I was teaching last week about the expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I in 1290. It’s pretty depressing reading all the material, especially the article by Robert Stacey which discusses ‘the connections between the precocious development of the medieval English state and the no less precocious development of medieval English anti-Semitism.’ (Robert C. Stacey, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State’, in J.R. Maddicott and D.M. Palliser, eds, The Medieval State (2000), pp. 163-77).

But it also got me thinking about some current issues of freedom of speech. There is currently a considerable divide between a US belief in freedom of speech as a fundamental right and considerably greater restrictions in most European democracies. One justification of the European position is the Holocaust, but the case of the medieval Jews is also instructive.

I would distinguish three basic degrees of ‘hate speech’ (including writing). Firstly, there is speech encouraging violence against specific individuals e.g. websites which list the names and addresses of opponents (anti-Nazis, abortionists, animal experimenters etc) and encourage attacks on them. I don’t think there is any enthusiasm among supporters of freer speech for this to be allowed. Secondly, there is speech encouraging violence against a social group in general, but without specific targets e.g. ‘Kill the unbelievers’, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. Thirdly, there is speech which encourages hatred against a group, but does not specifically encourage violence e.g. ‘Jews are Christ-killers’, ‘God hates fags’.

Those who are most enthusiastic about free speech think that the second and third forms of hate speech should be allowed, since they distinguish very clearly between words and actions. You may say anything, as long as you do not do anything. However, this clearly seems dubious when it comes to speech in category two. Otherwise, you have the paradox that the leaders of a hate movement (such as the Nazis, the groups responsible for Rwandan genocides etc) are acceptable, because they may not have blood on their own hands, but those lower down the organisation, who actually commit violence, are guilty. (You can only get round this by arguing about responsibility up a chain of command when it a government committing atrocities).

The trickiest bit is the third category, speech which encourages hatred, but not violence. Here, the case of medieval Judaism is particularly instructive. The position of the Catholic church, from the patristic period onwards, was clear. Jews should suffer various restrictions within Christian society, but they should not be harmed simply for being Jews. In particular, they should not be removed from Christian society, but instead should remain as ‘witnesses’. Thus the church opposed the murderous attacks on the Jews associated with the crusading movement from 1096 onwards; as far as I know, the more senior members of church hierarchies are never reported as sanctioning or abetting these attacks in the Middle Ages. Similarly, expulsions of the Jews from particular kingdoms seem to have been an independent initiative by rulers, often without much specific church enthusiasm.

Yet it is completely unrealistic to say that therefore the medieval church had no responsibility for these wider attacks on the Jews, when they had centuries of preaching the Jews as ‘Christ-killers’. Those who support unrestricted free speech have to answer the question: how do you prevent hate speech creating a climate which encourages violence and murder, when we have seen this happen? (The standard US view seems to be that the constitution will miraculously protect despised groups: given the current manipulation of the constitution and the rule of law generally in the US, this seems a less good argument than in the past).

The case of the medieval Jews also raises two other interesting issues. One is that the distinction made by some liberals (and also many other opponents of Islam) between religious and racial hatred is not necessarily a firm boundary. There has been a lot of discussion among medievalists about when anti-Judaism (religious hostility) became anti-Semitism (hostility to Jews as a race). There is a consensus that there is some kind of change in the twelfth and thirteenth century. It’s then that you begin to find doubts about whether converted Jews can really become proper Christians, caricatures of Jews showing ‘ethnic’ features, suggestions that Jews are congenital liars etc. Is the same things happening to ‘Muslims’, as a category? When you read references to the ‘Muslim mind’, or the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci describing Muslims as ‘breeding like rats’, I think you can see it already.

There is also the thought-provoking issue of assimilation. Jews in Medieval Europe refused to abide by one of the most basic tenets of the societies they lived in: Christian belief. If you follow some modern views, such refusal to adapt means that they shouldn’t have been tolerated by European societies. (There is a clear progression from the view that ‘if you don’t abide by British norms, you shouldn’t be in this country’ and the logic of expulsion, even if it’s one that at the moment would be seen as a step too far). Over the centuries, some Jewish communities have largely assimilated into other societies (though, notoriously, it didn’t help the German Jews at all in the end). But there has always been a strain of Jewish thought that has rejected assimilation, that has wished to remain separate in significant ways from the rest of the population, for example by rejecting intermarriage. Should modern British society accept such people, or should it be telling them: ‘if you want to behave like that, then you need to go to Israel?’ If you argue (as I would) that such groups should be accepted in Britain and as British, then you need to come up with a clear answer as to why some relatively unintegrated Muslims are unacceptable.

The Muslim veil argument rumbles on, with some good articles in the Guardian (see e.g. David Edgar: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1892543,00.html). However there are also some articles that confirm David Edgar’s view that some liberals’ tolerance is limited to what they approve of. Take the article by Catherine Bennett (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1920279,00.html). Bennett’s main comparison is with the Victorian movement for dress reform, which complained about such irrational dress for women as corsets. This is certainly one argument against the niqab and burka; that its restrictions limit what women can do. The problem is, that if rationality in dress is the main thing, more British women ought to be going round wearing the shalwar kameez. (south Asian dress of loose trousers and long shirt). By any reckoning this is a far more practical and less restrictive garment than e.g. miniskirt and high heels, and if global warming continues, might prevent a lot of skin cancer cases.

Bennett’s discussion of Victorian views on dress lead her into her main point: the problem of false consciousness (though she doesn’t specifically use this phrase, the implication is clear):

In common with today's critics of the veil, Gerrit Smith, his daughter Elizabeth and their fellow clothing reformers had to contend with the fact that most of the women constricted by laced-up whalebone and petticoats insisted that they wore their absurd skirts and corsets gladly, just as readily as they embraced dependency on men as their own free choice. Most women, Smith noted, "are content in their helplessness and poverty and destitution of rights. Nay, they are so deeply deluded, as to believe, that all this belongs to their natural and unavoidable lot".

This, according to Bennett, is why religious restrictions on clothing must be rejected:

All this free choosing, according to Straw's critics, we should accept, uncritically, at face value, because - here's their trumping argument - what does freedom mean, if it doesn't mean being free to oppress yourself? What does freedom mean if you can't feel comfy in a niqab? Or happy to shave off your hair and wear a wig instead? Or comfortable - if you so choose - with footbinding? Or keen - if that's what you want - to have a clitoridectomy?

As David Edgar wrote in this paper yesterday, true tolerance requires that we defend to the death people's right to oppress themselves. In all kinds of unappealing, even - you might think - barbaric ways.

Bennett doesn’t make clear what she wants to do on these issues; I’ll take the generous view and presume that she doesn’t actually want wearing the niqab or sheitel (the wig worn by some married Othodox Jewish women) banned. [Footbinding and clitoridectomy are a) permanent procedures and b) normally performed on children, so these are very different issues]. If she wants to argue against them and try and convince women not to wear them, she’s free to. But it is patronising to assume that women in the UK who adopt religious restrictions or other behaviour seen as ‘oppressed’ by some liberals are necessarily doing it because they are deluded. For example, it seems to be the case that the niqab (which is rare in Britain) is being adopted by some young Muslim women as a deliberate religious statement (see e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1889871,00.html).

I think there is a problem here for some liberals (and particularly some ‘missionary atheists’); they possess no adequate framework for dealing with those who choose not to accept liberal views. The opposite of the Enlightenment must (by definition) be the unenlightened. If those who do not accept liberal views do not respond in the correct way when properly informed, they must either have particularly acute forms of false consciousness or be mad (or evil). It is noticeable how often the idea of ‘brainwashing’ comes up in discussions by atheists of child-raising by the religious, as if seeking to inculcate one’s beliefs and values into one’s child was not common practice by all parents. Many religions, of course, have a long tradition of poor treatment (and sometimes immense cruelty) to unbelievers. But, at least in Anglicanism, there is, I think, now an acceptance that people can reject religion without necessarily being evil or deluded. There needs to be some thought among liberals about how they (we) treat the non-believers in liberalism.

Last week, where they met was at the first Institute of Historical Research seminar of the year, which was a joint meeting with the Institute of Archaeology. And the paper, by Richard Hodges on ‘Dark Age Economics in 2006’, was not a good example of how the disciplines might collaborate productively (although I wouldn’t go quite as far as the distinguished historian next to me, who commented ‘absolute tripe’ at the end).

One of the problems was that much of it was archaeology for the archaeologist, starting with a lot of discussion of theoretical spatial models of settlements and economies. This assumed that you were already well up on the debate, but it also wasn’t clear how well the models actually fitted what was on the ground. For example, Hodges was talking about the possibility of periodic trade at beach-heads, temporary coastal meeting points, but it wasn’t clear to me how you would recognise those in the archaeological record.

The bigger problem is the familiar disjunction between the disciplines: archaeology can tell you what’s happening, but not by whom or why. There is still a lot of redating of some of the key sites going on, but even when they are securely dated, twenty-five years here or there is not a lot for an archaeologist, but is crucial for a historian. In addition, Richard Hodges seems particularly prone to making unsubstantiated claims about how developments are due to rulers, even when there’s little evidence for that. For example, he’s excavated St Vincenzo al Volturno (a monastery on the fringes of the Carolingian empire) and was claiming its developments there are part of a scientific/technical revolution under Charlemagne.

What is frustrating is that there is a lot that archaeology can contribute to historical research, especially for the early Middle Ages. You shouldn’t now discuss the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’ without looking at the archaeological evidence of trade collapse. Hodges made a couple of passing mentions of some very interesting work: his dig in Byzantine Albania and also evidence of assarting in early medieval Europe (for non-medievalists, this is clearing of woods/wastelands for farming, a key sign of more intensive agriculture and normally thought to have developed only post-1000). But if archaeological research wants to contribute more to history than a collection of site reports, then we need some archaeologists with a rather more sophisticated grasp of historical argument (to set alongside early medieval historians such as Chris Wickham, Guy Halsall and Ross Balzaretti who are taking the archaeological evidence very seriously). Otherwise historians are either going to ignore archaeology or just use archaeological data, not the wider implications drawn by archaeologists.

In the midst of all the newspaper discussions from last week on the peculiar clothing worn by some religions, there is one point that everyone has been too PC to point. It is time to stand up and say it loudly: Amish women should be banned from wearing bonnets.

Why? Because as Jack Straw puts it, the bonnet is ‘such a visible statement of separation and of difference’. And as Martin Kettle writes in the Guardian:

It says something not just about the wearer but the non-wearer too. It says, or seems to say, I do not wish to engage with you. It is at some level a rejection. And since that statement of rejection comes from within...cultures, some of whose willingness to integrate is explicitly at issue in more serious ways, it is hardly surprising that it should be challenged.

Oh wait, it isn’t the Amish costume that people are complaining about, despite the fact that they are a community who has defiantly not integrated into society. It’s Muslim women with veils. Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom of dress...

It’s difficult to discuss the issue of the veil because there are so many different concerns being packed into one garment, but the comparison with Amish dress does make some of the hypocrisy clear. There are a few good reasons to be concerned about the veil. Wearing a veil is likely to makes face to face communication more difficult. There are some situations where there may be concern about security. If women are being coerced into wearing the veil or threatened for not wearing it, that’s obviously wrong. These cases mean that there are some situations where it’s justified asking a woman to remove her veil. It seems to me acceptable for schools and other institutions which have uniforms or dress codes, for example, to decide whether or not veils are appropriate. Maybe Jack Straw finds it easier to conduct constituency business, but he needs to think hard about whether he’s potentially deterring some women from coming to talk to him.

But Jack Straw goes further: he thinks women shouldn’t wear the veil in public, because it is ‘bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult.’ And this is where the hypocrisy starts coming in. Does he stand up and tell white people they shouldn’t go round wearing Union Jack T-shirts? I bet there are a lot of ethnic minorities who would see that as not only a ‘visible statement of difference’, but also an implicit rejection: I’m British and you’re not. Would Jack Straw dare say that you shouldn’t wear very revealing clothing in certain areas, because it might scandalise the religious communities there and worsen relations?

When I saw women wearing the full veil (in Gloucester, it’s not common in Hitchin) I thought it was peculiar, but I didn’t take it as some kind of statement rejecting me. Some religious people choose to wear funny clothes: nuns, Buddhist monks, Amish and Hassidic Jews, to name just a few. I would probably personally prefer women not to wear the veil, but then a large percentage of the population go round wearing things I think it would be better not to. Jack Straw, by broadening the issue beyond what he finds helpful in his office, is pandering (consciously or not) to all the bigots of Britain. And behold, they’ve come out. I saw the tabloid headings: 97% of Daily Express readers want the veil banned. It’s fair enough to discuss the limits of free speech and free dress, but Jack Straw’s soft bigotry (Oh, you can do that, but it’d be better if you didn’t, because it might upset the natives) isn’t a good place to start.