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Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?: Anti-Semitism and the Medieval and Modern Models of Samuel ibn Naghrīla

Earlier this year, I was approached by the editor of a small, specialized publication for a general readership who had read my review here of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise and  on that basis asked me to write something for his web magazine. I was thrilled, sent him a little abstract, we agreed on the topic, and I was off. It’s a newish publication and the editor not, as far as I can tell, especially experienced; and by the time he asked me to rewrite the entire thing for the third time, contradicting edits he had made in earlier versions, futzing for the sake of futzing, and trying to make my writerly voice sound like his, I withdrew the piece. He deplored my “lack of commitment to the process,” (that sound you hear is me scoffing, indignantly) and the whole experience left a lot of bad feeling all around. I gather, through the grapevine, that I am not the only person to have had such an experience with this publication. Because it was written specially for a specific publication (and because it’s an approach I don’t really want to take in my own work and writing — looking at medieval history through a lens of anti-Semitism) I’m not sure that I’ll have much success in placing it elsewhere; and on top of that, I’m just not in the mood at the moment to sell myself and my work in the way that one has to do to attract the attention of the editors of general publications. And yet, I have this thing sitting on my hard drive and I wouldn’t mind clearing it from my mental plate. So I’ve decided to share it here. What’s the point of having one’s own web publishing platform if not for that? Plus, I’ve been working on a short blog post that’s related and that I will post by the end of the week, so it’s thematically appropriate for this moment in this space. Plus plus, since I’m already sharing some of the materials that will make up my next book, it fits in that way, too. It’s a long piece (it would have appeared in two parts had it run in the publication that commissioned it) and it’s designed for a general audience, so I hope that lay readers will enjoy it and that the academics who float through here on occasion will see some merit in it, too.

“…from the members of the community of Granada, the city of ourteacher Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph.” T-S 20.26.

Part I

The Hebrew poets of medieval Spain were the rap and hip-hop artists of their day. In the public performances of their verse, often at the fanciest parties with the finest liquor, they declaimed their opinions on social and political issues that affected them, imbuing their work with their victories and sadnesses; they praised themselves and their skills, caught beef with their peers, and did not let those rivalries die; they sampled the beats of the Arab poets working around them; and they irreversibly altered the properties of the Hebrew language in which they composed. They were complete badasses, they knew it, and they rhymed about it. What they perhaps could never have anticipated was the extent to which their poetry would speak so directly to the concerns of readers who would follow them into the world by a thousand years. But reading with a modern eye, it is immediately clear that many of the struggles that medieval Hebrew poets faced over language choice and national identity — over how to belong — were strikingly modern in their character and they poured out in their strikingly modern verse.

One of these poets was Samuel ibn Naghrīla (d. 1055-6) who served as a vizier and general to the Muslim emir of Granada but was also the leader, or nagid, of that city’s Jewish community and the best of its poets. He earned himself the nickname “twice the vizier” for his military and poetic prowess. His poetry covers topics from fatherhood to the battlefield to the value of both healthy and pleasing foods; some of his most significant poems were written to and about his beloved son Yehosef would succeed him as both the nagid and a government official in Granada. Samuel’s own writings and those that survive that tell his story from others’ perspectives demonstrate that he was deeply engaged with both Jewish and Muslim thinkers and cultural leaders of the day and with their ideas. His poetry is secular in nature but written in what medieval Jews considered to be the divine language — Hebrew — and drew often and strongly on biblical and other religious language, all the while using the rhyme and meter schemes of his Arabic-speaking Muslim counterparts.

Continue reading “Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?: Anti-Semitism and the Medieval and Modern Models of Samuel ibn Naghrīla”

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Reading the Poema de Mio Cid in “Dante’s Cult of Truth”: Literary History, Theory, and “Reconquest” Historiography

This is the paper that I am slated to give this afternoon at the workshop “After the Conquest: Converging Approaches to the Study of the Iberian Reconquista” at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.  Writing the paper allowed me to begin to think through a new chapter in my current book project; perhaps predictably, by the time I was finished writing the conference paper I had gotten my argument just to the point from which I need to start writing the book chapter version. Even as a first draft of a first draft, this is truncated; I had to cut fully a thousand words from my initial version of the paper in order to keep to time — one of the things I’m looking forward to about this workshop is that we’re giving short papers and each session is followed by a roundtable. It seems like it will be a very productive format. The sets of asterisks mark where I did the most butchery — I’ve saved those passages to put back when I begin to (re)construct the chapter. The state of medieval studies online these days is such that I’d simply say: If you read this and are inclined to shout at me for not including enough examples, for not having a more fully developed theoretical framework, or not having cited the work of your favorite theorist or scholar or medieval chronicler, please consider the possibility that it was there in the extended version and will again be there in the book. (I, myself, was particularly unhappy about consigning the work of Nadia Altschul, Simon Barton, and Ibn Bassam to the file called “cut bits of the cambridge reconquest paper.docx.” I don’t have time before the workshop begins but I’ll add some bibliography later to give a sense of where I’m going with all of this in terms of its situation within the field.) This is a paper that really sets out a methodology rather than offering a full display of what it can do. That will come in the parts of the conference that are invisible to the internet and in the much longer project of book-writing. For that, stay tuned.

Continue reading “Reading the Poema de Mio Cid in “Dante’s Cult of Truth”: Literary History, Theory, and “Reconquest” Historiography”

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My Year in Books: 2017 (Part 2)

Normally I don’t include my academic reading in my year-end roundup, but I wanted to keep track of what I accomplished on my sabbatical so I have a running list already prepared. I didn’t end up reading exactly what I expected. I thought that I would sit and read a lot of Arabic text since I had time to work without interruption. However, I found that just coming off of finishing the book that has had me tied to my desk chair since 2011-12, I didn’t just didn’t want to sit at my desk. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work or to read, but I wanted to not be in a desk chair at a desk. I read out of doors and, since the weather was mostly disgusting in the summer and then, suddenly, freezing, with very little in between, on my couch in my living room. The little table-sitting that I did was devoted to working on a translation project that is ongoing. I didn’t have the wherewithal for another semester of all-day desk-sitting, so I translated in the morning and read, took notes, and wrote while sitting on the couch in the afternoons. Like translating, reading medieval Arabic text is a desk activity, and so it just didn’t happen that much; it was one or the other in terms of desk time and I wanted to make some progress on that project, which had stalled while I finished my book. Realistically, I was also just mentally exhausted from finishing the book and tenure, and reading text is a taxing activity; certainly far moreso than reading scholarship.  In a certain respect, keeping this list has gotten me to think about habits of reading and the physicality that governs them. I thought that the long stretch of time would be good for reading text, but it was actually better for reading scholarship precisely because of how I was prepared to sit or not sit after years of a very specific kind of sitting. I’m hoping that now that I’m back to teaching, where I’ll have blocks of time where I’m on my feet, blocks of time where I’m prepping classes (which I can do anywhere), and blocks of time in meetings — that is, I’ll have lots of different physical modes of being at work — that I’ll be able to put in an extra hour or two of desk time, both physically and mentally. (I’m also hoping this doesn’t sound completely bonkers.)

With that said, here’s the mostly-complete list of what I read this semester with an eye toward reading widely and starting to think about the intellectual setting and framework for my next book:

Altschul, Nadia and Kathleen Davis, ed. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Jewish English,” in A Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed. Lily Khan. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 130-7.

—. “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99:2 (2009): 230-69.

Bishop, Chris. Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Calderwood, Eric. “Franco’s Hajj: Moroccan Pilgrims, Spanish Fascism, and the Unexpected Journey of Modern Arabic Literature,” PMLA 135:5 (2017): 1097-1116.

Coope, Jessica. The Most Noble of People. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2017.

Dangler, Jean. Edging Toward Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Derrida, Jacques. “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14:3 (1988): 590-652.

Dockray-Miller, Mary. Public Medievalism, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s Colleges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Efron, John M. German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton: UP, 2016.

—. “Scientific Racism and the Mystique of Sephardic Racial Superiority,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 38:1 (1993): 75-96.

Guichard, Pierre. Los reinos de taifas: Fragmentación política y esplendor cultural. Málaga: Editorial Sarriá, 2005.

Hernández Cruz, Victor. In the Shadow of al-Andalus. Minneapolis: Coffee House Books, 2011.

Herman, David. “Narrative Worldmaking in Graphic Life Writing,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael Chaney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 231-43.

Hever, Hanan. Suddenly, the Sight of War. Stanford: UP, YEAR.

Horn, Dara. “The Future of Yiddish in English,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 471-80.

Judt, Tony. A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe. New York: UP, 2011.

León, María Teresa. Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar: Gran señora de todos los deberes. Madrid: Castalia, 2004 reprint.

—. La Historia tiene la palabra: Noticia sobre el salvamiento del Tesoro artístico de España. Madrid: Endymion, 2009.

Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question,” in The Early Writings. New York: Penguin.

Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso Books, 2013.

Muñoz Molina, Antonio. Córdoba de los omeyas. Madrid: Seix Barral, 1991.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism.

Ozick, Cynthia. “America: Toward Yavneh,” in What is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. 20-35.

Rashid, Hussein, “Truth, Justice, and the Spiritual Way: Imam Ali as Superhero,” in Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation, ed. A. David Lewis and Martin Lund. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Ravitzky, Aviezer. The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986.

REDACTED, Prof. Dr. REDACTED. REDACTED: A book I reviewed in manuscript, confidentially, for a press. REDACTED: REDACTED Press. Forthcoming, inshallah, 2018.

Rein, Raanan. “Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine: Zionists, Communists, and the Contemporary Press,” Journal of Contemporary History 43:1 (2008) 9-23.

Rennger, N.J. “The neo-medieval global polity,” in International Relations: Theory and the Politics of European Integration, ed. Morten Kelstrup and Michael Williams. New York: Routledge, 2000. 57-71.

Rodríguez, Ana A. “Mapping Islam in the Philippines: Moro Anxieties of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific,” in The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, eds. Keller, Marcus and Javiero Irigoyen García. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 85-100.

Rosser-Owen. Maryam. Islamic Arts from Spain. London: V&A Publishing. YEAR?

Roth, Laurence. “Innovation and Orthodox Comic Books: The Case of Mahrwood Press,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 37:2 (2012): 131-56.

Salgado, Minoli. “The Politics of Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge: UP, 2007. 153-68.

Schirmann, Jefim. “Samuel Hanagid: The Man, the Soldier, the Politician,” Jewish Social Studies 13:2 (1951): 99-126.

—. “The Wars of Samuel Ha-Nagid,” Zion

Schorsch, Ismar. “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34:1 (1989): 47-66.

Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries Since 1492,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman, et al. Oxford: UP: 2002. ##.

Tabachnick, Steven E, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. Cambridge: UP, 2017.

—. The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2014.

El-Tayyib, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Unamuno, Miguel de. Gramática y glosario del Poema del Cid. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1977.

Viguera Molins, María Jesús. “El Cid en las fuentes árabes,” in Actas del Congreso Internacional El Cid, Poema e Historia, ed. César Hernández Alonso. Burgos: Ayuntamineto de Burgos, 2000.

Wilson, G. Willow. “Machina ex Deus: Perennialism in Comics,” in Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, ed. A. David Lewis. New York: Continuum Publishing, 2010. 249-56.

Zihri, Oumelbanine. “A Capitve Library Between Spain and Morocco,” in The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, eds. Keller, Marcus and Javiero Irigoyen García. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 17-31

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Jumping Off the Shoulders of Giants

I have been getting some comments on my previous post to the effect of: How dare you repeat claims of racism without proving them yourself, de novo? The answer to that question is that having read the blog posts so accused and having read the arguments that bear out those claims, I find them convincing. I’ve read the claims, I’ve read the evidence presented for those claims, and I’ve accepted it. It is worth mentioning that racism or no racism isn’t the central point of that post, but rather the question of how scholars grapple with the work of those so credibly accused; but I did have to repeat those claims in order to be able to illustrate the example. I did not think that I needed to re-prove the claims, however, when they have been proven elsewhere.

I bring this up not because I’m particularly interested in carrying on that conversation per se but because it gets to a larger question that is present, in varying degrees, in how we think about writing and sourcing both for the public at large and for academic audiences. The question is this: How do we decide when to accept work that has been done before us and when to reject and redo it?

For me, the most recent manifestation of this question came when I was invited by the editor of a magazine aimed at a general audience with an interest in the Middle Ages to write a shorter version of the chapter I’m currently working on for my second book project. One of the works that I am analyzing in the chapter is a graphic novel loosely based on the life of Samuel ibn Naghrīla that leverages his biography in the service of modern political commitments that are laid particularly clear when one learns that its author was devotee of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane.

The editor wasn’t comfortable with my citing a peer-reviewed journal article that gave a biographical sketch of the author and delineated his political leanings and instead wanted me to do original biographical research on the author before assuming a political affiliation that even his obituaries acknowledge. But in order to be able to move the state of knowledge forward, there are certain things that we read, assess, accept, and build upon. Time runs short and the work is unending. If I first have to rewrite a history of the JDL when the work has already been done in a satisfactory way, I’m not going to move forward and write the history of how JDL members and aficionados refashioned the Middle Ages in their own image.

And in fact, I ended up not publishing the piece in that magazine because I wanted to spend my sabbatical going forwards rather than redoing work that had already been done to acceptable standards. (There were a number of other editorial disagreements that led to the decision, but this is the one that’s relevant here.) Is the lay reading public interested in the Middle Ages served by backing me into a corner, so that I have to choose going backwards or going nowhere at all?

One of my senior colleagues has a beautiful way of phrasing this: We have to trust our craft. We have the tools to assess what is presented to us, both primary and secondary sources; and we can exercise our judgment about when those secondary sources present a questionable narrative that requires reevaluation and when we can use it as part of the foundations for our further work. It’s a bit of a facile example, but I don’t re-prove that medieval Hebrew poetry adapted its meters and rhyme schemes from Arabic poetry every time that I write about that body of poetry. I’ve read close to a millennium of scholarship (because medieval grammarians and historians wrote about this before their modern heirs did) on the topic and it’s good. I can run with it. I’ve been training to read text since I was 18 years old; by this point I trust my own judgment about what to rely on and what to revisit and the methodological tools that help me make those decisions.

And this all ultimately gets back to the subject of my last post, the question of not discarding earlier generations’ scholarship because we now reject their racism, sexism, etc. within scholarship rather than within writing for a general audience. While revisiting and interrogating the foundations of the field is an intellectually invigorating prospect, it’s not practical to reproduce 200 years worth of scholarship that was produced under conditions much more conducive to humanistic inquiry, much better funded, and (at least in the case of my field), before two centuries of modern warfare and political turmoil destroyed many of the manuscripts upon which our forebearers relied. And while digital technologies and increasing possibilities for academic collaboration means that recreating reference works might not take as long as it did in the 19th-century, those are still incredibly labor-intensive, time-intensive projects that require knowledge of the field cultivated over a long period of time. Furthermore, redoing everything already done forecloses the possibility of working on the materials that are still emerging. If I’m re-editing or re-translating the Nafḥ al-Ṭibb (which sorely needs it, to be quite honest), that means that I’m not working on, say, the manuscripts newly made available from the Timbuktu cache or the works of poetics that have been languishing, rediscovered but unpublished for 75 years. (I’m suddenly reminded of an admonition from one of my undergraduate professors of Arabic literature: Do your work carefully because it will be a minimum of 80 years before someone comes along and even thinks about redoing it.) Whether it is scholars or lay readers who would like us to reinvent the world anew every time we sit down to write, that is not the way that scholarship works.

While a field like Egyptology might change and update its understanding of certain symbols through both reflection upon its field’s foundations and as more texts are discovered,  it’s never going to go back and re-solve hieroglyphic writing from scratch. Nor can we separate the foundations of our own personal knowledge from those of our fields.  Those of us who learned languages from books of grammar written by Victorian Orientalists will never be able to go back and re-learn those languages in some other way even if we wanted to. While it might be an interesting intellectual exercise to think through whether we could teach or learn Arabic as the medieval Arab grammarians did, there are a number of insurmountable practical, methodological, and theoretical barriers to such a project. And so we are ourselves already implicated in the history of scholarship by virtue of having become scholars.

In a certain respect it’s kind of cool that the general public might imagine that scholars create everything for ourselves every time we sit down to do work (and it’s aspirational to think about it ourselves): in that image, the myth of the lone genius inheres in each of us. But it can also lead to devastating disappointment when they realize that part of what we do is assess earlier work and choose to build upon it and are never lone geniuses. Making clear our intellectual lineages and how me make those kinds of judgment calls must, then, be a part of how we present our work to the public (and to our students). If just linking to a peer-reviewed article isn’t enough to clarify to lay readers what the process of scholarship is and why that article is a sound foundation, then perhaps public writing could include a kind of scholarly “how I got the story” sidebar of the kind that newspapers sometimes write in order to explain their process to their readers; in scholarly writing, we spell out our methodologies and commitments. There’s not just one right possibility, not one right way of grappling with earlier scholarship, and not one right way of presenting it to the public; but what is clear is that there is still quite a lot of work to be done on all fronts. And that is pretty exciting.

May this be a year of thoughtful methodologies and much productivity for everyone!

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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.

***

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.

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My Year in Books: 2017 (Part 1)

Once again it is time for my annual roundup of mostly non-work-related reading. Being done with my own first book and successfully past the tenure process definitely facilitated more and better reading for pleasure this year than last. Nevertheless, I will shamelessly begin my year-in-books roundup with a new category (although let’s be honest, they’re always all new categories):

Book published: The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition. By me.

With that out of the way, here’s what I read in the year that was:

Would have read very differently if I had read it in April, 2016, when it was recommended to me by a friend, rather than when I finally got to it, in early January of this year: Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere

<— Relatedly, since we’re all in the same profession, everyone to whom my friend recommended the book posed for a picture in an Andalusi monument (mine was at the top of the tower of the church of San Román in Toledo) and sent it to her.

Read it for work but would have read it for pleasure all the same: The Full Severity of Compassion by Chana Kronfeld

Hate-read it for work: The Myth of an Andalusian Paradise by Darío Fernández-Morera

Thinking about how I want to work post-tenure: The Slow Professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber

Thinking about (at least a part of my) audience post-tenure: The Public Professor by Lee Badgett

I can justify reading graphic novels when they’re about textual transmission and written in Spanish: El secreto del salmo 46 by Brian Moriarty and Iván Sende

…or even when they’re sort of bilingual/Spanglishy/mostly English: El Ilumniado by Ilan Stavans

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!: Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman

Ars longa vita brevis: Everything is Happening by Michael Jacobs

Spain books: The above, The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming, and Moorish Culture in Spain by Titus Burkhardt

Brought it to Spain again, didn’t read it again: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Bought-in-Spain books:

C-Bv9UaXgAA_k4z.jpg_large

Abu Dhabi book: Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan

Wanted to read it before going to Abu Dhabi but didn’t quite get to it: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Canada book: Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

And because my trip to Canada involved an unexpectedly large number of googly eyes:

Cuba books: Freedom’s Mirror by Ada Ferrer, My Brigadista Year by Katherine Paterson, Cecilia Valdés by Cirilio Villaverde**, Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet, and  Papyrus by Osdany Morales

There was a prequel…: Nights of Awe by Hari Nykkanen

There was a sequel?!: Jacobo reloaded by Mario Bellatín

Written in an English least like the one I know: Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brien

Favorite story from the Complete Sherlock Holmes**: “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” (or maybe “The Sign of the Four”)

Favorite novel from the Complete Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles
(although ultimately I think this was a stronger start than a finish)

Least favorite story or novel from the Complete Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet (sacrilege, I know, I just found it so tedious)

Story or novel from the Complete Sherlock Holmes most interestingly adapted into an episode of Elementary: “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”/”Ears to You”

Most disappointing story or novel from the Complete Sherlock Holmes, having watched Elementary first: “Silver Blaze”/”The Marchioness” (Whorls? Whorls.)

Favorite narrator of the Complete Sherlock Holmes audiobooks: Stephen Fry

Least favorite narrator of the Complete Sherlock Holmes audiobooks: Simon Vance

Didn’t quite get the voice of the Orientalist narrator right, but full marks for effort and an interesting thought exercise: Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

Almost but didn’t quite get the voice of the NYU literature professor right: Jeremy O’Keefe in Patrick Flannery’s I Am No One

Didn’t even come close to getting the voice of the NYU literature professor right: Alfred O’Malley in James Carse’s PhDeath

“Her grid, it seems to me, is true…”: Agnes Martin and Me by Donald Woodman

Because, 2017: Women and Power by Mary Beard

Listened to the audiobook read by Kenneth Branaugh before seeing the movie directed by Kenneth Branaugh: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Saw the musical before reading the book: Hamilton by Rob Chernow**

Best Federalist Paper: #78

Books purged in the interest of shelf space:

Book purged after two chapters so that I wouldn’t have to keep reading paragraphs like these: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

Absolute favorites of the year, in no particular order: Limonov, Temporary People, and The Full Severity of Compassion, Freedom’s Mirror

The definitive answer to the question: How many books is too many books to have in bed? This many. I have too many books in my bed.

** Two stars mark the long ones that are 2017 starts and will be 2018 finishes. For Sherlock Holmes, I got through The Hound of the Baskervilles; the second half of the collected works will be for next year.

And finally: Normally my year-in-books roundup only comprises things that I read outside of work because keeping track of everything that I read, half-read, skimmed, read the relevant chapters of, threw at a wall in disgust, etc., would be total chaos. Plus, work reading is as much if not more articles — and fragmentary medieval text bits — than books. However, this fall I was on my post-tenure sabbatical. And although I have a second book project in mind, my main sabbatical goal was to treat the time like I was back in grad school, but smart enough to know how to handle it this time around. The goal was to read, and to read broadly and well and wherever it took me. So I made myself a reading and rereading list and just read. And yes, some of it was in the service of the next project, but even there, I tried to read as broadly and widely as possible; I no longer have to read just what I know I need to read to finish a book before a Damoclean deadline.  Since academic calendars and the rest of the world’s calendars don’t align perfectly, I’m still on sabbatical for just about a full month into 2018 I’m going to wait until I’m back to teaching, but there will be a Part 2 of work-related reading soonish.

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Twitter and Tenure

This is a long-form reflection on my short-form commitments. In other words, while I’m not disappearing from Twitter altogether, I’m going to be cutting back significantly on my usage of the platform. I took a break from academic social media — from #medievaltwitter and from the Facebook groups populated by medievalists — as some of the discussions over the role in Medieval Studies of scholars trained in Arabic and Islamic Studies became infuriatingly narrow and dismissive of the kinds of expertise that my most immediate colleagues and I have spent long and difficult years cultivating in favor of more overarching (and, theoretically, unifying) theoretical approaches. The zenith of this break was a week I spent out of the country with no access to the internet whatsoever. After the better part of a month more or less away from #medievaltwitter and its ancillaries, my mood was dramatically improved and my head far clearer. Even as those fractious conversations have slipped down everyone’s timelines, I realize that even before that the medium was taking a toll on me.

I’m finding that medieval social media has become tedious (with a few notable exceptions, always) even as the Middle Ages and its pursuit have grown more topical and relevant of late. The people with whom I very much agree politically have been reduced to saying the same thing over and over again. This is not to say that those things don’t need to be said to the wider world — they clearly do — it’s that as an in-group professional conversation, the constant repetition of the same rhetoric has lost its interest for me. I’m ready for a space to explore new ideas not only about my scholarship but about how best to use the popular interest in medievalism to help to support a liberal vision of civil society; I’m frustrated that #medievaltwitter is becoming a space where political agreement is coming to signify and require intellectual agreement and streamlining.

I didn’t initially think of my withdrawal from social media as a consequence of earning tenure, but upon reflection I think it’s connected. (Actually, I think it says something that both of my post-tenure trips were to places where I was completely cut off from internet access for a week at a time. I didn’t just need a break from having been living at my desk nonstop since 2010, but from all of the social consequences of that.)

I suspect that my post-tenure self no longer needs the instant gratification that can sometimes come from being a part of a social media-medievalist peer group and can instead feel a part of a medievalist community that is a better fit. #medievaltwitter very much reflects the fact that the field of Medieval Studies is fundamentally allied, in disciplinary terms, with English literature. There’s nothing wrong with English literature, it’s just not my scene.  My participation in that community made sense when my primary concern was earning tenure, when the main thing taking up space in my head was academic per se rather than the subject of my work, and when the people I saw as my closest colleagues were those who, ironically, were at a remove from my work and could be supportive because they wouldn’t be adjudicating it. In stepping back from Twitter I lose that unique sustained immediacy of discussion that can sustain a person in the isolation of the tenure track and the instantaneous approval of a global cheering section of colleagues. But with tenure I don’t feel like I might be losing a tenuous grip on my professional and intellectual relationships by not having them reinforced daily. I have an easier sense of who my colleagues really are; they are not in English literature and they’re not going anywhere. They’re the Hispanists and Arabists who speak the same intellectual language I speak (and speak and read the same human ones). They’re the ones I’m looking forward to talking through my next project the next time we meet, whenever that might be, on the project’s terms and on ours; and they’re the ones with whom I can brainstorm productively about how to use our specific kind of expertise to help reach out to and educate the public.

I am so grateful to the senior colleagues who handle their social media presence with real grace, passion, and anti-hierarchical collegiality, but by this point I think that I have learned what I can from them in that arena. Junior tweeps, if you need anything read or need job market advice or anything, don’t think twice about asking. I’m still around. If you need another voice in your cheering section, just say so and I will lend mine. I want to continue modeling the best of #medievaltwitter that I’ve learned from the senior tweeps, but for myself I need to hang back from the daily fray.

I think that from here on out I’ll be doing more retweeting than tweeting. And I’m going to treat the platform more like a Sunday long-read that I’ll catch up on intensively once (or twice or so) a week. Even with the new expanded character limit, I don’t find this platform to be conducive to thoughtful discussion anymore. I expect that I’ll treat this as a space for checking in with tweeps who really have become my friends over the last few years, for a little banter, for sharing news and articles; but it’s not going to be my discussion space going forward. That’s not a comment on how I read medieval marginalia (just to preempt that accusation, that is sometimes thrown around when others have come to similar conclusions…) and it’s not to say that it can’t be a useful platform for that for some people and for some conversations — it’s just not working for me anymore. I don’t expect I’ll jump in for long, involved conversations with either academics or lay people.

My head, post-tenure, is clear enough to be ready for narrative rather than for a series of salvos and my internet usage is going to begin to reflect that. Vale.

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Still Here!

I just realized that I haven’t written a new blog post since August, and here it is, pushing the beginning of November. I’m still here. I’m percolating some new posts: a love letter to the Spanish past imperfect indicative, which is the very best of all verb tenses; and a consideration of how we handle good scholarship carried out by terrible people. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking over my sabbatical, and so if nothing else my end-of-year reading roundup will be epic. I’ve been doing some non-academic writing, too, which has taken me away from the blog: One piece fell through after the editor asked for a fourth round of major revisions, including the removal of a long section he had specifically asked me to write in an earlier round, at which point I said, “enough”; so I’m pitching it elsewhere and will hopefully be able to share it soon. Another piece that reflects on how we do medieval studies when there is a white supremacist narrative running parallel to us in popular culture saying that the Middle Ages was something other than what it is should be out in the next week or so.

For now, I’ll just leave you a picture of this tiny metal knight figurine that someone threw out and that was rescued and accessioned to the Department of Sanitation’s Treasure in the Trash Museum, which I visited for Open House New York weekend this year:

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The Lore and the Reality of an Islamic Spain

Since finishing my book I’ve been thinking about how to pursue my goal of doing public writing as well as academic writing and research. Following the attack in Barcelona last week I finally stopped overthinking it and actually wrote something and submitted it to a few op-ed sections. I didn’t move fast enough and the news cycle had moved on by the time I got it in and they got back to me, so for now I’ll post it here; I fear the issues will continue to be relevant, so I’ll give it a go the next time around…

***

The vehicular attack on pedestrians along Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade this past week brought up all of the usual, expected, old discussions about terrorism, life and death, and the role that Islam can play in European societies. The oldest of all of those discussions does not go back to the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 but rather to the year 711, when a Syrian military governor landed at Gibraltar, the rocky outcrop that still bears his name, and set up outposts in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula in the name of the Umayyad caliph at whose pleasure he served. Every time that Spain suffers an attack attributed to terrorists acting in the name of Islam, the discussion inevitably turns to the flourishing Islamic society that grew up in the wake of that commander’s arrival and the improbable series of global events that, by the end of the 8th century, made much of the lands that we now call Spain and Portugal into al- Andalus, a Muslim-governed polity that was the vibrant home to cultural flourishing, cutting edge science and medicine, and rock-star poets writing in three languages. Even when Spain is not involved, the splendor of Islamic al-Andalus often merits a mention to signal nostalgia for a different world — from one perspective or another.

One of the most striking invocations of al-Andalus this time around came in an interview this weekend on National Public Radio in which Spanish terrorism expert Juan Zarate contextualized the threat of Islamic terror in Spain by explaining that “the reality is Spain sits right at the heart and crosshairs of jihadi lore. Remember that Moorish Islamic rule controlled parts of southern Spain, known as al-Andalus in the lore.” In two sentences, Zarate ceded the historic Umayyad polity of al-Andalus to the ideology of terror. The majority of the Iberian Peninsula was known as al-Andalus in far more than modern, aspirational “lore,” but at the same time, the lore is powerful.

Instead of treating al-Andalus as a jihadist’s fantasy, we would do better to explore the medieval origins of medieval-inspired lore and the reach that it has in the modern day. One of the best examples of Andalusi history becoming lore comes from the battle in the year 778 at Roncesvalles, the Pyrenees mountain pass sometimes better known by its French name, Roncevaux. A rift between the Andalusi emir of Cordoba and some of his generals, who resented his centralization of power, ultimately led those officers to reach out to Charlemagne for assistance in regaining their former positions. The emir and Muslim troops loyal to him skirmished with Charlemagne and the Muslim generals he was assisting. One of those battles was for control of Barcelona. The Battle of Roncesvalles came at the end of the campaign. It took place as Charlemagne’s forces retreated from the city of Zaragoza; they were routed at the mountain pass by Basque forces defending territory they sought as their own.

Yet by the time the medieval troubadours, the singers of songs whose vision becomes our memory, told the story of Roncesvalles, Charlemagne’s forces were made holy warriors vanquished not by Basques but by zealous Muslim enemies. This story becomes the legend of French and Italian literary classics, the Song of Roland and Orlando Furioso. History tells us that this was a battle in which Muslim forces were fighting for a Muslim prince against Muslim

forces fighting alongside the Holy Roman Emperor that were ultimately routed not by their Muslim-led enemies but territorial Basques. Lore tells us that it was a failed attempt at holy war in which Muslims vanquished Christians for their infidel beliefs. It was called al-Andalus in both history and in lore; the mythological, lyrical version allows people to tell their own story with the greater gravitas of an appropriated history. It’s not just terrorists who do that; it’s been happening since the beginning. Everyone tells stories about that grow out of the place known in history and in lore as al-Andalus.

One of the best-known scholars of Islamic Spain once wrote that al-Andalus was a first-rate place, evoking F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate mind: one that is capable of holding two contradictory opinions at once. How we tell the story of that first-rate place is, in its own way, just as resolutely and sensibly self-contradictory: Lore matters because it has a past and a future of its own. And as a result, it’s never just lore.