Periphery and Center, reading Natalie Zemon Davis at Stern College for Women

Catalan Atlas by Judah Crescas

I am teaching a new course this semester at Stern College: Wanderers, Exiles and Merchants: Jewish travel writing, medieval and early modern.

We start with the Radhanite merchants and their global trade-network as described by a contemporary Muslim geographer and then move on to Eldad the Danite’s tale of the lost tribes, strong and free, in the Indies.  Benjamin of Tudela’s Itinerary gives us a picture of Jewish life throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond but tells us very little about the famous traveller (much to our regret); Yehuda Halevi’s poems imagine his journey to Zion and stand as a rich counterpoint to his poems written from tempest-tossed ships or while admiring the beauty of the Nile delta- KeGan Hashem/Like God’s Garden! We read these Jewish writers in light of Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta. We explore the world of the Cairo Geniza and its intrepid merchants, European Jews on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, David Reuveni the messianic messenger from beyond the Sambatyon river who comes to Rome with a message from his brother the King of the lost Tribes and then we see how a century later the Portuguese converso merchant Antonio Montezinos arrives in Amsterdam telling of his journey to the kingdom of the Reubenites hiding in the heart of the Andes.  It’s a wild ride!

During one of my first classes I was looking out at the room filled with bright and curious students, all women, and the reality hit me: there are no women in this entire syllabus! Not only are there no women authors, the texts we will read almost consistently elide any mention of women in their travels with just a few exceptions scattered in this vast sea of texts. I reached out to a friend and colleague who has thought about this felt absence both in her scholarship and her teaching. Sarah Pearce suggested I think about the Geniza as a resource because so many of the letters between husbands and wives refer to the spouses’ travels. We read a great article by Joel Kraemer weaving together a rich “itinerary” of letters and other personal documents that opened up the world of Middle Eastern Jewish women and pointed to the frenetic movement of people and goods throughout the Mediterranean. The students were energized by this reading and it inspired some excellent essays. Sarah also referred me to an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis where she discusses her methodology and the challenges and opportunities at stake in capturing the voices of those who left no clear testimony behind for historians to unravel. In “’Being speculative is better than to not do it at all’: an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis.” The ground breaking historian of the early modern period talks about the challenge of reading the lives of people who left behind a scant paper trail with two other historians of the early modern period Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black.[1]  Zemon Davis reflects on her own approach to listening in on the past and of filling in the empty space around marginal figures who would otherwise be forgotten: women, the enslaved, Muslims, Jews, peasants, etc.   I paired this theoretical piece with a short essay Zemon Davis wrote about the Surinamese Sephardi man of letters David Nassy, his daughter and his (eventually freed) slave Mattheus. The article follows Nassy from Suriname to his 3 year furlough in Philadelphia in the 1790’s. Zemon Davis weaves archival documents with what we can know about the places that Nassy and his household travel: the members of Congegation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia that he befriended, the rich intellectual culture of Philadelphia that Nassy enjoyed and participated in, the abolitionists and vibrant community of freed blacks that his manumitted but still indentured slave Mattheus would have encountered on the streets. Without any scrap of autobiographical material about Mattheus she tries to recreate the world he inhabited and she charts out the contours of his intellectual and social orbit. In the absence of reading his own words NZD paints the details and texture of the possible interactions and experiences he would have had. NZD discovers that Nassy and his servant held the ropes when the visiting French avionist Jean Pierre Blanchard launched himself into the sky in a hot air balloon on January 9 1793- we can only imagine what a strange and wondrous sight this might have been for both Mattheus and Nassy and how this extraordinary event and so many other things particular to Philadelphia might have influenced master and slave as they returned to the Caribbean. 

One student found the project something of a swindle.  Zemon Davis presents conjecture as fact! Most women in class rejected this view. They were drawn in to her story telling and appreciated her caution and careful erudition. I believe that they were also inspired by her indefatigable curiosity. We discussed her long career and her interest in the marginal as a way for better understanding the center. I mentioned hearing her give a talk at NYU last spring. At 88 she is clear, focused and energizing. She is a great listener and mediated a very fiesty group of professors and graduate students with elegance. She seems to feed off her discoveries and the connections she finds. My students and I fed off that energy! One was taken by the Zemon Davis’ excitement at finding a Creole dictionary. Another found magical the way she tied disparate pieces together, with care and self-awareness of the pitfalls and possibilities of this reconstruction. The original nay-sayer was not persuaded but I thanked her for providing a spark to our discussion of the essay.

I teach at a university where Jewish studies is not marginal, it is at the center. However, to a great extent it is through my students’ exploration of Jewish history that they discover world history. Starting with themselves they move outwards. They encounter Christianity and Islam as they trace the development of Jewish culture and society from the late classical into the modern age. They encounter the harsh realities of the slave trade by meeting a New World Sephardi who owns slaves and who wrestles with the economic realities that make slave-owning so tempting at the same time that he is moved b the ideals of abolition. We also read the grand narratives against their grain to find the stories of the marginalized and forgotten, the poor, women, heretics and misfits. So center and periphery shift and the particular and the universal are ineluctably tied. Reading the other is no simple matter because inevitably it brings us to see our selves in a new light. History should return us to this imbalance, this frenetic and generative dissonance between our comfortable assumptions and the yet unknown and strange which can lead us to new knowledge and a deepening awareness of our ever changing place in the world.  Natalie Zemon Davis is a great guide to this hermeneutical dance.

Jodensavanne, the “Jews’ Savannah” where Jews had large farms and employed slaves to cultivate the land. The synagogue was the tallest building in the center of the town. It can be made out in this image drawn from across the river.

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[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115315000108

Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black (2015). “Being speculative is better than to

not do it at all”: an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis. Itinerario, 39, pp 3-15

doi:10.1017/S0165115315000108