Tag: jewish history

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Pozo Amargo, 2020

I used to have this friend. For a lot of reasons we grew apart. Ultimately, it was one of those grad school friendships that didn’t survive one and then both of us no longer being in graduate school. I might have tried to hang on longer if I hadn’t felt like I had taken on the role of being the friendly local Jewess whose very being could debunk the kinds of myths believed by people who grow up in parts of the world and the country where they might not have ever met any Jews, and if I hadn’t felt like I was failing at it. She’s the sort of person who thinks she can identify Jews — strangers, classmates, faculty —  by the size of our noses or who will start out an anecdote by mentioning that one of the people involved “is Jewish — no offense” as if it were an insult. 

There are other reasons for it, too, but we’re not in touch anymore; and that’s entirely on me. I don’t wish her ill. I hope she’s doing well, whatever well means to her; and I do occasionally look at her social media to see if that’s the case. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a Jewish journalist posting a photo of a line of men in coats and streimels and black hats waiting to buy suits for Passover; the journalist commented that he found this phenomenon infuriating.

My former friend replied to him:

(Guys, look, I know this is searchable, but I’ve anonymized it because as much as this hurt is personal, this is a much wider problem. Don’t go be an arse to someone I used to care about on social media, please.)

I’m teaching an introductory lecture course on medieval Spain this semester as part of NYU’s core curriculum, and we are nearing the lecture in which I will discuss the fourteenth-century legends and the rhetoric that grew up around Jews as unique and malicious vectors of the plague, legends and rhetoric that have persisted until today. It’s less flashy than the neo-Nazis who march with tiki torches, afraid that Jews will “replace” them, but it’s still an anti-Jewish myth that has persisted — in forms that change over time, of course — since the Middle Ages.

Let’s start with some statistics. The measles outbreak in Marin County, CA, was the result of a huge percentage of parents refusing to vaccinate their children for non-religious philosophical reasons. The United States was within days of no longer being considered a country where measles is eradicated; we’re not a big enough or spread out enough part of the population at large for that to have happened if measles were a Jewish problem. The bottom line is that yes, there are people in Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. But there are also people in non-Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. Thinking that you know better than physicians and epidemiologists or that you don’t have to pay attention to the wider world, whatever the foundation of those beliefs, is not an inherently Jewish trait. People are people in both the wonderful and the deeply stupid ways they engage with the world; but people tend to highlight it and act on it when it’s Jews in the wrong.

Continue reading “Pozo Amargo, 2020”

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Material Culture

These are images from the catalogue for the new exhibition at the Cloisters of a horde of 14th-century Franco-Jewish jewelry and other metalwork on loan from the Cluny. It’s material evidence of Jewish life in the town of Colmar and the material consequences not only of the Plague but also the accusations that followed around Jews and Muslims about causing the disease. The horde was buried in the floor in advance of the arrival of the Plague and the patriarch of the family was ultimately accused of causing it.

I had hoped to go up today and take some of my own pictures for this blog post because I haven’t seen the exhibition yet, but my own personal material culture (Marie Kondo-ing my apartment as I move back in) is the more pressing matter.

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Paradise Still Lost: Epigrams as a Test Case for Textual Fidelity

As a result of this brief review of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, I was invited to submit a chapter to an awesome forthcoming Routledge volume entitled The Extreme Right and the End of Historiography, in which I was able to return to the chapter that I walked through very quickly in the blog post review and give historical and historiographic context in greater depth and go into more detail about the problems in the book with more examples and specifics. After the pushback I got from right-wing commentators both on the blog and on Goodreads complaining that I was talking about historiography and interpretation rather than facts as such, I had a space to lay out  a really detailed, textually grounded case against the book. And in fact, my first draft ran to sixty pages and still didn’t address all of the mistakes and misrepresentations in a single chapter and the historiographic context in which they were committed. One of the sections that I’ve cut is only tangentially related because it concerns the epigrams within the chapter rather than the body of the text itself; however, I wanted to post it here because it is also one of the clearest-cut cases of the ways in which Fernández-Morera distorts material and draws upon the work of hate groups; and it raises the question: If he can’t even represent short quotations in a few epigrams honestly and correctly, why should his readers trust the rest of his readings and analysis?

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Epigrams as a Test Case for Textual Fidelity

The structure of each chapter of The Myth alternates between a series of epigrams that represent Fernández Morera’s antagonists and his argument against them. Our present case study, chapter six, opens with the following observation by the author:

“As the epigraphs in this chapter indicate, it is widely believed that Islam granted to Spain’s Jewish community, composed largely of Sephardic Jews [sic, see above], a substantial degree of liberty and tolerance. According to this view, the idyllic life for Spain’s Jews was interrupted by the invasion of the ‘fanatical’ Almoravids and Almohads, and later by the ‘intolerant’ Christian kingdoms during the Spanish Reconquista. However, the fact of the matter is that the life enjoyed by the Sephardim, within and without their communities, was full of limitations long before the invasion of the Almoravids and Almohads, and that the Catholic kingdoms eventually became a place of refuge for Jewish families.”[1]

This opening sentence sets up the epigrams as representative of key positions that the author plans to refute. Yet by bowdlerizing even these citations, he calls into question his treatment not only of the scholarship in the field but even of the primary sources themselves.

The first epigram is drawn from the article “Sephardim” on the web site Jewish Virtual Library.[2] It contains a brief overview of the history of Jews in Spain before moving on to its main topic, the Sephardi diaspora; it ostensibly illustrates the attitudes of the mainstream, liberal scholars against whose work Fernández-Morera sets his own. The quoted passage reads: “The era of Muslim rule in Spain (8th-11th century) was considered the ‘Golden Age’ for Spanish Jewry. Jewish intellectuals and spiritual life flourished and many Jews served in Spanish courts. Jewish economic expansion was unparalleled.”[3] An examination of the article in its entirety reveals it to be compromised by erroneous information on both the small-detail and big-picture scales. Some of the errors are relatively minor (although not insignificant), such as giving the date of the conquest of Toledo by Alfonso VI as 1089 instead of 1085 and implying that Muslim rule ended in the Iberian Peninsula in the 11th century. But other errors reveal a broader misunderstanding of the religious history of al-Andalus, misunderstandings upon which Fernández-Morera is willing to hang his own argument. Again, by way of example, the article writes that Jews treated Arabic as a replacement for Hebrew; in fact, though, rabbinic authorities were clear that when Arabic was used in a Jewish liturgical context (and not all such authorities permitted it), it was to be used to supplement, rather than replace, the Jewish sacred languages of Hebrew and Arabic. Of greatest consequence for the political and religious stakes of Fernández Morera’s book is an erroneous description in the article of the evolution of Christian belief in Visigothic Spain: Following an explanation of Visigoths’ religious beliefs, namely that they adhered to the apostolic Arian Christian faith before converting en masse to Catholicism in the year 587, the article’s section on Visigothic rule concludes with the assertion that “in 638 C.E., the Arian Visigoths declared that ‘only Catholics could live in Spain,’”[4] thereby demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the religious sea-change that took place by virtue of that conversion of and the incompatibility of Arian and Catholic belief. By selecting this article as the source for his epigram Fernández-Morera can seemingly support his contention that writing on medieval Spain ignores or misrepresents Christian history when this is in fact a broader pattern of errors in the article “Sephardim” and not exclusive to the history and theology of Christianity. Some bad work will always be published regardless of its politics; that does not make it representative of the state of the field or the quality of its scholarship as a whole. And as a popularizing encyclopedia article, it is also not representative of the kinds of academic studies with which Fernández-Morera claims to be taking issue.

In addition to choosing a weak, straw-man adversary in the form of this epigram, Fernández-Morera has chosen one from a site that makes its political leanings clear; and they are not ones that support his overall argument about the liberal biases of the academic study of medieval Spain. The Jewish Virtual Library is digital encyclopedia project of the non-profit organization American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise; its web site fawningly sports quotations from right-of-center politicians Benjamin Netanyahu[5] and Donald Trump speaking in their capacities as the heads of their respective governments.[6]  Rather than illustrating that liberal professors are the sole source of his pernicious imagined myth of al-Andalus as a paradise he instead shows that positive portrayals of Islamic Spain can also be promoted in popular sources supported by right-wing political and religious organizations and that those portrayals can be made to serve right-wing agendas. He has taken an example of sloppy writing about the topic from a right-wing web site and implicitly passed it off as an example of what is wrong with left-wing popular writing on the topic.

As another example of supposed visions of al-Andalus that incorrectly promote a picture of tolerance occurs in the second epigram in the chapter:

“The years between 900 and 1200 in Spain and North Africa are known as the Hebrew ‘golden age,’ a sort of Jewish Renaissance that arose from the fusion of the Arab and Jewish intellectual worlds. Jews watched their Arab counterparts closely and learned to be astronomers, philosophers, scientists, and poets. At its peak about one thousand years ago, the Muslim world made a remarkable contribution to science, notably mathematics and medicine. Baghdad in its heyday and southern Spain built universities to which thousands flocked. Rulers surrounded themselves with scientists and artists. A sprit of freedom allowed Jews, Christians, and Muslims to work side by side.”[7]

Fernández Morera attributes this quotation to an article by Francis Ghiles in a 1983 article in the journal Nature entitled “What is Wrong With Muslim Science?”[8]; however, his citation is only partially accurate. Ghiles’ article is in fact a review of a book review of Ziauddin Sardar’s 1982 monograph Science and Technology in the Middle East,[9] a volume that is in fact critical of overly-rosy presentations of science in the Islamic Middle East. The Nature review of that book actually opens with the portion of the text cited by Fernández-Morera beginning with “at its peak” and continuing through the end of the citation. The first two sentences appear nowhere in Ghiles’ review; instead they come from the FAQ section of a web site called Jews for Allah, which appears to be aimed primarily at encouraging Jews to convert to Islam.[10] In response to a query about the role of minorities in Islamicate civilizations,  the FAQ section introduces Ghiles’ review with those two sentences as an editorial response to the question and then quotes the opening sentences of Ghiles’ review to support that response.[11] In other words, the text as cited in Fernández-Morera’s epigram are cited from Jews for Allah rather than directly from the review; the author erroneously combines the web introduction with the citation from the book review. In doing so, he demonstrates that instead of referring to the texts he claims to have cited he instead uses a web site representative of a strain of modern Islamic antisemitism[12] in order to backform his own fantasy about medieval Islamic antisemitism (which will be discussed in greater detail in the following section). This particular epigram, then, demonstrates flaws in handling sources, recourse to teleological analysis, as well as a reliance upon information gleaned from hate groups.

In addition to misrepresenting its original source and incorporating ideas from a hate group’s web site, this epigram manifests other problems as well. Even as it is presented, erroneously, this epigram does not further an ideology of Andalusi exceptionalism, or the idea that al-Andalus was the uniquely tolerant haven for religious minorities in the Middle Ages. The first source of this combined quotation treats Spain and North Africa correctly as a single geographic and cultural unit,[13] and the second source in the quotation talks about the intellectual innovations both in al-Andalus and in the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. In other words, the epigram shows that the idea of tolerance and intellectual flourishing in the Islamic world are not limited to discussions of Islamic Spain, which is itself not treated as an exceptional entity unto itself but rather as a part of Islamicate world systems; the epigram does not, then, serve as evidence for his argument but rather demonstrates its exact opposite.

One of the ways in which this book operates is to interpret selectively and without direct recourse to the primary sources; this is clear simply from a review of the epigrams, and will be demonstrated in greater detail with respect to the body of the work itself in the following section. Fernández-Morera protests much in his introduction that his work’s strength is based on his direct consultation with sources, yet even the epigrams with which he illustrates the problem his book is meant to counter are transcribed incorrectly and indirectly. He asks the reader to trust his analysis of complex medieval sources written in many languages and mediated through the judgment of editors and translators[14] while proving that he does not even go directly to easily accessible[15], contemporary, English-language sources.

Footnotes below the jump.

Continue reading “Paradise Still Lost: Epigrams as a Test Case for Textual Fidelity”

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The Star of David (and the Church and the Caliph and Chicago Feminsits)

The first time I traveled with students to Spain, one in my group was a talkative sophomore in the NYU honors program with a name straight out of the Hebrew Bible. He was great at keeping any discussion going — I suspect that he liked the attention that talking brought him, but he was also genuinely interested and had questions at every turn. In the Prado Museum he saw six-pointed stars surrounding a late fourteenth-century church altarpiece and asked our tour guide — an older Spanish art historian of a conservative school of thought — why there were Jewish stars in Christian art.  The guide looked puzzled and I asked him to hold off and ask me later. I knew she wouldn’t understand his question, because those six-pointed stars were not Jewish stars. He repeated his question when he saw the same geometric design in the modern plaza below the tenth-century walls of the Arab settlement at Majeriṭ, which would come later to be known as Madrid.

“It reflects geometric designs found in Islamic contexts from the period when this wall was built,” I explained. He argued for its inherent Jewishness.

“In the tenth century,” I answered him, “and all the way up to the fourteenth, the six-pointed star wasn’t a Jewish symbol; it was just a geometric design.”

He was incredulous, reluctant to accept that a shape with such deep symbolism could have been chosen, as he put it, “just at random.” His final argument was: “But it’s on the flag of Israel!”

“Which,” I reminded him, “was founded well after the fourteenth century.”

This is a very typical and important kind of conversation. Students who were brought up in any one of the Abrahamic religious traditions that my research and teaching touch upon often find their personal beliefs and the tenets they learned in their families or their synagogues, churches, or mosques, challenged by the historical development of their religions and the ways in which medieval people practiced those religions that look very different from the ways in which they are practiced today. I tell every class of students at the beginning of every semester — and I firmly believe — that my role as a teacher isn’t to change or challenge their religious beliefs or their place in their own communities; rather, my role is to show them where scholarship has gotten us. And every semester I have students express shock — sometimes loudly, but always, in my experience, without malice and in a way that can start defensive but usually leads to very genuine inquiry — as they learn the history of their communities and learn the ways in which religious history has been interpreted throughout time.

A different set of questions about the symbolism of the Jewish star, and with a very different tenor, have been raised by various LGBTQ and feminist groups demonstrating this summer: The Dyke March in Chicago ejected marchers who were carrying the gay-pride flag modified with a white Jewish star; the feminist Slut Walk in the same city has indicated that it will adopt a policy of ejecting anyone wearing Jewish symbols and has begun to use the anti-semitic slur “zio” in some of its publicity materials. Slut Walk protests in some other cities are following suit, while others are openly welcoming Jewish feminist marchers.

Perhaps most striking in the aftermath of the Dyke March was some of the organizers claiming that they were justified because “different symbols mean different things to different people.” That is, of course, what makes literature work. When the principle stops working, though, is when a reader of the symbol decides that it can only work one way; it turns the interpretation of literature into a treasure-hunt for symbols and a cryptogram to be solved, nothing more. And in day-to-day life, it tends to stop working when an outside what the one operative meaning of a symbol they have chosen for themselves works.

The history of the six-pointed star as a Jewish symbol doesn’t run along a straight line. There are two ideas about the origin of the symbol that are common in many Jewish communities: First, that it is a messianic symbol that dates back to an early Jewish revolt against the Romans in the 2nd century of the Common Era; and second, that it acquires a mystical meaning somewhere in between the 13th century, when the kabbalistic work The Zohar was composed and the 16th, with the composition of Isaac Luria’s The Book of the Lion. Both of these ideas are parts of the stories that communities tell about the evolution of their own symbols and rituals. The reality is much more complicated and interesting.

The scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem traced a different development of the symbol: It occurs occasionally in very limited Jewish contexts in the early centuries of the Common Era; it appeared as a part of underground Jewish magical practices beginning in the thirteenth century, came above ground in the fourteenth, and didn’t come to be known as the “Shield of David” and be a symbol of the Jewish people, and recognized as such by both Jews and Christians until as late as the seventeenth century in central Europe. It does not start being used on Jewish tombstones until that point, and does not spread to the rest of Europe and the world until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. It was adopted by the Zionist congress in 1897, but also remained a Jewish symbol, apart from nationalism.

The stories about the role of the Jewish star in the Bar Kochba rebellion and as a part of Lurianic kabbalah are stories that communities tell about the origin of a symbol that has come to have meaning. In large measure, the Star of David is one that has come to be meaningful through a process of reclamation by different Jewish communities: It was imposed by Christian nobility in 17th-century Prague and Jews there came to claim it as their own; and, as Scholem himself wrote: “But even Zionism did not do so much to confer the sacredness of a true symbol on the Shield of David as did that mad dictator who made of it a badge of shame for millions of our people, who compelled them to wear it publicly on their clothing as the badge of exclusion and of eventual extermination. Under this sign they moved along the road of horror and degradation, struggle and heroism. If there be such a thing as a soil that grows meaning for symbols, this is it.” For the sake of this argument I will concede the separation of Zionism and Judaism (although I don’t think that such a point can really be conceded so freely without further discussion, nor do I think that it is non-Jewish liberals who should be allowed to define these terms, either) and say that while it is a Zionist symbol, it is also a wholly separate Jewish symbol with its own range of meanings and long, winding history.

(Just as an aside: I also hesitate to draw in Scholem’s point about the Holocaust being what effectively sanctified the symbol in the 20th century because of the way it has become a political football in precisely this kind of discussion: I can think of half a dozen examples since the November election when non-Jewish liberals have, on one hand, used the Holocaust to make a political point about discrimination and genocide . This political rhetoric, which grows up alongside protest movements such as the ones under discussion here, appropriates the tragedy but then also dictates what is the appropriate response of victims. I know that those are not the values and the actions of liberal groups and activists that value cultural authenticity and the self-determination of minority groups. I don’t know how to reconcile the contradiction.)

On the face of it, I’ve made two different points through the anecdotes in this blog post: On the one hand, I wanted to challenge my student to think about the six-pointed star in artistic contexts outside of Judaism and earlier than its usage as a Jewish symbol. On the other hand, I hate to see non-Jewish activists dictate how their Jewish counterparts use a symbol that is of history community value to them. Maybe I’m just a contrarian pain in the arse who likes challenging people’s assumptions. But maybe the points aren’t so far apart from each other after all: in each case, I would ask people to think about a geometric shape and its life in the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. I asked my student to think about the use of the six-pointed star outside of Jewish contexts, and I’d ask the organizers of the Slut Walk to think about it as one that has its own history and mythology in an American Jewish community that has been and is increasingly living under threats of religious persecution.  As liberals, we have accepted as a first principle that the way in which a community, particularly a community at a structural disadvantage, defines itself merits respect. (And for the academics in the bunch, we’re past the linguistic turn and know that accounts of history are representations of their author rather than a recoverable accounting of What Actually Happened Then.) And so narrative — and in this case the stories that Jews, and even politically liberal Jews tell ourselves about the history of our symbol — is a reality worthy of respect. In my role as a teacher, I want my students to see a world that does not have them at the center. In my role as a Jewish feminist, I want my community to be able to define itself and to be heard.

*None of the photos in this post are my own.

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Spain, I love you so much. And then you go and do stupid sh¡!t like this.

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:

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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.