Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ they are to savages, their identification with Christians is far from complete. The two captivity stories presented in the tale—the pious Jew and his savage captor on the one hand, and the pious Jewess and her Christian captor on the other—draw an unavoidable analogy between savages and Christians. This analogy, followed by the conversion into Judaism of the Christian sailors and their acceptance of the pious Jew’s rule, all point toward Glikl’s ambivalent perception of Christians as being at once religiously inferior and politically superior to Jews. This hesitant haughtiness of Glikl’s is evident throughout the entire memoirs, in which Christians are often presented in inferior or derogatory roles such as bandits, murderers, or drunks.¹³² It would appear, then, that in the great chain of being drawn by Glikl, Christians are located between Jews and savages, and their conversion to Judaism is a prerequisite to their progress.

      THE IMAGE OF THE IDEAL WOMAN

      A fascinating glimpse into Glikl’s understanding of the difference between Jews and Christians—and, more specifically, between Jewish and Christian women—is afforded by the Christian captain’s description of his two wives: “The captain … said he had two wives—one at home with whom he had had three children. ‘Her I keep as a housewife. The other is very delicate and no good at housework, but she is very wise, and so I always take her with me to superintend the affairs of the ship. She collects the money from the passengers and enters it in a book, and manages all my affairs’” (G. Tur., 94; G. Abr., 27). This description warrants a close inspection. Three women appear in Glikl’s story, and all three share with her the characteristic of being single mothers. They are all women who have been abandoned by their husbands and left to fend for their children on their own. Their responses seem to signify the three forms of single motherhood as envisioned by Glikl. The most striking form of single motherhood is, of course, the savage woman’s, who copes with her abandonment by killing and devouring her child. In this manner, she vents her anger and frustration, while at the same time redeeming herself from the toils of single motherhood. As we have seen, in depicting the savage woman as infanticidal, Glikl shares with many of her contemporaries an intriguing understanding of maternity, not as a biological imperative of women but as an attribute of civilization. As mentioned above, eighteenth-century depictions of savage infanticide often served as a means to construct an opposing image of the civilized European woman as an emblem of domesticity. And indeed, in Glikl’s story the image of the Christian housewife stands in stark contrast to that of the monstrous savage mother. Left ashore by an adulterous husband, this woman offers a more civilized response to single motherhood by choosing the path of domesticity. This portrayal of the devoted Christian mother as the exact opposite of the savage murderous mother is consistent with many other contemporaneous treatments of maternity, in which, as Felicity Nussbaum explains, the “civilized notion of motherhood … is contrasted with a savage motherhood capable of infanticide and cannibalism yet at the same time described as ‘natural.’”¹³³ Interestingly, however, Glikl shows nothing but disdain for this domestic Christian woman. Both she and the savage wife are depicted as entirely dependent on their husbands, unable to care for their children or to support them financially on their own. The two women are thus contrasted with the pious Jew’s Jewish wife: an independent, wise, and resourceful woman, who supports her children financially after the incarceration of their father, and who, even after losing her husband and children, continues to find solace in business and financial success. Interestingly, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, which is characteristic of the entire story, the Jewish woman’s economic prowess is also contrasted with the pious Jew’s financial ineptness.¹³⁴

      Significantly, this kind of resourceful widowhood was embraced by Glikl herself, who, in spite of losing her husband and three of her children, continued to run the family business on her own for many years. In fact, even though Glikl did eventually remarry, ten years after the death of her first husband, she was to view this decision as a woeful mistake. As she stresses in her memoirs, contrary to what could be expected, her dependence on a husband led not to financial relief but to ruin. Furthermore, after the death of her second husband, which left her with almost nothing of her former fortune, Glikl was forced to resort to a second kind of dependent widowhood, which she perceived as most deplorable—a widow in a multigenerational household, dependent on her children.¹³⁵ The travails brought about by her second marriage are portrayed by Glikl as a form of divine punishment inflicted on her for her decision to become financially dependent on a husband: “The blessed lord laughed at my thoughts and plans, and had already long decided on my doom to repay me for my sins in relying on people. For I should not have thought of marrying again” (G. Tur., 500; G. Abr., 151).

      In her memoirs, then, Glikl constructs an image of the ideal woman, or widow, as one who manages to uphold a respectable household after her husband’s demise, without resorting to dependence on others, such as her children or a second husband. In this sense, she presents an understanding of feminine virtue quite different from the sorts of chaste, maternal, or domestic virtue commonly ascribed to women in eighteenth-century novels, conduct books, and other writings.¹³⁶ However, it appears that Glikl was not alone in pursuing this ideal. In fact, many of her contemporaries, both Jewish and Christian, appear to have shared this ideal of independence and made every effort “to be independent of material and financial intergender and/or intergenerational transfers.”¹³⁷ Thus, for instance, in her reading of Eliza Haywood’s 1724 The Rash Resolve, Toni Bowers demonstrates how the author constructed “a vision of powerful, enabling, and independent motherhood.”¹³⁸ Haywood confronts her readers with a single mother who succeeds in upholding a respectable household, notwithstanding the absence of her child’s father. When, however, toward the end of the tale, the absent father reappears, the heroine dies of shock and heartbreak. In both Haywood’s tale and Glikl’s memoirs, the appearance of a dominant male figure on the scene, in the form of an estranged father or a second husband, results in ruin.

      Traces of early modern women’s ideal of independence are also found in other Jewish sources. Thus, for instance, an early seventeenth-century Jewish folktale tells of a Jewish woman who wished to remain single in order to continue her life as a businesswoman.¹³⁹ Other writers commended their mothers, grandmothers, or other family women for managing to uphold their own after the deaths of their husbands. The aforementioned Bohemian memoirist, for instance, speaks highly of his grandmother, who “remained a widow with three sons and two little daughters [but] was an eshet ḥayil [a woman of valour], energetic, and clever and supported her family comfortably.”¹⁴⁰

      As Glikl’s memoirs demonstrate, the ideal of resourceful widowhood also required that widows remain independent of their children. And indeed, a second rare text by an early modern Ashkenazi woman bears further witness to parents’ reluctance to turn to the aid of their children. I am referring to the sixteenth-century women’s guidebook Meneket Rivkah, written by Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner. Tiktiner relates a story about an old widower of some means who decides to move into his son’s household. At first, the relationship between the man and his son and daughter-in-law is friendly, and yet the moment the old man bequeaths his wealth to his son, the young couple begins to abuse him, to the extent that he is resorted to sleeping naked under the stairwell and eating scraps off the kitchen table.¹⁴¹ The story is repeated in other sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sources, and is just one of a wide variety of stories which express the exceeding suspicion of parents toward the gratefulness and reliability of their children. Similar doubts are frequently voiced in Glikl’s memoirs, for instance in the story of the infanticidal bird, which ends with the following moral: “[We see] the difference: how parents toil for their children and with what great devotion they raise them, while they, if they had the trouble with their parents as their parents do with them, would soon tire” (G. Tur., 32; G. Abr. 9).¹⁴²

      Glikl’s solution to the problem of the unreliability of children and spouses is to offer her readers an image of a woman who is independent and resourceful, and does not rely on the aid of others for her happiness or success. But Glikl does more than justify the authority and adequacy of the independent women/widow as head of the household. In presenting her ideal woman as “no good at housework,” and contrasting her sophistication СКАЧАТЬ