December 2016 – S.J. Pearce

December 29, 2016

My Year in Books: 2016

What with finishing my own book, I didn’t do nearly as much reading for pleasure as I would have liked. Here’s what I did (and didn’t) read in the year that was:

Most delicious alphabet soup of hardware: Feynman’s c-clamp, used to test o-ring resiliency as a member of the Rogers Commission, as described in his Why Do You Care What Other People Think?

It’s very different to listen to an audiobook without having first watched the TV episode based on it rather than the other way around: The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter, read by Kevin Whately

Expected Philip Roth. Got Joseph Roth instead: Jacobo el mutante by Mario Bellatín

Book I wish I lived my life in such a way so as to be able to have written: Teaching Plato in Palestine by Carlos Fraenkel

Not a guidebook but I put in a ton of sticky notes as I read and then walked around Jerusalem with it all the same: Till We Have Built Jerusalem by Adina Hoffman

I have dragged a copy with me on every single flight to Madrid that I have taken since 2004, this year being no exception (three flights to Madrid), and still haven’t actually managed to read: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Two details about Finland that I found during my visit there to be surprisingly accurate: The close-knit-ness of the Jewish community, as illustrated in Behind God’s Back by Harri Nykanen; and the apparent predilection for hot pepper-flavored foods, as illustrated in The Core of the Sun by Johana Sinisalo

Art forger whose life and work make me want to go on a grand tour of Europe to see all the museums he duped: Reinholt Vasters, as profiled in Noah Charney’s The Art of Forgery

Book I started with high hopes but have been put off by the stultifying writing and therefore have no charming little tidbit with which to characterize it and, in fact, may not finish it in 2017: Tolkien and the Great War by John Gath

Favorite source of book recommendations: NPR’s Science Friday occasional science and sci-fi literature episodes

December 14, 2016

Spoiler alert: 1341.

Sometimes you can have been staring at something completely obvious for nothing short of years without realizing it, and then all of a sudden it comes into very sharp focus. This just happened to me recently, with the copying date of a manuscript I’ve been working with since 2012 suddenly becoming apparent. To be fair, I’m not the first scholar to have worked with the manuscript, so I’m far from the first to have overlooked it. I was in very good company in not having noticed the date. But I also like being the one who noticed that it was there. This blog post, then, is sort of a preview of a ḥiddush, a new discovery, that will be published in my book early next year.

The colophon of Bodleian MS Mich. 50.3 begins with the phrase: “This was completed — praise the lord God! — by the hand of Yoav.” It then has a funny little abbreviation, the Hebrew letters aleph-yud-mem-nun.

With the help of the dictionary of acronyms, I had already identified the letters as an abbreviation for the biblical phrase: אנא יי מלטה נפשי, which comes from Psalm 116. But it kept nagging at me. Scribes will often cite biblical verses in their colophons, but this one is a little weird and a little obscure. It’s not what I would expect to find in a colophon. And so I kept coming back to it, opening up the image file and staring at the manuscript page on my computer screen. And finally, suddenly, it occurred to me that this phrase might be a chronogram, an abbreviation that indicates a date through the numerical values of the letters. I suspected that it wasn’t — that if it were, someone else would have figured that out by now — but I figured I’d do the math anyway just in case.

The letters in this abbreviation add up like this: aleph = 1, yud = 10, mem =40, nun = 50. Chronograms often omit the leading 5 in the thousands place; so for example, this year is 5777, but it might be indicated with letters that add up to 777. If we restore an extra 5,000 to the numerical value of the chronogram in this colophon, we get 5101, which is the year that runs across 1340-41 of the common era. Up until now, the manuscript has been dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries on the basis of the script, so reading the abbreviation as a chronogram actually comports totally with the paleographic evidence and so it is reasonable to date the copying of the manuscript to that year.

The strangeness of the phrase chosen to yield the chronogram still leaves me with a question, one I can only speculate about at this point. Psalm 116 comes from the hallel cycle of psalms, recited as part of the liturgy at the three major pilgrimage festivals, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Hallel is recited at other time, too, so it’s not as secure an identification, but I wonder whether choosing a phrase from hallel indicates that the scribe, Yo’av, finished copying the manuscript just before one of these holidays, that is, sometime between Sukkot (with the 15th of Tishrei falling on 7 October, 1340) and Shavot (with 6 Sivan falling on May 23, 1341).

So, in case it is useful for anyone to know, the upshot is this: The earliest and most complete surviving copy of Judah ibn Tibbon’s ethical will was copied 150 years after the author’s death and the text’s dissemination in 1190, in the fall of 1340 or the spring of 1341. Ultimately this is a question of the reception and readership of the ethical will and what particular value it might have had for the Jews of Provence and northern France at a particular nadir of Jewish-Christian relations and the end of the Maimonidean Controversie. Being able to date the manuscript gives us some context for the reception and transmission of what is a very Andalusi text to a wider audience.

December 2, 2016

“Both Sons of Spain”: Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Imagined Nation

My department held a round-table and teach-in yesterday in response to post-election Islamophobic and anti-Semitic vandalism on campus. We felt it was important, as scholars in the humanities, to offer a humanistic intellectual response to the changing tenor of campus discourse; we grounded this response within our discipline, with six speakers offering case studies of how different communities have responded to repression within the Spanish-speaking world. (The event was livestreamed and a recording will be available early next week; I’ll post it as and when. Edited on 12/9/16: The video is now available! ) What follows was my intervention:

I want to let you in on the dirty little secret of my field, Medieval Studies: The Middle Ages is incredibly attractive to white supremacists. For people whose vision of a backwards-looking, great world is one with white Christian men in positions of power and the rest of us put in our places, the Middle Ages is a fertile ground for fantasy, where it seems very easy, at least superficially, to ignore the integral role of an incredibly diverse population. There are legends like King Arthur, images like the Bayeaux Tapestries, and long histories of Crusading that, on the face of it, make the Middle Ages look very white and like a world very divided neatly into categories of “us” and “them.”

This vision of a very white, very Christian Middle Ages has been a part of political rhetoric for rather a long time: Anti-feminist politicians exploit their idea of medieval chivalry and courtly love to give their ideas a historical grounding. The British Nationalist party uses the story of Excalibur to promote its vision of a racially pure England. The Crusades, in particular, have factored into that: Crusaders became a favorite theme of 19^th-century Romantic writers and thinkers, whose refashioning of these tales were crucial to the creating the popular vision of a very white Middle Ages. T.E. Lawrence, the young British army officer who would go on to be known as Lawrence of Arabia and reshape the map of the modern Middle East came to that region as a student at Oxford writing about Crusader castles. Various European fascist movements throughout 20^th-century have adopted Crusader rhetoric. More recently and in our own country, George W. Bush called for Crusade in the wake of 9/11. And the most recent presidential election saw a proliferation of images that have long circulated more quietly in the darkest, most racist corners of the internet that rely on medieval and Crusading themes and images to support both individual candidates and wider worldviews.

The fall of the last Muslim principality of Spain, Granada, in 1492 is another popular motif for white supremacists. They also love that that was the year when the Jews were expelled; and because it was also the year that Columbus first set forth for the New World, it allows modern white supremacists to translate a late medieval Spanish desire for empire into something rather different, both in Europe and in the Americas.

But it’s not just political rhetoric: Attachment to a white Middle Ages is also an attitude that has absolutely permeated our cultural outlook: Look at something like the TV version of Game of Thrones and you see a kind of fantasy Middle Ages in which the race politics is incredibly uncomplicated, with a lily-white savior and her dragons redeeming the inarticulate, teeming masses of brown barbarians. It’s a rhetoric that politicians can use because it resonates with the population.

But when we look at the actual Middle Ages in all its complexity, the possibility of this fantasy vision evaporates very quickly.

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