Since the mid-nineteenth century, historians, literary theorists, and cultural critics have written about the Berlin Jewish salons and salonnières in the period from roughly 1780 to 1840. Most authors have made assumptions about the nature of the salon and the lives of the salonnières based on their own time and interests, generally envisioning this short-lived social phenomenon as a precursor of Jewish and female emancipation or as a kind of idyll of Jewish-German social integration. The salon easily became a site of projection because it was a largely undocumented social activity. Few participants wrote accounts of what occurred on any specific afternoon or evening. The two memoirs by Henriette Herz (1764–1847) and posthumously published letters and diaries by Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1832), as well as some reports written by salonnières and guests form the corpus of documents upon which salon historians rely. Scholars such as Deborah Hertz, Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Liliane Weissberg, Barbara Hahn, and I have worked in the last decades both to engage with the activities of the salons and the salonnières in greater detail and to demystify the projections of previous writers.

Based on our work and that of other salon historians, as well as on original sources, this essay traces the genesis, high points, and demise of the Berlin Jewish salon, offers a comprehensive overview of salon practices and organization, and addresses some of the complexities of its reception. Although there were other salons in the German-speaking world, those discussed here are the ones hosted by Jewish women in Berlin. In tracing the origins of the salon, this essay concentrates on what are known as the literary salons, although, as this book shows, salons in which musical performance was a central activity were also important. After the occupation of Berlin in 1806 and for the generation that followed Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz, musical salons increased in influence.

The development of salon culture in Berlin can be attributed to a confluence of influences and activities. The single most significant was the desire of a very small group of Jewish women to attain an education in German secular culture.