Difference of a Different Kind - Iris Idelson-Shein Jewish Culture and Contexts

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and natural geography books (figs. 2, 3). The presence of the leaf must also be understood, however, as an indication of the woman’s humanity. After all, only humans, who have tasted from the tree of knowledge, experience the sensation of shame.59

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      The image of the hairy wild man also has its roots in antiquity, and appears as early as the epic of Gilgamesh.60 Admittedly, the association of savages or wild men with excessive body hair was called into question by early modern “professional ethnographers,” but it continued to dominate popular notions of savagery throughout the eighteenth century, and even later.61 In Carl Linnaeus’s acclaimed Systema Naturae, for instance, feral children, who had grown up outside of civilization, were characterized as hairy and mute. This kind of characterization was ubiquitous during the eighteenth century and was repeated by later writers as well.62 In fact, hairy children continued to exist in European imagination well into the twentieth century, as attested by a 1937 newspaper report from Palestine that relates the capture of a “four footed wild-man, in the form of a girl.” The image of the child, who is said to have subsided on frogs, snakes, and grass, was probably inspired by the famous case of Marie Angelique Leblanc, who was captured in Songi in 1731 and has since captured the imagination of countless Europeans.63 The girl was described as “long-haired and long-nailed, her body covered in hair too.”64

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      But to return to the early modern period, an interesting feature of the feral children stories is the extreme fluidity that the writers seem to attribute to the characteristic of body hair. In contrast to their demonic corollaries, feral children are imagined to have been born as hairless as any other European. It is their detachment from society, and secluded lives “in nature,” which have deemed them hairy. This radical fluidity of the characteristic of hairiness receives startling expression in Glikl’s tale, where it is noted in passing that after having spent three years with the savages, the pious Jew came to resemble them in every way, hairiness included. The notion that time spent “in nature” would result in excessive body hair appears to have been widespread in early modern Europe, and it resulted in a host of bizarre hairy beings that inhabited European imagination. Indeed, in the woods of early modern Europe, one could expect to encounter not only hairy demons and wild men, but also hirsute saints, who, due to their reclusive lifestyle, had become almost indistinguishable from beasts.65 Europeans also turned hairy in the colonies, as may be gleaned from a 1770 illustration depicting the colonial American woman Mary Rowlandson, who had been held captive by Native Americans for three months during the year 1676, as an exceedingly hairy woman.66 In the mind of the unnamed illustrator, even a three-month “excursion into nature” would suffice to render a smooth European hairy. But perhaps the most striking use of the hairy woman motif in early modern Europe may be found in two Jewish illustrations, which appeared in two separate calendars dating from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (figs. 4, 5). The illustrations portray as hairy no less than the mother of all women everywhere—the biblical Eve.67

      The use of body hair to signify demons, savages, and “natural people” may have something to do with the unique nature of hair, which, as art historian Angela Rosenthal explains, is a signifier of borders. According to Rosenthal: “Emerging from the flesh and thus both of, and without the body—at once corporeal and a mere lifeless extension—hair occupies an extraordinary position, mediating between the natural and the cultural. It prompts one to scrutinize and question those boundaries defining self and other, subject and object, life and death.”68And indeed, the body hair of Glikl’s savage woman positions her in a liminal space, between human and beast, exotic and demonic, life and death. Her hair entangles folktales and medical discourse, travel narratives and mythology, colonial discourse and demonology, images of nature and biblical allusions. It is this final, biblical, element to which we now turn.

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      RAPE AND EXOGAMY

      In her pioneering study on rape imagery in medieval and early modern Europe, art historian Diane Wolfthal explains that even though the vast majority of early modern rapists were male, there was at least one dominant image of a female rapist in European imagination of the time: the biblical image of Potiphar’s wife. For early moderns, explains Wolfthal, Potiphar’s wife was the female rapist par excellence: “Depictions of Potiphar’s wife as a sexual aggressor are quite numerous and appeared over a large span of time throughout the medieval and early modern era. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic images … attest to the immense popularity of the theme.”69 Significantly, the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is just one, albeit the most famous, of a variety of biblical tales that feature Jewish heroes or heroines who are harassed by non-Jews, and especially by non-Jewish kings or persons of authority. Joseph’s great-grandmother Sarai also fell victim to the sexual aggression of her non-Jewish superiors, and was forced to become a concubine to the Egyptian Pharaoh and later to King Abimelech (she was also pursued by Og, King of Bashan); the Jewish Dinah was kidnapped and raped by a Canaanite prince; and another Jewish woman, Esther, had no choice but to marry the Persian king Ahasuerus.70 The Talmud also features several stories of the attempted rape of a Jewish man by a non-Jewish woman. In one case, the man is saved from his female pursuer by running into a burning flame; another man jumps off a roof to escape his temptress.71 These stories of coveted Jews all share a fear of being coerced or tempted into marriage or concubinage with a non-Jew, an anxiety intensified by a biblical prohibition: “You must not intermarry with them, neither giving your daughters to their sons nor taking their daughters for your sons; if you do, they will draw your sons away from the Lord and make them worship other gods.”72 This biblical prohibition demonstrates the basic fear underlying these stories of coerced intimacy: the fear of assimilation through exogamy.

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      And indeed, it appears that the assimilation anxiety underlying the biblical stories of Joseph and Sarai is also prevalent in Glikl’s tale. In stark contrast to other “Inkle and Yarico” narratives, Glikl’s story of the savage princess and her Jewish lover does not express fantasies of a benevolent conquest of the “exotic Other,” but quite the contrary: it manifests a fear of being culturally and religiously conquered by the Other. This fear crystallizes in the rape of the pious Jew by the savage woman, but is also foreshadowed in the kidnapping of the pious Jew’s Jewish wife by a Christian sailor earlier in the story. As mentioned above, the Jewish woman is coveted by a Christian sea captain and is eventually kidnapped by him and forced into a state of pseudo-concubinage. Glikl, however, stresses that the captain’s desire is never realized. When asked by the pious Jew why he did not consummate his passion for the woman, the captain replies that she had threatened to commit suicide if forced to please him, since “it is not appropriate that a commoner should ride the king’s horse” (G. Tur., 96; G. Abr., 27). Moseley reads this difference between the two captivity narratives (the pious Jew’s captivity and his wife’s captivity)

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