The Nazi on My Bookshelf

This is the second time that I’m making an attempt at this blog post. The first attempt was rather flippant, the tone the product of my being fed up with being lectured to by people I generally agree with, both intellectually and politically, about striking from the canon of scholarship the work produced by people with vile political ideas and no discernable humanity. I don’t think we should, and I don’t think we are yet at a point where that kind of intellectual damnatio memoriae should be an un-debatable tenet of the intellectual left, a place where I still situate myself despite some major differences of opinion with the medievalist leaders in that camp. I’m trying this again without the tone, without the attitude, because I want to try to defend my position, which is one at which I have arrived through both necessity and conviction.

First, the matter of necessity: The foremost modern bilingual dictionary of the Arabic language was compiled by Hans Wehr, an active, card-carrying member of the original Nazi party for the project of creating an official Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. The dictionary is so closely identified with its compiler that it is referred to not by any title but rather by his name. The man and the book are both Hans Wehr. Scholarship does not get much more entangled with Nazism than that. I couldn’t escape it if I wanted to; as an Anglophone Arabist I have no real choice but to use that dictionary. As a modern dictionary it is not the final authority in matters medieval, but it is always the first. It is a perfect size — both comprehensive and compact — for cradling in your hand or your lap or setting down on the desk next to the text for an initial reading. It is erudite, humorous, and amazing.

As dictionaries go, it nears perfection. I own three copies. One is so well-worn and its spine so abused that I now affectionately refer to that copy as the “pocket Wehr in six volumes.” I will not stop using the tool that is most suitable for my trade simply because it was born of evil.

Perhaps with E.W. Lane’s Arabic-English dictionary digitized and searchable alongside the multivolume medieval works themselves the question of bare necessity will change; although the two dictionaries are not identical and cannot be swapped wholesale one for the other for their differing merits. In that case, the romanticism of the image of generations of Arabic students sitting with a compact, green work of Nazi propaganda cradled in our laps would be insufficient justification to continue the routine use of Wehr; though its continuing excellence surely would be.

If necessity might someday soon be obviated, there is, second, the matter of conviction. I am writing this as a Jew who listens to a lot of Wagner. As far as I am concerned, neither the political convictions of the composer nor the catastrophically fatal racism of its most famous fan is the fault of the music itself. While there is room to analyze, criticize, debate the strain of folklore represented by Wotan, Sigfried, inter al., and to understand its appeal to a certain kind of white nationalist, to close the door to the music does not address the villain. The music is not the enemy; and nor is the scholarship. To use a different metaphor, as a hobbyist photographer, I do not watch “Triumph of the Will” for its lessons in photography; I have, however, watched the pioneering work by the same cinematographer, Leni Riefenstahl, at the deeply political, deeply racist 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin hosted by the Third Reich.

My belief is this: If the scholarship (or the music, or the photography) can be reasonably separated from the political convictions of its creator, then it should be. If the extracurricular ideas of the creator do not diminish the work then they do not diminish the work; if they do diminish the work then the problem is not the politics of the creator but rather the problem of an inferior work.

In a certain respect, this is not the major issue at play with today’s neo-Nazis in the way that it is with the original gangsters who, in the 1930s and 40s, were equally the most prominent members and public supporters of their genocidal regime and the greatest scholars; it is not possible to read the classics of the field that was once called Oriental Studies without reading the paradigm-shifting work of Nazis. Today, as much as Richard Spencer fancies himself a historian he’s not doing work with which scholars must reckon; and even the Yale-trained Ben Sasse is using his credentials more as a cudgel than a license to practice. Within the academy — reception outside of it is a separate issue — bad scholarship by racists should be a non-issue not only because of their racism but also, and principally, because of their bad scholarship.

The one possibly analogous contemporary case is that of Rachel Fulton Brown. Much of the discussion of her recent turn to the basest forms of online trolling refuses to name her, calling her by her initials or by nicknames, but I am not going to adopt that practice. I’m going to name her because I don’t think she merits a nickname or the elevation to fame implied by a set of three initials, as well as for the consistency of my argument. (Although to be clear, right-wing online trolls are such a thing to contend with that I’m in no way critical of my colleagues who choose to do otherwise. It’s really a personal, practical choice as much as if not more than a principled one.) It will make this post more searchable for her rabid fans, but let the trolls do their worst, I guess.

Over the course of the last two years, Brown has written a series of blog posts that impose her own very contemporary and very wrong-headed ideas about race upon a medieval context; she tries, rather gracelessly and through a truly disturbing devotion to Milo Yiannopoulos, to justify her racism through her medieval scholarship and her academic expertise. My colleagues have very rightly refused to engage with her on these issues and, to the extent they can, have tried to avoid allowing the authority and gravitas of the academy to legitimize her racism. All of the scholarship she published going forward (if she ever returns to scholarship as we recognize it from the more memoir-like writing she seems to be pursuing as her main vocation) will necessarily be read with an eye toward whether it, too, reflects a Middle Ages infected with a modern racism.

But what about her previous scholarship? I do not for a moment believe that she became a champion of a racially-inflected western civilization very suddenly two years ago. I have to imagine that the same racist she has proven herself to be wrote her first book, the one published before her other, baser tendencies were known. I consider myself lucky to be able to watch this on the sidelines rather than having to engage with it directly. I am neither a European historian nor a scholar of English literature, the two disciplines that tend to be the heart of Medieval Studies. Even as a medievalist, I do not consider Medieval Studies to be my main field. As a disciplinary outsider and as someone who does not do too terribly much with the study of Marian devotion, I don’t know Brown’s work, nor do I have to contend with it. Those who do have largely commented that even though they did not know Brown to have been a racist, and even though they found her first book to be tremendously valuable, they will not use or cite it anymore.

And I’m not sure that’s the right response.

When considering the contemporary academic landscape, particularly with respect to Islamophobia in the academy, I have tended to think that hatred would always manifest itself in the scholarship of a racist. But thinking about it more, I’m not so sure. Jacques Derrida, as thorough a reader of Paul de Man as any, wrestled with how he could have assumed that de Man was on the “right” side of the second world war once it emerged that he had been on the wrong one.  If there was a time when Brown was able to separate her racism from her scholarship and to create work that was useful and even field-defining, then doesn’t the work endure? I could understand refusing to purchase a work written by a racist scholar so as not to send any royalties her way; but to refuse to read it? Perhaps it is a more fraught and complex question in the moment, when the racism is living and personal rather than historical and largely defeated. Is it possible that I am lucky to have to contend with a dictionary born of a political ideology that the world once rejected and trounced?

Where discarding the scholarship of racist and/or fascist scholars, writers, and artists has seemingly come to be a matter of dogma in the academic circles I have inhabited in the last couple of years (and from which I am increasingly trying to extricate myself without being taken as an enemy of or traitor to the principles that operate there with which I still do agree — I’ve just never been a joiner or much good at being programmatic). For a number of people the line was drawn, inexplicably to me, at Garrison Keillor. He is a popular writer and performer rather than a scholar and his transgressions were sexual rather than racial in nature. But the phenomenon is parallel. Many called for the scrubbing of everyone from Kevin Spacey to Charlie Rose from popular culture; the shift happened when Garrison Keillor was accused of sexual harassment and many of those same individuals hesitated about the damnation of his memory. That’s when I started seeing people discussing, quite civilly, the implication of his biography in his work and whether, given that, it could still be enjoyed separately from his sexual transgressions. (And while I might stand accused of reifying notion of civility that is tied up in a white, Midwestern, Lutheran mode native to Keillor’s fans, all I can say is that I think that I’m well-enough read and self-aware enough not to fall into such a trap; believe me or not as you will.) It’s surprising to me that something that is so bibliographically implicated might be the first work to be redeemed in the face of its creator. It’s also surprising to me because I don’t really see the value of A Prairie Home Companion. But even if it’s a program that makes me change the station on the radio, I can appreciate it for, in its afterlife, proving to be a turning point in a discussion that, to my mind, had gone too far.

I knowingly use a Nazi’s dictionary. It is self-evident to me that I can do so while also utterly rejecting his ideology. And so I carry on, doing both of those things well and at the same time. Maybe we can talk about it at some point.

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Postscript: This is sort of a draft. Not a first one, but a second one. It’s a finished-enough draft that I’m happy to push the “publish” button. But as I write the final sentence of this post while reading Derrida’s meticulously argued contention with de Man, I wonder whether that last sentence shouldn’t, in fact, be the first sentence of a final draft that does something slightly different. So there may be more of this, similar but different, possibly here or possibly in some other venue, at some point in the future.

Post-postscript: In my life post tenure I’m trying to escape from the curse of writing in academese, which for me tends to manifest itself in a tone that has been described as “writing while looking over your shoulder.” Having a venue for regular non-academic (or, let’s be real, para-academic) writing is one of the reasons I continue blogging. So I’m not going to pre-empt every possible side-long counter-argument to this post that might be raised in a particular kind of bad faith that seems to be proliferating lately. But I know that if I get any response to this, it will be along the lines of: “So, what you’re saying is that we should be honoring X with statues and not tearing those down either.” No, as I have unfortunately become used to saying to some of my colleagues online, that is not even a little bit what I am saying. This is separate from the kind of damnatio memoriae at stake in removing statues that honor and laud slaveholders, segregationists, and doctors who experimented on unconsenting human subjects simply because they could. This is a question more parallel to whether doctors may ethically use procedures or knowledge developed by Sims in the antebellum United States or by Mengele in Nazi Germany than one of whether either of those men should be honored with a public statue. As the (oh, by the way, Nazi-sympathizing) poet once said: That is not it at all.