|
||||||||
(I wonder if
this is what Dina had in mind?)
So, why do I engage in a whimsical report of my travels through the wrong fourteenth century? More familiar with Late Bronze and Iron Age
“ancient Israel,” what am I doing
poking around in medieval manuscripts, subjecting their margins to the same kind of
scrutiny usually reserved for textual content? Well,
as an artist, I am still working out my disgust with my own education, a narrowly based
consideration of text that never mentioned the micrography of the Masoretes except for its
use in textual reconstruction, never alerted me to the presence of women like me, female
scribes, working away in secluded obscurity, or to the shimmering Hebrew illustrations glowing unseen in specialized
libraries. After the shock of the paintings
of the Dura-Europas synagogue (I guess that whole second Commandment thing was just a
“guideline”, not a law!), doesn’t a modern scribal artist deserve to follow
her history a little further, despite handicaps of being from the wrong discipline, the
wrong faith, and the wrong gender?
Thanks
to funding from my institution for our Worship, Theology and the Arts program, I had the
funding to pursue my frustrated search for women scholars and scribes of the past. Feminist Codicology? Technically, I was hot on the trail of the Jewish
gazelle: my work on the Song of Songs convinced me that much of its poetic imagery was in
fact based on a visual ‘register’ of iconic representations from the Near East,
a register replete with female and goddess imagery whose only mention for general readers
was to be found in specialized commentaries by Pope or Keel. Waiving the question of
whether or not medieval Hebrew manuscripts were made by Jews or secular Christian scribes
filling a Jewish order, I wondered if comparison of families of imagery might prove useful
in determining provenance of images, their origin, and reuse by later communities. (In a postmodern world, such questions are as good
as any other.)
Gazelles
and trees were my target images, and, equipped with digital camera and bibliographies, I
was trying to see if there might be continuity between ancient images and medieval ones. Amsterdam yielded up different images than the
ones I was expecting, deserving critical study by some nice Jewish girl with more
expertise in the medieval period. There are
dissertations here! I thought to myself upon my return.
So, I offer images here in hope of stimulating more research and discussion. Once again, in feminist studies, it is easy to see
that we have been taught not to look outside our
own bailiwicks, the better to preserve the convention of female invisibility in history,
humanities, and faith.
Dutch Flowers: Author’s watercolor
Week One.
Ah, Amsterdam! (Trust Athalya to
put me in such dangerous temptation.) Flowers
everywhere—I am way too close to the
Bloemenmarkt for the good of my budget! And
such fashion sense everywhere: dildos openly displayed in shop fronts appear in colors
never seen in nature. Even the dogs sport the
same costume as their bondage-oriented owners! The
women students of the University of Amsterdam (where I am hosted) are tall and thin and
blond: I pass among them unnoticed, and it
feels wonderful to have been de-genderized by stature, age and coloring. It is remarkably freeing to be the troll
beneath the bridge rather than the princess chained to it.
I take risks I never would have in my academic ‘work clothes’, and
find it wholly wonderful to be an out-of-place biblical scholar on the town.
My research assistant, upon arrival, announces that she had never had any interest in research of the academic kind, but
had come along to study irrigation ditches, naturally of considerable interest to a Yankee
farmer. I take a deep breath, tuck away the
bibliography which I had hoped to complete, and regroup.
Armed with minimal Dutch and barbaric German (I only know verbs in the past
tense, it seems), sketchbook and camera enabled, I strike out for the Bibliotheca
Rosenthaliana: quiet, a repository of a collection of printed Haggadot, but a few
medieval texts too, most notably the Esslingen
Mahzor and the Sefer Or Zarua. The Or Zarua
tells perhaps one of the earliest versions of the legend of R. Amnon. This renowned scholar of Mainz was mutilated by a
Christian leader who could not convert him, but the good rabbi appeared in a dream after
his death, teaching a now-standard liturgical hymn. Fair
enough: you can’t keep a good teacher down, apparently, whether in Roman Palestina or
the medieval Christian Rhineland.
But it
is when I ask for the Sefer Mitzwot Katan that
the librarian’s eyes light up: “Such a wonderful manuscript, but no one ever
asks for it!” (Gentle Reader, you may
view information about this super resource on line at http://cf.uba.uva.nl/en/collections/rosenthaliana/
. To view images of the manuscripts discussed here, see the on-line version of Treasures of Jewish Booklore, published by the
Bibliotheca, at http://cf.uba.uva.nl/nl/publicaties/treasures/frame.html ). Colette Sirat’s summary of the main features
of the manuscript can be found under the frame link to “1386”).
The Sefer is a fourteenth-century copy
of the popular Small Book of Precept by Isaac ben Joseph of Corbeil, from about a
century before. A sort of household
compendium of everything a good Jewish family needed to know—Good Housekeeping with a soupcon of Leviticus, it
was widely loved, copied, glossed and annotated. Divided
into seven sections, I wonder if it has a proverbial genre behind it. But in this case, it is the scribe who delights,
and not the content of the text: it was
copied by Hannah bat Menachem Zion, of Cologne, a divorced
woman, probably of a scribal family—after all, what female scribe wasn’t?
Immediately,
questions come to mind: how did Hannah fare
in Cologne and how did she manage to get out of that city in one piece? Only a century later, the Theological Faculty of
the University placed its seal of approval on the outrageous Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in 1487, thereby becoming a
noted hotbed of ‘pyromania’ with respect to uppity women and key distributor of
anti-woman techniques of torture. Such trends
do not begin overnight; I wondered about the state of the Jewish community a century
before the witchcraze made misogynist hate speech one of the most enduring products of
that marvelous new invention by Guttenberg.
And how
did Hannah and her family fare during the Plague years, 1347-52, when 25 million Europeans
died in just five years. Jews, of course,
were blamed for poisoning wells, with few Christian communities ever stopping to reflect
that the Jewish community drank from those very same wells!
Did the decimation of the medieval workforce have some impact on Hannah’s
ability to receive scribal training? All the
miniaturists of the Winchester school in England died in a single week; the scribal
tradition never recovered from this loss of living “intellectual capital” of
technique and expertise. Did Hannah see the
Plague herself or did her family flee persecution because of it?
Setting
aside the inquiry about how the Jewish community made out during times when even
Christians were at grave risk, a question closer to home for the historian of women in
Judaism surfaces: a divorced woman can be a scribe? In
“down home” terms from my southern childhood, “that really takes the rag
off the bush!” Surely, from all we are
taught to assume, Hannah should have been upstairs in an attic crying her eyes out, so
appalled by her fate that performance of even the most simple tasks of daily life would
constitute an impossibility, given her putative despair.
Maybe “plagues” of various sorts have implications for women in
particular, opportunities which lay hidden beneath the general narration of the events
sweeping Europe in the fourteenth century. So
much death, so many images of horror traumatizing a continent, stirring responses of wild
licentiousness or frightened asceticism!
Yet, here is Hannah, writing up a storm, and quickly, too! There is a sense of humor in Hannah’s
calligraphy, rudimentary illustrations and marginalia: look at a tracing of her
illumination of her own name found on folio 13r!
SeMaK, 13r
Nothing shy or retiring about this divorced female! The flourishes around the name are in deep red ink, and consistent with all her other decorations of this type. She calls special attention to her name by adding not just flourishes, but a circle of roundels enclosing the Hebrew. These seem to be used to set off one section from another in the Leipzig Haggadah; Hannah appears to know that general tradition and uses it throughout her work, as in f. 154r, just one line above a gorgeous sela of exceeding sharpness.(The Great Lady tells me this is clearly "sh-lo' ", and not an innovative and kinky sela---oh, where is my head at?)
SeMaK, 154r
In fact, I have a sense that the sharply
delineated letters here must mean that she had just recut her nib—I can almost feel
the knife in her hand. I believe she must
have kept two nibs by her, too; one for black and the other for red, because the purity of
her red ink shows no sign of black. Since the
use of red in Christian manuscripts to mark special feast days in liturgical tables gave
us those proverbial “red letter days,” we have to wonder where Hannah stands
within this artistic tradition. If Jewish
scribes are not marking calendrical events, what are
they marking, and does the use of the roundels vary from scribe to scribe? Does anyone know?
As I work through the manuscript, I am amazed at all Hannah knew, and the time and
effort it must have cost her to bring this project to completion. She stands well within the Ashkenazi scribal
traditions of the Rhineland. Somewhere along
the way, she must have been taught to select parchment, handle a quill or reed nib,
reconstitute ink, and well as other tasks that scribes must know. Was it Hannah who sewed the neatly embroidered
holes in parchment with a fine buttonhole stitch? (I finger the embroidery thread
covertly—it feels like linen to me, a staple in artistic bookbinding.) Did
she fold the sheets of parchment into quires, and pumice down any rough spots with ground
cuttlefish bone created in her own studio? Her
parchment shows a typical trait for Jewish manuscripts, in that one can see “neither
hide nor hair.” Unlike Christian
manuscripts where one can easily distinguish between the “good” side (hide) most
suitable for illustrations and the “bad” side (hair), Hannah’s pages of
parchment are largely indistinguishable in quality. A
kind of ecological statement, perhaps? If it
not lawful to yearn for new shoes if your old ones still give service, for the sake of the
animal who gave its life for human purpose, perhaps extra care was given to make both
sides of the parchment equally usable—for the sake of the life of the beast. Or, did her parchment come from ritually
slaughtered animals, the treatment of whose hides might have been affected by this
different provenance? Was it Hannah who went
to the orchard to gather the “gall nuts” from the oak trees to make her ink? Did a peddler come by with a supply ready to be
processed, and did he go to the backdoor of the monastery scriptoria, too?
Oh, Hannah, who are you? I need more
data!
Week Two: I
hear that the irrigation ditches of Holland do not disappoint, and neither does van Gogh
Museum -- some of those potato eaters have the lean and hungry look of colleagues back
home after the last downsizing. The polders
and their drainage systems are replete with their own histories, and I get my “ditch
update” daily. (And indeed, I *have*
noticed that the vegetables, especially the tomatoes, have actual flavors. Coming home on the trolley from the Museum, a
transvestite in great shoes gives me his seat. I
tell him he is a good boy as I admire his shoes, and he asks if I will tell that to his
mother.) But along with ditch stories,
ancient and modern, I am now treated to the corresponding histories of canals and pilings,
thanks to a discarded group of travel books in the hotel lobby. Fine; bits of folklore are always welcome, and I
find evidence even here that Jews and Christians are both alike in their use of proverbs,
yet different in what they choose to categorize as worthy of negative comment.
Outside
the old Portuguese Synagogue, stands a statue of a Dutch dockworker, a monument to
Februaruistaking (February 25), the strike of municipal workers in Amsterdam in 1941 in
protest of Nazi deportation of Dutch Jews. Organized
by the illegal Communist party, the strike grew from Amsterdam to outlying areas, but
ultimately had no impact on stopping German atrocities.
It was, however, a reminder that not all
of Europe stood silently by while their neighbors were singled out for extinction. The guide books tell us that this admirable
protest was led with the cry of the Dockworkers to the Nazis, “Keep your filthy hands
off our stinking Jews!” What a battle
cry for justice! (Read more about this era of Dutch resistance at http://www.uen.org/utahlink/lp_res/AnneFrankHolland.html
or http://www-lib.usc.edu/~anthonya/waralt.htm
. The same guide book cites a local Jewish
“folk saying” in giving the history of the prosperous Sephardic community whose
synagogue still stands: “Better your
daughter should marry a Goya, than an Ashkenaz.”
So even where groups mingle with relatively less friction, there may still
be plenty of reason to suspect old biases beneath the calm surface… But then, whose side is this old guide from the
50s on?
The Anne Frank Huis (http://www.annefrank.nl/ned/default2.html),
the Joods Historich Museum (http://www.jhm.nl/)
and the Dutch Resistance Museum (http://www.verzetsmuseum.org/home.html) tell the story with more
resources and rather different results.
Dockworker Statue, by Marie Andriessen
Working in the Humanities office while
its occupant attends festival days in Israel, I find the Dutch students have clearly
tagged me as someone who can fix the network printer.
I cheerfully lend a hand as well as give them their laugh of the day with my
German. My Dutch improves daily, thanks to
subtitled reruns of David Letterman and Sex and
the City, although the vocabulary I gain is not always the most useful
(“cesspit,” “lying weasel,” “tuchas-lingas”). Still, I can now order sausage brodjies with the best of them. Will these linguistic acquisitions aid me in
facing down the dreaded Xerox machine which only gives directions in Dutch? We shall see.
Searching
for Hannah in what slim documentary evidence there might be on Jewish medieval women, I
discover that she is not in the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Gentile’s
user-friendly starting place (adrift in the “H” entries, I discover there is
also no entry for “human rights!” I begin to worry about that, but that’s
another article!). Thanking the cosmos for
the work of Colette Sirat, who seems to be the only one writing on such things, I poke
around in the Jewish Historical Museum for remnants of women’s contributions. I realize that it is quite true that women’s
theology must be “read” differently: the
issue at stake is the medium of female
appropriation of theological traditions. I
should be reading “textiles”, not “texts,” if I am interested in the
way the work of women’s hands expresses their subjectivity. At last, I find my gazelle, in a format that could
only have been produced by someone like me:
Embroidered Pillow with Tree-and-Gazelle Motif, Provenance Unknown, Joods Historich Museum.
I was
hoping for micrographic gazelles in Hannah’s margins, along the order of those in
Feibusch Ashkenazi’s Ashkenazi Haggadah (f.
14a, where the gazelle’s leg is in the jaws of a dog, adding weight to Marc
Epstein’s contention that the Jewish communities saw themselves as the
“prey” of Christian hunters, changing those much beloved scenes of nobles
hunting into biting social commentary). Or a
tree, perhaps—a tree of life would be just what this doctor ordered! Hannah’s manuscript is divided into seven
sections (so writes Colette Sirat, but I don’t find them easy to pick out), and I
hoped to see mirrored in that arrangement a symbolic nod to the seven pillars of wisdom in
Proverbs 1-9, of special interest because it is there that Woman Wisdom begins her decent
into the human incarnation of Strong Woman householder of Proverbs 31. Hannah’s work doesn’t seem to be
gesturing toward any of those traditions (or so it seems, given her at-times mystifying
cursive medieval letters), and there is neither tree nor gazelle to be had. (Drat!)
Wending my way home from the Rosenthaliana, I succumb to an outpost of Aussie
ice-cream. Savoring the chocolaty goodness on
a bench, I feel like Cartman on South Park or
perhaps Homer Simpson, free of guilt and thoughts of consequences. But consequences there are: my wallet slips out
of my backpack, and I don’t find out quickly enough to search the right places. The Great Lady had already shaken her head at the
ease with which the pockets of my backpack could be picked, and I ruefully agree as I
trudge off to the police station and call home to cancel cards and what-not. But, miracle! (The police and the hotel think so,
too.) A businesswoman on an appointment to
city center finds the wallet and takes it directly to my hotel, something which happens
seldom-to-never. Angels do walk the streets in Amsterdam in human form! I am amazed, grateful, and I dutifully buy a much
more guarded bag to schlep about. Pondering
life in a café, I wonder if I have been sitting there too long.
“Watch out for Pick-pockets!” - Author’s drawing.
Viewing all these medieval manuscripts
that look like they were illustrated half by Dr. Seuss, I think my art is beginning to
show it.
Week Three. Husband arrives for visit; fun is had. Without a fun shopping companion, I had only
trekked off to the bead stores, which sported nothing that couldn’t be had in Boston
without having to declare it in customs. Now,
appropriately partnered, we discover the “The Seven Straatjes” (Streets) that
run between the Herengracht and the Prinsengracht canals, tiny shops (“winkels”)
with art, antiques, Indonesian imports and interesting clothes. It is here that one finds the little specialty
shops that serve the market for antique restoration of the canal houses: tassels and drapes, lampshades and buttons in
vintage and ultramodern styles. As the
well-trained husband-of-artist trots along beside, carrying parcels, he speaks the refrain
of all collage, and fiber artists visiting the city: “Oh, the winkels! The
winkels!” He understands that we will be
returning and claims he is only grateful that the eighteenth-century linen press, so
excellent for pressing etchings and handmade books, is too large to fit in a suitcase.
I have been storing up photographic needs that could not be met by my little
digital camera whose drivers sometimes work, often don’t. Now dragging my mate and his manual film camera
from museum to museum, I fill in the gaps and become Queen of the F-Stop (so much better
than being Princess of the F Train). Last
week’s trip to Leiden to view a Maimonides’ Moreh Nekuvim revealed carpet pages and marginalia
that stand squarely in the medieval Rhinish and Hibernian traditions: weird creatures of every sort, half human hybrids
of the ribald sort that conjure up Chaucer and the Luttrell Psalter. But call me biased:
I still have difficulty
believing that Jewish scribes would put this sort of deconstructive circus of monstrous
critters in their texts dealing with sacred traditions.
And what Jewish patron would pay a secular or monastic scribe who added
these unsolicited diversions to a manuscript? Are
these dogs, monkeys, and assorted bipeds indeed
social commentary? On what, and by whom?
Two years later in the British Library, still on my gazelle hunt, I finally get my
hands on a copy of Ruth Mellinkoff’s Antisemitic
Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Germany, which cannot be
had on eBay for love nor money. I am
delighted to learn that I am not the only one troubled by these hybrids in Jewish sacred
texts: Mellinkoff, in her examination of the ears on hybrid creatures, discovers them to
‘folded’, marking them as the ears of a pig.
For her, there is no possibility that a Jewish scribe or illuminator created these
hybrid images, and the reason they appear is amply accounted for in the medieval Germanic
ritual of the Judenssau. Any Jew who wished to bring legal action against
a Christian had to stand on bloody pigskin while making his case in the court---thus
effectively foreclosing on the ability of Jewish patron to seek redress when Christian
scribes put their own meanings and images into a Jewish book. There is, of course, more to hybridity than that
in the medieval world, but this may well be a Christian preoccupation which wound its way
into Jewish illuminations without Jewish consent.
Examining a facsimile of the Rylands Haggadah, a fourteenth-century
Sephardic manuscript, I conclude that Epstein’s remarks on the ‘hunt’ motif
are right on the money as I observe the manuscript’s strange permutations (f. 27b; f.
29b; f. 41a; f. 42b; cf. also Catalan Mahzor, f. 5a): now bunnies are climbing
trees to flee from hounds. A new joke forms
in my mind:
Why did
the Jewish bunny climb the tree?
To flee from the Christian dogs.
While disturbed by the implications of the creatures of the Jewish
bestiary-inspired marginalia, I am overwhelmed by the number of dragons I am seeing in
these medieval texts, both Jewish and Christian. Dragons
I know—they come complete and varied in any study of Near Eastern art history. Reclining, rampant, snaky or winged, they can
symbolize both bad luck (greedy ogres who drink up all the streams of water), or fertility
and its ambivalence (murky demoted goddesses of the waters who lurk under Genesis 1). And here in Amsterdam, they sprawl all over the
cities’ museums, curled up in their manuscripts like an ancient matriarch guarding
her hoard of gold and jewels. Sometimes
dog-faced, other times more reptilian in aspect, they seem to sport breasts more often
than not—now that is a pungent iconographic
comment if ever there was one!
The Museum Willet-Holthuysen on the Grachtengordel, built in 1685 and inhabited by
wealthy merchant families throughout the centuries, gives a great example of the
dragonomania of European art. The windows in
the upstairs “Antiquities Room,” which overlooks the garden, tell the story in
green light:
Female Dragon, Stained glass, Willet-Holthuysen House
Two main window scenes from the
seventeenth century show scenes from the Hebrew Bible, adapted from prints by Dutch artist
Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574). The
left-most one shows Job riding a slow tortoise (what’s that about?), followed along by the Satan,
swinging an afflicting branch at the naked but politely covered Job. Next to the horned Satan, is Mrs. Job following
behind Job, hands outstretched in a comforting way. Next
to her stand the three “comforters,” who are oddly linked to Job by reins he is
holding. In the background of this black and
white scene are scenes of the destruction of Job’s livelihood and children. On either side of this beset patriarch, we find
twin female dragons, clearly breasted, whose wing tips rise above the mythological scene
they flank and turn into vegetal motifs. Above
each outward-facing she-dragon (does she face away from patriarchal mythology to make her
own statement?) hangs a fruited branch, in
full blossom. The refracted light from the
garden which this window overlooks highlights the lush fertility of the flanking dragons,
even as the turtle-coach and its male characters are rendered without benefit of color. If I had to pick, I’d put these she-dragons
down on the side of fecundity, a nice motif for Dutch merchants who built and restored the
house, rather than as chaos-mongers or monstrous females.
But the horns on the Satan make me suspicious of the possibilities for
liberation of the dragonic female hybrids
found here, just on principle.
Down in basement, there are yet more dragons with breasts and hybrids, these from
the impressive collection of glass and pottery made by Abraham Willet in the late
nineteenth century. All these nipples drive
home the lessons of this art journey: some
motifs just won’t die!
Cermaic Epergne, collection of Abraham Willet
On this ceramic, again two female
dragons flank a central scene, this one with hybrids, gazelle-ish creatures side by side
with humanoids and elongated, stylized dragons, some with breasts and humanoid heads and
others with three crested horns. The main
focus of this scene reads from top to bottom: above,
a sort of ‘green man’ spits out the following central scene; below, a breasted
hybrid creature resembling a displaced mermaid with wings is shown in full frontal
position, similar to that of a Sheela-na-Gig. Immediately
beneath, a male human is centered inside a scalloped cartouche, flanked by two outward
facing female hybrids of a dragonish sort. Outside
of this whimsical scene of the central portion, two martial female-faced dragons wear a
military headdress, a breast plate with real breasts between which nestles a male face.
Off to the side of the breasted plate, wings fold back onto the central scene, leading the
viewer to pause to consider the relationships which make up the whole. Clawed feet ground
the two outward facing dragons, but the central portion of the pot is footed with a
demonic face with horns and a goatee, somewhat belying the harmless whimsy of the scene it
supports.
What should the viewer make of this confusion of gender, the purity of the male
figure in the cartouche and the distortion of the females?
The male face between the dragon-ladies’ breasts certainly seems
appropriate—perhaps this is all a stylized male fantasy, recalling the war goddesses
who also, inexplicably, bring fertility. If
hybridity signifies a social critique, perhaps of nobility by an artisan class, is there
an inherent genderizing of that critique? From
the presentation of the images here, the male is clearly center of all things, the female
assigned auxiliary protective roles. So:
perhaps in dragon imagery the female dragon stands not for chaos, a meaning often assigned
by critics—at least to the dragons from the Bronze Age, but for the nurturing
function without which no male could find himself the center of anything. How
nice to be useful!
Week Four. The weather has turned cold,
and I am ready to be somewhere else. In the
midst of rain and gusts of wind that blow away the mosquitoes of Amsterdam’s Indian
summer (is this what it’s called in Europe?), I find even more to admire in the tall,
blond super-women riding past me on the way to the place where Hannah’s enigmas lie bound up in leather. Even in tumultuous winds, they do not cover their
magnificent charms: little
“demi-sleeves” go with neck ponchos that hint of the firm curves beneath. A marsupial student-mom goes by, amazing me: with
one hand she holds her cell phone; with the other she levers an umbrella over her head and
shields the child strapped to her midsection. I
stare in surprise: surely there needs to be a hand for steering the bicycle?! But, no: the
umbrella is a must, and the cell-phone hand goes from slight touches to the handlebars up
to the face to cover yawns! Even the
multifunctional Dutch beauties get tired, I guess, which makes me suspect that they could possibly belong to the same species as the
Middle-aged Moms Who Love Jesus who comprise the bulk of my students back home.
Immersing myself in the quest for Hannah, having searched for her in archival
records and sought out her scribal traditions in other manuscripts and art works, I am all
the more delighted with the woman! Though I
find next to nothing about her, I still have the present witness of her illustrations, her
humor, her curvaceous script. Hannah’s
version of the SeMaK has annotations by R.
Meir of Rothenburg, the great man of medieval response
who ruled on the legality of illustrations in liturgical and other sacred texts. While he maintained the view that even a Jew was
allowed to have two-dimensional art in
‘his’ book without breaking any commandments, he nevertheless frowned on the
practice. Curious, hybrid creatures and
cunning illustrations were all too able to distract the reader from the true meaning and
purpose of the words of the text! How well
does Hannah know his teachings on such matters? If
she does know them, they don’t stop her from adding her own set of marginal visual
elements, though they are inoffensive, compared to the Maimonides in Leiden. On the bottom of f.22 verso, she goes to
town—is this a comment on the comment?
SeMaK, 22v
SeMaK, 53v.
And just what the heck is that on page
53 verso? A flying Aleph, along the lines of
mystical calligraphy of Moses Cordovero in Pardes
Rimmonim (Cracow, 1593)? A windmill? The layout of an herb garden? How does this what’s-it fit in with the context of the
words beneath, “to mourn concerning”? [“to mourn about relatives, one must
tear…” – Editor’s note]
But Hannah does not spurn basic micrography in her composition of a page’s
‘look’, either. Does her choice of
rounded forms on 18 recto have anything to do with the mended hole in the parchment?
SeMaK, 18r
I am starting to go all
‘Rorschach’ as I consider the relation of text, mistake, marginal notes and main
text block. I see a female form in this
micrography—a flowering stalk blossoming into an elongated ‘flower’ of
notes. In this whimsy, the mended tear looks
like an arrow pointing to the area of the margin between two ‘text balls,’ or an
arm branching out from the midriff of a woman composed of two circles representing chest
and flanks. Elsewhere (f. 43 recto) Hannah sticks a little pointing hand in the margin
when she wants to make the reader certain of her emphasis.
Colette Sirat has noted that Hannah’s most elaborate illustration is to be
found on page 66 recto, at the head of the section on purity (the Hebrew reads lqdsh),
but she does not show the page or discuss it. Here,
Gentle Reader, we find the most extraordinary creature, or at least, an extraordinary
version of the motif explored above. Just
look!
Hannah’s Dragon, 66r
In a world of female dragons, interpreted as positive in fertility and negative in chaos, Hannah gives us an armless/pawless dragon with an erect penis!! I have enough confidence in Hannah’s drawing skills to say that the extra ‘stroke’ that creates the nub at the end of the dragon’s phallus must have meaning, as it is clearly there for emphasis—but whether it highlights the retracted foreskin of an uncircumcised penis ready for penetration, or the circumcised penis of her own kind cannot be determined, even in close-up. She’s making a point of the dragon’s penis, but what point would that be?? And after all those breasts, nipple upon nipple gracing manuscripts and decorative art, why is her dragon male, and not only male, but rampantly so? If the illuminated word beneath is not qdsh but qrsh, then she could be referring to a single-horned (!) beast, read variously as a ‘unicorn’ or some sort of gazelle in Jastrow’s lexicon. Has Hannah give me a dragon-cum-gazelle (ahem!) image to complete my cycle of artistic musings on her text, or is she just messing with my head? Can I ever know?
Back in Massachusetts, I am wondering what it all means. You, Gentle Reader, may be wondering, too—at
least I hope so! You will note that I have
not included an exposition relating Hannah’s penis to the content of the whole
textual section, but only to the red illuminated guide word heading the section. This is deliberate: this is surely someone’s dissertation, and I have already
written one. I know a phallus when I
see one, especially when it displaces the more common breasts on the beast. But what does it mean? Why is it there?
If ever there was a ‘gendered’ comment being made by the marginal
(female, divorced, Jew) artist-calligrapher, this is certainly it!
Hannah’s iconography for this section ought to be compared to other versions
of the SeMaK, as well as to the whole set of
dragons in the corpus of Jewish manuscripts from the Rhineland—Mahzorim, Haggadot,
whatever. Her existence should be explored in
deeds, letters, responsa, and archives of
medieval Jewish communities (these sorts of documents, when on parchment, were often saved
by Christian book and parchment makers during the Inquisition’s zealous burnings,
often finding their way into archives as wrappers of Christian secular documents, or as
padding beneath the leather of bound Christian books).
Who knows where Hannah might turn up, if a dedicated feminist went
looking in the right place?
You may ask, O future biographer of Hannah and her community, why this little travel journal appears here as
‘modern fiction’. A good question,
with good answers: it is a modern fiction to
think that we can ever know the past we seek to reconstruct. Postmodern theories of history writing teach us to
suspect the verities we seek to establish. But
it is also fiction to believe that we will stop trying to recover the women of the past
who contributed, however marginally, to a largely male-mediated religious tradition. Hannah’s penis is no fiction, but its meaning
is deferred and possibly vanished. Yet, a
medieval Jewish woman’s comment on purity is worth understanding. This is a story whose ending has not yet been
written—that remains for you to complete, dear sister.
Hannah and her dragon are waiting for you!
Beit-Arié,
Malachi. The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book:
Studies in Paleography and Codiocology. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1993.
Camille,
Michael. Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter
and the Making of Medieval England. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Epstein,
Marc Michael. Dreams of Subversion in Medieval
Jewish Art and Literature. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
1997.
van
de Kieft, Anneke. Museum Willet-Holthuysen. Translated by Wendie Shaffer. Amsterdam:
Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1999.
Mellinkoff,
Ruth. Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated
Manuscripts from Medieval Germany.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art, 1999.
Offenberg,
Adri K., Emile G. Schrijver, F. J. Hoogewoud, and Lies Kruijer-Poesiat, eds. Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana: Treasures of Jewish Booklore. Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1994.
Richler,
Binyamin. Hebrew Manuscripts: A Treasured Legacy. Cleveland/Jerusalem:
Ofeq Institute, 1990.
Sirat,
Colette. “Les femmes juives et
l’ecriture au Moyen Age.” Les nouveaux
cahiers 101 (1990): 14-33.
