As anyone familiar with Fiddler on the Roof knows, matchmakers once played a pivotal role in traditional Jewish life—even though, contrary to the musical, they were almost always men. Jenna Weissman Joselit explains how traditional matchmaking made its way to the U.S. and then fell into decline:
As modernity seized hold of the Jews, introducing them to new forms of social interaction and new ways of thinking about just about everything, including the prospect of intimacy and the meaning of love, Jewish marriage brokers lost their footing as well as their standing. Taken to task and vilified for having commercialized affairs of the heart, they symbolized the old, and increasingly outmoded, order.
Their power diminished, marriage brokers . . . increasingly became the butt of humor and sly derision. By the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the matchmaker was grist for the mill of contemporary Jewish writers, such as Abraham Cahan and Israel Zangwill, with a keen eye for the absurdities of daily life. . . .
Lampooned for their garrulousness and guile, Jewish marriage brokers made for good copy, and in some cases, for a good cry, too. In Cahan’s short story “A Providential Match,” published in English in 1895, the smooth promises of Feivele the matchmaker transform Robert, né Rouvke, from a “simple bokher [young bachelor] into a khoson [a groom],” from a rough-hewn immigrant into a swain. It didn’t take long, though—just a few pages of flowery text—before those promises come to nothing, leaving Robert brokenhearted and alone. . . .
In the years that followed, the Jewish marriage maven became more of a curiosity than a casualty of Americanization. By 1938, when a profile of Rubin’s Matrimonial Bureau appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, Rubin’s days seemed numbered. Written by Meyer Berger, the piece detailed the comings and goings of a “bearded Cupid” named Louis Rubin, . . . one of those people who were in, but not of, the times. “Call and see the World-Prominent MR. RUBIN,” bubbled his business cards and circulars where he [enthusiastically] described his clientele as “respectable business and professional high-class working people and nice, intelligent girls from rich business families, also widows and widowers.” To which [the author] Berger couldn’t resist noting: “It’s a bit breathless, . . . but it gets results.”
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/255009/the-rise-and-fall-of-matchmakers