Between 1691 and 1719, the wealthy Jewish merchant and widow Glikl of Hameln composed a series of seven books in Yiddish to document her life and give advice to her children. The form has widely been remarked upon as unusual. Although Yiddish texts in the early modern period often contained a patchwork of different stories, fables, and proverbs, along with the occasional authorial interjection, scholars disagree on what form Glikls memoirs most closely aligns with: autobiography, mussar literature, ethical will, etc. I am interested in moments of philosophical inquiry in the text. A number of times, Glikl tells stories about Greek philosophers, who she calls “philosophers” (פיליסופיא ) in Yiddish. Glikl describes these philosophers as men who explore the world with a particular method: investigation, which she describes with the word אפזרפירט.
These philosophers – Solon, Alexander the Great, Aristotle — investigate the world around them through observation and measurement. They ask questions like what is the best life, or what is the heaviest substance, and then they look around and measure what is available. In doing so, these philosophers presume that the objects of one’s investigation can be compared to one another: that the life of one person can be measured and compared to the life of another.
Glikl herself explores her life in the text through investigations in a way that tracks with the investigations of Greek philosophers such as Solon. When she looks at her own life’s suffering, she considers the responses of others to the same thing; For example, when her own daughter dies prematurely, she looks to the stories of King David and Rav Yochanan to bear her own grief. She investigates how these figures made sense of their tragedies, and how they managed to accept their lots, as she herself hopes to accept her own. But as I will show, Glikl does not resolve these questions of investigation as Solon does: she does not find the objects of her inquiry suitable for comparison.
I’ll discuss this, for example, when she shows that one person’s pain is not commensurate with another. The question “whose pain is greatest” is misguided and not suitable to philosophical measurement.
I ask, somewhat imaginatively but also seriously: Is she understanding herself as a philosopher? And if so, how is her method of investigation different from these Greek philosophers?
I show how Glikl’s account of Jewish wisdom responds to what she views as the insufficiencies of Greek philosophy. Then, I show how her embodied practice of writing and her constant references to Job suggests that Glikl does not attempt to make philosophy her way of life, but rather uses the practice of life writing to do philosophy. Her engagement with Job is telling: like Job, she observes her life not only to give an account of it, but as a complaint that she hopes will be heard, and indeed, change her own outcome.
Between 1691 and 1719, the wealthy Jewish merchant Glikl composed a text in Yiddish to document her life and give advice to her children. The form has widely been remarked upon as unusual (Moseley 2006; Davis 1995). Yet these debates on form largely overlook the philosophical questions that underlie her work, which I argue meditate on what it means to “live well.” Glikl’s approach to the question of “living well” relies on her interrogation of Greek philosophy and her preference for something else, what we might call Jewish wisdom or “counter-philosophy” (Bielik-Robson 2014). I show how Glikl’s account of Jewish wisdom responds to what she views as the insufficiencies of Greek philosophy. Next, I show how her embodied practice of writing becomes the method for achieving this wisdom. After critiquing philosophy as a way of life, I show that Glikl demonstrates how writing about life can be a philosophical practice.