Sir Gawain and Queen Esther
Even under the bitterest days
of Roman oppression, when Jerusalem lay in ruins and the land was filled with
bodies of the fallen, the rabbis continued to preach Mordechai’s message of
disobedience, arguing that power and rule on earth, no matter how vast, cannot
grant sovereignty, the right to command—a right which ultimately rests only with
the individual (or the state) when guided by truth.[i]
As Jose Faur
has pointed out many times, at the heart of anti-Semitism lies not a religious
argument or a racial prejudice, but a political impasse: the Jews see the world
as a place where Justice and Truth should be the goal of a horizontal society
not one based on hierarchical power.
When Jews are forced by circumstances to live in the middle of other
peoples who think of power as always coming from above and thus where the ideas
of truth and justice are determined by those who wield such hierarchical power,
well, these Jews become rebels and revolutionaries: they refuse to buckle
under, to submit passively to the dictates from above, to believe that
something is right because of the might behind it—and if they have to give in
for a while, they only pretend to agree, and bide their time waiting for an
opportunity to get out from under and set up a state in which society can be
horizontal, where the people in positions of power and decision-making are not
right simply because they are there and believe it is their right to be
there. While living in exile from their
own land and during the time when they are dispersed, weak and disenfranchised,
they operate through indirection, speak ironically, and try to make the best
of a bad thing. As Yoram Hazony puts it, “Judaism is a rebellion against the authority
of the ruler to establish moral valuation according to the weight of his
interests and the perversity of his whims.”[ii] The key biblical text for Jews living in the
Galut, the exile and dispersion, especially for those living under the cover of
conformity or conversion, is the Book of Esther. The special holiday associated with this
celebration of the two ways of rebellion, that of Mordechai and of Esther, is
the Festival of Lots, Purim, with its
masquerades, drunkenness and noisemaking to drown out the name of the
oppressor, as well as the time for duplicity, subversion and wheeling-and-dealing.
As we have noted, Gawain is not aware of what
the games are he really plays nor of the implications of his discomfort and
need to dissimulate. Though he plays out
a number of roles appropriate to Crypto-Jews in the mid- to late fourteenth
century, he himself never doubts his own Christian identity, no more than he
does his place in the court at Camelot or in the controlling paradigms of
romantic literature and refined love: but never
and no more than in his case allow
for a fair bit of wiggle room. The author
of the poem, however, plays a very cautious and subtle game when he puts Gawain
into situations where the essentials of chivalry, refined love, feudal loyalty
and Christian faith are concerned. This
author—individual or collective, one never knows in terms of the alliterative
tradition that became fashionable in the mid-1300s in England with its
predilection for complaint, satire and ironic themes in general and strange
toying with biblical themes and images. Due
to the catastrophic riots, massacres and dispersals of Jews in France, Germany
and elsewhere in the first two Crusades, with the invention of new slurs
against Jews and Judaism, such as the slander of infanticide, host desecration,
blood libel, there were probably more troubled souls seeking hiding places in
out of the way, remote and eccentric places in Europe, including the British
Isles. These would include what we call
Marranos, as well as Crypto-Jews who had some inkling of the beliefs and
customs they sought to disguise under the masks of conversion and conformity;
the Marranos were more undecided, confused, and cynical, that is, they could
keep shifting their public identities as well as their inner faith to match
external circumstances and conditions, and yet were already so separated from
the institutions and traditions of Judaism that they were never sure of what
they could, should or really believed and therefore depended as much as gossip,
rumor and Christian lies and libels to know what constituted Jewish laws; and
since what they could recall from their own or their family memories about the
failure of the Jewish community to protect its members from harm and the often
harsh rejection of refugees wanting to return but lacking the intellectual
knowledge and emotional skills to fit in—who were deemed likely traitors,
spies, and liabilities—they had little desire to return to whatever it was they
could construct in their minds as Judaism.
They would know from other refugees, remnants and befuddled souls that
Jews had a new emphasis on martyrdom, including self-murder, and a set of
customs and beliefs that appeared very odd indeed viewed through the filter of
Christian normality all around them.
And yet that
Christian normality seemed bizarre and repugnant in itself. From this perspective, mostly as outsiders
but superficially as insiders, they looked at the fundamentals of Christian
belief and thought, as written in the Nizzahon
Vetus:
…how could this
man be God, for he entered a woman with a stomach full of feces who frequently
sat him down in a privy during nine months, and when he was born he came out
dirty and filthy, wrapped in a placenta and defiled by the blood of childbirth
and impure issue.[iii]
Even the
manger where little baby Jesus was born, worshipped by the angels, adored by
his parents and the shepherds and the three kings, was “a place of dirt, filth,
stench and refuse”.[iv] So much for the glorious mystery of Christmas
and the Incarnation. Throughout his
life, Jesus was seen as a heretic, a consorter with tax-collectors, prostitutes,
Roman soldiers, and other persons unworthy of an educated rabbi, let alone a
priest or prophet; and when he died, this same Jesus “became worthless and
turned to worms,”[v]
and so a slimy rotting corpse on the cross.
There goes respect for Easter.
The whole of the Nizzahan Vetus
is crammed with such vituperative aspersions cast on Christ, Christians,
Christianity and Christian society, a most unpleasant book to read, but
understandable as a long pent-up rage and hatred of the persecuting, condescending
and murderous mob who generation after generation reviled and mocked Jews,
Judaism and Jewish civilization. But it
was extremely rare for any Jew to write down such feelings, rare for Jews to
speak amongst themselves of such matters and in such words, and, for all we
know—which is very little because there are so few personal remarks recorded,
letters, diaries, poems, jokes, at least outside of Sephardic archives, like
the Cairo Geniza—for Jews to think in the silent darkness of their own souls.
Generations
later, in Iberia in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries, in Spain
and Portugal and their territories elsewhere in Europe and in the New Worlds
beyond, when the pogroms began, the Inquisition was established, and
persecutions institutionalized leading up to mass conversions, expulsions and
executions, Jews once again suffered these outrageous iniquities throughout
their lives and in most of the lands where they could flee: once again they
attempted to outrun the agents of the Holy Office, outwit its familiars,
dissimulate before the malsains who
spied for pay, hide their true beliefs and history from neighbors, relatives,
siblings, spouses, children until they could be proved trustworthy and mature
enough to handle the complicated web of deceit that had to be maintained and
constantly adjusted to changing political and social circumstances.
That these
attitudes existed and that people whispered their hopes, fears and fears into
the darkened cellars where they gathered is hinted at only. In paragraph 243 of the Nizzahan Vetus, we read:
The fear of our
God and his holy Torah must not be changed for any other, for he has given us a
true Torah that will stand till the final generation, as it is written,
“Listen, my people, to my Torah; incline your ears to the words of my
mouth. I shall open my mouth in a
parable; I shall utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and
our fathers have told us. We shall not
hide them from their children, telling the last generation the praises of the
Lord and his strength and the wonderful works that he has done” [Ps.
78:1-4]. Thus, there is a tradition
passed down from the fathers and sons to be firm and guard your soul
diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, etc.” [Deut.
4:9] ….[vi]
Only in the
ought of such extended, pervasive and persistent persecutions can we understand
the trauma that almost every Jew not born safely within a fairly stable
community would feel free enough to express themselves—in a place where
normative Jewish child-rearing practices prevailed and infants grew up in love
and security, their personalities formed with the protection and guidance of
families that were warm and close and provided constant education to confirm
them in the beliefs based on the covenant of Truth and Justice; elsewhere,
especially after the waves of persecution would break up the stable
communities, spread the families into hostile environments, and thus children
would grow up suspected and suspicious of everyone around them, the need for
cautious ironies was felt and the panic appear very near the surface if not
already evident in nervousness, hesitant speech, and awkward behavior.
The story of
Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai stands as a lens through which to examine Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green
Chapel still further. Though he
stands high in the eyes of the Emperor of Persia in Shushan the capital city,
Mordechai the Jew knows he must deal delicately and with caution with a mad
drunken fool, whose ignorance, anger and outbursts of rage can hardly be
contained. Ahasverosh wields all the
power in the state but he does not realize what he does, its implications, its
consequences for himself or his people.
His other advisers are also stupid, vile and untrustworthy, at are
always looking to take advantage of the situation. His first wife, Vashti, in attempting to
stand up for herself and avoid the degradation the emperor’s egotism would
inflict on her, is cast out—and the first minister, Mordechai, notes how
dangerous and naïve it is for anyone to cross the inebriated ruler. He also knows it is important to have a
trusted, intelligent, sensitive, mature person as close to the king and the
centers of power as possible to act as informant and agent. Mordechai seizes opportunity by the forelock
and puts his own step-niece in as a candidate to be the new consort of
Ahasveroth. Hadasseh, renamed for the
purposes, Esther receives careful counselling from her uncle on how to behave
and control herself during the months of preparations and choosing of the new
queen. Hadasseh (meaning myrtle, as in
the hodesh of the twisted candles that interweave their light to indicate the
passage in and out of profanity of the ordinary week to the sacredness of
Shabbat, that time out of time, that foretaste of Paradise) becomes known as
Esther (pointing towards Ashterah, the Persian Venus, star of the east, of the
sea, of the powers of erotic and reproductive femaleness) and is eventually
chosen to be the new consort. She is in
herself, then, the doublet of the hidden Jewish agency of justice according to
divine Law and human intelligence and reason and of the outwardly seen
allurement and fertility of womanhood and maternity, a shadowy allusion, too,
to the doubled females in the Gawain poem, the young and seductive Lady
Bertilak and the ugly, stiff old crone who is revealed as Morgan Le Fée. But like the havdalah candle, with its two stems interwoven and its double wick,
Hadasseh-Esther embodies the sacred interface of the unseeable and purely
divine and the shadowed presence in the world of the Shekhina. The lady and the
crone in Hautdesert both have negative, threatening and polluting qualities
about them, and the green girdle handed over to Gawain, which he conceals on
his person, seems to grant life in the face of imminent death but only gives a
temporary release from death through sterility in the profane literature of
Arthurian romance.
In due
course, as expected, the evil forces of history show themselves in the person
of Haman. Progeny of Israel’s age-old
enemies, this snake-in-the-grass once promoted to a key position in
Ahashervosh’s court does not bide his time for very long before striking. Taking as an excuse Mordechai’s refusal to
bow before his authority in public, he whispers in the king’s ears slanders
against the Jews—the traditional calumnies: there is a people in this land who
don’t belong, who cannot be trusted to be loyal, who plot against you, and who
must be gotten rid of. Unable to think for
himself, the emperor accedes to his henchman’s advice and the plans are set in
motion for annihilation of the Jews throughout the empire. Mordechai cannot on his own act, except to
tear his garments, throw ashes on himself, and mourn outside the palace gates. That, at least, brings him to Esther’s
attention and he is able to whisper new advice to her on how to act in order by
subtle and indirect means to reverse the decrees of the tyrant. Playing on her beauty and sexual allure and
pretending to be silly wife, she is able to wheedle herself into a position
where she breaks protocol without rousing the king’s immediate anger, and thus,
step by step, to lure both the emperor and Haman into her trap. At an appropriate moment, without open
rebellion, insulting charges, or anything but the arrogance of Haman himself,
she makes the king know that if all the Jews in Persia are murdered, she too
will be one of the victims in this plot, and that would be not good for the
king’s prestige or honor. She also is
able to bring Mordechai in on the negotiations on how to undo the royal decrees
which are otherwise irreversible and absolute, and thus able to shift the
target from the entire immigrant Jewish community throughout the Empire to all
those implicated in Haman’s plot. The
price for this rescue of her people, however, is that Esther has to remain
within the imperial household as the queen consort, with all the debilities of
female oppression that implies, must not show herself openly as a Jew, and must
avoid bearing any children who would then from this unkosher marriage be
nothing but mamzerim, unclean
bastards. Though the actual plot of the
Book of Esther is more complicated than that sketched out here, the basic lines
are evident enough.
As Hazony
puts it “Esther’s stratagem, her arousal of the king’s jealousy and suspicions,
has therefore brought appearances into line with the truth: Has in fact sought
to take the queen with the king in the palace—not sexually, but, similarly enough,
because of his inability to tell that which is his to lay his hands on from that
which is not.”[vii] As with King Arthur and Lord Bertilak, the
Persian Emperor always thinks he is in charge, but drunkenness, ignorance, and
egotism blind them to the fact that they are pushed around by others and by
circumstances. They are creatures of
time and place, seasonal puppets, as it were. Gawain, on the other hand, though he cannot
free himself from these same worldly constraints, can play the game a little
differently, can take up opportunities to wiggle about within the larger
paradigms of the pre-set romance tradition and generic requirements, and find
inside himself a degree of self-doubt, shame, awkwardness, hesitation and
cynicism to operate as an individual—not a happy or satisfied man by any means.
He knows what he knows and, though he
cannot tell anyone else, or act differently than they expect, he can realize
the shallowness and hypocritical nature of the game itself. Others dream of perfection, he realizes has
lacked a little. They believe everything
has turned out just as it ought to have and they sport the green sash of
victory; he knows the result was a muddle, and he hides the green girdle’s
meaning as a badge of shame to remind him of the difference between what is
true and what is not, what is just and what is not. But at least he has not lost his head.
[i] Yoram Hazony, The Dawn: Political
teachings of the book of Esther (Jerusalem: Genesis Jerusalem Press, 1995)
p. 82.
[iii] David Berger, ed. and trans, The
Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the
Nizzahon Vetus (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1996 p. 44.
