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.
CHAPTER 2
“And Let Him Speak”
Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz’s Amudey beyt Yehudah
It is best to walk the course of nature, and to stray neither left nor right, for its paths are those of pleasantness, and all its lanes are those of peace.
—SHIMON BAR-ZEKHARYAH, 1788
And Hushai turned to Ittai his master and cried in anguish: have you not heard, oh master, how this man of the woods has arisen to devour my soul with his questions?
—YEHUDAH HOROWITZ, 1766
In the popular imagination of medieval Europe, Africans, Americans and other “exotic peoples” were perceived as savage and voracious beings, creatures that had been cursed by God. Hairy, four-footed, and mute, they occupied a mysterious limbo between the bestial, the demonic, and the human. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was some attempt by more “professional” ethnographers to change this imagery and promote a less mythological view of the non-European world. However, the image of the hairy wild man endured; wild men and women appeared in folktales such as Glikl’s story of the pious Jew and his savage wife, or the myth of the hairy anchorite, and were observed by such sixteenth-and seventeenth-century explorers as Antonio Pigafetta or Henry Schooten. Other writers confronted their readers with ominous beasts, bearing the body of a man and the head of a dog, or Haitian Satanists, whose skulls could endure the sharpest blade.1 Clearly, these were not beings with which one could engage in rational dialogue. Such dialogue was reserved to the monotheistic and “civilized” nations—Christians, Muslims, Jews, at times also Asian peoples—whose cultural and religious proximity crystallized against the context of these ruthless savages.
But this was to change during the eighteenth century. Slowly but surely, non-European peoples were relocated from the realm of folklore and demonology and introduced into the European elite of philosophers and men of science. Already in 1711, an observant Lord Shaftesbury pointed to this burgeoning intellectual trend by complaining that a “Moorish fancy, in its plain and literal sense, prevails strongly at this present time. Monsters and monster lands were never more in request, and we may often see a philosopher or a wit run a tale-gathering in those ‘idle deserts’ as familiarly as the silliest woman or merest boy.”2 Shaftesbury’s complaint notwithstanding, throughout the eighteenth century, non-Europeans began to assume a kind of philosophical prestige, and these formerly mute atheists with whom dialogue was once an impossibility began to open their mouths—and speak. The present chapter is a look at some of their conversations.
AN ENCOUNTER IN THE WOODS
In 1766, a Lithuanian physician by the name of Yehudah ben Mordecai Ha-levi Horowitz published in Amsterdam a book titled Amudey beyt Yehudah. The book tells of a society in crisis, split into two rival and equally corrupt camps. The first, the heretical camp, uses Jewish lore and mainly the Kabbalah as a form of magic and entertainment. The second camp, comprising materialists and libertines, uses rational philosophy to undermine religion, morality, and society. Faced with this deepening moral and religious crisis, two Jewish sages, Ittai the Gittite and Hushai the Archite, flee society and find refuge in the woods. The names of the two protagonists are derived from the biblical story of King David and his rebellious son Absalom (2 Samuel 15:19, 15:32). Ittai and Hushai were two advisors who remained loyal to the king during the rebellion. In choosing these names Horowitz refers, of course, to the characters’ loyalty to Judaism in a time of moral crisis. The sages’ time in the woods is spent in complete solitude, studying the sacred texts of Judaism and reading philosophy, until one day they encounter a savage “unabashed and nude, and collecting wet herbs for his food” (AMBY, 3a).3 The man’s first instinct is to flee back into the woods; eventually, however, he is tempted to taste a loaf of bread offered to him by Ittai, and from that moment on “the savage man followed them as a calf follows a cow” (AMBY, 3a). This encounter marks the savage’s entry into society. Initially, Hushai suggests that the man be enslaved; however, Ittai firmly objects and vows not only to acculturate the savage, but also to introduce him into society as a living moral exemplar, which will arouse the remorse and repentance of immoral men. Thus, the savage’s domestication begins. He is given the name Ira the Yaarite (“Ira of the Woods,” also from the story of David and Absalom), and promptly acquires the Hebrew language, scientific knowledge, morals, religious commandments, and proper laws.4 Three years go by, until one day a messenger arrives in the woods and announces that the conditions are ripe for the sages’ return into society. The men head back to the city, accompanied by their now acculturated savage, and upon their arrival begin a dialogue concerning religion, society, and philosophy. The dialogue, which dominates the greater part of the text, serves Horowitz as a platform from which to rationally justify Jewish faith and traditions and to demonstrate their compliance with the dictates of reason. In so doing, Horowitz wished to deliver a crucial blow to what he viewed as the most dire threats to contemporaneous Jewish tradition: kabbalistic mysticism, Sabbatianism, and Frankism (two influential messianic movements) on the one hand, and radicalism, skepticism, and libertinism on the other.5 These two forms of heresy are symbolized in the book by the two opposing camps from which the Jewish sages Ittai and Hushai flee to the woods. The sages, in turn, personify the solution to the crisis of eighteenth-century European Ashkenazi Jewry as it is perceived by Horowitz, a careful combination of tradition and reason, religious and secular studies.
YEHUDAH HOROWITZ