Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ not only in widowhood but also in marriage. We find hints of this attitude, which values professional success over domestic bliss, throughout Glikl’s autobiographical text. As explained by Turniansky: “Though Glikl is constantly busy with pregnancies and labor [during the period described in the memoirs], these are not the only subject of her written memoirs, nor are they their central theme.”¹⁴³ In fact, the greater part of the memoirs deals with matters relating to Glikl’s professional life as a businesswoman: her financial success and the subsequent financial travails brought about by her second husband; her business partners and their deeds and misdeeds and other such matters. Throughout the memoirs, Glikl prides herself on her financial conduct, both during her first husband’s lifetime and even more so after his demise. Other women are also commended by Glikl, not only for their piety, modesty, or chastity, but also for their success as businesswomen. Thus, for example, one woman is presented as “a chaste and resourceful woman, very well versed in trade [who] practically kept her family afloat” (G. Tur., 62). Another woman is described as “unprecedented in her integrity and piety, and especially in her being an eshet ḥayil who managed her own trade and provided for her husband and children bountifully” (G. Tur., 312). For Glikl, then, a woman’s worth is a function of her resourcefulness, wit, and intelligence, and not, as may perhaps be expected, of her domestic virtues.

      This understanding of woman as financial agent differs greatly from later representations of true womanhood as being achieved through maternity and domesticity, but it appears to have been shared, at least to some extent, by Glikl’s contemporaries. The anonymous Bohemian memoirist commends his mother who “showed her ability in supporting the family by her own efforts, and started to manufacture brandy out of oats.… This was hard labor, but she succeeded. In the meantime my father pursued his studies.”¹⁴⁴ One eighteenth-century responsum (a rabbinic reply to a question concerning Jewish law) by the great Jewish scholar Yeḥezkel Landau went as far as to accuse married women who refrained from work of being a cause of their husbands’ deaths. Landau explained: “A woman who is confined to her home, and is kept by her husband, her luck is such that she causes her husbands’ deaths, so that she may live in poverty. And this holds true for regular women. But in a women who is an eshet ḥayil we find that even after the deaths of her husbands she succeeds in commerce and manages to support herself adequately, and so it clear that her luck does not cause her poverty, and therefore her husbands’ deaths are not caused by her.”¹⁴⁵ Rabbi Jacob Emden, for his part, praised his first wife, who worked in loans, and berated his second wife, who, though a descendant of a family of merchants, was financially incompetent.¹⁴⁶ As befitting a rabbi of his stature, Emden’s primary concern was that the financial incompetence of his second wife would not allow him to leave matters of business to her and concentrate on his studies. Significantly, Emden’s view differs from Glikl’s in that, for him, a woman’s financial ability is to be commended only to the extent that it enables her husband to devote himself to his religious duties.¹⁴⁷ However, as shown by historian Moshe Rosman, who has studied the lives of early modern Jewish women in Poland and Lithuania, the majority of working women were not the sole breadwinners. Rather, like Glikl herself, they were either partners in their husbands’ businesses or working widows. Through an elaborate survey of the financial activities of Jewish women during this period, Rosman concludes that these women’s financial roles influenced their social status: “In contrast to the bourgeois ideal of a woman reaching fulfillment through cultivation of the home and family, which was prevalent during the nineteenth century, in the earlier period, women interweaved financial activity and gain into their everyday lives. The family was an economic unit, in which the husband was senior partner, but the woman was also a partner.”¹⁴⁸

      ENCOUNTERS IN A THIRD SPACE

      Glikl poses a fascinating problem for the historian of race in the long eighteenth century. On the one hand, her story cannot be read by means of a colonialist paradigm; on the other, it cannot be understood as a misogynistic display of male anxieties regarding women.¹⁴⁹ In my reading of the memoirs, I have attempted to show that Glikl’s lack of identification with the savage woman expresses a decidedly Jewish indifference toward the early modern project of cultural and political colonization. In contrast to the traditional image of the European male colonist, who becomes master of the New World through the seduction and romantic conquest of the native, the protagonist of Glikl’s story is a highly effeminate man who is raped by the native woman and saved by the more masculine European men. In this sense, Glikl’s story gives tantalizing expression to the reality of being Jewish in early modern Europe. Similarly to the androgynous hero of Glikl’s tale, so too the early modern European Jew was a hybrid being, simultaneously hegemonic and subaltern, same but different, part of the European “we” but not quite.

      Glikl’s use of the literary tropes of savage infanticide and the colonial love story differs, then, from other, non-Jewish uses in that it conveys specific Jewish anxieties concerning assimilation and Jewish-Christian relations. In this sense, Glikl can be read as rejecting the dual possibilities of both external and internal colonization: of the acculturation of the non-European Other and of the assimilation of the intimate Other, the Jew.

      However, as is most often the case with early modern Jews, Glikl’s thought cannot adequately be understood outside the context of the non-Jewish intellectual and cultural trends of its time. Indeed, in her choice of literary motifs, Glikl reflects more general concerns shared by her non-Jewish contemporaries regarding the meaning of civilization, the possibility of cross-cultural encounter, and the differences between men. Throughout the eighteenth century there occurred some radical transformations in the answers European writers provided to these questions. I turn now to review the ways in which these transformations affected Jewish discourse in the decades following Glikl’s memoirs.

      CHAPTER 2

      “And Let Him Speak”

      Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz’s Amudey beyt Yehudah

      It is best to walk the course of nature, and to stray neither left nor right, for its paths are those of pleasantness, and all its lanes are those of peace.

      —SHIMON BAR-ZEKHARYAH, 1788

      And Hushai turned to Ittai his master and cried in anguish: have you not heard, oh master, how this man of the woods has arisen to devour my soul with his questions?

      —YEHUDAH HOROWITZ, 1766

      In the popular imagination of medieval Europe, Africans, Americans and other “exotic peoples” were perceived as savage and voracious beings, creatures that had been cursed by God. Hairy, four-footed, and mute, they occupied a mysterious limbo between the bestial, the demonic, and the human. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was some attempt by more “professional” ethnographers to change this imagery and promote a less mythological view of the non-European world. However, the image of the hairy wild man endured; wild men and women appeared in folktales such as Glikl’s story of the pious Jew and his savage wife, or the myth of the hairy anchorite, and were observed by such sixteenth-and seventeenth-century explorers as Antonio Pigafetta or Henry Schooten. Other writers confronted their readers with ominous beasts, bearing the body of a man and the head of a dog, or Haitian Satanists, whose skulls could endure the sharpest blade.¹ Clearly, these were not beings with which one could engage in rational dialogue. Such dialogue was reserved to the monotheistic and “civilized” nations—Christians, Muslims, Jews, at times also Asian peoples—whose cultural and religious proximity crystallized against the context of these ruthless savages.

      But this was to change during the eighteenth century. Slowly but surely, non-European peoples were relocated from the realm of folklore and demonology and introduced into the European elite of philosophers and men of science. Already in 1711, an observant Lord Shaftesbury pointed to this burgeoning intellectual trend by complaining that a “Moorish fancy, in its plain and literal sense, prevails strongly СКАЧАТЬ