Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein
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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