Midrashing the New World
In
short, by reshaping older material, and, with it, constructing new memories of
sacred practice and spade, the rabbis could present their own hegemony as a
natural continuation of the past rather than, as it truly was, a sharp break
from it.[i]
We have said that Jewish
tradition since the Fall of the Temple—and from earlier times, as is evidence
in the meta-critical redacting of Torah in the period between the two
Temples—operates through a process of midrashing,
that is, not only of “cleverly reading” (as Dov Weiss puts it, following
Naftali S. Cohen) ancient texts as though they already always were aware of and
could apply to modern instances, but of operating covertly and subversely in
the real world of history where, by all accounts of dominant and hegemonious cultural
continuity and development, Jews were excluded (except as victims of events
they brought upon themselves and witnesses of their own sinfulness). They adopted, adapted, contravened in
seemingly satirical acts of madness and folly the dominant iconographies and
historical tropes to find protected enclaves, to gain psychological and
epistemological advantage over those whose power they could not otherwise
resist, defy or escape.
Take the role of the native
peoples in Aphra Behn’s Oronooko. They are at once stupid to the point of
infantile ignorance and lack of self-control, and yet intelligent enough to
understand and apply knowledge gained from natural experiences. Though they cannot stand up to European
intrusion and retreat to the interior of the jungles of Surinam, they exploit
differences between French, Dutch and English settlers, and they play off
African slaves against ignorant colonists.
Not only were Indians, Judeans
and Jews confounded in the tropes of New World propaganda, for and against, but
the imagery of the Black Legend of Spanish Conquest emphasized the cruelty of
the European conquerors by showing native peoples being dismembered, their body
parts strewn around as in a shambles or hung on hooks over open fires as in a
kitchen. Previous depictions of the
newly-named Indians as cannibals has tried to cast that grotesque light on
their savage habits, but especially in Protestant Lands the inverting mirror of
satire would attempt to present a vision of suffering Noble Savages in order to
discredit brutish Catholics. Indeed, it
has been argued that the propagandistic cartoons developed during the Religious
Wars of the early seventeenth century, fought mostly in German-speaking lands
of Central Europe, first in vented these scenes of torture and abuse, but then
transferred them to so-called scientific illustrations of heathenish customs in
the New World, from which then would return to be exploited in further
anti-Catholic posters and booklets. In
the midst of this farrago of partly-true and partly-concocted imagery, the role
and the likeness of Jewish suffering were also played out—sometimes from older
filthy, scandalous pictures of rabbis capturing, killing and cutting up
innocent Christian boys for the purposes of ritual slaughter (in early
instances of the Blood Libel),[ii]
sometimes in both verbal and visual accounts of anti-Jewish massacres and
pogroms from the Crusades through to the Cossack Uprising in the
mid-seventeenth century. For Jess
especially these last icons of martyrdom and suffering would be recognized as
similar to drawings and paintings of the Fall of the Second (King Herod’s) Temple[iii]
illustrating passages from Josephus’s Jewish
Wars. It is in this half-light, this
deliberate obscurity of expression, that we need to approach the grotesque
emblems in Oronooko. But the implications of a Jewishness behind
the other themes in the mixed narrative—comedy, tragedy, pastoral, satire—are
not merely to be inferred by retrospective knowledge of who and what Aphra Behn
was or might have been.
We should note as well, as rabbis
always did in midrashic exercises, the peculiarities and apparent infelicities
of language, logic and narrative order in the text, divergent spellings,
misplaced lexical units, breaks in syntax, solecisms of grammatical usage, gaps
and repetitions. For instance, look at
the repetition of the word resolution/irresolution
as the leitmotif of the long passage
discussed above. In its obvious primary meaning, it signals the triumph of will
over passion, the heroic decision made by both the African husband and wife to
endure pain and suffering in order to prevent mockery, scorn and humiliation—in
other words, to save face. Common usage,
however, gives to resolution the
sense of reaching a way to break an impasse, of choosing between alternatives,
of solving a problem and reaching an agreement between disputing parties. But within its etymological history and its
semantic development, resolution also
signals a way of breaking down a difficult, finding a way to harmonize a
discordant problem, dissolving something hard into something soft or fluid—to
get moving that which is stopped up. In
medical terms, it refers to the subsidence or disappearance of a swelling, an
inflammation, a fever. From se-luere meaning to set something free,
to unblock, to loosen, resolve comes to mean its opposite: to harden one’s
determination and to fix one’s will. To
be resolute is to dig one’s heels in
and take a determined stand for or against something, that is, to become free
of doubts and hesitations, to accept the inevitable and to place oneself where
the powers of fate can break themselves against one’s will.
This word complex leads us to an
approach into the person and persona of
the author and the evaluation of her long strange narrative called Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. A True
History by Mrs. A Behn (London,
1688). Notice that here the attribution
of the text to Mrs. A Behn is made part of the book title, part of the
complicated set of peculiar and puzzling elements that precede any reading of
the narrative as such. These elements,
these particles of information, are at once fragmentary relics of something
that fictionally is claimed to belong to an historical events, with all its
persons, places, and events, so that a much larger text lies behind it,
something as yet unwritten, perhaps recalled by the narrator and her sources,
and partly created out of literary reminiscences that can be shared by all
those who belong to the same cultural matrix as the putative compiler and
formal rememberer; in other words, what is presented here in terms of historia—a mode of argumentation, a
style of articulating and expressing a narrative, a protocol of rhetorical
persuasion and movement—is also a parody of travel writing, an imitation of
anthropology, a pretense at natural history (“science”), a crypto-message of
“intelligence” (a spy’s coded report and a forerunner of a spy novel); and thus
something that needs to be resolved, brought into focus, re-organized in the
eye and mind of the reader. There are
similar interpretive problems that arise when we consider the role of the
various European components of the colonial society forming in the area, as
well as contesting its possession and governance, the place of the indigenous
local Indian tribes who are at once savage (forest-dwelling and hence
“primitive” in terms of technical achievements and complexity of government) other taken as part of the fauna in the
descriptions of the value of the future colony as well as manipulators of a
cumulative knowledge based on natural experience,[iv]
and the imported black slaves from Africa who are treated as mere chattel and
yet perceived as noble, heroic and romantic figures of literature.
In other words, this kind of
study of Aphra Behn and her most famous prose-narrative named after its nominal
heroic protagonist Oroonoko (one
still hesitates to call it a novel) raises several interesting questions:
- The extent to which one may approach the
author and her works from a Jewish perspective, because the absence of
acknowledgment of its setting near Joodensavaan
is an acute allusion to the Sephardic refugees who reached the
contested English-Dutch region of Guyana (Surinam) in the first half of
the seventeenth century, and their need during the open negotiations,
military skirmishes and secrets wheeling-dealing to maintain (in part and
for a short time) their masks while operating in the mirror of history:[v] and
thus further—
- What
a Jewish perspective means in regard to such an ambiguous, fluid and
controversial topic. This raises the
two subordinate questions of, first: how far a Crypto-Jewish or Marrano
literature (they are not synonymous though they occasionally overlaps and
reinforce one another) needs to draw indirectly from rabbinical writings,
customs and ethical ideals or project itself through the language,
concepts and iconography of Christian traditions and practice before it
becomes something distinct both from the kosher body of Judaism and the orthodox dogmas of the Catholic
Church; and second, in what ways the books of these putative set of
generic categories engages in the process of midrashing private, communal and historical experiences and
memories into textual phenomena.
And then:
- More
generally, how far is it legitimate to create contexts for a
mid-seventeenth-century book like Oronooko
that draw on attitudes, insights and information available two or three
hundreds of years later? Or even from two hundred or two millennia
earlier? In other words, what is
the critical reader’s role in resolving the tensions, fitting together the
pieces of the puzzle, generating adequate answers to the riddles asked,
and other acts of interpretation and application?
[i] Dov
Weiss, “Anachronism and Authorty,” review of Naftali S. Cohen, The Memory of the Temple and the Making of
the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) on H-Net
Reviews (September 2013) at
http:www.h-net.org/reviews/showrevphp?id=38222.
[ii] Another
scene commonly recalled in visual art and dramatic performance was the Massacre
of the Innocents, when Herod sent his soldiers to slay young children born
around the time of Jesus’s nativity in order to ward off the threat to his own
kingship. Only a few artists would,
however, be conscious of the potential in these scenes to show Jewish children
and their mothers—for who else were the inhabitants of the towns and villages
of Judea where the Herodian militias were sent?
As I have argued in my essays on The Second Shepherd Plays, the authors,
script-redactors, players and even some of the audience would contain
Crypto-Jews and/or Marranos who were aware and would take the opportunity to
express their own deepest, most secret feelings.
[iii] Actually
the third, as Herod rebuilt the Second Hasmonean Temple, and recent archelogy
suggests that development of the Temple site continued after Herod’s death
right up to the time of the Roman investment and eventual destruction of that
House of Holiness (Bet Kodesh).
[iv] It should not be forgotten that very soon
after the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese sailors, explorers, and
missionaries, the image of the indigenous peoples-=-the “Indians”—was
confounded with that of the Jews, “Idumeans”, “Judeans”, Lost Tribes, and mysterious
mixed-peoples or Creoles who may have from the very beginning self-formed out
of run-away slaves, absconding exiles from the Inquisition and various nomadic
groups themselves escaping from Inca, Aztec and other fanatical
sacrifice-obsessed empires or engaged in mythical-mystical peregrinations to
discover magical edenic other worlds.
[v] Norman Simms, “Being
Crypto-Jewish in Colonial Brazil (1500-1822): Brushing History Against the
Grain”, Parts 1 and 2”, Journal of
Religious History 31:4 (2007) 421-450
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