I’ve traveled to see family three times between getting the vaccine and now, but this will be my first trip for research. Both the travel itself and the spontaneity with which I planned the trip feel so strange after two years of effectively not doing any profession-related travel. I used to go somewhere at least once a month to give a talk or visit an archive before the pandemic, but now I’m mostly planning how I will get digital surrogates for the archival and manuscript materials I will need to read for my book-in-progress because going to the UK right now seems foolish. And yet, here I am, having freaked out last night about a dramatic turn in my research and writing, and having dealt with it by booking myself a last-minute trip to a domestic archive a flying distance away to see if I can salvage the project there.
Part of what feels frenetic is that this trip as well as my last trip to see family were booked at the last minute as the potential end of the domestic-flight mask mandate is set to expire. Last time, when I went home, it was extended; this time, I don’t expect it will be. And so even though my travel schedule is nothing like what it was before the pandemic, it doesn’t feel so different: the suddenness of needing to change gears and be in a different place after not being able to think about it too much or for too long.
The world seemed like it was closing down and getting very small at the start of the pandemic, and I have that sensation again: that just as we were beginning to be able to emerge and do some things we used to more safely, protections like the mask mandate on flights are being rolled back that are going to make those of us who believe in the germ theory of disease transmission begin to retreat again. Back to the old normal seems so unwise.
I’m trying to do more of my medium-form writing these days with an end toward getting it publish, so I suppose that I’ve been doing more listicle-ing over here as I try to balance blogging and publishing.
I’m preparing to take my sophomore honors students to Madrid for a week. It’s a great trip and I’m looking forward to it a lot, but it also means being responsible for the health and safety of 30 19-year-olds for a week, and I tend to end up having anxiety dreams for weeks ahead of time. Usually they’ve been the very standard sort of I’m stuck on a train platform and I can’t move my feet and the train is leaving kind of thing that comes from knowing it takes a lot of extra time to move a group of people anywhere. This year, though, my subconscious has been keeping me entertained with far more elaborate scenarios:
Was put on a special diet with only ten foods allowed. Amongst those were ham, eggs, and lavender tea. No vegetables anywhere on the list. I decided it was stupid and I was going to eat some romanesco.
Was chased through the streets of Ávila by two big black dogs.
Was chased through the streets of Ávila by several of my senior colleagues.
Was in Ávila and couldn’t get back to the train station because people kept giving me directions in Italian and I couldn’t understand the street numbers. (This was kind of cool because it’s the first time I dreamed in Italian, and of course I understood what people were saying, but somehow in my dream it was as if I didn’t. We are not, I should mention here, taking the students to Ávila.)
Arrived in Madrid with such a large blister on the base of my thumb that I couldn’t hold anything or hand out itineraries to the students.
And as a bonus but unrelated travel-and-teaching combo anxiety dream: Was stuck in Poughkeepsie in the late afternoon on a Sunday and couldn’t rent a car to leave because the only open car rental place was run by a guy who had seen my tweets about alt-right appropriation of the Middle Ages and didn’t approve of my opinions. (I’ve been thinking about participating in NYU’s prison education program, which would require my taking Metro North to Poughkeepsie once a week and getting a zip car to go from there to Wallkill.)
The first travel that I did after I knew that my tenure bid had been approved was to take a weekend trip to the city of Zaragoza in between two conferences a week apart in Cordoba and Barcelona, early in the summer of 2017. This was a really meaningful trip to me because before I had tenure I struck a bargain with myself that if I kept my butt in my chair and got my work done, in spite of feeling like I was sacrificing having any kind of life, that I’d do things just because I wanted to once I was post-book and post-tenure. It was especially hard to keep up the first half of the bargain the semester that I was at NYU-Madrid, when I had planned to start on a new project at the National Library there and spend weekends tromping around Castilian castles; and I couldn’t do any of htat because the book manuscript still needed significant this work. This trip to Zaragoza, then, a weekend between two conferences in Spain and Israel, was the first thing I did to keep the second half of that bargain with myself. And so Zaragoza, medieval and otherwise, — well, I understand why people who live there complain about it, but — as a place to visit for me represents a kind of personal and intellectual freedom that was totally new.
One of the more challenging aspects of Spain is its ongoing, collective ambivalence about Jews and Muslims. It’s a place that, in the last 20 (or maybe even closer to 30) years has come to embrace its Judaeo-Islamic past — uneasily and and sometimes haltingly — if for nothing else than because it makes for a very attractive draw for tourists and foreign investment; but at the same time, it is still very much a place that hasn’t figured out how to deal with the Jews and Muslims in its midst. (A brief disclaimer here: I’m talking strictly about the public sphere and not the academic one for the purposes of this blog post.)
It’s something that struck me most strongly when I was here in 2015 for a semester and visited Alcalá de Henares, a city that very much plays up the presence of its Jewish and Islamic quarters but also sports a mural that trades in stereotypes about Jews being the shadowy, driving force behind corporate and military America. And, here again for what I have come to call The Great NYU Global-Conference-Conference-Research Trip of 2017, I walked past a shop that was trying to sell highish-end women’s accessories by using the image of a frightening, unindividuated Jew conducting bad business under the table. (And now with added homophobia!)
But the casual, corporate, Jews=money=flashy accessories antisemitism of this marketing campaign pales in comparison to the postcards that are available on sale at the Museum of Jewish History in Girona, such as this one:
Girona is easily the best-preserved medieval city I have ever visited and was an important center of Jewish life in the late Middle Ages. Yet even here, even in a medieval city that very much markets itself for Jewish tourism, the old medieval stereotypes are never far below the surface. The “joke” of this postcard is that Isaac “the Blind” of Posquieres, a thirteenth-century kabbalist, is shown selling the lotto tickets that, in Spain, are a concession held by blind and visually impaired people. The not-really-a-joke is that the postcard shows a Jew with a big nose (for anyone who needs a refresher about the medieval origins of this stereotype, see Sara Lipton’s Dark Mirror) enriching himself.
I took a photo of the postcard and showed it on my phone to the women sitting at the entrance desk and explained what I thought the issue was with it; they looked at me very sheepishly, explained that they knew about it but because the bookshop is actually a concession that isn’t operated by the museum, there was nothing they could do about it. They promised to pass my complaint on to the director of the museum, and suggested that it would be helpful if I mentioned it to the owner of the bookshop. Perhaps, they suggested it without really believing it, he just didn’t know.
Of course, the bookshop owner knew. I suspect that this is not the first time that this conversation has proceeded along the edges of this particular triangle: a surprised tourist, the women at the desk, and the owner of the book shop. The shop owner first told me that he doesn’t make the postcards but just orders them; and since the shop orders them in multi-packs and these come in the multi-pack and they are all paid for, he has to sell them. (Nevermind that if it were me and those postcards came in my multi-pack, I’d throw them out even at a loss before I’d sell them — who’s the greedy Jew now?) He also tried to tell me that Isaac the Blind — the thirteenth-century kabbalist, in case you’d forgotten from a few paragraphs up — wasn’t a Jew, but rather was the owner of a tavern at the edge of the Call, the Jewish quarter, so it wasn’t actually a stereotype of Jews.
The tourist industry here that pours so much energy into remembering long-dead Jews and enticing the living ones to tour their old haunts will never be more than a silly little parody of itself and a pathetic disservice not just to Jewish history but to its own — which are, of course, inextricable from each other — until it actually looks its own history, both medieval and modern, squarely in the face and appreciates it rather than just casting a casual glance in its direction.
My pithy closing sentence was going to be this: I love this country deeply, but I also have to hate it because it still very much hates me. But the use of that word, country, is what opens up the broader question. How much does a modern country owe to what used to be there? To the descendants of the people who used to be there? What is the nature of what is owed? Is there only a choice between forgetting fully and remembering fully, or is there some middle ground? I had planned to end with a barrage of unanswered questions that I’d really like to answer, but I think that would make this a much longer and different post. So for now, I’ll just get on with loving and hating Spain and trying to let that seething tumult wind itself into words.
This trip was such a whirlwind, and with such little possibility for sleep that it feels like a dream — down the sensation that if I don’t write it down I will forget it all. I was in the Persian Gulf for such a short time that I didn’t even have to book the cat sitter. 60 hours on the ground with almost as many in transit back and forth, and I think I slept for about 5 of them.
I arrived on campus around 10 and was shown to my guest suite by Sandeep, a hospitality contractor; most of the site staff there are contractors rather than employees of the university and most are south Asian. What surprised me most was how little Arabic is heard on campus (and around Abu Dhabi at large) and, by comparison, how much of the various languages of India and Pakistan. There seem to be a whole host of language politics issues at play at every level of society. I asked Sandeep how he liked it there and said that he preferred the UK, where he had studied for his hospitality degree, because there is more freedom. He was so upfront about it, and so on the nose that I wondered if he wasn’t just saying what he expected an American visitor to want to hear. Service industry ethos, perhaps?
I caught myself admiring the stone floors in the guest suite where I was staying (which is as large as my apartment in New York) and stopped myself with the thought “…stone floors that were probably installed by slaves.” I don’t want to betray conversations that I had on the ground so I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but it was interesting and helpful to get a more local perspective on some of the labor issues, how they came about, and how they’re trying to be resolved.
After the first day of the conference concluded and after the Maghrib prayer was over, we visited the Sheikh Zayed mosque. The exterior is a mash-up of marshmallows, Disneyland, and Qairowan.
The interior is something else.
We also visited the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, which is what happens when all the medievalists gang up on the one modernist at the conference while planning the conference excursion.
A falconry scene in a Persian Kalila and Dimna manuscript. BL Or. 13506, f. 86v.
I got to hold one of the falcons, and it’s like having a very lightweight gyroscope on your wrist — you feel the animal constantly making tiny adjustments in her balance. (I’ll update with a picture when the colleague who got the picture of me with the falcon sends it to me.) We watched the veterinarians anesthetize a falcon in order to trim its nails: “It reduces the stress on the birds and on us,” he explained. We also got to watch feeding time; the falcons are fed defrosted, cleaned quails while they are in the hospital and make a great, audible go of crunching on the bones.
The downtown didn’t quite work for me. It’s not dusty, but the quality of the light makes it look so. All the same, it’s very sterile: A glass financial district on some massive scale that doesn’t really admit human existence. It’s sort of a post-apocalyptic rebuild of Los Angeles still in progress. It also struck me that many of the public spaces seemed to look like a parody rather than a showcase of design and ideas current in the Arab world.
This public art, with the coffee pot sculpture positively dwarfing the minaret of the mosque across the street just struck me as an Orientalist fantasia. I laughed to myself when I imagined archaeologists 500 years from now wondering to themselves what kind of circumstances allowed coffee-worshipers to build their shrine taller than that of their Muslim neighbors.
The art historians in our group were insistent that we visit the World Trade Center, a building designed by Foster + Partners that is supposed to replicate a traditional souk. I don’t have anything more intelligent to say than that it just didn’t do it for me. It was kind of tacky and kitschy, full of mass produced stuff you could get anywhere. And as far as perfect metaphors go, the green wall on the outside of the building is populated by plastic plants. (And yes, it’s a desert, but those of us from dry climates have some basic appreciation of xenoscaping.) I did get to see raw gum Arabic in one of the spice stores.
So, that was my very brief introduction to Abu Dhabi.
On my recent administrative trip to Madrid, I had the weekend mostly free and spent a day in Segovia, which I’d never visited before. What struck me most is the way in which the city seems to preserve, better than anywhere else I’ve visited, the sense of space that would have been operative in the medieval town.
Was put on a special diet with only ten foods allowed. Amongst those were ham, eggs, and lavender tea. No vegetables anywhere on the list. I decided it was stupid and I was going to eat some romanesco.
I was really worried about the flight. 
