Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ peoples on the other, was established not by turning to skin color or other biological traits, but rather by addressing cultural and religious differences. Cannibalism, nudity, homosexuality, infanticide, atheism, lack of technology or manners, polygamy, and other cultural characteristics served as prime markers of difference for Jews and Christians alike. It was only later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, that these contingencies were to be gradually replaced by other, more essentialist notions of difference, most notably skin color.¹² Indeed, the central thesis of the present study is that something did change—and change radically—in the ways in which Ashkenazi Jews understood difference during the early modern period.

      Throughout the book, I ask two fundamental questions concerning this change. First, I attempt to expose the contours of the change itself, and tackle the ways in which it affected the uses and representations of race in Jewish discourse over the long eighteenth century. Second, I review how these Jewish uses and representations of race correspond with racial discourse in non-Jewish thought during the same period. These questions are answered in four separate chapters of the book, which are organized both chronologically and thematically. My method is to begin each chapter by focusing a narrow lens on one key text, an archetypical test case, and then slowly expanding the view to include other texts. I begin by comparing my key text to a corresponding non-Jewish text or corpus of texts from the same period. This technique satisfies the synchronic aspect of my work, and allows me to arrive at an answer to my question regarding the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish notions of race. I then continue by comparing my key text with later and earlier Jewish and non-Jewish texts that are preoccupied with similar issues. This analysis satisfies the diachronic aspect of the work and directs me toward an answer to the question of change in Jewish notions of difference throughout the period.

      Operating at the level of the text enables an examination of the racial imagery employed by Jewish authors in all its complexities. It permits us to view these texts in their proper context, to examine their intertextual aspects, the ways in which they engage other texts, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in a multi-faceted and often perplexing dialogue. The focus on four different sets of texts should not be read, however, as providing an exhaustive account of Jewish attitudes toward the question of race in the long eighteenth century. Largely excluded from this study are halakhic (Jewish legal) discussions, such as those surrounding questions of conversion, burial, and other such issues. Though I do touch upon some rabbinical texts, such as those written by Jacob Emden or Abraham ben Elijah, the focus of my study is on secular conceptions, and halakhic discourse surrounding race cannot be adequately treated within its confines. For the most part, this work also excludes Sepharadi Jewry, as well as colonial Jews, such as the Jewish community of Jodensavanne. For these Jews, difference was an altogether different matter. The routine encounters with other peoples, the importance of economic considerations, their different status in European society and culture, the different kind of political motives which came into play in their treatment of non-Jews—all these elements make the reality of colonial and Sepharadi Jewry quite different from that of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, and particularly the maskilim (thinkers of the Jewish Enlightenment), for whom race was a deeply introspective category, and the Other, primarily a conceptual or rhetorical tool.

      In terms of corpus selection, the four texts or sets of texts selected for this study correspond with four different literary genres—folktales, philosophical literature, scientific writing, and children’s books. These four genres represent the most dominant modes of writing about race during the long eighteenth century, and correlate with the changes in racial discourse throughout the period. In the move from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, the image of the savage was relocated from the realm of myth and folklore into the philosophical literature of the Enlightenment, where it assumed a dominant position until the rise of anthropological positivism toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. The increasing emphasis on skin color, skull shape, brain size, and other physiological or pseudo-biological traits made the non-European Other a much less appealing philosophical tool. The savage was thus gradually removed from the philosophical laboratory of the Enlightenment and introduced into the physical laboratory of nineteenth-century hard science. A corresponding literary trend may be found in the relocation of colonial discourse from philosophy books and novels into children’s books. The latter phenomenon receives poignant expression in turn-of-thecentury maskilic literature (literature of the Haskalah), which, for reasons discussed further below, devoted a great deal of attention to Jewish translations of German travel books for children.

      Another characteristic of the corpus selected for this study has to do with language. Although the study engages texts written in Yiddish, German, German written in Hebrew characters, and other languages, the reader will notice that particular prominence is given to texts written in biblical Hebrew. This choice stems in part from the prominence given to biblical Hebrew by writers of the Haskalah. Of course, the importance of the Haskalah movement in the construction and proliferation of new modes of thinking throughout the eighteenth century and beyond grants maskilic thinkers a privileged position in the present study. Another reason for focusing on Hebrew works, and particularly Hebrew translations of non-Jewish works, is the unique intertextual nature of the biblical Hebrew used by the maskilim. Writing in biblical Hebrew opened up a world of associations to contemporaneous readers, which are not always immediately available to us today. Significantly, the use of biblical Hebrew was also a nod to thinkers of the non-Jewish Enlightenment(s), for whom the Bible supplied one of the few positive images of the Jew. Here was language that Christians viewed favorably, a language spoken by a people purportedly not corrupted by rabbinical Judaism/Hebrew on the one hand, or by life in Europe/Yiddish on the other. And yet, at the same time, the choice to write in Hebrew was also a choice to remain within the Jewish world, both in terms of language as well as in terms of readership. By choosing to write in Hebrew rather than in German or other non-Jewish languages, maskilic authors asserted their roles as harbingers of Jewish acculturation, while at the same time pledging their allegiance to Jewish tradition, community, and faith. In a way, writing in Hebrew constituted a choice to retain Jewish difference, but render it a difference of a different kind. Forgoing the hybrid Hebrew-Aramaic of rabbinical Judaism, and the equally hybridized Jewish-German or Yiddish spoken by the vast majority of European Jews, maskilic authors declared a kind of intellectual independence that took its inspiration from the image of “the native,” in this case the native Israelites. Indeed, one could perhaps say that for a brief moment in the eighteenth century the subaltern could speak in a language of its own. This language was Hebrew.

      The first chapter focuses on representations of the savage woman, and particularly the savage mother, through a reading of the memoirs of the German Jewish merchant woman Glikl bas Leib. In her memoirs, written in Yiddish between the years 1691 and 1719, Glikl describes an erotic encounter between a pious Jew and an East Indian woman. Glikl’s story is, in fact, part of a tradition of colonial fantasies, such as the story of Pocahontas, or the tale of Inkle and Yarico, which envision the intercultural encounter as an erotic exchange. However, this specific version of the story, with its gruesome infanticidal twist and its incorporation of a highly unorthodox motif of male rape, is intriguing particularly in light of the writer’s personal background as a woman, a (bereaved) mother, and a Jew. In my analysis of Glikl’s story, I argue that her often radical departures from orthodox European paradigms of cross-cultural contact offer fascinating insights into the ways in which race and gender relate to one another during the early modern period. In addition, throughout the first chapter, I attempt to tackle the assimilation anxieties and inversion fantasies underlying Glikl’s story, and to locate them against their Jewish backdrop.

      Robert Liberles has warned against overreliance on Glikl as an authoritative source on early modern women.¹³ And yet, as the only extant autobiographical text by an early modern Ashkenazi woman, and one of the precious few texts by early modern Jewish women in general, the memoirs should not—or rather cannot—be neglected. In the context of Jewish images of race, they afford, when combined with other contemporaneous Jewish and non-Jewish sources, an invaluable view into the ways in which notions of race and gender informed, reinforced, and complicated one another in early modern discourse in general, and in the Jewish and Jewish feminine world in particular. In addition, the folktale, СКАЧАТЬ