IGGUD SELECTED ESSAYS IN JEWISH STUDIES

VOLUME 1 THE BIBLE AND ITS WORLD, RABBINIC LITERATURE AND JEWISH LAW, AND JEWISH THOUGHT

EDITORS

Baruch J. Schwartz Abraham Melamed and Aharon Shemesh

Editorial Secretary Ronela Merdler

World Union of Jewish Studies Jerusalem 2008

The Soul is a Foreign Woman: Otherness and Psychological Allegory from the Zohar to Hasidism
C a r s ten L. W i l k e
It is generally known, wrote Gershom Scholem, that allegorical interpretations arise spontaneously whenever a conflict between new ideas and those expressed in a sacred book necessitates some form of compromise.1 As indicators of a clash between intellectual systems, the images and plots of allegorical exegesis can offer important insights into the evolution of religious consciousness, especially when they are borrowed from foreign religious traditions or from secular literature. Studying the exegetic history of a particular biblical image, we can try to establish a genealogy of the changing narratives through which the authors expressed their own distinctive synthesis of the underlying intercultural encounter. In biblical tradition, three staple concepts express otherness, as Isaac Breuer noted: Blessed be God, who has not made me a Gentile nor a slave nor a woman: In these sentences of the daily prayer we find recapitulated with an astonishing clearness all the singularity of Jewish law, which affirms these barriers while referring them at the same time to God as the author of universal justice.2 According to this Jewish concept of otherness, the three forms of inequality are neither naturally determined nor spiritually insignificant, contrary to the Christian claim that in the mental realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ (Gal 3:28). The traditional Muslim view likewise tends to confer religious value to the three sacrosanct distinctions establishing the subordinate status of the slave, the woman, and the unbeliever.3 In order to focus on a biblical context where these three dimensions of alterity are simultaneously at work, I have chosen the military law of Deut 21:1014 which in

1 2

Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (trans. Ralph Manheim; New York: Schocken, 1965), 33. Isaac Breuer, Die rechtsphilosophischen Grundlagen des jdischen und des modernen Rechts, Jahrbuch der Jdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft 8 (1910): 3564, see p. 44. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations in this paper, including those of biblical quotations, are mine. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 83.

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rabbinic tradition is known as the din yefat toar, the Law of the Beautiful Woman. This short text may be rendered into English as follows: When you go to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives him [!] into your hand and you take some captives, and you see among the captives a woman of beautiful appearance, and you desire her and you take this woman to be yours, you shall bring her into your house, she shall shave her head, pare her nails and discard her captives robe. She shall sit a months time in your house lamenting her father and mother. After that, you may come to her and possess her, and this woman will be yours. Then, should you no longer want her, you must set her free; you must not sell her for money nor use her for slave work, since you have forced her. There is no evidence of the law having been put into practice at any time in history; and it may well have been fictitious from the outset.4 A poetic rather than a legal text, it marks the two extremes of the biblical conception of humanity by juxtaposing a male Israelite master and a female Gentile slave. The contrasts in gender, faith and status are dramatically enhanced by the tension between the social distance of the woman and her seemingly irresistible attractiveness. Conquest, captivity and erotic seduction are powerful metaphors for cultural influence. Captivity, especially the abduction of women, is also one of world literatures oldest topics. In a study presented at a previous World Congress of Jewish Studies, David Stern pointed out how ancient exegesis of the law on the Beautiful Captive is coloured by secular literary models: Philo of Alexandria and Josephus reflect plots from the Hellenistic novel when they treat the captivity story as a moral example teaching compassion and humanity (). Rabbinic exegesis, on the contrary, follows the biblical and Greco-Roman narrative of the pernicious foreign temptress.5 The Sages searched the text for rules of halakhah that might help the warrior to control and canalize his desire.6 Neither Philo nor the rabbis tried to give the captivity story an allegorical sense;7 only Christian exegesis did. The Church fathers transformed the image of the captiva
4 5 6 Alexander Rof, Mavo leSefer Devarim (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1988), 138. David Stern, The Captive Woman: Hellenization, Greco-Roman Erotic Narrative, and Rabbinic Literature, Poetics Today 19/1 (Spring 1998): 91127. Rabbinic exegesis of Deut 21:1014 can be traced back to a second century baraita from Akibas school. The baraita is conserved in two almost identical versions, the first of which is given in Midrash Sifre 211214, and the second of which occurs in three tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 35a, Qiddushin 21b22a, and Yevamot 48a. For a synthesis of the halakhic discussions, see Pearl Elman, Deuteronomy 21:1014: The Beautiful Captive Woman, Women in Judaism 1/1 (1997), http://www.utoronto.ca/wjudaism/journal/vol1n1/v1n1elma.htm. Philo considers Deut 21:1014 only in its literal sense as a legal text; see Paul Heinisch, Der Einfluss Philos auf die lteste christliche Exegese (Barnabas, Justin und Clemens von

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gentilis into a theological topic which served to help clarify proper Christian attitudes towards non-Christian literary culture. The function of this allegory as a vehicle for selective cultural synthesis motivated the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac to write its literary history. In the exegetical mainstream that runs from Origen of Alexandria (d. 254) to Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536), the soldiers espousal of the captive woman while making her shave her head, cut her nails and change her manner of dress symbolizes the Christian theologians cautious appropriation of classical wisdom and rhetoric.8 However, de Lubac points out that from the 11th century, Christian mysticism developed a radically different decipherment. The foreign woman becomes the image of the Christian soul alienated by sin, recaptured by Jesus and obliged to perform a ceremony of penitence and purification. Mystical interpretation of the topic thus entails a complete inversion of perspective: the female rather than the male protagonist of the story represents the religious subject. This reading of the captiva gentilis narrative and other similarly gendered allegories became common around 1300 with the spread of Franciscan spirituality, most notably in Nicholas of Lyras Moralia9 and Vital du Fours Moral Mirror.10 The latter elaborated two complementary mystic tales: on one side, the slave Hagar is the disobedient flesh subdued by Abraham, the spirit; on the other side, the Gentile captive of Deuteronomy is herself the rational soul chosen to be the spouse of Christ.11 Thus, the capture of the Gentile woman becomes a kind of violent version of the erotic union between God and the Soul depicted in the Song of Songs. The exceedingly popular prayers of Thomas of Jesus, a Portuguese Augustinian of the 16th century, reach a peak of mystical masochism

Alexandria): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der allegorisch-mystischen Schriftauslegung im christlichen Altertum (Mnster i. W.: Aschendorff, 1908), 286. 8 Henri de Lubac SJ, Exgse mdivale: les quatre sens de lcriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959; repr., Paris: Cerf, 1993), 1:290304. 9 Nicolas of Lyra OFM (d. ca. 1340), Postillae, in Biblia sacra (Antwerp, 1634), 1:col. 15931594. 10 Vital du Four OFM (d. 1326), Speculum morale totius Sacrae Scriptura, in quo universa fere loca & figurae veteris ac novo Testamenti in sensu mystico explanantur (Venice, 1623), fol. 206r, 278v, 280v. 11 The flexibility of gender imagery plays out a paradox from the Judeo-Hellenistic tradition. For Philo, the rational soul is feminine in relation to God, but masculine in relation to the body; see Richard A. Baer, Philos Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 59, 62; Genevive Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 25. As regards the medieval literary tradition, see Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 17374, on the famous dialogue between the (male) Self and the (female) body in Guillaume de Guillevilles Plerinage de la vie humaine (1331).

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when the penitents soul appears as a captive woman screaming for her master: Do with me whatever you wish... . Take me, my Lord, chain me, ravish me.12 While sensing, like most modern readers,13 that the law condones rather than restricts violence, halakhic and allegorical exegesis adopt two radically different evaluations of the plot. Rabbinic moralizing, in its unflattering terms, pits a libidinous man against a woman resolved to defend her idolatry; Christian allegory stages an idealized male hero and his grateful mate, whose passivity symbolizes humanitys dependence upon divine Grace. Whereas the rabbis disapprove of the mixed union and blame the Jewish males evil instinct for pursuing it, Christian theologians highly acclaim this uncommon marriage. They perceive no other evil than the foreign womans alterity, which will be adequately overcome by the purification rite. The option of religious and sexual coercion, which the Christian scholars recommend as a powerful means to solve the conflict,14 incommodes the rabbis, who came to define the forced conversion of the woman captive as a unique and highly problematic breach of the halakhic system.15 Moreover, Christian exegesis has often tainted the allegory with an outspoken antiJewish tendency. Origens commentary ridicules Jewish efforts to treat the captivity plot as a meaningful legal prescription. He mockingly points out that the strange rite performed by the woman defies any literal understanding, let alone practical application. An exegetic tradition not mentioned by de Lubac, which goes back to the Church father Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444 C. E.), applied the allegory to the exodus and election of Israel. Liberated from Egyptian bondage, purified and introduced into the sanctuary, the Synagogue proved to be unfaithful; she was expelled from divine Grace, but not definitively sold to Satan.16 Cyrils interpretation was singled out by a few later exegetes, most prominently by Martin Luther: like the biblical captive humiliating herself before her lord, he wrote, the Synagogue will have to renounce her claims to priestly honours, to the ritual commandments and to external justice; she will have to confess the dogma of original sin and finally become the bride of Christ.17
12 Thomas of Jesus OSA (d. 1582), Les Souffrances de Jsus (trans. G. Alleaume; Paris, 1883), 2:8286 (28th suffering). 13 See Harold C. Washington, Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: a New Historicism Approach, Biblical Interpretation 5 (1997): 32463; David Resnick, A Case Study in Jewish Moral Education: (Non-)Rape of the Beautiful Captive, Journal of Moral Education 33/3 (2004): 30719. 14 This holds true for Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 105, art. 4, as well as for Albert the Great, Postilla super Isaiam, in Opera omnia (Mnster: Aschendorff, 1952), 19:47375. 15 Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1991), 54. 16 Cyril of Alexandria, In Glaphyris, in Patrologia Graeca (Paris: Migne, 18571866), 69:64958. 17 Martin Luther, Deuteronomios Mose, ex Hebraeo castigatus, cum annotationibus (Basle: Andreas Cratender, 1525), 27273.

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Charged as they were with militant Christian ideology, these allegorical amplifications of the captive woman had no counterpart in Jewish homiletics until the late 13th century, when they appear almost simultaneously in the work of several Spanish kabbalists. How can we explain the sudden Jewish appropriation of an exegetical convention that Christian theology had been cultivating for a thousand years? It is important to remember that the Kingdom of Aragon was the first European power that obliged its Jews to listen to Christian missionary sermons. These sermons were given in the synagogues by friars trained at the Hebrew school of Barcelona, which the Dominican Raymond of Penyafort founded in 1240 and which rose to its major influence when the anti-Jewish polemicist Raymond Martini, the author of the Pugio Fidei, was its director in the years 12811285.18 It can be shown that the chief rabbi of Barcelona, Solomon ben Abraham Ibn Adret, who had to respond to Martini in 1284, knew the friars claims only from oral sources.19 We cannot expect, therefore, to solve the problem of Christian influence on Jewish homiletics by looking for textual proofs. The Barcelona missionaries used, as it seems, anti-Jewish allegories in their sermons; and I would venture the hypothesis that Jewish preachers of the time, trying to give their communities alternative readings of the primary biblical texts, adopted not only the allegorical methods of their adversaries, but also some literary images and elements of religious outlook, such as the positive view of enforcing marriage on a foreign woman. The Aragonese preacher Bahya ben Asher Ibn Halava, in his commentary on the Pentateuch finished in 1291, interprets the Law of the Beautiful Woman as the victory of the good male instinct over the evil female counterpart. This means that the woman is in reality not a captive but an intruder, who, as in the Midrash, has to be subdued by means of the humiliating ceremony only in order to be expelled.20 A more complex plot was invented by Bahyas younger contemporary, Shemtov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, a kabbalist from Soria in Castile, who edited his sermons after migrating to Safed in 1312. Ibn Gaons allegorical drama has not two, but three, actors. The warrior, that is, the good instinct, confronts the enemy, the evil instinct, in order to seize the woman, i.e., Matter, and to dominate her.21 The use of Christian sources is quite obvious in this case. For example, Ibn Gaon reproduces Origens classical explanations of the ritual elements one after another: shaving the hair means abandoning vain opinions; cutting the nails means reforming ones actions; donning the robe of captivity means obtaining spiritual liberty by setting aside worldly
18 Yitzhak Baer, Toledot ha-Yehudim bi-Sefarad ha-Nosrit (2d ed.; Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1965), 91; Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 19 Jeremy Cohen, The Christian Adversary of Solomon ben Adret, JQR 71 (19801981): 4855. 20 Bahya ben Asher Ibn Halava, Beur al ha-Torah (Pesaro, 1566), fol. 229v. 21 Shemtov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, Keter Shem Tov (Venice, 1601), fol. 126v.

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considerations. The rite, on the whole, is meant, in Ibn Gaons words, to uproot memory. The Jewish reworking of these literary elements is not too successful, as the inner contradictions of Ibn Gaons interpretation show. In philosophic tradition, Matter is passive and certainly does not think, remember, act and repent on its own initiative. For Ibn Gaon, the woman nevertheless takes the active part in the plot: she provokes the mans attention either through her physical beauty or by some inexplicable force of attraction: Ibn Gaon names it absurd love which is called desire (ahavah beli Faam wezeh niqra xesheq). The submissive captiva gentilis of Christian imagery does not easily amalgamate with the pagan women whose menacingly autonomous psychology Jewish interpreters like to stress. Joshua Ibn Shuaib imagines her as a strong religious subject, very pious (aduqah) in her idolatry.22 At best, her conversion becomes a psychodrama, a painful substitution of personality; the rite, Joseph Ibn Kaspi says, will mark in her soul that she is like a different woman.23 Whereas Bahya and Ibn Gaon remain close to the scholastic branch of Christian allegorizing, the mystic option is reflected in a third text, the Zohar. We can confirm the observations of Yitzhak Baer and Yehuda Liebes concerning this works exceptional receptiveness to ideas from Christian and, in particular, Franciscan sources.24 The commentary on the Deuteronomic law not only uses a Christian-style allegory, but also reproduces the generic inversion which characterizes Franciscan preaching on the subject. For the first time in Jewish exegesis, the religious subject is invited to identify with the foreign woman. As in the Christian model, the feminized soul is reclaimed from the power of the evil instinctnot by Jesus of course, but by the good instinct; or rather by a curiously transcendent Self. This human saviour brings her into his house, the body, whose dominion the evil instinct had hitherto usurped. Where Christian allegory refers the penitential rite to concrete contexts such as auricular confession or monastic vows, the Zohar finds a parallel in Jewish liturgy. Deuteronomy 21 is read in the synagogue precisely at the time of the yemei teshuvah, the penitential period during the month of Elul, when the soul laments her offences against her father and mother, i.e., God and the Torah. The Zohar then compares the elements of the womans captivity to the Exodus in an even more detailed manner than does Cyril. The cutting of the hair and fingernails symbolizes the Talmudic
22 Derashot al ha-Torah (Cracow: Isaac ben Aron of Prostitz, 1573), fol. 86r. 23 Mishneh Kesef (Cracow: Fischer, 1906), p. 292. 24 Y. Liebes, Christian Influences on the Zohar, in Liebes, Studies in the Zohar (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993), 13961. In his review article Ha-Omnam Betulah hi ha-Shekhinah?, Peamim 1012 (20042005): 30313, Liebes objects to the more far-reaching theses formulated by Arthur Green, Shekhina, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs, AJS Review 26/1 (2002): 152; and Peter Schfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1115.

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idea that when standing at Mount Sinai, Israel lost the hereditary impurity which the serpent had cast upon Eve.25 The change of dress signifies atonement for Israels sin of the golden calf. The waiting period corresponds to the forty days the Israelites awaited the return of Moses. Finally, the consumption of the union between captor and captive signifies the conclusion of the alliance between God and Israel. The conquest of the alienated soul is accomplished on the Day of Atonement, when the fast initiates the mystical union between God and the maTronita, that is, the Shekhinah. The warriors personality is curiously split in two: a human Self acts as the hero of the inner conquest, but God is the partner in the mystic union. The Zoharic text mentioned above was absent from parts of the manuscript tradition as well as from the first imprints; it was published only in 1597 with the Zohar Hadash.26 But the problem of textual transmission is certainly not the only reason why the contemporary kabbalists discarded the Zoharic allegorical solutions based on gender inversion. A less audacious projection of subjectivity into the foreign woman is proposed by Joel Ibn Shueib, an Aragonese preacher of the 15th century, who depicts an elaborated psychological mechanism: the army are the human forces, the leading priest is the active intellect, the enemy is the evil instinct, the treacherous officers are the senses, the desiring warrior is the good instinct, and the disputed woman is Desire (taavah).27 The fact that the Hebrew verb to desire, hashaq, is conjugated with the preposition be (in) and the indirect object, proves for Ibn Shueib that erotic desire stems from its object and not from the desiring subject. This projection, reminiscent of Renaissance Platonism, turns ancient rabbinic psychology upside down. Female beauty, which for the Midrash is no more than a delusion of the lustful man, here expresses an autonomous perfection that incites masculine love.28 The foreign woman is nevertheless seen as ambiguous, because she reflects the moral qualities of the good and evil men who fight to possess her. Kabbalists since Moses Nahmanides have believed that her body and soul remain dominated by the influence of her first husband, so that the name of idolatry will never completely vanish from her mouth.29 But she is also capable of collecting divine influences. In the terms of the cosmological imagery of the 16th century Safed kabbalists, her beauty reveals a scattered spark of divine light lost in the shells of the netherworld
25 26 27 28 See Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 145b146a, Yebamot 103b. Zohar (Jerusalem: Yeshiva Qol Tora, 1988), 19:78081. Joel Ibn Shueib, Olat Shabbat (Venice: Zuan di Gara, 1577), fol. 151v. According to Sigmund Freud, antiquity placed love in desire, but modernity in its object; see Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europischen Seele von der Schwarzen Pest bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Beck, 1927; repr., 1965), 815. In rabbinic psychology, love is definitely a virtue of the subject; it may even be commanded as a component of the discipline of the holy life; see Jacob Neusner, Vanquished Nation, Broken Spirit: The Virtues of the Heart in Formative Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 139. 29 Hiddushei ha-RaMBa"N (Jerusalem: Ha-Ivri, 1928), 1:294.

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during the process of creation. Isaac Luria flatly denies the midrashic idea of the moral baseness of the male protagonist. In ancient Israel, a warrior had to conform to perfect ethical standards; therefore, his desire towards a Gentile woman could not stem from vulgar instinct, but rather from his sense that she was a soul from the root of Israel, abducted into the captivity of the shells who was hoping to be redeemed by conversion to Judaism. From this, Luria draws his famous conclusion that any Jewish man of unimpeachable character who desires a non-Jewish woman, may, and should, unite with her and make her a proselyte.30 The narrative theme at the basis of Lurias mystical plot is that of the abducted and saved noblewoman, which abounds in tales of chivalry. The most famous example is found in the Spanish novel Amads: the protagonist saves his beloved Orianda from the captivity of the evil magician Arcalaus, and while disarming after the battle, Amadis and Orianda are vanquished by their mutual desires.31 This scene, which a Sephardi physician had made available in Hebrew by 1541,32 had an astonishing echo in the sermons of the Safed kabbalist Moses Alshekh (d. 1593).33 Whereas the moralizing first section of his homily on the Beautiful Captive offers some graphic storytelling in the chivalric vein, its second part contains an allegorical development (derekh remez) which is quite rare elsewhere in his works.34 In this second section, Alshekh enlaces the captivity narrative with another biblical plot, the slave that reigns (Prov 30:22), and arrives at an adventurous love story between the Will and the Soul. There is a city, the body, whose command has been usurped by a black slave king (eved melekh ha-kushi), the latter representing Satan or the evil instinct. This tyrant keeps a princess captive, the soul. At the age of thirteen, God leads the good instinct into battle; he tells him to vanquish the usurper and to subdue the inhabitants by means of the commandments. Reluctantly, the good instinct takes up arms against the evil one. When he has single-handedly vanquished the black kings thousand servants, he discovers the beautiful princess among them and falls in love with her. The dynamics of otherness that drive the conflict are suddenly reversed: the hero recognizes his kinship with the foreign girl, whereas her black master is turned into the racial Other of both: Do not fear that she is joined in love to the slave and will not love you. On the contrary, your Soul will cleave only to you and not to him,
30 Isaac ben Solomon Luria, Kitvei ha-ARI (Tel Aviv: Hoaat Kitvei ha-ARI, 1962), 8:127, 12:272; see Isaiah Tishby, Torat ha-Ra weha-Qelippah be-Qabbalat ha-ARI (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1942; repr., Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1992), 13738; Charles Mopsik, Les Grands Textes de la cabale: Les rites qui font Dieu (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993), 52729. 31 Amads de Gaula [1508], part I, chapter 35 (ed. Edwin B. Place, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 1959), 1:285. 32 Abraham M. Habermann, Toledot ha-piyyut weha-shirah (Ramat-Gan: Masada, 1972), 2:282. 33 Moshe Alshekh, Torat Mosheh (Warsaw: Yehoshua Gershon Munk, 1879), 5:142. 34 Shimon Shalem, Rabbi Mosheh Alshekh: Lexeqer ShiTato ha-Parshanit we-Hashqafotaw be-Inyene Maxshavah u-Musar (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1966), 7172, 9495.

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because she is not of his kind (lo mi-mino) and as distant from him as East from West [...] She is of your kind (mi-sugkha), related to you. She has never cleaved to the slave. After purifying herself from pride, desire and past guilt, she becomes queen of the conquered body. The imagery of racial otherness, which also occurs frequently in the chivalry genre, belongs to the elaborate (not necessarily derogatory) discourse on blackness in rabbinic literature;35 but it is rather uncommon in our precise exegetical context. Prior to Alshekhs allegory of a black enemy dominating a woman (presumably not herself black), we find hardly any examples other than Ibn Kaspis inverse plot. Wishing to illustrate the rabbinic principle that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Ibn Kaspi surmises that a Jewish conqueror may legitimately choose a black and very ugly woman (ishah kushit ukheurah beyoter) to become his beautiful captive.36 Black and ugly is no more a hendiadys than its biblical model black and comely (Song 1:5). Ibn Kaspi creates a twofold deviance from received canons of beauty. Moses Alshekh, in the moralizing first part of his homily, likewise affirms the colour blindness of desire: even if she is not of beautiful complexion (mareh) but only of beautiful figure (toar), the fire of the evil instinct will certainly burn inside him.37 In the derash section of his homily, Alshekh thus introduces the woman as the racial other: the more exotic she looks, the more she will tempt her captors evil instinct, because it is the nature of everything new to become an object of the eyes desire. In the remez section, in contrast, a hidden racial affinity explains the conquerors attraction to the unknown girl he discovers among the black kings subjects. Alshekhs disciple Haim Vital38 neatly juxtaposes two mutually exclusive captivity narratives, that of the body as the rebellious handmaid, and that of the soul as the liberated princess.39 The kabbalists thus utilize two absolutely contradictory conceptions of the unconscious, without ever conflating them: firstly, the Gentile woman is the evil instinct, identified
35 See David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Abraham Melamed, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: a History of the Other (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003); Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 36 Ibn Kaspi, Torat Mosheh, p. 292. 37 Alshekh, Mishneh Kesef, 5:141. In medieval Hebrew, the word mareh, sight, also has the meaning of colour. 38 Ham ben Joseph Vital, Ef ha-Daat Tov (ed. Rafael Haim Fridman; Jerusalem: H. Wagshall, 1985), fol. 223v224r. 39 See the first version in Isaac ben Moses Ibn-Arroyo, Tanxumot El (Salonica: David ben Abraham Azubib, 1578), fol. 142r; Moses ben Jacob Albelda, Olat Tamid (Venice: Daniel Zanetti, 1601), fol. 224rv; Jacob di Alba, Toledot Yaaqov (Venice: Zuan di Gara, 1609), fol. 102v103r; Jacob ben Isaac Shapiro, Beer Mayyim Hayyim (Cracow: Sons of Isaac ben Aron, 1616), fol. 101r 103r; the second in Haim Ibn Atar, Or ha-Hayyim (Jerusalem: Mekhon Tiferet ha-Torah, 1998), 2:480.

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with the evil queens in Jewish demonology, Lilith and Malath;40 and secondly, she is the hidden soul, a kind of transcendent personal essence. The choice between these options reflects the ideological standpoint of the commentator between the extremes of rationalism and mysticism. Among the early Hasidic masters, Elimelekh of Lizhensk and his followers adapted the plot of mystic captivity for their own meditation techniques, with the intent of freeing the captive soul from the shells by fighting foreign thoughts and foreign love.41 Later Hasidim conspicuously introduced the idea of entrusting purification and redemption to an external agent: the tsaddik. For Jacob Joseph Katz of Polonye, the captive is the multitude of Israel, whom the tsaddik has to address and convert.42 Overall, the construction of a flawed femininity and a redeeming masculinity, first found in Origen, reigns supreme in Hasidism. A rare exception, Haim Tyrer of Chernivtsi (d. 1818), radicalizes the Zoharic gender inversion by relating the unhappy marriage between the male body and the female soul in the manner of a folk tale. The author imagines a king reluctant to marry his daughter to a nobleman, who might come to despise her; he marries her to a poor fellow whose admiration for such a sublime wife could be taken for granted. But the princess, the soul, does not find the attention she needs in the company of the uncouth rustic, the body; their relationship becomes strained until the husband is made to fear the loss of his anima, that is death, and learns to behave more agreeably.43 Commentators from among non-Hasidic orthodoxy, as for example the Berlin rabbi Michael Sachs and the Presburg chief rabbi Wolf Sofer, elaborate in their sermons the classical triumph of male will over a woman signifying Desire, Sin and Vice.44 Most orthodox Jewish allegories during the 19th and early 20th centuries compare the biblical warrior with the Talmudic student hunting exegetical ideas; the woman is Torah study, which has to be freed from entanglement with the profane sciences, or recaptured from the satanic bondage of worldly considerations.45 Origens interpretation of the captivity plot as an allegory of critical reading habits was also
40 See, for example, Isaiah ben Abraham Horowitz, Shene Luxot ha-Berit (Jerusalem, 1970), 3:fol. 87r. 41 Noam Elimelekh (Warsaw: n.p., 1880), 14344; new edition by Gedalia Nigal (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), 2:418. 42 Jacob-Joseph ben Zevi Cohen Katz, Toledot Yaaqov Yosef (Jerusalem: Agudat Bet Wiellipoli, 1973), 2:623. 43 Haim ben Salomon Tyrer, Beer Mayyim Hayyim (Jerusalem: Levin-Epstein, 1970), fols. 118121. 44 Michael Sachs, Sabbatpredigten zu den Wochenabschnitten des fnften Buches Moses (ed. David Rosin; Berlin: Gerschel, 1869), 36178; Abraham Samuel Benjamin (Wolf) b. Moses Sofer, Ketav Sofer al Hamishah Humshei Torah (Tel-Aviv: Sinai, 1995), 660. 45 Moses Elyakim Beria Hofstein, Binat Mosheh (Jerusalem: Bet Koznitz Foundation, 1972), fol. 43r; Alter Benzion Maggid, Maaseh Avot (Saint Louis: Moynester Printing Company, 1927), 156; Avraham Shapiro, Divrei Avraham (Tyrnau: Widow of Y. Y. Glantz, [1901]), 78.

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used in a midrashic garb. Leib Margulies of Lemberg (d. 1811) recounts his visit to the home of a pious friend, where he was astonished to discover an unbound and mistreated copy of a work by one of Mendelssohns modernist followers. As his host explained, he treated this volume like a captive woman: he kept and used it, but he had given it an ugly appearance in order to prevent his falling in love with its ideas.46 It is surprising to see the exegetical solution of the scholastics resurface in a different, but parallel, intellectual endeavour. To sum up, modern rabbinic allegories on the theme of the Gentile captive are obviously indebted to Christian models, but the Jewish authors arrive at more complex solutions because they had to dismiss, for theological reasons, the easy option of forced conversion. The Jewish counter-narrative based on the impossible Christian plot strengthens the Gentile womans religious personality and replaces the divine fighter with a human protagonist. The imageries of ethnic, racial, social, and religious otherness interfere with each other and enhance the central clash of genders. Jewish exegetes tend to give the story a more pessimistic ending, pondering and questioning all three conventional solutions: separation, subordination and marriage. The allegorical complex that Moshe Idel named ethno-eroticism47 may link group conflict and mental process in two ways. Most commonly, it leads to conceiving the latter in military terms, either as grim self-oppression or as the mystic self-liberation of alienated or transcendent subjectivity. In the reverse sense, some rare minds interpreted the dynamics of group conflicts according to the laws of erotic attraction and mystic quest for spiritual union. Isaac Luria treated both the inner struggle and the group conflict as dramatic illusions: Reason appears in the disguise of male Desire, and the highly seductive Gentile woman reveals herself as a lost Jewish soul. Later Hasidic mystics tried to work out a more audacious synthesis between the Self and its enemies. According to Pinhas Horowitz of Frankfurt, the Baal ha-Haflaah, some of the purest souls of Israel are lost so deeply inside the qelippot (shells) that they can find no other way of returning to the Jewish fold than by inciting Israels enemies to launch fierce attacks against the Jews, hoping thus to be conquered and liberated.48 The erotic and the political perspectives are united in an 1874 sermon of the Hasidic master Shmuel of Sochaczew: he concluded from the captivity chapter that the integrity of the individual as well as that of the group depends on the conquest of the same hidden essence, the divine image, Selem ha-Eloqim.49

46 Shmuel Feiner, Mahpekhat ha-Neorut: Tenuat ha-Haskalah ha-Yehudit ba-Meah ha-18 (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2002), 58. 47 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 204. 48 Pinhas ben Sevi Horowitz, Panim Yafot (Ostrw: n. p., 1851), ad loc. 49 Shmuel ben Abraham Bornstein de Sochaczew, Shem mi-Shemuel (Jerusalem: Parshan Family Charity Fund, 1974), 13435.

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