Untitled (In Praise of Poverty)

Born in Baghdad, Saliman Menahem Mani spent his youth in Hebron where his father Eliahu Saliman Mani (1818–1899), a noted kabbalist and rabbinical scholar, settled in 1858 and served as chief rabbi (hakham bashi) from 1865. Given a deep rabbinic and kabbalistic education in his youth, Saliman Mani would become a noted rabbi in his own right later in life. This turn to the rabbinate came, however, after many years of adventures and misadventures in business, travel throughout the Levant and North Africa, and, most relevant here, serious engagement in Hebrew literary creativity that at times traversed the boundary between traditionally sanctioned modes of literary expression and more self-consciously modern and critical ones. A devoted student of Hebrew and Arabic from his adolescence, Mani produced a body of notable Hebrew poetry and some prose in the 1870s through the 1890s. Scholars are still investigating the thematic and formal scope of his sophisticated poetry, where poems on well-established conventional moral and religious themes sit alongside striking poetry about such fraught themes as adultery and Mani’s own experience of being imprisoned in Damascus from 1880 to 1883. Mani’s apparently more limited engagement with prose was interwoven with the budding world of secular Hebraism in Ottoman Palestine: in the 1880s, he published several socially descriptive sketches and the story excerpted here in Ha-Tsvi, the journal of the Zionist-Hebraist pioneer and secular Zionist publicist and provocateur Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Scholars read the skeptical conclusion of “The Valley of the Demons” (of which only the beginning appears here) as mounting a critique of then-widespread beliefs in supernatural forces and the onerous practices involved in avoiding or appeasing them; Mani wrote this story, notably, in response to a report in Ha-Tsvi that a girls’ school in the region had been closed for a two-week ‘exorcism’ process (indolka) in which a soothsayer offered sweets and charms to appease the demons haunting the locale.