The Unparalleled Memoirs of a Jewish Businesswoman from the Age of Louis XIV

A businesswoman, philanthropist, daughter of a prominent Jewish family, the wife (sequentially) of two wealthy men influential in German and French Jewish communal affairs, and the mother of fourteen children, Glikl of Hameln (1645–1724) was also the author of a remarkable Yiddish memoir. Chava Turniansky, who has edited a new English translation of this work, notes that although Glikl carefully composed it for posterity, she did not give it a title, or, as was the convention then, identify its genre:

Why did Glikl refrain from giving her book a title or naming its genre? Was it only because she did not intend to have it published? . . . [E]ven later on, when Glikl’s grandson supplied the copy his father had made from her manuscript with a regular title page, he, too, abstained from providing a title. He did adorn the page with a biblical verse in the conventional manner, but when referring to the work itself called it simply haksav (the writing). Not only did Glikl refrain from granting her book a title, but throughout her writing she avoided labeling it in any way, referring to it only as “it,” “this,” “such,” or “what I am writing.”

“I intend, God willing, to leave all this for you [i.e., her children] in seven little books, if God grants me life”—she says. “Therefore I think it would be most appropriate to begin with my birth.” Glikl’s “seven little books” (by which she means chapters) are so utterly different from anything published and known in the Jewish world until then that it is not surprising that she did not have a word to describe what she was writing.

Among those works written by Ashkenazi women before the Enlightenment that have come down to us—all but one or two of them in Yiddish—no other account of a personal life exists.

[There is but one] missing leaf from the nearly 200 the manuscript comprises. However, this can hardly be the reason for the fact that the period of the writer’s formative years, her growth and education, her evolution from childhood into maturity—precisely the topic that research of modern autobiography since Rousseau’s Confessions considers to be the key to and the quintessence of the genre—is almost entirely missing from her book.

Two brief excerpts from the memoir can be read at the link below.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: French Jewry, German Jewry, Jewish literature, Memoir

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF