Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein
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Tahitian woman and spends the night with her while occasionally crying: “Mais ma religion! Mais mon état!” [But my religion! My vocation!].43
A different description, somewhat closer to Glikl’s own, may be found in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Smollett tells of the Scottish traveler Lismahago, who is taken captive by a band of Miami Indians, along with his companion, Murphy. The Indians decide to feast on Murphy and adopt Lismahago instead of their deceased leader.44 Lismahago has no choice but to join the tribe and marry the widow princess Squinkinacoosta, who is described in the following terms: “Lismahago’s bride, the squaw Squinkinacoosta, … shewed a great superiority of genius in the tortures which she contrived and executed with her own hands. She vied with the stoutest warrior in eating the flesh of the sacrifice [Murphy].”45 Smollett’s portrayal of the Indian princess as a wild and voracious cannibal parodies the traditional distinction, made by such colonial love stories as “Inkle and Yarico,” between the savage princess and her cannibalistic tribesmen. Smollett makes it clear that the tribe’s princess is just as savage and cruel as her male counterparts, and that the European visitor has no choice but to marry her. In this sense, Smollett’s anecdote bears some resemblance to Glikl’s story. However, Smollett promptly departs from Glikl’s notion of coerced cross-cultural intimacy and clarifies (ironically, perhaps) that the marriage is anything but coerced and unhappy: “[Lismahago] had lived very happily with this accomplished squaw for two years, during which she bore him a son, who is now the representative of his mother’s tribe.”46 Additionally, while Glikl describes the savage princess as being a hairy and physically disgusting beast of a woman, Smollett’s Squinkinacoosta is portrayed as beautiful and attractive.47 Thus we find that even in this case of coerced marriage, the European man is not raped by the native woman, but rather enjoys the sexual contact between colonizer and colonized.
The closest descriptions I have found in a non-Jewish travel narrative to Glikl’s portrayal of the sexual victimization of a European traveler by a native woman appear in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In this account, Gulliver expresses his disgust at being used as a virtual sex toy by the giant women of Brobdingnag. His aversion to the women is explained by their size, which accentuates every defect in their bodies. Gulliver is once again the victim of sexual harassment during his stay in the land of the Houyhnhms, where he is sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo but is rescued by his protector, the sorrel nag. Here, too, the savage female is presented as not entirely unattractive, as Gulliver notes, contrary to what may be expected: “Her Countenance did not make an Appearance altogether so hideous.”48
Though they differ vastly in context, purpose, and meaning, all these accounts of sexually aggressive women share a distinct comic aspect, which is also discernible in other tales of sexually aggressive women situated within Europe itself. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, for instance, poor Joseph is attacked by a whole host of lustful and downright sex-crazed women, resulting in several farcical states.49 Similarly, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill describes the temptation (or rather, to our modern sensibilities, rape) of a mentally challenged young man by Fanny and a colleague, as a highly amusing episode: “Struck with the novelty of the scene, he did not know which way to look or move; but tame, passive, simpering, with his mouth half open, in stupid rapture, stood and tacitly suffered me to do what I pleased with him.”50 The comic aspect of feminine sexual assault is also found in at least one eighteenth-century Jewish text. In the memoirs of Salomon Maimon, the author relates to his readers what he himself terms “a comical scene,” in which an educated widow attempted to seduce him, and at length grasped him by the hand, refusing to let go. “I began to laugh immoderately,” writes Maimon, “tore myself from her grasp, and rushed away.”51 Such comical treatment of the sexual assault of a man by a woman is characteristic of eighteenth-century (as well as contemporary) writing. Literary scholar Patricia Spacks explains that in such stories, the women’s “sexual aggression is a joke, specifically because it belongs to women, not imagined to present real threats to men.”52
And yet, the comic dimension of feminine sexual aggression is entirely absent from Glikl’s story of the sexual assault of the pious Jew. The latter perceives the savage woman to be a real and concrete threat—not only of a sexual but also of a religious, and indeed mortal, nature.53
SAVAGES AND SEIRIM
We find that Glikl’s portrayal of the European man as sexual victim is not characteristic of the colonial literature of her time. In her discussion of the memoirs, Davis suggests in passing that the story may have been inspired by the widespread folkloristic theme of a marriage between a Jewish man and a she-demon. The particular story Davis has in mind is the “Maaseh Yerushalmy,” a popular early modern tale in which a shipwrecked man is saved by a she-demon, to whom he is reluctantly wed. Eventually, the man begins enjoying his life with the she-demon, and the two have a child together. However, at length, he is overcome with longing for his human wife and sons, and escapes his demon-wife. In response, the demon wife sues her husband for divorce and, in some versions of the story, kills him.54 There are, of course, many differences between this story and Glikl’s tale; most importantly, “Maaseh Yerushalmy” presents its Jewish hero in a highly unfavorable light. However, the similarities between the two narratives are also striking. Other demon wife tales also feature some of the prominent motifs of Glikl’s tale, such as travel to a faraway land, coerced bigamy, and, in at least two cases, the killing of a child by its (in this case, demon) mother.55 Of particular interest is the Galician oikotype of the “Maaseh m’Worms,” of which, unfortunately, only a late nineteenth-century written version has survived. The tale features three of the most striking motifs of Glikl’s story: rape, infanticide, and the shredding to pieces of a child. It tells of a Jewish man who mistakenly marries a she-demon and is physically forced to consummate the marriage. Eventually, the man discovers a certain root to which his diabolical wife cannot be exposed, and he uses it to banish her. Frustrated at her husband’s betrayal, the demon woman kidnaps the children she has borne him, shreds them to pieces, and tosses their remains at his feat.56 The relationship between the tale of the pious Jew and such folktales as “Maaseh m’Worms” or “Maaseh Yerushalmy” is undeniable. It is possible that the tale found in Glikl’s memoirs and in the Perlhefter’s Beer sheva was a kind of modern formulation of the mythical demon wife tale, in which the modern day colonial Other—the savage—took the place of the earlier diabolical Other—the demon wife. Indeed, it has long been recognized that in medieval and early modern European imagination, wild men and savages were closely linked to the world of demons.57
The close connection between Glikl’s story and the story of the demon wife is also attested to by Glikl’s physical description of the savage woman as hairy. The motif of excessive hairiness as a symbol of the demonic is widespread in European literature, both Jewish and Christian. Use of this motif goes all the way back to the Bible, in which the term seirim (hairy) is used to denote a type of demons. Use of the term, and with it the association of body hair with the demonic, continued in the medieval and early modern periods.58 Thus, for instance, in an anti-Sabbatian pamphlet published in 1758, R’ Jacob Emden depicts the Sabbatian movement as a hairy demon, bearing three faces (one for each of monotheistic religion), hoofs, a tail, and wings of fire (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Sabbatian demon, from Jacob Emden, Sefer shimush, 1758. Reproduced by permission of the National Library Israel.
It is important to note, however, that the close connection between Glikl’s savage woman and the image of the coercive demon-wife notwithstanding, Glikl leaves no room for doubt as to the humanity of her savage heroine. Indeed, even though she refers to the woman as “woman” [ווייב, G. Tur., 90, 92] and “animal” [טיר, G. Tur., 90, 92] interchangeably, she makes a point of mentioning that the woman wore a large fig leaf to cover her shame. The motif of the fig leaf is of course an allusion to the biblical story of the expulsion from Eden, and is ripe with symbolism of primordial sinfulness. Similar images of hirsute women wearing