Writing Against Death: Glikl’s Jewish Wisdom

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.