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CHAPTER 1

An East Indian Encounter

Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib

Maternal Love! thy watchful glances roll

From zone to zone, from pole to distant pole;

Cheer the long patience of the brooding hen,

Soothe the she-fox that trembles in her den,

Mid Greenland ice-caves warm the female bear,

And rouse the tigress from her sultry lair.

—LUCY AIKIN, 1816

And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee.

—DEUTERONOMY 28:53

The past few decades have seen a growing scholarly awareness to the fact that notions of gender and race are closely intertwined in early modern discussions of difference. Scholars such as Susanne Zantop, Margarita Zamora, and Louis Montrose have called our attention to the ways in which early modern colonial discourse often employed eroticism and gender talk in order to narrate, justify, and at times criticize the conquest, colonization, and subjection of colonial peoples and lands.¹ But women were not merely a useful colonial analogy. Rather, for the vast majority of early modern Europeans, they were much more concrete, immediate, and tangible objects than those wild savages, who inhabited faraway lands. Indeed, in recent years, more and more scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which colonial discourse interacted with gender talk and served to construct and deliver notions of femininity, as well as to discuss other non-hegemonic groups within Europe.² In many cases, the relationship between race and gender as discursive tools is merely suggestive, but every once in a while there appears a text that is located right at the heart of this complex discursive web. The memoirs of the German Jewish merchant woman Glikl bas Leib constitute one such text.

In her memoirs, Glikl relates a folktale that is an early variant of the ubiquitous European tale depicting an encounter between a European sailor and an Indian maid. Glikl’s idiosyncratic version of the tale affords an invaluable opportunity to investigate the ways in early modern notions of racial difference were informed and complicated by notions of femininity, maternity, and childhood. Her understanding of cross-cultural contact is especially intriguing in light of her personal background as a woman, a mother, and a Jew. At the very center of the tale is another woman—a savage woman—who butchers and devours her own son. Thus, Glikl’s story offers a turbulent encounter between notions of savagery and civilization, maternity and femininity, nature and family, Judaism and Christianity. Such encounters would continue to appear in Jewish writings on non-European peoples throughout the long eighteenth century, and would serve Jewish authors as a means to adapt, revise, and deconstruct notions of identity and difference. As in many other Jewish discussions of savages, Glikl’s story reveals Jewish-specific fantasies and anxieties, as well as a unique Jewish feminine perspective. However, the story also reflects more general concerns, found also amongst Glikl’s non-Jewish contemporaries. As such, it offers an excellent starting point for our present discussion.

GLIKL AND HER MEMOIRS

The growing interest in questions of gender and family within the historical discipline in general, and the field of Jewish studies in particular, has been kind with Glikl. As author of the earliest surviving autobiographical text by a Jewish woman, over the past few years, Glikl has risen to stardom. Her late seventeenth-century memoirs, which remained in manuscript form for almost two centuries, have now appeared in German, Hebrew, and English translations, and have been the subject of several major studies.³ The most important of the latter are Chava Turniansky’s definitive Hebrew translation and critical edition of the memoirs, which appeared in 2006, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s discussion of the memoirs in her 1995 Women on the Margins.⁴ Here, I offer only a concise overview of Glikl’s life, and a brief discussion of some of the most important characteristics of the memoirs.

Glikl was born in Hamburg in 1645 to a family of Jewish merchants. At the age of twelve, she was engaged to Chaim of Hamel, and within two years the couple was wed. The marriage was generally a happy one, but it ended tragically in 1689 when Chaim fell on a sharp stone and died. Chaim’s demise left Glikl alone with the couple’s business debts and twelve children (another two children had died at an early age). But Glikl prevailed; she continued to run the family business on her own and enjoyed a fair degree of financial success. She was not unique in this respect. Even though there had been, since the sixteenth century, a gradual process of excluding women from the world of work in Christian society, this process had not been completed by Glikl’s time, and European women, especially single women or widows, continued to support themselves as laundresses, maids, or even merchants throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was especially true in the Jewish community, where women often took an active part in the financial support of their families, and it was not uncommon that a widow should continue managing her late husband’s business.⁵

A decade after her husband’s demise, however, Glikl tired of her life as an independent merchantwoman and remarried. This second marriage was far from successful, and Glikl eventually came to regret her decision to remarry. She writes: “God laughed at my thoughts and plans, and had already long decided on my doom to repay me for my sins and for relying on people. For I should not have thought of remarrying, for I could not hope to meet another R’ Chaim Hamel, and I should have stayed with my children, and accepted the good, as well as the bad, all according to God’s will.”⁶ Before long, Glikl’s husband encountered severe financial difficulties and was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died in 1712 and Glikl was once again left to fend for herself. In her desperation, she resorted to seeking the aid of her children and moved into the home of her daughter Esther, where she remained until her death in 1724.

Glikl began writing her memoirs in 1691 as a means to cope with her grief over Chaim’s death. And yet, even though Chaim’s spirit haunts the text from beginning to end, still the memoirs are not merely a monument to his memory. They do not open with his birth or end with his demise. Rather, they track the course of Glikl’s own life, beginning with the history of her parents, and present Glikl’s views on such issues as ethics and religion, commerce and family, and Christians and Jews.⁷ Contrary to later autobiographies, both Jewish and non-Jewish, such as the memoirs of Salomon Maimon, Henriette Herz, Mordecai Aaron Günzberg, and of course Rousseau, Glikl devotes very little attention to her childhood in the text.⁸ This marginalization of what later writers would consider the formative period in the life of the individual bears witness to the perception of childhood amongst Glikl’s contemporaries.⁹ As shall become clear over the course of our discussion, such disregard for children and childhood stands in direct contrast to the pedagogical thought of the Jewish maskilim, which would begin to take form during the second half of the eighteenth century, and which, inspired by such thinkers as Rousseau, Joachim Heinrich Campe, and Johann Basedow, would put great emphasis on childhood experiences in the formation of the adult personality. Further evidence of a dismissive attitude toward children and childhood is found in Glikl’s literary treatment of the deaths in her family. Throughout the memoirs, the younger the deceased, the less attention is given to his or her demise. Thus, Chaim’s death, which was the impetus for writing her memoirs, receives far greater attention and is described in much more detail than the deaths of Glikl’s four children: three-year-old Mate, an unnamed two-weekold baby, newly wedded Hendeleh, and Lob, who died at the age of twenty-eight.¹⁰ Similar attitudes are exhibited in other memoirs from the period, such as the early seventeenth-century memoirs of Asher Ha-levi or Jacob Emden’s Megilat sefer, written sometime around 1776.¹¹

Another important characteristic of the memoirs is the ubiquitous use of folktales, fables, anecdotes, and stories that serve to deliver Glikl’s religious, social, and moral views. Though these stories are most often derived from other sources, they play a central role in the memoirs. As Marcus Moseley explains: “It is the Mayse [tale] that provides [Glikl] with the greatest latitude for autobiographical expression, albeit indirect and disguised.… The stories … constitute a realm of autobiographical play; she can imply and say things in and through her stories that would be unmentionable in the life-account proper.”¹² The exact nature and meanings of this “autobiographical play” crystallize in what is the longest and most complex of the stories appearing in the memoirs, the story of the pious Jew and his savage wife.

THE STORY OF THE PIOUS JEW AND HIS TWO WIVES

The story tells of a pious Jew and devout torah scholar who lacks a talent for business. In light of his financial inadequacy, he is forced to borrrow money and is subsequently incarcerated for a debt he could not repay. Following the man’s arrest, his wife becomes the family’s sole breadwinner, working as a laundress on the beach.¹³ One day, she is spotted by a Christian sailor who, captivated by her beauty, abducts her. After his release from prison, the man and his two sons set out on a journey to save the abducted woman, but the boys also disappear, and the pious Jew himself is stranded on an East Indian island. There, he is taken hostage by a band of wild savages and forced into marriage with the tribe’s princess, a hairy and cannibalistic beast of a woman. Two years go by, during which the savage woman bears her husband a child. The man remains, however, miserable, and just as he begins to contemplate suicide he is confronted by a heavenly voice, instructing him to dig for a hidden treasure on the island and then seek salvation on the shore. Following these instructions, he discovers a box of riches hidden in the sand and then, while on the shore, sees a European ship. At first, the ship’s crew is reluctant to approach the man who, after living with the savages for so long, has grown hairy and has come to resemble them in every way. However, once they hear him speak, they realize that he is indeed a “mentsh” like them and they resolve to rescue him.

Upon learning that he has left her, the man’s savage wife calls to him from the shore, begging that he take her with him. He mocks her, shouting, “What have I to do with wild animals?” (G. Tur., 92;G. Abr., 26). In response, the savage woman grabs the couple’s child by its feet and tears it in half. She then proceeds to throw half of the child’s severed body toward her husband in the ship and devours what remains of her son. The story continues with the ship’s crew converting to Judaism and forming a small colony on a neighboring island, governed by the pious Jew. During his reign on the island, the man discovers his long-lost wife and sons, and they live happily ever after (G. Tur., 80–106).

As Glikl herself informs her readers, the story of the pious Jew and his savage wife is not her own original creation. The tale’s exact source is the focus of ongoing debate amongst Glikl scholars.¹⁴ In a recent study, Nathanael Riemer uncovered another version of the story in a late seventeenth-century manuscript titled Beer sheva, by the couple Beila and Baer Perlhefter of Prague. Barring a few linguistic differences, this version is almost identical to Glikl’s. In addition, the manuscript contains two additional stories that are also found, in slight variations, in the memoirs.¹⁵ Still, given the linguistic variations between the tales, it is difficult to ascertain whether Glikl was indeed familiar with the Perlhefter’s manuscript or whether she copied her story directly from it, perhaps from a copy no longer extant. The inclusion of the story in a second Jewish manuscript may simply attest to its popularity during the period.

The exact origins of the story notwithstanding, it is clear that in her memoirs Glikl appropriated the story for herself and interweaved it into her personal life narrative. Indeed, it is my contention that we should read the story as Glikl’s own, not only because it is the longest and most complex tale appearing in the memoirs; more importantly, as Turniansky, has observed, Glikl tends to borrow existing stories and to assimilate them into the framework of her memoirs in such a way as to make them her own.¹⁶ This understanding of Glikl’s autobiographical use of existing stories is reinforced by what appears to be her careful and conscientious selection of stories with which to pepper her text. Her choice of stories creates a recurring motif of filicide in the memoirs, which implies a fascination with the issue, almost an obsession with it. Of the seventeen full stories appearing in the memoirs, including the one discussed here, I have counted six in which Glikl discusses parents who killed or almost killed their children, either intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly (G. Tur., 30–33; 107–180; 236–239; 376–383; 504–519). Thus, Glikl tells of a father bird that drops its young into the ocean, and also offers an adaptation of the story of David and Absalom. The child death motif is evident also in the three stories Glikl supposedly took from Beer sheva, all of which raise the possibility of the intentional or accidental killing of a child by its parent. Thus, for instance, in both Glikl’s memoirs and in Beer sheva we find a story about a prince whose friends conspire to have his father, the king, kill him.¹⁷ Additional references to filicide are also made in the memoirs, for instance, when Glikl twice mentions the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, in a comical reference to the story of King Solmon’s trial (where once again we encounter the notion of a bisected baby), or when Glikl compares herself to King David, who grieves the slaying of his son by his own men (G. Tur., 34–35, 132–137, 168–169, 552–553). The appearance of the filicidal motif in such a text, which the author explicitly addresses to her children (e.g., G. Tur., 10–13, 26–29), is (to put it mildly) somewhat confounding. It becomes even more surprising when we consider Glikl’s own biography as a bereaved mother and widow. How, then, are we to interpret the dominance of child murder in the memoirs?

Glikl’s intense preoccupation with filicide challenges the traditional scholarly portrayal of the memoirs as the work of a prototypical “Yiddishe mame,” someone constantly preoccupied with her children’s well-being and the quest for an ideal family life. One critic complains that scholarly overreliance on Glikl’s memoirs has resulted in an inaccurately positive depiction of early modern Jewish family life. Glikl, it is argued, “provides a picturesque portrait of the ideal family in action, but other memoirs fill out the impression by depicting what everyday Jewish life meant for many others.”¹⁸ Such readings of Glikl dominate literary, historical, and psychological analysis of the text, and can even be observed in slight deviations from the source text in modern-day translations. Thus, for example, while musing on the issue of divine absolution, Glikl writes: “God forbid if the Holy One had no more mercy on us than parents [eltern] have for children! Because if a person [mentsh] has a bad child he helps and takes trouble over him two, three times but at length grows tired and thrusts the child, allowing him to go his own way, even though he knows it means his ruin” (G. Tur. 16). Significantly, in two separate translations of the memoirs (one into English, the other into Hebrew), this paragraph is (mis)translated: “God forbid if the Holy One had no more mercy on us than a human father has for his children.”¹⁹ In contrast, Glikl discusses the love parents in general (eltern) have for their children, not merely paternal love. This telling deviation from the source text demonstrates the scholarly tendency to overlook or downplay Glikl’s ambivalence toward the meanings and nature of maternity. In fact, even though a less idealized image of Glikl has emerged in recent years, her doubts, anxieties, and convictions concerning motherhood have yet to be adequately addressed.²⁰

I suggest that in her usage of the image of the cannibalistic mother, Glikl unwittingly partakes in two of the most interesting debates of her time: the debate concerning the nature and limits of maternal devotion and the debate surrounding the nature and limits of civilization. Throughout the eighteenth century, these two discussions were often interwoven, and the image of the murderous mother ran through them, binding them together with strands of exoticism, mystery, and horror. A review of these two debates, both together and apart, will allow a better understanding of Glikl’s preoccupation with the image of the infanticidal savage, and the ways in which this image corresponds with the major cultural trends of Glikl’s time.

THE EROTIC ENCOUNTER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COLONIAL LITERATURE

Glikl’s story corresponds with what was perhaps the most popular short story of eighteenth-century Europe. One of the earliest and certainly the most famous written versions of the story is Richard Steele’s “History of Inkle and Yarico,” which appeared in The Spectator in 1711. Steele tells of an English sailor by the name of Thomas Inkle who is stranded on a Caribbean island inhabited by savage cannibals. Inkle is saved by an “Indian maid” by the name of Yarico, and the two fall instantly in love. However, within time, Inkle tires of his exotic lover, and after being rescued by a European ship he decides to sell Yarico into slavery. In her desperation, Yarico calls to him and tells him that she is pregnant with his child, but he, in response, merely raises her price.²¹

Steele’s story was extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century, and it was adapted into ballads, children’s stories, songs, a few comedies, and a famous opera by George Colman. It was used in order to deliver various messages concerning such issues as slavery, colonialism, ethical trade, and women’s rights.²² But though they vary in detail, language, and genre, as well as in their meanings and motivations, almost all versions of the story share at least three components: (a) they are all love stories; (b) they all share a sense of sympathy toward the savage woman; and (c) they are all critical of the behavior of her European lover. Let us shortly review each of these components before returning to Glikl’s version of the tale.

Stories of the Inkle and Yarico trope are part of a longstanding 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 victim of the encounter between the European man and the savage woman is not the colonized woman but the man, who is raped by the lustful cannibalistic princess.³⁹ Correspondingly, Glikl’s sympathies lie not with the deserted woman, but rather with the pious Jew. This man, who leaves his child to die at the hands of a savage mother, without showing even a hint of sorrow or remorse, is the hero of Glikl’s tale.⁴⁰ In Glikl’s memoirs, then, the story is shorn of its humanistic and sentimentalist character and becomes a Eurocentric anecdote that draws a sharp distinction between the civilized European and the savage Other. But the question is—why? Why is the only version in which the author sympathizes not with the colonized woman but rather with the European man written by a Jewish woman? Does this difference stem from Glikl’s Jewish background? Does it reflect a uniquely Jewish understanding of the meanings of cross-cultural contact? Or does it perhaps reveal a specifically feminine or Jewishfeminine response to the tale? Put differently, if the mutual attraction between the European man and the native woman symbolizes the colonial fantasies of such Christian authors as Steele, Colman, or Gessner, which fantasies, or rather which anxieties, does the rape of the European man by the native woman in Glikl’s tale betray?

THE RAPE OF THE COLONIST

Stories of the rape or sexual assault of European men by native women are extremely rare in early modern travel literature.⁴¹ Even though European writers did tend to view native women as more lustful than both European women and native men, and the seduction scenes depicted in their travel narratives may often appear somewhat aggressive, still, the European man is most often portrayed as taking an amused delight in these blunt advances. Thus, for example, in John Thelwall’s comic retelling of Inkle and Yarico, the seduction of the European man is presented as an amusing reversal of traditional gender roles: “Aye, I sees how it is: it’s the custom here for the women to make love. Why then, of course the men must be coy. I supposes now she’ll think nothing of me if I’m won too easy; for I thinks they say we’re in the Auntoy’s Podes, and so every thing’s reversed here.”⁴²

Another comic description of the somewhat forward advances of native women appears in Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, in which a French chaplain is seduced by a Tahitian woman and spends the night with her while occasionally crying: “Mais ma religion! Mais mon état!” [But my religion! My vocation!].⁴³

A different description, somewhat closer to Glikl’s own, may be found in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Smollett tells of the Scottish traveler Lismahago, who is taken captive by a band of Miami Indians, along with his companion, Murphy. The Indians decide to feast on Murphy and adopt Lismahago instead of their deceased leader.⁴⁴ Lismahago has no choice but to join the tribe and marry the widow princess Squinkinacoosta, who is described in the following terms: “Lismahago’s bride, the squaw Squinkinacoosta, … shewed a great superiority of genius in the tortures which she contrived and executed with her own hands. She vied with the stoutest warrior in eating the flesh of the sacrifice [Murphy].”⁴⁵ Smollett’s portrayal of the Indian princess as a wild and voracious cannibal parodies the traditional distinction, made by such colonial love stories as “Inkle and Yarico,” between the savage princess and her cannibalistic tribesmen. Smollett makes it clear that the tribe’s princess is just as savage and cruel as her male counterparts, and that the European visitor has no choice but to marry her. In this sense, Smollett’s anecdote bears some resemblance to Glikl’s story. However, Smollett promptly departs from Glikl’s notion of coerced cross-cultural intimacy and clarifies (ironically, perhaps) that the marriage is anything but coerced and unhappy: “[Lismahago] had lived very happily with this accomplished squaw for two years, during which she bore him a son, who is now the representative of his mother’s tribe.”⁴⁶ Additionally, while Glikl describes the savage princess as being a hairy and physically disgusting beast of a woman, Smollett’s Squinkinacoosta is portrayed as beautiful and attractive.⁴⁷ Thus we find that even in this case of coerced marriage, the European man is not raped by the native woman, but rather enjoys the sexual contact between colonizer and colonized.

The closest descriptions I have found in a non-Jewish travel narrative to Glikl’s portrayal of the sexual victimization of a European traveler by a native woman appear in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In this account, Gulliver expresses his disgust at being used as a virtual sex toy by the giant women of Brobdingnag. His aversion to the women is explained by their size, which accentuates every defect in their bodies. Gulliver is once again the victim of sexual harassment during his stay in the land of the Houyhnhms, where he is sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo but is rescued by his protector, the sorrel nag. Here, too, the savage female is presented as not entirely unattractive, as Gulliver notes, contrary to what may be expected: “Her Countenance did not make an Appearance altogether so hideous.”⁴⁸

Though they differ vastly in context, purpose, and meaning, all these accounts of sexually aggressive women share a distinct comic aspect, which is also discernible in other tales of sexually aggressive women situated within Europe itself. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, for instance, poor Joseph is attacked by a whole host of lustful and downright sex-crazed women, resulting in several farcical states.⁴⁹ Similarly, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill describes the temptation (or rather, to our modern sensibilities, rape) of a mentally challenged young man by Fanny and a colleague, as a highly amusing episode: “Struck with the novelty of the scene, he did not know which way to look or move; but tame, passive, simpering, with his mouth half open, in stupid rapture, stood and tacitly suffered me to do what I pleased with him.”⁵⁰ The comic aspect of feminine sexual assault is also found in at least one eighteenth-century Jewish text. In the memoirs of Salomon Maimon, the author relates to his readers what he himself terms “a comical scene,” in which an educated widow attempted to seduce him, and at length grasped him by the hand, refusing to let go. “I began to laugh immoderately,” writes Maimon, “tore myself from her grasp, and rushed away.”⁵¹ Such comical treatment of the sexual assault of a man by a woman is characteristic of eighteenth-century (as well as contemporary) writing. Literary scholar Patricia Spacks explains that in such stories, the women’s “sexual aggression is a joke, specifically because it belongs to women, not imagined to present real threats to men.”⁵²

And yet, the comic dimension of feminine sexual aggression is entirely absent from Glikl’s story of the sexual assault of the pious Jew. The latter perceives the savage woman to be a real and concrete threat—not only of a sexual but also of a religious, and indeed mortal, nature.⁵³

SAVAGES AND SEIRIM

We find that Glikl’s portrayal of the European man as sexual victim is not characteristic of the colonial literature of her time. In her discussion of the memoirs, Davis suggests in passing that the story may have been inspired by the widespread folkloristic theme of a marriage between a Jewish man and a she-demon. The particular story Davis has in mind is the “Maaseh Yerushalmy,” a popular early modern tale in which a shipwrecked man is saved by a she-demon, to whom he is reluctantly wed. Eventually, the man begins enjoying his life with the she-demon, and the two have a child together. However, at length, he is overcome with longing for his human wife and sons, and escapes his demon-wife. In response, the demon wife sues her husband for divorce and, in some versions of the story, kills him.⁵⁴ There are, of course, many differences between this story and Glikl’s tale; most importantly, “Maaseh Yerushalmy” presents its Jewish hero in a highly unfavorable light. However, the similarities between the two narratives are also striking. Other demon wife tales also feature some of the prominent motifs of Glikl’s tale, such as travel to a faraway land, coerced bigamy, and, in at least two cases, the killing of a child by its (in this case, demon) mother.⁵⁵ Of particular interest is the Galician oikotype of the “Maaseh m’Worms,” of which, unfortunately, only a late nineteenth-century written version has survived. The tale features three of the most striking motifs of Glikl’s story: rape, infanticide, and the shredding to pieces of a child. It tells of a Jewish man who mistakenly marries a she-demon and is physically forced to consummate the marriage. Eventually, the man discovers a certain root to which his diabolical wife cannot be exposed, and he uses it to banish her. Frustrated at her husband’s betrayal, the demon woman kidnaps the children she has borne him, shreds them to pieces, and tosses their remains at his feat.⁵⁶ The relationship between the tale of the pious Jew and such folktales as “Maaseh m’Worms” or “Maaseh Yerushalmy” is undeniable. It is possible that the tale found in Glikl’s memoirs and in the Perlhefter’s Beer sheva was a kind of modern formulation of the mythical demon wife tale, in which the modern day colonial Other—the savage—took the place of the earlier diabolical Other—the demon wife. Indeed, it has long been recognized that in medieval and early modern European imagination, wild men and savages were closely linked to the world of demons.⁵⁷

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 of authority. Joseph’s great-grandmother Sarai also fell victim to the sexual aggression of her non-Jewish superiors, and was forced to become a concubine to the Egyptian Pharaoh and later to King Abimelech (she was also pursued by Og, King of Bashan); the Jewish Dinah was kidnapped and raped by a Canaanite prince; and another Jewish woman, Esther, had no choice but to marry the Persian king Ahasuerus.⁷⁰ The Talmud also features several stories of the attempted rape of a Jewish man by a non-Jewish woman. In one case, the man is saved from his female pursuer by running into a burning flame; another man jumps off a roof to escape his temptress.⁷¹ These stories of coveted Jews all share a fear of being coerced or tempted into marriage or concubinage with a non-Jew, an anxiety intensified by a biblical prohibition: “You must not intermarry with them, neither giving your daughters to their sons nor taking their daughters for your sons; if you do, they will draw your sons away from the Lord and make them worship other gods.”⁷² This biblical prohibition demonstrates the basic fear underlying these stories of coerced intimacy: the fear of assimilation through exogamy.

Figure 5. Hairy Eve (detail), from Pinchas Halberstadt, “Sefer evronot,” 1716. Reproduced by permission of the National Library Israel.

And indeed, it appears that the assimilation anxiety underlying the biblical stories of Joseph and Sarai is also prevalent in Glikl’s tale. In stark contrast to other “Inkle and Yarico” narratives, Glikl’s story of the savage princess and her Jewish lover does not express fantasies of a benevolent conquest of the “exotic Other,” but quite the contrary: it manifests a fear of being culturally and religiously conquered by the Other. This fear crystallizes in the rape of the pious Jew by the savage woman, but is also foreshadowed in the kidnapping of the pious Jew’s Jewish wife by a Christian sailor earlier in the story. As mentioned above, the Jewish woman is coveted by a Christian sea captain and is eventually kidnapped by him and forced into a state of pseudo-concubinage. Glikl, however, stresses that the captain’s desire is never realized. When asked by the pious Jew why he did not consummate his passion for the woman, the captain replies that she had threatened to commit suicide if forced to please him, since “it is not appropriate that a commoner should ride the king’s horse” (G. Tur., 96; G. Abr., 27). Moseley reads this difference between the two captivity narratives (the pious Jew’s captivity and his wife’s captivity) as a subversive element in the text, concluding: “The only leading character in this story whose behavior can really be said to be exemplary is the Talmid khokhem’s first wife, who is indeed Jewish, but more to the point, I think, a woman.”⁷³ That Glikl was in some way critical of the pious Jew’s behavior, however, appears unlikely. Though effeminate and unheroic to modern eyes, for Glikl, the pious Jew is a paradigm of sublime morality and proper conduct. He is a man who, much like the righteous Job, manages to uphold his Jewish faith even when faced with the most dire of circumstances.⁷⁴ Glikl’s approval of her protagonist’s conduct is evident throughout the entire story and manifests itself most clearly in its happy ending, in which the pious Jew retrieves his long-lost family, becomes king of his own colony, and converts the Christian sailors to Judaism. Moreover, in stark contrast to other versions, in which the European sailor’s abandonment of his savage wife and child inspires harsh criticism, in Glikl’s version the pious Jew’s story arouses nothing but admiration in its listeners, so much so that the Christian sailors are inspired to convert to Judaism upon hearing it. The sparing of the Jewish wife’s virtue in the story could be the outcome of various considerations, not least of which that chastity was an essential indicator of a woman’s (but not a man’s) moral worth. A virtuous woman was expected to maintain her chastity even under the most extreme circumstances (as exemplified by Richardson’s famous Pamela), and one who failed to do so could hardly be depicted as a model of pious morality.⁷⁵ We must also bear in mind the symbolic elements of the rape of the pious Jew by the savage woman; this form of rape not only emasculates the Jewish man, but also interrupts his Jewish lineage, as any child born out of this unholy union would be a non-Jew (in contrast to the potential outcome of the rape of a Jewish woman by a non-Jewish man). This last element may explain the pious Jew’s indifference toward his own son, which stands in stark contrast to his devotion to his Jewish children.⁷⁶

In fact, the female rape motif constitutes part of a recurring motif in the story of the threat of being devoured or consumed, which is a further articulation of Glikl’s aforementioned assimilation anxiety. Throughout the story, the pious Jew is delivered from various types of metaphoric or actual consumption. Thus, the story begins with his arrest and imprisonment, and continues with his wife being “swallowed” into the Christian captain’s boat and disappearing. Further uses of the motif abound throughout the tale: while in prison, the pious Jew dreams of being eaten alive by wild animals; after his release, his ship sinks and he and his children are in danger of being “devoured” by the sea; finally, during his years as a castaway, he is under constant threat of being literally devoured by his cannibal hosts. This fear of being eaten is accompanied by an even greater fear: that of not receiving a Jewish burial. The non-Jewish, cannibalistic burial signifies for Glikl the complete and eternal loss of Jewish identity through consumption/assimilation. For the pious Jew, who has lived so long among savage people, eating their foods, sleeping in their caves, that he has come to resemble them almost entirely, the final loss of Jewish identity is unbearable. The mere thought of not receiving a proper Jewish burial drives him to attempt suicide by drowning: “One day he stood on a small hill … not far from the sea, and reflected on all that had happened to him; the loss of his wise and pious wife and children and—heaviest of all—how he must now spend his years among uncivilized wild animals, who eventually, with time, when they have tired of him, will devour his flesh and crush his bones for marrow, and he will not be laid to rest among other good Jews as befitting a pious Jew. ‘Is it not better,’ [he mused] ‘that I should run from this hill and drown myself…?’” (G. Tur., 90; G. Abr., 25). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the pious Jew’s deliverance is achieved by the act of digging out a buried treasure, a counter-reaction to the constant threat of consumption, of being devoured. This act of digging out is the opening scene of the second part of the story, which is a reversed narrative of rediscovery and exposure, including the discovery of the European ship and of the pious Jew’s lost wife and sons. Throughout this latter part of the story, the assimilation anxiety is resolved through what Davis has appropriately termed a “fantasy of inversion,”⁷⁷ which culminates in the conversion of the Christian sailors to Judaism. In other words, in the second half of the tale, the pious Jew turns from devoured to devourer. But at the very beginning of this reversed narrative of exposure and discovery is one final act of devouring, the devouring of the hybrid child by its savage mother.

EARLY MODERN INFANTICIDE

The scene of infanticide is a troubling one, which rarely appears in contemporary modern culture. Even the most provocative and gruesome horror films will most often avoid this particular horrific motif. But infanticide wasn’t always such a taboo literary trope. In fact, the image of the murderous mother, who slays her own child in a horrific moment of vengeance or despair, or, conversely, out of considerations of mere comfort, troubled the minds of a great many thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, infanticide and paedophagia (the eating of children) were extremely popular tropes in pre-modern Western imagination. There are numerous examples, of course, dating back to Greek mythology, the Bible, and medieval works. Parents eating children is mentioned in Deuteronomy, Kings, Lamentations, Josephus, and Sefer Hasidim, to name just a few examples.⁷⁸ In some cases, they are permitted to do so by law. One thirteenth-century Spanish source suggests that paedophaogia was considered acceptable and, what is more, legal, during a siege.⁷⁹ Other sources reveal that the slaying or abandonment of a somehow disabled child was relatively tolerated by contemporaries.⁸⁰ Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, it was also believed that parents may resort to murdering their children as a means of punishment or in order to prevent them from converting to a different religion. In 1694 Prague, for instance, a Jewish man by the name of Laser Abeles was accused of having murdered his son, following the latter’s interest in converting to Christianity.⁸¹ Another seventeenth-century Jewish folktale told of a father who killed his daughter after discovering that she had engaged in sexually promiscuous behavior with a bandit.⁸² During the eighteenth century, murderous parents were often used for social criticism, for instance in Hogarth’s hugely famous “Gin Lane,” which shows a drunken mother throwing her son head-first down the stairs, while another gin-crazed mother forces the spirit down her infant’s throat (fig. 6). In Jonathan Swift’s timeless “A Modest Proposal,” it is ironically suggested that the starving Irish begin harvesting their own children for food.⁸³

There is an interesting assumption underlying many of these premodern depictions of the murderous parent, most often the mother, according to which in cases of severe stress, poverty, or despair a mother or parent may harm, abandon, kill, and at times even eat their own children. Single mothers were considered especially vulnerable to this particular risk, and they were often accused, and found guilty of, infanticide. Indeed, belief in the infanticidal potential of a woman was so pervasive that in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England, France, and German lands, an unwed woman’s concealment of her pregnancy was considered proof enough of infanticidal intentions.⁸⁴ In contemporaneous Ashkenazi thought, the notion that a widow may turn infanticidal appears to have been equally widespread, and nursing widows were forbidden to remarry for at least twenty-four months after giving birth, the underlying premise being that after her remarriage a mother might lose interest in her child and cease nursing it, thus leaving it to starve to death.⁸⁵

Figure 6. William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751. Courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

The twenty-four-month bar presupposes that a mother’s love for her children is, at least to some extent, a function of time. As explained by English satirist Bernard Mandeville in 1732: “Even when Children first are Born the Mother’s Love is but weak, and increases with the Sensibility of the Child, and grows up to a prodigious height, when by signs it begins to express his Sorrows and Joys.”⁸⁶ Glikl would probably have agreed, as attested to by her casual mention of the death of her two-week-old son.⁸⁷ But there were also those who doubted a remarried mother’s devotion toward her adult children. The Jewish moralist Ẓvi Hirsch Kaidanover complained in his hugely popular 1705 Kav ha-yoshar that remarried mothers tend to leave their sons “ragged and bare-footed. Devoid of their father’s wealth, they … sit between the oven and the stove, and watch their mother enjoy meat, wine and other delicacies.”⁸⁸

A sharp critic of maternal abandonment was the English novelist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe. In his 1722 Moll Flanders, Defoe had his heroine explain that abandonment of children is, in essence, “only a contrived method for murder; that is to say, a-killing [of] children with safety.”⁸⁹ Moll had a point; studies on the fate of children in eighteenth-century foundling homes show appallingly high mortality rates.⁹⁰ Of course, this did not prevent Moll herself from abandoning, after the death of her husband, two of her own children, who were, she explains, “taken happily off my Hands by my Husband’s Father and Mother, and that by the way was all they got by Mrs Betty.”⁹¹ Glikl would probably not have judged Moll’s behavior in this particular matter too harshly. In her memoirs, she discusses a granddaughter of hers, daughter of her deceased son Zanvil, who “should be about 13 years old and is apparently a very gifted person.” That Glikl does not know the exact age of the girl, and has to rely on second-hand reports of her talents, suggests that that she did not keep in touch with her. Glikl additionally relates that the girl’s mother remarried and left her in the custody of her maternal grandfather. Interestingly, Glikl’s reportage of her daughter-in-law’s behavior is uncritical, and in the very same paragraph in which she relates the situation of her granddaughter she refers to her mother as “this good young person” [דאש גוטי יונגי מענש] (G. Tur., 558–59), regardless of her having abandoned her daughter after remarriage.⁹²

This absence of critical undertones may be startling to the modern reader; however, stories of parents, most often mothers, who abandoned, sacrificed, or even murdered their children to better their own situation appeared relatively frequently throughout the eighteenth century, often without any discernible judgmental tone. The Jewish memoirist Dov of Bolichov told of a Mrs. Reisel who refused to pay ransom for her son and allowed him to be slain under her window, all the while screaming, “Mame, Mame, open up and give ransom for my soul!”⁹³ Salomon Maimon was abandoned by his family when they were pursued by Christian assailants, as was his father before him. Both were miraculously delivered.⁹⁴ Another story, this time by a Christian writer, told of a “Negro Woman” who smothered her infant to death during a raid so as not to be discovered. A second woman, a European by the name of Mrs. Clendenin, managed to escape the assailants but left her baby to be ruthlessly slain by them.⁹⁵ Interestingly, early versions of the story portrayed Mrs. Clendenin’s behavior as brave or heroic, but in a later version, which appeared in Samuel G. Drake’s 1839 anthology of captivity narratives, the following passage was inserted into the original text: “This ends the remarkable, though short captivity of a woman, more to be admired for her courage than some other qualities not less desirable in the female character [my emphasis].”⁹⁶

Drake’s telling addition marks a change in Western attitudes toward maternity, which has been eloquently characterized by Wahrman as “a distinctive shift … from maternity as a general ideal, broadly prescriptive but allowing for individual deviations, to maternity as inextricably intertwined with the essence of femininity for each and every woman.”⁹⁷ Indeed, whereas early reports could often feature praise or appreciation for the murdering or abandoning parent, for instance in the cases of Mrs. Clendenin, in a Yiddish song commending Laser Abeles for the murder of his son, or in the Yiddish folktale of the father who killed his promiscuous daughter, later depictions of infanticide tended to portray the murdering mother as either a pathological figure, a stepmother, or—in some cases—as wishing to protect her infant from a life of slavery or utter poverty.⁹⁸ The change in prevailing attitudes toward murdering mothers received expression in diverse realms of European culture, including literature, art, and law.⁹⁹ One telling expression of the change may be found in the field of children’s stories. Folklore research over the past three decades has shown how some of our favorite fairytales today, which feature vicious and often murderous stepmothers, such as “Snow White” or “Hansel and Gretel,” originally featured biological mothers who aim to murder their own children.¹⁰⁰

Similar changes in perceptions of maternity are found in early nineteenth-century Jewish literature, which features a wide range of loving and devoted mothers. Of particular interest are Baruch Shenfeld’s 1826 “Indian Songs,” in which a Native American mother is portrayed mourning her deceased son, and Joseph Perl’s moving depictions of the maternal devotion found in female birds. Of course, Shenfeld and Perl’s understanding of maternal devotion in “natural peoples” and animals stands in direct contrast to Glikl’s earlier stories of infanticidal birds and paedophagic East-Indians.¹⁰¹

The changing attitudes toward maternity in general and murdering mothers in particular were supported also by science. In the early nineteenth century, phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim made a startling discovery: they found a unique area in the female human skull which, they explained, was responsible for women’s natural devotion to their children. In writing about this “discovery” in 1815, Spurzheim explained: “It is objected that love of children is the result of moral sentiments, of self-love, or of the desire of suckling, and not of a peculiar propensity. These causes, so commonly admitted, cannot produce love of offspring; for in many animals which love their progeny, these causes do not exist. No animal, below man, has any idea of duty or religious sentiment; birds do not give suck, yet they love their young.… Moreover, in mothers there is no proportion between moral or religious sentiments, and philoprogenitiveness. Consequently, we must admit a particular organ for this propensity.” Spurzheim proceeded to explain that, based on the examination of the skulls of twenty-five murderous mothers, he had discovered that this organ is either exceedingly small or entirely missing in the skulls of infanticidal women.¹⁰² Thus, the murdering mother became a pathology, no longer a social, religious, 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 of Whiteness. This element of the story adds to our modern reader’s confusion, as it is unclear in what ways this fisherman, who according to our modern-day understanding of the term is quite clearly White, could ruin the element of surprise. There is something awfully strange going on here, for we cannot help sensing that the natives are not really seeing “something they never had seen,” as claimed by the narrator, since we are told that they have had many encounters with the English fisherman. However, it is clear that for Behn, this fisherman is no longer White at all. Indeed, for Behn, Whiteness is an extremely fluid designator not of race, but of culture, mode of living, degree of suntan, and, perhaps most importantly, choice of clothes. Skin color as Behn perceives it is not an ethnic characteristic at all, but rather a cultural one: being White merely amounts to being dressed as a European, whereas being non-White means being nude, or wearing non-European clothes. Thus, Whiteness emerges in Behn’s anecdote as an exceedingly fuzzy concept, a highly mutable designator of difference, which can be assumed or removed at will.

I will return to the importance of clothes in eighteenth-century anthropological discourse shortly; however, for the purpose of our present discussion it is important to note how mutable and unclear notions of Black and White were for early moderns.¹¹⁵ Clearly, such fuzzy concepts could hardly serve as prime markers of difference between men. And indeed, as scholars such as Roxann Wheeler and Dror Wahrman have shown, throughout the early modern period skin color played a much less substantial role in the characterization of non-European peoples than religion, customs, and climates.¹¹⁶ Moreover, complexion was most often viewed by early moderns as the mere outcome of these same customs and climates. Perhaps the most ardent and influential propagator of this view was Buffon, who attributed the great variety within the human species (“les variétés dans l’espèce humaine”) to the differences in climate, nutrition, and ways of life. Buffon went as far as to suggest that the removal of Africans from their native lands and their incorporation into Europe would result in the “whitening,” within ten to twelve generations, of the African skin. The exact number of generations required in order to “whiten” the Africans was a source of controversy during the eighteenth century, but a great many scientists agreed that it was a material possibility.¹¹⁷ As Behn’s anecdote suggests, it was also widely accepted that a European may turn Black after a time spent under a warmer climate, or after embracing some of the practices of non-European peoples.¹¹⁸ Some eighteenth-century writers viewed this possibility as a real hindrance to the colonial project. In 1745, for instance, the Dutch Jewish intellectual Isaac De Pinto, director of the Dutch East India Company, expressed his concerns that the Europeans in America were slowly growing to resemble the natives, and this, he prophetically added, may eventually result in a colonial revolution.¹¹⁹ The notion that humans and other animals change under different climates or upon being subjected to different customs or diets was reiterated by numerous authors throughout the eighteenth century. One persistent rumor, which appeared in a wide range of texts in English, French, German, and also Hebrew, was that dogs imported into America tended to lose the ability to bark.¹²⁰

But how did seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Jews think about physical difference? Did they too attribute the same mutability to physical traits as their non-Jewish contemporaries? In her study on images of Native Americans in sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century Jewish literature, historian Limor Mintz-Manor shows that most early Jewish writers on the Americas tended to associate physical appearance and cultural practices with the effects of climate.¹²¹ This association between climate and appearance continued in Jewish writing well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. Writing in 1794, the English maskil Elyakim ben Avraham (Hart) explained that natural organisms are highly influenced by climate, which leaves its mark on the nature of animals, countries, and plants.¹²² A fellow maskil, the German English Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, wrote in 1771 that those men and women who live under the equator “are black due to the intense heat, but are rational beings nonetheless.”¹²³ The notion that Europeans tend to darken outside of Europe was also shared by the maskilim. Thus, in an early nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish translation of Campe’s description of Willem Bontekoe’s voyage to the East Indies, often attributed to the Polish maskil Menachem Mendel Lefin, it is argued that during their journeys the Dutch travelers became “darker than black.”¹²⁴

Some Jewish apologists attempted to harness the climatic theory to the debates surrounding Jewish emancipation. Thus, in his 1789 Apologie des Juifs the Polish French thinker Zalkind Hourwitz explained that there is no physical difference between Christians and Jews, which may serve to justify the latter’s discrimination. “It is recognized by all physicians,” explained Hourwitz, “that the physical constitution of the Jews is absolutely identical to that of other peoples who inhabit the same climate.”¹²⁵ Indeed, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, climatic theory appears to have held particular sway amongst Jewish thinkers, and especially the maskilim, who continued to propagate the theory well after it was, to a large extent, discarded by their non-Jewish contemporaries. Thus, as late as 1828 we read in Shimshon Bloch’s Sheviley olam that European travelers to Africa “darken, their white skin turns black, and their beauty becomes ugliness.”¹²⁶

But for eighteenth-century thinkers, climate was not the sole factor determining the constitution of man. Faced with the reality of colonial expansion and slavery, which had resulted in the large presence of Europeans in the colonies and colonial subjects in Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish writers sought new ways to account for physical variety. A popular explanation focused on cultural practices. Already in 1707 the Jewish physician Tuviah Ha-cohen explained that a person’s physical constitution is modified not only by climate, but also by diet.¹²⁷ Later writers attempted to explain skin color by referring to tattoos, hygienic practices, or the application of various potions to the skin. Thus in a manuscript written by an obscure maskil named Shlomo Keysir, we read that “when (the Greenlanders) are born they have white skin like all other humans but because they never wash and their homes are full of smoke and they cover themselves in oil or fat, their skin tends to become green.”¹²⁸ Another interesting example may be found in a geography book published in 1801 by the rabbinical scholar Abraham ben Elijah of Vilna, son of the famed Vilna Gaon: “It is now time to explain the reason for the difference in appearances and sizes. God created man to live in the divine Garden of Eden, a place protected from heat and cold.… But when God dispersed men throughout the entire earth, and each chose his own climate and multiplied there, their sons varied in looks, sizes, and character according to their climates and choice of foods.”¹²⁹

The attribution of complexion to climate or culture emphasizes its marginality for these thinkers.

In other eighteenth-century texts, both Jewish and non-Jewish skin color and other “racial” characteristics are considered so marginal that they are simply omitted from the description altogether. Thus, in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville or in Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, no note is made of the physical appearance of the Peruvian and Tahitian protagonists, or of their European hosts and visitors.¹³⁰An interesting Hebrew example of the extreme marginality of physical appearance is found in the Lithuanian physician Yehudah Horowitz’s discussion of savages in his 1766 Amudey beyt Yehudah, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Like Glikl before him, Horowitz neglected to make any note whatsoever of skin color in his description of either the noble or the ignoble savages described in his book. Instead, he used the opposition between civilized monotheist and savage atheist to present a program for the unification of all civilized peoples, meaning Jews, Christians, and Muslims.¹³¹

It is unlikely, however, that Glikl would have approved of Horowitz’s somewhat radical program for monotheistic unification. In fact, reading through her story one can easily detect an ambivalent attitude toward Christians, which complicates her view of the varieties of man. Indeed, Glikl’s story does not offer a simple division of humankind into the two traditional groups of civilized/monotheistic and savage/heathen. Rather, it offers a much more nuanced view of identity and difference, which takes into account a multiplicity of axes of identity such as gender, religion, and manners or perhaps class. Indeed, even though Jews are depicted as somehow closer to Christians than they are to savages, their identification with Christians is far from complete. The two captivity stories presented in the tale—the pious Jew and his savage captor on the one hand, and the pious Jewess and her Christian captor on the other—draw an unavoidable analogy between savages and Christians. This analogy, followed by the conversion into Judaism of the Christian sailors and their acceptance of the pious Jew’s rule, all point toward Glikl’s ambivalent perception of Christians as being at once religiously inferior and politically superior to Jews. This hesitant haughtiness of Glikl’s is evident throughout the entire memoirs, in which Christians are often presented in inferior or derogatory roles such as bandits, murderers, or drunks.¹³² It would appear, then, that in the great chain of being drawn by Glikl, Christians are located between Jews and savages, and their conversion to Judaism is a prerequisite to their progress.

THE IMAGE OF THE IDEAL WOMAN

A fascinating glimpse into Glikl’s understanding of the difference between Jews and Christians—and, more specifically, between Jewish and Christian women—is afforded by the Christian captain’s description of his two wives: “The captain … said he had two wives—one at home with whom he had had three children. ‘Her I keep as a housewife. The other is very delicate and no good at housework, but she is very wise, and so I always take her with me to superintend the affairs of the ship. She collects the money from the passengers and enters it in a book, and manages all my affairs’” (G. Tur., 94; G. Abr., 27). This description warrants a close inspection. Three women appear in Glikl’s story, and all three share with her the characteristic of being single mothers. They are all women who have been abandoned by their husbands and left to fend for their children on their own. Their responses seem to signify the three forms of single motherhood as envisioned by Glikl. The most striking form of single motherhood is, of course, the savage woman’s, who copes with her abandonment by killing and devouring her child. In this manner, she vents her anger and frustration, while at the same time redeeming herself from the toils of single motherhood. As we have seen, in depicting the savage woman as infanticidal, Glikl shares with many of her contemporaries an intriguing understanding of maternity, not as a biological imperative of women but as an attribute of civilization. As mentioned above, eighteenth-century depictions of savage infanticide often served as a means to construct an opposing image of the civilized European woman as an emblem of domesticity. And indeed, in Glikl’s story the image of the Christian housewife stands in stark contrast to that of the monstrous savage mother. Left ashore by an adulterous husband, this woman offers a more civilized response to single motherhood by choosing the path of domesticity. This portrayal of the devoted Christian mother as the exact opposite of the savage murderous mother is consistent with many other contemporaneous treatments of maternity, in which, as Felicity Nussbaum explains, the “civilized notion of motherhood … is contrasted with a savage motherhood capable of infanticide and cannibalism yet at the same time described as ‘natural.’”¹³³ Interestingly, however, Glikl shows nothing but disdain for this domestic Christian woman. Both she and the savage wife are depicted as entirely dependent on their husbands, unable to care for their children or to support them financially on their own. The two women are thus contrasted with the pious Jew’s Jewish wife: an independent, wise, and resourceful woman, who supports her children financially after the incarceration of their father, and who, even after losing her husband and children, continues to find solace in business and financial success. Interestingly, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, which is characteristic of the entire story, the Jewish woman’s economic prowess is also contrasted with the pious Jew’s financial ineptness.¹³⁴

Significantly, this kind of resourceful widowhood was embraced by Glikl herself, who, in spite of losing her husband and three of her children, continued to run the family business on her own for many years. In fact, even though Glikl did eventually remarry, ten years after the death of her first husband, she was to view this decision as a woeful mistake. As she stresses in her memoirs, contrary to what could be expected, her dependence on a husband led not to financial relief but to ruin. Furthermore, after the death of her second husband, which left her with almost nothing of her former fortune, Glikl was forced to resort to a second kind of dependent widowhood, which she perceived as most deplorable—a widow in a multigenerational household, dependent on her children.¹³⁵ The travails brought about by her second marriage are portrayed by Glikl as a form of divine punishment inflicted on her for her decision to become financially dependent on a husband: “The blessed lord laughed at my thoughts and plans, and had already long decided on my doom to repay me for my sins in relying on people. For I should not have thought of marrying again” (G. Tur., 500; G. Abr., 151).

In her memoirs, then, Glikl constructs an image of the ideal woman, or widow, as one who manages to uphold a respectable household after her husband’s demise, without resorting to dependence on others, such as her children or a second husband. In this sense, she presents an understanding of feminine virtue quite different from the sorts of chaste, maternal, or domestic virtue commonly ascribed to women in eighteenth-century novels, conduct books, and other writings.¹³⁶ However, it appears that Glikl was not alone in pursuing this ideal. In fact, many of her contemporaries, both Jewish and Christian, appear to have shared this ideal of independence and made every effort “to be independent of material and financial intergender and/or intergenerational transfers.”¹³⁷ Thus, for instance, in her reading of Eliza Haywood’s 1724 The Rash Resolve, Toni Bowers demonstrates how the author constructed “a vision of powerful, enabling, and independent motherhood.”¹³⁸ Haywood confronts her readers with a single mother who succeeds in upholding a respectable household, notwithstanding the absence of her child’s father. When, however, toward the end of the tale, the absent father reappears, the heroine dies of shock and heartbreak. In both Haywood’s tale and Glikl’s memoirs, the appearance of a dominant male figure on the scene, in the form of an estranged father or a second husband, results in ruin.

Traces of early modern women’s ideal of independence are also found in other Jewish sources. Thus, for instance, an early seventeenth-century Jewish folktale tells of a Jewish woman who wished to remain single in order to continue her life as a businesswoman.¹³⁹ Other writers commended their mothers, grandmothers, or other family women for managing to uphold their own after the deaths of their husbands. The aforementioned Bohemian memoirist, for instance, speaks highly of his grandmother, who “remained a widow with three sons and two little daughters [but] was an eshet ḥayil [a woman of valour], energetic, and clever and supported her family comfortably.”¹⁴⁰

As Glikl’s memoirs demonstrate, the ideal of resourceful widowhood also required that widows remain independent of their children. And indeed, a second rare text by an early modern Ashkenazi woman bears further witness to parents’ reluctance to turn to the aid of their children. I am referring to the sixteenth-century women’s guidebook Meneket Rivkah, written by Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner. Tiktiner relates a story about an old widower of some means who decides to move into his son’s household. At first, the relationship between the man and his son and daughter-in-law is friendly, and yet the moment the old man bequeaths his wealth to his son, the young couple begins to abuse him, to the extent that he is resorted to sleeping naked under the stairwell and eating scraps off the kitchen table.¹⁴¹ The story is repeated in other sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sources, and is just one of a wide variety of stories which express the exceeding suspicion of parents toward the gratefulness and reliability of their children. Similar doubts are frequently voiced in Glikl’s memoirs, for instance in the story of the infanticidal bird, which ends with the following moral: “[We see] the difference: how parents toil for their children and with what great devotion they raise them, while they, if they had the trouble with their parents as their parents do with them, would soon tire” (G. Tur., 32; G. Abr. 9).¹⁴²

Glikl’s solution to the problem of the unreliability of children and spouses is to offer her readers an image of a woman who is independent and resourceful, and does not rely on the aid of others for her happiness or success. But Glikl does more than justify the authority and adequacy of the independent women/widow as head of the household. In presenting her ideal woman as “no good at housework,” and contrasting her sophistication with the image of the simple Christian housewife, Glikl demonstrates an intriguing disdain for domesticity, not only in widowhood but also in marriage. We find hints of this attitude, which values professional success over domestic bliss, throughout Glikl’s autobiographical text. As explained by Turniansky: “Though Glikl is constantly busy with pregnancies and labor [during the period described in the memoirs], these are not the only subject of her written memoirs, nor are they their central theme.”¹⁴³ In fact, the greater part of the memoirs deals with matters relating to Glikl’s professional life as a businesswoman: her financial success and the subsequent financial travails brought about by her second husband; her business partners and their deeds and misdeeds and other such matters. Throughout the memoirs, Glikl prides herself on her financial conduct, both during her first husband’s lifetime and even more so after his demise. Other women are also commended by Glikl, not only for their piety, modesty, or chastity, but also for their success as businesswomen. Thus, for example, one woman is presented as “a chaste and resourceful woman, very well versed in trade [who] practically kept her family afloat” (G. Tur., 62). Another woman is described as “unprecedented in her integrity and piety, and especially in her being an eshet ḥayil who managed her own trade and provided for her husband and children bountifully” (G. Tur., 312). For Glikl, then, a woman’s worth is a function of her resourcefulness, wit, and intelligence, and not, as may perhaps be expected, of her domestic virtues.

This understanding of woman as financial agent differs greatly from later representations of true womanhood as being achieved through maternity and domesticity, but it appears to have been shared, at least to some extent, by Glikl’s contemporaries. The anonymous Bohemian memoirist commends his mother who “showed her ability in supporting the family by her own efforts, and started to manufacture brandy out of oats.… This was hard labor, but she succeeded. In the meantime my father pursued his studies.”¹⁴⁴ One eighteenth-century responsum (a rabbinic reply to a question concerning Jewish law) by the great Jewish scholar Yeḥezkel Landau went as far as to accuse married women who refrained from work of being a cause of their husbands’ deaths. Landau explained: “A woman who is confined to her home, and is kept by her husband, her luck is such that she causes her husbands’ deaths, so that she may live in poverty. And this holds true for regular women. But in a women who is an eshet ḥayil we find that even after the deaths of her husbands she succeeds in commerce and manages to support herself adequately, and so it clear that her luck does not cause her poverty, and therefore her husbands’ deaths are not caused by her.”¹⁴⁵ Rabbi Jacob Emden, for his part, praised his first wife, who worked in loans, and berated his second wife, who, though a descendant of a family of merchants, was financially incompetent.¹⁴⁶ As befitting a rabbi of his stature, Emden’s primary concern was that the financial incompetence of his second wife would not allow him to leave matters of business to her and concentrate on his studies. Significantly, Emden’s view differs from Glikl’s in that, for him, a woman’s financial ability is to be commended only to the extent that it enables her husband to devote himself to his religious duties.¹⁴⁷ However, as shown by historian Moshe Rosman, who has studied the lives of early modern Jewish women in Poland and Lithuania, the majority of working women were not the sole breadwinners. Rather, like Glikl herself, they were either partners in their husbands’ businesses or working widows. Through an elaborate survey of the financial activities of Jewish women during this period, Rosman concludes that these women’s financial roles influenced their social status: “In contrast to the bourgeois ideal of a woman reaching fulfillment through cultivation of the home and family, which was prevalent during the nineteenth century, in the earlier period, women interweaved financial activity and gain into their everyday lives. The family was an economic unit, in which the husband was senior partner, but the woman was also a partner.”¹⁴⁸

ENCOUNTERS IN A THIRD SPACE

Glikl poses a fascinating problem for the historian of race in the long eighteenth century. On the one hand, her story cannot be read by means of a colonialist paradigm; on the other, it cannot be understood as a misogynistic display of male anxieties regarding women.¹⁴⁹ In my reading of the memoirs, I have attempted to show that Glikl’s lack of identification with the savage woman expresses a decidedly Jewish indifference toward the early modern project of cultural and political colonization. In contrast to the traditional image of the European male colonist, who becomes master of the New World through the seduction and romantic conquest of the native, the protagonist of Glikl’s story is a highly effeminate man who is raped by the native woman and saved by the more masculine European men. In this sense, Glikl’s story gives tantalizing expression to the reality of being Jewish in early modern Europe. Similarly to the androgynous hero of Glikl’s tale, so too the early modern European Jew was a hybrid being, simultaneously hegemonic and subaltern, same but different, part of the European “we” but not quite.

Glikl’s use of the literary tropes of savage infanticide and the colonial love story differs, then, from other, non-Jewish uses in that it conveys specific Jewish anxieties concerning assimilation and Jewish-Christian relations. In this sense, Glikl can be read as rejecting the dual possibilities of both external and internal colonization: of the acculturation of the non-European Other and of the assimilation of the intimate Other, the Jew.

However, as is most often the case with early modern Jews, Glikl’s thought cannot adequately be understood outside the context of the non-Jewish intellectual and cultural trends of its time. Indeed, in her choice of literary motifs, Glikl reflects more general concerns shared by her non-Jewish contemporaries regarding the meaning of civilization, the possibility of cross-cultural encounter, and the differences between men. Throughout the eighteenth century there occurred some radical transformations in the answers European writers provided to these questions. I turn now to review the ways in which these transformations affected Jewish discourse in the decades following Glikl’s memoirs.