Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century

1. An East Indian Encounter: Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib

13 c h a p t e r 1 an east indian encounter Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib Maternal love! thy watchful glances roll From zone to zone, from pole to distant pole; Cheer the long patience of the brooding hen, soothe the she-fox that trembles in her den, Mid Greenland ice-caves warm the female bear, and rouse the tigress from her sultry lair. —lucy aikin, 1816 and thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee. —deuteronomy 28:53 the past few decades have seen a growing scholarly awareness to the fact that notions of gender and race are closely intertwined in early modern discussions of difference. scholars such as susanne Zantop, Margarita Zamora, and louis Montrose have called our attention to the ways in which early modern colonial discourse often employed eroticism and gender talk in order to narrate, justify, and at times criticize the conquest, colonization, and subjection of colonial peoples and lands.1 But women were not merely a useful colonial analogy. rather, for the vast majority of early modern europeans, they were much more concrete, immediate, and tangible objects than those wild savages, who inhabited faraway lands. indeed, in recent years, more and more scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which colonial discourse interacted with gender talk and served to construct and deliver notions of femininity, as well as to discuss other nonhegemonic groups within europe.2 in many cases, the relationship chapter 1 14 between race and gender as discursive tools is merely suggestive, but every once in a while there appears a text that is located right at the heart of this complex discursive web. the memoirs of the German Jewish merchant woman Glikl bas leib constitute one such text. in her memoirs, Glikl relates a folktale that is an early variant of the ubiquitous european tale depicting an encounter between a european sailor and an indian maid. Glikl’s idiosyncratic version of the tale affords an invaluable opportunity to investigate the ways in early modern notions of racial difference were informed and complicated by notions of femininity, maternity, and childhood. her understanding of cross-cultural contact is especially intriguing in light of her personal background as a woman, a mother, and a Jew. at the very center of the tale is another woman—a savage woman—who butchers and devours her own son. thus, Glikl’s story offers a turbulent encounter between notions of savagery and civilization, maternity and femininity , nature and family, Judaism and Christianity. such encounters would continue to appear in Jewish writings on non-european peoples throughout the long eighteenth century, and would serve Jewish authors as a means to adapt, revise, and deconstruct notions of identity and difference. as in many other Jewish discussions of savages, Glikl’s story reveals Jewish-specific fantasies and anxieties, as well as a unique Jewish feminine perspective. however, the story also reflects more general concerns, found also amongst Glikl’s non-Jewish contemporaries . as such, it offers an excellent starting point for our present discussion. 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 an east indian encounter 15 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...