Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ or legal problem; she was now an anatomical enigma.

      SAVAGE MOTHERS

      But to return to Glikl’s time, it appears that early modern Europeans viewed the act of infanticide not as pathological, but rather as somehow natural (though not necessarily adequate) behavior.¹⁰³ It is therefore not surprising that many early modern authors tended, like Glikl herself, to attribute infanticidal tendencies to precisely those persons they considered to be most “natural,” non-Europeans, or savages. The rumor that parenting norms outside Europe were somewhat lax appeared in some of the earliest reports describing the New World. Already in his first report on the American natives, Columbus explained that these men and women exhibit very loose family ties. According to his account, whenever the Spanish attempted to approach the natives, they fled so quickly that fathers forsook their children.¹⁰⁴ Reports of somewhat “unconventional” parental relations also appeared in the first detailed Jewish report on the “discovery” of America—Abraham Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam. In his book, Farrisol argued that it is the custom of American mothers to have sexual relations with their sons. He added that these people “have no governor or lord, no religion or gods, but they behave according to nature alone.”¹⁰⁵ The savage family and its loose ties continued to excite European imagination generations later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories of child murder were a prominent motif in scientific or travel literature, as well as in the fiction and philosophy of the period. They appeared in such popular and esteemed texts as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which certain Amerindian peoples are said to be fond of eating their children’s flesh; or in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Europeans are reminded of their own infanticidal past.¹⁰⁶ The British navigator James Cook reported to his numerous readers that child murder rituals were still practiced in Tahiti and constituted the main means of combating the high birthrate on the island.¹⁰⁷ Jews were also accused of infanticide, most famously by Voltaire, who used the Deuteronomic passages cited in the epigraph to this chapter to portray the Israelites as a savage people whose descendants would never be able to integrate into Europe.¹⁰⁸ Savage infanticide was such a popular trope in early modern European thought that even primitivist thinkers were obliged to confront it, lest it taint their own depictions of the “noble savage.” In his popular 1777 Les Incas, for instance, French playwright Jean-François Marmontel explained that the Incas had recently discontinued the barbaric custom of sacrificing their children.¹⁰⁹

      Some writers attempted to explain the infanticidal customs of savage peoples by turning to climate. Thus, in his magnum opus Histoire Naturelle, the leading naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon informed his readers that parental love tends to diminish or even disappear in certain climates. According to Buffon, the damp and relatively chilly American climate produces frigid natives who “lack any enthusiasm for their females, and as a consequence, for their fellow men. As they do not know the most basic attachment, so too their other sentiments are cold and languid. Their love for their parents and infants is feeble; the most intimate social relations, the familial relations, are merely weak links.”¹¹⁰ Buffon added that, by contrast, the Africans who reside in a warmer climate are deeply devoted to their children. And yet, even in the case of the Africans, Buffon appears not to have been entirely convinced of their degree of parental devotion, and he reported that African parents are often willing to sell their own children into slavery in return for gin, a claim that was widely repeated during the eighteenth century.¹¹¹ The premise underlying all these reports of savage infanticides was concisely put by Samuel Johnson, who observed: “[Savages] have no affection.… Natural affection is nothing; but affection from principle and established duty is sometimes wonderfully strong.”¹¹²

      In the minds of Glikl’s contemporaries, then, maternal devotion was an attribute of civilization, and infanticide was just one of so many “natural vices,” such as cannibalism, homosexuality, atheism, or bestiality that characterized the lives of men and women who had been completely abandoned to the dictates of nature. It should be clarified, however, that if infanticide was indeed considered a natural response under certain conditions, it was certainly not thought of as adequate behavior. Much like cannibalism, this was one natural inclination a good parent (and particularly a good mother) was expected to overcome. And indeed, contemporary research suggests that the intense preoccupation with the image of the murderous mother in eighteenth-century Europe was the result of an attempt to construct an opposing image of the civilized European woman as an emblem of domesticity. As we shall see, traces of this kind of thinking are found in Glikl’s story.

      NOTIONS OF DIFFERENCE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

      It is time to divert our gaze from the atrocious sight of the savage woman who bisects and devours her child to the fascinating encounter that occurs in Glikl’s tale between savages, Christians, and Jews. This triangular encounter affords an unusual view into Glikl and her contemporaries’ complex understandings of identity and difference. Upon a first reading of the tale, it appears that Glikl’s perception of human variety conforms to a simple binary of savage and civilized, with the cannibal woman’s barbarity serving to stress the cultural proximity between Christians and Jews. In her cannibalistic, atheistic, and infanticidal behavior, the savage woman unites Jews and Christians in a mutual bond of civilized people, or “mentshen,” in Glikl’s own phrasing. In this sense, Glikl is part of a longstanding Jewish rhetorical practice, in which the non-European other served as a means to establish a shared Jewish-Christian identity. This rhetorical practice has been previously discussed by such scholars of Jewish-Black relations as Jonathan Schorsch or Avraham Melamed, who explain that throughout the history of the West, Jewish authors utilized the image of the Black as a means to construct an opposing image of the Jews as White(r).¹¹³ However, it should be noted that skin color does not play a role in Glikl’s description of the savage woman or in her identification with Christians. In fact, the savage woman’s skin color is never once mentioned in the story, and her other physical traits, such as nudity and hairiness, are depicted as exceedingly mutable. So mutable that, indeed, Glikl mentions that after having lived with the savages for some years, the pious Jew came to physically resemble them in every way, and appeared a complete savage to European eyes (G. Tur., 90). Thus, contrary to Schorsch or Melamed’s predictions, skin color does not act as a marker of difference in Glikl’s story; rather, she uses the savage woman’s cannibalism, infanticidal behavior, and barbarity as a means to contrast between civilized and savage, European and non-European.

      The marginality and fluidity of physical designators of difference in Glikl’s tale is indicative of the anthropological thinking of her time. Another contemporaneous encounter narrative, from Aphra Behn’s popular 1688 Oroonoko, exemplifies the fluidity of early modern designators of difference quite vividly. The scene takes place on the banks of the Suriname River and depicts a strange encounter between a group of English settlers, a tribe of Surinamese natives, and an African slave. The encounter is described thus: “Now, none of us [the English] speaking the language of the people …, we took a fisherman that lived at the mouth of the river, who had long been an inhabitant there, and obliged him to go with us. But because he was known to the Indians … and being, by long living there, become a perfect Indian in colour, we, who resolved to surprise them, by making them see something they never had seen (that is white people), resolved only myself, my brother, and woman should go.”¹¹⁴ Let us look closely at this scene. The narrator explains that she wanted to surprise the natives with “something they never had seen (that is white people).” And indeed, the natives are fascinated by the narrator and her European entourage, and are amazed by the strange visitors’ clothes and hairstyles. The Europeans, on the other hand, are impressed mainly by the natives’ nudity. A modern-day reader, however, may find all this somewhat confusing, since even though Behn clearly states that the natives had never seen “white people” before, they appear strangely unimpressed with the English visitors’ skin color. In fact, throughout the entire description, skin color plays an extremely marginal role and is mentioned only once, in Behn’s description of the English interpreter, who is asked by the narrator to remain hidden in the bushes so as not to ruin the spectacle СКАЧАТЬ