Guest Lectures, Omissions, and Dumb Visigoths

A really terrible account of Islamic Spain was posted to the academic blogosphere a couple of weeks ago by a modernist. (Not going to link to it.) It basically read like a parody of what critics of Ornament of the World make that book out to be. One medievalist (not me) responded and the author replied with ad hominem attacks against her and against medievalists in general and defended her post in an argument that boiled down to, well, it's a blog post and not a doctoral dissertation (And also: Not all cultures are equal so how dare you call me out for saying that the Visigoths were dumb? I really wish I were kidding, or even exaggerating.)

The blog post =/= dissertation formulation was on my mind this week because I was preparing a guest lecture to give in a colleague's class. It's a "presidential honors seminar," part of a program for the best and brightest NYU freshmen that includes extra access to advising and enrichment, and participation in a seminar that meets every other week and culminates in a trip  to the part of the world that they are learning about. My colleague is teaching the "Spain" seminar, and my guest lecture was the only thing that these students were going to hear about the Middle Ages. It's the guest teaching equivalent of writing a single blog post or teaching one single session on the Middle Ages in a big survey course.

To be sure, I couldn't do more than give a sledgehammer overview of the period. There's even a decent possibility that the group of students I met now think that the red-and-white alternating vouissoir is the single most important cultural development in the Middle Ages — because the Great Mosque of Cordoba is a really nice encapsulated way to talk about interreligious cultural relationships at that time and place; and because it's concrete, it works well under limits of time and continuity. I did a lot of that kind of shorthanding. I compared the mythology that grew up around the Cid to the mythology that grew up around George Washington because it was an analogy that allowed me to say a lot in just a minute or two, even though it's never an analogy I'd use in a semester-long class. I used the word multicultural, which I hate. And I used the world hybrid, which I spend a lot of time unpacking when I use it in seminars.

I showed these slides and did not once mention the word Almohad (an omission that should be abhorrent to me as a cultural historian of 12th and 13th century Spain), instead explaining that artistic and architectural tastes changed over time and that synagogues and palaces, just as much as mosques, kept up with the times.

But all of the shorthanding and all of the omission was done in the service of conveying the one main idea that I wanted them to take away: That religion is one factor amongst many, including economic interest, taste, desire for power, that goverened people's behavior in the Middle Ages; that they gravitate towards what is familiar to them without regard for its complex history; and in this respect, people in the Middle Ages weren't all that different to us. I thought that was a good takeway for a bunch of college freshmen I'd only ever meet once before they were loosed on the historic Toledo which survives unscathed in name only. It's not how I'd talk to my own students and certainly not how I'd talk to my colleagues (it's also not how I'd shorthand it for my own blog post or even for a general public talk to an older lay audience outside of a university setting) but there's still a certain integrity and logic to the talk that I gave.

So I've really said all of this to hopefully start a conversation.

We all make judgment calls and omissions and elisions when introducing material in introductory classes, and even moreso when we're stepping into someone else's class for one session or giving a public talk. I'm curious to hear what kinds of judgment calls other people make? What do skip when you're pressed for time? What would you unpack in a seminar that you leave at face value in a one-off talk? What kinds of principles or ideas or guiding frames help shape your thinking about what to leave in and what to take out?

Okay. Go.

Voir Dire

I’ve been summoned to jury duty next month.

I know that nobody ever wants to do jury service (with one serious, fabulous exception I can think of), but the idea of having to go down there and get empaneled (because the City and County of New York, unlike the City and County of San Francisco, does seem to empanel most people) while I’m on research leave seemed to me like a special sort of dreadful. It got me thinking about the absolute extent to which being on the tenure track skews one’s priorities. I know jury service is important. I know that smart people are exactly the ones who shouldn’t try to get out of it. I know that the obligation of women to serve on juries is barely older than I am, from a constitutional-legal perspective (Duren v. Missouri, 1979), and that women serving is tremendously important in ensuring trial by peer. But all of that logic keeps circling back to: But, while I’m on research leave? For my first book? My tenure book? Now? Trying to finish up my book manuscript has turned me into an incredibly tedious person. I'm not proud or happy about the fact that I care less about a lofty ideal of justice for the people who breathe the same air that I do than about some kind of historical-narrative justice for their 800-years-dead familiars. There's a lot of talk about justice and the academy these days — not in these terms, but I think it's another manifestation of the bigger problem. 

I’m looking forward to having my head and a slighter wider horizon back. But for now, in my current frame of mind, this is how the voir dire, the jury selection process, played itself out in my head last night:

— Have you served on a jury before?

--- Yes, sir.

— Did you think the outcome was fair?

--- Hard to say, in the end.

— Did you think the process was fair?

--- No, sir, I didn’t. It was a civil case. We were determining damages for a personal injury case that had already been decided. We weren’t even talking about orders of magnitude of difference and we just didn’t have a frame of reference for what might have been the right decision. It seemed like the sort of thing that a judge or an arbiter could have decided faster and probably more fairly. It wasn’t fair and it was a colossal waste of time.

— The plaintiff was entitled to have a jury decide.

--- Yes she was, sir.

— Do you think the criminal justice system has the capacity to be fair?

--- I think it has the capacity to be fair, sir, but most of the time it isn’t. That’s what I think, anyway. I think that if you’re not white, it’s hard to get justice and hard to be treated fairly.

--- I think that the current jury system brings out the worst in people. It incentivizes acting like a nut in this setting. The last time I was called for jury duty, there was a woman who was either acting nuts or only pretending to be a nurse, or the Mount Zion HIV/AIDS clinic has a real problem because she claimed to be a nurse for them. And I’m not proud, but you are talking to someone, you are about to empanel someone who cares more about her career right now than about justice.

— What is your career?

--- I’m a college professor, sir.

— What days do you teach this semester?

--- I’m on sabbatical, sir, so I don’t have regular classes that I’ll miss, but actually, that would be easier. I could ask a colleague to fill in or reschedule two, or even three meetings with my students for later in the semester. But if you take me away from my research for two weeks now, that’s two weeks that I’m not going to get back. I’m at a point where two weeks matters, where it could make the difference between finishing my book in time to submit it for tenure or not finishing in time. I know jury duty is important but I don’t want to lose my job.

— You can’t be fired for serving on a jury.

--- That’s not how tenure cases work, sir.

— You don’t want to be here, then.

--- It might be that I don’t give a damn anymore, but it might also be that I don’t give a damn again yet. I hope that’s all it is. Let me postpone to 2017 and we’ll see.

A Wikipedia Dissent

There's been a lot of talk lately about the value of scholars participating in Wikipedia editing.

There were some declarations of victory from the digital humanities community when this obituary appeared, fronting the work of its late subject in editing tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles. To me, though, it didn't seem like a great victory for DH nor a great way for a scholar to be remembered.

I have to question the tact of declaring academic-disciplinary victory on the basis of an obituary, especially one of someone who died so young, but I might also be saying that out of a sense of my own discomfort about likewise using an obituary, especially one of someone who died so young, to make a point. I should just add that fundamentally, I'm critical of the priorities of the obituary and the positive response to it in the digital community, and not of the work of the scholar memorialized. I probably wouldn't even have written about this were it not for the proliferation of scholarly Wikipedia write-ins that have been happening this year, the next one I'm aware of being scheduled for Kalamazoo. Details are here.

I absolutely believe that as scholars we have a responsibility to disseminate our knowledge the general public but I don't think that Wikipedia editing is a worthwhile focus.  The inherent structure of wikipedia is such that this endeavor is, in effect, shifting sand from one pile to the other and hoping that it doesn't get moved back. One could spend four days or a career editing entries with no guarantee that one's work won't be overwritten or undone. It might be a striking metaphor for life and humanistic endeavor, and it might even be just a very extreme version of what all of us are doing, but the degree of difference seems important. Or, as my late mentor put it aphoristically: The only things that last are books and children. That's not to say that I believe only in books or that I do not believe in digital work; rather that Wikipedia editing is neither digital scholarship nor good public outreach.

And what's more, having scholars edit articles, either in an organized or disorganized fashion, in an order or at random, still does not make Wikipedia a scholarly resource. Wikipedia is still always going to be the thing that I tell my students they can't use. There's no reliable way to identify which articles have been fixed by scholars, whether the fixes haven't been edited by somebody else with a less-than-scholarly agenda, and I can't identify which scholars have written which articles. Add those to all the existing reasons — the obvious one about it being something that anyone can edit; the more existential one about what it means to call an article "scholarly" within a digital work that is itself not scholarly; and perhaps the one that should most bother all of us and especially the people spending their time on this: Wikipedia does not allow editing based on primary sources.

The account of one historian's attempt to edit the entry for his own subject matter is very instructive of all these problems.

Finally, the current iteration of Wikipedia writing-in requires the physical presence of medievalists at the big national conference in Kalamazoo, MI, a place that is difficult and expensive to get to for a meeting that medievalists who don't work in very traditional areas of scholarship often don't find to be useful. Several people have asked on the listserves whether they can participate remotely and have been told that no, they must be present in Kalamazoo to watch a demonstration. The preposterousness of requiring that Wiki editors be physically present at the edit-a-thon seems to cut at the heart of a digital enterprise and seriously talks down to medievalists as a group. There are people asking to volunteer at a distance; presumably those are the ones who are comfortable reading through documentation that, theoretically, anybody should be able to read through — after all, isn't that the point of Wikipedia? — and getting themselves started. What does it mean for a digital project to be catering, on the production end, to technophobes?

Briefest of updates, added 5/4/14, after the jump:

Pass (Part II)

Part I is here. Just a heads up: This post quotes from a play that uses the f-word. I've reproduced it intact in the quotation.

***

Jews as white folk? This is where the terminology becomes problematic because it conflates religion and race, although that’s really a separate matter that deserves its own post. But this terminology also attempts to inextricably conflates race with power, implying that just because I look European-ish I am a part of the power structure. The idea that whiteness is the proxy for power reminds me of the scene in Angels in America when Roy Cohn, the fictional alter ego of the eponymous man who tried the Rosenbergs and pulled the strings at HUAC, explains that he’s not gay even though he sleeps with men because he’s also powerful:

“Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. "Gay", "homosexual", "lesbian"; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn't understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?... Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.” (Tony Kushner, Angels in America)

Heterosexual as powerful, white as powerful, those careless substitutions are harmful all around, I think. To describe "bad feminists" with the term "white feminists" racializes social evil even in spite of all the caveats that one can be white and a feminist and not be a "white feminist." It conflates an oppressed class with an eternally, existentially, definitionally powerless one. If white is a proxy for power, then nobody else can ever even aspire to have it. The converse is just as harmful: witness a recent blog post (relevant because tenure and race have become conflated in what Another Damned Medievalist has termed the “winter privilege wars”) in which the author was given the pseudonym “Adjunct Nate” in spite of his not being an adjunct because he “has solidarity.” It ends the conversation before it begins it because nobody who isn’t an adjunct (or an honorary one, as determined by whom?) can possibly be on the “right” side or have anything productive to say. The terminology becomes pernicious destiny.

What’s more, in terms of facilitating a broader conversation in which those “white folks” begin to behave and discuss in more productive ways, then railing rightly against a warped system or structure by making broad claims about white folk is going to put a lot of white folk on the back foot. And sure, an ideal reaction would be for those people to take themselves out of it and not to react by saying, well, I’m not like that! I know this probably puts me in the bad or useless ally category, but I see it simply as realistic. (And frankly, given that the standard-bearer of what constitutes a good ally has herself just been caught out making fun of interracial families, perhaps the absolute authoritativeness of her opinions in such matters and her poetics of discourse ought to be revisited.)

Defensiveness is going to be a suboptimal but natural and not uncommon reaction; and it seems that it would be better all around to have both a more precise discussion and one that allows more people to participate. I know that critical race theory has moved beyond this, that conversations about being a good ally are done and dusted, but I’m not sure they should be. There’s something deeply twisted about ADM feeling that she has to write, in the post linked above: “I don’t want anybody to think I think like that.” I don’t want anybody to think I think like that either; in other words, don’t assume that I’m one thing intellectually or in my approach to the world because I'm in your category of white people.

The idea that being allied or supportive or just a basic not-bad person requires simply taking everything that’s dished out, and that there’s only one correct way to have these conversations, and that white people should be shouted down and should be shut out for even asking questions; to my mind, activism and education go hand in hand. It’s not a question of understanding or approving but simply of being practical and realistic. I’ll put the nail in my own coffin and quote Claire Potter, who has been demonized as an arch-conservative (which, I think, says something more about the academy at large than it does about her): “Allies don’t let allies make excuses; they push for better analysis.”

Anything short of that is a Catch-22 in that it forces people to say, oh, I’m not that kind of white person, I don’t think like that, which is also an unacceptable thing to say:

The Twitterverse is sweeping a spokesman and her movement on its shoulders as its current hero-darling. It’s a popular message that it’s easy for people to get on board with unquestioningly. It makes me want to exercise my prerogative as a medievalist and disconnect from the web. I know exactly what criticisms I’m going to receive for saying what I’ve said here, and I realize it may be stupid for me to post this now, when I don’t have time to play along or argue back because I’m trying to finish a book project. But I think it’s worth being a little critical before adopting and heralding and celebrating a subtly-but-deeply flawed message of justice.*

The twin rhetorical techniques of piling on and shouting down is just a long winded, cathartic way of saying: Get out. (And I know that saying this opens me to charges of “tone policing.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.) But two cases where other academics were trying to think through structural issues this winter are perfect counterpoints that illustrate the problem. Claire Potter, quoted above, is a prominent academic blogger who wrote about the extent to which internet rage is or isn’t a productive response to the sorry state of the academy; and the raging internet didn’t hesitate in proving her point by piling on, heavy-handedly shouting down, ad hominem attacks, and frivolously declaring victory. Karen Kelsky, who blogs job market and professional advice, tried to tie that broader discussion of the horrifying state of the academic hiring to the ongoing discussion on Twitter amongst activists and academics about racism, structural and otherwise. She wrote an exceptionally offensive post in which she completely appropriated and minimized the conversation on race by comparing white people to tenured professors in the way that they take advantage of a system that is rigged in their favor. And oddly, despite how so clearly offensive it was, the web response, at least where I was looking, wasn’t so much unbridled rage but rather explanations about why different people found every aspect of the post problematic; and the blogger listened and apologized in a genuine and unqualified way.  It was obviously really big of her to apologize straight-up with no rhetorical curlicues or contortions. But I suspect that the fact that there hadn’t been a great piling on, that people explained what they found problematic or offensive about her argument, and encouraged her to read specific things to educate herself more, that all of that made it easier to apologize than it might have been from a beaten-down position.

Am I making this about me? Yeah, I am. And that’s because I’m thinking about this from my own perspective as someone who wishes she had done a better job in handling an issue of structural racism that came up in her classroom, as someone who is still trying to work out how to balance her pastoral role against her pedagogical one. I’m thinking through it in the way I know how to think through things — by writing about them, by reading, by talking to other people. I don’t really want to participate in the discourse that I have found, though; but I suspect that’s ideal because I’m smart enough to know that in so many ways I’m not welcome there.

For the most part, this just makes me want to stay farther away from the corner of the Twitterverse I have begun to inhabit; it has stopped being useful and interesting and has become more like distracting, hurtful background noise. There are more examples and problems I’d like to draw in, but this has already gotten quite long, so I’ll stop here with this: I went online, I found a relevant discussion that wasn’t going to be productive. I couldn’t join in and I couldn’t even just plain quietly walk away without being rendered some other kind of caricature:

There was never a way in; but even for a bystander looking in from the outside there is also no way out.

***

I'll Never be Worth $5.7 Million to Anybody

An article in today's New York Times headlined "NYU Gives Its Stars Loans for Summer Homes" has generated a lot of buzz in the twitterverse and blogosphere, as well as here on campus, where the topic has been the subject of some discussion for a while already. The article contains more details than I'd seen previously on the topic, including the $5.7 million loaned by the university to the dean of the law school to buy two homes, one in the city and one outside of it.

With the caveat that I'm sidestepping the real point of this article, which is about executive compensation in universities relative to other expenses (including faculty salaries and student financial aid packages) and about transparency in university spending, I found myself most preoccupied by the extent to which this article demonstrates that the university values us not for any merit inherent in our work but to the extent that other people or institutions value us. The article quotes a university spokesman as saying that "certain loans help retain faculty members who 'can easily pursue a financially rewarding professional career instead of choosing the path of university scholarship and teaching.'"

Let's concede that in an ideal world, intellectual endeavors would be valued on their own terms. But let's also concede that we don't live in an ideal world. Assume that in every other area of human activity, people are valued for what they produce and its market value, and that academics are valued for the opportunity costs they incur for being in the academy rather than plying their trade elsewhere. Professors in the law school are compensated on the basis of what they would earn as lawyers; engineering and physics professors earn salaries commensurate with engineers and physicists working for the space program or making sure that buildings don't collapse. And in the humanities? We have virtually nowhere else to go (and certainly nowhere higher-paying), so there are no astronomical salaries or glitzy perks to be matched.

To be sure, this is in large measure because American society, by and large, looks at pure knowledge, at history and literature, with disdain; there are all sorts of measures that indicate this. But to what extent have we in the humanities contributed to our own undervaluing? Have we hamstrung ourselves?

In the hard sciences and in law, not only do university faculty have other career options, but they also routinely do some work outside of the university walls: in consulting, in government, etc. In the humanities, though, when someone dares to write for a general audience — say, to try to explain that maybe there's something to be learned from the Middle Ages, or to tell a little bit of an early-modern Indiana Jones story that is simply going to grip people, fascinate them, and maybe, just maybe, make them want to learn more, read more and see more —a full-on Greek-tragic chorus rings out in condemnation and foreboding at the simplification and the dumbing down, even if that's not what's really happening. In contrast with the sciences and the legal academy, when scholars in the humanities work outside of the ivory tower, they often stop being taken seriously inside it. Is it any wonder we can't make a better argument for our own value, however true or just or right or self-evident that argument may indeed be?

I'm not even going to try to argue that it shouldn't be the case that we have to talk to "normal people" about what we're doing, to wring my hands and lament such extramural contact as a necessary, unfortunate side effect of the declining place of the humanities in the academy as well as in society at large. I don't actually think it's a bad thing. If we start making our work accessible to general audiences as well as to academic ones, everybody wins: These obscure, esoteric topics that we all believe in so passionately can interest and benefit a much wider range of people; and maybe as a side effect, we ourselves can become more valuable.

Not a Broblem

On the one hand, this morning's offering on Mc Sweeney's Internet Tendency, an open letter to the labial phonemes in Arabic, is taking some flak for capitalizing on the foreign-accents-as-humor trope.

On the other hand, you sort of have to be such a geek (or at least have something of geekiness buried deep in your nature, coupled with at least a passing familiarity with basic linguistics) to try to pull something like this off that it was the fellowship with others who find the IPA to be a bottomless mine of comedy gold that grabbed me and won me over.

Not to make this about the thirteenth century or anything, but there's sort of a kinship among people who have worked tirelessly to learn Arabic, especially the grammar and the phonology. Learning Arabic is the sort of of challenge that, once you've taken it on, it's very heartening to read about other people in the same boat and to hear other people expressing the same things you are thinking or have thought. One of my favorite sentences in Samuel ibn Tibbon's prologue to the Moreh comes as he is talking about his advocacy for word-for-word rather than sense-for-sense translation but makes some small concessions for grammatical correctness in the target language of Hebrew. If you've made it through first year Arabic you can identify exactly the proportions of wonder, puzzlement, bemusement and frustration in his mental tone of voice when he wrote, of the grammatical rule that dictates that non-human plurals take singular feminine agreement: "Sometimes, when we would use a a masculine plural, they use a feminine singular!"

And I know it's not exactly the same thing because this is written from the perspective of someone teaching English to Arabic-speaking students, but this odd fellowship of students of Arabic a big enough tent to include a pretty broad swath of intersection between Arabic and language learning. I didn't read the piece as him making fun of his students or of foreigners with accents as much as engaging in that same head-shaking that we all do at the complexity of the Arabic language.

I think it's okay.

In This Land as in a Kingdom of Ishmael

A talk open to the general public,
Delivered at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia, 2/20/13

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a gentleman who is about my grandfather’s age. He was telling me about taking New York State Regents’ Exams as a yeshiva student in the 1940s and how, in spite of having had to learn geometry on his own because there was no teacher for that subject in his yeshiva, he earned a 96 out of 100 on the statewide exam. Proud, he raced home to tell his immigrant father. At this point, I interrupted his story because I knew exactly where it was going: “Your father asked you what happened to the other four points, right?” He answered me: “No, my father asked why I couldn’t get a 100.” Even though I graduated from a secular public high school in a different millennium from this man, and even though not only are my parents not immigrants but most of my great-grandparents were not even immigrants, he and I had a shared, very culturally American Jewish experience of bringing home not quite good enough really good exam scores and being interrogated about them. And even though I knew that my parents were mostly joking when they asked what happened to those last four points I had failed to earn, the persistence of that question also helped to instill two important values in me: the importance of succeeding in education, and the importance of a sort of filial piety — making my parents proud by that very same success.

It turns out that variations on that question — Why couldn’t you get a 100? — go back a lot farther than the Lower East Side in the 1940s. And these questions are not only asked by American Jews who speak English, like my parents, or Eastern European Jews speaking Yiddish, like my elderly friend’s father, but also by Jews whose parents spoke Arabic because they lived in places whose culture was informed by the Muslim leadership of their lands. As far back as antiquity, there are examples of sons bringing home the Hellenistic or Byzantine equivalent of a 96 on the Regents’ Exam and their fathers saying, “What happened to the other four points?” What I’m going to speak about tonight is an example of this question that occurs in the Middle Ages, at the end of the twelfth century. This questions is, in equal measures, an indication of the value that Jews living in and in exile from Islamic lands placed upon what today we might call religious and secular types of education, of the importance of family relationships, and also of an issue that is of special importance to us as Reform Jews in the twenty-first century: the question of assimilation into and within a wider non-Jewish culture.

Putting Islam in the Title

Tonight is the infamous "That sounds very interesting but could you put the word Islam in the title?" talk.

I went to the web site of the congregation where I'm speaking to grab an image of their sanctuary, which is built in what is referred to as Byzantine-Moorish Revival style as a way of driving home and making very concrete the idea that you can't always tell what a building is based on its architectural style. It's really a very small point at the start of my talk, but I thought that this would be a good way of engaging the group very much on their own terms.

Much to my surprise, I learned that I am giving a talk entitled "Understanding Islamic History."

I suppose I should have seen it coming. Regardless, I suspect I'm going to be facing a lot of very disappointed little old ladies.

Joining the Ranks of the Popularizers and Hybridizers

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. —T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

At the infamous roundtable at the start of the year, the one where we came to the inescapable conclusion that while there is lots of interesting stuff happening in various parts of the worlds at various times that include the years 1198-1304, ultimately the thirteenth century, the theme for the year, is not a valid critical category, one of the fellows took a gratuitous swipe at the vision of the middle ages presented in a book that was written for a general audience and has become popular for teaching undergraduates and recommending to interested lay readers. Without defending the book or its author, I suggested that perhaps that book and its overarching themes didn't belong in a scholarly conversation amongst social, intellectual and material historians and scholars of literature and mysticism working from the middle of the twelfth century well into the fifteenth with no common research language and spanning the earth from the Islamic world through Ashkenaz, all struggling to figure out the terms of an academic conversation meant to last a full year.

"This Was Corrected Against My Own Books."

In the name of public outreach, I have made Moses Maimonides' signature glow red.

I am preparing to give a talk to a general audience next week, and I find that lay people are usually suitably impressed when they are shown the actual handwriting of the actual Rav. To be fair, the first (and only) time I was taken by a friend to the Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library, I was pretty bowled over, too, when one of the researchers brought out a letter written in Maimonides' own hand.

This may not have been exactly what the folks at the Bodley had in mind when they digitized their copy of the Mishneh Torah, the one that Maimonides himself authorized as having been corrected against his own books (as the little portion of the colophon shown above attests). But the digitization project happened exactly so that a wide range of people, and only scholars, could have access to the book — the same outreach-y type goal, something I'm sure to be thinking about more in this space over the course of the next few days.

The rationale is based in a sort of forerunner to the famous will of Albert Barnes, which stipulated that his collection be forever displayed exactly as it was upon his death. With perhaps a similar educational mission in mind, an owner of the codex stipulated in his will that it be made available to anyone who wanted to correct his own copy against it. And, as you'll see on their web site, it's something that the library has taken seriously, with digitization being the next logical step.

I do think it says something amazing about the collective collecting and archival ethic at the Bodley that they would take so seriously the will of someone who could easily have been written off.

The Long Thirteenth Century

A really interesting conversation began a week or so ago in the blogosphere about periodization and the value of "early modern" as a label:

A Periodization Collation

However, it turned into a debate on the merits of Stephen Greenblatt's newish book, The Swerve, after he was given an award by the MLA. Many medievalists took issue with his construction of a world in which first there were the dark ages and then *boom!* there was modernity:

Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong and Why it Matters

The Swerve and the Prize

Modernity is Not History

I'm not sure I fully agree with the characterization of the book (about which, incidentally, I've had a post in the works for a while now, hopefully to be completed over the winter). Besides that, though, I get the impression that the swerve towards The Swerve is as much about popularization as it is about periodization. Greenblatt is an easy target not necessarily as much for what he writes as much as for the audience for whom he's writing. Loads of academics look down upon popularizers, that is, people who write for a general audience in addition to writing for an academic one. And I think that when popular writing comes into play, people tend to be less than honest about what's really at stake in any given debate. There tends to be a lot of huffing and puffing about inaccuracies and distortions and flattening out and omission as though it were a scholarly work and seemingly without any recognition or awareness that writing for different audiences requires different sets of priorities. In my immediate field, books like these two, just to choose the two that come immediately to mind, have been subject to that treatment.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating bad history, even though I am, I suppose, fundamentally a literature scholar. (I reject the polarity of the distinction between literary and historical writing — although that's an issue that deserves a separate post — and am defending myself against the anticipation of a charge, that people who read literature don't care about historical narrative, that I hear made all the time.) It just strikes me that there's a lot under the surface to the effect of how dare he write for the uninitiated?! that it might be worth unpacking before continuing a debate.

It might also be worth considering that discussions like this one tend not to happen until there are awards in play.

***

Returning to the issue that is explicitly at hand, though, periodization has been a topic near the front of my mind this whole year. The fellowship that I'm holding is thirteenth century-themed. At the start of the year, there was a round-table discussion amongst the most senior of the fellows about the extent to which . The bottom line, at least from that brief discussion was that from an institutional and intellectual history perspective, the thirteenth century does cohere as a unit, but from a social-cultural history perspective, it doesn't.

Even as an intellectual historian, though, the thirteenth century doesn't totally work for me. When I first wrote my proposal for the fellowship, I was pretty sure I'd be discounted out of hand with a project that begins in 1150 and is basically, in its continuity, wrapped up by the middle of the 1230s. But when I arrived in the fall, I started to realize that my "long" thirteenth century was just about the shortest one in the group. We have thirteenth centuries that begin in the eleventh and some that end in the sixteenth. Say "the log thirteenth century" amongst this lot and you tap into what has become a running group gag. The more the year has worn on, the less it seems (unsurprisingly) that "the thirteenth century" isn't really a sensible period of time to talk about.

I don't have something really good to fill in the narrative void, though.

I wish I had more to say about this or a real and concrete conclusion to arrive at beyond saying that an arbitrary numerical system isn't going to map very well only any trends in history or literary production,  but I don't. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll have a dramatic flash of insight about the value or lack thereof of the thirteenth century. But until then, I at least wanted to jump into the discussion while it's still current-ish

"I have honored you by giving you many books... but you have dashed my hopes and made yourself scarce from them!"*

As part of my fellowship this year, I'm meant to be involved in outreach to the greater Philadelphia Jewish community. I am actually pretty excited about that; I think it gives meaning to the work in a way that simply doing abstract research for the sheer pleasure and intellectual satisfaction doesn't often have. And so I proposed to give a talk in the spring called: "You Have Fallen Short of My Expectations!": How a Medieval Jewish Guilt Trip Brought Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed to Europe. And I was going to talk about a letter from the father of the first Hebrew translator of the Guide of the Perplexed, an important Jewish text, to the translator himself, in which the father berates the young man for not studying hard enough, for not caring about intellectual endeavors, and for having messier handwriting than a twelve-year-old. It's a very vivid letter and a very over-the-top berating. (*The title of this post quotes from that berating.) But the real kicker is that when it comes time to translate this very important work of Jewish law and philosophy, the son uses his father's methods rather than the methods preferred by Maimonides, who had been nothing but encouraging.

The theme of the series of public lectures of which this is one is "Why the Jewish Middle Ages Matters." Now, I'm not a big fan of making the Middle Ages relevant to modernity, but I figured that showing that values of family and hard work and education, and even the occasional guilt trip about not being perfect in school, were present amongst thirteenth century Jews in very similar ways as they are present amongst American Jewry would be a good and not-totally-cliched way of handing the question.

I thought the title was catchy.

Plus, I figured the talk itself would play really well to a synagogue audience.

I was seriously wrong.

I heard back today that no, actually, they'd prefer it if I could put the word Islam in the title.

And yeah, I could. But that's going to go one of two ways: It could take me into the much more technical side of my current project. I promise you: even the most educated lay audience is not going to care about Judah ibn Tibbon operating as a lexicographer rather than as a translator when he incorporates the work of Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali into his own writing. (Frankly, I've probably lost most of you, and I don't fault you for that. It's really cool to me and about six other people.) Or it could take me way general, your sort of basic Okay. 711. Muslims. Jews. Cordoba. Horseshoe arches. kind of thing. And maybe that would be interesting to them, but it's sure not really interesting for me, not to mention that it's not what I'm totally immersed in at the moment; and I have to figure that my own investment in the topic is probably worth something just in terms of the presentation.

I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out. I'm also sure that it's not going to be quite as good as what I had in mind. But what do I know? I'm just the expert.

Update 13 Oct. 9:45am: I've decided I can give the same talk under the revised title: "In This Land as in a Kingdom of Ishmael": Fathers, Sons and Jewish Learning in the Islamic World