The Marriage Plot – Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature

The Marriage PlotOr, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature\nAuthor(s): Naomi Seidman\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9780804799676, 978-0804799676\nSynopsis\nFor nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the \""love match.\"" Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of \""the love religion\"" was always partial. \n\n In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the clai.