The Vital and the Moribund in the Jewish Middle Ages

The final book chapter that I'm writing (which is not the last chapter but is, in fact, either four out of five or five out of six, depending on how I'm organizing it on any given day) is a reception history, which means that it takes me far out of my comfort zone and area of expertise, both geographically and temporally, as I am looking at how late medieval European readers tried to contend with a Hebrew that was Arabic as much as it was Hebrew.

So I'm doing some basic reading in areas adjacent to my own to get myself oriented, including the relevant chapters in the Oxford Handbook for Jewish Studies, an authoritative volume that lays out the contours of various subfields and provides ample bibliography.

In the chapter on rabbinic literature, authored by Israel Ta-Shma, one of the grandees in the field of Talmud, I found this gem:

"A unique characteristic of halachic literature, which sets it apart from other areas of creativity, is that a large part of it, perhaps even all of it, has not become outdated, so that it continues to serve the rabbinic scholars in yeshivot then as now with the same remarkable degree of vitality. The other areas of rabbinic creativity, as with other areas of medieval scholarship in general, serve only students and scholars of medieval culture." 

People wonder why I don't enthusiastically embrace Jewish Studies as my intellectual home. It's that attitude, precisely, and its pervasiveness and authority that does it. It's being told over and over again that the literature and philosophy of medieval Jews are both less than and useless and boring, the same kind of things that a modernist or a lay person might be expected to say. It's the sense, when the humanities, and the pre-modern in particular, are under attack for being fusty and useless, that Jewish Studies is a field that provides no refuge for someone with my interests and of my particular intellectual profile and is instead one more corner from which to be assailed.

Pious Raffle Ephemera

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

Orientalists of New York

In admitting that I don't like the wildly popular Humans of New York project, I feel like I'm vindictively telling a room full of children that Santa doesn't exist while kicking their puppies off my lawn: curmudgeonly.

That said, I don't like Humans of New York.

The web site gave great publicity to a cause that's important to me when it published the photo of one of the leaders of the Save NYPL group:

However.

However, I don't think that the guy who runs the site is a great photographer from a technical perspective. And so many of his photos are in the same locations, and so often is that location Washington Square Park, a veritable mecca of one certain type of New York weirdo that one gets the impression that he's hardly trying and that he's never going to catch a cross-section of New York. Perhaps that's too great a demand to put on one photographer, but it's a mantle he's assumed for himself.

On the one hand, somebody said of Henri Cartier-Bresson that anyone who took that many photos was bound to get a few good ones. But on the other hand, part of what makes August Sander's archive of man project so great is its clean technical aspects. That is all to say, you might get good photos by sheer volume, but being good at it, having a good eye, and having a broader vision all help.

He's also not a great interviewer or editor. He gives a snippet of conversation that he had with the subject that sometimes is sufficient but more often comes off as cryptic and vague. They're intriguing soundbites that don't tell a story.

He's now on a world tour sponsored by the United Nations, and his work has moved from a little irritating with occasional flashes of insight to deeply discomforting. It's not the good, productive kind of discomfort that should come from art that you can sit with and develop and contemplate. Rather, it's the discomfort of being made an uncomprehending voyeur as an accomplice of the gaze of the artist. It's photography of the obscene circumstances of human suffering without the kind of self-critique that Pasolini applied to it.

There is so very much wrong with this image, shared on the HONY page on Facebook, and the snippet of interview that accompanies it:

You can't simply waltz into a place and expect people to open up to someone coming from the country that so directly contributed to the current mess and from the wider culture that created the circumstances of the broader historical mess. It reflects a weird sense of entitlement without any kind of meaningful cultural understanding or engagement. The photographer ruined an old man's day for what? What does this photo accomplish? What's more, the interviews are obviously mediated through a translator, and there's something off about the translation; the phrase "I don't think I can do this" is so very Anglo-American sounding that it's hard to trust the accuracy of the "reporting."

The conceit that street portraiture in New York City is the same as photojournalism in a war zone is so breathlessly naive and simultaneously dehumanizing. Because his subjects are not identical to those he knows at home, all they can be is victims of war and nothing more.

Additionally, because the trip is being sponsored by the UN, it's not journalism but instead fundraising and/or publicity for an NGO; and I'm of a mind that NGOs that work with vulnerable populations shouldn't use photos of them in their publicity materials.

So far he has been in Iran and Iraq, and the images and captions he is sending back are a grand project of neo-Orientalism starkly in the tradition of nineteenth century portraiture.

He gives a helpful lecture to one of the benighted natives to inform him that he shouldn't feel ashamed because taxi driving really is a noble profession. Subtext: a noble profession for savages that maybe the next generation can escape.

He subsumes all of these people into the sentiment of a single one of them, without identifying whose aspiration it is that he is transmitting; in giving a voice nonspecifically to one of them he does worse than depriving the rest of the same.

A lot of the comments left on the photos are from people saying that they never realized that people in the Middle East didn't all live in dusty tent villages and that this is the first time that they are seeing people in the Arab world and Iran humanized. That's all the more reason that it's important that this project not happen through such an Orientalizing lens.

Follies in Dictionaryland

I was looking up the Judaeo-Arabic word רופיי. It was, as is sometimes the case, a multi-step process.

I began with the root R-W-F in the Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary. It's not specifically a J-A dictionary, but it's where many people start. (It's also not a medieval dictionary, and while that's still where many people start even with medieval texts, I was translating a few lines from something modern.)

Unhelpful. And now I'm going to have the song lyric  !الروف، الروف، الروف مشتعل stuck in my head, in Arabic, for the rest of the day.

Next I turned to Joshua Blau's dictionary of medieval Judaeo-Arabic texts. It is a remarkable addition to the research tools in my field, but it is also seriously incomplete, as it is based on a corpus of the texts that Joshua Blau has edited. 

R-W-F reminded me that the middle radical can sometimes change to ',  pointed me to R-'-F, and remarked to see section 97 of Blau's grammar for a discussion.

R-'-F reminded me that the middle radical was originally W,  pointed me to R-W-F, and remarked to see section 97 of Blau's grammar for a discussion.

Finally, under R-'-F in Hans Wehr, a possibility:

But, no, the orthography is still not quite right. There is sometimes slippage with one weak letter dropping out of a doubled pair, but that seemed unlikely in this case, as one of the Ws is the seat of a hamza on top of the fact that apparently, this word is unattested in an adjectival form ending in -Y, as the orthography in the document in question has it.

A small eternity later, I realized that the word, appearing on a salary table from a Jewish community in modern India, is "rupee."  

BYOLS

Bring Your Own Lightsabre to Washington Square Park Night. Natch.

   

עברי, דבר עברית

I was tickled to see that the two directions of transit on this Paris metro line allow a choice between Ivry  (Hebrew) and Villejuif (Jewish Town.)

Islamic Art at the Louvre

(Content note: This is basically pictures and captions, not a review.)

The new Islamic art galleries at the Louvre are fantastic. It's a bit of a TARDIS in there, with a small upper gallery and what looks like a small lower gallery that actually opens up and ends up being much bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. Most of the collection is Iranian, but there is a good variety, and very thoughtful display. The one surprising thing was the lack of works on paper.

Paris on a Sunday (Part II)

This is Ste. Chapelle. And that is all that needs to be said:

Paris on a Sunday (Part I)

I was really excited to visit Notre Dame for the first time since reading Michael Camille's Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, a book that argues for a basically Victorian interpretation of the gargoyle program on the building, set into motion by the nineteenth-century restorers. It's a brilliant book and I highly recommend it, although it's hard to get one's hands on a print copy anymore (as I discovered while futiley trying to get it for my mom for her birthday), but my conclusion, having been in the space, was that the scale of the building limits the force of Camille's argument to a certain extent: His thinking is totally sound and innovative and brilliant for the gargoyles and chimeras to which it applies; but there are loads that don't fit into his categories.

In any event, it was Sunday when I visited, which was interesting anthropologically as much as architecturally.

Sacre Coeur, Montmartre

I liked this gargoyle on the façade of Sacre Coeur because you can see really clearly how it is actually a rainwater runoff spout.

Neo-Mudéjar Paris

The Great Mosque of Paris was built in the 1920s in a style variously described as Neo-Mudéjar, Islamic-Byzantine Revival, and Hispano-Moresque. It's a style in the register of some of the Islamic(ate) architecture in Spain and North Africa. 

Adventures in Not Speaking French

I ate lunch at the café at the Great Mosque this afternoon and could not for the life of me explain to the waiter that I could read the French menu perfectly well and didn't need an English one despite the fact that I didn't understand a word of what he had told me about why I couldn't eat lunch on the patio but had to eat indoors even though other people were eating lunch on the patio. It was a little bit "Excuse me, does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?" Vestiges of Oriental Studies and all. Frankly, I think I'd have an easier time getting around in 1930s Cairo.

***

A guy in his early 20s came up to me and started to ask me something in French, and I stopped him and said, "I'm sorry. I don't speak French." And he said, "Oh, you speak English. That's a relief." He was obviously an American college student, and asked me if I knew where something was. I didn't. And he said, totally innocently: "So what are you doing here if you don't speak French?" If that's the attitude that American college students are developing about travel and language study, maybe we're not in such bad shape after all.

***

On my way home, I stopped to buy a baguette. There were two Korean kids in the bakery, obviously tourists (their parents were standing outside) trying to buy macarons in very halting English, and the baker either did not speak English or was feigning not doing. And he turned to me, and I could understand the gist of what he was saying, which was a huge complaint about why people can't just learn to speak French. I figured that wasn't the moment to mention that I haven't either. I managed to buy my baguette without incident. 

Liberté, Egalité, Laicité (not necessarily in that order)

I. Laicité

I accidentally (because this kind of thing seems to happen to me) wandered into a celebration of Vespers by nuns and priests who belong to the Monastic Orders of Jerusalem at the church of San Gervais. 

This was my one shot at a surreptitious photo; it's not great:

I'm always moved by the ceremony of high church activities, but what really struck me, especially after watching a woman walk in with her young daughter was how hollow the French calls for laicité really are. If you are a French Catholic and can just wander in off the street to your own religious service because that's just what the very fabric of your society looks like — if as a kid you simply know you belong — then what you're calling for when you ask your society to be secular is for you to be able to continue on in your life, religious unmarked rather than secular, while placing a burden of invisibility on people whose religious lives are not quite so literally built into the shape of the city.

II. Egalité

III. Liberté

I like this and think it's clever — don't get me wrong. Somebody seems to be turning traffic signs into stations of the cross.

Andalusi Textiles at the Institut du Monde Arabe

On loan from the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.

Granada, Nasrid, 13th and 14th centuries:

Post-1492 Almería:

 Textiles that are being described as specifically Andalusi from north Africa post 1492:

A video at the end of the exhibition followed a day in the work life of a man who took over his family textile workshop in Chouen from his father, and demonstrated some of the techniques described and shown throughout:

And the self-indulgent yet obligatory selfie from the panoramic roof garden with Notre Dame in the background:

Freedom From Expression in Higher Education

This one isn't about the Middle Ages, but rather about current trends in higher education:

Remember in elementary school when you'd divide up teams for Jeopardy in social sutdies or for flag football in physical education? And at some point, somebody would invariably shout: "Let's do boys versus girls!"  Winning gender got bragging rights and sometimes Reece's cups or pencil erasers shaped like little animals as a prize. Those are fair stakes for boys-versus-girls competitions. 

This week the Supreme Court divided up as the boys' team and the girls' team. At stake were the credibility of the institution and women's access to health care. The boys' team won.

The Supreme Court ruled that private corporations with sincere religious beliefs (!) against contraception can sign a waiver that allows them not to pay for insurance policies that cover contraception; the federal government will provide that coverage for employees. Only a few days later, in a 6-3 decision, boys-versus-girls, it gave a special exception Wheaton College, which claimed that it was against its institutional religious beliefs to even sign the waiver because then it would be complicit in its female employees getting birth control. 

In essence the court has allowed Wheaton college to trap its female employees in a no-man's land, with their health care not covered by an employer that does not pay for contraception and not covered by a federal government whose participation in the matter has not been triggered by a declaration of faith. 

I think that the real problem with the Wheaton College decision is that the college is requesting special treatment not because of its religious beliefs but rather because it refuses to stand up and be counted for them. The institution is not asserting that because it is a Christian college it will not pay for women's coverage of contraception. It is asking for a right not to cover women's health care without stating a reason why.

It's so twisted around that it's almost hard to define the problem. The college wants to exercise its freedom of religion without exercising freedom of religion. It wants to say that it can't say that it can't do something because of its faith.  It does not want freedom of religious expression. It wants freedom from religious expression while still reaping the benefits of the freedom to exercise religion and act upon religious belief. It does not want freedom of religion. It wants freedom of religion and freedom from the rest of the world continuing to function around the wide berth carved out for that freedom.

Wheaton College is no longer asserting its right to the free exercise of its religion. Rather, it is asserting a right ripped unsensibly from another context: a right to remain silent. It is the paradoxial reductio ad absurdum of Christian colleges that do not believe that  their academic missions include the freedom of expression and the freedom to question and to investigate and research and form conclusions. It has gone so far that they no longer believe in the expression of their own beliefs. Wheaton College's religious expression is not the problem. Its assertion of its right to remain silent, and to wield its religious beliefs over women's lives sheltered by that cloak of silence that is the problem.

And to borrow a slogan from another campaign and another period in the history of sexual health: silence kills.