Perhaps of interest.

Best,
Roberto


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Date: Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:41 PM
Subject: H-Net Review Publication:  'The Supernatural Reconsidered'
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Jeremy Asher Dauber.  In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and
the Early Modern.  New Haven  Yale University Press, 2010.  x + 399
pp.  $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-14175-7.

Reviewed by Zelda Kahan Newman (Lehman College)
Published on H-Judaic (September, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

The Supernatural Reconsidered

English-readers unfamiliar with premodern Yiddish literature will
find in this book four different genres of Yiddish stories about the
supernatural. Professor Dauber compares and contrasts these tales,
giving the reader a sense of their individuality and complexity.
However, the title of this book is deceptively narrow, while its
subtitle is deceptively broad. Although this book does indeed deal
with a tale of a she-demon in a man's bedroom, that is only one of
the four primary texts examined in this book. And while the early
modern era (the sixteenth to the seventeenth century) is indeed the
temporal locus of this book, there is no attempt here to examine all
of the Yiddish literature of this era. Only tales of the supernatural
are examined here.

The introductory chapter of this book is followed by a second chapter
that contains a comparative case study of witches and demons in the
works of Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. After these chapters,
the book begins in earnest to examine: 1) a book of fables; 2) the
story of a she-demon and a man; 3) _dybbuk_ tales; and 4) the
chivalric romance called "Tale of Briyo and Zimro."

In his introduction, Dauber tells us that the supernatural element
shared by the four stories suggests that all four genres are open to
similar theoretical considerations. All raise questions of potential
skepticism of the audience as readers and as thinkers. The topics
covered in the rest of the introduction lay out an ambitious set of
research questions; only some of them (quite naturally) are covered
in detail in this book. By raising more questions than he can
possibly answer, the author has set out research agendas aplenty for
future researchers.

The second chapter, a detailed study of Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_
(published posthumously in 1604) and Shakespeare's _Macbeth_
(published posthumously in 1623), are there to shed light on the
Yiddish works that appear in chapters 3 through 6. After thirty-four
pages of close readings suggesting alternate ways of understanding
Marlowe and Shakespeare and their works, Dauber says, "It is not my
intention to argue for direct influence between Marlowe and
Shakespeare and their respective audiences and the contemporary
Jewish texts" (p. 84). Why, then, include these authors and their
works in a book ostensibly devoted to Yiddish texts? One formulation
of Dauber's answer is to point to ways that texts can "be
simultaneously true and false, both illusion and reality" (p. 86).
But do we need Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works for this? As Dauber
himself perceptively notes in his pre-introductory quote, the Talmud
itself (Sanhedrin 92/b) comments on this very topic, and in much the
same way. This chapter on Marlowe and Shakespeare, then, fascinating
as it is, sheds only a little light on and offers very little insight
into the Yiddish texts discussed here.

The third chapter of this book is devoted to _Sefer Mesholim _, a
book of thirty-four animal fables published in 1697. Here Dauber
notes the role of Hebrew and _loshn koydesh_ (Hebrew-Aramaic), and
the author's assumption of readers' knowledge of biblical and
midrashic stories. These fables presuppose such knowledge, and the
audience/readers were able to enjoy their playfulness precisely
because they had this knowledge. A section of this chapter is devoted
to the role of this book's woodcuts and their accompanying captions.
Here we see the two working, sometimes in tandem and sometimes at
cross purposes. Dauber isolates themes that recur in all four of the
genres examined here: tensions between the rich and the poor, the
question of theodicy, the place of women and the threat they pose to
the established order.

Chapter 4 is entitled "'Thinking with _Shedim_ [other worldly
spirits]': What Can We Learn from the _Mayse fun Vorms_ (The Tale
from Worms)?" Dauber claims this story is essentially about the
transactional nature of marriage and "the horrific realities of class
inequity" (p. 152). While allowing for allegoric readings in
addition, the lesson of this story, as Dauber sees it, is that the
poor can become rich through piety and good deeds, in particular,
"good deeds that domesticate rebellion and affirm the status quo" (p.
161). At the end of this chapter we find a comparison between this
tale and the she-demon story as it appears in the "Tale of Poznan,"
written almost two centuries later. The differences between the two
stories, Dauber contends, are attributable to the popularization of
Lurianic Kabbalah in the interim period. Nevertheless, both she-demon
tales deal (albeit in different ways) with issue of gender, class,
belief, and skepticism.

Chapter 5, an analysis of the _dybbuk _tales, concentrates on "The
Tale of the Spirit of Koretz," apparently written in the 1660s.
Dauber spends some time discussing "the 'dissonant' elements of the
story" (p. 180) that "clearly point to the 'fictiveness'" (p. 182) of
the events portrayed in the text. Among the hidden lessons of this
text, Dauber says, is the question of theodicy: the possessed victim
is a pious young lady, seemingly suffering through no fault of her
own. In addition, the author claims that the _dybbuk_ can be seen as
"the voice of Jewish skepticism and heresy" (p. 209). Its exorcism
"allows for the expunging of deviant identity and replaces it with a
positive conformist identity" (p. 208).

The last text analyzed here is the "Tale of Zimro and Biryo." Dauber
rightly says that this tale provides us with the opportunity to
investigate cultural "porosity" (p. 217). In addition, he claims it
complicates traditional Jewish concepts of masculinity and sexuality.
The star-crossed lovers of this tale are not allowed to marry because
Zimro is not as "highly born" as Biryo.[1] Although the hero succeeds
in a quest, he does not get the heroine in this world. The lovers
reunite only in the world of fantasy or in the next world. This
story, then, expresses genuine doubt about and concern with "the
moral valences" of chivalric, erotic love (p. 253).

Just because the early modern era was a time when the traditional
Jewish world was in flux, one would have expected Dauber to contrast
the major elements in these stories with the way these elements were
treated in traditional Jewish literature. It is regrettable that he
does not do so. While the Talmud does not have she-demons living with
a man, it does have Ashmedai, king of the demons, showing an interest
in lying with Batsheva, the mother of King Solomon. Because Ashmedai
is King Solomon's wannabe-double in this story,[2] the story is not
simply one of demon-human conjugal relations; it is one of potential
incest. Dauber knows the Ashmedai story; he refers to it on page 242.
However, how the Ashmedai story may have influenced the Yiddish
she-demon story has yet to be explored.

Another element in one of the stories that has a Talmudic counterpart
is the notion of possession. While the _dybbuk_ of the early modern
era is unthinkable without Lurianic Kabbalah, nevertheless, this
concept has a Talmudic counterpart in the Babylonian Talmud _Gittin_,
where we are told: "he who has been seized by kordaikos ..."[3] Here
the discussion revolves around an illness/spirit that so entirely
grips a man, that he is not held responsible for his words or
actions. It is most unfortunate that Dauber did not examine the
development of this idea of a spirit/illness that "grips" a man from
its Talmudic antecedents to its appearance in the early modern era.

The missing vertical dimension in this book is coupled with a missing
horizontal dimension. Some of the themes that recur in the Yiddish
literature of this era have parallels in the then-contemporary Hebrew
literature. A critique of the era's obsession with social standing in
the arrangement of marriages, for example, surfaces in the Hebrew
works of the period, as Elhanan Reiner has shown.[4] Since the early
modern era was bilingual, (or at least diglossic), there is every
reason for scholars who study this era to examine Hebrew-language
texts alongside their contemporary Yiddish-language texts.[5]

Finally, Dauber says in his introduction that "relative inattention"
has been paid to these works. While this may be true for
English-language research, it is by no means true for Hebrew-language
research. A database search of Hebrew-language writing on the
subjects of demons and/or _dybbuk_s, for example, yields a plethora
of books, articles, and doctoral dissertations, all written since
Sarah Zfatman Biller's work (her book was published in 1993) or Yosef
Dan's work (Dan's two Hebrew-language books were written in 1974 and
1975. Two of his more recent English-language articles are noted and
referred to by Dauber). It is unfortunate to see the work of an
entire generation of scholars overlooked.

Notes

[1]. This is precisely the issue that arises in the text Reiner
discusses (see endnote 4). One looks forward to a study of the
different works of the era that address this issue.

[2]. For the whole story, see Gittin 68/a-b.

[3]. The rest of this quote is: "and says 'write my wife a divorce,'
it's as though he said nothing" (Gittin 67/b). The sages are divided
on what "kordaikos" means. But all agree that affliction with this
illness renders a man unable to function intelligently.

[4]. See "_Ma'ase she-ira be-k'k Vermayza be-ra'ash ha-gadol shnat
sz'av: sipur ahava Ashkenazi ganuz likh'ora be-sefer she'elot
u-tshuvot min ha-me'ah ha-shva esreh, ben bat ashirim le-shluyat
ketsavim_": An Incident that Occurred in the Holy Community of Worms
in the Period of the Great Earthquake of 1636--An Ashkenazic Love
Story Seemingly Tucked Away in a Responsa Book from the Seventeenth
Century between a Rich Family's Daughter and a Butcher's Apprentice,"
_Ha-aretz_, October 6, 2006.

[5]. My Israeli colleague, Noga Rubin, and I have, I believe, shown
that Hebrew-language texts can be profitably studied alongside
contemporary Yiddish-language texts. In our paper "Pious Wrappings,
Troubling Insides: Four Different Genres of Ashkenazic Literature"
(_Journal of Modern Jewish Studies _7, no. 3 [November 2008]:
269-282), we showed that four different genres of literature, three
in Yiddish and one in Hebrew, used the technique of a pious frame to
mask troubling social realities.

Citation: Zelda Kahan Newman. Review of Dauber, Jeremy Asher, _In the
Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern_. H-Judaic,
H-Net Reviews. September, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33204

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.