Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Steele’s “Inkle and Yarico,” and argue that the two conflicting images of the savage reflect the Janus-faced character of a strand of religious and conservative Enlightenment, which pursued modernization on the one hand, while rejecting radicalism on the other. In addition, throughout the second chapter, I explore the ways in which the maskilim’s notions of nature and savagery correspond with their attitudes toward slavery and colonialism, and attempt to tackle some of the questions surrounding the relationship between colonialism, political hegemony, and race. Did Jews, as a persecuted minority within Europe, identify with other subaltern groups? Did they use the image of the colonial Other as a means to deliver a subversive message regarding European hegemony and Christian intolerance? Or did they, on the contrary, utilize the non-European Other as a means to demonstrate a cultural, religious, or perhaps racial proximity between Christians and Jews?
Chapters 3 and 4 follow the image of the savage from the philosophical literature of the early Haskalah into the very first Hebrew books for children, written around the turn of the nineteenth century. The choice to focus on children’s literature in these two chapters is reflective of the changes that occurred in the uses of the exotic Other in Jewish (as well as in non-Jewish) thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter 3 focuses on the Hannover-born maskil Baruch Lindau’s translation of German pedagogue Georg Christian Raff’s Naturgeschichte für Kinder, whereas Chapter 4 discusses the early nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish translations of the widely read works of Joachim Heinrich Campe. My reasons for focusing on the issue of race in translation are threefold. First, images of non-European peoples played a significant role in the building of the maskilic corpus of translations. Second, by comparing maskilic translations to their non-Jewish source texts, it is possible to extract and expose some Jewish-specific images and uses of the exotic Other. Finally, turn-of-the-century Jewish translations demonstrate the desire of maskilic Jews to acculturate themselves by conforming to the standards of a hegemonic culture, which was perceived by them as higher. In this sense, Jewish translators may be viewed as agents of an internal cultural-colonization. In my discussion of the turn-of-the-century corpus of Jewish translations, I attempt to identify the relationship between this form of internal colonization and the external colonization depicted in the translated books.
The final two chapters demonstrate the ways in which Jewish translators dealt with new, more rigid notions of difference put forth by the writers of the original texts. Written in 1788, Lindau’s Hebrew translation demonstrates a kind of reluctant resistance to racism by continuing to employ archaic notions of skin color and ethnicity. It appears that Lindau, like many other Jewish thinkers of his time, was wary of the new intellectual trends of the late eighteenth century, which called for a more deterministic understanding of physical difference between men. I propose that this reluctance to abandon the environmentalist paradigm was inspired by Lindau’s understanding of the hazards inherent in the new notions of race for Jews. As the century progressed, however, it became much more difficult to continue upholding archaic notions of skin color and physical difference. Thus, later texts were less preoccupied with destabilizing the new racial discourse, but rather reproduced it in their own, maskilic versions of the colonial fantasy. This cultural shift is discernible in the early nineteenth-century Hebrew children’s books, which are the focus of the final chapter of my work.
The eighteenth century was a period of radical changes in Europeans’ understandings of identity and difference. Well versed in the intellectual trends of their time, Jewish writers began turning their gaze eastward, toward the Orient (both far and near), and westward, to the New World. Often, it was a longing gaze, a reflection upon viable cultural alternatives to contemporaneous European (Jewish) life. Other times it was a subversive gaze, which aimed to challenge European notions of identity and alterity. Still other gazes were inspired by these same notions, and utilized the Others out there as a means to establish Jews as part of the White or “civilized” world. However, whether longing or loathing, subversive or conservative, the European Jewish gaze eastward and westward was almost always also a gaze inward. In their scrutinizing of the non-European Other, Jewish thinkers attempted to delineate the borders of their own racial, cultural, or political identity in many different, often conflicting ways.
A few final words of caution; any comparison between cultures runs the risk of simplifying one side of the equation while complicating the other. This is especially true when juxtaposing a subaltern culture with a hegemonic one. In the present study I have attempted to tackle this methodological risk by occasionally drawing the reader’s attention to the polyphony not only of Jewish discourse on race, but also to that of non-Jewish discourse. Indeed, it is my hope that by focusing on the nuances and complexities of Jewish racial discourse, new light may also be shed on similar trends within the various non-Jewish discourses.
The reader will also note that the study often employs such politically charged and culturally constructed terms as savage, civilized, race, and exotic. For reasons of convenience I have chosen not to surround these terms with scare quotes. Their cultural constructedness, however, lies at the very heart of this study. Conversely, the terms Black and White appear in uppercase throughout the text when signifying social groups, and in lowercase when meant to designate formal color.
CHAPTER 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 non-hegemonic groups within Europe.2 In many cases, the relationship 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