Tag: lone medievalist challenge

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Travel

I’ve spent the last couple of years on and off trying to find a set of photographs of Karaite manuscripts that my advisor was involved in shooting in Cairo in the mid-seventies on behalf of a Bay Area collector, Seymour Fromer. Fromer’s papers are now mostly in the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. There’s a lot of record of his travels to Egypt and to India to document Jewish books and collect Judaica for his museum in Berkeley, the Judah Magnes Collection. I wasn’t able to find the manuscript photos. (The one above isn’t from that set.) They may still be in one set of personal papers that hasn’t been processed for scholarly access yet (Ze’ev Brinner’s papers), but it appears that even in the mid-seventies they didn’t make it to the JNUL, which helped to fund the expedition to Cairo.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Music

This is a picture of Idan Raichel and Vieux Farka Touré performing at Symphony Space in New York in 2014. They performed an arrangement of music Raichel had written for Psalm 136. He explained to the audience before he performed it: “In my side of the world, you are not great until your music is heard in the synagogues.” It struck me at the time as a comment in the mode of the medieval Spanish poets writing both secular and liturgical poetry, both as different ways of showing off themselves and the Hebrew language.

The psalm starts at the 7:35 mark below, but listen to the whole thing; it’s music I love.

This one, the sound isn’t as good and he’s kind of dithering around a bit, but he’s performing in a synagogue setting:

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Meeting of Cultures

I don’t love the framework of “meeting of cultures” because I think that it frequently obscures the organic, syncretic  nature of culture by trying to break it down into component parts, as if they were separable and had met at one point. The closest I could come was some images from the museum of Arab art in Havana, including the most spectacular late-seventeeth-century neo-moresque cabinet I have ever seen in my life. Cuba is the site of that legend about Columbus’ Arabic-speaking translator — because any civilized society would be made up of Arabic speakers —meeting the Taino chief, the cubanacán, and thinking that he had definitely met the right person — the Cuban Khan. And now, this Spanish cabinet inlaid with the motto of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, vanquished by Columbus’ patrons in the same watershed year he set out, has become a part of the collection of the Arab art museum in Havana, supported by the Turkish government in what is perhaps another attempt at a meeting of cultures and the assertion of imperial power in the Caribbean.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Place to Visit

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.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: People of Color (Day 21) and Library/Collection (Day 22)

This is the point at which I got stuck on the Lone Medievalist Challenge. I’m actually writing this on August 27, but will backdate it so that it comes in the correct place in the order of my blog posts. The trouble that I was running into was in that I don’t know that “people of color” is a suitable term to use in the context of medieval Spain; and my explanations were falling short and the images I was choosing to shoehorn into the theme weren’t really doing what I needed them to do in able to facilitate a a post appropriately thoughtful for the subject. So: I’m not in any way saying, as some medievalists do and as my colleagues who work on the subject of race and race-making in the Middle Ages rightly decry, that race wasn’t an applicable category in the medieval period. Rather, what I’m saying is that “people of color” as a term seems to me so bounded by modern, western notions of race that to try to identify a “person of color” in medieval Spain requires, itself, a lot of racial categorization that I don’t think is appropriate for the scholar to take on.

With that said, I’m going to combine my “people of color” post with my “library/collection” post because the former allows me to talk about the latter in the context of modern medievalism.

These are some images from the Beit-Bialik house-museum archive, where I spent several weeks last summer looking at Hayim Nahman Bialik’s manuscript draft of his Hebrew translation of Don Quixote and his notes from the time when he was editing the poetic diwan of Solomon ibn Gabirol. But in spite of Bialik’s interest in both the Jews of Spain and utilizing Spanish literature as a way of creating a world literature in Hebrew, he was largely contemptuous of actual Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews. There are two versions of a statement attributed to him, one saying that he hated Sephardim because they reminded him of Arabs and the other asking how he could hate Arabs when they were so like Sephardim; neither version reflects an attitude friendly toward people of color within the Jewish world or the Levant. The archivist of Beit-Bialik sees himself as an absolute defender of Bialik’s reputation; but reading work of scholars like Lital Levi and Sami Chetrit suggests that such a full-throated defense is not warranted.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Modern Significance (Day 18) and Edifice (Day 19)

Some views of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, a building that is all modern significance, and always has been. At the moment it was built it signified an attempt to unify a fragmented Muslim community that included military rulers who had been left to do their own thing until the center of power moved west in the middle of the 8th century. It came to symbolize Córdoba during the period of the Umayyad emirate and caliphate, when it became the visual touchstone for al-Andalus (about which the art historian Susana Calvo Capilla has written — Las mesquitas de al-Andalus — and which is quite self-evident in the illuminations of the Beatus commentary on the apocalypse). When Fernando III took the city of Córdoba in 1236, the building was converted into church and left, architecturally, just as it always had been because it was the modern look for buildings of all sorts. When modern aesthetics turned to the Europeanizing and the baroque, Charles V plunked a baroque cathedral down in the center of the building.

Its red and white striped arches are still a visual short-hand for the region. And it is the site that most closely reflects the debates about Islam, religion, and history in the peninsula in the contemporary period, about which my colleague Eric Calderwood has written about it: The Reconquista of the Mosque of Córdoba.

And finally, my favorite piece of paper ephemera: The Great Mosque is the first place I took students on a big trip in Spain, and this is a map from that visit, drawn for me by the colleague I was traveling with, of a suggested path through the mosque. So this is a modern, erm, signification of the space.

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: Teachable

My favorite part of teaching is being the faculty advisor to a cohort of sophomores in the Presidential Honors Scholars program at NYU; we teach students research skills to prepare them to write their senior honors theses, expose them to the cultural offerings of New York City (opera, museums, etc.), and travel with them for a week in January to one of the cities where NYU has a site; the place is so much more teachable in person than in photos and lectures and it’s very rewarding to see the kinds of connections that students make to the material by being on site. (Photo credit: Noelle Marchetta)

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Lone Medievalist Challenge: LGBTQIA

This is a document from the Cairo Genizah that describes a relationship between two gay men in Fatimid Palestine and the social and legal consequences of that relationship. This isn’t an area about which I am particularly knowledgeable, so I’m going to direct you to the Cambridge University Library’s “Fragment of the Month” web feature, where scholars write about documents before they feel like they have enough material for an article. The feature about this document can be found here.