Today’s quiz question: From which book of the Bible does the following come?

Then the king, completely inflexible, was filled with overpowering anger and wrath; so he summoned Hermon, keeper of the elephants, and ordered him on the following day to drug all the elephants - five hundred in number - with large handfuls of frankincense and plenty of unmixed wine, and to drive them in, maddened by the lavish abundance of drink, so that the Jews might meet their doom.

As may be guessed, this is something of a trick question. The verse is from 3 Maccabees, which is in the Orthodox Christian Bible, but not Roman Catholic or Protestant versions. The persecutor of the Jews here is Ptolemy IV of Egypt (extending to cover Israel at that point), in about 217BC. In the end, the Jews are miraculously saved three times from the elephants, who end by turning on the king’s own forces. Ptolemy, frightened, passes a decree protecting the Jews, who inaugurate a new festival to celebrate. The whole book reads like a rather cruder version of the story of Esther. (Text is at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Rsv3Mac.html).

There are four books of Maccabees (which cover events between 217 BC-c 130 BC) and reading them gives you the curious impression of the Old Testament colliding with the classical world head-on. The Jewish people are still in the heroic age, fighting to maintain their religious purity in a hostile world. And yet at the same time they have diplomats making alliances with Rome (involved in the Punic Wars) and even Sparta. It brings home just how anomalous the Jewish people were in the period. Their refusal to assimilate was exceptional in its thoroughness (one of the complaints was that a gymnasium had been built in Jerusalem), and led to terrible acts of violence on both sides. (There were several massacres of the Jews; meanwhile, at one point, Mattathias, a heroic Jewish priest and his friends ‘forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel’). Yet without such die-hard (literally) refusal to compromise, Judaism at a religion (and the Jews as a distinct people) might not have survived and Christianity might never have developed. In a modern world where assimilation is seen as more and more as a citizen’s duty to the state, it’s a reminder that the distinctiveness and even isolation of some ethnic/religious groups does have something to be said in its favour.

The film ‘Transamerica’ comes out shortly in the UK and the publicity has just started, focusing on Felicity Huffman being Oscar-nominated for her role as a male-to-female transsexual. In the one newspaper feature I’ve seen so far, it says:

Initially Huffman felt the fact she was a woman robbed Transamerica of its inherent drama, but she was persuaded otherwise by Duncan Tucker [the director and writer], who “wanted to honour where transsexual women were going, not where they’d been.”

I think Huffman’s first instincts were right - it seems to me this is a fairly crass bit of casting and unenlightened gender politics. At one level, we’re back to the old problem of whether it’s appropriate for an actor to play someone with a radically different bodily appearance: a white actor playing black, a physically able actor playing someone who’s disabled, a thin actor in a fat suit. (This isn’t about whether you can act something you’ve never experienced, e.g. a straight actor playing gay, an actor pretending to be a Nazi. It’s the specifically physical aspect here). Roughly, on these matters, the trend seems to be that it’s felt that it’s acceptable only in two cases. One is if there are very few actors who are physically near the required type (there aren’t many actors in wheelchairs, very fat and ugly actresses etc), though this is always debated. Secondly, where the whole piece is non-naturalistic, e.g. integrated casting in a Shakespearean play, where the audience is having to imagine already the stage is a Bohemian kingdom, so imaging that a black man is king there is not much of a further stretch. (Or indeed, pantomime, which has its own traditions and conventions).

Here, neither reason seems to hold valid: there are good male actors who could play a transsexual and (I presume) a naturalistic effect is being striven for. So why have a woman in the part? In fact, the casting seems to me to go one bit further in its denial of gender than if it was simply having a white person play someone black. Part of the difficulty of being a transsexual is precisely that your physical body does not match your belief of who you are, in a fundamental way. In order to live as one of the sex you feel you really are, you have to manipulate your body to resemble something it’s not. And such ‘passing’ is very difficult, and often unsuccessful. (See http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1733547,00.html for Norah Vincent’s discussion on how hard it is for a female to be taken as male, arguably the easier way round). I’ve just seen an episode of ‘New Tricks’ (a humorous British cop show) that had a plot about a male to female transsexual. The character was made quite sympathetic, with reactions to her that included recognising the fundamental similarity of her to some of the ‘straight’ characters. Physically, she wasn’t caricatured and yet when you saw her (played by a man) you would be unlikely to think that she was biologically a woman. Similarly, the one transsexual I knew slightly was immediately recognisable as such. The realities of size, bodily contours, voice are hard to change or disguise. A woman playing such a role hides the difficulties of this and thus distorts an audience’s reactions both to the character and to the character’s relationships with others in the film. It reminds me, of the stupid decision they made in the remake of the film ‘Showboat’. One of the key characters is Julie, a mixed-race woman ‘passing’ as white, who is exposed and due to racist laws is forced to separate from her white lover. In the second film version, Julie was played by Ava Gardner! A white actor playing someone ‘passing’ as white seems about at the same level to me as a woman playing someone ‘passing’ as a woman.

The printed edition of the Daily Telegraph on Saturday had a review of James Reston Jr, Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition and the Defeat of the Moors. (It doesn’t seem to be on the Telegraph’s website). This discusses the late medieval conquest of Moorish Spain by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The review concludes with the following statement:

I find it hard to gave a monkey’s about the loss of Al Andalus, which was never the multicultural paradise portrayed by today’s hand-wringing apologists for Islamism. The Moors, were, after all invaders. But the expulsion of the Jews was a different matter...

Damian Thompson, the author of the review describes the expulsion of the Jews from the reunited Christian Spanish kingdom as an ‘outrage’ and a ‘cowardly, fanatical and pointless act’. This makes it clear what his values are: persecution of Jews bad, persecution of Muslims, fine.

A positive valuation of the Spanish Arab states didn’t start with apologists for Islam. William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (2001) argues that it started with nineteenth or twentieth century liberal or anti-clerical Spanish scholars, looking at a backward Spanish society and imaging a time when the Church was less powerful. Jordan, however, still sees the Muslim period as marked by ‘less violence’ than the later Middle Ages with its Christian political domination.

I don’t know the specific details of treatment of Christians and Jews in Arabic Spain, but there was a general pattern in the Islamic world of discrimination combined with limited toleration. Christians and Jews had to pay additional taxes and there were also some restrictions on their religious practice. They were not, for example, allowed to carry out missionary work, there were often not allowed to build new churches/synagogues, have church bells or generally have a very visible presence. Otherwise, the religious minorities were more or less left alone. As a result, Christian and Jewish minorities survived for centuries in Muslim ruled countries (some still survive today, such as the Jews in Iran). The fifteenth century Spanish Christian state, by contrast, could not endure such religious minorities. The Jews were expelled or forcibly converted. Jews who did convert were often later persecuted by the Inquisition, who mistrusted their sincerity. The pattern with Muslims was similar. There were attempts to forcibly convert Moors after 1492, against the treaty agreed at the capitulation of Granada. In 1502 Muslims who refused to accept Christianity were expelled from Spain. The poor treatment continued and in the early seventeenth century Philip III expelled around 250,000 Moriscoes (descendants of Muslims who had converted) to Africa.

Even if you go by the extremely limited criterion of treatment of the Jews, the reconquista of 1492 replaced an Arab state which tolerated Jews with a Spanish state that ethically cleansed or killed them. Why does Thompson feel this is positive? His answer is that the Moors were ‘invaders’. This calls for an analogy. Suppose I were to say: ‘I find it hard to gave a monkey’s if the USA disappeared, which is not the multicultural paradise portrayed by today’s hand-wringing apologists. The white Americans, were, after all invaders.’ I would, rightly, be regarded as a nutter and a vicious one at that. The obvious point is that while white Americans may have conquered and colonised North America, that was over 300 years ago. It is irrational to claim that their descendants deserve to be punished for this act. The Moors, however, hadn’t been in Spain for 300 years in 1492. They had conquered it in 711, nearly 800 years previously. I suspect that due to intermarriage and voluntary conversion, the population of Muslim Spain was probably more genetically Spanish than Arab or Berber, as far as such ethnic labels make any sense at all. The Moors were as Spanish as any Castilian.

Except not for the casual Islamophobes so prevalent in today’s West. Muslims once conquered Christian territory, so violence against them is eternally justified. For them the European Muslim can never be more than an anomaly, however long established, can never be assimilated while maintaining their religion. He or she is the eternal Other, an object of suspicion and fear, a replacement for the medieval European figure of the Jew. I hope this time it takes less than European genocide of a religious minority to realise that such thinking is a bad idea.

I came across a fairly peculiar article in the journal Foreign Affairs on ‘The return of patriarchy’ (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376&print=1). The gist of the story is that patriarchy and conservatives values are going to return because of evolutionary realities. Liberals have fewer children than conservatives, therefore liberals are going to become extinct and conservative, patriarchal, religious values will triumph. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this argument made, but there’s a rather nasty lip-smacking relish by the male (surprise, surprise) author, as the following quote shows:

Without implying any endorsement for the strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with essentially three options—be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear children—has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of demographic decline.

The article is marked by some fairly dubious historical claims about the Roman and Greek upper classes dying out because of reluctance to have children, to be replaced by new Christian patriarchal families. But aside from its historical inaccuracies and misogynistic tone, does the central argument actually hold water? The answer is no, because the author completely ignores cultural reproduction (or, if you want to put it in Christian terms, spiritual fatherhood/motherhood).

To explain this, consider the case of medieval Western Europe. Clergy were theoretically forbidden to marry and have children, and though this wasn’t always held to, their reproduction rates would have been substantially below that of laymen. Therefore, by this author’s argument, the clergy as a class would soon have become extinct. What this ignores is that the clergy as a class ‘reproduced’ by inspiring others to become clerics themselves (or to have their children enter the church). They had ‘spiritual children’ in the sense that they inspired non-related/more distantly related people to follow their example. In extreme cases such cultural reproduction can have far more impact than any possible biological reproduction. St Augustine had one (illegitimate) child and so his genes have probably long since vanished. His books and his ideas however, still survive and have influence.

Therefore liberals are safe from extinction provided that enough new liberals are created either by children being raised as liberals and staying with this ideology or by converting the children of conservatives to liberalism. This is where it gets interesting. Liberal women are likely to be disproportionately represented both in the education system and in other positions of influence, to act as role models. This is because firstly, conservative women/women who support the patriarchy are less likely to want to have a career other than raising children. Secondly, if they are having more children it’s going to be harder for them to achieve more outside the home, even if they wanted to, due to time pressures, additional costs etc. Girls who are raised in patriarchal households are thus still going to see an alternative lifestyle in the outside world and a lot of them are likely to choose that. The relative collapse of patriarchy in the West is predominantly due to women wanting more opportunities, not to men being reluctant to shoulder the burdens of family life, as the author suggests.

There is probably much less of a contrast between men: patriarchal men possibly have a slight social advantage in having a domesticated wife to rely on as opposed to liberal men. On the other hand, there may be some preponderance of liberal men in higher education because the authoritarian views of patriarchal men are less compatible with the mental flexibility and questioning of assumptions required for scholarship.

The educational system, therefore is likely to convert more conservatives to liberalism than vice versa. The only way that conservatives could avoid this would probably be to withdraw largely from mainstream education (as happens to a certain extent in the US already). However, any alternative ‘patriarchal’ educational system would probably be less effective than the current one (for example, because of restricting opportunities for girls and probably also excluding many good educators because of their ‘unsound’ views). The end result in that case might be a conservative class that was larger, but more poorly educated than what would then truly be a liberal elite. Given that better education very partially correlates with higher status/greater power (if it correlated better, I wouldn’t be a PhD willing to take menial jobs), then conservatives would probably still not have the power that they demand or see as their right. I don’t think that you could now realistically go back to wholesale patriarchy in the West unless you’re prepared to use force to subjugate women. Even in the US, which is seeing some loss of women’s rights, reconstructing the patriarchy is only really a rightwing daydream.

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I cam across a particular crass article by someone called Phylis Chesler
(http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=pXgdqcZYzSdrCxdn2ytfR4qnjmpj85xm) on ‘The Failure of Feminism’. Its failure, apparently is that:

most Western academic and mainstream feminists have not focused on what I call gender apartheid in the Islamic world, or on its steady penetration of Europe. Such feminists have also failed to adequately wrestle with the complex realities of freedom, tyranny, patriotism and self-defense, and with the concept of a Just War.

Apparently most feminists don’t hate Islam enough. (I can think of some British ones who do, but that’s a different matter). Because Phyllis Chester really hates Islam. Indeed she states: ‘Women in the Islamic world are treated as subhuman’. Where do you start with such a statement? By pointing out that several Muslim countries (Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh that I know of), have had women heads of state? By mentioning that the two countries with the biggest problem of aborting female foetuses (surely the worst form of anti-female prejudice) are China and India (neither majority Muslim)? Or just by saying that it’s about as sensible to refer to *the* attitude of the ‘Islamic world’ to women as it would be to describe a ‘Christian world’ which lumped together, among others, the USA, Serbia and Kenya?

The author’s main complaint is that feminism has been invaded by cultural relativism and ‘European views of colonial-era racism’ (presumably as opposed to a fine-upstanding American belief that’s it’s OK to invade other countries as long as you’re ‘civilizing’ them). Feminists therefore no longer speak out about: ‘head scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancy, or female genital mutilation.’ Here, the spray-gun rhetoric obscures a valid point. There are practices common in some Muslim countries (not necessarily ‘Islamic’, since Islam as a religion does not endorse genital mutilation, for example) that are oppressive to women and should be opposed by all feminists. I would add the use of Sharia law to this list, which is institutionally biased against women. However, there are also practices, which, however distasteful to some strands of Western thought, are not necessarily seen by Muslim women themselves as oppressive. If women choose to wear the head scarf or to enter an arranged marriage (with the necessary safeguard that they’re not being coerced), then Westerners should not be telling them that they are wrong. Many religions (and other institutions) contain provisions which some non-religious feminists would see as oppressive to women: for example, the Catholic opposition to contraception, the widespread Christian condemnation of abortion, the Evangelical belief in ‘male headship’, the Orthodox Jewish belief that a menstruating woman is ritually impure. Yet the women within these traditions are in many cases content with their religion, or at least want to work within the tradition to change it, not simply reject it.

Phyllis Chester’s viewpoint poses a stark dichotomy: feminism and feminists either have to oppose and reject Islam totally or ‘fail’. Where does that leave all the feminist Muslims (and there are some in the most unlikely places, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1712461,00.html on the female Hamas MPs) who want to change aspects of their religion, but not all of it? Where does that leave Western feminists like myself who aren’t convinced that the pornification of Western culture is the perfect role model for other countries? Presumably, Chester feels ‘you’re either for us or against us’. Which brings me to another worrying point in her article. Her hatred of Islam is probably explained by her later mention that she suffered very bad personal experiences when married to an Afghani. She explains how she argued that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan should be overthrown ‘on behalf of women’ and how other feminists opposed her. She also comments that ‘America has not yet done all that is necessary to build up the country’ and that women are still oppressed there post-Taliban. Here again, I have some sympathy with her initial position: the Taliban was an unusually bad regime for women and that was one justification for its overthrow (which I supported). The problem is that seeing invasion as a tool for women’s rights shows horrendous naivety. Firstly, because it’s clear that George Bush was only interested in women’s rights as a propaganda tool. (I bet there will soon be a state of completely inaccurate articles about how badly Iran treats women). As soon as the Taliban were gone, the US government lost interest in women’s rights in Afghanistan. (It’s noticeable that Chester says nothing about Iraq, where women’s rights are now in a worse state than in the days of Saddam). Secondly, invading a country is not an effective way of changing women’s position anyhow, even ignoring the problems of misogyny in warfare. At best it’s a short-term fix. In most countries where women are oppressed, it’s because of a deep-seated culture that approves of this. The only real way to change the position of women is to change the culture, which takes time and a lot of effort. Simply imposing laws from the top down is not going to make a real difference if those laws don’t get enforced or accepted. Bombing countries into feminism is frankly not a good idea.

Finally, Chester complains that ‘Hollywood loudmouths’ haven’t spoken out enough about the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, whereas they have condemned Bush for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. (After all, which is worse, an individual killing of a Westerner, or an immoral war which kills tens of thousands of non-Westerners?) Again, I don’t know about in the US, but there have been lots of condemnations of the killing in the UK. It doesn’t excuse his killing, but van Gogh isn’t an ideal liberal poster-child. There’s a very interesting article by David Aaronovitch which discusses the film he made and points out how differently a similar film made about Jews rather than Muslims would have been seen (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1352016,00.html).

I’ve just started a new (temporary) job and trying to research a paper, which is not a good combination as far as time for blogging goes. The planned paper is comparing Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian ideas of lordship, particularly as reflected in secular poetry. It has brought me face to face again with one of the great unanswerable questions of early medieval scholarship. Why do scholars of Anglo-Saxon England write so much about so few sources?

There are dozens of articles about the poem The Battle of Maldon, for example, which is an interesting, but relatively short late-tenth century poem. There is even one article (which I have copied, but not yet read) which spends twenty pages discussing one key word in the poem (This is H. Gneuss, 'The Battle of Maldon 89: Byrthnoth's ofermod once again', Studies in philology, 73 (1976), pp. 117-37). Nothing short of holy writ deserves that much scrutiny. The same inflationary scholarship is seen on other Anglo-Saxon topics. I’ve seen estimates that there are around 50 new articles on Beowulf a year. What can all these possibly have to say? The disproportion is clear if you search library catalogues. COPAC (the combined library catalogue for the main UK research libraries) has around 2800 entries under ‘Aeneid’, and 2100 for ‘Beowulf’. (These aren’t absolute numbers of items, because there will be duplicate entries for books and it doesn’t cover journal articles, but the relative proportions should be similar). Beowulf is a great poem, but it has nothing like the 2000 continuous years of cultural significance that the Aeneid has.

I found something similar when I attended a few ASNAC (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic) lectures at Cambridge. One course included two lectures solely on the Synod of Whitby. A comparable course on Carolingian history would have to be generously off for time to allow a whole lecture for 150 years worth of synods, whose acts fill 4 or 5 large volumes.

All this obsessive study might be justified if it meant that every area of scholarship was well covered, but it isn’t. When I look for articles relevant to my interest in comparing Carolingian Latin and Old English poetry, there’s almost nothing. Two neighboring cultures, close together in time and yet it’s as if most Anglo-Saxonists are barely aware of the existence of the Franks (though there are a few glowing exceptions). Why are they so insular (in all senses) and what can be done about it? In some ways I feel I’m being rash in steeping into literary territory and outside my main area of interest, but if I don’t point out some of the interesting parallels I don’t know who else is going to. I just hope a few people listen (and even better, agree).