In 1665, reports began flying around the Jewish world that the Messiah had arrived in Jerusalem. His name was reported to be Shabbetai Tzvi. Upon hearing the news Glückel of Hameln’s father-in-law sent two large casks filled with dried food and clothing to her home in Hamburg. He asked her to keep the casks safe until the time came to set sail to the Land of Israel to greet the Messiah.
Glückel of Hameln wrote about her father-in-law’s request in a memoir she had begun to compose for her children after the death of her husband. She said she was writing it ‘to stifle and banish the melancholy thoughts which came to me during many sleepless nights’. She had no intention of publishing her memoir; it was an ‘ethical will’, a way of passing on reflections and moral instructions to her hildren. But in 1896, nearly 200 years after her death, the memoir was published. It was brought to print by the Austrian scholar Dr David Kaufmann who recognised its value as one of the most important documents to have survived from the 17th century.
When letters first arrived in in Hamburg declaring that the Messiah had arrived in Jerusalem, Glückel wrote about the joy in Hamburg. She described the young Portuguese Jews hurrying to the synagogues to hear the letters read, all in their best clothes, with broad green, silk ribbons around their waists. Many people sold their homes and possessions in preparation for their pilgrimage to the Land of Israel. But it was not to be. The casks containing food and clothes that her father-in-law had sent remained unopened in her home for more than four years, while he waited for the Messiah’s summons. She was philosophical when Shabbetai Tzvi was exposed as a fraud and the messianic fantasy finally collapsed. Their hopes were dashed, she wrote, because ‘it did not suit the Almighty’. The redemption had failed ‘because of our sins’.
Glückel’s memoir opens an astonishingly broad window onto Jewish life in Germany in the second half of the 17th century. It gives us a first-hand account of the joys and sufferings of ordinary people, of the opportunities that came their way and the recurring threats and dangers that confronted them. Unlike most Jewish testimonies from that period, it is not an account of life in a Polish shtetl blighted by poverty, pogrom and antisemitic persecution; it is not a real-life Fiddler on the Roof. On the contrary, Glückel was born into a comfortable family and lived a privileged life in one of Germany’s most sophisticated cities. Her mother was the daughter of a prosperous merchant and although the family fell on hard times after his death she married well: Glückel’s father was a businessman who traded in jewellery and advanced small loans. Glückel herself was married, at the age of fourteen, to Chaim, the son of a wealthy gems trader from Hameln or Hamelyn, a town otherwise only famous for its Pied Piper.
Chaim was an ambitious young man; he set himself up in Hamburg as a dealer in gold and precious stones. Glückel worked with him in the business and carried it on after his death, becoming one of a small number of independent businesswomen who could be found in trade fairs across Germany and Denmark buying and selling pearls and jewellery.
Glückel was born in 1646 and died in 1719. Chaim died in 1689. Ten years later she married again. She wrote the first part of her memoir after Chaim’s death and returned to it after her second husband died in 1712. The span of her life covers some of the most pivotal events in early modern Jewish history. When she was just three her family was expelled from Hamburg, along with the other Jews of the city. They fled to the Danish town of Altona where they stayed for some years until her father received permission to return to Hamburg. He was the first Jew, so she said, to be allowed to return.
This was a time of great movement among Jewish populations. As a child she would have encountered refugees from Poland and Ukraine fleeing the Cossacks who were massacring Jews on the instructions of their leader, Bogdan Chmielnicki. In Hamburg she witnessed the arrival of converso families- Jews whose ancestors had been forcibly converted to Christianity two centuries earlier, who had now escaped Portugal and were fleeing to Germany on a convoluted route via the West Indies. She and her husband travelled throughout Northern Europe, trading in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna and elsewhere. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a foothold in England, a country to which the Jews had been admitted when she was eight years old.
Glückel’s memoir is dense with facts; she describes the lives, families and personalities of everyone she comes into contact with or to whom she is related. She doesn’t devote much space to self-reflection, instead she provides insights into the way she is thinking through the stories and homilies that punctuate her memoir. Drawn both from the Talmud and from German folklore, some of these stories run for pages. On one occasion she illustrated how she dealt with hardship with a lengthy tale about the Empress Irena of the Orient who was due to marry the Emperor Charlemagne. Things did not work out as planned for the Empress; she was driven from her throne and forced to end her days on the Greek island of Lesbos. Glückel spells out the moral of the story; “To know what befell such a mighty empress and how patiently she bore all, is to learn that everyone should accept sufferings with patience.”
She’d had a particular hardship in mind when she wrote the story about Irena. Her family had travelled from Hamburg to stay with relatives in Hanover during the festival of Sukkot. One of her young daughters had a boil under her arm. The family had gone to the synagogue on the first day of the festival, where their maid had unfortunately showed the boil to an elderly woman. The old lady flew into a panic crying out that the child had the plague. The synagogue emptied in a flash and the maid and child were ordered out of the town. Glückel was the only one to keep her head, though it did her no good. ‘I wept and cried aloud, “For God's sake, people, what are you doing? Nothing is the matter with the child, she is quite healthy, God be praised. She had a sore head before we left Hamburg, I anointed it and the fluid from the head has, doubtless, led to this boil. If, God forbid, one has the plague the signs are different. See how freely my child is running about the street and eating a roll.”’
Glückel’s pleas were to no effect. She was obliged to send the child and maid away for a week and forbidden to accompany her. The community took great care to keep the matter secret and to find the child a secure hiding place; they feared that if the authorities heard that the plague had broken out among the Jews they would all be exiled. Glückel describes the events at great length, sparing no detail of the trauma she, the child and the whole family went through. Even though the child had not had the plague, they had to wait until the eight-day festival was over before they could convince the community that she was healed and bring her home.
Glückel gave birth to thirteen children, of whom twelve survived to adulthood, an unusually high proportion for those days. She was sixteen or seventeen when her first baby was born. Her mother, who must also have married young, was pregnant at the same time and both women gave birth in the same week. Because Glückel was so young her mother insisted that both babies slept at night with her and the maid, while Glückel had a room to herself. Her mother told Glückel not to worry, if the baby cried the maid would bring him to her.
One night Glückel awoke, realising that the baby had not been brought to her to be fed. Fearing the worst she jumped up and ran to her mother’s room. The cradle was empty and the maid was in a deep sleep. ‘I had to shout before I could rouse her from her torpor. I asked her, “Where is my baby?” . . . My mother - long may she live - woke up. She too cried to the maid, 'Where is Glückel's baby?' But she was still so sleepy that she could not give a clear reply. Then I said to my mother, “Mumma, perhaps you have my baby in bed with you?” She answered, “No! I have mine in bed with me,” and held it close to her as though someone was trying to snatch the baby away. I bethought me to go to the other cradle, and there lay her baby, fast asleep! I said, “Mumma, give me my baby, yours is in the cradle.”
Glückel describes this story as a ‘pretty tale’ that she included in the memoir to make it a bit longer. For us however it is one of many anecdotes she tells that illustrate how different life was in the 17th century. And that is the real value of Glückel of Hameln’s memoir. She allows us to see 17th century life through the eyes of a woman.
Glückel’s autobiography is one of the earliest literary works written by a Jewish woman. It was not the first; Glückel herself mentions an ethical will written by ‘the pious Pessele Ries’, her sister’s mother-in-law. And other women may have written memoirs and books that no longer exist. But The Life of Glückel of Hameln more than serves its purpose, it is a classic of 17th century literature. As a testament to the level of education that someone like Glückel must have received and to the quality of educated Jewish women’s writing in her generation, Glückel’s memoir is unsurpassed. It is a very good thing that David Kaufmann decided to publish it.