Glikl: Memoirs, 1691-1719: Reading Resources

Glikl, Outside the Book

Glikl bas Judah Leib was born in 1645 in Hamburg. Before the German states unified in 1871, Hamburg was an autonomous city-state within the Holy Roman Empire. Located at a confluence of rivers that flowed into the North Sea, Hamburg was a member of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of market towns and merchant guilds. In 1612 the Hamburg authorities allowed Sephardim (Jews from the Portuguese community), mostly bankers and merchants, to settle in Hamburg under protected status, subject to an annual payment. Ashkenazi or “German Jewish” families like Glikl’s lived in Hamburg without official permission and centered their commerce on money lending and trading in gold and jewelry. Hamburg was conveniently located just a few miles from Altona, a city where all Jews could live freely under the protection of the Danish monarchy. Glikl spent her relatively short childhood shuttling back and forth between these two cities.

Glikl’s father arranged her engagement, at age 12, to Haim, son of a jewelry trader in Hameln, a small town more than a hundred miles to the south. They were married two years later. The young couple were not expected to provide for themselves, however; following the Jewish custom of kest, the couple lived with and was supported by Haim’s family. As scholar Natalie Zemon Davis points out, Christian women of Glikl’s class in western Europe rarely married before the age of 18, but it was common for prosperous Jewish families to arrange early marriages for their children. This was likely because it was easier this way to obtain an acceptable match and also because the wealth in these families tended to be liquid, established through credit and capital rather than landed property or family businesses, as was common for Christians.

Glikl gave birth to fourteen children, twelve of whom grew to adulthood. She also took part in every aspect of her husband’s business affairs, arranging loans, trading pearls, gold, and silver, buying and selling fabric, and participating in the great market fairs of Leipzig and Frankfurt. Glikl and Haim were married for thirty years, but Haim died tragically in 1689, slipping on a stone and strangulating a hernia. No medical treatment available at the time could save him. Glikl was left to care for the family business and her eight unmarried children, considered “orphans” in the parlance of the time. Glikl busily provided matches for these children and concerned herself in the business dealings of her sons-in-law. Her children moved to distant locations such as Berlin, Bamberg, and Copenhagen, a common survival strategy in a time when, as Zemon Davis notes, “wide dispersal of one’s kin was an economic advantage and a safety measure”—one never knew if Jews would continue to be permitted to live in certain cities or if they would be expelled, as they were from Vienna in 1670. 

Glikl continued to support herself and her family as a businesswoman, manufacturing stockings in Hamburg, buying and selling pearls, and importing and exporting various wares. While upper-class Christian women at the time often took part in retail trade, they rarely left their own cities. Glikl, on the other hand, traveled widely, participated in major market fairs even as a widow, and made significant monetary trades on the Hamburg stock exchange. 

In 1699, when she was in her early fifties, Glikl married Hirsh Levy and moved in with him in Metz, a small town under French royal control. Metz, a Catholic city, granted no rights to Protestants, but Jews were tolerated and allowed to settle. Shortly after the marriage, however, Hirsh Levy went bankrupt. Glikl was forced to do something she never wanted to do: accept help from her children. After Hirsh Levy died, in 1712, Glikl moved in with her daughter Esther and son-in-law Moyshe. She died on Rosh Hashanah 5485 (1724), at age 78. 

Glikl’s Readings and Writings

Glikl’s book is considered the first autobiography of a Jewish woman. Facing sleepless nights and dark thoughts after her first husband’s death, she began writing. She was not writing a diary or a journal, nor even a family history, but an account of her own life, consciously structured in seven books. She begins with an “ethical will,” establishing her spiritual and moral foundations, before documenting her early years, marriage, the lives and marriages of her children, and commenting astutely on community and business affairs. As a sharp businesswoman, Glikl likely read a variety of newspapers, merchants’ reports, and letters from a wide variety of people. She composed her seven books over thirty years, revising where necessary, such as adding memorial formulas (for example, zikhroyne livrokhe, “of blessed memory”) after family members passed away. 

While Christian life writings of the time were inspired by Augustine’s Confessions and the lives of the saints, Jewish life writings drew on a variety of sources. Literate in Yiddish and given a rudimentary religious education as a child, Glikl was likely inspired by books such as Meynekes Rivke (Rebecca’s Wet-Nurse), an ethical treatise for women written by Rivke bas Meir Tiktiner (died 1605); tkhines, prayers written for women often published in short booklets; and the Tsene-rene, the popular 17th-century “Women’s Bible,” a Yiddish adaptation of the five books of the Torah, including the weekly haftarah readings. As Chava Turniansky points out in her introduction to Glikl, Glikl’s frequent quotations and references to Hebrew literature likely come from oral tradition, not from a familiarity with Hebrew texts. 

Although we do not know why she chose to stop writing, or why she ends the book as she does, the ending fits the text and concludes on a particularly literary and introspective note: Glikl (an unnamed woman in the text) stands on the banks of the Moselle River in Metz, at 10 at night. Since her hands are never idle, she is washing dishes. Suddenly the night sky blazes as light as day and flashing sparks fill the sky. Everything dazzles and then flashes back to darkest night. Glikl interpreted her experience as a religious vision. English astronomer Edmond Halley recorded the phenomenon as the fall and disintegration of a large meteor, something relatively unknown to the populace of Europe at the time. 

Themes

Early Modern Yiddish Literature

While Yiddish literature of the early modern period is often referred to as “women’s literature,” it was often not written by women. Since Yiddish was the most commonly spoken Jewish language from Berlin to the Ottoman Empire, this literature naturally developed a language adapted to—and a publishing industry geared to—a wide range of readers, not just women. Many of these texts were devotional or focused on religious instruction, but epic poetry on biblical themes was also quite popular. By the end of the 1700s, when Western Yiddish declined as a spoken language, Yiddish publishing shifted to eastern Europe, and the foundations were laid for the emergence of modern Yiddish literature in the mid-late 1800s.

Autobiography and Modernity

Scholar Shmuel Feiner considers the 18th century to be “the Jews’ first modern century.” This era gave rise to various new genres and practices of reading and writing, most notably with regard to the rise of newspapers and to the quintessential modern genre, autobiography. Autobiographies are intimately tied to the Enlightenment’s focus on the mutable individual self, a concept bound up with emerging philosophies of humanism and secularism. Many Jewish and non-Jewish autobiographies self-consciously model themselves on Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, completed in 1769. Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, published in 1792–93, is considered the first autobiography of an east European Jew. 

Chava Turniansky notes that Glikl would have been startled by all of the genre designations that have been attributed to her manuscript: memoir, diary, autobiography, or even “adventures.” But Glikl herself never gave her book a title or a genre designation, and she resolutely refused to categorize it or to categorize herself as a writer. Turniansky refers to Glikl’s manuscript as an “ego-document.” Today, in retrospect, we can trace a lineage from Glikl’s writings to these later Enlightenment texts. Although she would likely not have recognized herself as a subject of modernity, with her focus on politics, finance, business, and the world beyond home and family, she embodies a philosophic transition of emphasis from private to public sphere, from community to self, from early modernity to Enlightenment. 

Jewish Women in the Transition from Early Modernity to Enlightenment

Jewish women in the 18th century enjoyed increased social opportunities and more exposure to non-Jews than their foremothers. They also concomitantly experienced a growing tension between gradual integration into the surrounding society and the commitment to maintaining communal structures and cultural traditions. Glikl stood on the brink of vast political changes transforming her society and cultural changes transforming western Jewry. The use of Western Yiddish as the most common spoken language declined sharply, replaced by German. By the end of the 18th century, German Jewish salonnières like Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) conversed with the great writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment. Jewish women began to establish their own societies and voluntary organizations, creating a new public sphere for Jewish women, albeit with its own set of constrictions and patriarchal assumptions. Religious practice centered on the private sphere, focused on the family and bourgeois conventions of motherhood, femininity, and domesticity. Glikl’s granddaughters would have faced choices Glikl could not have comprehended, such as conversion and marriage to a non-Jew. This rapid social transformation makes Glikl’s chronicles of her time all the more important, as she shows us a moment in time that would evanesce, much like her meteor.

Multimedia Resources

• Listen to translator and scholar Chava Turniansky, interviewed in Yiddish in Jerusalem, describe why she thinks it is so extraordinary that an Ashkenazi woman wrote down her memoirs in Yiddish.

• Prof. Moshe Rosman presents a seminar for Fordham University’s Jewish Studies Department on Glikl and “Well-Behaved Jewish Women Undermining Gender.”

• Chava Turniansky describes why she thinks Glikl is such a rare linguistic and historical treasure.

• Watch and listen: Frank London presents a medieval Yiddish plague song, with a dance sequence from the play The Memoirs of Glikl of Hameln, directed by Jenny Romaine and performed by Jenny Romaine and the late Adrienne Cooper.

• What did Glikl read? What was her intellectual sphere? Chava Turniansky has some theories.

Discussion Questions

1. Why do you think Glikl decided to write her manuscript? Why do you think she kept coming back to her writing over 30 years, revising and re-reading? Do you think the text changed in meaning for Glikl over time?
    
2. Imagine another member of Glikl’s household recording their experiences, a manuscript by, say, Glikl’s 12-year-old daughter or her servant. What would it focus on? What about a manuscript written by someone who did business with Glikl?
    
3. Compare Glikl’s manuscript to a Jane Austen novel. How would you discuss the emphasis on making a good marriage and on having a dowry? How would you compare the roles of women in their respective societies? 
    
4. Imagine that you are writing your own “ethical will,” with spiritual and moral instruction for your descendants, as Glikl did. What would you write? What kinds of literary, religious, or cultural influences would you draw on for inspiration?

—Jennifer Young