Tag: modern and medieval

Posted on

Wax Nationalism

It took me a minute to realize why the Wax Museum of Madrid smelled like church. The odor I had always assumed was incense used for ritual purposes is, in fact, the smell of votive candles. Votive candles and wax statues of major figures in Spanish history and culture.

I’m currently writing a new biography of Moses Maimonides for a medieval lives series that will include images. My editor encouraged me to find images that are freely available to use through creative commons license or other means. As I was looking for images to include with my book proposal, I discovered that there is a likeness of Maimonides in the Madrid Wax Museum, but I couldnt’ find any photos that would be good enough to use for publication so I went to take my own. 

Behold Wax Maimonides (r) and Wax Averroes (r) in the wax Nasrid-style palace that holds all of the Andalusi figures, regardless of whether they lived in any kind of temporal or geographic proximity to Nasrid Granada.

 

Continue reading “Wax Nationalism”

Posted on

Dispatches from the Roof

I went on the “vertical tour” of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine yesterday with a friend who was visiting from out of town — up into the clerestory, the space between the ceiling and the roof, and then onto the roof.

The wildest thing, for me, though, even beside being that close to an installation of Guastavino tile and the surprise, gorgeous, a cappella choir concert that was going on in front of the altar, was how *easy* it is to go up and down the narrow spiral staircase when the risers of the steps are perfectly even and the treads haven’t been worn down with seven or eight centuries of use. When I’m in Europe (or, when I used to go to Europe before the pandemic) I’d usually limit myself to one bell tower climb per trip because coming down, in particular, I would find really taxing; and I realized that it’s very much about the minute differences in the depth and evenness of the stairs .

One woman on the tour said she was worried about coming down, and I told her: “Look, I’ve been up and down a lot of these things, and worst case scenario, you can just sit down and scooch. It’s not elegant but it works.” She made it all the way down on her feet, in the end, though. 

Posted on

Inflamed Nerves, Shva Shalhoov

I am generally firm in my belief that it is only poets who should translate poetry; I am not a poet, but this poem has been very present with me, for historical reasons, since I first read it this summer and so I’m giving it a go. With a sounding of the obligatory *draft klaxon* here’s where I”m up to:

Zion, let me begin by asking: How are you?

Is everything alright? How have your captives fared? Your Palestinians? Your Jews?

Tell me: How are the children? Zion, are your enemies at peace?

Zion, won’t you ask after me?

I don’t feel so well.

My right hand has withered,

my nerves inflamed.

Don’t ask.

Posted on

Lone Medievalist Challenge: Monstrous

I love this gargoyle (at Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, Paris; my photo from 2014) because you can see very clearly how he is really a water spout. Gargoyles and chimeras (those that aren’t part of the drainage system) are, in the words of the late art historian Michael Camille, the “monsters of modernity” left to us by the Middle Ages. To me gargoyles have always felt very present in difficult modern moments (such as this one: https://wp.nyu.edu/sjpearce/2015/11/18/as-a-medievalist-i-cant-help-you-maybe-nobody-can-or-what-im-not-going-to-tell-my-students-after-paris/), and with so much of Notre Dame now gone, they feel both closer and farther away, more of a help and perhaps more in need of help themselves.

Posted on

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?

***

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”

Posted on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

España Es Diferente: Neo-Medievalism Edition

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

***

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

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

To highlight some examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Posted on

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

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”

Posted on

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.