Ronnie Perelis
Natalie Zemon Davis passed away on October 21 of this year. She died during a painful moment of upheaval and violence, not unlike the times she wrote about with deep compassion and sensitivity to the human dimension of the past. She was a path-breaking historian, a wonderful teacher, a generous mentor, and an intellectual hero to me and many others. Her scholarship pushed boundaries and took the reader on a journey. She taught me to read with care and humanity. I am grateful that I had a chance to meet her a few times in person and to hear her teach face to face, and of course I am thankful for the treasure of analysis and lucid, psychologically insightful scholarship she produced throughout her long and varied career.
I always love teaching her work, but I found a particular resonance between her writing and my students at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish liberal arts college that combines traditional Torah study—Bible, Talmud, and religious thought—with the arts and sciences.
A few years back, I taught a new course, called 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 traveler (much to our regret); Yehudah Ha-Levi’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–described as ke-gan Hashem [like God’s garden]! We read these Jewish writers in light of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. We explore the world of the Cairo Geniza and its intrepid merchants; European Jews on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and David Reuveni, the messianic messenger from beyond the legendary Sambatyon River who comes to Rome with a message from his brother, the King of the Lost Tribes. We then see how, a century later, the Portuguese converso merchant Antonio de 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, but the vast sea of texts we will read almost consistently elide any mention of women in their travels with just a few scattered exceptions. I reached out to a friend and colleague, Sarah Pearce, who has thought about this tangible absence both in her scholarship and her teaching. She suggested I think about the Geniza as a resource, because so many of the letters between husbands and wives refer to the spouses’ travels. My students and I read a great article by Joel Kraemer, in which he weaves together a rich “itinerary” of letters and other personal documents in the Geniza that opened up the world of Middle Eastern Jewish women and pointed to the frenetic movement of people and goods throughout the Mediterranean.[1] The students were energized by this reading, and it inspired some excellent essays.
Dr. Pearce also referred me to an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis, in which 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 the 2015 interview, the groundbreaking historian of the early modern period talks about the challenge of reading about the lives of people who left behind a scant paper trail with two other historians, Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black. Zemon Davis reflects on her own approach to listening in on the past and filling in the empty space around marginal figures who would otherwise be forgotten: women, the enslaved, Muslims, Jews, peasants, etc.[2]
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 three-year furlough in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Zemon Davis weaves archival documents with what we can know about the places that Nassy and his household traveled, the members of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia that he befriended, the rich intellectual culture of Philadelphia that Nassy enjoyed and participated in, and 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 chart out the contours of his intellectual and social orbit. In the absence of reading his own words, Zemon Davis paints the details and texture of the possible interactions and experiences he would have had. She discovers that Nassy and his servant held the ropes when the visiting French aviator 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.[3]
One student found the project something of a swindle: Zemon Davis presents conjecture as fact! Most women in the class rejected this view. They were drawn into her storytelling 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 was clear, focused, and energizing. She was a great listener and mediated a very feisty group of professors and graduate students with elegance. She seemed to feed off her discoveries and the connections she found. My students and I fed off that same energy! One was taken by 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, while at the same time moved by 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 ourselves 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.
[1] Joel L. Kraemer, “Spanish ladies from the Cairo Geniza,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991): 237.
[2] Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black, “ ‘Being speculative is better than to not do it at all’: an interview with Natalie Zemon Davis,” Itinerario 39 (2015): 3, available at http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115315000108doi:10.1017/S0165115315000108.
[3] Natalie Zemon Davis, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus,” New Essays in American Jewish History (2010): 79.
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