A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz

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СКАЧАТЬ functioned less as a coherent, independent treatise than as a “summa of sermon material.”²¹⁷

      Figure 1. A weasel resurrecting her cubs using “a certain herb” (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, fol. 96v)

      Figure 2. A lion hunts using a magic circle (MS Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 3466, 8º, fol. 6v)

      It is quite plausible that medieval Ashkenazic Jews could have encountered such preaching, since one of the most prominent ends for which animal data were marshaled was precisely anti-Jewish polemic. A wide array of “Jewish animals” was thought to anchor anti-Jewish beliefs and stereotypes firmly within the symbolic meaning of the natural order.²¹⁸ Thus the owl, for instance, was consistently equated with the Jews, since both of them “prefer darkness to light.”²¹⁹ Other animals, like the hyena, which feasts on corpses with its ferocious fangs, and the bonnacon, which attacks men using its dung as a projectile, were linked to Jews in equally unsubtle ways.²²⁰

      These animals’ supposed properties, and their anti-Jewish implications, could easily have become known to Ashkenazic Jews in the course of polemical encounters. In his Topographia Hibernica, for example, Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223) homiletically invokes the wondrous natural properties of animals found in bestiary lore for anti-Jewish polemical ends:

      Repent, unhappy Jew, recollect, though late, that man was first generated from clay without being procreated by male and female; nor will your veneration for the law allow you to deny that. In the second place, woman was generated of the man, without the intervention of the other sex. The third mode of generation only by male and female, as it is the ordinary one, obstinate as you are, you admit and approve. But the fourth, from which alone came salvation, namely, birth from a woman, without union with a man, you utterly reject with perverse obstinacy, to your own perdition. Blush, O wretched man, blush! At least, recur to nature, which, in confirmation of the faith for our best teaching, continually produces and gives birth to new animals, without union of male and female. The first creature was begotten of clay; this last is engendered of wood.²²¹

      Gerald refers here to the wondrous properties of barnacle geese, animals that literally grow on trees. They are invoked in order to highlight the Jews’ blindness and stubbornness. After all, the Jews deny the possibility of Christ having been descended only from a woman, with no biological male input—but they should realize that nature itself attests that this is a tenable possibility, since barnacle geese exist despite having neither father nor mother.²²²

      Significantly, Pietistic sources themselves describe encounters in which Jews and Christians debated the theological meaning of animals’ properties. According to Sefer Hasidim,

      A gentile once brought a garment to a group of gentiles and said it was the garment of Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, “If you do not believe me, see what I can do with it.” He cast the garment into the fire, and it did not burn. The monks and priests said to the Jews, “See—there is holiness in this garment!” The sage replied, “Give it to me, and I will see what it contains.” He took some strong vinegar, and washed the garment before their eyes. He said, “Now cast it into the fire and test it.” They cast it into the fire, and it burned immediately. They asked [the sage], “Why did you think to wash it?” He replied, “Because it was coated in salamandra, and so I needed to wash the garment [to reveal its true nature].”²²³

      Here, knowledge of the imperviousness of salamanders to fire becomes a weapon in the Jews’ polemical arsenal, as it allows them to combat an otherwise miraculous proof of the sanctity of a Christian relic. Two implications of this passage are worth emphasizing. First, it suggests that animals and their properties could be discussed in the course of actual encounters between Jews and Christians.²²⁴ Second, it reinforces the fact that “wondrous” animal properties were understood to be part and parcel of the natural order. Far from being an inexplicable, supernatural phenomenon, the imperviousness of the salamander to fire is here invoked precisely as a naturalistic explanation for what would otherwise be considered a miraculous occurrence. Other contemporaneous Ashkenazic texts similarly marshal “facts” about wondrous animals for avowedly “scientific” ends.²²⁵

      The Pietists’ exposure to contemporary, polemically wielded bestiary lore can be confirmed by noting their adaptation of one final anti-Jewish motif. A number of bestiaries linked the “duplicitous” Jews to animals whose sexuality was ambiguous or threatening. Thus the hyena, mentioned above, was not only a corpse eater, but also a hermaphrodite; Jews were also linked to rabbits, whose gender supposedly alternated on a monthly basis, and to weasels, who were thought to copulate orally.²²⁶ This linkage between Jews and hermaphrodites—itself linked ideationally to the popular belief that Jewish men menstruated²²⁷—further served to equate Jews with “sodomites” in the minds of some Christian authors.²²⁸ It is quite possible that the Pietists’ knowledge of weasels and their powers of resurrection, discussed above, may have derived precisely from their exposure to such anti-Jewish barbs. In any case, the Pietists certainly did adopt, and invert, the bestiary’s position on dual-gendered rabbits. In a thirteenth-century exegetical text called Sefer Gematriyot, Judah betrays his knowledge of this motif and utilizes the supposedly dual-gendered nature of the rabbit to clear up a grammatical inconsistency in the Bible’s description of the arnevet (rabbit). According to Leviticus 11:6, because the rabbit “chews its cud, but its hooves are not split, it is impure”—not kosher. As Judah points out, “This [verse] is written both male and female”—that is to say, the verse in Leviticus refers to the rabbit using the female gender (ma’alat gerah hi … teme’ah hi lakhem), but the parallel verse in Deuteronomy 14:7 switches to the masculine in its description of the rabbit and hare (ma’aleh gerah hemah … teme’im hem lakhem). The conclusion Judah draws is that “one month [the rabbit] is male, and the next month it is female, and it menstruates like a woman.”²²⁹ This resolution of the textual difficulty clearly draws on the supposed physiology of rabbits, and reflects Jewish awareness, if not internalization, of this widespread Christian belief. Indeed, elsewhere in the Pietistic corpus, Christian priests are explicitly accused of habitually engaging in homosexual behaviour—suggesting that the same charges aimed at the Jews could be just as easily redirected.²³⁰ It is particularly noteworthy, too, that the animals whose theological and exegetical significance the Pietists chose to highlight here are precisely the same ones that were used against them as Christian polemical ammunition—and that, at least in the case of the rabbit, the Pietists level precisely the same charge against their Christian contemporaries, based on the same naturalistic argumentation, that they had themselves been faced with.²³¹

      THE WANDERINGS OF A WONDERING JEW

      In addition to lapidaries, grimoires, bestiaries, and “books of secrets,” the Pietists consumed and produced an additional genre that anchors them firmly within contemporary debates over the relationship between natural order and occult mirabilia: travel narratives, which reported on, and sought to make sense of, the wonders to be found in far-off lands. As we have seen, Christian interest in natural wonder was nourished by, and nourished in turn, an efflorescence of travel narratives describing the “wonders of the east,” especially the ubiquitous Alexander Romance, which, in its varying recensions, described the monsters and wondrous natural phenomena thought to exist at the far reaches of the known world. In the case of the Pietists, too, an interest in wondrous phenomena within the natural world left its mark on the Hebrew travel narratives that circulated among the Jews of Ashkenaz. One such narrative, Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi-Ratisbon (“The Circuit of R. Petahiyah of Regensburg”), was produced within Kalonymide circles and manifests the СКАЧАТЬ