Creating Judaism

Who can fail to like the memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln (1645-1724)? Her account, as rendered in the English translations of the Yiddish original, give a detailed, first-hand account of a pious Jewish woman (who had also raised 12 children and took over her first husband’s business after he died). Her memoir has a modern feel to it and stands as one of the very few extant literary writings by a pre-modern Jewish woman.

Well, it turns out that that if Gluckel’s memoirs have a modern feel to them, it is because the English translations give it to them. In his Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 155-175, Marcus Moseley demonstrates just how peculiar Gluckel’s Yiddish work is. The translators, he argues, selectively left out huge swathes of it that did not appeal to their own sensibilities of what a “memoir” should be. One such omitted passage, for example, tells a story of a learned Jew stranded on an island with cannibals. He marries a naked, hairy woman and father’s a child with her, but when he has the opportunity to flee the island on a boat of “civilized” people he leaves both wife and child, and watches with no emotion as the wife kills their child in rage. Gluckel puts this story close to her account of her own betrothal: What she meant by doing so might be anyone’s guess, but it is certainly not characteristic of the author we know through the popular translations. Gluckel has written a far more interesting and complex “memoir” than has been commonly taught and thought, and as Moseley points out at the end of his discussion a new, full translation is a desideratum.

Reading Moseley’s fascinating discussion also raised for me a secondary story. Gluckel’s manuscript was apparently copied by her children and passed down through the generations; her great-granddaughter, Bertha Pappenheim (’Anna O.’ of Freudian fame) published a German translation. The printed Yiddish edition was made by David Kaufmann in 1896. I suspect that there is an also an interesting story to be told about the transmission of this work - perhaps more on that in a later post.

The other day I taught a Me’ah class on women and gender in rabbinic literature. My choice of readings was, to be honest, somewhat lazy: my article “‘Try to be a Man’: The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity,” Harvard Theological Review 89/1 (1996): 19-40. If I had prepared better, I would probably have assigned something by Tal Ilan or Ross Kraemer. In any case, the article argues that rabbinic gender assumptions associate “masculinity” with self-control as a prerequisite for Torah study; women were seen as constitutionally unable to maintain self-control, much like children and non-Jews. [Note that Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, highlights a very different aspect of rabbinic gender construction.]
I was unprepared for the violence of the class’s reaction. They were “appalled,” “disgusted,” and “repelled” at these rabbinic attitudes and the texts that I cited to support the argument. While I steered the conversation to the historical arguments and context, they were - quite predictably, in hindsight - far more interested on what they as modern Jews are to do with these rabbinic texts.

I never have had a particularly good answer to that question. I laid out a series of hermeneutical strategies that others have used: apologetics, historically contextualizing the disturbing passages, ignoring them. On a personal level I struggle with these texts, yet I cannot yet translate my own internal struggle with something that can easily be articulated. Yet while I left the class frustrated at my own inability to do this, I was also excited by the passion with which these adult students encountered these texts. They have been challenged and they too are struggling.