Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof page 245 1.9.2008 6:39pm 14 ‘Virgil in the Basket’: narrative as hermeneutics in Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages Eli Yassif THE T EXT An outstanding magical-erotic novella appears, for the Wrst time, in a Hebrew chronicle dating from the early fourteenth century. Here is a translation of the story as it appears in the only extant manuscript of this work: In Rome in the days of Titus the Wicked there was a very wealthy man. He owned large houses and courtyards, gardens, and castles. This man was one of the great men of Rome, and his family was called Bogamni1 in the Roman tongue. He had an exceedingly lovely wife who was as radiant as the moon. She was so beautiful, he built her a tower in one of his courtyards and she never left her home. Once, there was a wedding there and [the people] danced with drums and Xutes through the streets of the city until they came to the same tower in which the woman lived. She heard the sound of drums and dancing and looked out of her window. A certain man, who was a magician,2 saw her and desired her. He sent his servant to the tower to see if she left there at night, and he would lie in wait for her always. When he saw that she did not ever leave he said: ‘What shall I do? If I go myself it will be bad, what shall I do?’ He wrote her a letter and sent it to her in the hand of the demon. In his letter, he said that he would like to come to her. In the morning, she went to the window, as was her custom. She saw the letter before her, wondered at it, and said: ‘What is this letter and whence did it come?’ What did she do? She called for her maidservant and told her: ‘Go and fetch the scribe, who is in the courtyard.’ She went and called for him. He came and she told him secretly: ‘When I arose today, I found this letter on the windowsill. Tell me what is written in it.’ He told her what was written. She said to him: ‘Write him in response that I am not interested and curse him.’ Some time later, her husband went far away and instructed her not to set foot outside her home with the maidservant. The magician heard that her husband had left and sent her silver and gold and jewelry so that she would do his will. She said to her maidservants: Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 246 page 246 1.9.2008 6:39pm Eli Yassif ‘What a fool is this man that he keeps trying me. What shall I do?’ She accepted the money and sent word to him: ‘I want you to come to me and I shall do as you want, but do not come by the door, come by the window.’ So he did, coming in the middle of night. So overjoyed was he at hearing her words that he forgot his magic implements and books. He looked at the tower at night. Before his arrival, she went to another of her husband’s towers nearby and called for a large basket held by three ropes. When the magician came, they told him: ‘Get into the basket and we will pull you up.’ He got in and they pulled him halfway up the tower. Meanwhile, she returned to the tower where she was in the beginning and tied the ropes to the rafters of the tower, and they neither raised him nor lowered him. The tower was tall and he hung suspended in the air. He was in the basket for three days and three nights without food or drink, and he became hungry and thirsty and wanted to throw himself out of the basket. When he looked down to the ground and saw how high up he was, he was afraid he would die from so tall a drop, and he could not climb up. The demons did not come to him, as was his custom, as he could not swear [his incantations] without his books. He did not know what to do and he stayed where he was, desolate. Passers-by below saw him and said to one another: ‘What is that hanging upon the tower?’ They speculated much and the boys would throw stones at him. On the third day, she looked out of the window and said to him: ‘Well, how goes it and how are you?3 Did you think I was a prostitute when you sent me your money and your gold and jewels? Now you have lost your money and not gained your desire.’ He begged her and wept that for the sake of his love for her she lower him to the ground so that he would not stay there in shame. She said to him: ‘[This] is what people like you deserve, who want to commit adultery with their fellow’s wife,’ and she left him until the fourth day. On the fourth day, she took pity [on him] and gave instructions to lower him to the ground. When they lowered him to the height of a tall man, they suddenly tipped him out of the basket to the ground, and his rib broke from the force of the fall against stone. He cried out and people gathered around him for they heard his voice, and they said to him: ‘What happened to you?’ He was afraid to tell them the story, and they led him home, wounded on his side. He called for physicians, and they healed him. When he became strong again, he said to his servants: ‘I will avenge myself against this woman.’ He told them to bring his magic books. What did he do? He went and extinguished every Wre throughout Rome and all the surrounding villages with his sorcery. Not a Wre was to be found in all the Roman Empire. If they brought it from elsewhere with stones or wood, it would go out before they completed a third of the journey home. Even logs as large as beams and trees, he extinguished everything. Many died of hunger, for there was no bread in the city, as they had no Wre to light their ovens. The inhabitants of Rome gathered to take counsel and deliberate: ‘Where shall we Wnd Wre and what shall we do?’ One spoke and then another. The sorcerer answered: ‘If you will give me money, promise me not to harm me, and do as I tell you, you will Wnd Wre and you will live.’ They said: ‘It is a good thing you have said you would do,’ and they gave him a large sum of money. Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 247 1.9.2008 6:39pm 247 In the morning the Romans went to him and said, ‘Where is the Wre you will give us?’ He said to them: ‘Go to so-and-so who has Wre and she will give you.’ They went, and he went with them. He gave each one of them a wax candle to hold in their hand. He said to them: ‘Seize her!’ And they seized her. Then they placed her on a wooden platform and stripped her naked. Then the sorcerer came and put the wax candle by her vagina,4 and the candle caught Wre spontaneously. Everyone followed suit. They were not permitted to light from candle to candle, only from her vagina. The woman suVered a shame so great, there was none to equal it from the founding [of Rome] to this day. Some time later, that same woman’s husband came and they told him the entire story of what had happened to his wife, and he was very angry. What did he do? He rose up, gathered all his people, and went to her family with the sorcerer and his family and his helpers.5 They annihilated each other. Those who died over this woman numbered forty thousand and thirty-Wve Romans.6 THE B OOK OF MEMORY Why was a magical-erotic novella such as this included in a historical, authoritative work? At Wrst glance it has nothing to do with Jewish history, and its almost pornographic qualities oppose not only Jewish moral norms but also the very essence of historical writing. While there are sporadic examples of novellae in the writings of such historians as Herodotus, Josephus Flavius, and others, the daring of this tale goes beyond anything known before in historical writing.7 In order to understand the phenomenon and its importance, we must examine the immediate and the broader contexts of the tale. The chronicle containing the novella is known as The Book of Memory (Sefer ha-Zikhronot), or The Chronicles of Jerahmeel (Divrei ha-Yamim le-Yerahme’el). It has survived in a single manuscript from the Rhine Provinces in Germany. Although the earliest date mentioned in it is 1325, its authorship unquestionably began much earlier.8 The author-copyist, Eleazar ben-Asher ha-Levy, leaned heavily on the writings of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Italian poet and learned Jew Jerahme’el ben-Solomon; hence, the overall title of the work is The Chronicles of Jerahme’el.9 The Book of Memory, as a historical work, belongs to the genre of the ‘universal chronicle’—Weltchronik, chronikon mundi, historia universalis, summa istoriarum—which was popular in Germany and the surrounding area between the years 1250 and 1350, the time and place in which it was written.10 These are historical works that tell the history of the world from its creation to the time of the author, or continue on to the end of days and the Second Coming. Historian Aron Gurevich deWned them as follows: ‘The Middle Ages saw the eZorescence of the Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 248 page 248 1.9.2008 6:39pm Eli Yassif Encyclopaedias, the Summae, the Specula. All of these exhibit that same obsession with comprehensiveness which we Wnd in medieval universal histories, which claim to tell the story of mankind from Adam to the moment of their writing—or even beyond that to the end of the world and the Day of Judgment.’11 Indeed, The Book of Memory tells the history of the world— focusing on the Jewish people—from the very beginning to the very end, from the Creation to the messianic age. The main literary characteristic of the work is that it recounts history by copying from earlier works. The book is a vast compilation of a wide variety of entire works—some complete and some incomplete—arranged chronologically to retell the history of the world and the Jewish people through ‘authentic’ documents. A continuous reading of the chronicle puts into yet starker relief the curious inclusion of the novella. All the other sources that the author quoted, at length or in brief, as part of the mosaic of Jewish history, belong to the normative Jewish canon: biblical stories, rabbinic legend, medieval Jewish ethical works, and even apocrypha and pseudepigrapha that began to reappear in works of Jewish culture during this period. These recount the foundation myths of the creation of the world, the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, the wars of the Jews against the Romans, the destruction of the temple, the expulsion and dispersion of the Jewish people, the Crusader massacres of 1096, and the story of the messianic age. In his ethical will, which serves as the preface to The Book of Memory, Eleazar ben Asher ha-Levy declares: ‘I wrote these events in a book . . . so that the readers will see, comprehend, and know the truth of some of the acts committed beneath the sky, and some of the trials and tribulations to Wnd our fathers in their exile . . . lest their descendants forget. Therefore, I named the book The Book of Memory . . . as I have collected in this Book of Memory all that has happened and all that has been done from the creation of the world until today.’12 Yet our story is a typical folktale based on vulgar, ‘low’ folk humor, lacking any connection to Jewish history or the ‘tribulations [of] our fathers’. It certainly did not originate in any of the copyist’s canonical sources. Here we confront the question of the authority of narrative texts as historical documents as well as the question of narrative hermeneutics—in all its force and seriousness. T W I N TAL E S The story is known in European folklore of the Middle Ages as ‘Virgil in the Basket’. It concerns the Roman poet Virgil, known in the Middle Ages mainly as a magician.13 The Wrst known version of the tale comes from the mid-thirteenth Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 249 1.9.2008 6:39pm 249 century, but oral versions almost certainly pre-date it by far.14 Domenico Comparetti, in his great philological-folkloristic work on the medieval legends of Virgil, indicated convincingly the local connection between these legends and Naples and its environs. Nonetheless, this novella is the least Neapolitan of all; the tower from which Virgil hung suspended in a basket is located in Rome.15 Since the thirteenth century the tale spread in numerous versions and various forms, such as folk-songs, street performances, paintings, sculpture, and wood engravings. It has also been documented in detail in the modern period by Comparetti and John Spargo. Interestingly, the tale is still found in folk traditions of various regions of the world.16 Comparetti, Spargo, and Flusser (following the former) claim that the novella is composed of two distinct and independent tales: the Wrst part is a folk-tale about an ardent suitor spurned by a woman of great resourcefulness, and the second is the powerful magician’s revenge against the woman who humiliated him. Comparetti pointed out the independent earlier versions of the two distinct stories. Tales of feminine wisdom and resourcefulness, in which women get around wise men, the heroes of the Bible or of myth (Samson, David, Hercules, Hippocrates, Aristotle), were common before the appearance of this novella, and in his opinion the Wrst part of the story should be viewed as belonging to this narrative theme.17 This assumption is problematic, as the second half of the story—that is, the story of revenge—cannot exist without the motivation for revenge. While the woman’s insult may have taken some other form—not necessarily the abandoning of the magician in the basket—she must have oVended him in some way to provide the impetus for his harsh retaliation. Indeed, the Wrst documented version, from the mid-thirteenth century, does not cite the full version of the story. Instead, it summarizes, describing the Wre that Virgil extinguished in revenge for his humiliation at the hands of a woman. Another argument of those scholars who claim two separate stories is the contradiction between the two parts of the tale: in the Wrst part the hero cannot even extricate himself from the basket, while in the second he is a powerful sorcerer who puts out every Wre in greater Rome. Flusser praises the poetic license of the author of the Hebrew version, who reconciled the contradiction by having the magician, in a haze of anticipation, forget his magic implements, providing the reason why he could not exercise his magic power.18 The contradiction can be resolved in another way: an essential element of the magic power of sorcerers is their connection to the ground. Cut oV from it, magicians and witches lose their power.19 It may be that the very raising of Virgil in the basket was a trick to separate him from the sources of his magic powers. In an earlier version of the story—the Latin version Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 250 page 250 1.9.2008 6:39pm Eli Yassif discussed below—Virgil was so aroused that he undressed before getting into the basket, and this may be another cause of his lack of magic powers just when he needed them. If this is the explanation, there is no further need to indicate a seeming contradiction between two distinct stories. Instead, I would argue that there is a smooth and integral transition between two succesive parts of one, single narrative structure. FIRE RITUALS The second part of the story—the magician’s revenge—begs for examination from additional angles. It may have crystallized around ancient fertility rites, with which the bringing of Wre began anew with the start of the spring season. As Wre was perceived as the source of life, and the female reproductive organs are the source of life, the ritual taking of Wre from her symbolizes renewal and rebirth.20 It may be that, once this rite lost its ritual power in later periods within the same society (the Roman-Italian society in transition to the Middle Ages, for example), the universal rite-myth underwent a process of concretization, as happened to many myths, becoming a historical tale and erotic novella.21 Here the taking of Wre from a woman’s genitalia goes from being a demonstration of power—as one who bears within the source of life—to an act of humiliation and rape. We have to understand the development of the tale of Virgil in medieval European folk traditions, inter alia, in light of Christianity’s struggle against the pagan culture of the ancient world. The transformation of the pre-eminent representative of Roman culture into a lecherous and vulgar magician can be nothing other than a deliberate attack by medieval Christianity on the renaissance of classical culture and what it viewed as its inherent perils.22 The pagan Wre rites were still popular in Europe during this period, and continued until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The lighting of Wre at a plainly ritual event, complete with the use of erotic symbols (nudity among participants in the ritual, wooden sticks that symbolize by their friction the sexual act, the torches and candles with which Wre was taken from the central bonWre, and so on), could not but arouse the Church’s opposition. In a tale such as this, that parodies the solemn Wre ritual as a crude and vulgar practice, it is hard to overlook the outright criticism of the ceremony and its underlying folk beliefs. How would a person who heard this vulgar novella relate in the future to a rite taking place in the city square and employing the same eVects? Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof page 251 1.9.2008 6:39pm Narrative as hermeneutics 251 THE H EBREW TALE—THE FIRST EXTA NT VE RSION? In his universal chronicle from the year 1280, Jansen Enikel of Vienna formulated one of the two Wrst full versions of this story that have reached us. The other is the manuscript Latin version in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, also from the thirteenth century.23 This is another proof that the importance of the Hebrew version in the history of the tale of ‘Virgil in the Basket’ is greater than what we might have assumed until now. Various motifs in the story—Italian words and phrases, and the novelistic character that recalls the style of the Italian folk novellae that preceded Boccacio—attest that the source of this version apparently lies among Italian Jewry.24 The only connection that The Book of Memory has with Italian culture is in its tight relationship with the work of Jerahmeel ben Solomon, an late eleventh- to early twelfth-century Italian, and it is nearly certain that this novella reached Eleazar ben Asher as part of The Chronicles of Jerahmeel. Still, Jerahmeel was not its translator, as it is written in a style very diVerent from his own. While the literary style of Jerahmeel was quite Xorid, his Hebrew prose being marked by an exaggerated pathos (perhaps stemming from the fact that he was a poet),25 the prose style of the novella is economical, precise, and clear. It is almost certain that Jerahmeel copied the story from another source, and whoever translated it into Hebrew apparently took it from oral tradition, not any written version. Interesting evidence of this appears in the travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Italy in or near 1168. Regarding his visit to the region of Naples, he wrote: ‘Puteoli, known as Sorento . . . where a spring Xows from a chasm [and where can be found the] oil called petrolio. It is collected from the surface of the waters and used in several [salves and medicaments]. There are baths there of hot water Xowing from underground and they are on the shore. There are dozens of baths where anyone with an ailment may go and immerse in them and Wnd a cure and relaxation.’26 This tale about the Puteoli springs bears a connection to Virgil’s name: with his spells, he created the therapeutic springs and the petroleum that Xows from them to aid the residents of Naples and its environs.27 However, the Jews of the region from whom Benjamin and Jerahmeel heard the story of the baths do not relay the name of the main protagonist of the story, and Virgil was not mentioned by name in either the travelogue or the historical chronicle. The similarity between this case and the novella about Virgil in the Basket is not by chance: in both, the penetration of the story into Jewish tradition was accompanied by a blurring of Virgil’s identity, which apparently lacked any importance in the eyes of the Jewish residents of the area. Another possible Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 252 page 252 1.9.2008 6:39pm Eli Yassif connection between the two tales is that one version of the tale of Virgil in the Basket, the Latin manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (and see more on this below), tells how Virgil escaped the wrath of the maiden’s father, the emperor Nero. He consented to be thrown into a fountain of boiling water in Rome, but on the way he managed to escape to Naples, where he resolved to take revenge on the maiden.28 It emerges from all this that the Hebrew version from the eleventh–twelfth centuries is the Wrst complete version we have of the story, and from this perspective its importance to the study of the history of the tale is immeasurable. No use has been made of it until now in the study of ‘Virgil in the Basket’, as it was published only recently and has never before been translated from Hebrew into any other language.29 T H E VE R S I O N S A short discussion of the relationship between the Hebrew version, which is the earliest version of the tale, and the next two earliest extant versions, will provide us with an additional, even suprising, perspective. One version is by Jansen Enikel from 128030 and the other the Latin version copied in a manuscript in Paris, also dating from the thirteenth century.31 Despite the local, historical, and linguistic proximity between the time and authorship of The Book of Memory and Jansen Enikel’s work, there could not have been any direct connection between the versions of the tale that appear in them: apart from the course of the narrative plot, the diVerences between them are vast. The version of the tale in the Weltchronik is long, richly detailed, and interspersed with rhetorical digressions. It is also the crudest of all versions known to us. It seems that, apart from minor disparities, the main diVerence between the German and Hebrew versions focuses on the role of the woman in the plot. In the German version, not only does she spurn the magician’s advances, she also tells her husband about them. Moreover, her husband initiates the humiliation of Virgil: he plans the lifting in the basket, and he pretends to depart on a long journey but instead remains in the city. After Virgil extinguishes all the Wres in Rome and demands that the Romans bring him the woman, he himself tries to persuade her to light the Wre from her body of her own will, but she chooses death instead, and only after binding her were they able to do as they wished, nearly killing her. There is no mention of any of this in the Hebrew version—rather the reverse: the woman herself initiates the magician’s humiliation after her husband truly leaves on a long journey, and the magician makes no attempt to convince her afterwards to accede to his Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 253 1.9.2008 6:40pm 253 request, as in the German version. In the latter she is the example of a modest woman completely subservient to her husband’s authority. She is passive and does not initiate any action; rather she reports everything to him and acts according to his will. In the Hebrew version the woman has an independent personality: she mocks and curses, she does not reveal to her husband anything of the event she is involved in, and she initiates the humiliation of the magician. Therefore, she bears no small measure of ‘responsibility’, according to the logic of the story, for what happens to her. In the German tale her humiliation is the result of her husband initiating the disgrace of Virgil; in the Hebrew version she brings disaster upon herself. We have another version of the tale in which the woman actively encourages the protagonist to court her in order to ensnare him and prove that she is cleverer than he is. This is the group of versions whose protagonist is Hippocrates, who became, in the later traditions, along with Virgil, the regular protagonist of this tale.32 There is no way of estimating today how these diVerences came into being. Did the German version seek to curb the woman’s independence—as expressed in the earlier Italian versions—and so remove any doubts about her innocence? Alternatively, were these changes made in the Hebrew version, which is outstanding in its emphasis on the woman’s ‘responsibility’ for what happened, as an expression and symbol of the Jewish people, as we shall see below? The Hebrew version contains three details of fundamental importance that are absent from the German version. First, there is the attribution of the story to the period of Titus (see more on this below). Another diVerence was mentioned earlier, namely the attempt to explain the magician’s powerlessness when suspended in the basket. While the Hebrew version contains a convincing explanation (he forgot his books and magic tools in the heat of the moment), the German version ignores this completely. Indeed, there is a narrative implausibility here, as his impotence in this part of the tale does not tally with his immense magic power in the second part. David Flusser considered the third diVerence, claiming that the dropping of the magician after three days restrained in the basket, so that his bones broke upon impact, was a change in poor taste made by the Hebrew narrator to the European versions.33 Indeed, this motif is not explicit in Enikel’s version, though this version does recount that it was the woman’s husband who lowered the basket to the ground, and that Virgil, upon getting out, suVered from severe aches in his heart and body. It is not clear, however, if his pain resulted from embarrassment, from being cramped in the basket (and in this version he was only suspended for one day), or from the fall, as the rope that held the basket was released abruptly. Spargo, who—like all who studied the tale—was not familiar with the Hebrew version, uncovered the reality layer of the text, which he viewed as Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 254 page 254 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif the source of the story. However, the versions with which he was familiar connect at this level only indirectly, and he could not know that the Hebrew version of the tale would strengthen his assumption. According to local customs and laws in Germany dating back to antiquity, though most of the testimony is from the Middle Ages, it was customary to hang criminals in a basket in the town square for the purpose of shaming them. This was the custom in many places (there is testimony from Regensburg, Magdenburg, Vienna, Lübeck, and Zurich), and the punishment included the release of the basket with one blow and the dropping of the conWned criminal into the mud publicly, after which he would get out of the basket, bound and humiliated. This punishment was called Scuppestol.34 From the perspective of the history of the tale, special importance accrues to an event from the latter part of the thirteenth century in Zurich. A baker named Wackerbold, who had cheated on quantities of Xour, was punished with the basket: Beside the water was an apparatus with a basket in which criminals were placed before sentence was executed. The basket was hoisted up and the occupant had to jump into the water below to get out. When the baker Wackerbold leaped into the water he was roundly laughed at by the bystanders, who thought he had got only what he deserved. But Wackerbold, enraged at his shame, plotted how to turn the tables on them. By virtue of his trade he was allowed to collect Wrewood, so he stored his house full, awaited a favorable wind, and Wred it. The wind carried the blaze to other houses, and a great conXagration started quickly. Two women found Wackerbold on a height where he could enjoy the spectacle, and reproached him for running away from the city when there was so much need of him to help Wght the Wre. ‘Go and tell them’, said the baker, ‘that I needed a Wre to dry myself by after my wetting. Now that I am comfortably dry, I can laugh at them as they laughed at me. Let them sit by their Wre and laugh or weep, as they will.’35 Two elements link this testimony to our tale. First, Eleazar ben Asher Halevi, author of The Book of Memory, was a contemporary of these testimonies and lived in the same region. Living in Germany at the end of the thirteenth century, he was undoubtedly familiar with so prevalent a custom in the public life of the German cities. We can surmise that the episode he described in such detail of the raising of the basket, the townspeople crowding beneath it to ridicule the magician bound inside, and especially the sudden dropping of the basket into the mud, replicate scenes that he witnessed personally, and so he accentuated them in his version. The story of the baker also links the sinner (incidentally, in some testimonies the transgression was adultery) to the raising of the basket, the victim’s fall from it, humiliation, and subsequent rage and desire for vengeance, and revenge through the Wre that destroyed the city. The historical testimony and the novella converge closely, sharing so many motifs that the likelihood of a connection between them is strong. I maintain that the story of the baker indicates a real kernel from which the tale developed, Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof page 255 Narrative as hermeneutics 1.9.2008 6:40pm 255 though not necessarily in a direct manner, as the novella is known to pre-date the case of the baker in Zurich. The numerous testimonies show that the punishment of being dropped from the basket was a public event in many German cities in the Middle Ages. One can get a sense of the depth of humiliation suVered only from the testimony that survived in the story of the baker. This combination of a public event and the profound emotional response of the individual concerned could not but provide the necessary components for the emergence of an artistic expression of the scene—narrative or Wgurative. Indeed, the case of the man bound in the basket and unceremoniously tipped out of it includes both components. According to the process of the formation of a folk-tale, as we understand it today, from the moment a narrative kernel crystallized around a real event, it attained a life of its own and developed independently through use of traditional motifs, social symbols, and psychological residues that were no longer connected to the real event from which it emerged.36 It should be emphasized that the raising of the basket and the revenge that follows take place here together in real life, and not as two independent and separate narratives as suggested by scholars until now. The novella almost certainly grew out of real events like that of the baker, and when it became a folk narrative it had already undergone independent development in whose course the novelistic motifs of adultery, feminine wiles, spousal jealousy, and so forth had been added to it. The fusing of events from the social or religious reality with Wctive-narrative motifs from the narrative tradition of society is the most likely explanation for the creation of a story like our novella. More important still is another real event mentioned above, namely the Wre rituals that also took place in the town squares. The combination of two such events—the basket penalty and the Wre rituals—into a single narrative plot indicates another important aspect of the tale. Both take place in public, before a large crowd, are accompanied by externalized physical activity and exposure of intimate parts of the body, and elicit laughter and ridicule or sexual excitement in a public context. These indicate clearly the carnivalistic nature of the tale in its Bakhtinian sense, and they were almost certainly one reason for the tale’s inXuence and broad distribution. T H E ME D I U M A N D AU T H O R I T Y Whether the tale is taken from a written version or an oral one, it was certainly not copied from any authoritative source; thus it is not clear how and why Eleazar Halevi put it into his history of the Jewish people, which he based Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 256 page 256 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif almost entirely on normative sources. From where does this tale draw its authority—authority that enables Eleazar Halevi to include it as a historical document in the chronicles of the Jewish people? If we assume that the author took the story from some written source, whether foreign or Jewish, then the conventional medieval mentality was probably at work here, according to which a text’s very existence in a written work, even if it was diYcult to accept its logic, is accepted as authoritative and authentic. Gurevich formulated this concept as follows: ‘Quotations and borrowings, set phrases and clichés, were a natural way of expressing oneself in an age when authority was everything and originality nothing . . . As a rule, the historian saw himself as continuing the work of his predecessors; since, strictly speaking, there is only one universal history which cannot be rewritten anew: it can only be continued.’37 The author came upon a text of a famous story that repeated a literary topos familiar to him and in his society. Even if its source was dubious, even if it contained elements at odds with his society’s conventional moral norms, Eleazar Halevi (or Jerahmeel ben Solomon before him) viewed the tale as an authoritative ‘document’. As such, its inclusion in his composition was appropriate; it would enrich his historical portrait. It seems that an oral source for the tale would not, in itself, have detracted from the authoritativeness of the story as a historical document. If indeed Eleazar ben Asher Halevi witnessed, as we have assumed, such penalties carried out in the streets of German cities, wherein criminals were hoisted up in a basket then dumped unceremoniously into the mud for all to see, that would be enough to strengthen, in his view, the authenticity of the tale. If such was the local custom from time beyond memory, there would be no hesitation in believing that it was practised in ancient Rome as well. Similarly, there would be no reason to doubt that the story indeed rested on an authentic local tradition. For a Jewish narrator, the concept of ‘the oral torah’ has a binding and authoritative value; the steadfast transmission of this body of unwritten law from generation to generation is its established foundation. If the Italian Jew, the copyist of the tale into Hebrew, heard the story from locals, he would have seen it not as an entertaining erotic story but as an authentic historical document. This may seem unusual from the vantage-point of modern mentality, but such a consideration would seem eminently logical to denizens of the Middle Ages. Fascinating testimony of this conception has survived in the remarks of a Jewish traveler, Menahem ben Peretz ha-Hevroni, who made a pilgrimage to Palestine about a hundred years before the writing of The Book of Memory (he was nearly a contemporary of Jerahmeel), and recounted his impressions and experiences in the various communities of Europe. Below, he comments on the authority of oral traditions he heard in the Holy Land: Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof page 257 Narrative as hermeneutics 1.9.2008 6:40pm 257 And thus I received [these reports, e.g. local legends] from the natives of the Land of Israel. As I, Menahem ha-Hevroni, wrote them, so they are, from beginning to end. Let no one who sees this report about [those saints] suspect that I wrote it to Wnd favor or to extract money from them. It is revealed and known to the Creator that this is how I heard [it] from the natives of ma’arava [the Land of Israel]. And if the reader Wnds it diYcult and says, how could the natives of the Land of Israel know about [the graves of] the righteous buried there three thousand years ago? Then I, the writer, will answer them: from the mouths of the natives of the Land of Israel, not from their writing. For those living in the Land of Israel now were never exiled from there to this day . . . and they, the very ones still living in the Land of Israel today, received it each one in turn from his father [going back] to the destruction of the temple; they know the whole matter and it is thus that I, Menahem ha-Hevroni, received [it].38 According to this logic, then, written testimony was unreliable, as forged written documents were rife, but oral testimony on the location of the graves and on the numerous miracles performed there was unassailable truth, because it had been handed down in a reliable tradition from father to son for over three thousand years. According to the same logic, Jerahmeel ben Solomon or Eleazar Halevi apparently accepted our story as credible. Indeed, neither written nor normative sources had preserved it, but local people, the simple folk, who were unbiased witnesses and who had lived in the same place forever, had passed on this story from father to son for hundreds of years. They had even preserved it in juridical practices, and their oral transmissions were no less authoritative than any written historical document. One explanation, then, for the inclusion of an erotic novella in a historical work, and for its status as a reliable document, is entirely independent of the tale’s contents; it instead has to do with the general mentality of the Middle Ages and the nature of the medium through which it was transmitted. Even if the nature of the tale opposes the basic logic of the historical document, the fact that informants considered reliable by the author conveyed it orally or in writing gives it the basic authority to admit it into a historical work such as The Book of Memory. TH E CO N TE XT A S M ES SAGE The story appears in The Book of Memory after the description of the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people in the ancient world—the destruction of the temple and the subsequent exile. This is one of the most detailed and tragic chapters in the composition: the revolt, the siege of Jerusalem, the slaughter and rivers of blood, the burning of the temple, and the processions Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 258 page 258 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif of captives led away to exile. This is also the closing chapter of the history of the Jewish people as an independent political entity. At this point a new historical chapter begins, that of dispersion and exile. Titus, the Roman general who led the attack on Jerusalem, returned to Rome as a conquering hero. The story of Titus’ punishment—a mosquito entered his ear and gnawed away at his brain until he died in agony—constitutes an integral part of the story of the destruction in all the normative Jewish sources, and so too in The Book of Memory. Immediately following this comes our tale—the novella appears in The Book of Memory in this immediate context. The story of Titus and the mosquito, as we shall see below, connects to our novella not only on the contextual, sequential level, but also on the deep meaning of the text. The introductory remark claiming that the story took place in the days of Titus the Wicked is apparently the simplest and most candid explanation of why the tale appears in this particular place.39 Another possible connection to the Wgure of Titus lies in one of the earliest versions of the novella—perhaps the earliest, apart from the Hebrew version. This is the thirteenth-century Latin version preserved in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale.40 According to this version, the object of Virgil’s desire is not a married woman, as in all the other versions, but the virginal daughter of the emperor Nero. Nero orders Virgil’s execution for having sought to sully his daughter’s innocence. Thus, the Latin version sets the tale in the same period as the Hebrew story: the period of Nero and Titus. In other words, the ‘invention’ of the time the story took place, which we tended until now to lay at the door of the author of the Hebrew version, existed already in the European versions that transferred Virgil’s lifetime to the period of Nero, which coincides with the time when Titus lived. As the name of Nero had almost no importance for the Hebrew narrator,41 the latter linked the tale to Nero’s contemporary, Titus, who was a symbol of great importance in Jewish culture. In so doing, he left the story in the same temporal focal-point as the source before him; in other words, he sought to preserve in this manner its historical authenticity. The need for retaliation and revenge for the dreadful destruction is selfevident. The great and glorious city of Rome, according to the tale, was actually a base and corrupt place: its leaders were people who, like the magician, were governed by their sinful impulses. The destroyers of Jerusalem and the temple were themselves degraded and immoral people. God would not allow them to continue their comfortable lives without punishment for what they did, as overt history would have it seem. The remarks of the author of the Josippon lend credence to this notion; he explains the inclusion of the erotic novella of Paulina, mentioned above, in his historical narrative: ‘For in the days of the emperor Tiberius, not only in Judaea were contemptible things done [by the Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 259 1.9.2008 6:40pm 259 Romans], but also in Rome, the imperial city, many [such] things were done. Now I will recount one of the contemptible things done in Rome in the days of the emperor Tiberius.’ Again, at the conclusion of the tale: ‘Thus we wrote about this contemptible thing done in the days of the emperor Tiberius to make known that throughout his empire such contemptible things were done in his time.’42 In other words, the tenth-century, Italian author of the Book of Josippon also viewed such individual cases as evidence of Rome’s moral depravity, and it was unthinkable that it would not suVer retribution. Israel J. Yuval read the story of Titus and the mosquito, one of the most important Jewish legends about the destruction of the Second Temple, as a mirror image and mental reaction to the Christian legend of ‘The Savior’s Revenge’. According to this legend, Titus, or his father Vespasian, recovered from a severe malady (either a wasp had Xown up his nose or he had developed a hideous ulcer) because he believed in Jesus and swore revenge on the Jews, who had killed him. After recovering, he set out for Palestine and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in retaliation for the murder of Jesus at the hands of the Jews. In Yuval’s opinion, the legend of Titus and the mosquito is Jewish culture’s response to the legend of the Savior’s Revenge. The tables are turned: Titus was not cured of the mosquito because he razed the temple; rather he died in agony brought on by the mosquito because he razed the temple.43 Were this the case, however, there would remain a glaring imbalance, as Titus destroyed an entire city and an entire people, while in the story of the mosquito he alone is punished. The notion of ‘measure for measure’ does not seem to be in eVect in this case. Interpretations like Yuval’s of the story of Titus point up the imbalance in the Jewish people’s revenge against him: Rome, since its terrible sin against the Jewish people, grew yet more powerful and became the capital of Edom—that is, the capital of the Christian world. If in the fourth century, when it seems the story of Titus and the mosquito developed, there was need for revenge against the Christians, by the thirteenth century the need must have grown tenfold. Therefore, any story that could substantiate the collective punishment of the Romans in their new Christian raiment, hated even more, was likely to be mobilized to this purpose of mental and psychological revenge. Therefore, the tale of the magician in the basket, inserted into precisely this context, should be seen as the completion of the tale of revenge left unWnished by the previous tale of Titus and the mosquito. The tale was inserted here as an integral part of the history of the Jewish people, not because of its narrative beauty or erotic appeal, but above all because it was perceived as reliable testimony of a great punishment inXicted on the city of Rome, capital of the destroyers of the Jewish capital. Here, the pornographic elements have an obvious function: God punished the wicked measure for measure—by means of a crude and cruel event—as they deserved. Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 260 page 260 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif If we look at the question of the authority of the narrative text from this perspective, we must understand that it draws authority not from the source in which the document was found (as suggested above), but from the function of the text in this context. Even if the story was taken from a non-Jewish oral tradition—which might be a dubious source, initially—and even if it violates Jewish cultural norms, it is still the only account the author had of a disaster befalling Rome in the time of Titus, immediately after the destruction. Leaving the account of the tragic destruction as it stood, with only the story of Titus’ private punishment (found indeed in the rabbinic sources, hence its unquestioned authenticity), and continuing on with the chronicle with the description of the exile and its attendant suVerings, might be interpreted as a lack of faith in the power and ability of God to retaliate against the destroyers of His temple. This urgent need for a tale of calamitous punishment for the wicked Romans is the real authority the text needed. The best evidence for the historicity of the story is that the Romans themselves (the Italian inhabitants of the place) tell it. The fact that Virgil died almost a hundred years before the destruction of the temple is not signiWcant in terms of folk memory, for which ‘creative historiography’ is a central component.44 Moreover, as we saw above, non-Jewish versions of the story attribute it to the period of the emperor Nero, that is, the time of Titus. Thus the tale, despite its eccentric and erotic character, fulWlls an important need in the historical function of the work, and it draws its authority from the world-view that it was meant to present and not necessarily from its documentary authority. THE M EA NIN GF UL U NC O NS C IO US We tend to deal with the meaning of a given text on the conscious level, forgetting that a narrative tradition might work along unconscious channels in a much more powerful way. According to the midrashic legend of Titus, after conquering Jerusalem he enters the Holy of Holies, sword in hand. With his sword, he pierces the curtain that covers this holiest of places, and it emerges dripping with blood. He believes that he has killed the God of Israel. He has sex with two prostitutes on the altar, again thinking that by doing so he has punished the God of Israel. Upon returning to Rome, a mosquito enters Titus’ head through his nose and gnaws away at his brain until he dies in agony.45 Yet the two stories have something more fundamental in common than Titus as protagonist, according to Galit Hasan-Rokem: ‘This is a story about entering, about crossing boundaries into closed spaces, about the Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 261 1.9.2008 6:40pm 261 central limits of a culture, about the holiness of the interior, about ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘not us’’ ’.46 The topos of the woman imprisoned atop a tower is a central motif in general and Jewish folk narrative. In the study of European folk literature, the narrative poem ‘Yonec’, by the twelfth-century poet Marie de France, is customarily cited as the text most inXuential on the development of the motif.47 This is a tale about a young woman forcibly married to an old and jealous husband who imprisoned her in the top of a tall tower. Her lover, the prince, would visit her in the guise of a hawk. However, the basis of tale type AT 310—the girl in the top of the tower48—which is one of the most popular in European folk narrative, was shaped by the Brothers Grimm’s tale ‘Rapunzel.’49 It is natural that a tale so laden with erotic symbols should be interpreted with psychoanalytical tools, both as an expression of ancient rituals of coming-of-age50 and as a symbol of the maiden threatened by the male, the phallus (¼ the tower).51 In Jewish folk narrative, the parallel oicotype (the local variant of an international tale-type) known as ‘Solomon’s Daughter in the Tower’ became even more popular following H. N. Bialik’s kunstmärchen, ‘On Three and Four’.52 However, the maiden in the tower is also an ancient Jewish symbol of the Jewish people or, alternatively, of Divine Providence (the shekhina of Jewish mysticism). Only the resolute believer’s great devotion, self-sacriWce, and daring will bring him close to her.53 Therefore, the magician seeking to get to her and seduce her into betraying her husband in our story should be seen as a symbolic representation of ‘the other’ culture, the foreign nations who try in every generation to tempt the Jewish people to betray its ‘husband’, the Almighty. Once rejected, ‘the other’ takes revenge by violating the nation’s most intimate site—its Holy of Holies. Violation is the most precise term for this, as what could be more brutal than what was done to her. Indeed, the description of the destruction of the temple in terms of violation and sexual degradation is one of the main themes of the biblical book of Lamentations: Jerusalem has grievously sinned; therefore she is become loathsome: all that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: she herself also sighs, and turns backward. Her Wlthiness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her last end; therefore she came down astonishingly: she has no comforter. O Lord, behold my aZiction: for the enemy has magniWed himself. The adversary has spread out his hand upon all her pleasant things: for she has seen that heathen nations invade her sanctuary, those whom thou didst forbid to enter into thy congregation. (Lam 1:8–10; emphasis added) These biblical verses echo precisely the deprivations inXicted on the wealthy Roman woman in the town square. Had the medieval story tried to describe her feelings as she lay bound while the citizenry stood before her waiting their turn to violate her, it might well have used the words from these verses. In this Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 262 page 262 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif way, it is possible to express (as indeed the book of Lamentations does) the emotions of a society whose hated enemy ‘penetrated’ its most sacred and intimate ‘place’, the place where even the servants of the Holy were not permitted entry, and, once inside, violated it. This feeling is no diVerent in principle from that of a woman who has suVered rape and its attendant humiliation. If we follow this line of interpretation, the tale of the magician in the basket can be read as parallel to the story of the destruction of Jerusalem: the magician, the unmistakable representative of the foreign nations, sees the Jewish people’s hidden, protected beauty in the tower. He desires her and attempts to seduce her, but the Jewish people, instead of distancing itself from him and others like him, provokes him, teases him by seeming to respond, without any intention of truly betraying her husband—the God of Israel. In other words, both the woman in the story and the Jewish people in the parallel historical narrative are not entirely free of sin; they bear some responsibility for the subsequent revenge and retribution. Thus, Israel was forcibly ‘brought down’ from its lofty abode where it had guarded its innocence, and the nations of the world wounded her one after another, as she remained abject and beaten for all to see. In this respect, the disgrace described in the story is harsher yet than that described in the midrashic story about Titus; in the latter he alone, as representative of Rome, penetrated the Holy of Holies; the rape was not a public group rape, as in our tale. Thus, in parallel to the overt plot of the story, there is a parallel and underground narrative layer that stems from the historical memory of the narrating society (the memory of the destruction) and relies on the texts that the same society created in order to preserve this memory (for example, the book of Lamentations and the legend of Titus). The narrating society was by no means aware of this mental layer, in which it identiWes with the feelings of the Roman woman who was raped and humiliated. The tale was not fashioned deliberately as a ‘parallel narrative’. It echoes the profound feelings and exposed nerves of past traumas that never faded away but became stronger in the face of present suVerings (described in detail in the later chapters of The Book of Memory that deal with the atrocities of the Crusades). When Eleazar Halevi (or Jerahmeel ben Solomon before him) chose to include this story in his history of the Jewish people, and to place it immediately after the chapter about the destruction of the temple, all three factors deWned here were active in establishing the meaning of this story. He viewed the story as a reliable historical document, because he relied on the source— written or oral—from which he drew it. He also believed that the story of the destruction was incomplete until an appropriate, collective punishment was Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 263 1.9.2008 6:40pm 263 seen to be inXicted on those who perpetrated the unspeakable destruction, and what punishment could be more suitable than that describing the internal destruction of Rome as a consequence of its sexual licentiousness? Such a punishment truly completes the historical picture (‘as it should be’), and from here the story draws its historical authority and meaning. Yet it seems that without the deep, unconscious layer there could be no real connection between the story and the devastation of the Jewish people. Narrative themes like the beautiful and chaste woman in the tower, the seducing stranger, the woman whose intimate parts are exposed publicly, penetration into the Holy of Holies, and the perpetual Wre taken from there, are symbols planted deep beneath the threshold of consciousness of each individual member of Jewish society. As the principal narrative motifs in the story echo so clearly the symbols of the temple and its destruction, the traumas of the destruction and the disgrace of exile, this not-overt and not-conscious layer should be seen as one of the important components that endow so strange and exceptional a story with its power and historical legitimacy. NOTES 1. David Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer in an Old Hebrew Story’ [Hebrew], in Roberto BonWl et al. (eds.), Memorial Book for Umberto Nahon (Jerusalem, 1978), 169. Flusser reads bonomini, that is, the good men, the nobility. 2. The manuscript reads mekhasef rather than mekhashef. This may not have been a mistake, but a deliberate indication of his desire for the woman (mekhasef/ kosef), or of his being a liar (mekhazev). 3. In Hebrew, hei’akh atah ’omed is not proverbial Hebrew. Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, speculates that this is a literal translation of the Italian come state. 4. In Hebrew, qever (grave)—a euphemism used by the rabbinic sages in several places, and cf. variants in E. ben-Yehuda, Dictionary of the Hebrew Language [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Talpiot Publishing, 1948–59), xi. 5728. 5. It seems it should be the inverse: ‘he went to the sorcerer with her family and with his family’—because the sorcerer had desecrated the honor of both families. 6. Oxford Bodleian ms. Heb. D.11; on it, see A. Neubauer and A. Cowley, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), ii. 208–15. The story appears in the full text of the chronicle in my critical edition: The Book of Memory: Text and Interpretation [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv, 2001), 313–15. Flusser published this tale earlier, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 168–75. 7. For the novella in Herodotus, see Norbert Jankowski and Heinrich Alexander Stoll (eds.), Die Novellen und Anekdoten des Herodotus (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1968); W. Aly, Volksmärchen, sage und Novelle Bei Herodot und Seinen Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 264 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. page 264 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif Zeitgenossen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969). On the tale of Paulina, who slept with a man who was disguised as a god, in Josephus and the Book of Josippon, see The Book of Josippon [in Hebrew], ed. David Flusser (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978), i. 267–71; S. Bowman, ‘Sefer Yossipon: History and Midrash’, in Michael Fishbane (ed.), The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 280–94. On this work and the main scholarship treating it, see E. Yassif, ‘The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages’, Prooftexts, 17 (1997), 153–76, and Yassif, The Book of Memory. On this, see the early works of A. Neubauer, ‘Jerahmeel Ben Shlomo’, JQR 11 (1899), 364–86; M. Gaster (trans.), The Chronicles of Jerahmeel (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1899); and H. Schwarzbaum, ‘Prolegomenon’, in M. Gaster (trans.), The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, 2nd edn. (New York: Ktav, 1971), 1–124. The extensive scholarship on this genre includes Ernst Schulin (ed.), Universalgeschichte (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974); R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 195–8; K. H. Krueger, Die Universal-chroniken (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985); Alexander Randa (ed.), Mensch und Weltgeschichte: Zur Universalgeschichtesschreibung (Salzburg and Munich: Pustet, 1969). Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 289. Oxford ms., 7a. See Domenico Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 326–37; John W. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer—Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 136–206. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 60–8, oVers a table of the development of Virgilian legends in the Middle Ages, according to which the Wrst mention of Virgil extinguishing all the Wres throughout Rome as punishment for humiliation at the hands of a woman appears in the book Image du Monde, written in the years 1245–46, and cf. ibid. 154. ‘Torre di Virgilio’, Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages, 332–3. J. H. Savage, ‘Some Possible Sources of Medieval Conceptions of Virgil’, Speculum, 19 (1944), 336–43, reinforces the connection between the Virgil legends in the Middle Ages and medieval Neapolitan history. See also J. Wood, ‘Virgil and Taliesin: The Concept of the Magician in Medieval Folklore’, Folklore, 94 (1983), 91–104. See M. William Clements, ‘ ‘‘Virgil in the Basket’’: A Northeast Arkansas Analogue’, Mid-America Folklore, 12 (1984), 21–6. Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages, 327–30; Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 137–42, even divides the discussion of the story into two separate chapters, as if the tale were two distinct tales; Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 173–4. Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 173–4. p. Sanhedrin 6:6 and t. Hagigah 2:2, and cf. E. Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline Teitelbaum (Bloomington, Ind.: Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. page 265 1.9.2008 6:40pm 265 Indiana University Press, 1999), 156–8, 498–9; J. C. Baroja, The World of the Witches (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 6–9. ‘To produce Wre in one’s own body is a sign that one has transcended the human condition. According to the myths of certain primitive peoples, the aged women of the tribe ‘‘naturally’’ possessed Wre in their genital organs and made use of it to do their cooking but it was hidden from men, who were able to get possession of it only by trickery,’ Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 196. On the connection between ancient Wre rituals in Europe and the fertility rites, see James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1950), 641–50. On pp. 638–641 Frazer describes a very common ritual know as ‘wild Wre’ or ‘need Wre’: when a plague spread among the animals (who die by the masses in our story as well), all the sources of Wre in the region were extinguished; even a single spark was forbidden. Afterwards, the inhabitants gathered in the town square and lit a Wre by rubbing together two sticks—one symbolizing the male, the other the female. Sometimes a stark-naked young man and woman held the sticks. After the Wre was lit all the inhabitants stood in line to light their torches from the central Wre. Only from these were they allowed to then rekindle the Wres in their homes. Freud’s 1932 essay, ‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’, in the Standard Edition, vol. 22 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 187–93, interprets the Wre as a phallic symbol, and the acquisition of the Wre as a libidinal process. Following him, see the works of Gaston Bachélard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), and Donald Scott, The Psychology of Fire (New York: Scribner, 1974), 67–78, 128–38. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 202–5, suggests pushing this date to the years between 1238, when Pope Gregory IX banned such Wre rites, and 1245, when the work Image du Monde was written. As stated previously, this was the Wrst work to mention the tale explicitly. Spargo’s suggestion ignores the fact that complex processes in the sphere of folk religion develop over many years, not between borders delimited by written texts, or even texts dictated by the pope. Spargo also overlooks the fact that the story of the magician in the basket almost certainly preceded its mention in Image du Monde by many years, which ultimately attests to a folk tradition about Virgil already widespread in its time. Comparetti alludes to this, Virgil in the Middle Ages, 257–89, and passim. See below. As discerned by Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 173. See Yassif, The Book of Memory, 24–6. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. M. Adler (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 9. In the Book of Memory itself there is important testimony to the legend of the fountain of oil. In the framework of a description of the Roman antiquities, the Josippon describes the founders of Sorento as Aramites who Xed from David, ‘but the city of Sorento was split by a fountain of oil, and for many years it sat beneath the city, and the sea covered it between Naples and New Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof 266 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. page 266 1.9.2008 6:40pm Eli Yassif Sorento, and still that spring did not stop [Xowing] for to this day the oil Xows and rises above the seawater. The residents of Naples always collected it.’ Josippon, Flusser edn., 18 and cf. Yassif, The Book of Memory, 151. Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages, 270. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 373. See the table of versions of the tale and their chronological order in Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 61–2, 394, n. 1. Moses Gaster, who translated the Wrst part of the Book of Memory into English (1899), did not include this tale in his translation. The tale was published in Jansen Enikels Werke, ed. Ph. Strauch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 3 (Zurich, 1972), 463–70, vers. 23779–4138. The Latin version of the tale is in manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, BR 6186, fols. 149v–150v, and was published by Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 372–3. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 142–4. Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 175. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 147–53. The event is documented in several chronicles of Zurich; see Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 151, 378, n. 33. For example, the classic work of Arnold Van Gennep, La Formation des légendes (Paris: Flammarion, 1912), and Lutz Röhrich, Folktales and Reality, trans. Peter Tokofsky (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991). Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 128 Oxford-Bodleian ms. Or. 135, 362b–363a. On this manuscript, see M. Beit Arieh, ‘Oxford Manuscript Bodl. Or. 135’ [Hebrew], Tarbitz, 54 (1985), 631–44. On the travels of Menahem ben Peretz, see J. Prawer, ‘Hebrew Travelogues in Palestine in the Crusader Period’ [Hebrew], Katedra, 41 (1987), 69–73. Flusser, ‘Virgil the Necromancer’, 173, claims that, ‘since the author did not know the magician’s identity, only that the event took place in ancient Rome, it was easy for him to set the story in the days of Titus.’ This argument presents the anchoring of the tale in the days of Titus as a default option, which of course overlooks the deliberate fashioning of the tale as a response to and revenge for the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. See n. 31. For minor appearance in classical Jewish literature, see A. Taran-Israeli, ‘The Legend of Nero in the Babylonian Talmud—Between History and Literature’ [in Hebrew], in R. Cohen and J. Mali (eds.), Literature and History (Jerusalem, 1999), 77–88. The Book of Josippon (see n. 7), 267, 271. I. J. Yuval, ‘ ‘‘The Lord Will Take Vengeance, Vengeance for His Temple’’— Historia sine ira et studio’ [in Hebrew], Zion, 59 (1994), 364–70. I. Heineman, ‘The Ways of Creative Historiography’, in The Ways of Aggadah [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1954), 15–95. Green and Lieber / Scriptural Exegesis 14-Green and Lieber-chap14 Page Proof Narrative as hermeneutics page 267 1.9.2008 6:40pm 267 45. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, version B, ch. 7; Genesis Rabbah 10, 7, Theodor-Albeck edn., 80; Leviticus Rabbah 22, 4, Margolies edn., 492. For a discussion of the diVerent versions, see I. Lévi, ‘La Mort de Titus’, REJ 15 (1887), 62–9. 46. Galit Hasan-Rokem, ‘Within Limits and Beyond: History and Body in Midrashic Texts’, International Folklore Review, 9 (1993), 7. 47. The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (New York: Dutton, 1978), 137–52. 48. A. Aarne and S. Thompson, The Types of the Folktale—A ClassiWcation and Bibliography (Helsinki, 1961), 101. 49. The Grimms’ German Folk Tales, trans. Francis P. Magoun and Alexander H. Krappe (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), 47–50; Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 102–3. 50. Röhrich, Folktales and Reality, 98–9. 51. See e.g. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 147–9. 52. M. Ben-Yekhezkel, ‘The Book, ‘‘And It Came to Pass’’, by H. N. Bialik’ [in Hebrew], in G. Shaked (ed.), Bialik: Critical Essays on His Works—An Anthology (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1974), 368–9; and the impressive bibliography of texts and studies in Mimekor Yisrael: Classical Jewish Folktales, coll. Micha J. Bin Gorion; ed. Emanuel bin Gorion; trans. I. M. Lask; prep D. Ben-Amos (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), 70–1. On Bialik’s story, see E. E. Urbach, ‘H. N. Bialik’s ‘‘The Legend of Three and Four’’ ’[in Hebrew], HaUniversitah, 18: 2 (1973), 58–71; D. Miron, ‘Remarks on ‘‘The Legend of Three and Four’’ ’ [in Hebrew], in Shaked (ed.), Bialik, 373–402. A group of tales not yet given due attention in connection with the legend of ‘Solomon’s Daughter in the Tower’ is that of Darius’ daughter, dated to approximately the thirteenth century: Darius had a beautiful daughter whom he cloistered in a high tower to safeguard her innocence, allowing only eunuchs to serve her. The son of one of the king’s bodyguards, a handsome and clever young man, fell asleep one day among the trees near the tower. Darius’ daughter, who saw him, identiWed him as the lover of whom she had always dreamed. With the help of her maidservants, she raised him up to her room in the tower in a basket every day, until the eunuchs discovered that she was pregnant. The young man was caught but later saved (Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 141–2). 53. See e.g. Dov Sadan, ‘On the Burning Candle’ [in Hebrew], in Knesent in Memory of H. N. Bialik (1938), 79–87; Aryeh Wineman, Beyond Appearances: Stories from the Kabbalistic Ethical Writings (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 18–24.