Today at the bookstore, I came across a copy of André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt, which reminded me that I should write up my critique of Aciman’s much-circulated recent op-ed in the New York Times: “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.” When I first read the piece, I was quite surprised that a scholar of his standing would write something so unhistorical. But before I go on to explain my reaction, let me note that I do agree with his main message. It is indeed a shame that few of us know this history, that most young Egyptians today have no idea about the vibrant Jewish community that lived among them less than a century ago.
What Aciman forgot to mention is why or how, and under what historical circumstances most of the Middle East’s Jews fled their homelands or were (unjustly) expelled from there by the governments. Aciman writes: “Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.” This is a downright dishonest and inaccurate picture, if only because of the glaring absence of the one big word you would expect to see here: “Israel.” (more…)
I am not familiar with the works of Spinoza, but I have come across quite a few people who really like him. One of my college professors identified him as being influenced by medieval Islamic philosophers, at least by way of Maimonides. Of course, given my deep interest in the Sephardim, I have been particularly curious of Spinoza’s background: an Iberian Jewish family exiled in Amsterdam. Oddly enough, in an interview published in last fall’s ISIM Review, Abdolkarim Soroush admitted to an affinity with Spinoza:
I have a personal relationship with Spinoza; I feel a certain similarity in my fate with that of Spinoza: because of some of his unorthodox views, he was excommunicated, and had to leave his place of birth in Amsterdam. Of course, Spinoza’s was not a biblical God; I think it is very unfair, however, to call Spinoza an atheist. Some of his ideas are very relevant to the modern Muslim world: reconciling the religious law with democracy and providing a modern understanding of the state is much like what Spinoza has been doing. What makes Spinoza modern is that he historicizes all prophethood; but his ideas of prophethood are inspired in part by al-Farabi and Moses Maimonides.
The full interview is available online (PDF file).
“Children of the Holocaust:” a good piece on Guardian Online by British journalist Anne Karpf.
Jews are under pressure, not least from many fellow Jews, to uncritically endorse everything that the Israeli government does, or else to lie low, almost disavowing their Jewishness for fear of being identified with an occupying power.
I refuse both positions. I grew up in household where practically every meal was conducted to the sound of heated political argument… The idea of a single Jewish orthodoxy is a sign of weakness, not strength; of fear rather than confidence.
It’s been hard for me to speak out about the Middle East: most surviving members of my family live in Israel, and for a long time my family’s experience made me anxious about the repercussions that could come from speaking one’s mind.
Yet the more that the Israeli government claims to act on behalf of all Jews, the more I feel obliged to make my dissenting voice heard.
Read the whole thing here. Interestingly, Karpf remarks: “I get the sense that the quality of debate is far more frank and uninhibited in Israel than it is here.” But of course, this comparison probably more true for the USA than for the UK (as even a cursory survey of the British media and the American media would suggest). I blogged earlier about Jimmy Carter and this same concern.
I heard Peter Cole speak yesterday at a lecture entitled “Real Gazelles in Imaginary Gardens: Art and Scholarship in the Translation of Medieval Hebrew Poetry from Spain.” I believe this was the second time I had the chance to see him, because he had come for a reading two years ago, the same year that I learned of him through the readings for a class. Cole, himself a poet, is mainly known for his remarkable translations of Hebrew ‘Golden Age’ poetry, and I totally think he’s a genius, even though poetry is hardly my thing. Peter Cole alone can be credited, to a large extent, for the contemporary revival of works by the great Jewish poets from medieval Spain — such monumental figures as Samuel ibn Naghrilla and Solomon ibn Gabirol. This page at Words Without Borders provides a short but great compliation of poems by and information about three well known Andalusian poets. But Cole’s translation-mastery isn’t limited to the Medieval period, or to the Hebrew language: he has translated works by a number of contemporary poets, including the excellent Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali.
At the talk, Cole shared some of his ideas on translation, specially the translation of poetry, which is unquestionably quite complex, if not impossible. It was quite fascinating, particularly since I think the act of translation is something of a linguistic paradox, if not nearly a miracle.
Filed under: Judaica
The memoir of Jacob d’Ancona, a 13th century Italian Jew who purportedly traveled through Syria and Persia, along the coast of India, and all the way to China, has these amusing remarks to make about inter-faith relations in Acre:
Between the Jews and the Saracens there is much fellowship and association, even though the Jews of the city say among themselves that the Saracens often do them ill and are untrustworthy. Nevertheless, the Jewish and Saracen merchants of the place are often engaged in the same trade, buy much from each other, converse together in Arabic, and eat together in their houses.
Many of the Mahometans give freely of their bread to all who are in need, unlike the Christians. But this custom is mingled with other acts and usages toward thes the Jews which are base. In addition, they sometimes express to the Jews hatred for the Christians, for to hate Christians is a natural thing for the Saracens, and sometimes they express to the Christians equal hatred for the Jews. Therefore, neither the Christians nor the Jews may have trust in the Saracens, for their hatred changes as the wind blows, blowing today from the north and tomorrow from the south, so that none may follow the movement of their spirits.
Yet although they are often a wicked people and kill each other also, they are more skilled in trade than the Christians but less skilful than the Jews, who are always able to get the better of them. Hence the Saracens serve the Jews well as factors in many lands, as in Greater and Lesser India, for the are able to work on the Sabbath, God forbid, and have a love for mechandise, although they are also prone to steal, whether from the Christian or the Jew who takes no guard. All these things I have observed myself, for such is the best way to gain the truth, or have learned from others who have traded much in the lands of the Arabs.
Nonetheless, between the Jew and the Mahometan there is more love than between the Jew and the Christian, for the Mahometan declares himself to be the son of Abraam our ancestor and reveres our teacher Moses, may he rest in Eden and be quickened at the end of days. (~ p. 41, Jacob D’Ancona, The City of Light, tr. David Selbourne.)
I first discovered the City of Light in the library when looking for some other books related to my senior thesis. It looked like a fascinating piece of work, particularly because of the amazing story about the manuscript which it’s supposedly based on: apparently, David Selbourne, the translator, found the manuscript in the secret possession of an anonymous Italian man who basically says he’ll die before he lets anyone find out about it!
Today I again came across the book when getting hold of others for my thesis. I took it out and was flipping through it for a few seconds when I was struck by the passage quoted above. I decided to lend the book and bring it home, mainly hoping that it might somehow help with my senior essay, even though Jacob d’Ancona’s travels were nearly a century after those of the two guys that I am working on. But then now, on googling, I learned that there’s a lot more to this than I thought. David Selbourne has apparently become quite controversial due to this book, and it appears that this man Jacob may never even have existed. I realized that as a wannabe medievalist I should have already had an inkling of doubt myself, and for that I owe myself some reproach. Nevertheless, the issue is really somewhat complicated (and also quite interesting), and will need another post to explore. But for now, I will let you revel in the observations in the above excerpt: they say nothing new or surprising, but are still amusing.
This was recommended by a Turkish friend of mine, a junior film-studies major at Yale. I ran into him at Ivy Noodle the weekend after I saw Harem Suare, and when I told him I was really impressed by Ferzan Ozpetek’s work, he suggested that I might like Facing Windows. After watching it, I made a mental note that I should try and watch all of Ozpetek’s movies.
Facing Windows (2004) is just beautiful! It’s the story of an average (or maybe not) Italian woman in Rome, who basically gets caught up in existential crisis: job, marriage, kids and everything is a mess (or not really). The film is primarily an exploration of love, its many shades and complexities. But it also touches upon the issue of the Jewish Holocaust in Italy, in a subtle but very powerful way. The entire movie is full of great little details, amazing shots and beautifully crafted scenes. Great music, too.
I have recently taken an interest to the genre of travel narratives (having read several 19th century British examples for my Orientalism class): they are so funny and full of quirky details! As I already mentioned recently, I’m doing some research to find a topic for my senior essay, and was leafing through my old copy of Stillman’s great Jews of Arab Lands, when I came across an excerpt from the records of Meshullam of Volterra, who was apparently a 15th century Italian Jew who visited Alexandria, Cairo, Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus and then wrote down about it (Many people, of course, travel – but not everyone can/does write about it). I was studying in the library today and got hold of a bunch of random books for research, and lo and behold, who else but Meshullam of Volterra crops up in one of them!
The following is one of many funny passages I found on skimming the text (note particularly the line in bold!). Meshullam arrived in Jerusalem on 29th July 1481, and stayed there until 29th August.
The buildings of Jerusalem are very fine and the stones are larger than in the buildings of the other places that I have seen. The land flows with milk and honey although it is hilly and ruined and desolate, and everything is cheap; its fruits are choice and very good. There is a Karob honey which is called dipirasciativo, also date honey, and the honey of bees, and wheat and barley and pomegrenates and all kinds of fruits good and fine; and they have good olive oil, but they only eat sesame oil, which is very fine. The Moslems and also the Jews of this place are pigs at their eating. They all eat out of one vessel with their fingers, without a napkin, just as the Cairenes do, but their cloths are clean. They also have asses whose saddle is worth a lot of money, for they place upon it precious stones and gold threads. The customs of the Moslems are diverse from all people, for everyone marries twenty or thirty wives as he pleases, but they do not see them until they go home; and the men give dowries to the women, and from the day of marriage the man is only bound to give her food, but her clothes and all other things she requires she has to make herself; and when she is with child Moslems do not touch her till two months after the child is born,, for that would be a great sin, and the wife is bound to pay for the food and clothes of all her sons and daughters; therefore they are all openly harlots, and when they do not wish to stay with their husbands they go to the Niepo, the Lord of the City, and say that their husband does not give them food and they are believed, and the husband must divorce his wife; for the Moslems give divorce like the Jews. All men and women and children, Jews as well as Moslems, have these customs. They sleep in their clothes, and these customs are usual in the whole Kingdom of the Sultan, and not in Jerusalem only. I wrote this when I was in Alexandria of Egypt, but I forgot to write of some of their customs. They are all alike.
p. 194-5, “Rabbi Meshullam Ben R. Menahem of Volterra,” in Jewish Travellers, ed. Elkan N. Adler (London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930).
Filed under: Judaica
We just walked out of a play tonight on Chapel Street, and a friend of a friend noticed this across the street and was like, “OMG, that’s me!” This other girl, also Jewish, points at it and is like “OMG, me too!” Man, tell me that is not amazing?
I know this topic is tricky business, but before one jumps to conclusions about what I may or may not believe, it should perhaps be clarified that I’m discussing not that, but purely a matter of historical research.
Past spring semester, in my seminar (“Literary Encounters of the Three Faiths in Medieval Spain”) with Maria Rosa Menocal – yes, the Menocal! – we were studying the fascinating muwashshah poetry from al-Andalus. While reading this one particular love poem, many of us in the class were completely taken aback when, halfway through the poem, we disovered that the poet was addressing not a she but a he. When a student then asked the professor, she explained that this was actually quite common in classical Arabic poetry, and was in fact a poetic convention. We also read parts of Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al-Hamama (which I talked about in a post a while back), and were further suprised to note that in discussing romantic attraction, the author was completely oblivious to any disctinction between male-female love and male-male love (This was, of course, only in terms of attraction. In the last chapter of the book, Ibn Hazm explains the legal punishment for the acts of sodomy and fornication, and reminds readers to be God-conscious.) Later, quite by chance, when perusing comments on a site online, I found the reference to an article by Louis Crompton, entitled Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain (and thanks to Yakoub so much for that!). It was excellent, and set me off on further research on the matter. It turned out that homoerotic desire as expressed in Arabic verse was not merely poetic convention (although often it was just that), but had practical parallels. Furthermore, I discovered that this thematic element was not limited to Muslim poetry alone, but was also quite common in Jewish poetry (in both Arabic and Hebrew)! As you may or may not know, medieval Jews and Muslims lived pretty much within the same cultural milieu, particularly in Spain, but also in Baghdad, Egypt and elsewhere. So enthralled by this whole business, I ended up writing my final paper on homoerotic tropes in Andalusian Arabic and Hebrew poetry.
Here though, I want to focus on a slightly different issue. In one of the references I used for my research, I came across a particularly enlightening section which I will quote below. The author, James T. Monroe, the well-known expert on Arabic poetry, points out in a brief but excellent analysis that the term homosexuality as we understand today is “a Greco-Latin linguistic bastard of nineteenth-century creation, used to designate a condition, also deemed pathological by the modern medical profession that coined the term” (p. 115). There is no precise word for homosexual in the Classical Arabic language (there is one in Modern Standard Arabic), which means that medieval Arabs did not have the concept denoted by this term. According to Monroe: “…we can state categorically that there were no homosexuals in premodern Arabic civilization and that as a consquence there were no heterosexuals or bisexuals in it either, simply because the concepts did not exist” (p. 116). Moreover:
In sharp contrast to Christianity, which considers homosexuality to be a pathological character defect and homosexuals to be abnormal, perverted individuals, Islamic jurisprudence adopts a more restrained attitude, according to which attraction towards members of one’s own sex is viewed as entirely normal and natural. Thus, the Hanbalite jurist Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597/1200) is quoted as having expressed the opinion that “He who claims that he experiences no desire when looking at beautiful boys or youth[s], is a liar, and if we could believe him, he would be an animal, not a human being.” In this respect, it should be indicated that the mystics of Islam included among their meditative practices the contemplation of beautiful pubescent boys, who were considered witnesses “to the beauty of God and the glory of His creation.” For the Sufis, we may thus conclude, boyishness was next to godliness. In his Epistle of Singing Girls, al-Jahiz (d. 256/869), who otherwise shows little sympathy for grand sodomy, discusses passion between male and female, which he declares to be an instinct natural to the animal world. He then adds: “If the passion (‘ishq) is felt by a male for a male, it is only derivative from this fundamental carnal instinct. [Yet passion between two males produces the same symptoms as true 'ishq.] Otherwise it could not be called passion when the carnal instinct is absent.”
But just because Islamic law views mutual attraction between males to be natural does not mean that it considers homosexual acts between them to be appropriate. On the contrary, such acts are punishable by the death of both partners if either (1) the transgressors confess to having committed the deed (in which case they are given three chances to retract their confession), or (2) four reputable witnesses can be found, all of whom have personally seen the act of penetration take place. But since neither of these two requirements is easy to satisfy, the penalty prescribed in theory often remains inapplicable in practice.
Thus, as is the case with crimes such as zina’ (fornication), wine drinking, and theft, erotic attraction between males is viewed as a natural temptation to which religious law forbids the believer to yield and for which it prescribes the specific and severe penalty of death. Grand sodomy, like fornication, wine drinking, and theft, is in Islamic law a crime against religion, as opposed to a crime between individuals, such as homicide. Within these parameters, the person committing an act of grand sodomy may personally feel the guilt incurred by a sinner or a criminal, but unlike his Christian counterpart he need not necessarily feel that he is an abnormal or perverted individual. Indeed, he may even be inclined to boast about his homoerotic exploits, just as the fornicator or adulterer may boast about his heterosexual conquests before an approving audience of confidants.
In this area, Islamic jurisprudence was concerned exclusively with acts rather than preferences, proclivities, tendencies, or personalities. Individuals may commit acts of sodomy, but not necessarily because of an inherently sodomitic nature. Since same-sex attraction is viewed as natural, surrendering to a natural temptation cannot make the individual abnormal – merely sinful. Hence, within the restricted limits of discussion set by Islamic law, there was no room for the emergence or delineation of a homosexual personality per se. As a result, the vast corpus of licentious poetry produced by medieval Arabic writers that triad of sins constituted by fornication, pederasty, and wine drinking tends to be interconnected, in the sense that the same poet will frequently boast, occasionaly within the very same poem, of having committed all three activities… Authors such as Abu Nuwas and Ibn Quzman, had we accused them of composing homosexual poetry, would simply not have understood the nature of our accusation and would have responded by pointing to their poems dealing with equally illicit, if heterosexual, escapades and even anacreontic themes; for to them, it was the illicit nature of the escapades they extolled that mattered, not their gender-specific orientation. Moreover, since homoerotic attraction was viewed as perfectly natural by medieval Islamic society (as adulterous attraction is viewed as natural by ours), the forms of repression, internalized guilt, and bids for freedom that characterized homosexuality in modern European and American societies could not and did not develop.
pp. 116-18, “The Striptease that was blamed on Abu Bakr’s Naughty Son: Was Father being shamed, or was the Poet having fun? (Ibn Quzman’s Zajal no. 133)” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J.W. Wright Jr. and Everett Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
Just got back from my HUMS432 class: it was really intense, although enjoyable. This is the well-known History/Humanities junior seminar titled “Medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims Imagining Each Other” taught by Ivan Marcus, Professor of Jewish History: an amazing scholar and a great teacher. The coursework is really interesting, only that the workload is kind of overwhelming: the seminar meets once a week, with nearly 200 pages of reading to do for each class! Like for today’s discussion we had to read the whole of Sura Baqara (the longest chapter in the Qu’ran), and a bunch of other primary texts, including several excerpts from Ibn Hisham’s biography of the Prophet, relevant to accounts of the Jewish tribes living in Medina, such as the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza. It seems that most of our future case studies of Jews in medieval Muslim societies will refer back to the famous Pact of Umar, apparently regarded widely as the best source of understanding the concept of dhimma.
In last week’s reading though, I was really amazed to learn about Karaism, Hasidism and other movements in Jewish religious history. There are amazing examples of how one culture can influence the theological/philosophical thought of another neighboring culture. The “hasidim” were pietist Jews in 13th century Ayyubid Egypt who practised what has been called Jewish Sufism. And of course, the notorious Mu’tazilite movement in medieval Islamic theology influenced Karaite philosophers and other Jewish rationalists. The founder of Judaeo-Arabic philosophy, a Sa’adyah Gaon, who lived in Baghdad, drew inspiration from the Mu’tazilah, and apparently, “the idea that reason and revelation lead to the same religious truths remained a cornerstone of all medieval Jewish religious philosophy after Sa’adyah.”
On a more humorous note, we read a certain account of the life of Jesus that used to be circulated in Jewish communities, and also a medieval Christian account of the life of Muhammad (s). In each of these polemical satires, the unkown authors use terms like “heretic,” “bastard” and “adulterer”, animal imageries, and other insults to describe the prophets. The professor wanted us to note how these authors have used values and paradigms of one culture/tradition to look at something else. Today, he let us off with an interesting point: is it really true that most hatred springs from a lack of knowledge about the people you hate? Because as you learn more about the other, “you filter it through your own grid” and find more to hate. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that the more you know, the more you’re tolerant of others. Interesting! I wonder if/how that should affect my perception of the responsibilites as this year’s co-head of JAM, which, if you didn’t know, is Jews and Muslims at Yale.
