Royte Yidelekh Continued..

I feel I should do a follow up to that last post about the "little Red Jews" (royte yidelekh), as it was a bit all over the place. There was too much I wanted to say, so what I shared ended up a little half-explained.

The focus was supposed to be the Yiddish stories about the Red Jews, but I didn't really give an account of the actual stories, so I'll explain the basic archetype here:

The general theme is that the Jews are being persecuted. In Ma’aseh Akdamut, one version of the tale, the persecutor is an evil, wizard monk who's killing Jews. He threatens to kill all the Jews unless they can find someone capable of matching his magic. To find such a person an emissary is sent to the Red Jews across the Sambatyon river. A river that's only supposed to be crossed at the end times, in the messianic age. However, extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary measures. So someone crosses and the Red Jews send a helper. In this particular tale it's a little, limping old man. In others it's small children. (The motif being that they are (seemingly) physically weak, yet spiritually strong.) Needless to say, the old man defeats the evil monk in an epic battle of magical one-upmanship.

Like some sort of medieval Pokémon battle.

These tales take place within a wider narrative, where the Red Jews represent this heroic force, that one day will come, en masse, as an army of liberators. They're deemed so strong that even a single child or old man from their nation can overcome thousands of enemies ..or the most evil of magical monks.

Their physical prowess stands in contrast to the "effeminate" nature of the Jews in Europe, who weren't in a position to physically overcome the peoples they lived amongst.

One passage from the book Sons of Saviors I failed to share yesterday (in my garbled post) was this one:

Medieval Christian theology and science deprecatingly likened male Jews to women when characterizing them as "unmanly." [..] The French Roman Catholic priest Henri Grégoire, better known as Abbé Gregoire, actually linked this "womanish" weakness to red hair in the late eighteenth century, when he voiced popular opinion that Jewish men "have almost all red beards, which is the usual mark of an effeminate temperament."

This is interesting not just for the mention of red hair, but for the overall observation. I've voiced before the idea that red hair, Jewishness and "effeminacy" are the product of city living. Essentially civilised life or cosmopolitanism. That the melting pot nature of cities (or crossroads cultures) gives rise to red hair, as the diversity and mixing of peoples leads to greater fluidity in pigmentation.

The link between city life and effeminacy is something that Jewish writers were all too aware of. In fact, the dream of a Jewish state in part expressed a desire to counteract this effect. Leaving the city to return to the farm or countryside, to reforge Jewish warriors, in the mould of Biblical figures such as David. Current world events express this human alchemy. It's fascinating how all these things intertwine and overlap.