A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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Here, knowledge of the imperviousness of salamanders to fire becomes a weapon in the Jews’ polemical arsenal, as it allows them to combat an otherwise miraculous proof of the sanctity of a Christian relic. Two implications of this passage are worth emphasizing. First, it suggests that animals and their properties could be discussed in the course of actual encounters between Jews and Christians.224 Second, it reinforces the fact that “wondrous” animal properties were understood to be part and parcel of the natural order. Far from being an inexplicable, supernatural phenomenon, the imperviousness of the salamander to fire is here invoked precisely as a naturalistic explanation for what would otherwise be considered a miraculous occurrence. Other contemporaneous Ashkenazic texts similarly marshal “facts” about wondrous animals for avowedly “scientific” ends.225
The Pietists’ exposure to contemporary, polemically wielded bestiary lore can be confirmed by noting their adaptation of one final anti-Jewish motif. A number of bestiaries linked the “duplicitous” Jews to animals whose sexuality was ambiguous or threatening. Thus the hyena, mentioned above, was not only a corpse eater, but also a hermaphrodite; Jews were also linked to rabbits, whose gender supposedly alternated on a monthly basis, and to weasels, who were thought to copulate orally.226 This linkage between Jews and hermaphrodites—itself linked ideationally to the popular belief that Jewish men menstruated227—further served to equate Jews with “sodomites” in the minds of some Christian authors.228 It is quite possible that the Pietists’ knowledge of weasels and their powers of resurrection, discussed above, may have derived precisely from their exposure to such anti-Jewish barbs. In any case, the Pietists certainly did adopt, and invert, the bestiary’s position on dual-gendered rabbits. In a thirteenth-century exegetical text called Sefer Gematriyot, Judah betrays his knowledge of this motif and utilizes the supposedly dual-gendered nature of the rabbit to clear up a grammatical inconsistency in the Bible’s description of the arnevet (rabbit). According to Leviticus 11:6, because the rabbit “chews its cud, but its hooves are not split, it is impure”—not kosher. As Judah points out, “This [verse] is written both male and female”—that is to say, the verse in Leviticus refers to the rabbit using the female gender (ma’alat gerah hi … teme’ah hi lakhem), but the parallel verse in Deuteronomy 14:7 switches to the masculine in its description of the rabbit and hare (ma’aleh gerah hemah … teme’im hem lakhem). The conclusion Judah draws is that “one month [the rabbit] is male, and the next month it is female, and it menstruates like a woman.”229 This resolution of the textual difficulty clearly draws on the supposed physiology of rabbits, and reflects Jewish awareness, if not internalization, of this widespread Christian belief. Indeed, elsewhere in the Pietistic corpus, Christian priests are explicitly accused of habitually engaging in homosexual behaviour—suggesting that the same charges aimed at the Jews could be just as easily redirected.230 It is particularly noteworthy, too, that the animals whose theological and exegetical significance the Pietists chose to highlight here are precisely the same ones that were used against them as Christian polemical ammunition—and that, at least in the case of the rabbit, the Pietists level precisely the same charge against their Christian contemporaries, based on the same naturalistic argumentation, that they had themselves been faced with.231
THE WANDERINGS OF A WONDERING JEW
In addition to lapidaries, grimoires, bestiaries, and “books of secrets,” the Pietists consumed and produced an additional genre that anchors them firmly within contemporary debates over the relationship between natural order and occult mirabilia: travel narratives, which reported on, and sought to make sense of, the wonders to be found in far-off lands. As we have seen, Christian interest in natural wonder was nourished by, and nourished in turn, an efflorescence of travel narratives describing the “wonders of the east,” especially the ubiquitous Alexander Romance, which, in its varying recensions, described the monsters and wondrous natural phenomena thought to exist at the far reaches of the known world. In the case of the Pietists, too, an interest in wondrous phenomena within the natural world left its mark on the Hebrew travel narratives that circulated among the Jews of Ashkenaz. One such narrative, Sivuv R. Petahiyah mi-Ratisbon (“The Circuit of R. Petahiyah of Regensburg”), was produced within Kalonymide circles and manifests the interplay between real life observation and literary reworking that impacted Jewish ideas about nature just as it did Christian ones.
Very little is known about Petahiyah: he was apparently the brother of the prominent Tosafist R. Isaac ha-Lavan of Prague, and he set out in the late twelfth century on a tour of the Crimea, Babylonia, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere—perhaps on pilgrimage, perhaps in search of economic opportunities,232 perhaps in search of eschatologically meaningful portents.233 The Sivuv describes Petahiyah’s travels, records his observations regarding the Jews and non-Jews he encounters along the way, and is especially concerned with listing and describing the pilgrimage sites that Petahiyah visited during the course of his journey. But it also describes in detail the wondrous animals, objects, and social mores Petahiyah encountered during his travels—Petahiyah describes with manifest amazement his observation of elephants, mandrakes, and hybrid birds; the political power of the Exilarchate; Babylonian women who are learned in written and oral Torah; and so on. Moreover, the shrines and holy sites he tours are depicted as sites of magical activity so manifest that they are revered by Jews, Muslims, and other religious groups alike.
Though a critical edition of the Sivuv was published over a century ago,234 the existing scholarship on Petahiyah and his travelogue is relatively minimal—scholars have tended to dismiss the Sivuv as a useful historical source, given its fantastic and unverifiable contents, and have generally compared it unfavorably with the contemporaneous, more straightforward travelogue of the Spaniard Benjamin of Tudela.235 But more recent scholarship on medieval chronicle and travel writing should make us skeptical about dismissing a source merely on account of its fantastic or impossible contents. By focusing attention on the “social logic of the text” rather than on the discreet “facts” it purports to compile, scholars have demonstrated that a range of medieval Ashkenazic texts that “look like history” might be best approached from a literary or anthropological perspective rather than a positivistic one.236 Martin Jacobs’s recent work has applied these critical tools to medieval Jewish travel narratives to illuminating effect.237
Indeed, in the case of Petahiyah’s Sivuv, the specific circumstances of the text’s composition strongly suggest that it should be read as a literary artifact rather than as a collection of accurate and objective observations. First of all, Petahiyah did not himself compose the surviving accounts of his travels—rather, the Sivuv, which is extant in two main recensions, was compiled and composed by none other than Judah he-Hasid during the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, by which point he was already living in Regensburg. Now, Judah did not merely transcribe the account of Petahiyah’s travels—he edited it, at times with a heavy hand.238 As such, the surviving accounts of Petahiyah’s travels must not be seen as merely one man’s idiosyncratic recollections; rather, it is worth considering whether the Sivuv can be situated within the Pietists’ broader approach toward the investigation of nature, its workings, and its theological meaning. And indeed, the account contains no shortage of observations of natural phenomena, which Petahiyah (as channeled by Judah) recounts breathlessly. Thus in Baghdad, Petahiyah benefits from the healing properties of the waters of the Tigris River,239 observes an elephant for the first time,240 rides a “flying camel” that traverses a mile in just moments,241 and spies mandrakes growing in a local garden,242 all of which lead him to declare the region “strange and glorious” (meshuneh u-mefu’ar).243 Elsewhere, he observes new species of birds,244 snakes that behave in a marvelous manner,245 and weather conditions so unlike those of Europe that he declares, “Babylonia is truly a different world!”246 The observance of novel natural phenomena is a staple of travel accounts, and the notion that Petahiyah himself set out on his journey solely for the purpose of seeking out such natural wonders seems to me overstated.247 But Judah’s authorship of this description of Petahiyah’s travels may well have been motivated by such concerns—the Sivuv