Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ tradition of colonial romances, which employ eroticism to describe the conquest of the New World. The sexual potential of the colonial encounter is already alluded to in Amerigo Vespucci’s 1504 letter to Pier Soderini. Like Columbus before him, Vespucci makes special note of the natives’ nudity and adds: “The greatest sign of friendship which they show you is that they give you their wives and their daughters, and a father or a mother deems himself or herself highly honored when they bring you a daughter, even though she be a young virgin, if you sleep with her, and hereunto they use every expression of friendship.”²³ Such erotic formulations of the conquest were continued throughout the early modern period, both in literature and in art.²⁴ An infamous example is Walter Raleigh’s graphic 1595 description of Guiana as a country “that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned nor wrought.”²⁵ A less familiar but no less suggestive formulation is found in Thomas Morton’s 1637 description of New England as “a faire virgin, longing to be sped, / And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed, / Deck’d in rich ornaments t’advaunce her state,” or Roger Wolcott’s 1725 description of the English settlers who press forward upon “the virgin stream, who had, as yet, Never been violated with a ship.”²⁶ These eroticized descriptions of the conquest were, of course, a pervasive colonialist tool. The feminization of the land and its inhabitants provided Europeans with a language by means of which it was possible to present European hegemony in the New World as a natural and even benevolent state of affairs, much like the husband’s authority over his wife.²⁷ As Zantop has observed, stories like Steele’s “History of Inkle and Yarico,” which envisioned the conquest as a mutually desirable affair, offered readers “a model for successful, ‘humane’ colonization.”²⁸ A recurring motif in such colonial romances, one which features in all versions of the Inkle and Yarico story, is the half-European, half-native child, born to a member of the native royalty or nobility. This hybrid child, who appears as a legitimate heir of the native throne, constitutes a further means of establishing a firm and legitimate colonial rule.²⁹

      A second characteristic of the Inkle and Yarico tales is that of identification with the savage woman. An interesting aspect of this identification is the somewhat odd dichotomy that the various authors implicitly draw between Yarico, the noble Caribbean savage, who is idealized as a naïve and betrayed woman, and her cannibalistic tribesmen, who are often demonized by the tale. In George Colman’s famous operatic version, Yarico is portrayed as a noble, generous maid, “beautiful as an angel,” who protects Inkle from her cruel countrymen, the cannibals.³⁰ This dichotomy between the individual noble savage, who often appears in feminized form, and his or her barbaric tribe, which often consists of hairy, monstrous beings, is discussed in some detail in Chapter 2. For the present discussion, suffice to note that this Janus-faced image of the savage is an extremely widespread characteristic of early modern colonial literature, which receives one of its clearest articulations in the Inkle and Yarico trope.

      The characteristic of identification with the savage woman is closely connected to the final component of the Inkle and Yarico story discussed above—that of aversion toward the behavior of the European man. This last element is perhaps most pervasive and is found in all previously discussed versions of the tale. In his early version of the story, which is said to have inspired Steele’s tale, Richard Ligon explains that the English sailor “forgot the kindness of the poor maid, that had ventured her life for his safety, and sold her for a slave, who was as free born as he: and so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty.”³¹ In Salomon Gessner’s German version, even “Yariko’s” tribesmen are portrayed in a more sympathetic light, and their attack on “Inkel” is motivated not by cannibalism, but by the desire to protect themselves from their cruel conquerors, the Europeans.³² Yet even in versions in which a less idealized image of the native woman emerges, the narrator’s sympathies still lie with the betrayed savage. One such version is in Jean Mocquet’s Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes Orientales et Occidentales, in which the savage woman is portrayed as infanticidal. Mocquet’s version of the story is closest to Glikl’s, and is the only non-Jewish version known to employ the infanticidal motif. And yet, even though Mocquet’s savage woman resembles Glikl’s in having slain her son, still, the object of the writer’s scorn is her husband, the English sailor, who abandons his savage wife and their mutual child, after having been saved by her.³³ Aversion toward the European sailor’s behavior is evident also in the earliest Hebrew versions of the tale, which appeared in David Zamość’s 1819 Tokhaḥot musar and Baruch Shenfeld’s 1811 Musar haskel, which are, in fact, adaptations of German pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe’s retelling of the story in his Sittenbüchlein für Kinder aus gesitteten Ständen (1777). In all three versions of the story—Campe, Shenfeld, and Zamość’s—the narrator’s identification with the savage woman receives dramatic expression through the frame narrative, in which the children listening to the tale begin to cry, expressing their deep pity for the savage woman and their outrage at the European sailor’s behavior.³⁴

      Let us return now to Glikl’s version of the tale. Of course, Glikl was not directly familiar with Steele’s tale, or with Ligon or Mocquet’s earlier versions. And yet, the similarities between the tale of the pious Jew and stories of the Yarico and Inkle trope are unmistakable. As Davis points out, there is a clear connection between the Jewish folktale appearing in Glikl’s memoirs (and, I would add, in the Perlhefter’s Beer sheva) and Mocquet’s story of savage infanticide.³⁵ However, the differences between Glikl’s story and other stories of the Inkle and Yarico trope are also striking; in the “Jewish” version of the tale, the three components of love, identification, and criticism of the European sailor’s behavior are entirely absent. Glikl offers her readers a uniquely dismal version of the colonial encounter, which is not a love story but a horrendous tale of rape and infanticide in which the savage woman arouses neither empathy nor pity, but rather abhorrence and disgust. She is no different from her cannibalistic and hairy tribesmen, and the only reason she refrains from slaying and eating the Jewish visitor is that her appetite for human flesh is superseded by more intense fleshly desires. Of course, the European Jewish protagonist is in no way attracted to this cannibalistic monster. On the contrary, he is repulsed by the native woman and, in contrast to his non-Jewish doubles, does not wish to marry, domesticate, impregnate, or enslave her. This unique indifference toward the savage woman and her child, which Glikl expects her readers to share, signifies perhaps an underlying indifference to the kind of colonial dilemmas and aspirations that preoccupied her non-Jewish contemporaries. In stark contrast to these authors, Glikl does not view the intercultural encounter as an opportunity for the cultural colonization of the non-European Other. Unlike other Inkle and Yarico tales, her story does not criticize exploitative colonialism, nor does it endorse “colonial benevolence.”

      In this sense, Glikl is paradigmatic of the problems inherent in attempting to read early modern Jewish texts on the non-European world through a purely colonial prism. In fact, even though some Jews—mainly Dutch, French, and English Jews of Sepharadi origin—did take part in early modern colonialist enterprises, most early modern Ashkenazi Jews, and certainly women such as Glikl, were uninterested parties when it came to their countries’ colonialist policies. Being so remote from the locus of political power, they could hardly be suspected of entertaining some form of latent colonial fantasies. And indeed, in her study on representations of the “new world” in early modern Jewish literature, Limor Mintz-Manor finds the same kind of indifferent attitude toward colonialism in other early modern Ashkenazi works, particularly in Abraham Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam.³⁶ Similarly, Martin Jacobs questions the applicability of the Orientalist or colonialist paradigms to medieval Jewish thought and suggests that a new theoretical framework be applied to the writings of non-colonialist Jews.³⁷ As we shall see, Ashkenazi interest in colonization—both external and internal—would appear only later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, in the writings of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah.³⁸

      Not surprisingly, then, Glikl’s story cannot be understood as yet another colonial love story, in the same vein as other Inkle and Yarico tales. In fact, in Glikl’s version, the СКАЧАТЬ