A Personal Cartography of Cordoba

Surprises aside, this was a brilliant place to teach.

We got off the bus in Córdoba a week ago today just in time for lunch. The itinerary gave students an hour and a half before we would meet in the patio of the orange trees just  outside the Great Mosque where, the itinerary said, they would be required to take audio-guides as they walked through the cathedral. And so when my colleague asked me if I had given thought to what route I would take the students on through the cathedral, I answered her that I thought I would leave them to their audio guides and just make sure that I visible at several key points on the walk through to answer any questions they might have.

Turns out that the term "audio-guide" does not mean the same thing in Cordoba as it does in Madrid. This wasn't a false-friends situation in which I assumed a definition for a Spanish word on the basis of an English counterpart; the "audio-guías" at the Prado Museum and even at the Alhambra are exactly the same as you find anywhere else; the audio guides in the Great Mosque of Cordoba are just a speaker system so that a guide can address her group through a microphone and headphones without having to shout and disrupt the quiet and the sanctity of the space. "You are," my colleague said, "the audio-guide."

 Fortunately, even though I haven't been there in fully a decade it's a space I know quite well and whose history I know quite well. It's still the first time I've taken students there, though, and so my colleague drew me a map to show me how she walks students through and what she thinks is important to tell them and what seems like an excess for intro-level students.

This map, drawn for me alone, is the very best souvenir of Cordoba. It's going up in a small frame in my office when I get back.

It speaks, I think, to the very individual ways in which any of us relates to a monument. This is a description of the Great Mosque of Cordoba by a medievalist for another medievalist that reflects the intimacy with which we both know the space. It speaks to the Mosque as a site for teaching as much as it is for anything else for anyone else who might have been there on that day or any other day in the past.

Mostly we think of maps as being for people who are lost. This one says not how much I needed to be told how to make my way through the space, but how much I didn't need to be told; not how much I needed it, but how much I did not.

Even where you might be able to read this map as a way to walk through the space, unless you are its intended reader (me) or one of the few other people in this world with her intellectual and professional profile you can't see where it says "tell them about the flying buttresses" or where it says that al-Hakam II was vain caliph with no sense of political expediency or where it explains how much more advanced engineering was in the tenth century than in the ninth, or the eighth, or in Rome. You might or might not know how many times this space has been consecrated and reconsecrated in the name of competing visions of the same God; I see it written here in ink. Personalized, this is a map through history and ideology as much as it is through space.

Titus Burkhardt described the Great Mosque of Cordoba as a forest of mathematics and history. This isn't the map that could have saved any Little Red Riding Hood walking through it, but it did save me.

The paradox of this map is its explanation of its own innecessity. And the one who can understand it will understand.

Pious Raffle Ephemera

Found in Bobst's copy of the English translation of Judah of Regensburg's Sefer Ḥasidim.

"Ice Here Falls Here": A Visual Critique of the Beinecke

A postcard of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, helpfully annotated in 1963 by the then-university librarian to point out design flaws in the then-brand new building.

Shelfmark RU 106. Currently on display in the Beinecke as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. 

Prayers #20 and #21 for Peace

Rechov Agripas, Jerusalem

GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE! (medieval version)

 

Full marks for effort, major deduction for execution, though.

Personally, even if my cat loved medieval history (he doesn't), I'd still actually put a picture of him on a "lost cat" poster. I mean, if you see a ginger cat wandering Cambridge, are you just supposed to go up to it and start quizzing it on the Battle of Hastings and call the number if it responds?

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the need to advertise the cat's proclivities, but really, if you need a pictures of medieval cats (and yes, I've just used the words "medieval" and "cat" in the same sentence, fully knowing the risk of reigniting the flurry of cat-print-on-manuscript pictures circulating) there are much better options available.

Nevertheless, I do hope these folks find their cat.

Indiana Jonesing

I arrived in London today not having been successful in making contact with the librarian at the London School of Jewish Studies, where I am hoping to track down the early European provenance of a manuscript I'm working on. It was held for a long time as part of what was formerly Jews' College London, originally a rabbinical college and institution of higher education founded by Moses Montefiore. As the college fell into disarray, its associations with the University of London and SOAS were terminated, and the library was in such a shambles that it sold off its Hebrew manuscript collection, which had originally been assembled by one of the early chief rabbis of England. It's not clear what happened to the library's records for those manuscripts once the collection was broken up.

The librarian finally emailed me this morning to tell me that the manuscript I want records for was never owned by JCL. I was prepared to go in with my iPad and argue that this catalogue entry and this insignia in the manuscript say different. (Only I was planning to be more polite than that.)

 

I arrived at the time that the librarian had indicated, only to discover that she'd had to leave due to a death in the family. The problem was that nobody else in the school could tell me anything about the library. The girl at the reception desk took me to the library at the suggestion (by phone) from a library volunteer that she look at a few card boxes on the librarian's desk. No luck. I do have to say, though, the periodicals in this library are catalgogued well, in detail, and many times over in many places.

The receptionist told me she really couldn't let me into the room, but then relented and let me walk up and down the hall while she watched, and then left me to it with a sort of wink and nod.

It's a disaster zone:

It might not look so bad in the pictures, but the boxes and folders contain odd conglomerations of different types of documents: accession records, random periodicals, invoices, correspondence; and very little of it pre-dates the second world war (actually maybe that's part of the problem?).

This floorplan was the only evidence I found of the manuscript collection even having existed. To be fair, I was shuffling quickly and haphazardly, because I didn't want to get caught and kicked out (since I really wasn't supposed to be in there.) It's not an ideal way to work in a disorganized collection with zero finding aids.

Rule number one in handling archives, rare books, and manuscripts is that you must wash your hands when you're finished, especially before you touch your eyes, because you never know what kind of schmutz, arsenic, or bugs you might have gotten on your hands.

I found a book that contained conservation records for print incunables (close, but no cigar!), that had a mummified spider resting on the first page. There was far more wildlife in this hall than one likes to find in a rare book collection.

 

 

And my hands have never, ever been this dirty walking out of a library.

I'm almost ready to accept that I'll never have anything extra-textual that will help me situate this manuscript. I find it to be an infuriating state of affairs because it's not like it's information that was burned by the inquisition or lost sometime in the late Middle Ages: It's been discarded by an institution that doesn't appear to care about its own history or its cultural/religious heritage. It's such a shame.

Deaccessioned from... (?)

In the freshman honors seminar that I am giving in the fall, I am really looking forward to teaching about the Ottoman Hebrew translation of some of the Spanish-language New World chronicles as a way of demonstrating the continuing connections between the Judaeo-Islamic universe and Spain even as it moved forward from its increasing catholicization and oppression and expulsion of religious minorities. I ordered a copy of the Hebrew text from a British bookseller featured on ABE Books.

It arrived with the unaltered mark of it former owner:

I wish that either the library, when it sold off or donated surplus books, or the bookseller when he acquired it, had marked it as "deaccessioned" or in some other way defaced the owner's mark. This makes me just a teeny bit nervous that perhaps it was removed improperly from the library and somehow ended up illicitly in a secondhand bookshop.

Of course, given that I'm currently working on a question of owner's marks in late medieval and early modern books, I'm probably overthinking this.

New Haven Ephemera in an Arabic Grammar

(It's actually Brown University Library's copy of the book, here via Borrow Direct.)

Biblioteca Popular Judía

One of the things I've enjoyed most about being at Penn this year is having access to a specialized research library with some really unique collections that reflect the institution's pre-Penn history as the first college of Jewish Studies in the United States. Much of that collection is still in the process of being catalogued and integrated into the Penn library system (since, as I've mentioned before, previous cataloguing processes were not always totally standard) and so periodically, one will wander into the library and find piles of really interesting, obscure, random works.

Last week they were cataloguing was is apparently the most complete set in an American library of pamphlets in the series "Biblioteca Popular Judía." These were short works put out by the Buenos Aires-based Latin American wing of the World Jewish Congress.

I ended up xeroxing a bunch of them for teaching purposes. The Spanish is quite simple, and the booklets will work really well for my course on modern representations of the Spanish Middle Ages: What did mid-century Argentine Zionists think was important about figures like Maimonides and Judah ha-Levi?

Some of the pamphlets were not original portraits of major figures, but were rather Spanish translations of important (if now dated) academic articles in the field. Those are useful to have for teaching purposes as well, to be able to give students more reading in Spanish where appropriate.

There are hundreds of them — I wish I had snapped a picture of them all spread out on the table downstairs. But alas, they're all now in a box in the second subterranean level of the stacks awaiting the day when someone will finish cataloguing them.

Accessioning Ephemera

Knowing that the library here keeps a file of paper ephemera found in books — notes and scraps left behind by past fellows, past students and faculty of Dropsie College, and past owners collections that were donated upon their deaths — I offered this carnival ticket to the librarian when I found it in a book on tenth-century Arabic poetics.

"Oh," he said. "That doesn't count for very much here."

He proceeded to explain that when the library had to catalogue a large collection that it had just acquired, they used a roll of tickets to keep track of which ones they had entered and which ones they hadn't. And since the tickets were already there and so conveniently and sequentially numbered, those became the accessioning and call numbers for those books. It's unorthodox, to be sure, but only became a problem when they realized they had more books than tickets. Unable to get a different colored roll, they bought a second one of orange tickets and instituted a series of additions and substitutions so that each book could have a ticket and still have its own unique number. Apparently, to really make good use of this collection, you have to understand the system of substitution. It seems like a weirder system of organizing books than most, though alphabetical order, as Borges pointed out, is no less weird, yielding a collection that, when fully and optimally organized, sees hippopotamuses next to Hippocrates.

I love finding bits of paper in library books; better yet is when they have a great, quaint, improbable story to go with them.

Tofu, Semiotics and Sweeping Generalizations

Or, how Hallmark imagines that scholars celebrate the season. Frankly, I think more printed material should have a check-box for scholarly footnotes.

Paper Ephemera from the Library

The Writing on the Wall

Each spoke of the wheel says "love."

This is a life-sized photograph, outdoors and behind plexiglass, of a graffito that was scrawled on a wall in what is now called Rabin Square in 1995, after the political murder of Itzhak Rabin. The legend reads "Sorry." But that doesn't quite capture the depth of meaning of the Hebrew word, which here connotes despair and begging for forgiveness. It gave me goosebumps.

***

From the sublime straight to the absurd:

"Where are the fish??"

"In a giraffe's world, there are no shoes.

We have brothers out past the stars."

Lots more Tel Aviv graffiti after the jump:

Contemporary Christian Arabic Paper Ephemera from Akko

While walking along the sea-facing ramparts of old Akko, I passed by an unassuming brown door with a red cross on it; the guidebook and maps didn't list it as a site to visit, but after considering my options for a few moments, I decided to cover my shoulders with my shawl and try the door. I could hear music inside. And I figured that whatever happened, it wouldn't be worse than the time I got trapped in the Mozarab Mass in the cathedral of Toledo (a story for another time).  It was the church of St. John built during the Ottoman period over the site of the Crusader church of St. Andrew.

When I entered the church, there were two children having a music lesson, taught by a woman playing a synthesizer; they were singing hymns and other religious songs. I arrived just in time for a rousing chorus of "uḥibbuka, yā rabbī yesū'."It was lovely, and so I sat in the back pew for a while and listened and followed along on a printed page of the songs, copies of which were spread along all the pews. I knew I'd get exactly one shot at a photograph, and this was the result:

Before leaving, my attention was grabbed by a small table with cards containing different prayers and requests for interdiction by saints. They are Christian texts written in modern standard Arabic rather than texts written in Christian Arabic, but I found them interesting nonetheless.

The hymnal from which the children were singing, recto and verso:

A benediction:

A prayer card for St. Therese of the Child Jesus, recto and verso:

And another one for St. Jean-Marie de Vianney, recto and verso:

Anybody Alley, Shum-makom, Tel Aviv

I am currently in Tel Aviv ahead of what promises to be a very exciting conference, where I will be presenting work from my ostensible first book chapter. I'll be posting as and when there are academic, medieval, and broadly textual observations to be made.

My flight got in much later than it was originally scheduled for, so I didn't have a full day to explore the city, as I had originally planned. And even if I'd had the whole day, my main goal today was to do whatever it took to not become jet-lagged. So after a brief nap, I went to the home of the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, knowing that it would already be closed by the time I would arrive, but thinking that perhaps seeing the outside and the neighborhood would be sufficient. The little museum there had a few pictures of the interior posted on a board outside, though, and it looks lovely — so I'm going to shoot to go back to visit on Tuesday morning, before the conference begins.

I then visited a street called "Simtat Plonit," or "Anybody Alley," more or less, (ploni, or plonit in the feminine form, in case anybody from the Spanish crowd is reading, is cognate with the Arabic word that yields the Spanish fulano) which the guidebook made sound fantastic: "Walk down this alley to see old Tel Aviv decorative architecture at its best. Two plaster obelisks at the entrance mark the city's first 'gated' community. Note the stucco lion in front of Number 7, which used to have glowing eyes fitted with lightbulbs. The original apartment house is painted pale yellow with a garish orange trim..."

But instead of a history of Tel Aviv aesthetics, it was rather a study in urban decay.

This is the base of one of the obelisks. The sign that is posted says "don't look up!!"

(Click to enlarge any of the images, with the caveat that I had to post copies the files size of which I reduced substantially to be able to upload them on the hotel wifi, so viewing larger may pixelate.)

The lion and the apartment building that had been something completely different in my imagination. (Another photographically-related caveat is that this was meant to be purely illustrative rather than anything resembling a good photo — the sun was high up in the sky and the photographer was exhausted and jet-lagged.):

It was okay, because I happen to find urban decay to be fascinating, and because the urban decay in Israel is so much more visually interesting than anything I've ever come across in the US, though perhaps I've just not looked in the right places. Buildings here, as it seems, are just left to crumble.

And then all of a sudden, there will be a sign of life: a group of people roughly my age, with groceries, who obviously live well in one of the apartments and a man poking his head out of his little bookstore, across the alley from some specimens that weren't so lucky. It gives the impression of Tel Aviv being an ant-hill, with signs here and there that there is much more going on under the surface that is inaccessible until you are really a part of the community.

It did allow me to indulge my obsession with graffiti, though. If I have a text fetish, truly this is it. 

(Translations for these longer ones are forthcoming. I've already translated the shorter ones below.)

And some more from central Tel Aviv:

"We have come to banish the darkness." (A line from a Hannukah song.)

"In a country in which women can sit  get upset in the driver's seat, women can sit get upset everywhere."

"Rosa Parks also changed the world without getting out of her seat."

"Nu-nu-nu-nu-nudnik."

This one is hilarious if you know the least bit about the visual idiom of Israeli graffiti. One of the most common graffiti is "Na-nach-nachm-nachman me-Uman," which is a reference to a Hassidic story about rabbinic succession. This plays on the look of that graffiti, substituting the word nudnik, which means pest/irritating person, for the name Nachman.

So that's my snapshot, as it were, of the Kulturkreis. (Another reason I like graffiti — it's so good for that!) Lots more English graffiti since I was here last; that's the only major observation I have so far. I was also a little puzzled by the frequency of graffiti by apparent supporters of the Manchester United football club. Tomorrow I go to Jaffa, and so the adventures promise to be a little more medieval. Or Ottoman, at least.