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