I ran out of yarn while at the 4th Annual St. Louis Medieval and Renaissance Symposium Mini-Conference on the Cultures of the Translation in the Medieval Mediterranean. On the plus side, this means I finished a scarf* (based on a historical pattern) that has completely unnecessarily taken over three years to finish; on the down side it means I needed to stop and pick up some new yarn for the flight home. (Most of the time when a knitter tells you that he or she needs yarn, question the definition of the term need; in this case, it was really a question of having something to do on the flight home that would distract me from how much I hate flying. This is about as close to a legitimate, dictionary-standard definition of need as it gets with yarn.)
This will actually become as much a medieval poetry post as a knitting one momentarily. Really.
There is a 2007 edition of the ethical will of Judah ibn Tibbon that was made within more of a religious publishing framework than an academic one. It’s useful because it has the poetry fully vocalized, but it makes its point of view clear at the expense of scholarship in certain places. (For example, it changes a reference to Samuel’s study in the secular subjects to set him to studying religious law; although the manuscript is clear, the change can be made with one single letter in the Hebrew.)
I discovered today that there is a second edition of this redaction of the text that was produced in Monsey, reprinting the Hebrew edition and adding an English introduction and a translation of parts of the text.
Judah took himself into exile circa 1148 following the rise of the unfairly-maligned Almohad dynasty in Spain. The Hebrew introduction to the volume explains his flight as his reaction to “pressure from Muslim zealots in Spain.”
Yet somehow, by the time we get to the English introduction, Judah has been driven out of twelfth-century Granada by a recent invasion of Visigoths.
There is literary precedent in the Middle Ages for the conflation of national enemies and their incarnation in a single form or group or race or tribe, as when Samuel ibn Naghrila uses the names of biblical tribes to refer to the enemies of Zirid Granada, thereby making the political enemies of the state the religious enemies of its Jewish citizens and residents. There are also texts that have a tendency to run to litanies of national enemies with the ultimate outcome being Jewish victory, as well as the literary-religious trope of the Amalekites standing in as any all-purpose enemy.
So the idea of conflating Visigoths with Almohads just to signal both as enemies of Jews certainly comes from somewhere, but there is something very jarring about it all the same.
The kerfuffle over triggerwarnings (also here, here, here, here, and here) has mostly died down*, but I’ve been thinking about the arguments on both sides as I put together the syllabus for my lecture course for the fall. It’s the first time that I will be teaching a large course where I am not likely to get to know most of my students well over the course of the semester and definitely won’t be able to gauge reactions in media res. And so it’s also the first time that I have included a trigger warning (although I’ve called it a content note) in my syllabus.
[*Edited eight hours later to add: No, it seems it’s back up and raging.]
I include language about civil discourse, which I have included in every syllabus I have written since graduate school. This is grounded in Cornell’s Open Hearts, Open Minds policy and is required boiler-plate language on syllabi there. This, on top of the reverse-anthropology spiel I give at the beginning of the semester, are two useful framing tools that allow discussions of sometimes-fraught topics of identity (in their medieval incarnations, of course, but impossible for students to separate totally from the contemporary world) to flow smoothly and in mutually respectful ways in the classroom. Knock on wood, but I’ve never yet had a problem of modern religious tensions or conflicts spilling over into classroom discussions of medieval materials.
But this is the first time in my teaching career, included a content note about specific material. It flags the week that we will discuss the conquest of Spain by the Arab/Berber armies because of the role that rape plays in the construction of some the narratives that deal with those events: Some of the Latin accounts of the conquest describe the rape of the daughter of the Visigothic count Julian of Ceuta by his own king, Roderic, as the reason for the fall of the Visigothic kingdom. As the narrative has developed over time, Julian’s daughter is held responsible for her father’s subsequent alliance with the Muslim armies and consequent fall of Visigothic Spain; she is given the nickname La Cava, the whore, that has stuck throughout history and in literary representations of the events that have come to shape the traditional nationalist narrative of Spanish history. It is an important moment because it shows that even from the outset, what is often portrayed as Muslim conquest and Christian reconquest is never drawn so neatly along religious lines, with Christians allying themselves with Muslims against other Christians when that better served their personal and political needs; and it is important for talking about the kinds of roles women are allowed to play in conquest narratives and the kinds of blame that can be assigned to them.
Ultimately, I came down on the side of including the content note because it seemed like the decent-human-being thing to do: If there are students who will be helped by knowing in advance what is coming, why wouldn’t I want to give them the information that will allow them to prepare themselves?
But I also included this content note for my own comfort in delivering this lecture. (I can already envision the deliberate misreadings of this on Twitter: Prof doesn’t want to trigger herself while giving a lecture! Which, of course, is not at all what I’m saying.) It’s this: I don’t want to be the one whose springs rape-as-a-weapon-of-war on my students; I’m not comfortable surprising people with that, regardless of whether it would be a real trigger for them or no. I don’t want the rape of La Cava narrative to have an impact because of its shock value, because of its place as a crisis or turning point in a story well-told in a lecture. In other words, I want it to be shocking for what it is and how it has worked its way into the Spanish national narrative, and not for how I present it.
Critics of trigger warnings argue that their use marks the precipice above a slippery slope, and that if we as professors slide down it, we will eventually find ourselves warning our students about every last thing we do in class. While the slippery slope is a logical fallacy that exists, that doesn’t mean that one must give over one’s life to it or that it is an inevitability. For example, I’m not flagging questions of race or racialized discourse with content notes because the syllabus itself makes clear that that’s what will be discussed in class on those days. I will not be surprising anybody when I talk about the terms that people use to describe the Muslims of Spain or the ways in which the Spanish Inquisition perverted religion as a part of its own racialized ideology when we arrive at these moments in the semester:
And I hope that by having included the one content note on the syllabus, students who might want to talk, in advance or after the fact, about the content of the history-and-literature-of-race lectures (or anything else, for that matter) will know that I am open to that kind of listening and talking.
The strength of a course is not in its ability to surprise students in any given lecture, but rather to surprise them and challenge their preconceived views over the course of the semester. Equipping them not be shocked by the sudden mention of violence goes a longer way toward that goal than the alternative. The content note in my syllabus is not there to coddle my students; it’s there to make me a more effective instructor.
On my recent administrative trip to Madrid, I had the weekend mostly free and spent a day in Segovia, which I’d never visited before. What struck me most is the way in which the city seems to preserve, better than anywhere else I’ve visited, the sense of space that would have been operative in the medieval town.
I’m not going to the big medieval studies conference at Kalamazoo this year (actually, I’ve never been, but that’s another post). In the past, I’ve followed along with the few relevant sessions with more and less attention and interest and fury via audience members live-tweeting the talks; that is, reporting, with varying degrees of skill, on what has been said by the speaker. There is a presumption of live-tweeting at the big medieval conferences; that is to say that the general consensus in medieval social media is that speakers who don’t want their talks live-tweeted must actively opt out. I’ve never liked that formulation, but I’ve found that in the last year it has made me increasingly queasy as I have followed conferences through that medium that I could not attend in person.
So I’m opting out of opt-out live tweeting: I will no longer follow the Twitter stream of live-tweeted conferences; ideally, I would go as far as to say that I will not knowingly participate in conferences where opt-out live-tweeting is the norm, although I don’t know how practical a stance that is. If nothing else, I’m curious about the value of putting an opinion that runs counter to the prevailing culture out there. Is it possible I’m not the only one who doesn’t like the current state of affairs?
I submitted my book manuscript to the press this morning. One of the things that still strikes me about reading medieval texts is the extent to which medieval readers were so similar in some of their attitudes to us as modern readers. In this case, I came across the work of a scribe who felt similarly about finishing his work as I do about mine:
I revised my syllabus for Muslim Spain: Literature and Society for this semester, the third time I am teaching the course, to spend a little bit more time at the start of the term setting out the foundations of Islam and Islamic history, in both anthropological and historical perspectives in the Arabian Peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean before following the remnants of the Umayyad caliphate west into Spain. In practical terms this means we set up the rise of Islam in the imperial context of the late antique world, spent a full class session on the rise and development of Islam during Muḥammad’s lifetime and the period of the rightly-guided caliphs (still a total whirlwind of a tour) and spent two sessions on the Qur’ān and the notion of a sacred and scriptural history shared between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
In the course of introducing the Qur’ān, I borrowed an exercise pioneered by a grad-school friend and colleague whose work and teaching are much more immediately related to the development of the text, an exercise designed to illustrate to the students some of the kinds of textual issues that crop up in the oral transmission and subsequent editing of a work of scripture. In the exercise, two students act as prophets who receive a message, other students act as scribes, and still others as redactors.
I let the students choose their roles and took the two “prophets” out into the hall with me, where I read them two stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock; I chose the text because it is non-linear, has evocative imagery that draws upon existing religious traditions, and the rhythm of the poem strikes me as almost having the same effect for an Anglophone reader as saj’, the kind of rhymed prose in which the Qur’ān is written, might have for an Arabic reader.
This is the PowerPoint slide that I projected at the end of the exercise so the students could compare their texts with what the “prophets” heard.
Each prophet recited the “revelation” to two individual scribes, who wrote down it down individually. In the meantime, the editors were answering some discussion questions on the reading they had done for that class; this way, they weren’t really hearing what the prophet was saying to the scribes, but they might catch snatches here and there, as though they were living in a society in which people were starting to talk about this new revelation.
The transcriptions from all four scribes; the two marked “1” heard the recitation from the same prophet, and the two marked “2” heard the recitation from the other prophet:
The scribes handed their copies to the editors in their group, who had to agree on a version; then the two groups of editors had to unite, compare their versions, and determine an authoritative version of the scripture.
The two groups’ edited versions:
And the authoritative written scripture:
We did not talk about what the theological implications of the specific text would be, although I love the image and resulting possible theologies of a deity, an Eternal Footman, riding on the coattails of the believers. I was surprised that neither of the prophets successfully transmitted the image of the poet’s bald head as John the Baptist’s to their flock; that’s one of the most evocative images for me in the entire poem.
What we did discuss were the textual transmission issues that the exercise raised, and the students had great observations and comments: One student commented on feeling a sense of responsibility to the hypothetical people in our scenario for whom our text would become a hypothetical scripture. Several students made great observations about the experience of writing down and editing that opened up a discussion of how texts come to be: One group of editors said that they thought that the way the had received the text from their scribes reminded them of beat poetry, and so when they had to make editorial decisions, they let their ideas about that form guide their choices; another editor handed me her scribe’s text with some annotations in red and asked me just to please ignore her marks on thee original copy, and so we talked about marginalia and annotations and the traces that readers leave in books.
I had the great good fortune last week to be able to sit with some of the treasures from the Valmadonna Trust library before they were sold off at Sotheby’s last week. There was no crowd there on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve gotten to know one of their Judaic people, who seems very happy to let scholars look at the books that are being sold before they potentially disappear onto a collector’s mantle-piece on Park Avenue or into his vault in London.
I’m just chuffed to death with this picture and still a little bit bowled over by having had the chance to sit with a Bible that my guys or the guys in their extended intellectual circles might have themselves read.
I’ve been looking back at some of the media coverage when it was first announced several years ago that the collection was going to be broken up and sold, as a last resort, after no buyer could be found for the entire collection. The Times’ Edward Rothstein made note of some of the quotations that were written on the walls of the exhibition space then, including: “Make books your companions. Let your bookshelves be your gardens,” which Rothstein identifies as “the words of a 12th-century Spanish Jewish scholar, Judah Ibn Tibbon, translated on one gallery wall.”
The epigram is taken from a lengthy letter written by Judah ibn Tibbon to his son, which survives in a single manuscript copy in Oxford:
Bodleian Mich. MS 50.3 f. 116 v
That is a correct attribution as far as it goes, but there is much more to that quotation, how it ended up at the tip of Judah ibn Tibbon’s pen, and what he omitted in the process of transposing it from his native Spain to the France where he would spend most of his life in exile.
I have an arsenal of reasons that I give students for why they can’t use Wikipedia. There is the old “anyone can edit it and you don’t know what kind of angle they are pursuing or what kind of real expertise they have” chestnut, which students mostly don’t find convincing. There is the feminist argument, which some students buy into and others don’t, but which I feel increasingly silly explaining now that feminist medievalists have gone back to playing ball and hosting wiki hackathons. And then there is the epistemological argument, in which I explain to them that in a university setting, we base our knowledge on primary sources, while Wikipedia uses a model of knowledge that completely rejects the legitimacy of analyzing primary sources; the university is fundamentally incompatible with Wikipedia.
At the same time, I kind of can’t believe that we are still having this conversation.
I have a new arrow in the anti-Wikipedia quiver, though: a kind of combination of Salo Baron’s polemic against what he named “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and a major violation of Godwin’s Law, which states that the longer a discussion continues on the internet, the higher the probability that someone will make a Hitler analogy. The corollary to the law is that the first person who crosses that line loses the discussion automatically.
On this day in history, at least according to the Gregorian approximation of the Julian calendar, in the monumental year of 1066, a massacre of Jews took place in the city of Granada. Perhaps the most famous casualty was Yehosef ibn Naghrila, the Nagid, or Jewish community leader, of that city. His father was the battle-hardened poet Samuel, adviser to the Zirid court and known as twice a vizier: master of the sword and master of the pen.
The father was better-loved than the son, a politically ambitious hot-head who stoked conflict and was not possessed of a self-awareness that would have allowed him to see just how badly he antagonized the ruling political class and allowed himself to become a kind of institutional lightening rod for popular discontent with the government, especially with its tax policies, often enforced by Jews allied with Yehosef. The most visible contrast comes in a kind of memoir written by a deposed Zirid ex-leader from the exile in North Africa where he spent his final years, reflecting upon and defending his rule. The chronicle is known as the Tibyān, and its author, ‘Abd Allah ibn Bulugin, gives Samuel the honor of being called by his name throughout, while he refers to Yehosef contemptuously and pseudonymously as “the vizier” or “the Jew.” (For a further-developed treatment of this idea, click here and see pages 14-17 and chapter 1.)
Some of the primary sources are published in translation in the Medieval Iberia sourcebook:
The “the Jew” spat as a negative epithet makes it difficult, on the surface, for a modern reader to see this as anything other than blatant anti-Semitism; but in fact, it is more complicated than that. The narrative content of the text makes it clear that Yehosef earned the ire of his neighbors because of his smear campaigns against beloved officials, because of his officious personality, and because he had been put in the position of carrying out unpopular policies; criticizing him as “the Jew” is a shorthand for those undesirable characteristics. This is why scholars distinguish between anti-Semitism, a racialized hatred of Jewish people, and anti-Judaism, a cultural outlook that uses Judaism as a cipher and a scapegoat for things that have gone wrong. They are related, to be sure, and the one is encompassed in the other, but they are not the same thing (click here and read the introduction).
And yet. And yet if you look up the events of this day in 1066 on Wikipedia, you find it as a part of a bundle of articles on anti-Semitism illustrated with the yellow Star of David badge worn compulsorily by Jews in Europe following the advent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws.
This is not that.
Massacres are terrible. The massacre of 1066 was terrible. But it was not a holocaust or a genocide. The Zirids were not the Nazis. When Baron coined the phrase “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” he challenged his fellow historians to get away from the then-reigning teleological and pessimistic model of writing Jewish history, in which all events inevitably pointed to the marginalization, expulsion, and/or death of Jewish communities throughout time and space. He found it to be a dishonest model of history, and one that ghettoized both its subjects and its practitioners.
Wikipedia’s decision to mark its entry on the Granada massacre with a Nazi symbol is a neo-lachrymose move that places the two events in the same historiographic silo. Visually, it argues that if the beginning is an anomalous anti-Jewish massacre of a relatively small number of people, the only logical outcome is a society-wide drive to the gas chambers. It does a disservice to medieval and modern history and to readers who deserve a more complex and honest take. This is why the world needs scholars in the humanities and why those scholars ought to be writing for general audiences. Terrible methodology leads to terrible outcomes. Wikipedia is just terrible history; history, historians and history buffs alike deserve better.
On the basis of Godwin’s Law, Wikipedia loses the Granada massacre of 1066.
***
It occurred to me to look at the Wikipedia page for 1066 after seeing a few error-ridden Tweets about the massacre from on-this-day-in-history-themed social media accounts and becoming curious about where all the mistakes, missteps, and misinterpretations were coming from. (In possibly related news, my inner Snark would like to know how it is possible to make three errors in the space of 140 characters.)
Wikipedia editors don’t necessarily know better than to resort to a lachrymose conception of the 1066 massacre. They are not privy to the debates and currents and changes in scholarship, especially when the work that is most freely accessible to them is the oldest material, the work that is out of copyright. Furthermore, seeing the broad panorama of historiographic change is much different than having access to factoids.
(Edited on December 31 to add: The good news is that Brill has announced that its books will be open access. The terrible news is that the open access will only be extended to the top 25 most active Wikipedia editors. So instead of making its unconscionably expensive technical books available to the scholars who have the greatest need for them as well as the expertise and ability to translate very specialized research for a lay audience, they’re being made available to 25 people who might or might not have the ability or inclination to use the resources effectively; and Brill is creating a surreal situation in which academics without good library access (or those with access to good libraries that just can’t afford Brill’s extortionist prices any longer) might find themselves having to pick through Wikipedia articles trying to dust off the nuggets of good scholarship that get couched in an wikipedian framework that is wholly incompatible with academic enterprise.)
Ultimately, Wikipedia and an “on this day in history” outlook are two sides of the same coin. They offer the same “just the facts, ma’am” fantasy that absolve the reader from critical analysis because they claim to be simple collections of verifiable, transparent facts; but they ignore that every fact, every juxtaposition of two facts together, every attempt to highlight a single most important event, is informed by much more deeply-rooted ideas about what constitutes a true narrative.
Sometimes during my start-of-term anti-Wikipedia statement, students will ask why they can’t just check a fact on Wikipedia and then carry on with their analysis. The 1066 massacre page is an illustration of the extent to which those things cannot be separated. Baron wrote about lachrymose history as dishonest. His question of honesty is at the heart of the matter, but it is different from the truth that students (who are by definition lay readers) think that they are seeking. Pulling them away from Wikipedia is an effort to teach them that facts do not equal truth and that those facts are always bound up in the analysis that tells the story, honest or dishonest. Wikipedia articles have an agenda and angle and they need to be read critically and unpacked just as much as any other, proper work of history. Or, better yet, read not at all.
