Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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Figure 5. Hairy Eve (detail), from Pinchas Halberstadt, “Sefer evronot,” 1716. Reproduced by permission of the National Library Israel.

      And indeed, it appears that the assimilation anxiety underlying the biblical stories of Joseph and Sarai is also prevalent in Glikl’s tale. In stark contrast to other “Inkle and Yarico” narratives, Glikl’s story of the savage princess and her Jewish lover does not express fantasies of a benevolent conquest of the “exotic Other,” but quite the contrary: it manifests a fear of being culturally and religiously conquered by the Other. This fear crystallizes in the rape of the pious Jew by the savage woman, but is also foreshadowed in the kidnapping of the pious Jew’s Jewish wife by a Christian sailor earlier in the story. As mentioned above, the Jewish woman is coveted by a Christian sea captain and is eventually kidnapped by him and forced into a state of pseudo-concubinage. Glikl, however, stresses that the captain’s desire is never realized. When asked by the pious Jew why he did not consummate his passion for the woman, the captain replies that she had threatened to commit suicide if forced to please him, since “it is not appropriate that a commoner should ride the king’s horse” (G. Tur., 96; G. Abr., 27). Moseley reads this difference between the two captivity narratives (the pious Jew’s captivity and his wife’s captivity) as a subversive element in the text, concluding: “The only leading character in this story whose behavior can really be said to be exemplary is the Talmid khokhem’s first wife, who is indeed Jewish, but more to the point, I think, a woman.”⁷³ That Glikl was in some way critical of the pious Jew’s behavior, however, appears unlikely. Though effeminate and unheroic to modern eyes, for Glikl, the pious Jew is a paradigm of sublime morality and proper conduct. He is a man who, much like the righteous Job, manages to uphold his Jewish faith even when faced with the most dire of circumstances.⁷⁴ Glikl’s approval of her protagonist’s conduct is evident throughout the entire story and manifests itself most clearly in its happy ending, in which the pious Jew retrieves his long-lost family, becomes king of his own colony, and converts the Christian sailors to Judaism. Moreover, in stark contrast to other versions, in which the European sailor’s abandonment of his savage wife and child inspires harsh criticism, in Glikl’s version the pious Jew’s story arouses nothing but admiration in its listeners, so much so that the Christian sailors are inspired to convert to Judaism upon hearing it. The sparing of the Jewish wife’s virtue in the story could be the outcome of various considerations, not least of which that chastity was an essential indicator of a woman’s (but not a man’s) moral worth. A virtuous woman was expected to maintain her chastity even under the most extreme circumstances (as exemplified by Richardson’s famous Pamela), and one who failed to do so could hardly be depicted as a model of pious morality.⁷⁵ We must also bear in mind the symbolic elements of the rape of the pious Jew by the savage woman; this form of rape not only emasculates the Jewish man, but also interrupts his Jewish lineage, as any child born out of this unholy union would be a non-Jew (in contrast to the potential outcome of the rape of a Jewish woman by a non-Jewish man). This last element may explain the pious Jew’s indifference toward his own son, which stands in stark contrast to his devotion to his Jewish children.⁷⁶

      In fact, the female rape motif constitutes part of a recurring motif in the story of the threat of being devoured or consumed, which is a further articulation of Glikl’s aforementioned assimilation anxiety. Throughout the story, the pious Jew is delivered from various types of metaphoric or actual consumption. Thus, the story begins with his arrest and imprisonment, and continues with his wife being “swallowed” into the Christian captain’s boat and disappearing. Further uses of the motif abound throughout the tale: while in prison, the pious Jew dreams of being eaten alive by wild animals; after his release, his ship sinks and he and his children are in danger of being “devoured” by the sea; finally, during his years as a castaway, he is under constant threat of being literally devoured by his cannibal hosts. This fear of being eaten is accompanied by an even greater fear: that of not receiving a Jewish burial. The non-Jewish, cannibalistic burial signifies for Glikl the complete and eternal loss of Jewish identity through consumption/assimilation. For the pious Jew, who has lived so long among savage people, eating their foods, sleeping in their caves, that he has come to resemble them almost entirely, the final loss of Jewish identity is unbearable. The mere thought of not receiving a proper Jewish burial drives him to attempt suicide by drowning: “One day he stood on a small hill … not far from the sea, and reflected on all that had happened to him; the loss of his wise and pious wife and children and—heaviest of all—how he must now spend his years among uncivilized wild animals, who eventually, with time, when they have tired of him, will devour his flesh and crush his bones for marrow, and he will not be laid to rest among other good Jews as befitting a pious Jew. ‘Is it not better,’ [he mused] ‘that I should run from this hill and drown myself…?’” (G. Tur., 90; G. Abr., 25). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the pious Jew’s deliverance is achieved by the act of digging out a buried treasure, a counter-reaction to the constant threat of consumption, of being devoured. This act of digging out is the opening scene of the second part of the story, which is a reversed narrative of rediscovery and exposure, including the discovery of the European ship and of the pious Jew’s lost wife and sons. Throughout this latter part of the story, the assimilation anxiety is resolved through what Davis has appropriately termed a “fantasy of inversion,”⁷⁷ which culminates in the conversion of the Christian sailors to Judaism. In other words, in the second half of the tale, the pious Jew turns from devoured to devourer. But at the very beginning of this reversed narrative of exposure and discovery is one final act of devouring, the devouring of the hybrid child by its savage mother.

      EARLY MODERN INFANTICIDE

      The scene of infanticide is a troubling one, which rarely appears in contemporary modern culture. Even the most provocative and gruesome horror films will most often avoid this particular horrific motif. But infanticide wasn’t always such a taboo literary trope. In fact, the image of the murderous mother, who slays her own child in a horrific moment of vengeance or despair, or, conversely, out of considerations of mere comfort, troubled the minds of a great many thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, infanticide and paedophagia (the eating of children) were extremely popular tropes in pre-modern Western imagination. There are numerous examples, of course, dating back to Greek mythology, the Bible, and medieval works. Parents eating children is mentioned in Deuteronomy, Kings, Lamentations, Josephus, and Sefer Hasidim, to name just a few examples.⁷⁸ In some cases, they are permitted to do so by law. One thirteenth-century Spanish source suggests that paedophaogia was considered acceptable and, what is more, legal, during a siege.⁷⁹ Other sources reveal that the slaying or abandonment of a somehow disabled child was relatively tolerated by contemporaries.⁸⁰ Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, it was also believed that parents may resort to murdering their children as a means of punishment or in order to prevent them from converting to a different religion. In 1694 Prague, for instance, a Jewish man by the name of Laser Abeles was accused of having murdered his son, following the latter’s interest in converting to Christianity.⁸¹ Another seventeenth-century Jewish folktale told of a father who killed his daughter after discovering СКАЧАТЬ