Under the Tiger’s Paws (With Nachum Gutman)

In this essay Eitan Bar-Yosef returns to the work of Nahum Gutman, which fascinated him in the past, both as a child and as a young scholar. The essay examines Gutman’s complex encounters with animals – in the Israeli Jewish settlements, in the Paris zoo, and in the African jungle – and strives to understand when and under what circumstances Gutman is prepared to exchange his detached view of the animal for actual physical contact. One such rare moment is described in the chapter “Under the Tiger’s Paws” in the book In the Land of Lobengulu, King of Zulu: a hair-raising encounter between Gutman and a tiger lying upon him. Bar-Yosef, who had already analyzed this scene from a postcolonial perspective, seems to respond in his essay to Alphonso Lingis’s call by offering a new interpretation that emphasizes the intimate proximity “between these two mammals that are united here, in the illustration, almost becoming one flesh.”