The Book of Delight, and Other Papers | Page 3

the science
of medicine, is not more curious as coming from a medical man, than
are the attacks on women perpetrated by some Jewish poets (Zabara
among them), who themselves amply experienced, in their own and
their community's life, the tender and beautiful relations that subsist
between Jewish mother and son, Jewish wife and husband.
The life of Joseph ben Meïr Zabara was not happy. He left Barcelona in
search of learning and comfort. He found the former, but the latter
eluded him. It is hard to say from the "Book of Delight" whether he
was a woman-hater, or not. On the one hand, he says many pretty
things about women. The moral of the first section of the romance is:
Put your trust in women; and the moral of the second section of the
poem is: A good woman is the best part of man. But, though this is so,
Zabara does undoubtedly quote a large number of stories full of point
and sting, stories that tell of women's wickedness and infidelity, of their
weakness of intellect and fickleness of will. His philogynist tags hardly
compensate for his misogynist satires. He runs with the hare, but hunts
energetically with the hounds.
It is this characteristic of Zabara's method that makes it open to doubt,
whether the additional stories referred to as printed with the
Constantinople edition did really emanate from our author's pen. These
additions are sharply misogynist; the poet does not even attempt to
blunt their point. They include "The Widow's Vow" (the widow,
protesting undying constancy to her first love, eagerly weds another)
and "Woman's Contentions." In the latter, a wicked woman is
denounced with the wildest invective. She has demoniac traits; her
touch is fatal. A condemned criminal is offered his life if he will wed a
wicked woman. "O King," he cried, "slay me; for rather would I die
once, than suffer many deaths every day." Again, once a wicked
woman pursued a heroic man. He met some devils. "What are you
running from?" asked they. "From a wicked woman," he answered. The
devils turned and ran away with him.
One rather longer story may be summarized thus: Satan, disguised in

human shape, met a fugitive husband, who had left his wicked wife.
Satan told him that he was in similar case, and proposed a compact.
Satan would enter into the bodies of men, and the other, pretending to
be a skilful physician, would exorcise Satan. They would share the
profits. Satan begins on the king, and the queen engages the
confederate to cure the king within three days, for a large fee, but in
case of failure the doctor is to die. Satan refuses to come out: his real
plan is to get the doctor killed in this way. The doctor obtains a respite,
and collects a large body of musicians, who make a tremendous din.
Satan trembles. "What is that noise?" he asks. "Your wife is coming,"
says the doctor. Out sprang Satan and fled to the end of the earth.
These tales and quips, it is true, are directed against "wicked" women,
but if Zabara really wrote them, it would be difficult to acquit him of
woman-hatred, unless the stories have been misplaced, and should
appear, as part of the "Book of Delight," within the Leopard section,
which rounds off a series of unfriendly tales with a moral friendly to
woman. In general, Oriental satire directed against women must not be
taken too seriously. As Güdemann has shown, the very Jews that wrote
most bitterly of women were loud in praise of their own wives--the
women whom alone they knew intimately. Woman was the standing
butt for men to hurl their darts at, and one cannot help feeling that a
good deal of the fun got its point from the knowledge that the charges
were exaggerated or untrue. You find the Jewish satirists exhausting all
their stores of drollery on the subject of rollicking drunkenness. They
roar till their sides creak over the humor of the wine-bibber. They laugh
at him and with him. They turn again and again to the subject, which
shares the empire with women in the Jewish poets. Yet we know well
enough that the writers of these Hebrew Anacreontic lyrics were sober
men, who rarely indulged in overmuch strong drink. In short, the
medieval Jewish satirists were gifted with much of what a little time
ago was foolishly styled "the new humor." Joseph Zabara was a "new"
humorist. He has the quaint subtlety of the author of the "Ingoldsby
Legends," and revelled in the exaggeration of trifles that is the
stock-in-trade of the modern funny man. Woman plays the part with the
former that the mother-in-law played a generation ago with the latter.
In Zabara, again, there is