover for years afterward. Yet when even his most ardent Jewish supporters began to suffer persecution, Sarfatti needed to escape Italy and her salon disappeared quickly indeed.

Sarfatti’s case forces us to address the disturbing question of whether we should think of salons as always having been progressive institutions. Our curators have assumed that salons were a fulfillment of liberalism, even radicalism, because Jewish women were the quintessential outsiders as insiders. Margherita Sarfatti’s story suggests that we should beware assuming that salons across time and space were always a force for emancipation. Future research that asks social history questions about the functions of salons may help us move beyond vague assumptions about the politics of salons.

Among the many difficult questions about salons posed by the exhibit, let us dwell for a moment on the problematic of the specifically Jewish salon tradition. Our curators claim very explicitly that over time more Jewish women hosted salons than Christian women did. If true, this is significant, since for a declassed Jewish woman, salon hosting could be a huge triumph over stereotype, considering that salons began as an aristocratic practice and were thought to set the tone for high culture. But because the exhibit focuses only on Jewish salons and is not systematically comparative, the research presented here cannot actually substantiate their bold claim. The curators make much of the outsider as insider notion, that precisely because they were doubly marginal—as Jews and as women—the Jewish salonières became courageous modernists. They also argue that success in salon leadership helped bring about political emancipation, of particular importance for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in central Europe. But both with modernism and with emancipation, we also must consider the dark side of success. We need to attend to how the Jewish salonières might have infuriated observers outraged at their extraordinary wealth, their connections to the powerful, and their exercise of patronage. View the salons from the gaze of a dependent and furious Richard Wagner, and the entire picture shifts considerably.

This brings us to the final question of how the curators treat the prickly, touchy question of the women’s Jewish identities. The conversions of four of the salonières highlighted in the exhibition are discussed, and at least one more woman, Anna Kuliscioff, also seems certain to have converted. Moreover, almost all of the salonières who remained Jewish downplayed that identity and were sometimes downright conflicted about it. Bilski and Braun defend the converts in various ways, and in so doing they display a healthy open-mindedness about the constraints of past epochs. Moreover, for a Jewish Museum to sponsor a show dedicated to such problematic Jews is a huge accomplishment, for which we absolutely must be grateful. But Bilski and Braun are reluctant  to judge many of the salonières harshly for what seems to have been pervasive ethnic self-hatred and snobbish social climbing. We who admire what they accomplished should not minimize the cost of their achievements, both for their own serenity and for the wider Jewish world.

Every year we hear of new salons springing up across the United States and Europe. Magazines establish salon discussion groups, an Internet magazine is called Salon, the Lower Manhattan Salon meets at Starbucks City Hall in New York City, and book clubs call their gatherings salons. Some claim that Internet chat rooms function as salons, that film festivals and art shows are salons, and it has even been argued that Oprah Winfrey is a modern-day salonière. A new field called “relational aesthetics” celebrates and analyzes social occasions in gallery spaces, which are defined as art. As all of this activity suggests, many alienated modern urbanites feel a need to bring this lost institution to life! Some may want to reclaim this tradition because they envy what salon participants enjoyed. In our time, even in major capitals—from San Francisco to Warsaw—few intellectuals enjoy regular but informal public gatherings, smug in the conviction that what they say to each other effects events beyond the room. Our generation enjoys many new ways to communicate across time and space, but many find that more communication does not diminish their loneliness. The practice of regular spirited intellectual dialogue among both friends and fascinating strangers is seductive and appealing to many in our own day.

Immersing ourselves in the past can prove a wonderful therapy for pains in the present. Many will seek to re-invent the salon because they so badly need that rare combination of stability, influence, and intimacy. And Jewish women now rightly yearn for the fabulous synthesis of the domestic and the public, the muse and the creator, that the salonière role provided. Alas, if intellectuals in the present truly enjoyed the functional equivalent of salons, they would certainly not flock to the museum to see this exhibition, all the while feeling so much envy and nostalgia for these exceptional, golden moments in the female past.