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