Notes and annotated bibliography for the discussion I'm leading today (regular blog follows):
The Uncanniness of Female Jewish Faith
Medieval Hebrew Women Poet
Women and Jews both lived on the margins of medieval Christian Europe. Though one a gender and the other an ethnicity/religion, the two were compounded in several ways by the controlling social forces of Christian Europe. Both were monsterized for being something "other", defined through the discursive power of their difference to normative masculine and Christian identity. The monsterizing mark of woman_menstruation_becomes affiliated with all Jewish people in the sermons of Berthold of Regensburg, an anti-Semitic priest of the medieval period. Jewish men are feminized in this way, pushing them further into the realm of monstrosity. This accusation of Jewish male menstruation has its root in the Pauline Christian obsession with the ritual circumcision of Jewish male babies. This focus on the bodies, particularly the sexual organs, of Jewish males, and on women as well, is an example of the objectifying of the "other", stripping the "other" of his or her higher being, making the "other" an animal. By making women and Jews purely carnal beings, Christian males denied these groups access and belonging to the universal body of Christ that was so important to the formulation of the medieval Christian identity. This exclusion is deeply problematic for the construct: Christianity is borne of Judaism and man is borne of woman. Because women and Jews are the root of men and Christians, they are undeniably part of the body. Their attempted exclusion, then, becomes uncanny: the female and the Jewish are both part and not part of the body. Their monstrosity is reaffirmed.
A Jewish woman, then, is doubly monstrous. Her femaleness and her religious/ethnic identity make her a dual stranger. According to the masculine, Christian construct of her identity, she is extraordinarily corporeal. The current belief of women's religious capacity held that a woman, as a sexed being, was infinitely tied to her sexual function as the bearer of new life. This meant that she could never transcend individual selfhood and pass into the universal body of Christ. The only way for her to reach enlightenment of salvation, was to unsex herself and become male, the normative bodily form, or to marry into a man's salvation. Jews, similarly, were unable to assimilate into the universal due to their highly carnal orientation. As marginalized figures, their identity was assigned by the dominant group, their bodies stripped of human worth and defined by Christian male desire. They served the function of reminding Christians of the literal truth of the word of God as recorded in the Old Testament. Their bodies symbolized the physical home of the Law of Moses. In this way, Jews were also forbidden full access to the whole of medieval empowered identity and pushed into the margins, monsterized.
Where is the Jewess in this? The woman of any faith is an enigma. How can a woman be religiously faithful if she has no hopes of redemption but through denial and transcendence of her womanhood (a condition even more monstrous to the medieval male ego)? Jewish religiosity, too, stands as a marvel. The Jewish woman is a dual monster. It is perhaps for this reason that Merecina of Gerona placed herself quite literally in the margins, remaining anonymous but for the acrostics in her poetry. She, like Marie de France, seeks to identify with her works, or to be identified by them (indeed, to be identified by her power of mind rather than the assigned symbolism of her body would be quite the welcome change), yet must remain somehow hidden. This uncanny existence on the social and physical margins is seen yet unseen, known yet anonymous.
The religious aspect of the poems written by Merecina of Gerona and the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat are particularly interesting when looked at from this angle. Their anonymity is a testament to their feminine existence. The historical narratives and traditional prayer or praise poems serve to preserve and protect their Jewish/Hebrew ancestry and culture. It follows that as it is a woman's job to physically bear the future, then the preservation of histories and folktales falls as the woman's responsibility as well.
The sexing of religion is explained by Julia Kristeva in her letters to Catherine Clement. Woman's bodies play the important role of gatekeeper to the divine. Rather than the reduced corporeal existence argued above, Kristeva visions women as beings of both bios and zoos, "genetics and biography". In this position, women are sacred, their sexuality especially so. It is from this point, that Kristeva sees religious discourse about and by women as being elevated sexual discussion. The religious experience of women is deeply tied to sexuality; the poems of these Hebrew women are overtures of sexual desire. Indeed, some of the poems by the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat do not disguise their sexual heat.
The parallels between these women writers and Marie de France are sometimes unexpectedly strong. One hopes to dismiss the idea of the universal feminine, but the surviving narratives of medieval women show many sharp similarities in their experience of sexed difference. Like the women characters in la Passion Beatrice, these women writers, along with Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Charlotte Bronte, and a million other scribbling women, could sit together and know their sisterhood with but little communication despite their many cultural differences. Merely by being sexed female, they have known something of the same experience: Dunash ben Labrat's wife sings the same lament as the wife of the Wanderer, and all reveal the anger and fear that comes from being the externally-identified birth-monster of the future.
Annotated Bibliography
Bildhauer, Bettina. "Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture". The Monstrous Middle Ages. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds. University of Toronto Press, 2003. 75-92.
Bildhauer explores the monsterization of Jews in medieval Europe. As an 'other'_non-Christian_Jews became identifiable with all 'others'; monsters, women, and Jews become the same. Bildhauer includes two main examples_Gog and Magog on the Ebstorf mappa mundi, and the anti-Semitic sermons of Berthold of Regensburg_to illustrate her argument that Jews were excluded from the symbolic body of Christ that provided the basis for European Christian identity. These examples, which explain that the Christian-assigned Jewish identity and its affiliation with blood draw, also draw many parallels with Christ. The positioning of Jews within the community and the historical significance of the Jewish culture created ambiguity that pulls Jews back into the symbolic body of Christ from which they are otherwise excluded. The uncanniness of this situating on the margins aids in the monsterization of Jewish people.
Especially of interest is the passage on pages 90-91 on menstruation and the feminization of Jews and monsterization of women. Another passage that sparked particular interest is found on page 83. Here, Bildhauer describes how Jews became the "receptacle of anything 'other', anything that Christians didn't want to be." In this way, Jewish bodies, like women's bodies, became the stages upon which the drama of Christian self-identification played out. The discursive limits of not only sex, but ethnicity, religion, and cultural affinity are revealed.
Boyarin, Jonathon. "Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew". Thinking in Jewish. The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 34-62.
This essay explores the internal and external cultural importance of two major physical markers of the Jewish male individual: circumcision and the headcovering worn by Orthodox Jewish men. The idea of the 'other' is especially important to this discussion_how these markers establish the Jewish male as an 'other' and how European Christians (and other modern people) have used such symbols to marginalize and monsterize Jews.
The passages that struck the strongest note for the topic at hand is when Boyarin takes the above mentioned themes a step further: Pauline Christians used circumcision as a focus for their accusations that Jews are focused on the flesh, are carnal. Circumcision was a practice common to many of the 'outsiders' of medieval Europe, making it a clear marker of non-Christian identity (40-41). An exceptionally relevant quote is found on page 37: "In order for the margins to exist at all, they must have some content that affords them the possibility to resist pressure to evacuate or implode. Margins therefore produce their own centralizing and conformist pressures." This statement allows for an examination of the literature of marginalized peoples for evidence of norms and identifying markers.
Clement, Catherine and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Jane Marie Todd, trans. Columbia University Press, 2001.
Though I have not finished reading more than the first few letters exchanged between these scholars, I found many interesting points regarding the role women play in religion. Women play an important transitional role in human relation to the sacred: they give life, the sacred. Women are the physical mourners of humanity, the "eternal hired mourners" (12). Women's bodies are the intersection between physical, biological life and the psychological, spiritual drama. Kristeva understands the religious experience as sadomasochistic, and finds women's role in this to be particularly masochistic. The "'divine' corresponds to their masochism". This physical manifestation of the holy in women is behind the eroticization of the religious experience: "what is experienced as 'sacred' is a translation of eroticism into more noble terms".
The importance of women's religious poetry is heightened after reading these letters. The reason for writing the poetry becomes clearer and some of the poems warrant a closer reading.
Lambert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. University of Philadelphia Press, 2004. 21-57.
The two prominent themes found in this chapter (The Hermeneutics of Difference) are that of the metaphor of an olive branch grafted onto a prospering tree and the figuring of women and Jews as incomplete by normative masculine, Christian thought of the medieval period. In the examination of the olive branch metaphor, the author reveals that the passage was used to demonstrate not simply the idea of universality in Christ but the necessity and triumph of supercession. As male springs from female and then overtakes her, making her subservient, so Christianity (gendered masculine) has its roots in Judaism, but coming after and being superior, rightfully supercedes it. In this way, and in it "incompleteness", Judaism becomes gendered female. Normative masculinity and Christianity further marginalize womanhood and Jewishness using this psychological trope of incompleteness. Woman is linked to the body, particular individuality, and therefore cannot alone transcend particularity and become part of the universal body of Christ. To do so, she must shed her body, renounce her femininity and effectively become male. Silimarly, because of its link to the Old Testament, Judaism is a symbol of the old ways, a literal bearer of the truth of the Bible, physical possessors of the Law of God. Therefore, Jewishness, like womanhood, is a carnally imprisoned identity that prevents it from being taken into the universal.
Because of the "impossibility" of a woman being religious, women's religious poetry is especially problematic in this paradigm. A Jewish woman is doubly severed from universality. What, then, does a Jewish woman writer's religious poetry present to those who hold this worldview? The necessity of anonymity and therefore the use of acrostics is explained to some extent by this.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. Eighth edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2006. 2092-2152.
I referred back to this piece in considering the position of female writers. Even by the time Woolf was writing (and up to today), women writers had no established matriarchal literary lineage or inheritance. Woolf traces this condition to the past and current social condition of women: their financial independence on men (especially husbands and male relatives), the expected role of women in society, and the refusal of male denizens of art to recognize female creators.
The women Hebrew poets of medieval Europe were in even more dire straits than those of Woolf's reference. The very real physical danger that was possible when women writers may have paralyzed their craft, kept them from publishing under their names, leading them to prefer anonymity.
La Passion Beatrice. Bertrand Tavernier. Adolph Viezzi.
Though not a print source, I wanted to include this film in my analysis of Hebrew women's poetry. The film does a beautiful job of describing the crisis of being a woman in medieval England as well as providing a look at the religiosity of Christian women and their travails.
Buried grampa. I don't think I can cry anymore. At least not for a long time.
I have a brobot again.
Within the space of a couple months, I will have lost almost all of my roots on one side. That's hard to swallow. I barely know most of my family. I hate it.
I'm not letting it happen.
I actually enjoyed talking to my brobot. I loved being with my family on Sunday after the viewing. My sister, brobot, sister's boyf and I all stayed at mom's house (okay, sister and her boyf live there, but whatevs). We ordered pizza (had to go pick it up; no one delivers that far out in the boonies.) and watched Cops on TV and just. . . we were just a family. I don't know how to describe it. We were a family.
The guilt of not visiting my grampa more while he was still alive is motivating me into taking more time out of my wicked busy sched to be with the ones I love. I'm going to try to get up to my mom's house more often. I love it out there. And i have my own room (kinda; mine and the all the crap that doesn't go anywhere else) and a bed. ANd there's always lots of healthy, fresh, organic food. I want to get to know everyone.
And my friends are included in that list. I might be using this coming Saturday afternoon to have fun and possibly shoot.
ANd I' actually going to take a little bit of a break for Spring Break.
I've already asked off work.
I'm going to go down to my soldier's house and stay with him for a weekend. Get my snuggle on. Get laid. Talk for hours in person instead of over the phone. I could hear the shit-eatin' grin when I told him.
It's past my bedtime. I'm exhausted and achey.
But first:
1. What's your favorite color to wear?
2. What color looks absolutely amazing on the opposite sex?
3. What is one food item I should learn to make?
4. What kind of recipe would you like ME to teach YOU?
5. I had a really good question, but I forgot it. . . so. . . What was the first sex act you ever performed?
The Uncanniness of Female Jewish Faith
Medieval Hebrew Women Poet
Women and Jews both lived on the margins of medieval Christian Europe. Though one a gender and the other an ethnicity/religion, the two were compounded in several ways by the controlling social forces of Christian Europe. Both were monsterized for being something "other", defined through the discursive power of their difference to normative masculine and Christian identity. The monsterizing mark of woman_menstruation_becomes affiliated with all Jewish people in the sermons of Berthold of Regensburg, an anti-Semitic priest of the medieval period. Jewish men are feminized in this way, pushing them further into the realm of monstrosity. This accusation of Jewish male menstruation has its root in the Pauline Christian obsession with the ritual circumcision of Jewish male babies. This focus on the bodies, particularly the sexual organs, of Jewish males, and on women as well, is an example of the objectifying of the "other", stripping the "other" of his or her higher being, making the "other" an animal. By making women and Jews purely carnal beings, Christian males denied these groups access and belonging to the universal body of Christ that was so important to the formulation of the medieval Christian identity. This exclusion is deeply problematic for the construct: Christianity is borne of Judaism and man is borne of woman. Because women and Jews are the root of men and Christians, they are undeniably part of the body. Their attempted exclusion, then, becomes uncanny: the female and the Jewish are both part and not part of the body. Their monstrosity is reaffirmed.
A Jewish woman, then, is doubly monstrous. Her femaleness and her religious/ethnic identity make her a dual stranger. According to the masculine, Christian construct of her identity, she is extraordinarily corporeal. The current belief of women's religious capacity held that a woman, as a sexed being, was infinitely tied to her sexual function as the bearer of new life. This meant that she could never transcend individual selfhood and pass into the universal body of Christ. The only way for her to reach enlightenment of salvation, was to unsex herself and become male, the normative bodily form, or to marry into a man's salvation. Jews, similarly, were unable to assimilate into the universal due to their highly carnal orientation. As marginalized figures, their identity was assigned by the dominant group, their bodies stripped of human worth and defined by Christian male desire. They served the function of reminding Christians of the literal truth of the word of God as recorded in the Old Testament. Their bodies symbolized the physical home of the Law of Moses. In this way, Jews were also forbidden full access to the whole of medieval empowered identity and pushed into the margins, monsterized.
Where is the Jewess in this? The woman of any faith is an enigma. How can a woman be religiously faithful if she has no hopes of redemption but through denial and transcendence of her womanhood (a condition even more monstrous to the medieval male ego)? Jewish religiosity, too, stands as a marvel. The Jewish woman is a dual monster. It is perhaps for this reason that Merecina of Gerona placed herself quite literally in the margins, remaining anonymous but for the acrostics in her poetry. She, like Marie de France, seeks to identify with her works, or to be identified by them (indeed, to be identified by her power of mind rather than the assigned symbolism of her body would be quite the welcome change), yet must remain somehow hidden. This uncanny existence on the social and physical margins is seen yet unseen, known yet anonymous.
The religious aspect of the poems written by Merecina of Gerona and the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat are particularly interesting when looked at from this angle. Their anonymity is a testament to their feminine existence. The historical narratives and traditional prayer or praise poems serve to preserve and protect their Jewish/Hebrew ancestry and culture. It follows that as it is a woman's job to physically bear the future, then the preservation of histories and folktales falls as the woman's responsibility as well.
The sexing of religion is explained by Julia Kristeva in her letters to Catherine Clement. Woman's bodies play the important role of gatekeeper to the divine. Rather than the reduced corporeal existence argued above, Kristeva visions women as beings of both bios and zoos, "genetics and biography". In this position, women are sacred, their sexuality especially so. It is from this point, that Kristeva sees religious discourse about and by women as being elevated sexual discussion. The religious experience of women is deeply tied to sexuality; the poems of these Hebrew women are overtures of sexual desire. Indeed, some of the poems by the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat do not disguise their sexual heat.
The parallels between these women writers and Marie de France are sometimes unexpectedly strong. One hopes to dismiss the idea of the universal feminine, but the surviving narratives of medieval women show many sharp similarities in their experience of sexed difference. Like the women characters in la Passion Beatrice, these women writers, along with Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Charlotte Bronte, and a million other scribbling women, could sit together and know their sisterhood with but little communication despite their many cultural differences. Merely by being sexed female, they have known something of the same experience: Dunash ben Labrat's wife sings the same lament as the wife of the Wanderer, and all reveal the anger and fear that comes from being the externally-identified birth-monster of the future.
Annotated Bibliography
Bildhauer, Bettina. "Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture". The Monstrous Middle Ages. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds. University of Toronto Press, 2003. 75-92.
Bildhauer explores the monsterization of Jews in medieval Europe. As an 'other'_non-Christian_Jews became identifiable with all 'others'; monsters, women, and Jews become the same. Bildhauer includes two main examples_Gog and Magog on the Ebstorf mappa mundi, and the anti-Semitic sermons of Berthold of Regensburg_to illustrate her argument that Jews were excluded from the symbolic body of Christ that provided the basis for European Christian identity. These examples, which explain that the Christian-assigned Jewish identity and its affiliation with blood draw, also draw many parallels with Christ. The positioning of Jews within the community and the historical significance of the Jewish culture created ambiguity that pulls Jews back into the symbolic body of Christ from which they are otherwise excluded. The uncanniness of this situating on the margins aids in the monsterization of Jewish people.
Especially of interest is the passage on pages 90-91 on menstruation and the feminization of Jews and monsterization of women. Another passage that sparked particular interest is found on page 83. Here, Bildhauer describes how Jews became the "receptacle of anything 'other', anything that Christians didn't want to be." In this way, Jewish bodies, like women's bodies, became the stages upon which the drama of Christian self-identification played out. The discursive limits of not only sex, but ethnicity, religion, and cultural affinity are revealed.
Boyarin, Jonathon. "Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew". Thinking in Jewish. The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 34-62.
This essay explores the internal and external cultural importance of two major physical markers of the Jewish male individual: circumcision and the headcovering worn by Orthodox Jewish men. The idea of the 'other' is especially important to this discussion_how these markers establish the Jewish male as an 'other' and how European Christians (and other modern people) have used such symbols to marginalize and monsterize Jews.
The passages that struck the strongest note for the topic at hand is when Boyarin takes the above mentioned themes a step further: Pauline Christians used circumcision as a focus for their accusations that Jews are focused on the flesh, are carnal. Circumcision was a practice common to many of the 'outsiders' of medieval Europe, making it a clear marker of non-Christian identity (40-41). An exceptionally relevant quote is found on page 37: "In order for the margins to exist at all, they must have some content that affords them the possibility to resist pressure to evacuate or implode. Margins therefore produce their own centralizing and conformist pressures." This statement allows for an examination of the literature of marginalized peoples for evidence of norms and identifying markers.
Clement, Catherine and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Jane Marie Todd, trans. Columbia University Press, 2001.
Though I have not finished reading more than the first few letters exchanged between these scholars, I found many interesting points regarding the role women play in religion. Women play an important transitional role in human relation to the sacred: they give life, the sacred. Women are the physical mourners of humanity, the "eternal hired mourners" (12). Women's bodies are the intersection between physical, biological life and the psychological, spiritual drama. Kristeva understands the religious experience as sadomasochistic, and finds women's role in this to be particularly masochistic. The "'divine' corresponds to their masochism". This physical manifestation of the holy in women is behind the eroticization of the religious experience: "what is experienced as 'sacred' is a translation of eroticism into more noble terms".
The importance of women's religious poetry is heightened after reading these letters. The reason for writing the poetry becomes clearer and some of the poems warrant a closer reading.
Lambert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. University of Philadelphia Press, 2004. 21-57.
The two prominent themes found in this chapter (The Hermeneutics of Difference) are that of the metaphor of an olive branch grafted onto a prospering tree and the figuring of women and Jews as incomplete by normative masculine, Christian thought of the medieval period. In the examination of the olive branch metaphor, the author reveals that the passage was used to demonstrate not simply the idea of universality in Christ but the necessity and triumph of supercession. As male springs from female and then overtakes her, making her subservient, so Christianity (gendered masculine) has its roots in Judaism, but coming after and being superior, rightfully supercedes it. In this way, and in it "incompleteness", Judaism becomes gendered female. Normative masculinity and Christianity further marginalize womanhood and Jewishness using this psychological trope of incompleteness. Woman is linked to the body, particular individuality, and therefore cannot alone transcend particularity and become part of the universal body of Christ. To do so, she must shed her body, renounce her femininity and effectively become male. Silimarly, because of its link to the Old Testament, Judaism is a symbol of the old ways, a literal bearer of the truth of the Bible, physical possessors of the Law of God. Therefore, Jewishness, like womanhood, is a carnally imprisoned identity that prevents it from being taken into the universal.
Because of the "impossibility" of a woman being religious, women's religious poetry is especially problematic in this paradigm. A Jewish woman is doubly severed from universality. What, then, does a Jewish woman writer's religious poetry present to those who hold this worldview? The necessity of anonymity and therefore the use of acrostics is explained to some extent by this.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. Eighth edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2006. 2092-2152.
I referred back to this piece in considering the position of female writers. Even by the time Woolf was writing (and up to today), women writers had no established matriarchal literary lineage or inheritance. Woolf traces this condition to the past and current social condition of women: their financial independence on men (especially husbands and male relatives), the expected role of women in society, and the refusal of male denizens of art to recognize female creators.
The women Hebrew poets of medieval Europe were in even more dire straits than those of Woolf's reference. The very real physical danger that was possible when women writers may have paralyzed their craft, kept them from publishing under their names, leading them to prefer anonymity.
La Passion Beatrice. Bertrand Tavernier. Adolph Viezzi.
Though not a print source, I wanted to include this film in my analysis of Hebrew women's poetry. The film does a beautiful job of describing the crisis of being a woman in medieval England as well as providing a look at the religiosity of Christian women and their travails.
Buried grampa. I don't think I can cry anymore. At least not for a long time.
I have a brobot again.
Within the space of a couple months, I will have lost almost all of my roots on one side. That's hard to swallow. I barely know most of my family. I hate it.
I'm not letting it happen.
I actually enjoyed talking to my brobot. I loved being with my family on Sunday after the viewing. My sister, brobot, sister's boyf and I all stayed at mom's house (okay, sister and her boyf live there, but whatevs). We ordered pizza (had to go pick it up; no one delivers that far out in the boonies.) and watched Cops on TV and just. . . we were just a family. I don't know how to describe it. We were a family.
The guilt of not visiting my grampa more while he was still alive is motivating me into taking more time out of my wicked busy sched to be with the ones I love. I'm going to try to get up to my mom's house more often. I love it out there. And i have my own room (kinda; mine and the all the crap that doesn't go anywhere else) and a bed. ANd there's always lots of healthy, fresh, organic food. I want to get to know everyone.
And my friends are included in that list. I might be using this coming Saturday afternoon to have fun and possibly shoot.
ANd I' actually going to take a little bit of a break for Spring Break.
I've already asked off work.
I'm going to go down to my soldier's house and stay with him for a weekend. Get my snuggle on. Get laid. Talk for hours in person instead of over the phone. I could hear the shit-eatin' grin when I told him.
It's past my bedtime. I'm exhausted and achey.
But first:
1. What's your favorite color to wear?
2. What color looks absolutely amazing on the opposite sex?
3. What is one food item I should learn to make?
4. What kind of recipe would you like ME to teach YOU?
5. I had a really good question, but I forgot it. . . so. . . What was the first sex act you ever performed?
VIEW 9 of 9 COMMENTS
<3 I do my best!!!
Period.
Like I find certain types attractive, but I don't really fetishize them.
For instance, Charm's and Rys's ears I especially like.
Oh, and yes, my journal story is the long version of what I wrote above!