Marion Hartog

Marion Hartog was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1821, and educated at home, where her father read widely to her and her siblings. In 1838, Hartog and her sister Celia published an anthology of their poems, Early Efforts (Whittaker & Co.), by subscription and soon moved to London, where they worked as teachers and continued to write. In 1840, the sisters published a three-volume short story collection, The Romance of Jewish History (Saunders and Otley), again by subscription, and followed that collection three years later with the three-volume Tales of Jewish History (Miller & Field, 1843).

In 1845, she married a French tutor named Alphonse Hartog, and she, Hartog, and Celia founded a girls’ boarding school at their home. Both sisters continued writing, publishing their work in such periodicals as The Occident and American Jewish Advocate.

In 1854, Marion Hartog founded the Jewish Sabbath Journal, the first Jewish women’s journal in history, which contained stories about successful women, reflections on women’s relationships in the Jewish community, satires, and sermons she had written herself. Though her journal was popular among female Jewish readers, it was short-lived; after a chief rabbi and notable editor of a Jewish community newspaper derided the journal, claiming it promoted “un-Jewish” doctrines, it suffered from a loss of subscriptions, and Hartog discontinued the journal just months after she founded it.

Hartog continued running her boarding school until 1884, and for the rest of her lifetime, she published only sporadically. She died on October 29, 1907, in England.