Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives

2. Doubly Exiled in Germany: Abandoned Wives in Glikl Hamel’s Memoirs and Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography

10 chapter 2 Doubly Exiled in Germany Abandoned Wives in Glikl Hamel’s Memoirs and Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography Within the century spanning the final years of the seventeenth century and those of the eighteenth, two autobiographical works written by Jews living in Germany contained significant accounts of women whose husbands had deserted them or otherwise disappeared. Under traditional Jewish law, these agunes were unable to obtain a divorce and, therefore, to marry again. Although these particular incidents involving agunes comprise only a small part of the texts in which they appear, they nevertheless proffer important insights into the complex discourse of gender relations among Jews and into the interactions between German Jews and German Christians in a world in which the social, political , and cultural sands were beginning to shift toward modernity. The earlier of these texts, written intermittently between 1690 and 1719 in Judeo-German by Glikl Hamel,1 a relatively well-to-do Jew from Hamburg, came to be known as her memoirs.2 In 1792–93 Solomon Maimon, a brilliant former Talmudist and rabbi originally from Poland, published an autobiography (Lebensgeschichte) in German. Each of these works is in part concerned with separate yet interactive contexts of Jewish community and tradition, on the one hand, and the dominant German society and culture, on the other. The texts and what they communicate are also markedly distinct from one another, partly because of differences in genre and style and in the gender, status, and interests of the writers. But these texts were also affected by the enormous political and economic upheavals resulting from the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged the European continent during Glikl’s lifetime and, DOUBLY EXILED IN GERMANY 11 later, by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which generated significant cultural and ideological developments in eighteenthcentury Europe during Maimon’s lifetime. Glikl—a widowed mother of twelve living children and an able businesswoman—wrote the “seven small books” of her Zikhroynes (Memoirs) between 1690 and 1719. It was a project that she hoped would not only dissipate the melancholia she suffered following her husband’s untimely death but also inform her children of their family history and the moral behavior she regarded as necessary for an ethical Jewish life. Glikl wrote in Yiddish, her native tongue and the language common to the Jews of Germany at the time, and intended to have her writings circulate only within her own large family. In his midtwenties, Maimon—a product of an Orthodox Jewish Eastern European environment and a devotee of Moses Maimonides, in whose honor he adopted the name “Maimon”—moved to Germany, where he was an ardent supporter of the European Enlightenment; his ideas were highly regarded by contemporary philosophers such as Kant and Fichte. Although his native language was Yiddish and he was fluent in Hebrew, he wrote his major philosophical treatises and autobiography in German and, of course, intended to publish them. Prominent among the differences in the autobiographical writings of Glikl and Maimon is their treatment of the tragic situation of the deserted agune, a marginalized woman in a family-oriented and male-dominated society. By moving the agune’s desperate predicament into the foreground of one of her narratives, Glikl transmutes, without undermining its historicity, the factual record of an infamous event of 1687 about two murdered Jews into an account of a traditional Jewish housewife’s extraordinary prowess in search of justice. In Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Von ihm selbst geschrieben (Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography, Written by Himself), on the other hand, the deserted wife—left behind in Poland when her husband makes the great “leap into the alien history” (dieser Sprung in fremde Geschichte) of eighteenth-century enlightened Germany3 —disappears from its pages when he leaves for Germany. She does, however, reappear at the end of the Autobiography, when she confronts him on German soil. But even in the textual recognition of her presence, the narrator’s suppressions, evasions, and satirical antics obscure both the agune’s plight and his own complicity in it from German readers who were, in large part, uninformed about Jewish law and religious practices. Indeed, Maimon’s silence about the predicament of the wife and family he abandoned, as well as critics’ inattention to the significance of 12 DOUBLY EXILED IN GERMANY the agunes in both his and Glikl’s writings, make undoing this erasure all the more necessary, if only in critical recognition...