Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ is unclear in what ways this fisherman, who according to our modern-day understanding of the term is quite clearly White, could ruin the element of surprise. There is something awfully strange going on here, for we cannot help sensing that the natives are not really seeing “something they never had seen,” as claimed by the narrator, since we are told that they have had many encounters with the English fisherman. However, it is clear that for Behn, this fisherman is no longer White at all. Indeed, for Behn, Whiteness is an extremely fluid designator not of race, but of culture, mode of living, degree of suntan, and, perhaps most importantly, choice of clothes. Skin color as Behn perceives it is not an ethnic characteristic at all, but rather a cultural one: being White merely amounts to being dressed as a European, whereas being non-White means being nude, or wearing non-European clothes. Thus, Whiteness emerges in Behn’s anecdote as an exceedingly fuzzy concept, a highly mutable designator of difference, which can be assumed or removed at will.

      I will return to the importance of clothes in eighteenth-century anthropological discourse shortly; however, for the purpose of our present discussion it is important to note how mutable and unclear notions of Black and White were for early moderns.¹¹⁵ Clearly, such fuzzy concepts could hardly serve as prime markers of difference between men. And indeed, as scholars such as Roxann Wheeler and Dror Wahrman have shown, throughout the early modern period skin color played a much less substantial role in the characterization of non-European peoples than religion, customs, and climates.¹¹⁶ Moreover, complexion was most often viewed by early moderns as the mere outcome of these same customs and climates. Perhaps the most ardent and influential propagator of this view was Buffon, who attributed the great variety within the human species (“les variétés dans l’espèce humaine”) to the differences in climate, nutrition, and ways of life. Buffon went as far as to suggest that the removal of Africans from their native lands and their incorporation into Europe would result in the “whitening,” within ten to twelve generations, of the African skin. The exact number of generations required in order to “whiten” the Africans was a source of controversy during the eighteenth century, but a great many scientists agreed that it was a material possibility.¹¹⁷ As Behn’s anecdote suggests, it was also widely accepted that a European may turn Black after a time spent under a warmer climate, or after embracing some of the practices of non-European peoples.¹¹⁸ Some eighteenth-century writers viewed this possibility as a real hindrance to the colonial project. In 1745, for instance, the Dutch Jewish intellectual Isaac De Pinto, director of the Dutch East India Company, expressed his concerns that the Europeans in America were slowly growing to resemble the natives, and this, he prophetically added, may eventually result in a colonial revolution.¹¹⁹ The notion that humans and other animals change under different climates or upon being subjected to different customs or diets was reiterated by numerous authors throughout the eighteenth century. One persistent rumor, which appeared in a wide range of texts in English, French, German, and also Hebrew, was that dogs imported into America tended to lose the ability to bark.¹²⁰

      But how did seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Jews think about physical difference? Did they too attribute the same mutability to physical traits as their non-Jewish contemporaries? In her study on images of Native Americans in sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century Jewish literature, historian Limor Mintz-Manor shows that most early Jewish writers on the Americas tended to associate physical appearance and cultural practices with the effects of climate.¹²¹ This association between climate and appearance continued in Jewish writing well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. Writing in 1794, the English maskil Elyakim ben Avraham (Hart) explained that natural organisms are highly influenced by climate, which leaves its mark on the nature of animals, countries, and plants.¹²² A fellow maskil, the German English Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, wrote in 1771 that those men and women who live under the equator “are black due to the intense heat, but are rational beings nonetheless.”¹²³ The notion that Europeans tend to darken outside of Europe was also shared by the maskilim. Thus, in an early nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish translation of Campe’s description of Willem Bontekoe’s voyage to the East Indies, often attributed to the Polish maskil Menachem Mendel Lefin, it is argued that during their journeys the Dutch travelers became “darker than black.”¹²⁴

      Some Jewish apologists attempted to harness the climatic theory to the debates surrounding Jewish emancipation. Thus, in his 1789 Apologie des Juifs the Polish French thinker Zalkind Hourwitz explained that there is no physical difference between Christians and Jews, which may serve to justify the latter’s discrimination. “It is recognized by all physicians,” explained Hourwitz, “that the physical constitution of the Jews is absolutely identical to that of other peoples who inhabit the same climate.”¹²⁵ Indeed, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, climatic theory appears to have held particular sway amongst Jewish thinkers, and especially the maskilim, who continued to propagate the theory well after it was, to a large extent, discarded by their non-Jewish contemporaries. Thus, as late as 1828 we read in Shimshon Bloch’s Sheviley olam that European travelers to Africa “darken, their white skin turns black, and their beauty becomes ugliness.”¹²⁶

      But for eighteenth-century thinkers, climate was not the sole factor determining the constitution of man. Faced with the reality of colonial expansion and slavery, which had resulted in the large presence of Europeans in the colonies and colonial subjects in Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish writers sought new ways to account for physical variety. A popular explanation focused on cultural practices. Already in 1707 the Jewish physician Tuviah Ha-cohen explained that a person’s physical constitution is modified not only by climate, but also by diet.¹²⁷ Later writers attempted to explain skin color by referring to tattoos, hygienic practices, or the application of various potions to the skin. Thus in a manuscript written by an obscure maskil named Shlomo Keysir, we read that “when (the Greenlanders) are born they have white skin like all other humans but because they never wash and their homes are full of smoke and they cover themselves in oil or fat, their skin tends to become green.”¹²⁸ Another interesting example may be found in a geography book published in 1801 by the rabbinical scholar Abraham ben Elijah of Vilna, son of the famed Vilna Gaon: “It is now time to explain the reason for the difference in appearances and sizes. God created man to live in the divine Garden of Eden, a place protected from heat and cold.… But when God dispersed men throughout the entire earth, and each chose his own climate and multiplied there, their sons varied in looks, sizes, and character according to their climates and choice of foods.”¹²⁹

      The attribution of complexion to climate or culture emphasizes its marginality for these thinkers.

      In other eighteenth-century texts, both Jewish and non-Jewish skin color and other “racial” characteristics are considered so marginal that they are simply omitted from the description altogether. Thus, in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville or in Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, no note is made of the physical appearance of the Peruvian and Tahitian protagonists, or of their European hosts and visitors.¹³⁰An interesting Hebrew example of the extreme marginality of physical appearance is found in the Lithuanian physician Yehudah Horowitz’s discussion of savages in his 1766 Amudey beyt Yehudah, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Like Glikl before him, Horowitz neglected to make any note whatsoever of skin color in his description of either the noble or the ignoble savages described in his book. Instead, he used the opposition between civilized monotheist and savage atheist to present a program for the unification of all civilized peoples, meaning Jews, Christians, and Muslims.¹³¹

      It is unlikely, however, that Glikl would have approved of Horowitz’s somewhat radical program for monotheistic unification. In fact, reading through her story one can easily detect an ambivalent attitude toward Christians, which complicates her view of the varieties of man. Indeed, Glikl’s story does not offer a simple division of humankind into the two traditional groups of civilized/monotheistic and savage/heathen. Rather, it offers a much more nuanced view of identity and difference, which takes into account a multiplicity of axes of identity such as gender, religion, СКАЧАТЬ