Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein
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Название: Difference of a Different Kind
Автор: Iris Idelson-Shein
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Культурология
Серия: Jewish Culture and Contexts
isbn: 9780812209709
isbn:
The close connection between Glikl’s story and the story of the demon wife is also attested to by Glikl’s physical description of the savage woman as hairy. The motif of excessive hairiness as a symbol of the demonic is widespread in European literature, both Jewish and Christian. Use of this motif goes all the way back to the Bible, in which the term seirim (hairy) is used to denote a type of demons. Use of the term, and with it the association of body hair with the demonic, continued in the medieval and early modern periods.58 Thus, for instance, in an anti-Sabbatian pamphlet published in 1758, R’ Jacob Emden depicts the Sabbatian movement as a hairy demon, bearing three faces (one for each of monotheistic religion), hoofs, a tail, and wings of fire (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Sabbatian demon, from Jacob Emden, Sefer shimush, 1758. Reproduced by permission of the National Library Israel.
It is important to note, however, that the close connection between Glikl’s savage woman and the image of the coercive demon-wife notwithstanding, Glikl leaves no room for doubt as to the humanity of her savage heroine. Indeed, even though she refers to the woman as “woman” [ווייב, G. Tur., 90, 92] and “animal” [טיר, G. Tur., 90, 92] interchangeably, she makes a point of mentioning that the woman wore a large fig leaf to cover her shame. The motif of the fig leaf is of course an allusion to the biblical story of the expulsion from Eden, and is ripe with symbolism of primordial sinfulness. Similar images of hirsute women wearing fig leaves to cover their shame appeared also in other, non-Jewish sources, particularly in medicine and natural geography books (figs. 2, 3). The presence of the leaf must also be understood, however, as an indication of the woman’s humanity. After all, only humans, who have tasted from the tree of knowledge, experience the sensation of shame.59
Figure 2. Wild woman of Java (detail), from Gaspar Schott, Physica Curiosa (1662). Reproduced by permission of the University of Iowa John Martin Rare Book Room.
The image of the hairy wild man also has its roots in antiquity, and appears as early as the epic of Gilgamesh.60 Admittedly, the association of savages or wild men with excessive body hair was called into question by early modern “professional ethnographers,” but it continued to dominate popular notions of savagery throughout the eighteenth century, and even later.61 In Carl Linnaeus’s acclaimed Systema Naturae, for instance, feral children, who had grown up outside of civilization, were characterized as hairy and mute. This kind of characterization was ubiquitous during the eighteenth century and was repeated by later writers as well.62 In fact, hairy children continued to exist in European imagination well into the twentieth century, as attested by a 1937 newspaper report from Palestine that relates the capture of a “four footed wild-man, in the form of a girl.” The image of the child, who is said to have subsided on frogs, snakes, and grass, was probably inspired by the famous case of Marie Angelique Leblanc, who was captured in Songi in 1731 and has since captured the imagination of countless Europeans.63 The girl was described as “long-haired and long-nailed, her body covered in hair too.”64
Figure 3. Wild woman (detail), from Gaspar Schott, Physica Curiosa (1662). Reproduced by permission of the University of Iowa John Martin Rare Book Room.
But to return to the early modern period, an interesting feature of the feral children stories is the extreme fluidity that the writers seem to attribute to the characteristic of body hair. In contrast to their demonic corollaries, feral children are imagined to have been born as hairless as any other European. It is their detachment from society, and secluded lives “in nature,” which have deemed them hairy. This radical fluidity of the characteristic of hairiness receives startling expression in Glikl’s tale, where it is noted in passing that after having spent three years with the savages, the pious Jew came to resemble them in every way, hairiness included. The notion that time spent “in nature” would result in excessive body hair appears to have been widespread in early modern Europe, and it resulted in a host of bizarre hairy beings that inhabited European imagination. Indeed, in the woods of early modern Europe, one could expect to encounter not only hairy demons and wild men, but also hirsute saints, who, due to their reclusive lifestyle, had become almost indistinguishable from beasts.65 Europeans also turned hairy in the colonies, as may be gleaned from a 1770 illustration depicting the colonial American woman Mary Rowlandson, who had been held captive by Native Americans for three months during the year 1676, as an exceedingly hairy woman.66 In the mind of the unnamed illustrator, even a three-month “excursion into nature” would suffice to render a smooth European hairy. But perhaps the most striking use of the hairy woman motif in early modern Europe may be found in two Jewish illustrations, which appeared in two separate calendars dating from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (figs. 4, 5). The illustrations portray as hairy no less than the mother of all women everywhere—the biblical Eve.67
The use of body hair to signify demons, savages, and “natural people” may have something to do with the unique nature of hair, which, as art historian Angela Rosenthal explains, is a signifier of borders. According to Rosenthal: “Emerging from the flesh and thus both of, and without the body—at once corporeal and a mere lifeless extension—hair occupies an extraordinary position, mediating between the natural and the cultural. It prompts one to scrutinize and question those boundaries defining self and other, subject and object, life and death.”68And indeed, the body hair of Glikl’s savage woman positions her in a liminal space, between human and beast, exotic and demonic, life and death. Her hair entangles folktales and medical discourse, travel narratives and mythology, colonial discourse and demonology, images of nature and biblical allusions. It is this final, biblical, element to which we now turn.
Figure 4. Hairy Eve (detail), from Eleazar ben Joseph of Fulda, “Evronot ve-nosaḥ shetarot,” 1627. Image provided by the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.
RAPE AND EXOGAMY
In her pioneering study on rape imagery in medieval and early modern Europe, art historian Diane Wolfthal explains that even though the vast majority of early modern rapists were male, there was at least one dominant image of a female rapist in European imagination of the time: the biblical image of Potiphar’s wife. For early moderns, explains Wolfthal, Potiphar’s wife was the female rapist par excellence: “Depictions of Potiphar’s wife as a sexual aggressor are quite numerous and appeared over a large span of time throughout the medieval and early modern era. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic images … attest to the immense popularity of the theme.”69 Significantly, the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is just one, albeit the most famous, of a variety of biblical tales that feature Jewish heroes or heroines who are harassed by non-Jews, and especially by non-Jewish kings or persons СКАЧАТЬ