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My Year in Books: 2018

Best passing material-book/scribal culture remark: “‘I can read the first few lines and these in the middle of the second page, and one or two at the end. Those are as clear as print,’ said he, ‘but the writing in between is very bad, and there are three places where I cannot read it at all.'” — “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Fictional shacks that are larger than my bedroom: Black Peter’s cabin in “The Adventure of Black Peter,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Something I’d like to go back and tally: The number of bicycles in the second half of The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Don’t ever tell me my line of work is too obscure if a prize-winning, best-selling novel can just casually quote the Mozarab jarchas: Señales de humo by Rafael Reig

Of course a literary manual for cannibals is going to be a two-parter: La cadena trófica also by Rafael Reig

Madrid books: See above — they’ve got a super sense of place.

Italy  books: Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd; Venice, an Interior by Javier Marías (which was originally a longish newspaper essay and was only ever published in chapbook form in English and Italian translations); Day after Day by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Una Stransky, audiobook read by Daniel Philpott

Cambridge/Granchester book: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie

Israel books: The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Sparks; Someone to Run With by David Grossman; Volverse Palestina by Lina Meruane

(Bonus shocker of the year: Nick Hornby was totally right about Muriel Sparks!)

More Cuba books, because I am still haunted: Caviar with Rum, eds. Jacqueline Loss and José Manuel Prieto; Cuba in the Special Period, ed. Ariana Hernández Reguant; Dreaming in Russian by Jacqueline Loss

Michigan books: All-American Yemeni Girls by Loukia Sarroub

Because moving to Ann Arbor marked the first time I had to wrangle my cat onto an airplane: Catwings by Ursula K. LeGuin

Thought I would be okay taking these books on a trip and leaving them behind but definitely wasn’t: The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty; The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Was completely fine leaving this on the airplane when I finished it: Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

Have we met?: The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes

Hit too close to home to finish: Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm

Much too much to distill into one pithy comment: Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

Best babushka: Ali’s Russian mother in Ali and His Russian Mother by Alexandra Chetriteh, translated by Michelle Hartman

Ironically, didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know: The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols

And perhaps less ironically, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which seems to have been written for people who just haven’t been paying any attention at all

Ironically, written at a pace that made me more anxious: Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

Because apparently being in a relationship means attempting to share in your partner’s interests, even when those interests are Melville: Billy Budd and Other Stories by Herman Melville

Because it’s hard to be patient when learning a language in which one has much better reading comprehension than ability to generate verbal forms: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

Because, 2018: Not All Dead White Men by Donna Zuckerberg; Infidel by Pornsak Pichenshote; Holocaust Tips for Kids by Shalom Auslander

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2018 favorites: The Mandelbaum Gate, Billy Budd, Barracoon, The Library Book

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I have a huge fantasy that I’ll read about six more books before the end of the year, but if it happens, those’ll have to go onto next year’s roundup because reading for pleasure shouldn’t have high-pressure deadlines. Happy reading, all!

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…and who by gunfire.

I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die.

During the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) we recite a pietistic poem that affirms God as an all-knowing judge and, in effect, executioner. The text reads, in part:

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed – how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die, who in good time, and who by an untimely death, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by lapidation.

I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die, but not just through our liturgy. To grow up as the child of a rabbi is to know death closely. Its pace of being varies — frantic when it is close at hand, heavy and still when it lurks as a mere idea — but I am always aware of its presence. It is the part of congregational life that reaches out from the telephone and forces you to confront it. Nobody calls the rabbi at home if a baby is born in the early hours of the morning, or if a couple becomes engaged to be married on a Sunday afternoon; those calls wait and go to the temple switchboard during business hours. Phone calls about impending or just-transpired death wake up the house from the night. And so in real time and real emotion, disoriented in the dark, with sleep and grief in my eyes, I have always known:

Who died at the end stages of blood cancer, who by choking, who by accidental ingestion of a death-cap mushroom, who in a car crash, who in a plane crash, who after stepping through a plate glass window, who from galloping pneumonia, who from AIDS, who in service to his country, who in a mass shooting at an office building, who by suicide, who because of an undiagnosed heart defect: I know.

I learned to swim before I could walk because a few months before I was born, my father buried a two-year-old who had drowned in a swimming pool. My parents were determined that would not happen to me. I can’t have been more than eight years old when they made sure that I knew why. The dead boy’s siblings were more or less my age; and my parents explained: “Eve and Jonathan used to have an older brother.” It was matter-of-fact. Just like that, as if water safety could stave off the death that I already knew was all around us.

And so yesterday as my friends began to ask me how I felt about the synagogue shooting, I didn’t really know what to say. I don’t like to admit it, but I was sanguine. I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die; and in that deathscape, Judaism is just one more pre-existing condition of life, just one more unreasoning reason that can kill a person. It is a tragedy and it has uniquely horrifying features; but like any other fatality, being shot in a synagogue by an anti-Semite is just one more cause of death in the litany that I know by heart.

I have grown up privy to threat assessments and changing security measures. Snipers positioned in the dome, transforming it from a scale model of the Hagia Sofia floating above the city into a camouflaged, potential air raid? Of course. Federal agents standing at the back of the sanctuary? Go see what the lapel pin of the day is. Metal detectors, package scanners, screening off the wrought iron gates so that malicious passers-by can’t see the children playing in the courtyard? A revisionist architecture of contemporary Jewish life. Judaism can be fatal. And so, like teaching his child to swim so she doesn’t die by drowning, the rabbi fortifies his synagogue so his congregants do not die by being Jewish. Some children will always drown and some guns and bombs will always slip past security measures, no matter how fierce.

I know death too well to be surprised. It has been my most constant and reliable companion. I may feel it lying dormant but I know it is there, waiting to wake and ring the telephone or spill tears in the living room or at our kitchen table. This week, you have seen what I have already known.

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Jetzt Sefardirein

The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik is reported to have said that the nascent state of Israel would take its place amongst the nations of the world when the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew prostitute would be arrested by the first Hebrew police man. Updated for 2018, perhaps Israel joins the ranks of the nations of the world when Hebrew football fans make Hebrew wildly inappropriate Holocaust references in Hebrew graffiti.

I saw the above graffito, which reads “Holocaust Against Maccabi,” this past June when I was in Tel Aviv doing research at the Bialik house-museum. Now just a few months later I’m at the end of my own wildly inappropriate Holocaust reference also coming from a Jewish and Hebrew source. It’s part of an accusation that’s nonsensical on the face of it

There’s a guy with an M.A. from my graduate department and a Google Groups newsletter. He seems to think he’s a bit of a macher in the Brooklyn Sefardi/Mizrahi community. Or something. And he is known for being quite convinced that he is the keeper of the One True and Correct Interpretation of Sefardi Culture. His most recent newsletter addressed the well-documented problem of the primacy of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) culture in the Jewish world at the expense of attention and value given to Sefardi and Mizrahi (Spanish and Near Eastern) cultures. (For scholarly takes on this, see the work of my NYU colleague Ella Shohat, among others.) However, he addresses the problem by accusing Jewish Studies departments in U.S. universities of making themselves “Sefardirein,” or free of Sefardim, invoking Nazi-era terminology in which places that had been completely cleansed of Jewish “contaminants” were referred to as “Judenrein.”

And I am a part of the problem: 

First and foremost it strikes me as wildly inappropriate and utterly lacking in any sense of proportion to describe the hiring and curriculum decisions of any academic department, let alone Jewish Studies departments, in terms of mass murder and genocide especially in a political climate that presents real neo-Nazi threats to American Jewry.

Second, the attitude reflected in this presentation of the problem is a bit short-sighted and helps to reinforce academic structures that don’t serve medieval or Jewish topics especially well. Modern disciplinary boundaries are bad for the study of the Middle Ages, which is a period when there was far greater interplay between literature, philosophy, religion, and history than there is in the modern conception of those modes of thinking and writing, and when the role of religion in culture and society was drastically different than it is in the modern world. As such, separating fields of study according to modern standards often makes it difficult to deal with medieval texts and other forms of cultural production holistically and on their own terms. The same applies to modern countries. Particularly with regard to the study of literature in modern university departments, the work is typically divided along national-linguistic lines. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century quests for national origins in the various and relatively new countries of Europe led to the confinement of literary traditions and cultural programs to within the boundaries of the modern nation state when in fact they were far more expansive, fluid and mobile. Ultimately, the Middle Ages became a tool for the nationalisms of Spain, France, and Germany, amongst others. This meant that the contributions of religious, linguistic, and cultural minority populations were often ignored and even suppressed in the interest of curating a particular image of the nation and its history; this trend naturally found its place in the Americas, too, and it is only very recently that it has been possible to talk about things like Jewish and Muslim, Hebrew and Arabic contributions to Spanish literature. In terms of securing the place of the Sefardim in Europe in particular and establishing a true panorama of medieval literature in general, it is far more unusual and important that my appointment be in a Department of Spanish than in one of Jewish Studies. It’s all so obvious to me that I kind of can’t believe I have to keep saying all of this, but it’s equally obvious that the outside world has not yet gotten the message.

And finally: Sure. I’m not in Judaic Studies at NYU, at least partly because I’m not convinced of the utility of Jewish Studies as a framework.* That said, I’ve served on half a dozen doctoral committees and a search committee in that department. And within in a period of five years before I’m even a decade out of graduate school, I will have held both major US-based Jewish Studies research fellowships. So whatever my own ambivalence about Jewish Studies as a field and about disciplinary/field boundaries in general, and regardless of my not being appointed in that program at my home university, it’s not like I’m not participating in Jewish Studies conversations and making a name for myself there.

The takeaway: Am definitely a part of the Jewish Studies establishment even if that’s not where my NYU appointment lies. Disciplinary boundaries don’t help Sefardi Studies anyway. And this is definitely not a genocide; don’t ever lump me in with Nazis just because you think my intellectual life isn’t Jewish enough.*

(*Each of these sentences could be the start of a blog post in its own right. Perhaps for another moment.)

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Some Thoughts on Learning Italian

1) I’m just gathering some very preliminary thoughts for now. This will eventually be an essay of a sort.

2) Yes, I’m supposed to be learning Russian and procrastinating by learning Italian instead.

3) I can read Italian just fine. I have Spanish and Latin and that’s enough to fake my way through. I had to read a metric tonne of Italian archaeological reports for my general exams in grad school (late Byzantine and early Islamic fortifications in the Hadramawt). I got pretty good pretty quick with all that practice.  I want to be able to do more with it that read about moats and mud.

4) Reading (and to a certain but lesser extent, aural) comprehension was never going to be the problem. Slowing myself down enough to practice generating all the forms is. It’s hard to stick to changing definite articles from the singular to the plural or writing out three-word sentences with a choice of two verbs that you can conjugate in the simple present when you can flip to the back of the book and understand perfectly well the two-page passage on Pompeii.

5) Italian really is a completely different language from Spanish. I’m not sure why I was expecting it to be otherwise having read lots of it, but it was both a surprise and a relief to realize this when I opened my DIY Italian book. I was worried that all that there would be to it would be a series of small modifications to Spanish that I’d infinitely mix up, never learn properly, and confuse my Spanish horribly, to boot. Instead, it’s something that I have to learn from the ground up and having Spanish ends up being nothing but a huge help as a similar-but-distinct point of reference.

6) Italian is a diglossic language and standard Italian is as much a living linguistic fiction as Modern Standard Arabic. Even for learning an easy language, I’ve managed to pick a complicated one.

7) It’s the summer so this isn’t playing out in a classroom, but I think that with the very limited way in which I can express myself in Italian, I’m beginning to feel more empathy with my students. My undergraduates already have a pretty good level of Spanish by the time they get to me — I teach literature and history of the language, not elementary languages classes. But even though they have a decent-sized vocabulary and a handle on the subjunctive, their Spanish still isn’t anywhere close to their English (with the exception of those students who are native Spanish speakers). It never really occurred to me before now because they can express complex thoughts in a variety of verbal modes and times; but even so,  they must be thinking so much more than they can say. And that’s super frustrating.

8) I’m using two books. One is a workbook meant for people who want to learn Italian on their own and the other is a textbook meant for use in a college-level beginning Italian class (and in spite of whatever Amazon’s algorithm has done in the interim, I paid less than 5% of the current $645.12 asking price). The textbook is, well, my same vintage, which is to say that it’s definitely from the era in which there were no bundled media files that came with the book and accompanying YouTube channels for language classes. So it very much assumes that you will be hearing a professor speaking and repeating after him/her or responding to prompts. As a workaround, when it’s important to hear the pronunciation of new words I have been typing them into Google Translate and using the little audio feature to hear them read aloud. So I may end up speaking Italian with a Google accent.

9) There’s this quip that the vocabulary in the first chapter of a language textbook tells you what’s important in the culture(s) and place(s) where the language is spoke. Playing to type, the vocabulary for the first chapter of the DIY book is all food. It’s great because the summer produce is in at the farmers’ market and my community garden and I can kind of practice the basics in a seasonal way. So, you know, ho ventidue pomodori. And also, ci sono le herbe aromatiche. The trouble is that at this point all I have is four irregular verbs in the present tense and not a lot of context for place except in un ristorante del centro. I’m finding that my brain is filling in the gaps in Arabic: i peperoni sono fī l-jannah. On the one hand, it’s super unhelpful, but on the other hand it’s kind of an interesting insight into how the brain stores and processes foreign languages.

10) Don’t leave medievalists alone learning Italian. We have a weird sense of humor.

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The Martial Races

In an interview this morning, the president said deportation might be the appropriate punishment for football players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and the extent to which the American promise reflected in the lyrics to the song does not extend to African-American people. That’s not a good thing for the president of the United States to be saying.

On the one hand, he’s a madman and he doesn’t think before he speaks. But on the other hand? Well, on the other hand it reminds me of one year in grad school when the prospective students were visiting:

The players are J, a prospective student, and H, a current student two years behind me, a friend, and a guy who had immigrated to the US from an Asian country as a teenager. Also me and A, both white, American-born grad students.

During one of the meet-and-greets with the current students, the four of us were standing around talking and J asked H where he was from. H named the Asian country where he had grown up. “Ah,” said J, “I could tell that you belonged to one of the martial races.” We were all a little dumbfounded and I don’t remember how we changed the subject or recalibrated the conversation.

A and I had some words with J later. To everyone’s relief, he ended up enrolling in a different graduate program, one that, as it has emerged in the last few years, rather tolerates racialized comments towards Asian and Asian-American people.

When I talked with H about the whole incident later, he was inclined to give J the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that perhaps he had just been nervous and blurted out something really stupid because of that. And I remember saying to H that maybe that was the case, but that for J to have blurted out a comment out of a 19th-century ethnography textbook, it would have to have been not only in his brain but pretty close to the tip of his tongue to be the thing that he blurted out when he was at a loss for words due to a moment of pressure or social anxiety.

And here we are. Every rational fiber of my body and brain is trying to tell me not to worry that the president of the United States just admitted that he is considering deporting people who protest police brutality: it’s impractical (what country would agree to take political deportees from the US?); the institutions of our country are still, I hope, too strong for that to happen; and (again, I can only hope) citizens would flood the streets and prevent it from happening. But all the same — and I do not resort to Holocaust analogies lightly — nobody in Germany really thought that its own citizens would get deported, even as this kind of rhetoric surged on the political stage.

Maybe his off-handed comment about deporting football players who protest police brutality was just that, a stupid, off-hand comment; but it reflects something in his brain and on the tip of his tongue. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, the president has shown us all along who he is and he continues to show us; we need to believe him and we need to be prepared for what may c0me next.

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Gender Bias and Letters of Recommendation

Life’s been pretty non-stop for the last couple of months: I hosted Passover for the first time ever, for ten people. Then I went to Spain for NYU admin stuff. And then I came down with a cold/sinus infection/ear infection the likes of which I have not had since 2013 and which waylaid me for two entire weeks, during which time I had to make do at all kinds of end-of-semester meetings/defenses/receptions. Suffice it to say, not only are my leg and core muscles feeling pretty atrophied, but so are my writing muscles. Since part of the purpose of blogging for me has always been to flex my writing muscles and to get my brain into gear, I’m going to try to ease myself back into work on my book, my translation, and some stray articles, with a bit of a blog post. And maybe I’ll even try one that’s more in paragraph form later in the week.

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Some of the advice that circulates about writing letters of recommendation has to do with how letter-writers characterize female subjects in ways that might disadvantage them for fellowships, spots in grad school, and jobs, relative to their male counterparts. Does the letter focus on traditionally feminine qualities, such as her capacity to nurture her students rather than her capacity to teach or inspire them? Do you focus on her teaching and his research? Is she a hard worker while he is just plain brilliant? Did you mention how surprised you were that she finished her PhD even though she had twins while in graduate school? (Yes, that last one is a real example from a letter I’ve seen. We didn’t hold it against the candidate.)

I think I do a pretty good job of avoiding gender bias in my letters of recommendation, but since it’s the season for writing them (not so much for grad students, but for undergrads for summer and post-grad jobs and for honors and awards at graduation) I decided to aggregate the adjectives I used to describe my students and the characteristics/traits/skills that I emphasized, separate them out by gender, and take a look. This semester, I wasn’t writing for any students who identify as nonbinary/genderfluid/genderqueer, so I have a plain binary breakdown:

I talked about the curiosity and ambition of students of both genders, used superlatives in both categories, and talked about class participation for students of both genders. I think based on these lists I have room to make my letters even stronger on students’ behalf, but I think that at least in terms of gender balance, I’m doing okay.

Then I ran the same five letters through the Gender Bias Calculator for letters of recommendation, although I think that ultimately this told me more about the kinds of biases that are most superficial and most prevalent in the academy, and, even more, about the algorithm itself. These were the results:

It’s clear that context matters and that by pulling individual words out of phrases and sentences doesn’t necessarily yield information about bias. I understand that in designating “work” as a female-associated word the program is flagging the possibility of describing female students as hard-workers and male students as naturally brilliant; however, if I refer to a student’s brilliant work on X topic, is that really a female-associated bias? Same with teaching: Just to comment on a student’s teaching doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m flagging female students as nurturers and male students as charismatic, aloof lecturers. 

The algorithm also obviously thought that manuscript referred to the manuscript of an article or a book rather than an archival manuscript; otherwise it would have also identified paleography as a male-associated word. What technical skills are male- or female- associated? Is this tool able to assess gender bias in letters that deal in detail with students working on pre-modern topics?

There are some words that registered that seemed almost to border on a gender-equality farce. Including “semester” in the list of male-associated words just makes me think of the feminist law students in Legally Blonde who wanted to change the name of the term to “ovester.” (With that said, I do note that I used the word semester more times in fewer letters for men, so maybe there’s something to that.) And manifest? MANifest?

Also: Because? Because is a male-associated word?

The conclusion I’m drawing from this exercise is (perhaps deadly obviously) that in this kind of assessment, single words aren’t necessarily the most useful way to measure gender bias in letters; context matters and at least for now the human eye and brain can do the job better.

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#medievaltwitter: Fake News, Documentary Sources, and Short-Form Writing Then and Now

These are remarks I prepared for a roundtable discussion on addressing modern topics in Medieval Studies classes held at the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium Medieval Studies Conference.

In the fall semester of 2016, I was teaching a CORE Cultures and Contexts course on medieval Spain. It happened that on the morning of November 9, I was slated to talk about the watershed year of 1391 which, following massacres and mass conversions, saw a sea change in the status of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. The surprise result of the election and the next morning’s vandalism of a prayer space for Muslim students lent the campus a funerary air. In my experience here at NYU, a class on medieval Spain tends to attract two heritage populations: Muslim students and students from Spanish-speaking families. These students may be immigrants or the children of immigrants, they may be international students studying in New York from abroad, they may be third, fourth, or fifth generation Americans, they may be native English speakers or not, monolingual or linguistic polyglots. Despite the great diversity within these two student populations, one thing they have in common is that they belong to groups that had been the targets of hate speech, ridicule, threats, and fear-mongering throughout the election: the terrorists and the “bad hombres” of Donald Trump’s worldview. And the morning after we learned that this vision would be realized in the nation’s highest office, I had to ask my students, scared for their immediate safety and for their futures and shaken by the dystopian vision of what this place was quickly becoming, to care about the fourteenth century.

For those of you who are not immersed in the NYU undergraduate curriculum, our CORE program consists, in part, of three types of humanities courses: Cultures and Contexts, Texts and Ideas, and Expressive Culture. Students take a certain number of these and each section of each course is themed and taught by a member of faculty in a twice-weekly lecture format. These courses are designed for freshmen, although about half of our students delay completing this requirement until later in their career. For some, they are the only humanities classes they will take at NYU. For these reasons, one of my major goals in teaching in the CORE is that students use the literary materials from medieval Spain and the scholarship written on those materials to learn how to read critically and develop skills that will serve them as engaged and thoughtful citizens. As a goal for this particular type of class, this is even more important to me than anything they might learn about the Middle Ages per se. One of the episodes that comes up in the early weeks of this class is the ninth-century crisis of martyrdom provoked by Christians living in Arabic-speaking Córdoba; if my students can walk away from my class, log on to the New York Times and not assume, for example, that anyone who lives in an Arabic-speaking country is a Muslim, I consider that a success even if they forget the name of Paul Alvarus of Córdoba.

The days after the election presented an opportunity to challenge students to think critically about the kinds of rhetoric that had played a role in the campaign, within the framework of a medieval studies classroom. The most obvious form of writing to shape the discourse of the election was Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and the questions that it raised about audience, the mediation of text, and, in the form of fake news and Russian bots, forgery and reliability. Other parallel questions may be asked about tweets an medieval documentary sources with respect to genre, and with respect to the different kinds of impacts that different types of texts can have whether they are short or long, informal or formal, literary or documentary, or somewhere in between.  With Trump’s penchant for deleting and editing tweets possibly in contravention of the Presidential Records Act and the Library of Congress’ coetaneous announcement that it was not going to be able to archive all of the tweets that had ever been tweeted in spite of its initial plans to do so, it also invites questions about archival practice and about the serendipity of documentary survival. This is how I came to introduce Twitter into my medieval studies classroom as both a topic and a tool.

In the weeks running up to the election, the historian David Nirenberg gave an interview in which he recounted some of the experience of writing his first book, Communities of Violence. He described the extent to which he had become distanced from the very violence that marked the conflictive coexistence of the Jewish and Christian populations of northern Spain and southern France that was the subject of his book; he had come to think of the details as exaggerated strategies of rhetoric rather than records of the reactions of medieval people to the violence they endured in their communities. He comments:

“All the documents talked about this massacre, but none of them gave any numbers. I came to the conclusion that this probably was not a big massacre. It happened in a tiny town in the middle of the mountains. They probably were talking about it as a massacre in order to justify the fines on the populace… On my last day of research in this archive, I came across one scrap of 14th century paper which said that dozens of people—300 or so, I think—were killed in the village. It even described how some were dragged from under their beds, and how their throats were slit. I suddenly realized that I had constructed this explanation which minimized this event, even though the full extent of the terror was only visible on that one little piece of 14th century paper.”

Nirenberg then connected this experience to reading study showing that Twitter was contributing to the uptick of hate-speech in the United States. Again quoting from that interview:

“I felt this way when I was forwarded this Twitter study, that I had pooh-poohed the effects of a technology I don’t really understand, when in fact it may very well conceal something much larger… We should probably worry more about something like these tweets because we’re in a space in which the use of anti-Judaism as a way of fantasizing the perfection of the world is already becoming very powerful.”

In other words, on Novermber 9, 2016, I tried to help my students connect to the Middle Ages when their minds were preoccupied with life-and-death matters of the modern by asking them to assess the capacity of micro-short-form writing, whether medieval or modern, not only to capture the Zeitgeist but also to provide details that we find in no other type of source.

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Translation Notes 2:2: Translating Languages in Contact

One of the challenges that I’m confronting in my translation project is how to render words into English that, in Spanish, preserve very clearly not only their Arabic etymology but the specificity of their meaning relating to the society and culture of the Islamic period in Spain. For now, some preliminary thoughts and problems. Eventually, perhaps, a proper essay.

Some of the words that come from Arabic also exist in English:

Mozárabe: We have the word Mozarab in English, but it’s not going to resonate for Anglophone readers as it does for Spanish readers, especially those who inhabit a country where one can still regularly attend Mass celebrated according to the Mozarab rite. The text introduces the Mozarabs in such a way that it’s not a problem. They may not feel as familiar to English readers, but those readers won’t really lose out on anything in this case.

Mesquino: I love being able to translate this as mesquin and keep the Arabic etymology of the Spanish word in place in the English.

However, there are also words that are more complicated to translate while preserving the linguistic and cultural layers that they encode.

Alcázar: Sure. It’s perfectly fine just to translate this word into English as castle, but in doing so, it loses the traces of the Arabic morphology and root — al-qasr — that are preserved in the Spanish; and for a text like this, where we are very much talking about castles built by people riffing on ideas of Arab identity, it’s important for that layer to be there.

Muladí: This is a hispanization of the Arabic word muwallad, which refers to non-Arabic Muslims, often from convert families. Between Heinrichs, Hitchcock, and Glick, there are some interesting discussions on how to translate the term, including the option “indigenous Muslims.” In literary non-fiction, though, these academic solutions lose the euphony of the Arabic that persists in the Spanish. Mulatto seems like it might be the best choice on this front; but it is not etymologically related in spite of how similar the two words might sound and, more importantly, it has such a different and specific set of connotations in English that I’m not sure it is usable in this context.

And then there are words that are regular, everyday words that the author highlights to help connect his Spanish-language readership to the Arabic substratum present in their own language. When he writes about the limits of urban political authority, he also gives his readers insight into the development of Spanish: “La única autoridad, nombrada por el cadí o directamente por el soberano, es el sahib al-suq, el señor del zoco, que se llamó luego muhtasib, de donde viene la hermosa palabra castellana almotacén.” To a Spanish-language reader, this is an illumination of her own language; to an English-language reader, it’s no more than a random factoid. Is my responsibility as a translator to leave it as written or to try to find a parallel example that will resonate with English readers in the same way the original resonates with Spanish readers?

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España Es Diferente: Neo-Medievalism Edition

This is a lightly edited version of the comments that I made following Eric Calderwood’s talk at the Colubmia Workshop “Sites of Religious Memory in an Age of Exodus: The Western Mediterranean.” Part of the reason I’m posting my response is precisely because it is dependent upon reading his new book, Colonial al-Andalus, which I want to encourage. There are many people in medieval studies — especially those who are convinced that there is only one correct way to care about race, nation, and colonialism’s impacts upon the field and that people who work on Spain and North Africa and their modern-medieval legacies Don’t Do It Right ™ or at all — who would benefit tremendously from it. It’s also just fabulous and fascinating. So, go read the book and then come back to this as a response to chapter 6:

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Speaking in New York City about the use of al-Andalus as a site of memory in the creation of both a colonial and later an independent Morocco mediated by the visual vernacular of its architecture, it is almost impossible to avoid thinking about the reinstallation of the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the especially the creation of the Moroccan Court in 2011 and the ways in which the museum presented and justified the project. For those who don’t know the background: following upon the last major overhaul of its Islamic galleries in the 1970s which showed a real drive, innovative at the time, toward displaying Islamic art not as craft but as art on a par with the European objects in the collection, the Met, in the 8-year reimagining of the galleries culminating in 2011, moved its presentation of the artworks more towards accessibility, relevance, and cultural-historical contextualization. One of the centerpieces was the creation, de novo, of a Moroccan courtyard by Moroccan artists, designers, and craftsmen, with consultation from curators and architectural/landscape historians on staff at the museum. This followed the museum’s precedent of the creation of a Ming Dynasty-style garden court when the East Asia galleries where revamped in the early 1980s.

A mini-documentary on the museum’s web site records some of the processes of creation; and in rewatching it after reading Eric’s chapter, what really jumped out was the way in which the curatorial thinking about what constitutes Moroccan architecture was very much informed by the Moroccan nationalist appropriation of the colonial/fascist discourse about being the site and the heritor and continuation of Andalusi cultural heritage.

To highlight some examples:

  • The major narrative voice in the documentary is that of Najima Haider, who is one of the associate curators of Islamic art, who begins describing the design process as “medieval-style courtyard.”
  • In the course of talking about the mathematics of scaling down a full-scale, three-story Moroccan courtyard for the one-story space available in the museum, there’s a discussion of the different kind of CAD programs they used, until finally the landscape designer Achva Stein actually physically cut out little pieces of paper in the shape of tiles to stick on the walls which she described as a “medieval solution” to a neo-medieval problem. So she’s not only using “medieval” to mean backwards, but also to connect the idea of the medieval to the artisanal.
  • Not so much Tetouan, but Fez and Granada are treated as one cultural unit throughout the little documentary and, presumably, throughout the thought process that created the space. Not only are there explicit invocations of the Alhambra as a model for this Moroccan courtyard, but it is also a clear that those references come from the scholarship produced for the 1992 Al-Andalus exhibition at the Met. In his ArtForum review of the exhibition, Nasser Rabbat takes on this view.
  • (contrast with the Kevorkian room, Syrian colonial context)
  • One of the heads of the Naji family studio, which carried out the work, said: “We were transported back to the year 1300.”
  • There’s a question of authenticity: Haider talks about authenticity vs. reproduction; in other words that they are not trying to reproduce a real courtyard, but still want it to feel authentic. She also refers to the tiles as being done in 14th and 15th-century colors, while Naji talks about artificially aging them so that they look as they would now if they were from that period.

The New York-based echoes of the historical movement(s) that Eric has identified are fairly self-evident. This is al-Andalus mediated through Morocco, it is the Middle Ages mediated through Moroccan craftsmen, it is the elevation of the urban environment. But one theme that struck me both in Eric’s analysis of how this kind of narrative unfolded and the way in which it’s picked up by the Met staff was that of authenticity.

Three examples of where the idea of authenticity occurs in the chapter are:

  • p. 217: On Santos Fernández reporting on the Ibero-American Exhibition in 1929: “The official Morocco Pavilion gave Fernández ‘a strong impression of Moroccan authenticity.’”
  • p. 220: “The Spanish, in contrast [to the French] saw Andalusi culture as the essential and authentic core of Moroccan culture, and they imagined themselves as the direct descendants of al-Andalus .”
  • p. 221: “When Bertuchi spoke of the revival of Moroccan art under Spanish colonialism, he was talking about the revival of an artistic tradition that was not only authentically Moroccan but also authentically Spanish.”

What I want to do by highlighting these short citations and the same terminology that occurs when the Met curator talk about the Moroccan courtyard is to raise the question of how the different players on this stage understand the question of authenticity, the axes of authenticity, and of how that understanding is bequeathed, very implicitly, going forward. In other words, it’s not just a simple question of what authenticity means and then of what is authentic in terms of historicity and geography, but also of what a kind of joint Spanish-Moroccan authenticity might imply.

In the study of medieval Spain and North Africa, it has become increasingly clear, especially in the last 15-20 years to many practitioners that historical and literary scholarship need to see the Maghreb as an integral cultural unit rather than as two spaces divided by traditional Ango-American views of what constitutes nations in Europe and where a hard break between Europe and Africa occurs. But at the same time, what Eric has shown is the very pernicious side of that kind of unitary thinking. And so this raises two questions in moving forward: How do we account for this impulse in medieval scholarship? And to how we can look at the region in a unitary way without replicating the violence of the colonial project that was so contingent upon the very continuity that we are currently viewing as desirable and necessary?

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Postscript: I left this final paragraph out of my comments at the workshop because I didn’t want to pull my remarks in too many different directions and because this was really ultimately more of a response to the status quo of #medievaltwitter than to anything that was happening in the conference — mercifully there is still a world of thought offline! —  but this was another issue that came up in formulating my thoughts about the book.

I think that it’s worth mentioning that many areas of medieval studies are — very much to their benefit — beginning to appreciate this kind of historiographic work that clarifies where some of the modern understandings of places and cultures that are often attributed to the Middle Ages in fact come into being in the modern period. It’s in part a natural element of the field to know its own history, and in part it’s being accelerated by very contemporary repurposing of medieval tropes such as Crusades and Vikings on the extreme right to justify all kinds of contemptible, hateful modern attitudes. Medievalist responses have very much been drawn down black-and-white lines. Even as in my own historiographic research right now, I’m reading a book of poetry by Manuel Machado that is basically a paean to Franco that casts him as a medieval Christian reconquerer no less than Fernando el Católico or the Cid; and so while I knew that Franco had tried to be a bit sensitive about covering up figures of Santiago Matamoros when he met with his Moroccan generals,  I was really surprised to learn about the extent of Francoist engagement with and promotion of Islam. It’s a historiography that doesn’t fall along the neat lines of other European historiographies, where the various fascist forces uniquely adopted the Christian Middle Ages to imagine their histories. With that said, I’ll just leave off with a final question: To what extent is this a case of “España es diferente” and to what extent should we see it as a call to reexamine the one-dimensional nature of the current discourse on the relationship between medievalism in general and mid-century fascism?

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“I Sing: Mizmor le-David”: Hebro and the Hebrew Poets

My intellectual lineage is such that it is perhaps inevitable that I will always think about poetry and music together. Once you accept that Bob Dylan has more in common with the Provençal troubadours than not, something breaks open in the theories of literature that govern your reading. I will always be a Clapton girl at heart, but the more medieval poetry that I have read, the more I have come to appreciate rap, hip-hop and R&B music. I know, I know — what a bougie, white-girl, academic way to come to those genres, but all the same, maybe that’s the point: Maybe medieval poetry maybe shouldn’t be quite so rarefied and reified in the canon.

For Black History Month, the Black Jewish writer MaNishtana shared music videos on Facebook featuring Black Jewish artists; that’s where I first came across this song, which draws heavily on the words of Psalm 23. I found it compelling on its own: I think that rhyming “so the world should know” with “le-ma’an shemo” (1:15) is pretty close to poetic genius — although I’ll admit I’ve always been a sucker for a solid bilingual rhyme.

I don’t think I’m really saying anything earth-shattering by pointing out the cultural-contextual similarities between rap music and medieval poetry; it’s certainly one that I’ve found useful in the past in teaching and in presenting medieval poetry to a lay audience. I’m writing this now more because I was just really grabbed by a new-to-me example of the phenomenon of sampling which is a striking demonstration of the ways in which Jewish poets draw not only from the Bible  but from the literary, poetic, and musical traditions around them in their broader local communities.

This song plays with several modes of traditional Jewish writing, but also draws in its rootedness in hip-hop in a way that very much reflects the practices of the medieval Hebrew poets from Spain. The song uses medieval modes of commentary on a biblical text; it recourses to tropes about God and writing that we find all over medieval Jewish models; and it is bilingual and bicultural in ways that reflect the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets’ borrowings from other languages and the dominant cultural and literary contexts they inhabited. Continue reading ““I Sing: Mizmor le-David”: Hebro and the Hebrew Poets”