Banned Books and the Memory of a Promise

I'm writing about the Middle East in this post. I'm not sure what's come over me except to say that I've read a bunch of news items in the last few weeks that have seen books become casualties of the (mercifully, at the moment relatively cold) war between Israelis and Palestinians. Neither side is helping its own cause this way. Reading is a political act only when it is done in resistance to a certain kind of lunacy that bans books and silences writers; the banners of the books below would have paradoxically achieved their goals of stripping reading of its leaden significance if they had only stood down, or not stood up in the first place. When books go, people follow; nobody is saved by any of this.

As far as potential comments go, disagreement, dissent and debate are encouraged; hate, screeds, name-calling and anything off-topic will not even make it through moderation, let alone be responded to. Act like a human being even if you think I'm wrong. Let's have a civilized discussion than shouting or silence.

In fact, that's kind of the heart of the matter.

***

Although I lived in Jerusalem between university and graduate school, I'd never spent much time in Tel Aviv before my trip two weeks ago. Even that wasn't much time, but it was enough for me to start to get a sense of it. And one of the things that three days marching around Tel Aviv really drives home is just how awful the British were as mandatory governors. You don't walk more than a few blocks without seeing a plaque that commemorates the kidnap of Lechi commanders by the British or some officer opening fire on civilians for no particularly good reason. It's like walking around London and being aware of all the signs that commemorate so-and-so air raid warden killed or building destroyed in the Blitz, or going anywhere in New York and seeing a fire truck that will inevitably have a list of ten or more names down the side of of guys from that squad who were killed on 9/11. In commemorating, the cities shows off their scars of foreign-inflicted wounds and force your eyes to them, making you look and remember. Walking in Tel Aviv was the first concrete occasion I had to question the value of empire, the splendor of the queen and my general, overwhelming Anglophilia. God, the British were awful in Tel Aviv.

Yet in spite of the constant reminders of the human and cultural costs of British rule, the Israeli government has, in the last five years, revived a 1939 Mandate-period British law forbidding the import of books from enemy countries and has begun, suddenly, to enforce it. The Israeli legal system is based upon the idea of common law, which means that until they are replaced by new laws or court decisions, bits of Ottoman Turkish and imperial British jurisprudence remain in force; there is no constitution, though the declaration of independence fills that function in many legal situations. That document affirms the role of the Book of Books in the establishment and culture of the modern state of Israel. It is, at its core and outset a literary state. But the law on the books, the law on books and the Book are in conflict.

As unconscionable as it is to ban the import of books, enforcement of the law has taken an absurdist new twist. Something close to 80 copies of perhaps the single most proto-Zionist work of medieval philosophy, in a new edition printed in Lebanon by a German publishing house, are being held at the border crossing at the Allenby Bridge since their import would violate that 1939 law. The work in question originally appeared shortly before 1140 under the title Kitāb al-radd wa-l-dalīl fī l-dīn al-ḏalīl.

The book that would commonly come to be known commonly as The Kuzari was, in its original Arabic, entitled The Book of Proofs and Refutations in Defense of the Despised Faith. Different scholars take different views as to the nature of the text, and even to the intended audience. The basic structure of the Kuzari is a series of dialogues between a fictionalized version of a Khazar king who, as the text repeats several times, discovers that his intentions are pleasing to God but his actions are not, and the representatives of a variety of belief systems: Islam, Christianity and philosophy. He asks each representative to explain his system of beliefs and how it could be used to guide him to act in a way that would please God. After being unconvinced by all three, he deigns to consult with a Jew. He is convinced and converts, and four books follow detailing its author's accounting of the correct way to practice Judaism, spoken through the mouth of the Khazar king's Jewish companion. In the end, the companion decided that the only logical conclusion to everything that he has told the king is that he himself must move to the land of Israel. The text was written shortly before its author, Judah ha-Levi, did the same, abandoning what most of his contemporaries considered to be the true Zion, Spain, for the holy land, having decided that this was the only sufficient way to practice his faith.

 The text was written in Judaeo-Arabic, one of the dialects considered to be part of the bundle known as Middle Arabic. The  most prominent feature of its written form is the use of Hebrew, rather than Arabic, script, though there are also syntactic and lexical features that distinguish it from classical Arabic and the other middle Arabic dialects.  It was in common use among Jews in Islamic countries through the middle of the 20th century; there are still speakers today, and you can even listen to some Israeli radio broadcasts in the language.

But in the academy, Judaeo-Arabic has fallen well out of the mainstream of the fields broadly defined as Arabic and Islamic Studies, an academic discipline that is itself heir in all but name to the venerable philological discipline with the now-unfashionably moniker of Oriental Studies. Although learning the script would be just a first step towards understanding the language, a good many mainstream Arabists won't even do that. And so Nabih Bashir, an Arab Muslim Israeli citizen and doctoral student of medieval philosophy at Ben-Gurion University, decided that in order to give  the Kuzari a wider audience, he would transcribe it into Arabic characters. His edition would begin to help sidestep problem of reluctance on the part of mainstream scholars in Arabic and Islamic studies fields to give heed to the Judaeo-Arabic philosophy that very much grew up as a native part of the Islamic world and that is deeply connected with Arabo-Islamic philosophy. Since even learning the Hebrew alphabet is, by and large, a step too far, Bashir's edition brings, as it were, the mountain to Muhammad.

But the Israeli government is being just as closed-minded. So for now, the mountain is trapped in a customs station named for a British general, because of the enforcement of an anachronistic British law. Perhaps the relevant cabinet ministers and customs officials ought to take a stroll through Tel Aviv and review some of those placards before they reinstitute any more of rule britannica.

***

In a positive development, Hebrew and Arabic can be seen coexisting in a new digital resource:

The Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary of Modern Arabic

***

But that might be about it.

This week saw the collapse of a memorial volume that would have been published under the aegis of the University of Texas-Austin Center for Middle Eastern Studies in honor of the life of one of its founding professors. Thirteen scholars thought it more important for their work not to appear in the same volume as work by Israeli scholars than it was to honor the work of a beloved colleague and withdrew after the university press rightly refused to boot the Israelis from the project. Those thirteen withdrew and with half the volume gone, the editors scrubbed the project. The title that would have been seems that much more apt now: Memory of a Promise.

The way that the Times Higher Ed version of the story (the above link) reads, it sounds as if the editors were reluctant to publish a volume without the work of any Arab scholars; if that were the case, I would condemn the editors for playing identity politics. After all, surely there are non-Arabs who write about Arabic literature, and as long as the material is all covered, then who cares? But a little digging around online revealed a more complex picture. The memorial volume was not to be scholarship, but rather a collection of short fictions, the type of anthology where having no Arab writers would, in fact, distort the picture badly.

I don't believe in intellectual boycotts. First, they frequently target precisely the wrong people, that is, those who are on the cutting edge of whatever change is desired. Second, ideally scholarship should be apolitical. It isn't always, but a boycott drags it down, irredeemably to that level. Third, stopping the flow of information only hurts everyone. Additionally, boycotts are frequently a cudgel wielded hypocritically and inconsistently; many people who boycott Israeli academics in the humanities also don't think twice about taking, or allowing their family members to take, life-saving drugs compounded based upon science and technology developed in Israel.

So I would generally be disposed against such an action. But I found the rationale for this one to be articulated particularly weakly: The first author to withdraw finds Israel to be "obnoxious"? That's the first and strongest word that she, a writer, can come up with? The flimsiness of her argument, both in her op-ed piece and the interview she gave (see the links above), represented by this kind of weak rhetoric does not compel me to change my mind.

Does silencing  yourself help your cause? Is a self-imposed silence, while perhaps more righteous, any less quiescent than one imposed by a censor or an enemy?

Does refusing to honor a dead colleague mitigate your undeniable plight?

The zero sum is added up all wrong. It seems as counterproductive as — gosh, where to find an analogue? — Jews quarantining a Judaeo-Arabic book because it was transcribed into Arabic script and published in Lebanon.

A Canticle for Daniel, Part II

This is the second of three parts. The prologue to the series is here and part one is here.

Even if there were nothing else to it, I would think that a request to stop forced conversions from a people that has lived for more than two thousand years under the threat of forced conversions ought to be respected.

But there is more to it.

For people to suggest that we are just being angry, over-sensitive Jews reeks of the kind of gaslighting that would never be acceptable if it were done, for example, to women as a class of individuals. Imagine: I don' t understand what you women think is such a big deal about rape jokes; nobody's actually getting raped, and it doesn't affect anyone's body or physical safety. You're just being pissy; get a grip. Don't be so sensitive about it. Rape jokes are a big deal because they make light of an important issue, namely women's safety and autonomy.

Posthumous baptism in the Mormon church makes light of my beliefs and denies me and my ancestors the autonomy to make our own spiritual decisions. It treats us like children who chose not to become saved in our lives, so it's going to be done for us whether we want it or not. Rather than letting us go, according to their own belief system, and letting our eternal souls live with whatever the consequences might be — even if they are very negative in terms of Mormon beliefs — they hunt us down and force us into their vision of salvation. To baptize me as a Mormon doesn't actually make me a Mormon as far as I'm concerned, as far as my family would be concerned or as far as God is concerned. It doesn't mean, though, that I don't want my choice to remain not-a-Mormon to be respected. Your right to throw punches ends at the edge of my cheek; your right to religious actions ends at the edge of my religion.

I'm writing as if there is a monolith. There isn't, of course. For dissenting views, see this Slate roundtable discussion amongst its Jewish staff writers about whether they'd object or not to being baptized posthumously. I don't agree with him, but I do like Matthew Yglesias' formulation of his position as: "I feel that the Mormon view that they should posthumously baptize me so I go to heaven is better than the orthodox [sic?] Christian view that I should just burn in hell forever." But as for me, I prefer the flip side. There is a material distinction between a Catholic praying for my soul or for my conversion and Mormon acting to effect it, and the distinction lies in the respect for autonomy.

It has been argued in the blogosphere that since only our names are implicated, we shouldn't be so worked up about it. But the sanctity of our names is everything. People can and do desecrate our graves and our bodies — even today and even in the United States — and so our names are the only thing that we ever truly and fully possess. Man is not remembered by his corpse but rather by his name; names are central to mourning rituals and to remembrance. A typical honorific that is said of a dead person is "may his memory be a blessing." It is frequently also given as, "may his name be a blessing." We honor our dead not by mourning them, but by remembering them and by sanctifying God and studying in their names. We read out the names in synagogue of those whose death anniversary fell during the previous week in order to honor their memories. We observe Holocaust Remembrance Day by reading out the names, for twenty-four hours straight, of Hitler's victims. To curse someone in the strongest terms, we say: "Let his name be erased!" The sacred name of a dead Jew is anything but a triviality.

By the by, doesn't everyone want control of his or her name? Witness the trademarking, for example, of variations on Jeremy Lin's name, to cite only the most recent of celebrity examples. Take a look at the famed British libel laws. And as Juliet learned as she implored Romeo to "doff thy name" and begged to understand "what's in a name," for however trivial a name may seem, its power is inescapable. We may have specific cultural and religious reasons to object to the co-opting of our names, but it's not as if the rest of the world can't understand it.

Writing about this issue has forced me to better articulate the reconciliation between the day-to-day secularism of my lived life and the belief system that is at the core of my identity. I live assimilated, but still believe. I think that a lot of secular writers dismiss religion as a lot of hokum. Even as I used to, as well. One of the things that really changed my mind was reading Madeleine Albright's memoirs, and specifically the section in which she wrote about realizing that taking people's religious claims seriously had to be part of the Middle East peace negotiations. You couldn't just tell Christians that their claim to the Holy Sepulchre was a silly attachment to a building or Muslims that they should swap out the Temple Mount for more land in the West Bank because what's a rock, anyway? You might think it's silly. I might think it's silly. Madeleine Albright might think it's silly. But it is still real in that it is going to govern how people behave, and that must be accounted for. This kind of dismissal is practiced, then, by people who will never be able to understand why it is upsetting and who will never be able to be compassionate to the suffering that this kind of practice causes. Religion is something to be accounted for even if you don't believe it fully or at all.

Even though I have come around, perhaps it is still hubris and secularism that allows me to say that I'd rather be damned, thanks. But even if I were deeply religious, I would come to the same conclusion even though the reasoning is different: You believe that you are right and I let you; I believe that I am right, so let me. And let God sort it out in the end.

It's real even though it's not real. It doesn't change things. As Daniel Pearl's parents said when the news broke, with more grace than I would ever be able to muster, he died as a Jew and his eternal fate is as a Jew. But that also doesn't mean that it's not important or that we're wrong to be disgusted by the practice. It's one of those sensitive, cracked-up paradoxes to be held only by a first-rate mind: This thing that doesn't matter at all is everything.

A Canticle for Daniel, Part I

This will be a three-part series. The prologue is here.

Sometimes I wonder about the validity of the hedonistic, comfortable life I lead with my head buried deep in books or in the thirteenth century. Particularly if I've had a frustrating time teaching, I have a sense that I'm doing nothing to improve the world or make a mark. So I suppose that one small, quiet thing that I can do is to make different types of knowledge accessible, organized in an original and thought-provoking fashion — that is, be a certain type of long-form talking head and hope for the best. The medieval can be a guide, but so, too, is the twentieth century with its nationalism, new borders, cycle of despotism and the fearless reporting that was the first draft of it all. What follows is a most literary excerpt from that first draft, a lesser-known 1934 essay by Jorge Luis Borges entitled "Yo, judío," translated here by Eliot Weinberger:

Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past is one of those things that can enrich ignorance. It is infinitely malleable and agreeable, far more obliging than the future and far less demanding of our efforts. It is the famous season favored by all mythologies.

Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol, in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my 'Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden' (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me).

Borges Acevedo is my name. Ramos Mejía, in a note to the fifth chapter of Rosas and His Times, lists the family names in Buenos Aires at that time in order to demonstrate that all, or almost all, 'came from Judaeo-Portuguese stock.' 'Acevedo' is included in this list: the only supporting evidence for my Jewish pretensions until this confirmation in Crisol. Nevertheless, Captain Honorio Acevedo undertook a detailed investigation that I cannot ignore. His study notes that the first Acevedo to disembark on this land was the Catalan don Pedro de Azevedo in 1728: landholder, settler of 'Pago de los Arroyos,' father and grandfather of cattle ranchers in that province, a notable who figures in the annals of the parish of Santa Fe and in the documents of the history of the Viceroyalty — an ancestor, in short, irreparably Spanish.

Two hundred years and I can't find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.

I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.

Statistically, the Hebrews were few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan Province everywhere? Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews but never Phonecians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphalagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Lybians, Cyclopes or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of Memphis, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gift was granted. 

In Borges' reality, to be made a Jew is an act formed of malice and "outing;" in the present reality to be baptized is articulated an act of kindness. But the Mormon act is nothing more than the flip side of what was done to Borges in Crisol; both make being Jewish a flaw to be identified and remedied. Borges, though, walks cleanly down the line between what is and what might have been, fantasizing and stopping short of becoming his own inquisitor. Though he might have wished it to be different, he does what he can with the past he can identify and leaves the rest to hope, prayer, imagination.

He extends the same courtesy to his ancestors: In the realidad histórica, there are two: the visible Spanish viceroy and the missing Israelite. As an essayist, all he can do is present the gaping short distance between them rather than remedy it.

He also raises one of the interesting archival problems that the Mormon baptismal project creates. Intimating an answer of not much at all, Borges asks: "What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan Province everywhere?" What would we think? By posthumous baptism, the Latter-Day Saints are creating a world where future historians will find Mormons everywhere. They are creating a world where the five-hundred-years-from-now versions of ourselves will find people of San Juan Province everywhere. They're not making themselves the new Israel like early Christians did, or even like the Boston Puritans who made their colony a beacon on a hill as a light unto the nations; instead they are making themselves a latter-day Israel, the unqualified obsession of the modern age.

This is the enrichment of ignorance.

"My Name is Daniel Pearl... My Father is Jewish. My Mother is Jewish. I am Jewish."

Mormon Church Posthumously Baptized Slain Journalist Daniel Pearl 

***

I don't really want to write about politics or contemporary religion in this blog. I wrote about Occupy when it was on campus, because that seemed relevant to my academic life. I think I'm going to make an exception, though, now that the the latest story has emerged with the identity of another dead Jewish person who has been baptized in the Mormon Church. At some point, as academics, we have a responsibility to engage with the modern world. I've written before about my threshold for disregarding that modern world as being pretty high. But I've reached it. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish, maybe it's because I'm a scholar of religious conflict and coexistence, maybe it's because I miss the younger, invincible version of myself who fearlessly wanted to be a war correspondent. Whatever the reason, I'm climbing the privileged cloistered walls of the academy and of the middle ages to say this:

Cut it out. Now.

This is a man who died trying to bring us a story that would have made us all more human because it would have allowed us greater insight into the war being waged in our national name. He was courageous and he died professing his religion. He suffered for being a journalist, and he may have even suffered more for being a Jew. The title of the video that depicts his death was "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl." Those are the two things he died for: The story and the faith. Leave him, in death, with both of them.

Since Mitt Romney, who is Mormon, began his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency, the media have focused much more attention on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Some of that media coverage has been deeply unfair: How many stories about Mormon sumptuary strictures included the phrase "magic underpants"? But some of it has also drawn attention to the deplorable practice of baptizing dead people as Mormons. Recently, most attention has gone to the posthumous baptisms of the parents of Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal, all of whom perished in the Holocaust, but it turns out that President Obama's mother was also baptized after her death from cancer. We are taught as children not to speak ill of the dead because they cannot defend themselves; surely co-opting and commandeering the spiritual lives of the dead who have no choice in associating themselves or not with a particular set of beliefs should fall under the same prohibition.

The pace of the internet and the blogosphere is such that I wanted to post something while this was still newsworthy and not a week or a month from now when I will have had more time to reflect in a historically-informed and rigorous fashion. I've been struggling for a while to formulate, in intellectual terms, what bothers me so much on the gut level about this practice of posthumously baptizing Jews as Mormons — that is, to perform my responsibility as an academic and offer some kind of thoughtful and contextual commentary on a serious issue of the contemporary world. On some level, my rational self argues back: They're dead. And none of it's real. So why get so exercised about it? But every time I see a story like this one, it eats away at me. I'm still shaking now thinking about Daniel Pearl. I'm not yet ready to function with my academic hat on. Not about this. I'm still just trying to put one foot in front of the other wearing my human hat. So there will be more about this topic in this space.

But for now, please, just leave my dead alone.

mi she-nolad hirviach/ yechi ha-melech ha-mashiach*

Strictly from an anthropological perspective, I'm really pleased that I went home for lunch when I did, to be able to see this scene from my living room window:

(Click any of these to enlarge.)

For the moment, I'll simply observe that there are grammatical/lexical mistakes that one is prone to making in Arabic when one approaches it solely from the perspective of it being a cognate language to Hebrew. And I'll  reserve all other observations, even about the Spanish van.

*I'm also not going to explain the title of this post. Either you will recognize the musical-cultural-literary reference or you won't, ve-ha-meyvin yavin.

Occupy Wall Street, via the Square

I'm veering far out of my comfort zone by going within ten feet of current events on this blog; but the Occupy Wall Street protest set up camp today in Washington Square Park, so the current events are now within a stone's throw from my office. (Metaphorically, of course. Nobody's throwing stones. Not yet, anyway.) The tide of the twenty-first century is, once again and perhaps inexorably, lapping at the gates of my thirteenth-century oasis.

I went to return some library books and take a walk today, and there were eight mounted police officers between my apartment and the library, scores that I could see on foot and on motorbikes, and police cars and vans lining the perimeter of the park.  Normally, regardless of where I go walking, I have to go up the western edge of the park. Not today. I took a detour up Greene Street to 8th Ave because I didn't even want to be on the edge of the park if the police started arresting people. I wondered whether it might be worth taking some photographs; but again, my desire not to get arrested won the day. This struck me at first as terribly cowardly. The woman going out of her way to avoid a false arrest is not the woman I thought I would be. Right up to the time I decided to forsake modernity for the middle ages, I wanted to be a hot-shot journalist who would set the world on fire by running into the heart of all the places that every sane person was fleeing, who would afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and who would most definitely go to jail and rot away there if need be to defend the First Amendment.

I don't think that I've changed, though; instead, it's that I'm simply not compelled by this protest and so I'm not willing to risk anything to make a point with respect to it. Not as a protestor and not as a photographer or observer. If I'm going to get arrested to make a point about police power, I also want, tangentially for the arrest to be related to a cause I really support. (Or alternatively, I can imagine being willing to be arrested while photographing or observing a rally for a cause I truly abhorred.) This cause? There is no cause. I wasn't annoyed with the police for this state of affairs, even though I am well aware of the allegations that there have been many, many improper arrests over the course of this vigil.  Instead, I was cross that the protestors were essentially forcing me to choose between living an expression of my deep belief in the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and getting onboard with one of my great bugaboos, overenthusiastic but sloppy thinking.

A protest with no goal is not going to end with results. A bunch of people in a park with no specific, coherent demands and no real plan of action is not going to command the attention of anyone in a position to effect change. Down with the establishment, full stop is not a viable protest platform. For all the nods in the rhetoric to the Arab spring, the American protesters' attention seems to have shifted before they noticed that the protests in Egypt may have accidentally made things worse. That's not to say that the Egyptian uprising shouldn't have happened. It should have. Mubarak was a kleptocrat and a maniacal dictator. And it's not to say that the current protests shouldn't happen. They should. The big banks, with government collusion, have wrecked our livelihoods and the basic sense of equal justice under the law that we still like to think is our birthright. It's simply to say that down with the establishment is a meaningless proposition when it is not coupled with an idea of what should go up in its place.

So, to the protesters: When you get that figured out, I'll be marching and getting arrested right there with you. But until then, please, I'd just like the park back.

Edited on 10/20/11 to add: I can't even tell for sure if this is a sincere aspect of the protest or whether it is an elaborate performance or satire, but assuming for a moment the former,  if an offshoot movement is protesting museums' limited purchasing repertoire from amongst current working artists as a form of cultural oppression, then why, oh why, are they "occupying" a museum that doesn't have a contemporary art collection? I'm utterly done waiting for this protest to start being sensible.