Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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