Three photos from Semana Santa in Seville, 2015. A long-standing tradition based on inquisitorial rites and rituals.
Lone Medievalist Challenge: Tradition
Hold the Bacon — for how long?
I had a great sandwich for lunch. I’m not the type to wax poetic about Danny Meyer’s culinary empire, or the type to use the web in that stereotypical way of announcing what I ate for lunch, but here we are all the same, with me telling you that on my way to the New York Public Library this afternoon, I stopped for chicken sandwich with bibb lettuce, green tomato, dijonnaise, and a side of jardiniere at Meyer’s new chicken, sandwich, and baked goods shop, Daily Provisions.
The sandwich was supposed to have bacon, but I asked for it without; and that’s really why I’m writing about my lunch on a blog that is supposed to be at least tangentially about life with my head most of the time in medieval Spain.
It’s well established that the preponderance of pork in Spanish food is residual (I mean, not the pork itself because that would just be gross, but the excess of it) from a time when many people were eager to prove that they were most definitely not Jewish or Muslim and did so, at least in part, by making very public displays of pork product procurement. Almost every year have my students read Inquisition testimony in which a woman explains that she ate a lot of fish specifically to avoid mixing milk and meat in violation of Jewish dietary laws but also to avoid not mixing milk and meat and drawing suspicion that she might be secretly Jewish. One anecdote has a qadi eat so many appetizers that he makes himself sick and vomits on the main course of pork so that he and his fellow cyrpto-Muslims at a dinner have a totally plausible excuse for not eating it. And a favorite interpretation of the description of Don Quijote’s Dulcinea del Toboso as having “the best hand at salting pork in all of La Mancha” is that she was trying to hide her Jewish roots with a public display of her talents related to pork preparation.
In fact, my undergraduate adviser, may she rest in peace, spent a lot of time trying to convince me (and later some other Jewish colleagues) that the most authentic way to be Jewish in Spain was to eat a lot of pork rather than to try to avoid it.
All of this brings me back to the sandwich. As I asked for it to be made without the bacon, I began to wonder how long, in the current climate of arsons at mosques and bomb threats at synagogues with no consequences for the perpetrators or for the politicians (and their daughters) who either encourage such activity or at least stand silently while it happens, how long asking a restaurant to hold the bacon will be a feasible thing to do. It has probably always marked me as Jewish to order a dish, hold the bacon, or to substitute pork for tofu in a Chinese restaurant, but I never thought about it until today. I never thought about it as a luxury to be able to go into any restaurant and choose any dish I want, even if it has bacon on it, and simply ask for the bacon to be left off without it becoming a clash of civilizations kind of situation. I wonder when we might have to stop ordering things without bacon, either choosing only dishes that do not contain pork products or making a show of eating something forbidden. As unlikely as it is to happen in New York, it is quite likely to happen some time, somewhere in the homogeneous middle of the country.
It’s not getting shot. It’s not having a visa revoked. It’s just a sandwich. Right now it’s just a potential fear of a future sandwich, at that; but it’s maybe one more little change we’ll have to make in the simplest ways that we live our lives just to protect ourselves from our fellow citizens. It’s one more reminder, one more step towards the revocability of it all.
Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!: Ben[insert noun here] Netanyahu and European History
Caveat lector: This is not an academic article on the historiography of the Spanish Inquisition or of the implications of Benzion Netanyahu’s historical thinking, although I am certain that such an article could be written. Nor is it even a “long-read” or a well-documented, meticulously argued think piece for an interested lay audience; although my ultimate goal is to use this space to do that kind of better-developed essayistic writing, I will not realistically have the time or the intellectual energy to do so until early next calendar year when my book manuscript will be done and out of my hands. And yet, in my capacity as a medievalist in this modern world, I think I have something original and perhaps of some value to say about an issue that arose this week; and so I am writing about it rather than waiting too long for a proper, full-length, exquisitely footnoted essay to be relevant or of interest. This, then? This is still just a blog post. It is the beginning of the articulation of a thought. It is a mere observation. If you are a reader who needs to consider every bit of another academic’s output in the terms of the academy, then perhaps think of it as an abstract.
Wa-amma ba’d: Several years ago I was teaching a seminar centered around the four seminal events in Spain of the year 1492: The fall of Nasrid rule in Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, Christopher Columbus’ first voyage, and the publication of the first grammar of Spanish with its provocation to empire through language. When the students turned in the annotated bibliographies for their research papers, I noticed that one student had written something to the effect that it made sense that one of her sources, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, took such a defensive line about anti-Semitism because it obviously fell within the author’s political goals as prime minister of Israel. I explained to her in my written comments that the “B. Netanyahu” whose name was on the cover was not the prime minister of Israel, but rather his father; I explained how she could use WorldCat or the Library of Congress web site to look up the full name of an author and discover that this weighty volume was written by Benzion and not Benyamin. Privately I shook my head in disbelief that it wouldn’t have occurred to her to question whether it was plausible that the prime minister of Israel might or might not have written such a book. The next time this question arises — and I can say with greater certainty now that it will — I will have no plausible reason to be surprised.
Far be it from me to propose a psychoanalytic reading of text, but the prime minister of Israel appears to be moonlighting in his father’s footsteps as a revisionist historian, claiming that Hitler had planned an expulsion of Jews from Germany in the 1930s, and that it was the grand mufti of Jerusalem who spurred him to genocide. My reluctance to resort to Freud aside, there are some striking similarities to the world his father fashioned as a historian; and it is worth considering the consequences of applying a midcentury historical model of the fifteenth century to twentieth-century teleologies of a twenty-first century conflict. I’m surprised this hasn’t come up sooner in the backlash against Netanyahu’s remarks.
In the academic circles in which I travel, Netanyahu Pere is not considered to have been a first-rate historian. The Origins is recognized as a monumental work, but also as perhaps the apogee of what Salo Baron criticized as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” predicated upon a kind of eternal Jewish suffering. Baron ushered in a glass-half-full approach to Jewish history, while Netanyahu remained steadfastly with his glass half empty, famously reducing Jewish history to “a history of holocausts.”
The Origins is two separate, yet intertwined, things: First, it is a religious history that centers the source of the Spanish Inquisition in a doctrinally, spiritually-motivated, historic hatred of Jews rather than a racial one. Second, it is a universalizing history, the kind that tries to situate the experience of the Jews in medieval Spain within the wider experience of the Jews of the rest of Europe and, ultimately, the Jews of the rest of history. He traces the roots of the Spanish Inquisition back to Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Josephus’ Against Apion was not just a book that spoke to the interests of Spanish Jews; it was their own history. Benzion Netanyahu’s historiography, at least in part, sought to make distal causes (both temporal and spiritual) proximate.
By attempting to trace a direct cause of a European genocide back in time and across space, Netanyahu Fils sublimates its proximate and tangible causes to a far more abstract, essentialized, and universal picture. By focusing upon a Muslim agent while informed by a contemporary conflict (largely) between Muslims and Jews, he deploys his own experience of the world to cast hatred of Jews a primordial phenomenon and a religious one rather than a question of race with specific and local historic antecedents. The ends and the context are, of course, very different from each other, but this is also quite clearly an entry into his father’s school of historical thinking.
Benyamin Netanyahu has very directly and actively tried to leverage his father’s work to further his own agenda within the political arena. Yet while doing that and claiming that his father’s work was amongst his greatest influences, he has alternately claimed that his father’s work had no influence upon his own political career; it is a contradiction that does seem to invite an exploration of the Freudian tension in the Netanyahu School, as goes the father, so goes the son. Bad history is bad history, and written or lived, perhaps that is what is the only universal thing.