Here I am at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference (AJS) in Washington DC; a three day gathering devoted to Jewish Studies. It has been wonderful on many different levels for someone with my interests. I cannot think of many of places where I can accidentally run into people whom I know based on having read and admired their books. For example I was sitting in a lecture and I turned to the person sitting next to me and I see on his name tag Marc Saperstein. I also got to talk to Lawrence Fine and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. I have posted on both of these people in the past. (See here and here.) I even got to trade barbs over the History Channel with Lawrence Schiffman. Apparently he was just interviewed for a program on the Garden of Eden by a person who was trying to ask him for a geographic location. I also got to touch base with some old professors of mine from Yeshiva University such as Louis Feldman, Elisheva Carlebach, Steven Fine and Ephraim Kanarfogel. Finally there was the pleasure of running into old friends from various places. I even ran into an ex girlfriend. She did not cheat on me, lie to me, steal from me or do anything calculated to put me in a dangerous depression state so this was actually a good meeting. We left on good terms. She is now happily married and I wish her the best. I got to meet a blogging friend, Baruch Pelta, in the flesh.
While this was a vast conference and I was not able to be everywhere at once, I will be posting one the various lectures I attended. Obviously this reflects those things that interest me, mainly medieval and early modern Jewish history as it relates to philosophy, Kabbalah or messianism.
More to come so stay tuned.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Trail of Joseph
I had an idea once for a play about the brothers of Joseph discussing his fate, holding a “trial.” It would be Twelve Angry Men meets the Bible. Taking a leaf from rabbinic literature I do not view the brothers as simply hateful jealous people. On the contrary they are decent rational individuals and I take their side, at least up to a point.
The play would be in two acts. The first act would center on the brothers expecting Joseph’s arrival and finding themselves contemplating what to do about what they all agree is a real menace. This conversation takes the frightful turn toward murder as the brothers find themselves faced with the indisputable logic that if all they believe about Joseph is true than killing him because something reasonable and maybe the only reasonable thing. The act would end with the capture of Joseph and Reuben’s stop gap measure to have him simply thrown into a pit. The second act would be the brothers continuing their debate, which has now moved from simple theory to the real practical world and they are going to have to make a decision. The end being that Judah proposes that they sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt and trick their father Jacob into thinking he was eaten by a wild animal.
While the figure of Joseph looms over the play, he would hardly, if at all, be physically on stage and would not be the main character. Joseph simply is the big other out there that the characters on set, the brothers, are faced with; the one thing that unites them and makes them a community is that they are all in opposition to Joseph. The main characters of the play would be Reuben, Simon, Levi and Judah. They represent different power structures and different religious visions that come into conflict.
Reuben is the establishment figure. He is the eldest and naturally expects to be the leader. And why not: he is a decent person, who no one has any real cause to dislike. The problem is that he has no real plan beyond the status quo. As the situation with Joseph will make painfully obvious to everyone, he is incapable of offering a vision to follow or of solving the practical problem they are faced with. This puts his position at risk as others see him as vulnerable and begin to contemplate other solutions, particularly as represented by Simon and Levi and Judah.
Simon and Levi mark the second major position. They are allied in their opposition to Reuben and are the ones pushing for Joseph to be killed. While they are very different characters, they represent two sides of the same coin. Simon is a man of action. He is physically very imposing. Though he is not an intellectual, and often appears to his brothers to be rather crude, he is a lot more aware than he lets on. The brains and, maybe more importantly, the mouth in this alliance is Levi. He is an imposing intellectual force with a golden tongue that none of the other brothers can match. His world is undergirded by a firmly held belief that they are the chosen ones to build the Kingdom of God. Considering the cosmic importance of the task, anything or anyone that becomes an obstacle most be eliminated. To falter or show mercy is to demonstrate a lack of faith and commit an act of heresy. Despite Levi’s seemingly rigid worldview, he is willing to make some accommodations to practicality. For example in order to remove his least favorite person, Joseph, Levi will gladly deal with his second least favorite person, Judah.
Judah is the most worldly of the brothers. Levi might accuse him of abandoning the faith for his willingness to work with Canaanite merchants, but Judah sees himself as simply pursuing Abraham’s religious vision to its logical conclusion. This may all seem to be a power struggle between Reuben and Levi with Reuben being completely outmatched. Levi may think that he is simply getting Judah’s help to eliminate Joseph and take power from Reuben, but Judah knows better. In the end it will be shown that only he has what it takes to keep this family together.
I never got around to doing this project; maybe someday I will give it a shot.
The play would be in two acts. The first act would center on the brothers expecting Joseph’s arrival and finding themselves contemplating what to do about what they all agree is a real menace. This conversation takes the frightful turn toward murder as the brothers find themselves faced with the indisputable logic that if all they believe about Joseph is true than killing him because something reasonable and maybe the only reasonable thing. The act would end with the capture of Joseph and Reuben’s stop gap measure to have him simply thrown into a pit. The second act would be the brothers continuing their debate, which has now moved from simple theory to the real practical world and they are going to have to make a decision. The end being that Judah proposes that they sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt and trick their father Jacob into thinking he was eaten by a wild animal.
While the figure of Joseph looms over the play, he would hardly, if at all, be physically on stage and would not be the main character. Joseph simply is the big other out there that the characters on set, the brothers, are faced with; the one thing that unites them and makes them a community is that they are all in opposition to Joseph. The main characters of the play would be Reuben, Simon, Levi and Judah. They represent different power structures and different religious visions that come into conflict.
Reuben is the establishment figure. He is the eldest and naturally expects to be the leader. And why not: he is a decent person, who no one has any real cause to dislike. The problem is that he has no real plan beyond the status quo. As the situation with Joseph will make painfully obvious to everyone, he is incapable of offering a vision to follow or of solving the practical problem they are faced with. This puts his position at risk as others see him as vulnerable and begin to contemplate other solutions, particularly as represented by Simon and Levi and Judah.
Simon and Levi mark the second major position. They are allied in their opposition to Reuben and are the ones pushing for Joseph to be killed. While they are very different characters, they represent two sides of the same coin. Simon is a man of action. He is physically very imposing. Though he is not an intellectual, and often appears to his brothers to be rather crude, he is a lot more aware than he lets on. The brains and, maybe more importantly, the mouth in this alliance is Levi. He is an imposing intellectual force with a golden tongue that none of the other brothers can match. His world is undergirded by a firmly held belief that they are the chosen ones to build the Kingdom of God. Considering the cosmic importance of the task, anything or anyone that becomes an obstacle most be eliminated. To falter or show mercy is to demonstrate a lack of faith and commit an act of heresy. Despite Levi’s seemingly rigid worldview, he is willing to make some accommodations to practicality. For example in order to remove his least favorite person, Joseph, Levi will gladly deal with his second least favorite person, Judah.
Judah is the most worldly of the brothers. Levi might accuse him of abandoning the faith for his willingness to work with Canaanite merchants, but Judah sees himself as simply pursuing Abraham’s religious vision to its logical conclusion. This may all seem to be a power struggle between Reuben and Levi with Reuben being completely outmatched. Levi may think that he is simply getting Judah’s help to eliminate Joseph and take power from Reuben, but Judah knows better. In the end it will be shown that only he has what it takes to keep this family together.
I never got around to doing this project; maybe someday I will give it a shot.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
General Exams IV: Orals
Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.
I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.
The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.
Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.
Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.
So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)
I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.
The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.
Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.
Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.
So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Orson Scott Card’s Failure to Make the Case for Traditional Marriage against Robert A. Heinlein
In a recent interview on National Review, Orson Scott Card responded to comparisons between him and Robert A. Heinlein particularly in regards to Ender’s Game and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Both of these novels are works of military science fiction that deal with wars set in a future world against giant insect-like creatures. According to Card, while he has read a number of Heinlein’s novels, he has never read Starship Troopers and decided never to read it when he was told of the similarity to Ender’s Game. Card goes on to point out that his and Heinlein’s politics could not be further apart; Heinlein was a libertarian while he is an ardent communitarian.
I take it as a given that Card is familiar with a certain aspect of Heinlein’s work connected to his libertarianism that, while it does not appear in Starship Troopers, permeates almost everything else he wrote. I speak of course about Heinlein’s advocacy for polyandrous relationships and group marriage. For example in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress the colonists on the Moon take to group marriage as a practical solution to their situation. They have far more men than women so instead of forcing most of the male population to be celibate (funny that the issue of homosexuality is never raised) every woman has multiple husbands. While the more puritanical citizens of Earth look askance at such behavior, the Moon colonists have embraced this alternative lifestyle and fight to maintain it. Whatever one may think of Heinlein’s ideas, there is no question that he was a brilliant man and one of the truly great visionary writers of the twentieth century. His views cannot merely be cast aside and ignored.
In Ender in Exile, Card’s recently published sequel to Ender’s Game, Card sets up a very similar situation with the soldiers now turned colonists on the former bugger world now named Shakespeare. There is a shortage of women, something that will not be rectified for decades to come when the first batch of colonists arrive. The acting governor of Shakespeare, Vitaly Kolmogorov, makes the very un-Heinlein like decision to maintain monogamy. He has all the women distributed in marriage by lottery, with a little cheating on the side to cover certain particular situations. All men who do not win out in this lottery are forced, in theory at least, into a life of celibacy. In its own way Card’s decision to defend monogamy under such extreme conditions is equally as radical as Heinlein’s willingness to abandon it.
Card puts a human face, Sel Menach, to the situation and then turns him into his mouth-piece. Sel nobly turns down his assistant, Afraima, who comes onto him. (As a side point of interest, I should mention that both of these characters happen to be Jewish.) Not only does Sel turn her down, he also asks that he either be allowed to quit or to have her fired so that she would no longer serve as a temptation. This whole bit is a remarkably lousy piece of writing that serves no purpose in furthering the book other than to foreshadow an equally lousy scene later on in the book when Ender has to keep his own teenage hormones in check.
I have no problem with Card arguing for traditional social values. Particularly in this present climate, we need every voice we can get. And Card has generally been one of the more effective voices out there. It is precisely because of the situation we are in today, though, that we need something better than: “Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It’s not about genes, it’s about children – they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain.” (Pg. 104) What exactly is so great about monogamy and when has it been proven over and over to be the best to the extent that one would make such a sacrifice when Heinlein offers such a tempting solution?
I take it as a given that Card is familiar with a certain aspect of Heinlein’s work connected to his libertarianism that, while it does not appear in Starship Troopers, permeates almost everything else he wrote. I speak of course about Heinlein’s advocacy for polyandrous relationships and group marriage. For example in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress the colonists on the Moon take to group marriage as a practical solution to their situation. They have far more men than women so instead of forcing most of the male population to be celibate (funny that the issue of homosexuality is never raised) every woman has multiple husbands. While the more puritanical citizens of Earth look askance at such behavior, the Moon colonists have embraced this alternative lifestyle and fight to maintain it. Whatever one may think of Heinlein’s ideas, there is no question that he was a brilliant man and one of the truly great visionary writers of the twentieth century. His views cannot merely be cast aside and ignored.
In Ender in Exile, Card’s recently published sequel to Ender’s Game, Card sets up a very similar situation with the soldiers now turned colonists on the former bugger world now named Shakespeare. There is a shortage of women, something that will not be rectified for decades to come when the first batch of colonists arrive. The acting governor of Shakespeare, Vitaly Kolmogorov, makes the very un-Heinlein like decision to maintain monogamy. He has all the women distributed in marriage by lottery, with a little cheating on the side to cover certain particular situations. All men who do not win out in this lottery are forced, in theory at least, into a life of celibacy. In its own way Card’s decision to defend monogamy under such extreme conditions is equally as radical as Heinlein’s willingness to abandon it.
Card puts a human face, Sel Menach, to the situation and then turns him into his mouth-piece. Sel nobly turns down his assistant, Afraima, who comes onto him. (As a side point of interest, I should mention that both of these characters happen to be Jewish.) Not only does Sel turn her down, he also asks that he either be allowed to quit or to have her fired so that she would no longer serve as a temptation. This whole bit is a remarkably lousy piece of writing that serves no purpose in furthering the book other than to foreshadow an equally lousy scene later on in the book when Ender has to keep his own teenage hormones in check.
I have no problem with Card arguing for traditional social values. Particularly in this present climate, we need every voice we can get. And Card has generally been one of the more effective voices out there. It is precisely because of the situation we are in today, though, that we need something better than: “Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It’s not about genes, it’s about children – they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain.” (Pg. 104) What exactly is so great about monogamy and when has it been proven over and over to be the best to the extent that one would make such a sacrifice when Heinlein offers such a tempting solution?
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
General Exam III: Jewish History (Part IV)
[For the final part of the exam I was given two texts to analyze. One was from Jacob Marcus’ Jew in the Medieval World and the other was from Gershon Cohen’s translation of Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition.]
Text #1: (Modena)
This text comes from Leon Modena’s autobiography, Hay’ye Yehudah; it deals with the printing of his Historia de gli riti hebraici and how he nearly ran afoul of the Inquisition over it. This text is a useful example of the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period, particularly within the context of the age of the printing press and the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Modena was someone in regular contact with Christians and engaged in friendly scholarly discussions with them. Historia was written at the behest, we believe, of Henry Wotten, the English ambassador to Venice, and was meant to be given to James I of England. In this book Modena gives an overview of Jewish laws and practices. In large respect he was responding to Johann Buxtorf the elder’s Synagoa Judaica. Modena wrote the Historia in 1616. He later, in 1635, gave this same book to a French-Christian Hebraist named Giacomo Gaffarel. Gaffarel then went and published the book on his own initiative. This created a problem for Modena in that there was material in the book that violated Catholic censorship policies. While the Historia was just a manuscript, one that was also written for a Protestants to boot, this was not a problem. Now, though, that Gaffarel had printed the book, Modena found himself to be an inadvertent promoter of “heresy.” The problem was quickly and painlessly solved. Modena explained the matter to the local inquisitor, who proved to be quite sympathetic and understanding. It turns out that even this was not necessary as Gaffarel did not publish the manuscript as is but, on his own initiative, removed the potentially objectionable material.
This story illustrates something about Catholic censorship. This whole incident happened only a few years after Galileo was put on trial for the Dialogues. Galileo’s real crime was not that he was a heliocentrist, but that he failed to adhere to the letter of the original ban on him writing on the issue and, more importantly, he managed to antagonize Pope Urban VIII. One could get away with a lot during the seventeenth century, inquisition censors or no inquisition censors, as long as one knew how to adhere to the letter of the letter of law and avoided antagonizing any of the wrong people. Publishing books was a political game and one was perfectly safe as long as they knew how to play the game. Galileo was not very adept at this game and suffered the consequences; Modena could play the game and was perfectly safe.
A word should be said here about Christian Hebraism; there are quite a few Christians in this story that are interested in Jews and Judaism and some of them are fairly knowledgeable. This had nothing to do with Christians thinking about converting to Judaism; though, as the case of Peter Spaeth illustrates, this did happen on occasion. Rather this early modern Christian Hebraism was rooted in the search for the prisca theologia, the original theology, which lay behind much of early modern thought. The premise was that humanity had fallen away from the truths of antiquity and that these sources could be recovered by a close examination of the sources. One of the major manifestations of this was the interest in “magical” texts such as the Hermetic corpus, thought to date from the time of Moses, and the Zohar. Another manifestation was a renewed emphasis on the bible and reading it outside of the shadow of the Vulgate and the medieval Catholic tradition. Protestantism was a product of this movement. Protestants in particular were interested, in this period, in forming contacts with Jews and Jewish sources because they believed that, while the Jews may have corrupted their own sources, a critical analysis, in light of Christian truths, of such material would allow one to uncover the original true “Christian” religion behind it.
This whole incident is a good illustration of how interrelated Jewish history is with the happenings within the general society. Jews in Europe did not live in a different world from Christians. The printing press, the Catholic Church’s post-Tridentine censorship, the struggle with Protestantism affected someone like Leon Modena just as it affected Galileo.
Text #2: (Ibn Daud)
This text in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition, deals with the story of the four captives. According to this story four rabbis were captured by pirates and ransomed respectively by the communities of Fostat, Qairawan and Cordova. These rabbis stayed in these given communities and set up communities. Ibn Daud uses this story to explain how it came to pass that the authority possessed by the Babylonian Gaonate passed to Spain. This story is useful, though not in its most obvious sense. The story is clearly a legend and cannot be accepted as historical fact. That being said this story is an excellent example of the telling and use of legends. As such, while this story tells us nothing of use about the origins of the Spanish Jewish community, it is very useful in understanding Ibn Daud and by extension Andalusian Jewry.
The story of the four captives serves as a convenient foundation story. It gives a clear cut, dramatic story that points to a given conclusion. It clearly fits into the overarching narrative of the Book of Tradition. The main purpose of the Book of Tradition is the defense of the rabbinic tradition, particularly in the face of Karaite critic, and the establishment of Andalusia as the center of Jewish life and Torah authority. As such the story is just too convenient to be taken at face value as a historical event.
Within the story itself there is micro narrative that is highly suspicious. We are told that that the captain wanted to violate the wife of one of the captives, R. Moses. She asks him if she would be allowed to throw herself overboard to drown; would such an action bar her from the future resurrection of the dead. R. Moses responds by quoting the verse: “I will bring them back from Bashan; I will bring them back from the depths of the sea.” The wife accepted this and drowned herself. The problem with this story is that it is lifted straight out of the Talmud. In the Talmud the story is that there are two boats sailing to Rome with Jewish captives, one with four hundred boys and another with four hundred girls. Fearing for their chastity, the girls ask the boys if they would be forfeiting their place in the future resurrection by jumping overboard. The boys reply by the same verse. The girls follow this advice and jump. The boys then follow the example themselves and also commit martyrdom. So here in the four captives story we have the same scenario, woman on a boat with her virtue threatened, with the exact same conversation and the exact same verse quoted. What is one supposed to believe; that R. Moses and his wife played out the Talmudic story, apparently unaware of the precedent, or someone lifted the story from the Talmud and used it for the four captives story.
The ending of the whole narrative is also simply too convenient and too much to type to be believed. We are told that R. Moses and R. Hanok arrive in Cordova. They go to the central synagogue and sit in the back; everyone just assumes they are simple beggars. While they are sitting there, the leading rabbi, R. Nathan the Pious, is unable to give the correct explanation in a matter of law. R. Moses and Hanok come forward, deus ex machina, and solve the problem. R. Nathan the Pious is so amazed by these two scholars that he steps down and acknowledges their authority. This is the sort of thing that only happens in legends. In real life, revolutions in authority do not happen overnight; the opposition fights with every last breath and goes to its grave kicking, screaming and denouncing the interlopers, who stole what was rightfully theirs.
Text #1: (Modena)
This text comes from Leon Modena’s autobiography, Hay’ye Yehudah; it deals with the printing of his Historia de gli riti hebraici and how he nearly ran afoul of the Inquisition over it. This text is a useful example of the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period, particularly within the context of the age of the printing press and the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Modena was someone in regular contact with Christians and engaged in friendly scholarly discussions with them. Historia was written at the behest, we believe, of Henry Wotten, the English ambassador to Venice, and was meant to be given to James I of England. In this book Modena gives an overview of Jewish laws and practices. In large respect he was responding to Johann Buxtorf the elder’s Synagoa Judaica. Modena wrote the Historia in 1616. He later, in 1635, gave this same book to a French-Christian Hebraist named Giacomo Gaffarel. Gaffarel then went and published the book on his own initiative. This created a problem for Modena in that there was material in the book that violated Catholic censorship policies. While the Historia was just a manuscript, one that was also written for a Protestants to boot, this was not a problem. Now, though, that Gaffarel had printed the book, Modena found himself to be an inadvertent promoter of “heresy.” The problem was quickly and painlessly solved. Modena explained the matter to the local inquisitor, who proved to be quite sympathetic and understanding. It turns out that even this was not necessary as Gaffarel did not publish the manuscript as is but, on his own initiative, removed the potentially objectionable material.
This story illustrates something about Catholic censorship. This whole incident happened only a few years after Galileo was put on trial for the Dialogues. Galileo’s real crime was not that he was a heliocentrist, but that he failed to adhere to the letter of the original ban on him writing on the issue and, more importantly, he managed to antagonize Pope Urban VIII. One could get away with a lot during the seventeenth century, inquisition censors or no inquisition censors, as long as one knew how to adhere to the letter of the letter of law and avoided antagonizing any of the wrong people. Publishing books was a political game and one was perfectly safe as long as they knew how to play the game. Galileo was not very adept at this game and suffered the consequences; Modena could play the game and was perfectly safe.
A word should be said here about Christian Hebraism; there are quite a few Christians in this story that are interested in Jews and Judaism and some of them are fairly knowledgeable. This had nothing to do with Christians thinking about converting to Judaism; though, as the case of Peter Spaeth illustrates, this did happen on occasion. Rather this early modern Christian Hebraism was rooted in the search for the prisca theologia, the original theology, which lay behind much of early modern thought. The premise was that humanity had fallen away from the truths of antiquity and that these sources could be recovered by a close examination of the sources. One of the major manifestations of this was the interest in “magical” texts such as the Hermetic corpus, thought to date from the time of Moses, and the Zohar. Another manifestation was a renewed emphasis on the bible and reading it outside of the shadow of the Vulgate and the medieval Catholic tradition. Protestantism was a product of this movement. Protestants in particular were interested, in this period, in forming contacts with Jews and Jewish sources because they believed that, while the Jews may have corrupted their own sources, a critical analysis, in light of Christian truths, of such material would allow one to uncover the original true “Christian” religion behind it.
This whole incident is a good illustration of how interrelated Jewish history is with the happenings within the general society. Jews in Europe did not live in a different world from Christians. The printing press, the Catholic Church’s post-Tridentine censorship, the struggle with Protestantism affected someone like Leon Modena just as it affected Galileo.
Text #2: (Ibn Daud)
This text in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition, deals with the story of the four captives. According to this story four rabbis were captured by pirates and ransomed respectively by the communities of Fostat, Qairawan and Cordova. These rabbis stayed in these given communities and set up communities. Ibn Daud uses this story to explain how it came to pass that the authority possessed by the Babylonian Gaonate passed to Spain. This story is useful, though not in its most obvious sense. The story is clearly a legend and cannot be accepted as historical fact. That being said this story is an excellent example of the telling and use of legends. As such, while this story tells us nothing of use about the origins of the Spanish Jewish community, it is very useful in understanding Ibn Daud and by extension Andalusian Jewry.
The story of the four captives serves as a convenient foundation story. It gives a clear cut, dramatic story that points to a given conclusion. It clearly fits into the overarching narrative of the Book of Tradition. The main purpose of the Book of Tradition is the defense of the rabbinic tradition, particularly in the face of Karaite critic, and the establishment of Andalusia as the center of Jewish life and Torah authority. As such the story is just too convenient to be taken at face value as a historical event.
Within the story itself there is micro narrative that is highly suspicious. We are told that that the captain wanted to violate the wife of one of the captives, R. Moses. She asks him if she would be allowed to throw herself overboard to drown; would such an action bar her from the future resurrection of the dead. R. Moses responds by quoting the verse: “I will bring them back from Bashan; I will bring them back from the depths of the sea.” The wife accepted this and drowned herself. The problem with this story is that it is lifted straight out of the Talmud. In the Talmud the story is that there are two boats sailing to Rome with Jewish captives, one with four hundred boys and another with four hundred girls. Fearing for their chastity, the girls ask the boys if they would be forfeiting their place in the future resurrection by jumping overboard. The boys reply by the same verse. The girls follow this advice and jump. The boys then follow the example themselves and also commit martyrdom. So here in the four captives story we have the same scenario, woman on a boat with her virtue threatened, with the exact same conversation and the exact same verse quoted. What is one supposed to believe; that R. Moses and his wife played out the Talmudic story, apparently unaware of the precedent, or someone lifted the story from the Talmud and used it for the four captives story.
The ending of the whole narrative is also simply too convenient and too much to type to be believed. We are told that R. Moses and R. Hanok arrive in Cordova. They go to the central synagogue and sit in the back; everyone just assumes they are simple beggars. While they are sitting there, the leading rabbi, R. Nathan the Pious, is unable to give the correct explanation in a matter of law. R. Moses and Hanok come forward, deus ex machina, and solve the problem. R. Nathan the Pious is so amazed by these two scholars that he steps down and acknowledges their authority. This is the sort of thing that only happens in legends. In real life, revolutions in authority do not happen overnight; the opposition fights with every last breath and goes to its grave kicking, screaming and denouncing the interlopers, who stole what was rightfully theirs.
General Exam III: Jewish History (Part III)
What are some of the major historiographical debates concerning the conversos of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries? Who are the historians who have participated in these debates? Explain which side you take in each debate and why.
The year 1391 saw a wave of anti-Jewish riots engulf the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. This was followed by an intensive and well organized missionary campaign, with apostate Jews such as Paul of Burgos and Joshua Halorki playing prominent roles. The highlight of this missionary campaign was a public disputation at Tortosa, hosted by the Avignon Pope, Benedict XIII. These events utterly demoralized the Jewish community. It is believed that over the course of these two decades upwards of one third of the Jewish community converted to Christianity, creating a new social group in Spain, the conversos or New Christians.
The Christian populace viewed these New Christians with suspicion and as being, in a sense, a greater threat then Jews. Medieval society possessed an elaborate system designed to keep Jews in their place. Conversos, though, as Christians did not live under the traditional strictures that bound Jews. By converting to Christianity, these conversos now could take up high government positions, marry into noble families and even to enter the Church and become priests. In response to this problem, Old Christians developed, over the course of the fifteenth century, a series of mechanisms to keep conversos down, such as a theory of racial identity and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). This can be seen most clearly in a series of ordinances passed in the city of Toledo in 1449. These ordinances placed restrictions on all those descended from converted Jews and banned them from holding certain offices. Furthermore opponents of conversos accused them of being crypto-Jews or marranos. These accusations culminated in the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, whose purpose was to root out those who practiced “Judaizing” heresies.
In 1492, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, attempted to solve the converso problem by simply expelling all Jews from their dominions. The thought was that the continued presence of a Jewish community served as a negative influence on the conversos; remove the negative influence and the conversos would submerge into the general Christian society. Clearly a reasonable assumption, the problem, though, was that since they offered Jews a choice to convert instead of leaving and even went so far as to allow those Jews who left the chance to come back, embrace Catholicism and regain their property. (An offer that many Jews took the Crown up on.) This created a whole new round of conversos, thus putting everything back to square one. The Spanish Crown had to use the Inquisition to root out Judaizers, a process that would color the Spanish cultural landscape for centuries.
A similar situation, though, as we shall see later, with important differences, played itself out in Portugal. Many of the Jews who fled Spain in 1492 went to Portugal. In 1497 King Manuel forcibly baptized them, thus creating a new converso community. After a few decades Portugal found itself in the same situation as Spain; it had this large population of former Jews and their descendents with serious questions hanging over their doxy. To solve this problem Portugal followed the Spanish lead and instituted an Inquisition of its own to root out Judaizers. And as with Spain, this process went on for centuries.
Throughout the following centuries conversos continued to leave Spain and particularly Portugal. In fact Portuguese became a byword for converso amongst Europeans. Many of these conversos joined established Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Others went to places such as France and England where, even though Jews were banned, there was no Inquisition and so as long as one did not do anything too obvious one could live in safety. Finally there were conversos who established their own Jewish communities. The most prominent of these was the Amsterdam community in Holland. Thus making themselves, once again a factor in the Jewish world.
The Jewish community in dealing with these conversos was, ironically enough, faced with the exact same problem as the Spanish Inquisition; were these conversos Jews or were they Christians? Just as there was a first act for Spain, when they had to deal with conversos alongside a Jewish community in the fifteenth century, and a second act, when they had they had to deal with conversos without a Jewish community in a post 1492 Spain, so to there are two acts in the story of how the Jewish community dealt with conversos, the fifteenth century and post 1492. Each of these two phases has to be treated separately.
The problem of the conversos has been passed down to modern academic scholarship, which has struggled where to fit conversos and to answer the basic question of to what extent were the charges against conversos true; was there at any point a significant population of conversos secretly practicing Judaism. The two major figures in this debate are Yitzchak Baer, who assumed that the conversos were, by and large practicing Jews, and Benzion Netanyahu, who argues that this was all a myth creating by their Old Christian opponents.[1]
Yitzchak Baer relied on Inquisition material and was willing to lend credence to it. For Baer, obviously, the Inquisition’s charges were hardly negative. Baer embraces the conversos. The conversos were secret Jews and as such they are part of the Jewish people and of the Jewish destiny. The funny thing about Baer is that he believed that that the Jews who converted in the aftermath of 1391 were Averroists, who did not really believe in Judaism. Once they became Christians they continued to practice their Averroist Judaism. So the Church found themselves dealing with a group of heretical Christians made up of what had once been heretical Jews.
Benzion Netanyahu, first in The Marranos of Spain and later in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, advances the revisionist claim that the conversos, were by and large, believing Christians not any different from Old Christians. Ironically enough, Netanyahu basis this undermining of a Jewish legend completely on Jewish sources. Netanyahu’s argument is that, unlike the Inquisition sources which treat conversos as Judaizers, rabbinic sources particularly once we get past the events of 1391 are almost unanimous in their negative attitude toward conversos, viewing them as Christian apostates. In fact Jews cheered the creation of the Inquisition and willingly cooperated with them, even to the point of making up charges against conversos.
An example of a case that Netanyahu puts a lot of emphasis on is that of Profiat Duran and his friend. Both Duran and the friend converted under duress during the violence of 1391. They planned to travel to the Holy Land to do penance. Later, though, the friend reneged on these plans; even though he had originally converted under duress, he had since come to sincerely believe in Christianity. Duran devotes his satirical polemic, Do Not be Like Your Forefathers, to mocking this former friend of his. Netanyahu loves this story because it illustrates how even the original generation of conversos were hardly the loyal defenders of Judaism that myth would have it.
This begs the question, why the Inquisition; if there were no Judaizing conversos, particularly once we get past the early fifteenth century, why was the Spanish Inquisition formed? Netanyahu devotes Origins of the Inquisition to answering this question. For Netanyahu the Spanish Inquisition was the product of a decades long racial campaign by Old Christians to eliminate the conversos. The claim that conversos were secretly practicing Judaism was a lie made up in order to justify murdering off conversos and maintaining the racial purity of Spain. What is really radical about this theory is that Netanyahu has effectively rewritten fifteenth century Christian anti-Judaism as very modern sounding anti Semitism. Netanyahu’s fifteenth century Spain is almost identical to early twentieth century Germany. You have a large population of highly assimilated Jews who want nothing more than to leave their heritage behind and be accepted by the general populace. They are stopped, though, by a racial anti Semitism, that sees them as a threat not because of their Jewish beliefs, they have none to speak of, but because of their racial heritage.
Netanyahu’s views remain controversial. His main supporter is Norman Roth whose Conversos, Inquisition the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a history of fifteenth century conversos, consciously told outside the context of Judaism. Roth’s conversos are Christians and part of Christian society. Outside the field of Jewish history, Netanyahu has gained the gained the support of Henry Kamen, one of the leading scholars on early modern Spain. Kamen’s discussion of the Jewish situation in his book, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision, comes straight out of Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has gained quite a number of opponents, particularly Gershon Cohen and Yosef Yerushalmi. Cohen attacked Netanyahu’s use of rabbinic sources. For example he argued that rabbis were inclined to treat conversos as gentiles simply as a matter of halachic convenience. Saying that conversos were gentiles solves a number of problems, particularly those relating to marriage and divorce. For example if a converso women were to abandon her converso husband without a divorce, and declare herself to be a Jew she could still be allowed to remarry despite never getting a divorce; since she was not living as a Jew her original marriage was never valid in the first place.
Yerushalmi, in From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth- Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, does not directly come out in defense of the conversos Jewishness. What he is particularly interested in, though, is taking the Portuguese conversos out of Netanyahu’s model. These Jews were forcibly converted and were never given any sort of choice. Moreover these Jews had already fled Spain, abandoning their homes and possessions. Also, even after their conversion, they managed to go nearly forty years without having to deal with an inquisition.[2] This allowed them to build some sort of Jewish community. It is not a coincidence that almost all of the conversos leaving Iberia and joining the Jewish community were Portuguese. For example the main subject of Yerushalmi’s book, Isaac Cardoso, and his brother, Abraham Cardoso were of Portuguese descent.
I believe that it is important to transcend the issue of whether conversos were really Jews or Christians. I agree with Netanyahu that while many of the original conversos converted to Christianity out of fear and continued to practice Judaism secretly either in their hearts or in actual practice, the later generations of conversos were distanced from the Jewish community and therefore cannot be viewed as part of it. The Jewish community did not recognize them as Jews and so therefore it would not be appropriate to talk about secret Jews. That being said I am not about to pass on the Inquisition and assume that it was simply the product of a racist conspiracy. I assume that many if not most of the people who went through the Inquisition were not good Catholics and were guilty of something. Considering that the vast majority of the people that the Spanish Inquisition focused its attention on were descended from Jews it only makes sense that there would be a Jewish influence at work and the heresy involved would have a certain Judaic flavoring to it. Of course bad Catholic does not mean good Jew or even a Jew at all. Just as bad Jew does not mean good Catholic. The problem with having rabbinic sources face off against Inquisition sources is that they are talking at cross purposes with each other and mean very different things by Jew and Christian.
The fact that you had Christians with Judaic practices or even heterodox Catholics raises an interesting question as to why this was even important. Christianity has a long history of tolerating the native practices of recently converted people and it has even been willing to wink at their heterodoxies. (What are Easter and Christmas but pagan practices that were brought into Christianity by converts?) A useful parallel is the situation in the New World. Beyond getting natives to commit to the act of baptism there was little done to eliminate their traditional pagan practices and beliefs. Native Americans were specifically exempted from the Inquisition. Even today much of the Catholicism practiced in South America is a syncretist Catholicism far removed from Orthodox Catholicism. So the question is if the Spanish and Portuguese were so willing to turn the other way and ignore the native keeping an idol in his hut why did they care if a converso lit candles in his house Friday night, taught his children Hebrew phrases or believed in the continued relevance of Mosaic Law? Just the Church tolerated the development of a syncretist Catholicism amongst Native Americans it could have fairly easily tolerated a Judaic syncretist Catholicism among Spanish Catholics of Jewish descent. Of course Muslims were in the same situation so it cannot simply be a matter of anti-Semitism.
[1] Before I continue there is something I should make very clear. There is a long heroic mythology about conversos describing them as striving to maintain their Judaism under extreme situations. This myth is exemplified in Marcus Lehmann’s novel Family y Arguilar, written during the nineteenth century. Family y Arguilar features a family of conversos secretly leading a full blown traditionally Jewish lifestyle with an underground Jewish community in seventeenth century Spain. As far as everyone is concerned these sorts of conversos are a myth. No one is trying to claim that such people actually existed.
[2] The conversos did undergo a major attack in Lisbon in 1506. This is the subject of another book by Yerushalmi.
(To be continued ...)
The year 1391 saw a wave of anti-Jewish riots engulf the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. This was followed by an intensive and well organized missionary campaign, with apostate Jews such as Paul of Burgos and Joshua Halorki playing prominent roles. The highlight of this missionary campaign was a public disputation at Tortosa, hosted by the Avignon Pope, Benedict XIII. These events utterly demoralized the Jewish community. It is believed that over the course of these two decades upwards of one third of the Jewish community converted to Christianity, creating a new social group in Spain, the conversos or New Christians.
The Christian populace viewed these New Christians with suspicion and as being, in a sense, a greater threat then Jews. Medieval society possessed an elaborate system designed to keep Jews in their place. Conversos, though, as Christians did not live under the traditional strictures that bound Jews. By converting to Christianity, these conversos now could take up high government positions, marry into noble families and even to enter the Church and become priests. In response to this problem, Old Christians developed, over the course of the fifteenth century, a series of mechanisms to keep conversos down, such as a theory of racial identity and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). This can be seen most clearly in a series of ordinances passed in the city of Toledo in 1449. These ordinances placed restrictions on all those descended from converted Jews and banned them from holding certain offices. Furthermore opponents of conversos accused them of being crypto-Jews or marranos. These accusations culminated in the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, whose purpose was to root out those who practiced “Judaizing” heresies.
In 1492, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, attempted to solve the converso problem by simply expelling all Jews from their dominions. The thought was that the continued presence of a Jewish community served as a negative influence on the conversos; remove the negative influence and the conversos would submerge into the general Christian society. Clearly a reasonable assumption, the problem, though, was that since they offered Jews a choice to convert instead of leaving and even went so far as to allow those Jews who left the chance to come back, embrace Catholicism and regain their property. (An offer that many Jews took the Crown up on.) This created a whole new round of conversos, thus putting everything back to square one. The Spanish Crown had to use the Inquisition to root out Judaizers, a process that would color the Spanish cultural landscape for centuries.
A similar situation, though, as we shall see later, with important differences, played itself out in Portugal. Many of the Jews who fled Spain in 1492 went to Portugal. In 1497 King Manuel forcibly baptized them, thus creating a new converso community. After a few decades Portugal found itself in the same situation as Spain; it had this large population of former Jews and their descendents with serious questions hanging over their doxy. To solve this problem Portugal followed the Spanish lead and instituted an Inquisition of its own to root out Judaizers. And as with Spain, this process went on for centuries.
Throughout the following centuries conversos continued to leave Spain and particularly Portugal. In fact Portuguese became a byword for converso amongst Europeans. Many of these conversos joined established Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Others went to places such as France and England where, even though Jews were banned, there was no Inquisition and so as long as one did not do anything too obvious one could live in safety. Finally there were conversos who established their own Jewish communities. The most prominent of these was the Amsterdam community in Holland. Thus making themselves, once again a factor in the Jewish world.
The Jewish community in dealing with these conversos was, ironically enough, faced with the exact same problem as the Spanish Inquisition; were these conversos Jews or were they Christians? Just as there was a first act for Spain, when they had to deal with conversos alongside a Jewish community in the fifteenth century, and a second act, when they had they had to deal with conversos without a Jewish community in a post 1492 Spain, so to there are two acts in the story of how the Jewish community dealt with conversos, the fifteenth century and post 1492. Each of these two phases has to be treated separately.
The problem of the conversos has been passed down to modern academic scholarship, which has struggled where to fit conversos and to answer the basic question of to what extent were the charges against conversos true; was there at any point a significant population of conversos secretly practicing Judaism. The two major figures in this debate are Yitzchak Baer, who assumed that the conversos were, by and large practicing Jews, and Benzion Netanyahu, who argues that this was all a myth creating by their Old Christian opponents.[1]
Yitzchak Baer relied on Inquisition material and was willing to lend credence to it. For Baer, obviously, the Inquisition’s charges were hardly negative. Baer embraces the conversos. The conversos were secret Jews and as such they are part of the Jewish people and of the Jewish destiny. The funny thing about Baer is that he believed that that the Jews who converted in the aftermath of 1391 were Averroists, who did not really believe in Judaism. Once they became Christians they continued to practice their Averroist Judaism. So the Church found themselves dealing with a group of heretical Christians made up of what had once been heretical Jews.
Benzion Netanyahu, first in The Marranos of Spain and later in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, advances the revisionist claim that the conversos, were by and large, believing Christians not any different from Old Christians. Ironically enough, Netanyahu basis this undermining of a Jewish legend completely on Jewish sources. Netanyahu’s argument is that, unlike the Inquisition sources which treat conversos as Judaizers, rabbinic sources particularly once we get past the events of 1391 are almost unanimous in their negative attitude toward conversos, viewing them as Christian apostates. In fact Jews cheered the creation of the Inquisition and willingly cooperated with them, even to the point of making up charges against conversos.
An example of a case that Netanyahu puts a lot of emphasis on is that of Profiat Duran and his friend. Both Duran and the friend converted under duress during the violence of 1391. They planned to travel to the Holy Land to do penance. Later, though, the friend reneged on these plans; even though he had originally converted under duress, he had since come to sincerely believe in Christianity. Duran devotes his satirical polemic, Do Not be Like Your Forefathers, to mocking this former friend of his. Netanyahu loves this story because it illustrates how even the original generation of conversos were hardly the loyal defenders of Judaism that myth would have it.
This begs the question, why the Inquisition; if there were no Judaizing conversos, particularly once we get past the early fifteenth century, why was the Spanish Inquisition formed? Netanyahu devotes Origins of the Inquisition to answering this question. For Netanyahu the Spanish Inquisition was the product of a decades long racial campaign by Old Christians to eliminate the conversos. The claim that conversos were secretly practicing Judaism was a lie made up in order to justify murdering off conversos and maintaining the racial purity of Spain. What is really radical about this theory is that Netanyahu has effectively rewritten fifteenth century Christian anti-Judaism as very modern sounding anti Semitism. Netanyahu’s fifteenth century Spain is almost identical to early twentieth century Germany. You have a large population of highly assimilated Jews who want nothing more than to leave their heritage behind and be accepted by the general populace. They are stopped, though, by a racial anti Semitism, that sees them as a threat not because of their Jewish beliefs, they have none to speak of, but because of their racial heritage.
Netanyahu’s views remain controversial. His main supporter is Norman Roth whose Conversos, Inquisition the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a history of fifteenth century conversos, consciously told outside the context of Judaism. Roth’s conversos are Christians and part of Christian society. Outside the field of Jewish history, Netanyahu has gained the gained the support of Henry Kamen, one of the leading scholars on early modern Spain. Kamen’s discussion of the Jewish situation in his book, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision, comes straight out of Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has gained quite a number of opponents, particularly Gershon Cohen and Yosef Yerushalmi. Cohen attacked Netanyahu’s use of rabbinic sources. For example he argued that rabbis were inclined to treat conversos as gentiles simply as a matter of halachic convenience. Saying that conversos were gentiles solves a number of problems, particularly those relating to marriage and divorce. For example if a converso women were to abandon her converso husband without a divorce, and declare herself to be a Jew she could still be allowed to remarry despite never getting a divorce; since she was not living as a Jew her original marriage was never valid in the first place.
Yerushalmi, in From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth- Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, does not directly come out in defense of the conversos Jewishness. What he is particularly interested in, though, is taking the Portuguese conversos out of Netanyahu’s model. These Jews were forcibly converted and were never given any sort of choice. Moreover these Jews had already fled Spain, abandoning their homes and possessions. Also, even after their conversion, they managed to go nearly forty years without having to deal with an inquisition.[2] This allowed them to build some sort of Jewish community. It is not a coincidence that almost all of the conversos leaving Iberia and joining the Jewish community were Portuguese. For example the main subject of Yerushalmi’s book, Isaac Cardoso, and his brother, Abraham Cardoso were of Portuguese descent.
I believe that it is important to transcend the issue of whether conversos were really Jews or Christians. I agree with Netanyahu that while many of the original conversos converted to Christianity out of fear and continued to practice Judaism secretly either in their hearts or in actual practice, the later generations of conversos were distanced from the Jewish community and therefore cannot be viewed as part of it. The Jewish community did not recognize them as Jews and so therefore it would not be appropriate to talk about secret Jews. That being said I am not about to pass on the Inquisition and assume that it was simply the product of a racist conspiracy. I assume that many if not most of the people who went through the Inquisition were not good Catholics and were guilty of something. Considering that the vast majority of the people that the Spanish Inquisition focused its attention on were descended from Jews it only makes sense that there would be a Jewish influence at work and the heresy involved would have a certain Judaic flavoring to it. Of course bad Catholic does not mean good Jew or even a Jew at all. Just as bad Jew does not mean good Catholic. The problem with having rabbinic sources face off against Inquisition sources is that they are talking at cross purposes with each other and mean very different things by Jew and Christian.
The fact that you had Christians with Judaic practices or even heterodox Catholics raises an interesting question as to why this was even important. Christianity has a long history of tolerating the native practices of recently converted people and it has even been willing to wink at their heterodoxies. (What are Easter and Christmas but pagan practices that were brought into Christianity by converts?) A useful parallel is the situation in the New World. Beyond getting natives to commit to the act of baptism there was little done to eliminate their traditional pagan practices and beliefs. Native Americans were specifically exempted from the Inquisition. Even today much of the Catholicism practiced in South America is a syncretist Catholicism far removed from Orthodox Catholicism. So the question is if the Spanish and Portuguese were so willing to turn the other way and ignore the native keeping an idol in his hut why did they care if a converso lit candles in his house Friday night, taught his children Hebrew phrases or believed in the continued relevance of Mosaic Law? Just the Church tolerated the development of a syncretist Catholicism amongst Native Americans it could have fairly easily tolerated a Judaic syncretist Catholicism among Spanish Catholics of Jewish descent. Of course Muslims were in the same situation so it cannot simply be a matter of anti-Semitism.
[1] Before I continue there is something I should make very clear. There is a long heroic mythology about conversos describing them as striving to maintain their Judaism under extreme situations. This myth is exemplified in Marcus Lehmann’s novel Family y Arguilar, written during the nineteenth century. Family y Arguilar features a family of conversos secretly leading a full blown traditionally Jewish lifestyle with an underground Jewish community in seventeenth century Spain. As far as everyone is concerned these sorts of conversos are a myth. No one is trying to claim that such people actually existed.
[2] The conversos did undergo a major attack in Lisbon in 1506. This is the subject of another book by Yerushalmi.
(To be continued ...)
General Exam III: Jewish History (Part II)
Here are the questions that I did respond to.
Trace developments in the Church’s relationship with Jews during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in Western Europe. Your answer should make reference to legislation, polemics, and divisions within Christian society. Please refer to the relevant contemporary scholarship.
Traditionally the Church has had a complicated relationship with Jews. On the one hand Christianity developed in polemical opposition to Judaism, thus making Judaism the big Other, on the other hand Christianity came out of Judaism and Jews play an important role in the process of salvation. An example of this struggle can be seen in the witness doctrine of St. Augustine. According to St. Augustine, Jews needed to continue to exist as they serve a dual purpose for Christians. Jews testify to the truth of the Old Testament, which prefigures the New Testament. If it were not for the Jews pagans might claim that Christians made up the Old Testament and the prophecies contained within it. The other purpose that Jews serve is that their suffering and exile testifies to their punishment for rejecting Jesus. The witness doctrine, particularly as codified by Gregory the Great, created a dichotomy in regards to Jews. On the one hand Jews were to be protected, unlike pagans and heretics, but on the other hand Jews were to be kept in a low status. For example, while Gregory allowed Jews to maintain synagogues, Jews were not supposed to be allowed to build new synagogues and their synagogues were not supposed to outshine churches.
It is useful to contrast Pope Gregory the Great’s view on Jews at the end of the sixth century with that of Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century. The context which Innocent III wrote was remarkably different from that of Pope Gregory. The Church was taking a far greater interest into internal Jewish affairs and was failing to protect Jews from a populace that was heavily influenced by the Church’s anti-Jewish rhetoric. I would like to analyze specific events, laws and polemics connected to Jewish Christian relations within the context of the witness doctrine and discuss some possible explanations offered by scholars as to why the Church protection of Jews, as exemplified by the witness doctrine, stopped being effective.
In dealing with medieval Jewish Christian relations it is very easy to fall into the trap of Joshua Trachtenberg’s Devil and the Jews and see Christian anti-Semitism as a static inevitable result of Christian doctrine. The Jews rejected the “obvious” truth of Christianity. The Jews must know the truth. Only the Devil could know the truth and still reject it. Therefore Jews must be in league with the Devil. Since the Jews are in league with the Devil they must be devoted to doing such things as reenacting the crucifixion by torturing the Host or murdering innocent Christian children. It would seem only logical that Jews would be plotting to bring down Christendom with the dark magical arts that the Devil taught them. The problem with this view is that it assumes that Christians held to a static view of Jews. It does not take into account differences say in the twelfth century or in the sixteenth century. Trachtenberg assumes that once Christians, by the twelfth century, fully developed this satanic image of the Jew it remained static essentially all the way up to Nazi Germany. Furthermore Trachtenberg does not take into account why this view developed when it did; why the twelfth and thirteenth centuries?
It is an accepted fact that the bottom dropped out from underneath the Jews in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1096 you had the Crusades and the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, but this was mob violence. Jews were still protected, both by the Church and by the secular authorities. Things begin to change from here. In the twelfth century the Church began to take an interest in Jewish money lending. We see the letters of Peter the Venerable to Louis VII denouncing Jewish money lending and arguing that the Jews be made to pay for the Second Crusade. Even at this time, though, Church leaders such as Bernard of Clairvaux went out of their way to make sure that Jews were protected. In 1144 we see the first ritual murder charges in Norwich England. By the end of the century this charge had spread to France and to Germany. In the thirteenth century the ritual murder charge morphed into the far deadlier blood libel, that Jews needed blood. The first expulsion was carried out by Philip Augustus in 1182. This was rescinded and only covered a small area, greater Paris more or less, but would be a precedent for things to come.
The situation became really bad for Jews during the thirteenth centuries. Jews come face to face with full blown blood libels and desecration of the Host charges. They were subjected to an intense missionizing campaign and the assault on the Talmud that came its wake; the Talmud was burnt in Paris in 1242. Later in Spain we see the Dominican efforts that resulted in the Barcelona debate of 1263 and Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. Jews were expelled from England in 1290. They are briefly expelled from France in 1306; they are allowed back in a few years latter only to be finally expelled in 1394 but for all intents and purposes medieval French culture ends with 1306. There were large scale massacres, possibly even worse than the Crusades, in Germany, effectively bringing an end to that community as well. The situation for Jewish communities in Iberia held out for longer but the situation collapsed in 1391. Then in 1492 they were expelled. (More on this in the next essay.)
R. I Moore’s theory is that this downturn in Jewish fortunes in Western Europe was connected, one, to the general persecution of other marginal groups such as heretics and lepers and, two, that the source for this persecution was the rising clerical and merchant classes, which saw Jews as unwanted competition. In essence Moore sees this new persecution as being intimately connected to the twelfth century humanist and economic revolutions. What Moore suggests has a number of radical implications. Moore removes the Church from its traditional role as the villain in this narrative and makes them irrelevant bystanders. By locating the Christian turn toward the persecution of others within the context of the twelfth century Renaissance, Moore attacks the social progress leads to greater levels of tolerance narrative. In a certain respect what he does to the twelfth century Renaissance is similar to what Arthur Hertzberg did to the French Enlightenment in The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The other thing that Moore does is that, by putting anti-Judaism within the context of Muslims, heretics and lepers, he effectively eliminates the concept of anti-Judaism. If Jews are being persecuted alongside other groups and for the same reasons than the fact that they were Jews ceases to be relevant.
There are a number of other works of scholarship that come to mind to compare Moore to. Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150) takes a very similar line to Moore. Focusing on the thought of Peter the Venerable, Iogna-Prat builds a case for a major shift amongst Christian thinkers toward viewing society as a whole as a Christian society; one that was actively in a struggle with opposing forces, particularly Islam. Because of this the Church all of a sudden began to take an interest in Jews and heretics within the borders of Christendom and began to see them as a problem. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat sees the persecution of Jews as an extension of the move against heretics and other dissidents. Unlike Moore, Iogna-Prat directly connects this shift to the Church. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat’s discussion of anti-Judaism eliminates the Jewish element. Peter the Venerable is not interested in Jews as Jews. There is an interesting irony here; this turn for the worse is precisely related to a willingness to stop thinking of Jews as being in their own category and to start treating Jews just like everyone else. The fact that Jews were now just like everyone else meant that now the fact that Jews were practicing usury and blaspheming Christianity was all of a sudden relevant and a matter of Church interest.
David Nirenberg, in Communities of Violence, parallels Moore, though differs from him in certain key respects. Like Moore, Nirenberg assumes that Christian persecution of Jews was not inevitable and that it originated somewhere. Like Moore, Nirenberg looks to social causes of anti-Judaism and places it within the context of the persecution of other groups, thus eliminating the Jewish context of it. [1] Nirenberg is more radical than Moore in that he places anti Jewish activities into a context of a “tolerant,” “inclusive” society. Nirenberg focuses on a number of specific issues relating toward northern Spain in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This is different than Moore who is more interested in the larger narrative issues.
An example of Nirenberg’s dealing with anti Judaism is his discussion of legislation meant to ban Jews from using the services of Christian prostitutes and from sleeping with Christian women. Nirenberg sees this as coming out of a situation in which Jews did interact with Christians and were part of the Christian public space. The fact that Jews were in the Christian public space posed a theological problem for Christians so measures had to be taken in order to keep Jews in their place even as Jews were still in the public sphere and could not be removed from it. I do admit that certain elements in this line of argument strike me as a bit too post modernist, particularly when he starts talking about how the prostitute’s body represents the public space open to all and that the Jew, by penetrating the prostitute’s body, was seen as violating this space. Nevertheless, in general, I do find his discussion of Jewish “coexistence” with Christians and Muslims to be quite effective.
Jeremy Cohen, in his Friars and the Jews, argues that the key players in this shift against Jews were the newly formed mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These groups, so Cohen argues, turned away from the Augustinian witness doctrine which had traditionally protected Jews. The reason for this was the apocalyptic tendency that underlay much of Dominican and Franciscan thought. The assumption was the witness doctrine was something that was only supposed to apply during the time between the two comings; now that the end of days was it hand the witness doctrine no longer applied. Without the witness doctrine Jews become sitting targets for persecution.
Cohen is particularly interested in the attacks on the Talmud the trial of the Talmud in 1240, the Barcelona debate in 1263 and Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. The Dominicans in particular took a leading role in these actions. Pope Gregory IX’s attempt to ban the Talmud marks the first time that the Church itself had directly attempted to interfere in an internal Jewish matter. This, according to Cohen, meant that the Church no longer the right of Jews to practice their own religion unmolested under the protection of the Church as a sacred cow.
Cohen’s thesis has been challenged by Robert Chazan. Chazan denies that there was any fundamental shift in Christian theology. What he does see is a change in tactics, particularly with the introduction of the anti Talmud campaign. The Church’s decision to go after the Talmud, for Chazan, was a pragmatic decision. Since no Christian dogmas rested on the issue, any debate on the Talmud would be a matter of whether the Christian won or failed to win; there was no way to lose. Chazan makes a big deal over the fact that in Nachmonides’ account of the 1263 Barcelona debate, which he assumes is a literally construction with little to do with the actual historical event, Nachmonides wishes to dodge precisely this issue. Nachmonides keeps on taking the discussion away from the Talmud and toward more traditional lines of debate that focused on Christian dogma.
This move against the Talmud, for Chazan, has very little to do with the Dominicans. The interest that the Dominicans showed in the Talmud in the thirteenth century had its precedent in the work of Peter Alphonsi and Peter the Venerable in the twelfth century. So for Chazan there really is nothing revolutionary about happens to the Talmud in the thirteenth century; it is all a continuation from what was going on before.
Guido Kisch’s Jews in Medieval Germany, written during the 1940s, deals with Jews from the perspective of their status in various German law codes, particularly the thirteenth century Sachenspiegel. His essential argument is that the introduction of Roman law into Germany, during the twelfth century, marked a downturn for Jews, because it specifically singled them out. No longer were Jews simply residents of the cities that they lived in; now they were in a special legal category all of their own. Kisch in particular goes after the concept of servi camerae, that Jews were the slaves of the crown. While this notion justified the involvement of the crown in the protection of Jews, Kisch sees this, in the long run, setting the stage for crown being able to dispose of Jews as it saw fit.
As one can see Jewish Christian relations in the Middle Ages was a complicated matter. There is more here than bigoted fanatical Christians persecuting helpless Jews. The Church was often not the main culprit in all of this. Even when we talk about Church’s anti Judaism it is important to consider what elements of the Church was at work; whether we are dealing with popular Christianity, the Church hierarchy or any of the monastic orders. If we are to face the collapse of the Jewish relations we also have to consider the day to day coexistence which frames the context of that collapse.
[1] To be fair to both Moore and Nirenberg, neither of them are trying to completely remove the Judaic element from anti Jewish violence. Nor are they saying that there are no differences in dealing with different groups. What they are arguing is that we can point to certain common causes for violence against different groups and that therefore this violence must be understood within a larger context beyond that of any one group.
[I was asked a similar question on the medieval exam, but ended up not choosing it. So I guess it worked out for the best; I got to write it for this exam.]
Trace developments in the Church’s relationship with Jews during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in Western Europe. Your answer should make reference to legislation, polemics, and divisions within Christian society. Please refer to the relevant contemporary scholarship.
Traditionally the Church has had a complicated relationship with Jews. On the one hand Christianity developed in polemical opposition to Judaism, thus making Judaism the big Other, on the other hand Christianity came out of Judaism and Jews play an important role in the process of salvation. An example of this struggle can be seen in the witness doctrine of St. Augustine. According to St. Augustine, Jews needed to continue to exist as they serve a dual purpose for Christians. Jews testify to the truth of the Old Testament, which prefigures the New Testament. If it were not for the Jews pagans might claim that Christians made up the Old Testament and the prophecies contained within it. The other purpose that Jews serve is that their suffering and exile testifies to their punishment for rejecting Jesus. The witness doctrine, particularly as codified by Gregory the Great, created a dichotomy in regards to Jews. On the one hand Jews were to be protected, unlike pagans and heretics, but on the other hand Jews were to be kept in a low status. For example, while Gregory allowed Jews to maintain synagogues, Jews were not supposed to be allowed to build new synagogues and their synagogues were not supposed to outshine churches.
It is useful to contrast Pope Gregory the Great’s view on Jews at the end of the sixth century with that of Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century. The context which Innocent III wrote was remarkably different from that of Pope Gregory. The Church was taking a far greater interest into internal Jewish affairs and was failing to protect Jews from a populace that was heavily influenced by the Church’s anti-Jewish rhetoric. I would like to analyze specific events, laws and polemics connected to Jewish Christian relations within the context of the witness doctrine and discuss some possible explanations offered by scholars as to why the Church protection of Jews, as exemplified by the witness doctrine, stopped being effective.
In dealing with medieval Jewish Christian relations it is very easy to fall into the trap of Joshua Trachtenberg’s Devil and the Jews and see Christian anti-Semitism as a static inevitable result of Christian doctrine. The Jews rejected the “obvious” truth of Christianity. The Jews must know the truth. Only the Devil could know the truth and still reject it. Therefore Jews must be in league with the Devil. Since the Jews are in league with the Devil they must be devoted to doing such things as reenacting the crucifixion by torturing the Host or murdering innocent Christian children. It would seem only logical that Jews would be plotting to bring down Christendom with the dark magical arts that the Devil taught them. The problem with this view is that it assumes that Christians held to a static view of Jews. It does not take into account differences say in the twelfth century or in the sixteenth century. Trachtenberg assumes that once Christians, by the twelfth century, fully developed this satanic image of the Jew it remained static essentially all the way up to Nazi Germany. Furthermore Trachtenberg does not take into account why this view developed when it did; why the twelfth and thirteenth centuries?
It is an accepted fact that the bottom dropped out from underneath the Jews in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1096 you had the Crusades and the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, but this was mob violence. Jews were still protected, both by the Church and by the secular authorities. Things begin to change from here. In the twelfth century the Church began to take an interest in Jewish money lending. We see the letters of Peter the Venerable to Louis VII denouncing Jewish money lending and arguing that the Jews be made to pay for the Second Crusade. Even at this time, though, Church leaders such as Bernard of Clairvaux went out of their way to make sure that Jews were protected. In 1144 we see the first ritual murder charges in Norwich England. By the end of the century this charge had spread to France and to Germany. In the thirteenth century the ritual murder charge morphed into the far deadlier blood libel, that Jews needed blood. The first expulsion was carried out by Philip Augustus in 1182. This was rescinded and only covered a small area, greater Paris more or less, but would be a precedent for things to come.
The situation became really bad for Jews during the thirteenth centuries. Jews come face to face with full blown blood libels and desecration of the Host charges. They were subjected to an intense missionizing campaign and the assault on the Talmud that came its wake; the Talmud was burnt in Paris in 1242. Later in Spain we see the Dominican efforts that resulted in the Barcelona debate of 1263 and Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. Jews were expelled from England in 1290. They are briefly expelled from France in 1306; they are allowed back in a few years latter only to be finally expelled in 1394 but for all intents and purposes medieval French culture ends with 1306. There were large scale massacres, possibly even worse than the Crusades, in Germany, effectively bringing an end to that community as well. The situation for Jewish communities in Iberia held out for longer but the situation collapsed in 1391. Then in 1492 they were expelled. (More on this in the next essay.)
R. I Moore’s theory is that this downturn in Jewish fortunes in Western Europe was connected, one, to the general persecution of other marginal groups such as heretics and lepers and, two, that the source for this persecution was the rising clerical and merchant classes, which saw Jews as unwanted competition. In essence Moore sees this new persecution as being intimately connected to the twelfth century humanist and economic revolutions. What Moore suggests has a number of radical implications. Moore removes the Church from its traditional role as the villain in this narrative and makes them irrelevant bystanders. By locating the Christian turn toward the persecution of others within the context of the twelfth century Renaissance, Moore attacks the social progress leads to greater levels of tolerance narrative. In a certain respect what he does to the twelfth century Renaissance is similar to what Arthur Hertzberg did to the French Enlightenment in The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The other thing that Moore does is that, by putting anti-Judaism within the context of Muslims, heretics and lepers, he effectively eliminates the concept of anti-Judaism. If Jews are being persecuted alongside other groups and for the same reasons than the fact that they were Jews ceases to be relevant.
There are a number of other works of scholarship that come to mind to compare Moore to. Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150) takes a very similar line to Moore. Focusing on the thought of Peter the Venerable, Iogna-Prat builds a case for a major shift amongst Christian thinkers toward viewing society as a whole as a Christian society; one that was actively in a struggle with opposing forces, particularly Islam. Because of this the Church all of a sudden began to take an interest in Jews and heretics within the borders of Christendom and began to see them as a problem. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat sees the persecution of Jews as an extension of the move against heretics and other dissidents. Unlike Moore, Iogna-Prat directly connects this shift to the Church. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat’s discussion of anti-Judaism eliminates the Jewish element. Peter the Venerable is not interested in Jews as Jews. There is an interesting irony here; this turn for the worse is precisely related to a willingness to stop thinking of Jews as being in their own category and to start treating Jews just like everyone else. The fact that Jews were now just like everyone else meant that now the fact that Jews were practicing usury and blaspheming Christianity was all of a sudden relevant and a matter of Church interest.
David Nirenberg, in Communities of Violence, parallels Moore, though differs from him in certain key respects. Like Moore, Nirenberg assumes that Christian persecution of Jews was not inevitable and that it originated somewhere. Like Moore, Nirenberg looks to social causes of anti-Judaism and places it within the context of the persecution of other groups, thus eliminating the Jewish context of it. [1] Nirenberg is more radical than Moore in that he places anti Jewish activities into a context of a “tolerant,” “inclusive” society. Nirenberg focuses on a number of specific issues relating toward northern Spain in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This is different than Moore who is more interested in the larger narrative issues.
An example of Nirenberg’s dealing with anti Judaism is his discussion of legislation meant to ban Jews from using the services of Christian prostitutes and from sleeping with Christian women. Nirenberg sees this as coming out of a situation in which Jews did interact with Christians and were part of the Christian public space. The fact that Jews were in the Christian public space posed a theological problem for Christians so measures had to be taken in order to keep Jews in their place even as Jews were still in the public sphere and could not be removed from it. I do admit that certain elements in this line of argument strike me as a bit too post modernist, particularly when he starts talking about how the prostitute’s body represents the public space open to all and that the Jew, by penetrating the prostitute’s body, was seen as violating this space. Nevertheless, in general, I do find his discussion of Jewish “coexistence” with Christians and Muslims to be quite effective.
Jeremy Cohen, in his Friars and the Jews, argues that the key players in this shift against Jews were the newly formed mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These groups, so Cohen argues, turned away from the Augustinian witness doctrine which had traditionally protected Jews. The reason for this was the apocalyptic tendency that underlay much of Dominican and Franciscan thought. The assumption was the witness doctrine was something that was only supposed to apply during the time between the two comings; now that the end of days was it hand the witness doctrine no longer applied. Without the witness doctrine Jews become sitting targets for persecution.
Cohen is particularly interested in the attacks on the Talmud the trial of the Talmud in 1240, the Barcelona debate in 1263 and Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. The Dominicans in particular took a leading role in these actions. Pope Gregory IX’s attempt to ban the Talmud marks the first time that the Church itself had directly attempted to interfere in an internal Jewish matter. This, according to Cohen, meant that the Church no longer the right of Jews to practice their own religion unmolested under the protection of the Church as a sacred cow.
Cohen’s thesis has been challenged by Robert Chazan. Chazan denies that there was any fundamental shift in Christian theology. What he does see is a change in tactics, particularly with the introduction of the anti Talmud campaign. The Church’s decision to go after the Talmud, for Chazan, was a pragmatic decision. Since no Christian dogmas rested on the issue, any debate on the Talmud would be a matter of whether the Christian won or failed to win; there was no way to lose. Chazan makes a big deal over the fact that in Nachmonides’ account of the 1263 Barcelona debate, which he assumes is a literally construction with little to do with the actual historical event, Nachmonides wishes to dodge precisely this issue. Nachmonides keeps on taking the discussion away from the Talmud and toward more traditional lines of debate that focused on Christian dogma.
This move against the Talmud, for Chazan, has very little to do with the Dominicans. The interest that the Dominicans showed in the Talmud in the thirteenth century had its precedent in the work of Peter Alphonsi and Peter the Venerable in the twelfth century. So for Chazan there really is nothing revolutionary about happens to the Talmud in the thirteenth century; it is all a continuation from what was going on before.
Guido Kisch’s Jews in Medieval Germany, written during the 1940s, deals with Jews from the perspective of their status in various German law codes, particularly the thirteenth century Sachenspiegel. His essential argument is that the introduction of Roman law into Germany, during the twelfth century, marked a downturn for Jews, because it specifically singled them out. No longer were Jews simply residents of the cities that they lived in; now they were in a special legal category all of their own. Kisch in particular goes after the concept of servi camerae, that Jews were the slaves of the crown. While this notion justified the involvement of the crown in the protection of Jews, Kisch sees this, in the long run, setting the stage for crown being able to dispose of Jews as it saw fit.
As one can see Jewish Christian relations in the Middle Ages was a complicated matter. There is more here than bigoted fanatical Christians persecuting helpless Jews. The Church was often not the main culprit in all of this. Even when we talk about Church’s anti Judaism it is important to consider what elements of the Church was at work; whether we are dealing with popular Christianity, the Church hierarchy or any of the monastic orders. If we are to face the collapse of the Jewish relations we also have to consider the day to day coexistence which frames the context of that collapse.
[1] To be fair to both Moore and Nirenberg, neither of them are trying to completely remove the Judaic element from anti Jewish violence. Nor are they saying that there are no differences in dealing with different groups. What they are arguing is that we can point to certain common causes for violence against different groups and that therefore this violence must be understood within a larger context beyond that of any one group.
[I was asked a similar question on the medieval exam, but ended up not choosing it. So I guess it worked out for the best; I got to write it for this exam.]
General Exam III: Jewish History (Part I)
The general exam for my major, Jewish history, was longer than my two minors. I had forty eight hours and five thousand words as opposed to twenty four hours and twenty five hundred words. The exam was written by Dr. Matt Goldish and Dr. Daniel Frank. I was given four questions from which I had to choose two. I also was given two documents to analyze. I must say they were awfully nice to me. Here are the questions I did not do.
Explain Gershom Scholem’s thesis concerning messianism from the Spanish Expulsion through the Frankist movement. Who has criticized his thesis, and with what arguments?
[This question is essentially about one part of the major Gershom Scholem versus Moshe Idel debate on Jewish mysticism, which I have made occasional reference to in this blog. Part of Scholem’s narrative is that the expulsion of 1492 brought about a major shift in Jewish thought in that the magnitude of the tragedy forced the Jews who left to account for what happened on a theological plane. The result was the creation of a new form of Kabbalah which emphasized the themes of exile and redemption. The ultimate product of this school of Kabbalah was Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah was based on a cosmic narrative of a divine exile and redemption. The act of creating the world brought the “breaking of the vessels” which caused this great damage to the sephirot. Furthermore part of the divine light became ensnared by the dark powers, the klipot. It is up to man to bring about the cosmic redemption by bringing about the repair of the sephirot and the redemption of the divine light from the power of the klipot.
Lurianic Kabbalah brought about, what in Scholem’s opinion was the key turning point of early modern Jewish history, the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi. Sabbatai Sevi’s theology was a direct product of Lurianic Kabbalah and a logical consequence of it. The Sabbateans justified Sabbatai Sevi’s erratic behavior, violation of Jewish law and even his apostasy by arguing that Sabbatai was simply fulfilling his role as the messiah and redeeming the spiritual world by descending into the power of darkness. Scholem assumed that, by the mid seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had taken over the Jewish world. Scholem uses this to explain the success of the Sabbatian movement, which was unique amongst Jewish messianic movements in that it was able to gain followers not just in one area but amongst Jews across the world.
Scholem saw the Sabbatian movement as spawning many later movements that would affect Judaism and the world. Scholem pointed to the Frankist movement, a Sabbatian offshoot in Poland, as having a direct affect on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and other liberation movements of the nineteenth century. Scholem saw Sabbatianism as laying the groundwork for the Reform movement, by undermining rabbinic authority and creating a non halachic Judaism. Finally, and probably most controversially, Scholem saw Hasidism as a Sabbatean movement.
Idel rejects this narrative. He argues that redemptive Kabbalah had its roots before 1492 and that the expulsion had no real affect on Jewish thought. Idel challenges Scholem to find people who were Kabbalists, exiles from Spain and were involved in Messianism. According to Idel the only person who fits into this category was R. Abraham b. Eliezer ha-Levi. Idel distances Luria from the expulsion. He was not Sephardic and he was born decades after the expulsion. Idel also minimizes the importance of Lurianic Kabbalah, arguing that it only became a major factor after Sabbatai. Finally Idel rejects the major prominence that Scholem gave to Sabbatianism and does not make it the progenitor of modern Judaism.]
Discuss the evolution of Karaite attitudes toward Rabbinic literature and thought during the medieval period. Please illustrate your answer with specific examples.
[This question clearly came from Dr. Frank. In essence he wanted me to throw back at him what we have been studying together in the private reading course I had with him this past quarter.]
(To be continued …)
Explain Gershom Scholem’s thesis concerning messianism from the Spanish Expulsion through the Frankist movement. Who has criticized his thesis, and with what arguments?
[This question is essentially about one part of the major Gershom Scholem versus Moshe Idel debate on Jewish mysticism, which I have made occasional reference to in this blog. Part of Scholem’s narrative is that the expulsion of 1492 brought about a major shift in Jewish thought in that the magnitude of the tragedy forced the Jews who left to account for what happened on a theological plane. The result was the creation of a new form of Kabbalah which emphasized the themes of exile and redemption. The ultimate product of this school of Kabbalah was Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah was based on a cosmic narrative of a divine exile and redemption. The act of creating the world brought the “breaking of the vessels” which caused this great damage to the sephirot. Furthermore part of the divine light became ensnared by the dark powers, the klipot. It is up to man to bring about the cosmic redemption by bringing about the repair of the sephirot and the redemption of the divine light from the power of the klipot.
Lurianic Kabbalah brought about, what in Scholem’s opinion was the key turning point of early modern Jewish history, the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi. Sabbatai Sevi’s theology was a direct product of Lurianic Kabbalah and a logical consequence of it. The Sabbateans justified Sabbatai Sevi’s erratic behavior, violation of Jewish law and even his apostasy by arguing that Sabbatai was simply fulfilling his role as the messiah and redeeming the spiritual world by descending into the power of darkness. Scholem assumed that, by the mid seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had taken over the Jewish world. Scholem uses this to explain the success of the Sabbatian movement, which was unique amongst Jewish messianic movements in that it was able to gain followers not just in one area but amongst Jews across the world.
Scholem saw the Sabbatian movement as spawning many later movements that would affect Judaism and the world. Scholem pointed to the Frankist movement, a Sabbatian offshoot in Poland, as having a direct affect on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and other liberation movements of the nineteenth century. Scholem saw Sabbatianism as laying the groundwork for the Reform movement, by undermining rabbinic authority and creating a non halachic Judaism. Finally, and probably most controversially, Scholem saw Hasidism as a Sabbatean movement.
Idel rejects this narrative. He argues that redemptive Kabbalah had its roots before 1492 and that the expulsion had no real affect on Jewish thought. Idel challenges Scholem to find people who were Kabbalists, exiles from Spain and were involved in Messianism. According to Idel the only person who fits into this category was R. Abraham b. Eliezer ha-Levi. Idel distances Luria from the expulsion. He was not Sephardic and he was born decades after the expulsion. Idel also minimizes the importance of Lurianic Kabbalah, arguing that it only became a major factor after Sabbatai. Finally Idel rejects the major prominence that Scholem gave to Sabbatianism and does not make it the progenitor of modern Judaism.]
Discuss the evolution of Karaite attitudes toward Rabbinic literature and thought during the medieval period. Please illustrate your answer with specific examples.
[This question clearly came from Dr. Frank. In essence he wanted me to throw back at him what we have been studying together in the private reading course I had with him this past quarter.]
(To be continued …)
Monday, December 8, 2008
A Letter to President Gee
I have previously posted on my reaction to the Autism Speaks walk in Columbus. I would to therefore share a letter written to President Gordon Gee, who spoke at the event, on the matter. The author of the letter, Melanie Yergeau, is a friend of mine and fellow member of the Aspirations book club. She takes a similar line to mine. She does a great job at tearing Gee apart, but doing it with a smile. I would like to thank her for her kind permission to post this.
12 November 2008
E. Gordon Gee, President
205 Bricker Hall
190 North Oval Mall
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
Dear President Gee:
I am writing in regards to statements made at the Autism Speaks walk held on campus this past October 12. My name is Melanie Yergeau, and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in English. My area of focus is disability studies, and I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.
Ohio State has a small but burgeoning community of autistic students, and many of us were dismayed at your call to "cure" autism during the event on October 12. Though several autistics from our campus group were in attendance at the rally, I was not. As with many others on the autism spectrum, I do not feel that Autism Speaks speaks for autistic individuals. I was, however, saddened by The Lantern's emphasis on one of your remarks at the rally, during which you claimed, "It [autism] should not exist." Many—and I would argue most—autistics do not want to be cured. Both high- and low-functioning individuals on the spectrum understand autism as their unique way of perceiving the world (e.g., Amanda Baggs, D.J. Savarese). Autism is a part of who I am: remove the autism and you remove me.
I have waited a month to send this letter because, I admit, I am so very close to this subject. However, a non-autistic Master's student in social work suggested that you might not realize that autistics do attend Ohio State, that more of us enter the university everyday. And in further contemplating this, I realized that perhaps you have been thrown into this autism debate without realizing that it is, indeed, a debate.
Until very recently, I have felt incredibly welcome at Ohio State—due to the interdisciplinary work of the Disability Studies Program and the Department of English, the Office of Disability Services, and the programs for high-functioning/Asperger's adults at the Nisonger Center. I would urge you, as you continue in your autism advocacy, to consider what cure means to autistic individuals themselves, to familiarize yourself with organizations that actually appoint autistic individuals to their executive boards (e.g., the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, or the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership). In this regard, I find it important to note that none of the leadership or board positions of Autism Speaks are occupied by autistics: Autism Speaks speaks about autistics rather than for or with autistics.
As I read articles and listen to reports of the rally from my saddened autistic friends, I've noticed a trend in representation at Autism Speaks rallies like the one on October 12, 2008: autistics themselves have no voice. Any conversation that determines the fate of autism, I would argue, must consider the opinions, voices (however literally or metaphorically), and experiences of those on the autism spectrum. Although Autism Speaks admirably aims to help families attain necessary medical services, their cure-and-epidemic rhetoric frequently denies autistic individuals a most fundamental right—that of their personhood.
I have written this letter to you personally because I would like to think that the president of the university I attend might not refer to autistics as pitiable people in need of cures and able-bodied heroes, but rather as full and contributing members of the university community. Only when we acknowledge that the conversation on autism must, of necessity, include autistics can we begin to help all those affected by autism to lead productive and fulfilling lives. It is my hope that you might not only speak as a university president on issues of autism, but as a role model for those within the autistic community.
Sincerely,
Melanie Yergeau
Department of English
421 Denney Hall
164 W. 17th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
yergeau.1@osu.edu
12 November 2008
E. Gordon Gee, President
205 Bricker Hall
190 North Oval Mall
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
Dear President Gee:
I am writing in regards to statements made at the Autism Speaks walk held on campus this past October 12. My name is Melanie Yergeau, and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in English. My area of focus is disability studies, and I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.
Ohio State has a small but burgeoning community of autistic students, and many of us were dismayed at your call to "cure" autism during the event on October 12. Though several autistics from our campus group were in attendance at the rally, I was not. As with many others on the autism spectrum, I do not feel that Autism Speaks speaks for autistic individuals. I was, however, saddened by The Lantern's emphasis on one of your remarks at the rally, during which you claimed, "It [autism] should not exist." Many—and I would argue most—autistics do not want to be cured. Both high- and low-functioning individuals on the spectrum understand autism as their unique way of perceiving the world (e.g., Amanda Baggs, D.J. Savarese). Autism is a part of who I am: remove the autism and you remove me.
I have waited a month to send this letter because, I admit, I am so very close to this subject. However, a non-autistic Master's student in social work suggested that you might not realize that autistics do attend Ohio State, that more of us enter the university everyday. And in further contemplating this, I realized that perhaps you have been thrown into this autism debate without realizing that it is, indeed, a debate.
Until very recently, I have felt incredibly welcome at Ohio State—due to the interdisciplinary work of the Disability Studies Program and the Department of English, the Office of Disability Services, and the programs for high-functioning/Asperger's adults at the Nisonger Center. I would urge you, as you continue in your autism advocacy, to consider what cure means to autistic individuals themselves, to familiarize yourself with organizations that actually appoint autistic individuals to their executive boards (e.g., the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, or the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership). In this regard, I find it important to note that none of the leadership or board positions of Autism Speaks are occupied by autistics: Autism Speaks speaks about autistics rather than for or with autistics.
As I read articles and listen to reports of the rally from my saddened autistic friends, I've noticed a trend in representation at Autism Speaks rallies like the one on October 12, 2008: autistics themselves have no voice. Any conversation that determines the fate of autism, I would argue, must consider the opinions, voices (however literally or metaphorically), and experiences of those on the autism spectrum. Although Autism Speaks admirably aims to help families attain necessary medical services, their cure-and-epidemic rhetoric frequently denies autistic individuals a most fundamental right—that of their personhood.
I have written this letter to you personally because I would like to think that the president of the university I attend might not refer to autistics as pitiable people in need of cures and able-bodied heroes, but rather as full and contributing members of the university community. Only when we acknowledge that the conversation on autism must, of necessity, include autistics can we begin to help all those affected by autism to lead productive and fulfilling lives. It is my hope that you might not only speak as a university president on issues of autism, but as a role model for those within the autistic community.
Sincerely,
Melanie Yergeau
Department of English
421 Denney Hall
164 W. 17th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
yergeau.1@osu.edu
Sunday, December 7, 2008
International Medieval Congress this Summer
I am pleased to announce that, God willing, I will be presenting a paper at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds this coming summer. This is a major international annual conference on the Middle Ages, with over one thousand people presenting papers. The theme this year is Heresy and Orthodoxy. Here is the abstract of the session I will be taking part in; I am paper b.
Title : Reasoning with Heretics
Abstract This session explores the characteristic features and problems of attempts at dialogue between representatives of 'orthodox' positions and those they designated as heretical
groups.
Uckelman, Sara L. Mrs. Moderator/Chair
Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Title : Right Belief and Right Knowledge: Epistemological Subversion in _The Cloud
of Unknowing_
Paper / Customer
Woods, Chance Mr.
Department of English, University of Oklahoma
Paper -a:
The second half of the 14th century in England saw the effects of William of Ockham's powerful explorations into the nature of language and knowledge. Scholars have heretofore linked Ockham to Chaucer and Langland in various ways, but have not widened the purview to examine other texts of this period. Going beyond the putative links betweens literary writers and nominalist (i.e. Ockhamist) strains of thought, this paper will situate the anonymous _The Cloud of Unknowing_ within its intellectual context. In the face of growing scepticism on the efficacy of language to address complex ideas such as 'God', the _Cloud_ text emphasizes 'unknowing' as a mode of devotion and contemplation. Using the Pseudo-Dionysius as his example, the _Cloud_ author does not simply attack reason, but rather assails the tendency to divorce philosophy from personal observance. In this manner, the author stresses the importance of the Church to protect against false mystical experiences frequently reported in the latter 14th century. In this paper I will explore the Cloud author's epistemological subversion through unknowing, and expand to consider the frequent attempts by English clerics to define the path of the mystic as heterodox.
Title : Philosophers, _Conversos_, and the Jewish Campaign against Heresy in
15th-Century Spain
Paper / Customer
Chinn, Benzion Mr.
Department of History, Ohio State University
Paper -b:
This paper examines the rise of anti-philosophical literature and dogmatism within the Spanish Jewish community during the 15th century. While this has generally been viewed as a turn against philosophy by an ever increasing conservative rabbinate, I argue that this was an attempt to reach out to the large population of Jewish _conversos_, who were living as Christians. The crux of this argument rests upon the fact that there was no corresponding attempt to crack down on heretical philosophers or heretical books despite the fact that the Spanish Jewish community was uniquely suited for such actions.
Title ': Protego - proterreo': Pantaleon as Pagan Medicus, Healing Saint, and
Heretical Magician
Paper / Customer
Boer, Dick E. H. de Prof. Dr.
Instituut voor Geschiedenis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Paper -c:
The practice of combining medicine an magic through the application of amulets has a very old tradition, as has the veneration of St Pantaleon in Europe. The paper will discuss the way in which St Pantaleon developed as a pendant of Cosmas and Damianus as a patron of medical practitioners and the way in which the veneration of the saint developed, especially in the Middle and Lower Rhineland region. It will concentrate on a recently discovered Pantaleon amulet that through text and image perfectly combines magic and superstition on the one hand, and the belief in the healing powers of the saint on the other.
Title : Reasoning with Heretics
Abstract This session explores the characteristic features and problems of attempts at dialogue between representatives of 'orthodox' positions and those they designated as heretical
groups.
Uckelman, Sara L. Mrs. Moderator/Chair
Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Title : Right Belief and Right Knowledge: Epistemological Subversion in _The Cloud
of Unknowing_
Paper / Customer
Woods, Chance Mr.
Department of English, University of Oklahoma
Paper -a:
The second half of the 14th century in England saw the effects of William of Ockham's powerful explorations into the nature of language and knowledge. Scholars have heretofore linked Ockham to Chaucer and Langland in various ways, but have not widened the purview to examine other texts of this period. Going beyond the putative links betweens literary writers and nominalist (i.e. Ockhamist) strains of thought, this paper will situate the anonymous _The Cloud of Unknowing_ within its intellectual context. In the face of growing scepticism on the efficacy of language to address complex ideas such as 'God', the _Cloud_ text emphasizes 'unknowing' as a mode of devotion and contemplation. Using the Pseudo-Dionysius as his example, the _Cloud_ author does not simply attack reason, but rather assails the tendency to divorce philosophy from personal observance. In this manner, the author stresses the importance of the Church to protect against false mystical experiences frequently reported in the latter 14th century. In this paper I will explore the Cloud author's epistemological subversion through unknowing, and expand to consider the frequent attempts by English clerics to define the path of the mystic as heterodox.
Title : Philosophers, _Conversos_, and the Jewish Campaign against Heresy in
15th-Century Spain
Paper / Customer
Chinn, Benzion Mr.
Department of History, Ohio State University
Paper -b:
This paper examines the rise of anti-philosophical literature and dogmatism within the Spanish Jewish community during the 15th century. While this has generally been viewed as a turn against philosophy by an ever increasing conservative rabbinate, I argue that this was an attempt to reach out to the large population of Jewish _conversos_, who were living as Christians. The crux of this argument rests upon the fact that there was no corresponding attempt to crack down on heretical philosophers or heretical books despite the fact that the Spanish Jewish community was uniquely suited for such actions.
Title ': Protego - proterreo': Pantaleon as Pagan Medicus, Healing Saint, and
Heretical Magician
Paper / Customer
Boer, Dick E. H. de Prof. Dr.
Instituut voor Geschiedenis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Paper -c:
The practice of combining medicine an magic through the application of amulets has a very old tradition, as has the veneration of St Pantaleon in Europe. The paper will discuss the way in which St Pantaleon developed as a pendant of Cosmas and Damianus as a patron of medical practitioners and the way in which the veneration of the saint developed, especially in the Middle and Lower Rhineland region. It will concentrate on a recently discovered Pantaleon amulet that through text and image perfectly combines magic and superstition on the one hand, and the belief in the healing powers of the saint on the other.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Prop 8: The Musical
Here is a cute three-minute piece, titled Prop 8: The Musical. It features a sing-off between a colorful happy chorus of liberals cheering for Obama and looking forward to a new dawn, in which things will be good for blacks, women, and gays, and a dark and drab chorus of puritanical Christians trying to “sneak in some hate” into the constitution with Proposition 8. (How anyone could refer to a ballot proposition in which both sides spent over thirty million dollars and was all over the news for months as sneaky is beyond me.)
Ironically enough, this piece reminds me a lot of medieval Ecclesia versus Synagoga plays in which the dark and drab Jew is berated by the prophets of his own bible for his failure to believe in Jesus. The Jew then would be chased off, killed or converted. (Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice uses many of the basic elements of this tradition, which would have been familiar to his audience.) In Prop 8, the Christians get their comeuppance at the hands of a Jack Black played Jesus, who mocks the Christians for liking shrimp cocktails, but not being willing to compromise on gays. (I have used this same argument with Christians, but in the opposite direction. If they are not going to allow homosexuality they should also not allow shrimp cocktails.)
The Christians are finally converted by Neil Patrick Harris who shows them how gay marriage would be good for the economy. So Capitalism wins in the end. Now that is a story I can cheer for.
Ironically enough, this piece reminds me a lot of medieval Ecclesia versus Synagoga plays in which the dark and drab Jew is berated by the prophets of his own bible for his failure to believe in Jesus. The Jew then would be chased off, killed or converted. (Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice uses many of the basic elements of this tradition, which would have been familiar to his audience.) In Prop 8, the Christians get their comeuppance at the hands of a Jack Black played Jesus, who mocks the Christians for liking shrimp cocktails, but not being willing to compromise on gays. (I have used this same argument with Christians, but in the opposite direction. If they are not going to allow homosexuality they should also not allow shrimp cocktails.)
The Christians are finally converted by Neil Patrick Harris who shows them how gay marriage would be good for the economy. So Capitalism wins in the end. Now that is a story I can cheer for.
General Exam II: Early Modern
Here is my second general exam. It was in Early Modern Europe and given to me by Dr. Robert Davis. Like the first exam it consisted of three questions, of which I had to answer two. I had twenty four hours in which to do it and I had a word limit of 2500 words. Again I went a little over the limit.
Part I: Renaissance Italy
Compare and contrast the ways that Martines, Muir, and Nussdorfer present the civil societies of Florence, Venice, and Rome respectively. What aspects do each emphasize or neglect? How do their approaches aid or limit their ability to provide a holistic explanation of the society they are trying to examine?
A major part of Jacob Burckhardt’s legacy to Renaissance studies was his emphasis on civic life, particularly festivals, parades and other forms of civic rituals, in order to define the Italian Renaissance. I cannot think of another field whose historiography is so dominated be these issues as Early Modern Italy. Burckhardt saw this civic life as a demonstration of a supposedly newly found individualism that had not existed during the Middle Ages. I would like to discuss three examples of scholars, Laruo Martines, Edward Muir and Laurie Nussdorfer. Each of these scholars, in their own way, confronts this issue of civic life in various Italian city states.
Lauro Martines is the most directly anti Burckhardt. In Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy, Martines, utilizing a fairly Marxist perspective, portrays the Italian republics not as beacons of humanism or individualism but as oligarchic structures, under the rule of various aristocratic families. What Burckhardt saw as the expression of a common culture that served to elevate everyone Martines sees simply as the manifestation of an oppressive aristocratic culture, one that was in decline; a narrative that owes itself in many respects to Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages.
One of the interesting things about Power and Imagination is that it is not really about Renaissance Italy, at least not as commonly understood. The book is really about civic life in Italy during the late Middle Ages. For Martines this is the real locus of the Italian Renaissance. It was during the late Middle Ages that you had the major economic revolution, which helped bring about the rise of the Italian merchant class, who then took power away from the aristocracy, creating the Republican civic culture of the Italian city states.
For Martines, what we usually associate as part of Renaissance culture is really merely a reflection of the upper class and its values. Martines makes a big deal how the forces that shaped the Italian Renaissance came out of the struggle between various oligarchic structures such as nobles against merchants, or between cities. He then paints the flowering of humanism as being an extension of this power struggle. While I do not disagree with Martines on this issue, I fail to see why this is important. Yes, Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance touched all classes and was a reflection of a common will is naive. Martines, though wishes to hammer on this issue as if it was something bad for some reason, something that serves to discredit Renaissance culture. I fail to see the point of all of this; as long as we treat Renaissance humanism and Renaissance art as part of high culture and do not pretend that it has any greater significance there should not be a problem.
Martines work on Savonarola, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Italy, can also be seen as being anti Burckhardt, though it is a very different sort of book. (And may I say a far more readable book.) It focuses on the city of Florence during the reign of Girolamo Savonarola (1494-98). Savonarola is the sort of figure who, if one is going to dogmatically insist on Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance, should not have existed. If Florence was so full of the spirit of “reason” and if everyone was embracing their newly discovered individuality and casting off the “chains” of medieval Christianity then how did this Dominican preacher take over the city and turn it into his own personal theocracy? This question becomes all the more damning in the hands of Martines as he presents Savonarola not as an anomaly but as part of the fabric of Florentine culture. Martines accomplishes this by calling attention to Savonarola’s connections to the Lorenzo de Medici and to Pico della Mirandola, who played a major role in bringing Savonarola to Florence, as well how Savonarola played a role in the thought of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, who experienced Savonarola’s Florence first hand. In as sense, Fire in the City is less about Savonarola than it is about Florentine civic culture leading up to Savonarola, during his reign, and in its aftermath.
Unlike Power and Imagination, Martines does not get caught up with his concerns of class conflict. The Florence he presents is one in which power functions on different levels, which interact with each other. There are the various city councils, which, for the most part, were the province of the upper classes, there was the Church and then there were the various street gangs, which contained a lot more aristocrats than one might have suspected. Savonarola interacted with all three of these power structures and each of them was crucial in his rise to power and his eventual downfall.
Edward Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice is the most Burckhardt like of the works under discussion here in that he is the most invested in interpreting ritual as a means of analyzing society. He takes a far more anthropological approach than Martines; the influence of Clifford Geertz on Muir is readily apparent. In a sense one can see Muir as the anthropological apology for Burckhardt. He relies on the same sort of sources as Burckhardt did, visitor accounts and their descriptions of Venice and its customs. Of course Muir has no interest in waxing lyrically on how the Venetians cultivated the “human spirit” and represented true republican virtue. On the contrary, Muir deconstructs the discourse of Venetian liberty as the means to justify the existing power structures in place.
Venice was famous for its tradition of republican government and political independence. Venice was supposed to have been founded as a republic at the end of the Roman empire and had maintained its heritage throughout the Middle Ages. As Muir is quick to point, much of the history that the Venetians put out for themselves was pure myth. Muir exams the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when this myth of Venice was most potent. For Muir the civic rituals served both to uphold this legend and to maintain stability. The primary myths that Muir deals with are the founding of the city and its special relationship to St. Mark, who was supposedly buried there, its protection of Pope Alexander III in 1177 and his recognition of Venice’s special status and the rescue of twelve Virgin Mary statues from Dalmatian pirates. These legends served to grant a special authority to Venice, particularly in regards to fending off the claims of the papacy. It was not enough though for the Venetians to have such legends; these legends needed to be actualized within the public sphere. This is where ritual comes into play. Civic rituals such as the marriage to the sea and the bridge battles served to play out that image of the city as an ancient bastion of free republican men. This might have been a legend, but by engaging in these rituals the legend gained a reality all of its own.
In the discussion of Italian civic life the traditional focus has been on cities such as Florence and Venice. Rome in particular has generally been ignored. The problem with Rome is that it is overshadowed by the papacy. One can all to easily get the impression that the people of Rome were passive ciphers, ruled by the papacy, without any civic culture of its own. Laurie Nussdorfer’s Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII offers an important correction to this view. Focusing on the reign of Urban VIII (1623-44), Nussdorfer argues that the lay Romans managed to sustain a civic government under the absolutist regime of Urban VIII.
While Venice may have needed to invent a republican tradition going back to classical times, the city of Rome was the seat of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire; if any Italian state could claim to be the bastion of free republican people it was Rome. Nussdorfer analyzes the popular government that was in place, the Senate. It was based on the Capitoline Hill and saw itself as the heir of the Roman Republic. As such it possessed the traditional capital to more than hold its own against the papacy, even a pope as powerful as Urban VIII. Nussdorfer sees the Senate as representing lay members of the urban elite. It carried out the work of local government, and served as a symbol of the Roman voice in public life. In particular, Nussdorfer looks at specific events such as the plague threat of the early 1630s, the War of Castro (1641-1644) to show how the Senate, through the various lower committees was capable of challenging Urban VIII.
The problem with Burckhardt is that his narrative of the Renaissance was, in truth, an aristocratic narrative. It failed to seriously consider other aspects of Renaissance culture; worse it papered over these issues, thus denying that they even existed. As with Martines’ Fire in the City, Nussdorfer tries to move past the issues of free society versus aristocratic rule and high versus low culture for more holistic perspective. Nussdorfer analyzes different power structures and how they coexisted and competed with each other, thus giving us a more nuanced view of Renaissance politics. Muir in his own way also succeeds at creating a holistic picture of Renaissance Venice in that, while he is concerned with such upper class issues as republican freedom and classical antiquity, and the civic rituals created by those in power to perpetrate this legacy, he also considers how these issues affected lay people and how they participated in them, thus creating a Renaissance culture that truly does go from top to bottom.
[During the summer, when was reading Martines, I was meaning to write a post contrasting him with Burckhardt, but I never got around to it. So I ended up writing it after all.]
Part II: Early-modern Violence
2) Pretend you were asked to give a scholarly talk on Christian violence against Jews in early-modern Rome. Based on the reading you have done on violence, how would you structure your talk? What issues would you stress, which of the works you have read would you rely on most heavily and why? What tentative conclusions might you come up with?
[This is the one I chose not to do. I really am not familiar with the issue of anti Jewish violence in Rome. If I had to do this question I would have taken one example, the burning of the Talmud in 1553 and used that as a platform to compare it to medieval anti Jewish attacks carried out by the Church, particularly the Paris burning of the Talmud in 1242. This would lead me to discussing the debate between Kenneth Stowe and Jeremy Cohen on this issue. It is funny; now on both of my European history exams I have been given a question relating to Jewish history and both times this was the question I ended up turning down.]
Part III: Magic and Religion
3) Offer a thorough explication of Keith Thomas’ thesis in Religion and the Decline of Magic. Then select several of your other readings in religion and magic, such as Clark, Ruggiero, Christian, Mack (or others as you see fit), to show how more recent scholarship has modified, elaborated on, or rejected Thomas’ thesis. Draw your own conclusions.
Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England functions at two different levels and different readers may find themselves reading almost two different books depending on their interests and from where they are coming to it. First there is the micro issue; as the subtitle indicates, this is a book about beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. And when Thomas says England he very specifically means England, not Ireland, not Scotland and not even Wales. For this element of the book Thomas advances a very specific thesis; that the rise of Protestantism did not kill off magical beliefs in England. On the contrary the fact that Protestantism deemphasized the magical elements of traditional Christian beliefs simply allowed for the rise of more explicit forms of magic. For example if the local priest no longer engaged in exorcisms one could easily find a cunning man/wizard or a wise women/witch to step in to fill the void.
If this was all that Thomas was about Religion and the Decline of Magic would be of little interest to those not studying Early Modern England. There is another work interwoven within the book, which is of crucial importance to anyone studying Early Modern Europe. Using England as a case study, Thomas offers an overarching look at magic and other types of supernatural beliefs, common during the Early Modern period, and integrates them into the general narrative. Magic becomes critical for understanding popular culture and takes center stage in any attempt to deal with Early Modern social history.
Thomas postulates a medieval popular religion, based around magic, which continued from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, undisturbed by the Protestant Reformation or any of the major theological shifts that occurred within high intellectual circles. On the contrary, this popular magical culture, rather than be influenced by high culture, maintained a hold over the high culture.
The most important thing about Thomas is that he takes magic seriously as an intellectual endeavor pursued by rational and sane individuals. If Thomas had wanted to he could have easily written something like Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Thomas could have turned Religion and the Decline of Magic into a catalogue of all the foolish and “superstitious” things that people in Early Modern England believed in before they were “enlightened” by modern science. Thomas, though, allows us to confront Early Modern society with all of its magical beliefs and walk away still respecting the people who lived then.
As I have already pointed out, Religion and the Decline of Magic, is a book that goes off in many different directions. This is a book about many diverse fields, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology and prophecy. Thomas comes at the field from so many different directions, anthropology, intellectual history, history of religion and social history. On one hand this is a mark of his genius and makes for a very useful book. On the other hand, despite the book’s eight hundred pages, Thomas never adequately covers any one field, even in terms of just the English context. This creates a situation where Thomas, by definition, could never have hoped to be the last word. I would like to offer two examples of scholars, Stuart Clark and William Christian Jr., that come to fill in what Thomas does not adequately deal with, both in terms of geography and in terms of specific fields of study.
Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe deals with Early Modern perspectives on witchcraft. There is quite a bit on England though the spotlight is mainly on continental Europe. Like Thomas, Clark is interested in getting around the Whig model of witchcraft equals superstition, which equals rabid religious fanatics living in darkness unaided by the light of science. Also like Thomas, Clark does not see witchcraft as being either a mostly Protestant or Catholic phenomenon; witchcraft crossed religious lines and was a critical role in the common European culture. Clark, though, takes the issue of witchcraft in certain directions that Thomas either ignores or downplays. Clark focuses on witchcraft in terms of intellectual elites; for Clark, it is the elites who push the idea of witches. This allows Clark to make a far more effective argument for the importance of witchcraft and its fundamental “rationality.”
For Clark, the charge of witchcraft, that someone made a pact with the Devil, is premised, ironically enough, on a certain skepticism about the efficiency of magic. There is an essential shift between the charge of sorcery and the charge of witchcraft; with sorcery the issue is the malicious use of the supernatural, but with witchcraft the issue is the pact. If a person made a pact with the Devil, or some other demonic power, than they have committed an act of heresy and arguably an act of treason as well. It does not matter if Satan actually gave them any power or performed any wonders for them. In fact it makes perfect sense that witchcraft would be futile; clearly Satan is a liar and a fraud, with no real power, so obviously his promises are empty lies meant to entrap the hearts of the unwary. So the entire paradigm of superstitious witch hunters and their enlightened rational critics falls apart. Supporters of witchcraft charges, such as Martin Del Rio or Jean Bodin, were not less skeptical or less “scientific” than people like Johann Weyer or Reginald Scot, who opposed such chargers.
To take this a step further, witchcraft played an important role in the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. If one believed that Satan could not do actual miracles but could only use his extensive knowledge of the secrets of nature to create the appearance of a miracle and if Satan was now marshalling all of his efforts for one last effort to seduce mankind in these end of times than it would be only logical for the faithful to fight back through these same natural sciences. Through an ever growing knowledge of the natural sciences, both in its naturalistic and praeternatural varieties, one could combat Satan’s lies and demonstrate that he, unlike God, is unable to perform genuine miracles. Also, since it is the end of days, God is obviously going reveal the many secrets of the world that have lain hidden since ancient times in order to aid the faithful in their fight against Satan. So by pursuing the natural sciences one was taking part in this new revelation and helping to defeat Satan bring about the Second Coming. It is this sort of view that underlies the work, for example, of Francis Bacon and his New Atlantis.
William Christian Jr.’s Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain parallels Thomas in that Christian is interested in popular beliefs, in his case late sixteenth century Spain. Unlike Thomas, Christian is very focused on one particularly method and on one source, mainly a survey that was taken about the religious beliefs of those living in the Spanish Empire, during the later part of the sixteenth century. What was discovered was that the Catholicism practiced by those living even in rural Spain, let alone the natives in the New World, was not very deep and hardly in keeping with official Catholic dogma. Like Thomas’ sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishmen, the Spaniards of Christian’s sixteenth century rural Spain are continuing to practice their own particular brand of religion, one that dated back to the Middle Ages and was continuing unabated, despite any theological shifts such as the Council of Trent. This popular religion was heavily invested in the religion as magic paradigm, that religious rituals and objects contained a physical power, which could be harnessed to the benefit of the believer. If Thomas dealt with popular culture and the ways that it flowed into popular religious beliefs, Christian writes about popular religion and how it related to popular culture. Christian takes a far more sociological perspective than Thomas. While Thomas tends toward the anecdotal, Christian brings graphs and attempts to offer hard numbers. While Thomas is interested in giving a general picture of English popular culture, particularly as it related to the occult, Christian is keen on emphasizing the differences from place to place. In fact one of the main focuses of Local Religion (And probably the most tedious.) is his effort to catalogue local shrines and local saints to figure out which place had a shrine to which saint and how popular various saints were.
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, while seeming to deal with just England, was a paradigm shifting book that changed the field of Early Modern history, forcing a radical reappraisal of the interrelationship of religion, magic and popular culture. Thomas, despite his genius, is not able, though, to fully explore this new world of his. What he does offer is a road map, which one can take, on one hand, when dealing with other European societies besides for England and also when dealing with the specific fields of the various supernatural and occult beliefs that played such an important role in fashioning Early Modern Europe.
Part I: Renaissance Italy
Compare and contrast the ways that Martines, Muir, and Nussdorfer present the civil societies of Florence, Venice, and Rome respectively. What aspects do each emphasize or neglect? How do their approaches aid or limit their ability to provide a holistic explanation of the society they are trying to examine?
A major part of Jacob Burckhardt’s legacy to Renaissance studies was his emphasis on civic life, particularly festivals, parades and other forms of civic rituals, in order to define the Italian Renaissance. I cannot think of another field whose historiography is so dominated be these issues as Early Modern Italy. Burckhardt saw this civic life as a demonstration of a supposedly newly found individualism that had not existed during the Middle Ages. I would like to discuss three examples of scholars, Laruo Martines, Edward Muir and Laurie Nussdorfer. Each of these scholars, in their own way, confronts this issue of civic life in various Italian city states.
Lauro Martines is the most directly anti Burckhardt. In Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy, Martines, utilizing a fairly Marxist perspective, portrays the Italian republics not as beacons of humanism or individualism but as oligarchic structures, under the rule of various aristocratic families. What Burckhardt saw as the expression of a common culture that served to elevate everyone Martines sees simply as the manifestation of an oppressive aristocratic culture, one that was in decline; a narrative that owes itself in many respects to Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages.
One of the interesting things about Power and Imagination is that it is not really about Renaissance Italy, at least not as commonly understood. The book is really about civic life in Italy during the late Middle Ages. For Martines this is the real locus of the Italian Renaissance. It was during the late Middle Ages that you had the major economic revolution, which helped bring about the rise of the Italian merchant class, who then took power away from the aristocracy, creating the Republican civic culture of the Italian city states.
For Martines, what we usually associate as part of Renaissance culture is really merely a reflection of the upper class and its values. Martines makes a big deal how the forces that shaped the Italian Renaissance came out of the struggle between various oligarchic structures such as nobles against merchants, or between cities. He then paints the flowering of humanism as being an extension of this power struggle. While I do not disagree with Martines on this issue, I fail to see why this is important. Yes, Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance touched all classes and was a reflection of a common will is naive. Martines, though wishes to hammer on this issue as if it was something bad for some reason, something that serves to discredit Renaissance culture. I fail to see the point of all of this; as long as we treat Renaissance humanism and Renaissance art as part of high culture and do not pretend that it has any greater significance there should not be a problem.
Martines work on Savonarola, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Italy, can also be seen as being anti Burckhardt, though it is a very different sort of book. (And may I say a far more readable book.) It focuses on the city of Florence during the reign of Girolamo Savonarola (1494-98). Savonarola is the sort of figure who, if one is going to dogmatically insist on Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance, should not have existed. If Florence was so full of the spirit of “reason” and if everyone was embracing their newly discovered individuality and casting off the “chains” of medieval Christianity then how did this Dominican preacher take over the city and turn it into his own personal theocracy? This question becomes all the more damning in the hands of Martines as he presents Savonarola not as an anomaly but as part of the fabric of Florentine culture. Martines accomplishes this by calling attention to Savonarola’s connections to the Lorenzo de Medici and to Pico della Mirandola, who played a major role in bringing Savonarola to Florence, as well how Savonarola played a role in the thought of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, who experienced Savonarola’s Florence first hand. In as sense, Fire in the City is less about Savonarola than it is about Florentine civic culture leading up to Savonarola, during his reign, and in its aftermath.
Unlike Power and Imagination, Martines does not get caught up with his concerns of class conflict. The Florence he presents is one in which power functions on different levels, which interact with each other. There are the various city councils, which, for the most part, were the province of the upper classes, there was the Church and then there were the various street gangs, which contained a lot more aristocrats than one might have suspected. Savonarola interacted with all three of these power structures and each of them was crucial in his rise to power and his eventual downfall.
Edward Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice is the most Burckhardt like of the works under discussion here in that he is the most invested in interpreting ritual as a means of analyzing society. He takes a far more anthropological approach than Martines; the influence of Clifford Geertz on Muir is readily apparent. In a sense one can see Muir as the anthropological apology for Burckhardt. He relies on the same sort of sources as Burckhardt did, visitor accounts and their descriptions of Venice and its customs. Of course Muir has no interest in waxing lyrically on how the Venetians cultivated the “human spirit” and represented true republican virtue. On the contrary, Muir deconstructs the discourse of Venetian liberty as the means to justify the existing power structures in place.
Venice was famous for its tradition of republican government and political independence. Venice was supposed to have been founded as a republic at the end of the Roman empire and had maintained its heritage throughout the Middle Ages. As Muir is quick to point, much of the history that the Venetians put out for themselves was pure myth. Muir exams the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when this myth of Venice was most potent. For Muir the civic rituals served both to uphold this legend and to maintain stability. The primary myths that Muir deals with are the founding of the city and its special relationship to St. Mark, who was supposedly buried there, its protection of Pope Alexander III in 1177 and his recognition of Venice’s special status and the rescue of twelve Virgin Mary statues from Dalmatian pirates. These legends served to grant a special authority to Venice, particularly in regards to fending off the claims of the papacy. It was not enough though for the Venetians to have such legends; these legends needed to be actualized within the public sphere. This is where ritual comes into play. Civic rituals such as the marriage to the sea and the bridge battles served to play out that image of the city as an ancient bastion of free republican men. This might have been a legend, but by engaging in these rituals the legend gained a reality all of its own.
In the discussion of Italian civic life the traditional focus has been on cities such as Florence and Venice. Rome in particular has generally been ignored. The problem with Rome is that it is overshadowed by the papacy. One can all to easily get the impression that the people of Rome were passive ciphers, ruled by the papacy, without any civic culture of its own. Laurie Nussdorfer’s Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII offers an important correction to this view. Focusing on the reign of Urban VIII (1623-44), Nussdorfer argues that the lay Romans managed to sustain a civic government under the absolutist regime of Urban VIII.
While Venice may have needed to invent a republican tradition going back to classical times, the city of Rome was the seat of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire; if any Italian state could claim to be the bastion of free republican people it was Rome. Nussdorfer analyzes the popular government that was in place, the Senate. It was based on the Capitoline Hill and saw itself as the heir of the Roman Republic. As such it possessed the traditional capital to more than hold its own against the papacy, even a pope as powerful as Urban VIII. Nussdorfer sees the Senate as representing lay members of the urban elite. It carried out the work of local government, and served as a symbol of the Roman voice in public life. In particular, Nussdorfer looks at specific events such as the plague threat of the early 1630s, the War of Castro (1641-1644) to show how the Senate, through the various lower committees was capable of challenging Urban VIII.
The problem with Burckhardt is that his narrative of the Renaissance was, in truth, an aristocratic narrative. It failed to seriously consider other aspects of Renaissance culture; worse it papered over these issues, thus denying that they even existed. As with Martines’ Fire in the City, Nussdorfer tries to move past the issues of free society versus aristocratic rule and high versus low culture for more holistic perspective. Nussdorfer analyzes different power structures and how they coexisted and competed with each other, thus giving us a more nuanced view of Renaissance politics. Muir in his own way also succeeds at creating a holistic picture of Renaissance Venice in that, while he is concerned with such upper class issues as republican freedom and classical antiquity, and the civic rituals created by those in power to perpetrate this legacy, he also considers how these issues affected lay people and how they participated in them, thus creating a Renaissance culture that truly does go from top to bottom.
[During the summer, when was reading Martines, I was meaning to write a post contrasting him with Burckhardt, but I never got around to it. So I ended up writing it after all.]
Part II: Early-modern Violence
2) Pretend you were asked to give a scholarly talk on Christian violence against Jews in early-modern Rome. Based on the reading you have done on violence, how would you structure your talk? What issues would you stress, which of the works you have read would you rely on most heavily and why? What tentative conclusions might you come up with?
[This is the one I chose not to do. I really am not familiar with the issue of anti Jewish violence in Rome. If I had to do this question I would have taken one example, the burning of the Talmud in 1553 and used that as a platform to compare it to medieval anti Jewish attacks carried out by the Church, particularly the Paris burning of the Talmud in 1242. This would lead me to discussing the debate between Kenneth Stowe and Jeremy Cohen on this issue. It is funny; now on both of my European history exams I have been given a question relating to Jewish history and both times this was the question I ended up turning down.]
Part III: Magic and Religion
3) Offer a thorough explication of Keith Thomas’ thesis in Religion and the Decline of Magic. Then select several of your other readings in religion and magic, such as Clark, Ruggiero, Christian, Mack (or others as you see fit), to show how more recent scholarship has modified, elaborated on, or rejected Thomas’ thesis. Draw your own conclusions.
Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England functions at two different levels and different readers may find themselves reading almost two different books depending on their interests and from where they are coming to it. First there is the micro issue; as the subtitle indicates, this is a book about beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. And when Thomas says England he very specifically means England, not Ireland, not Scotland and not even Wales. For this element of the book Thomas advances a very specific thesis; that the rise of Protestantism did not kill off magical beliefs in England. On the contrary the fact that Protestantism deemphasized the magical elements of traditional Christian beliefs simply allowed for the rise of more explicit forms of magic. For example if the local priest no longer engaged in exorcisms one could easily find a cunning man/wizard or a wise women/witch to step in to fill the void.
If this was all that Thomas was about Religion and the Decline of Magic would be of little interest to those not studying Early Modern England. There is another work interwoven within the book, which is of crucial importance to anyone studying Early Modern Europe. Using England as a case study, Thomas offers an overarching look at magic and other types of supernatural beliefs, common during the Early Modern period, and integrates them into the general narrative. Magic becomes critical for understanding popular culture and takes center stage in any attempt to deal with Early Modern social history.
Thomas postulates a medieval popular religion, based around magic, which continued from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, undisturbed by the Protestant Reformation or any of the major theological shifts that occurred within high intellectual circles. On the contrary, this popular magical culture, rather than be influenced by high culture, maintained a hold over the high culture.
The most important thing about Thomas is that he takes magic seriously as an intellectual endeavor pursued by rational and sane individuals. If Thomas had wanted to he could have easily written something like Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Thomas could have turned Religion and the Decline of Magic into a catalogue of all the foolish and “superstitious” things that people in Early Modern England believed in before they were “enlightened” by modern science. Thomas, though, allows us to confront Early Modern society with all of its magical beliefs and walk away still respecting the people who lived then.
As I have already pointed out, Religion and the Decline of Magic, is a book that goes off in many different directions. This is a book about many diverse fields, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology and prophecy. Thomas comes at the field from so many different directions, anthropology, intellectual history, history of religion and social history. On one hand this is a mark of his genius and makes for a very useful book. On the other hand, despite the book’s eight hundred pages, Thomas never adequately covers any one field, even in terms of just the English context. This creates a situation where Thomas, by definition, could never have hoped to be the last word. I would like to offer two examples of scholars, Stuart Clark and William Christian Jr., that come to fill in what Thomas does not adequately deal with, both in terms of geography and in terms of specific fields of study.
Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe deals with Early Modern perspectives on witchcraft. There is quite a bit on England though the spotlight is mainly on continental Europe. Like Thomas, Clark is interested in getting around the Whig model of witchcraft equals superstition, which equals rabid religious fanatics living in darkness unaided by the light of science. Also like Thomas, Clark does not see witchcraft as being either a mostly Protestant or Catholic phenomenon; witchcraft crossed religious lines and was a critical role in the common European culture. Clark, though, takes the issue of witchcraft in certain directions that Thomas either ignores or downplays. Clark focuses on witchcraft in terms of intellectual elites; for Clark, it is the elites who push the idea of witches. This allows Clark to make a far more effective argument for the importance of witchcraft and its fundamental “rationality.”
For Clark, the charge of witchcraft, that someone made a pact with the Devil, is premised, ironically enough, on a certain skepticism about the efficiency of magic. There is an essential shift between the charge of sorcery and the charge of witchcraft; with sorcery the issue is the malicious use of the supernatural, but with witchcraft the issue is the pact. If a person made a pact with the Devil, or some other demonic power, than they have committed an act of heresy and arguably an act of treason as well. It does not matter if Satan actually gave them any power or performed any wonders for them. In fact it makes perfect sense that witchcraft would be futile; clearly Satan is a liar and a fraud, with no real power, so obviously his promises are empty lies meant to entrap the hearts of the unwary. So the entire paradigm of superstitious witch hunters and their enlightened rational critics falls apart. Supporters of witchcraft charges, such as Martin Del Rio or Jean Bodin, were not less skeptical or less “scientific” than people like Johann Weyer or Reginald Scot, who opposed such chargers.
To take this a step further, witchcraft played an important role in the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. If one believed that Satan could not do actual miracles but could only use his extensive knowledge of the secrets of nature to create the appearance of a miracle and if Satan was now marshalling all of his efforts for one last effort to seduce mankind in these end of times than it would be only logical for the faithful to fight back through these same natural sciences. Through an ever growing knowledge of the natural sciences, both in its naturalistic and praeternatural varieties, one could combat Satan’s lies and demonstrate that he, unlike God, is unable to perform genuine miracles. Also, since it is the end of days, God is obviously going reveal the many secrets of the world that have lain hidden since ancient times in order to aid the faithful in their fight against Satan. So by pursuing the natural sciences one was taking part in this new revelation and helping to defeat Satan bring about the Second Coming. It is this sort of view that underlies the work, for example, of Francis Bacon and his New Atlantis.
William Christian Jr.’s Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain parallels Thomas in that Christian is interested in popular beliefs, in his case late sixteenth century Spain. Unlike Thomas, Christian is very focused on one particularly method and on one source, mainly a survey that was taken about the religious beliefs of those living in the Spanish Empire, during the later part of the sixteenth century. What was discovered was that the Catholicism practiced by those living even in rural Spain, let alone the natives in the New World, was not very deep and hardly in keeping with official Catholic dogma. Like Thomas’ sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishmen, the Spaniards of Christian’s sixteenth century rural Spain are continuing to practice their own particular brand of religion, one that dated back to the Middle Ages and was continuing unabated, despite any theological shifts such as the Council of Trent. This popular religion was heavily invested in the religion as magic paradigm, that religious rituals and objects contained a physical power, which could be harnessed to the benefit of the believer. If Thomas dealt with popular culture and the ways that it flowed into popular religious beliefs, Christian writes about popular religion and how it related to popular culture. Christian takes a far more sociological perspective than Thomas. While Thomas tends toward the anecdotal, Christian brings graphs and attempts to offer hard numbers. While Thomas is interested in giving a general picture of English popular culture, particularly as it related to the occult, Christian is keen on emphasizing the differences from place to place. In fact one of the main focuses of Local Religion (And probably the most tedious.) is his effort to catalogue local shrines and local saints to figure out which place had a shrine to which saint and how popular various saints were.
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, while seeming to deal with just England, was a paradigm shifting book that changed the field of Early Modern history, forcing a radical reappraisal of the interrelationship of religion, magic and popular culture. Thomas, despite his genius, is not able, though, to fully explore this new world of his. What he does offer is a road map, which one can take, on one hand, when dealing with other European societies besides for England and also when dealing with the specific fields of the various supernatural and occult beliefs that played such an important role in fashioning Early Modern Europe.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part III)
(Part I)
(Part II)
Something should be said about Amy Chua’s scholarship or lack of which. The book offers a veritable shooting gallery of poor historical scholarship. I do not think that it is a coincidence that, of the four blurbs written on the back cover of the book, only one is written by an actual historian, Naill Ferguson and even he does not actually praise the book. For a trained historian to publically take a positive view of this book it would require serious brain damage or serious bribery. I would like to offer some examples that deal with issues close to my heart.
When reading her account of the Roman Empire and its downfall, it immediately struck me how Edward Gibbon like it sounded. I quickly turned to the endnotes and lo and behold, her sources were, by and large, taken from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have spoken in the past about Whigs being dependent upon Gibbon. In Chua’s case, this is quite literal. This is the equivalent of a creationist quoting eighteenth-century naturalists as scientific evidence. The field of history has advanced since the time of Gibbon; to pretend otherwise is a slap in the face to two centuries' worth of historians.
Chua’s dependence on Gibbon explains a number of things that might otherwise have proved perplexing. For example, Chua seems obsessed with establishing when Rome’s “golden age” occurred. According to Chua: “… most historians agree that the High Empire, from AD 70-192, represented the apogee of Roman civilization.” (Pg. 31) If Chua actually bothered to read any history written in the later part of the twentieth century she might have realized that historians today are not seriously concerned with defining when a given civilization reached its zenith and when it began to fall. For that matter, historians today do not try to define the essence of a civilization. That was the nineteenth century; we have moved past that. It was Gibbon who wrote about the four “good emperors,” creating a romanticized image of the second century, which Chua has swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Chua also drags out the old canard that Christianity, with its “intolerant” beliefs, brought about the downfall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon did not invent this idea; he simply represents one of the premiere examples of it.
Chua’s Gibbon-like history carries into the Middle Ages. According to Chua: “Christian Europe was fragmented and fanatic, consumed with the Crusades, sectarian rivalry, anti-Semitism, and the persecution of infidels.” (Pg. 109) This is Chua’s version of thirteenth-century Europe. Besides for ignoring the rise of Scholasticism (This was the age of Thomas Aquinas.), she also fails to consider the rise of the French, Castilian and Aragonese states. These states gained power through such acts of “intolerance” as the Albigensian Crusade and the Reconquista. This goes against what Chua is trying to argue so she simply ignores the problem.
Chua’s negative portrayal of Christian Europe is contrasted oddly enough with the Mongols. This is quite strange since Genghis Khan killed far more people than any “fanatical” Christian cleric. Genghis Khan manages to get into Chua’s good graces, despite slaughtering tens of thousands of people, because he was willing to put up with people regardless of their religion. In addition to followers of the native Mongol beliefs, his army included Confucians, Muslims, and Christians. Of course, Genghis Khan also took an equal opportunity approach when it came to killing people as well. Calling Genghis Khan tolerate misses the point. He was someone who did not care what god someone worshipped as long as that person served him; those who did not he killed.
Chua’s footnotes on Spain repeatedly refer to David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence and the work of Henry Kamen, both excellent present-day scholars. Unfortunately, she appears not to have actually read these books. If she had she might have been alerted to certain nuances that her beloved Whig narrative ignores. The whole premise behind Communities of Violence is that the paradigm of intolerance leading to violence, so basic to Chua’s book, does not work; the acts of violence against Jews and Muslims are extensions of a popular common culture, one in which Jews and Muslims were part of. Kamen has often been labeled as an apologist for the Inquisition. This may be just a bit unfair to Kamen, but Kamen does serve as a counterweight to the traditional “black legend” of the Inquisition and the portrayal of Spain as a country that sunk under the weight of barbarism and superstition. Chua seems to be blissfully unaware of this. One can only conclude gross levels of ignorance or dishonesty on her part.
Chua comments:
Why sixteenth-century Spain declined has been a favorite topic of historians. Technological backwardness, entrenched feudal traditions, crushing foreign debt, the lack of a significant industrial and entrepreneurial sector, demographic decline, a weak state apparatus, and chronic budgetary crises are some of the contributing factors most often cited. (Pg. 156)
This statement is an utter lie. It might be true to say this about seventeenth or eighteenth-century Spain, but to say this about sixteenth-century Spain is ludicrous. What sixteenth-century Spain is she talking about? Is she referring to the Spain of Charles V, which encompassed Spain, its empire in the New World, and the Holy Roman Empire? Maybe she is referring to the Spain of Philip II, which spearheaded the Catholic assault against Protestantism. The seeds may have already been there for its eventual downfall, but sixteenth-century Spain has a good a claim to hyperpower status as just about any of Chua’s other contenders. She cannot bring herself to call Spain a tolerant society so she has to deny that they were a hyperpower. Since the facts of history do not fit she simply goes for made-up facts, recycling the made-up history of centuries past.
Chua’s dishonesty in regard to Spain becomes truly unforgivable when it is placed side by side with how she treats the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century. She holds up the Dutch Republic as a contrast to Spain to show how the more tolerant Dutch Republic became a hyperpower. The Dutch Republic did not conquer for itself any empires it was not, militarily, that successful. All it was a small country that proved to be a remarkable economic success. I would give the modern example of the State of Israel. Israel is a remarkable success, particularly economically. That being said, no matter what the Arabs might say, Israel is not a hyperpower or even a superpower; Israel does not dominate the world. Reading this, one can only conclude that Chua has absolutely no regard for historical facts and is simply making stuff up as she goes along.
I have placed Day of Empire on my shelf next to Rabbi Yosef Eisen’s Miraculous Journey. I think these two authors deserve each other as they are a match in terms of their sloppy thinking and lack of scholarly standards. They are both intellectual frauds, who in pursuit of their own personal theologies actively distort historical facts. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, Chua seems to have been allowed to gain a position of public trust as a professor at Yale. The fact that the Yale law school would employ such a person forces one to question the legitimacy of the school and the value of any degree that it might confer. I would say no differently if a university employed a creationist or a holocaust denier even if they were not working as scientists or historians.
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