Two lectures
Apr. 17th, 2004 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI've been to two interesting lectures the last two evenings.
First: A.B. Yehoshua, the Israeli novelist, has been traveling around offering his theory on "The Root of Anti-Semitism", note the singular. It's dangerous to summarize an already sweeping argument, but he ties this in to the lack of a clear definition of Jewish identity: who is a Jew and who is not? His thesis is that Jews, as a people without geographic boundaries, are potentially a part of every people, and they take on the characteristics of the people among whom they live. (The basis of William Tenn's great story "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" - that's my comment, not Yehoshua's.) They therefore offer a fertile field for potential anti-Semites to deploy their own neuroses and psychoses on. It doesn't really matter if there are actually Jews in that society at all, and the less a person actually knows of the Jews, the easier it is to become an anti-Semite. And this is why anti-Semitism is found among all other religions and the non-religious: it's a personal psychosis projected against the alien within oneself. People who lack that psychosis are not anti-Semites, and they too are found among all peoples.
Yehoshua defines anti-Semitism as "hating the Jews more than necessary," saying that while the Palestinian Arabs understandably hate the Israeli Jews as their occupiers, real anti-Semitism is rare there: it's other Arabs further away who depict Jews with horns and tails. Anti-Semitism in word, he says, is comments like "They are responsible for all the evil in the world" or "They secretly control the world." Gosh, they can't even control the West Bank, how can they control the world?
My first thought is that while the lack of clear boundaries may be an extreme with the Jews, it's hardly unique to them. "Who is an Italian" may seem perfectly clear by comparison, but not if you live in Bolzano. And "Who is French" is a hot issue in that country right now, over the place of Muslim immigrants. Yehoshua would probably reply that the same kind of unreasoning ethnic hatred does crop up locally: it's the universal aspect of the Jews that makes anti-Semitism universal.
I'd also wonder why, if the lack of boundaries has generated anti-Semitism, why the Zionist project, which Yehoshua defined as putting geographies boundaries on the Jews, seems to have generated more and greater anti-Semitism than ever before. I gather that Yehoshua would say it has not, as the Jewish people as a whole have not changed; that the lack of a stable boundary to Israel has exacerbated the problem; and that to the extent there are boundaries, it's actually been ameliorating of anti-Semitism (see the Palestinian Arabs again).
More on this later.
The second lecture attracted me because of my interest in musical history. It was a talk to a small audience in the Stanford music department by a professor whose name I didn't catch, on the iconography of medieval and Renaissance instruments, i.e. trying to determine what (no longer physically extant) musical instruments looked like by studying paintings of musicians. The short answer is that it's very hazardous to try: the paintings are often wildly inaccurate. Early painters of trombones, for instance, tend to get them mixed up with slide trumpets, which have a very different physical structure. The prof himself once tried to physically re-create a portative organ, an instrument small enough to carry, working the bellows with one hand and the keyboard with another. It turns out that the instrument as seen in all paintings of it is acoustically impossible: it could not have looked like that. (If you have a recording that claims to feature a portative organ, it's something else: the name is used very loosely nowadays, he says.)
He also commented that the instrumental ensembles in these paintings often don't make any musical sense, something that hasn't changed: modern artists who want to depict a group of musicians will often portray, say, a trumpet, flute, and cello, or some other ensemble that doesn't exist in nature. Nor do many of them have any idea how to draw musical notation: they've seen some, but they have no idea how it works, so they draw staves without clefs, or with six or four lines, or impossible bar lengths, etc. Amusing for the musically literate.
First: A.B. Yehoshua, the Israeli novelist, has been traveling around offering his theory on "The Root of Anti-Semitism", note the singular. It's dangerous to summarize an already sweeping argument, but he ties this in to the lack of a clear definition of Jewish identity: who is a Jew and who is not? His thesis is that Jews, as a people without geographic boundaries, are potentially a part of every people, and they take on the characteristics of the people among whom they live. (The basis of William Tenn's great story "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" - that's my comment, not Yehoshua's.) They therefore offer a fertile field for potential anti-Semites to deploy their own neuroses and psychoses on. It doesn't really matter if there are actually Jews in that society at all, and the less a person actually knows of the Jews, the easier it is to become an anti-Semite. And this is why anti-Semitism is found among all other religions and the non-religious: it's a personal psychosis projected against the alien within oneself. People who lack that psychosis are not anti-Semites, and they too are found among all peoples.
Yehoshua defines anti-Semitism as "hating the Jews more than necessary," saying that while the Palestinian Arabs understandably hate the Israeli Jews as their occupiers, real anti-Semitism is rare there: it's other Arabs further away who depict Jews with horns and tails. Anti-Semitism in word, he says, is comments like "They are responsible for all the evil in the world" or "They secretly control the world." Gosh, they can't even control the West Bank, how can they control the world?
My first thought is that while the lack of clear boundaries may be an extreme with the Jews, it's hardly unique to them. "Who is an Italian" may seem perfectly clear by comparison, but not if you live in Bolzano. And "Who is French" is a hot issue in that country right now, over the place of Muslim immigrants. Yehoshua would probably reply that the same kind of unreasoning ethnic hatred does crop up locally: it's the universal aspect of the Jews that makes anti-Semitism universal.
I'd also wonder why, if the lack of boundaries has generated anti-Semitism, why the Zionist project, which Yehoshua defined as putting geographies boundaries on the Jews, seems to have generated more and greater anti-Semitism than ever before. I gather that Yehoshua would say it has not, as the Jewish people as a whole have not changed; that the lack of a stable boundary to Israel has exacerbated the problem; and that to the extent there are boundaries, it's actually been ameliorating of anti-Semitism (see the Palestinian Arabs again).
The second lecture attracted me because of my interest in musical history. It was a talk to a small audience in the Stanford music department by a professor whose name I didn't catch, on the iconography of medieval and Renaissance instruments, i.e. trying to determine what (no longer physically extant) musical instruments looked like by studying paintings of musicians. The short answer is that it's very hazardous to try: the paintings are often wildly inaccurate. Early painters of trombones, for instance, tend to get them mixed up with slide trumpets, which have a very different physical structure. The prof himself once tried to physically re-create a portative organ, an instrument small enough to carry, working the bellows with one hand and the keyboard with another. It turns out that the instrument as seen in all paintings of it is acoustically impossible: it could not have looked like that. (If you have a recording that claims to feature a portative organ, it's something else: the name is used very loosely nowadays, he says.)
He also commented that the instrumental ensembles in these paintings often don't make any musical sense, something that hasn't changed: modern artists who want to depict a group of musicians will often portray, say, a trumpet, flute, and cello, or some other ensemble that doesn't exist in nature. Nor do many of them have any idea how to draw musical notation: they've seen some, but they have no idea how it works, so they draw staves without clefs, or with six or four lines, or impossible bar lengths, etc. Amusing for the musically literate.
