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Review Article

The Lexicon, Philosophers, and the Challenge of Translation: Between Language and the History of Ideas

Ephraim NissanGoldsmith College, London

Abstract This is both a review article of the English-language edition of Barbara Cassin’s bulky, bountiful Dictionary of Untranslatables, and an original study, the point of depar-ture for whose sections is some locus in the Dictionary itself. We elaborate about verbal aspect and ancient alphabets, but our main original contribution is a discussion of the Haskalah and the Enlightenment (as well as of Chapter XVIII from Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance), delving into a constellation of facets in what is hopefully an innovative manner, novel at any rate for our expected readership. Importantly, we intervene in the controversy about the ascription to the Enlightenment of negative aspects of the mid-20th century, and propend for a nuanced view, highlighting positive and negative effects. In fact, we also point out how a few phenomena conspicuous in the 21st century have deep roots, with contradictions, the latter also typifying the cultural dynamics of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century.

Keywords History of ideas, Philosophy, Enlightenment, Haskalah, Longue durée

Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexi-con. Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood. Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathan-iel Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. (Translation/Transnation series, [Vol. 21]) Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014. xxxv + 1297 pages, cloth, 26×21×5 cm. U.S.$65. ISBN 978-0-691-13870-1.

10.3726/78000_215

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1. A Whale of a Book, and Dense at That: The American Edition

This article uses its assessment of the recent Princeton edition of Cassin’s remarkable volume, to develop a discussion providing a reassessment with novel insights into the history of ideas, especially concerning the impact of the Enlightenment. The bulky, heavy volume under review, set in two columns and reasonably priced for its contents, is appropriately defined as follows in the first sentence of the publisher’s blurb: “This is an en-cyclopaedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy – or any translation from one language to another”. Entries are long, as befitting the complexities involved, and provide an in-depth discussion of what in the history of ide-as the headword has meant or means in various languages. There are new entries by many authors, with respect to the original French edition, Voca-bulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles.1 Over 150 authors or co-authors of entries contributed.

Cassin’s “Introduction” warns that “we have not created yet another en-cyclopedia of philosophy, treating concepts, authors, currents, and systems for their own sakes” (xvii). “We have tried to think of philosophy within lan-guages, to treat philosophies as they are spoken, and to see what then chang-es in our ways of philosophizing” (xvii). “The selection of entries arises from a double labor of exploration, both diachronic and synchronic” (xvii).

Entries come in different kinds, as explained in “How to Use This Work” (xxi). “Among the ‘word-based’ entries, some start from a single word in a single language, taken as ‘untranslatable’, revealing a given constellation in time and/or space” (xxi). Examples of this first category of entries include “LEGGIADRIA, which initially expresses the gracefulness of women in the Italian Renaissance and evokes for us the smile of the Mona Lisa; or MIR, which in Russian means ‘peace’, ‘the world’, and ‘peasant commune’” (xxi). One comes across terms such as sprezzatura in studies in the humanities, and there is of course an entry for it in the book under review.

For good reason, abuses of the notion of untranslatability are not to be found here, such as bambini (which appeared decades ago in a French ladies’ magazine, in a text set in Italy: as though Italian children were not

1 Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004.

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your usual garden-variety of children), or American English papoose, in Italian papuso ‘Native American child carried in a sack on his mother’s back’, from which the sense ‘non-unionised free rider’ was derived in the slang of Italian trade unionists. This book is strictly high-brow.

Entries belonging to another subcategory of word-based entries “pres-ent one or more networks and seek to bring out their particularities” (xxi). The entry for POLITICS considers not only ‘politics’, but also ‘policy’. Both ‘pattern’ and Gestalt are dealt with s.v. STRUCTURE. The headword CLASSIC is followed, in smaller type, by CLASSICISM, NEOCLASSIC, NEOCLASSICISM (144). “The more general, ‘thematic’ entries” (xxi) are the second category, and are “meta-entries in a fashion”: they “examine the way in which one language or another works overall by starting with a crucial characteristic: for example, the difference between ser and estar in philosophical Spanish (see SPANISH) or diglossia in Russian (RUSSIAN). Some of them engage a major problem, like the order of words (WORD ORDER) or the mode of expressing time and aspect (ASPECT)” (xxi) – to the latter entry (48–64), I am devoting a section in this review article.

Boxes are set apart inside some pages. Boxes, in the book, are on three columns (instead of two), against a grey backdrop. The boxes “represent so many beams of light brought to bear on the text, its translation, a terminol-ogy, or a tradition” (xxi).

Some entries (e.g., COMMONPLACE) are more accessible than oth-ers. Clearly, this is not a book to be read quickly. This in turn means that you are likely to need your own copy. The “Preface” (which is signed by Apter, Lezra, and Wood) includes a section, “Editorial Liberties” (xi–xii), which lists or rather exemplifies additions with respect to the original French edi-tion. “In shifting the Dictionary’s language of address, we felt compelled to plug specific gaps, especially those pertaining to ‘theory’, understood in the Anglophone academic sense of that term” (xi). For example: “We added ma-terial by Kevin McLaughlin to clarify Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis in the entry MEMORY; by Leland de la Duran-taye on Giorgio Agamben’s marked use of the expressions Homo sacer and ‘bare life’ in the entry ANIMAL; by Étienne Balibar on Jacques Lacan’s fungible use of instance as a term for ‘moment’, ‘instantiation’, ‘agency’, in the entry WILL” (xi), and so forth. Ironically, there is no entry THEORY, nor does ‘theory’ or ‘théorie’ appear as an entry in the index, where we do find ‘themis’, a headword of THEMIS/DIKÊ/NOMOS, and we do find ‘theôsis’ in the index, with pointers to pages in the entry (121–124) entitled

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BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, a Russian philosophical term approximated, as for its etymological sense, by Deus-Homo in patristic discourse, but which in modern Russian philosophy “designates two movements directed toward each other: that of the divine moving toward man and that of humanity rising toward the divine” (121).

Thematic entries are set apart because the vertical line on the left side of the headword is thicker. An example is ESSENCE, a headword followed in smaller type by SUBSTANCE, SUBSISTANCE, EXISTENCE (298). Another example is the entry entitled “COMBINATION AND CONCEP-TUALIZATION”, given the subtitle “A ‘Particle metaphysics’ in German” (145), where the clever phraseological modification of particle physics is rather opaque. Section II in that entry is “An Extreme and Revealing Exam-ple: The Heideggerian Ge-Stell” (147), whose first subsection is “A. The ter-minological constellation of technology”. Section III is “Gefährt and Gestell: Hans-Dieter Bahr’s reply to Heidegger” (151). The entry is by Jean-Pierre Dubost (152), but a box, “Gestell”, is signed by Pascal David (149).

Consider the entry “ENGLISH: The English Language, or the Genius of the Ordinary”. Its first two sentences are: “A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic of classical English philosophy (from Berkeley to Hume, Reid, and Bentham) and American philosophy, whether in transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau) or in pragmatism (from James to Rorty). But the orientation did not become truly explicit until after the lin-guistic turn carried out by Wittgenstein, Ryle, and especially Austin, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of ‘ordinary language philosophy’” (257). The preamble claims that the “preponderant recourse to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the English language (such as the gerund) that often make it difficult if not impossible to translate” (257) – a “paradox because English claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as the dominant philosoph-ical language in the second half of the twentieth century” (257). The entry’s preamble is followed by a reference to Box 1, “Langage, langue, parole: A virtual distinction” (258), which debunks “what is often believed”, as “the English language does not conflate under the term ‘language’ what French distinguishes (following Saussure) with the terms langage, langue, and pa-role”: the box distinguishes the usages of tongue, speech, and language (258). Section I in the entry is “The Variety of Modes of Action” (whose subsections are “The passive” and “‘Do’, ‘make’, ‘have’”). Section II, “The Operator ‘-ing’: A multifunctional operator” (which comprises “1. The

gerund: The form of ‘-ing’ that is the most difficult to translate”, and “2. The progressive: Tense and aspect”), and “B. The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance” – comprising “1. Fictive entities”, “2. Reversible derivations” (“The reversibility of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential result of preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more difficult to avoid in French or German, where nominalization hardens and freezes notions” (261)), and “3. Toward an international phil-osophical neo-language?”, followed by a pointer to Box 2, “A ‘defect’ in the English language? ‘Between’ according to Bentham” (262). Section III, “The Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Philosophy”, includes “A. Critique of language and philosophy”, “B. The method of ordinary lan-guage: ‘Be your size. Small men’” (the latter being a quotation from con-versation cited by Urmson), “C. Who is ‘we’? Cavell’s question”. The entry ENGLISH is by Jean-Pierre Cléro and Sandra Augier.

Another thematic entry is TO TRANSLATE (1139–1155), under whose headword a list of terms from French, German, Greek, and Latin appears, and whose last box is entitled “No untranslatables!” (1154–1155). That box mainly discusses Leonardo Bruni’s Sulla perfetta traduzione (from the early 15th century), and concludes: “Is not this dictionary, with its inclusion of ‘poetic’ terms such as sprezzatura and leggiadria, ‘strength’, ‘to stand’, and thus terms from texts that are only marginally ‘philosophical’ in the strict-est sense, also a transformation of philosophical language into something broader: a way of speaking, or even a way of life? A philosophy for nonphi-losophers?” (followed by the box’s own three bibliographical entries).

The boxes in the thematic entry LANGUAGE are entitled “Sprache/Rede, langue/parole? Heidegger as a reader of the Greeks” (546), and “Lin-gua and sermo in classical Latin” (547). In the word-based entry “LAW, right”, Section I is “The Particularities of English Political Right(s)”, with the boxes “Edward Coke (1552–1664)”, for one “generally considered the greatest representative of the common law tradition” (554), and “Equity” (555): equity, along with common law and statute law, is one of the three fundamental sources of law, in English law. The remaining sections in the entry “LAW, right” are “‘Law’ and ‘Right’ According to Hobbes: Legal Positivism versus Common Law”, and “Two Philosophical Traditions”, with subsections such as “Legal positivism in England”. Another word-based en-try is LEX/JUS.

There is a word-based entry HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, as well as GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN and GESCHICHTLICH, and the thematic

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entry HISTORY/STORY. In the latter, Box 1 is entitled “The history of doc-tors” (441), and is concerned with the Hippocratic corpus and with Galen. Box 2 is “History between rhetoric and philosophy” (443). Box 3 is “His-toria [ἱστορία], muthos [μν̃θος] / fabula, plasma [μλάσμα] / argumentum” (444), where brackets are first followed by a comma, then by slashes, and where in the awkward Greek spelling μν̃̃θος, the υ was mistakenly replaced with ν as though this was not the letter nu, but rather like U and V of the Ro-man script. Box 4 is “Historia, history, Geschichte” (445). Box 5 is “Histo-riography, history of history, Historik” (448), and finally, Box 6 is “Rhetoric of history and ‘metahistory’” (449).

Karl Marx is conspicuous in the entry PRAXIS, but as shown by the index entry for him, he is mentioned here and there throughout the book. In the entry PRAXIS, Marx appears in headwords in Section II, “The Marxist Reversal”, Box 2, “Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach”, Section III, “After Aristotle and Marx” (whose Subsection A is about Antonio Gramsci), and Box 3, “‘Marx in Italics’: Labriola, Gentile, and the filosofia della prassi”.

As well as entries for AUTHORITY, POWER, and DOMINATION, there are related entries headworded in German: MACHT and HERRSCHAFT. The latter term “was never established as a stable equivalent in German for translating Latin notions such as dominium, dominatio, potestas, etc.” (433).

The word-based entry CLAIM explains in its preamble (141):

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘claim’ moved from the political and jurid-ical fields to that of the theory of knowledge, and then more generally to the philos-ophy of language. ‘Claim’ becomes a ‘claim to know’ and then a ‘thesis’. The use of the term raises first the problem, which emerged from English empiricism and was then taken up by Kant, of the legitimacy of the knowledge, of my claims to know and say. There is an equivalent in German (Anspruch), but none in French. Finally, ‘claim’, as in Stanley Cavell (The Claim of Reason), becomes a ‘statement’ to be maintained or claimed (‘my claim is’).

The preamble of the entry CLAIM is followed by Section I, “‘Claim’ as a Juridical and Political Demands” – which comprises “A. ‘Claim about’, ‘claim to’: A demand for something that is owed, the demand for a right” and “B. ‘Claim on’: Locke, or the possible illegitimacy of the political ‘claim’” – then Section II, “‘Claim’ as a Demand for Knowledge”, and Section III, “‘Claim’, the Voice of the Ordinary Language”.

One finds an unsigned entry ABSURD (7) with three brief sections (“The Absurd and Reason”, “The Absurd and Meaning”, and “The Absurd and Existence”), with plenty of pointers in the text to other entries. It is

followed by the entry ACEDIA by José Miguel Marinas (7–8), not subdi-vided into numbered sections, but one finds under its headword its approx-imations in French (tristesse, acédie), Greek (“akêdeia [ἀκήδεια], akêdia [ἀκηδία]”), and Latin (taedium). For sure Dante’s treatment of accidia in his Divine Comedy would have warranted also the Italian term to be listed, but it is not (Dante goes unmentioned in the entry). The Spanish terminol-ogy is discussed within the entry, dealing with ancient Greek or Roman authors, then “in Cassian and the eastern desert fathers” (8) and Thomas Aquinas. Concerning the eastern Church Fathers, the entry points out that among them, acedia was designated “by the expression ‘noonday demon’, which is supposed to come from verse 6 of Psalm 91” (8), but, may I add, the Hebrew wording qeṭeb yāšūd ṣahŏráyim is not interpreted that way in Jewish exegesis. Elsewhere,2 I have written:

Hebrew qeṭeb, according to Psalm 90 (91):6, “devastates/strikes (yāšūd) at noon”, may perhaps be rendered as ‘destruction’ (which is how Pormann translates it), but note that it’s arguably a personification or hypostasis, or at any rate, it is amenable to it (cf. réšep and déber). Therefore, contra Pormann, it is by far too costly and unwar-ranted to suggest that there was a “different underlying original which the Septuagint appears to render [and which] is probably […] wě-šēd; lit. ‘and demon’”. The real motivation for translating δαιμονιου μεσεμβρινου or daemonio meridiano (“[by] the noonday demon”) is there under your nose in the Hebrew: it is the verb yāšūd, which was interpreted as though as it had to do with šēd (‘demon’). This is an example of homiletic etymology instantiated in the Septuagint: what does a šēd do? It yāšūd, “does what a šēd does”. Cf. the Italian proverb: Marzo marzeggia (“March behaves likes March”, about the weather […]) […]

Having discussed in detail the evolution of usage in Spanish, Marinas turns to Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire at the transition from Romanticism to developments since the interwar period.

A related entry is DOR. Its preamble begins as follows: “The Romani-an word dor, like ‘spleen’, acedia, Sehnsucht, or saudade, is related to the notion of malaise, but gives it a particular meaning by turning it toward an object or toward being. It is a lyrical expression of the feeling of finitude, be-tween folk metaphysics and philosophical reflection, and is self-consciously Romanian” (227). There is an entry for Portuguese SAUDADE (another

2 In my review of Peter E. Pormann (ed.), Rufus of Ephesus: On Melancholy (SAPERE: Scripta Antiquitatis Posterioris ad Ethicam Religionemque Pertinentia, 12), Tübin-gen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008, in Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 4 (2011 [2012]), pp. 281–286.

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Portuguese headword is HÁ/HAVER), as well as an entry for GOGO: “In Basque, gogo expresses all the processes of interiority and subjectivity” (404), and so forth.

There are separate entries for Russian PRAVDA and ISTINA. “The Russian word istina [истина], unlike its French translation vérité, has a primarily ontological sense: it means: ‘what is, what truly exists’” (513). In contrast: “The word pravda [правда], despite the unambiguous nature of the equivalents used to translate it: ‘truth’, vérité, Wahrheit – designates not only truth but also justice” (813). It is a complex entry with ten sec-tions, with a focus on the sense ‘justice’ of pravda.

There is an entry whose headword, EVIGHED, is Danish (approx-imated by English eternity and German Ewigkeit), and concerned, of course, with Søren Kirkegaard (328–329). PLUDSELIGHED/DESULTO-RISK is another entry with a Danish headline; its English rendering is with “suddenness/desultory” (800). Another entry connected with a particular philosopher – this being Walter Benjamin in his late writings – has the German headword JETZTZEIT (English “at present, present time, the now time”).

Entries with a French headword include ÇA, IL Y A, SOUCI, SENS COMMUN, DÉNÉGATION, DROIT, ÉNONCÉ, PHÉNOMÈNE, and RÉVOLUTION. Entries with German headwords include the entry “GUT/BÖSE, WHOL/ÜBEL (WEH), GUT/SCHLECHT” (for good/evil, good/bad). The point of departure of the entry ES (a German technical term whose English and French equivalent is id) is, of course, Freud (292–294), and the next entry, too, has a German headword: ES GIBT, ranging from Kant to Husserl, Meinong, and Heidegger (295–298).

Some entry headwords are Greek, such as TO TI ÊN EINAI (approx-imated with Arabic ḥaqīqa and māhiyya, Latin quidditas, and French la quiddité, l’essentiel de l’essence), DOXA, and ESTI, or then MÊTIS, and the long entries MIMÊSIS and PHRONÊSIS. Also consider the titles of boxes, e.g. (s.v. I/ME/MYSELF), “To, auto, h(e)auto, to auto: The con-struction of identity in Greek” (468–469). The entry (about fate) whose main headline is KÊR also has six secondary headlines, and all of them are Greek: MOIRA, AISA, HEIMARMENÊ, ANAGKÊ (sic: the trans-literation is faithful to ἀνάγκη), PEPRÔMENÊ, and TUCHÊ (531). Con-cerning the latter, I would like to point out the following. In visual art from antiquity, Tychē (Τύχη) is Fortune, who is blindfolded. Tychē in Greek mythology was the most powerful of the three Parchae, who determine

man’s fate. It was from the late fourth century BCE, in the Hellenistic world, that the cult of Tychē became especially prominent, as being the protector and representative of individual cities. The visual image of the Tychē of Antioch (sculpted by Eutychides, and now at the Vatican Muse-ums) was a pervasive model as late as late imperial Roman art.3 The visual model of the Tychē of Antioch was recycled, in Christian art, for repre-senting the blindfolded Synagogue, i.e., Jewry being blind to salvation. The archetype of the blindfolded Synagogue is a statue at the Salzburg cathedral, from the eighth century.4 This appeared in Western Christianity, in cultures where (separately from that visual motif) the accusation of human sacrifices was also levelled against Jews. This was independent of the following. In eastern Christianity, memory of Tychē was preserved in association with human sacrifices.5

3 See Tobias Dohrn, Die Tyche von Antiochia. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1960.4 That much was pointed out by M. Bussagli, s.v. “Antropomorfismo. L’antropomorfi-

smo nelle arti figurative”, in L’universo del corpo, II. Il corpo e le sue parole, Roma 1999, 294 b; and, citing the latter, by Ezio Albrile, “Il Cerchio della Vita. Arte roman-ica e cosmologia”, Studi sull’Oriente Cristiano, 17.2 (Rome: Accademia Angelica- Costantiniana di Lettere Arti e Scienze, 2013), pp. 63–93.

5 In several African myths of origin about the foundation of a city, a maiden was re-portedly sacrificed, possibly entombed somewhere in the walls; see passim in Stephen Belcher, African Myths of Origin, Penguin Classics, London: Penguin Books, 2005, a book which I reviewed in Fabula, 52(3/4), 2011, pp. 316–320. There is an important parallel for the practice of sacrificing a maiden in connection with the founding or ceremonies of securing the continued good fortunes of individual cities, in Hellenistic practices maintained in the imperial Roman East, within the cult of the city’s Tychē, until the emperor Constantine discontinued the virgin sacrifices, but not the Tychē ceremonies of cities. At any rate, a Christian chronicler with polemic intents, John Malalas, incorporated in his writings passages from his sources that reported that much. Benjamin Garstad, “The Tyche Sacrifices in John Malalas: Virgin Sacrifice and Fourth-Century Polemical History”, Illinois Classical Studies, 30 (2005), pp. 83–135, remarked on p. 86: “It is most unlikely that Malalas himself is the author of the ac-counts of tyche sacrifice. Malalas presents the tyche sacrifices blandly and dispassion-ately, among the other deeds and accomplishments of those who perform them, and balances them with positive appraisals of the rulers in question.”

Garstad explained (ibid., pp. 83–85, his brackets):

Scattered throughout John Malalas’ history of the world from Adam to Justinian there are some dozen accounts of virgins being sacrificed at the foundation of var-ious cities. In most cases the sacrifice is overseen by a king or ruler, after the sac-rifice an image of the virgin selected is set up which becomes the cult statue of the civic tyche, and she gives her name to the tyche of the city. These tyche sacrifices

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are carried out by the heroes of Greek legend such as Perseus and Iphigenia, by Al-exander and Seleucus, by a number of Roman emperors, and finally – in a modified form – by Constantine. Seleucus’ foundation of Antioch and initiation of one of the most prominent civic tyche cults (made famous through the statue of Eutychides, a model for other figures), according to Malalas’ Chronicle, offers a good representa-tive example of these narratives.

Namely (Garstad, ibid.): “… where the village of Bottia was, across from Iopolis, there he [Seleucus Nicator] staked out the foundations of the wall, and through the agency of Amphion the high priest and officiant of the mysteries he sacrificed a virgin girl by the name of Aimathe in the space between the city and the river on the 22nd of Artemisios, or May, at the first hour of the day, as the sun was rising. He called [the city] after the name of his own son who was called Antiochus Soter. And he straightway established a temple, which he called that of Zeus Bottios. And he swiftly raised the tremendous walls through the agency of Xenarios the architect. He set up a bronze stele in the form of a statue of the maiden who had been offered as a sacrifice as the tyche of the city above the river, and at once he made a sacrifice to her as the tyche.” Garstad, ibid., re-marked that “Trajan’s tyche sacrifice, also at Antioch, includes some important details”, as Malalas’ Chronicle states indeed:

And this most pious Trajan made foundations in Antioch the Great, beginning with his first foundation, the gate called the Middle Gate near the temple of Ares, where the torrent of the Parmenios flows down, close to what is now called the Macellum. He carved above an image of the she wolf nursing Romus [Romulus] and Remus, by which it would be recognized that this was a Roman foundation. There he sac-rificed a comely virgin girl of the city by the name of Calliope for the sake of the redemption and cleansing of the city, and he held a bridal procession for her. And he immediately repaired the two great porticoes, and established many other public works in the city of Antioch, among them the baths and the aqueduct, diverting the water which flowed from the springs of Daphne to the [ravines] called ‘the Wilds’ (Agriai), and gave his name to the baths and the aqueduct. And he completed the theatre of Antioch, which was unfinished, setting up in it, on top of four small pil-lars in the middle of the nymphaion of the proscenion, a gilded bronze stele of the maiden sacrificed by him. She was sitting over the river Orontes, depicted as the tyche of the city being crowned by the kings Seleucus and Antiochus.

Garstad (ibid.) pointed out that the fuller context of the latter passage is significantly followed “by an account of Trajan’s execution of the Christian bishop of Antioch, and of five Christian virgins, statues of whom are also set up by the emperor. Con-stantine apparently also required a tyche for his new capital at Constantinople, but, it is made clear, he inaugurated this tyche without resorting to human sacrifice”, and Malalas’ Chronicle claims indeed: “Making a bloodless sacrifice to God, he [Constan-tine] called the tyche of the city renewed by him and reestablished in his own name Anthousa. This city was founded at first by Phidalia, and the tyche of the city was then called Ceroe.”

2. A Few Remarks about the Entry on Verbal Aspect

The entry ASPECT (48–64), I must say, is one punctual of the most im-penetrable. I am not against technicalities,6 but they need to be made ac-cessible, and usually in the book under review this is adequate. In the entry ASPECT, its seven authors did not deem it necessary to supply the usual list of aspects such as inchoative, ergative, stative, habitual, and frequen-tative vs. semelfactive7 (or punctual).8 They delve in complexities almost right away (though not exhaustively, nor could they).

The entry ASPECT comprises twelve sections (which have subsec-tions and sub-subsections), and five boxes. Whereas in the entry ASPECT,

6 For example, I reviewed Alice G.B. ter Meulen’s fascinating, very formal booklet Rep-resenting Time in Natural Language: The Dynamic Interpretation of Tense and Aspect (A Bradford Book. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997, 2nd rev. edn.) in Computers and Artificial Intelligence (Bratislava), 17.1 (1998), pp. 98–100, and reworked that review into Appendix B, “Ter Meulen’s Dynamic Aspect Trees and Chronoscopes” in E. Nissan, “The Rod and the Crocodile. Temporal Relations in Textual Hermeneutics: An Application of Petri Nets to Semantics”, Semiotica, 184.1/4 (2011), pp. 187–227.

I would like to signal Robert I. Binnick, A Bibliography of Tense, Verbal Aspect, Aktionsart, and Related Areas: 6600 Works, Division of Humanities, University of oronto at Scvarborough, 2001 (<http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~binnick/old%20tense/List.pdf>). He also has a website (updated to 2006) at <http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~binnick/TENSE/> entitled “The Project on Annotated bibliography of Contem-porary Research in Tense, Grammatical Aspect, Aktionsart, and Related Areas”.

7 The Latin etymological sense of the word semelfactive is ‘done only once’ (from semel ‘once’).

8 May I also mention these other aspects: gnomic (or generic) vs episodic, inceptive (or ingressive), terminative (or cessative), resumptive, durative, delimitative, defective, experiential, intentional, accidental, moderative, attentuative, and segmentative. This list with the respective exemplification appears, along with a good discussion, in the Wikipedia entry “Grammatical aspect” and those to which it is linked (see at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect>). In a sense, a remedy to what I have stated about the entry ASPECT in the book under review, could be simply to first ac-cess the Wikipedia entry “Grammatical aspect”. This puts my criticism in perspective.

Concerning, e.g., the inceptive, consider what Hayward Keniston, “Verbal Aspect in Spanish”, Hispania, 19.2 (1936), pp. 163–176, remarked on p. 166: “But the begin-ning may be approached from two points of view: (1) the beginning may be consid-ered as the culminating point of a prior series of actions or states (‘effective’ aspect), or (2) as the starting point, without regard to prior conditions, our interest being confined to events subsequent to the beginning (‘inceptive’ aspect).”

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Box 3 is “Aristotle and telos” (53), Box 5 (58) explains how the present- day usages of ‘telic’ and ‘non-telic’ reverse what Aristotle meant by ‘telic’ and ‘a-telic’.

Even though this is a book concerned with European languages and ideas, it has sporadic forays into Arabic or Hebrew terms (on this, more later). Concerning verbal aspects, it is useful to realise the relation be-tween aspect and derivation – for example, consider how suffixation forms dormicchiare ‘to doze’ or vivacchiare ‘to somehow live’ in Italian, out of dormire ‘to sleep’ and vivere ‘to live’; and that in Latin, Martial apparent-ly emulated the relation of the verbs pario ‘to give birth’ and parturio in order to coin (or did he rather find it already in existence?) the verb caca-turio for ‘to have to go to stool’ – but also with more complex regularities in Semitic languages, where every given verbal conjugation (this in turn being related to nouns) can express any of a number of verbal aspects. In the following, let P, ^, and L be meta-radicals (i.e., symbols for radicals, consonants to be plugged in the free spaces in the derivational patterns):

C1) The Hebrew basic conjugation is /Pa^aL/ and conveys ordinary active (the basic conjugation).

C2) The /niP^aL/ conjugation conveys the ordinary passive (it is the passive of /Pa^aL/), and it can also convey the aspect of “doability”.

C3) The /hiP^iL/ conjugation is active, and conveys any out of several aspects: unitransitive causal (“to make something or somebody become…” as in /himlik/

[him'lix], i.e., “to crown”, lit. “to make king”), ditransitive causal (“to make somebody do something”, as in /hi’kil/ [he?e'xil],

i.e., “to make somebody eat”), inchoative (“to become…”, as in /hismiq/ [his'mik/, i.e., “to become red”),

declarative (“to affirm that somebody is…”, as in /hicdiq/ [hits'dik], i.e., “to justify”, as if declaring that the direct object is just),

delocutive (“to say some formula, e.g., a prayer, which contains ‹root› or is named by ‹derivative_of_root›”, as in /hibdil/ [hiv'dil] “to say Havdalah”),

simply active – the latter, historically, perhaps out of affectation – and so forth.C4) The /huPâL/ conjugation expresses the passive of /hiPîL/ verbs.C5) The aspects conveyed by /Pi^êL/ conjugation are the intensive active, or ordi-

nary active, or frequentative active, or (sometimes) they convey deprivation.C6) The /Pu^âL/ conjugation expresses the passive of the /Pi^êL/ verbs.C7) The /hitPa^êL/ conjugation conveys reflexive action, or mutual action, or ordi-

nary active, or ordinary passive, or doability.

The following is (with some simplifications) a convenient notation for as-sociations between Hebrew conjugations and verbal aspects. Notating a

function’s argument as (·) is familiar from “systems and control”, an engi-neering discipline. The braces { } enclose a set, as usual in mathematics.

C1 { act ( ord ( (·) ) };C2 { pass ( ord ( (·) ), pass ( may ( (·) ) };C3 { act ( erg ( (·) ), act ( inch ( (·) ), act ( ord ( (·) ) };C4 { pass ( erg ( (·) ), pass ( inch ( (·) ), pass ( ord ( (·) ) };C5 { act ( intens ( (·) ), act ( ord ( (·) ), act ( freq ( (·) ), act ( depriv ( (·) ) };C6 { pass ( intens ( (·) ), pass ( ord ( (·) ), pass ( freq ( (·) ), pass ( depriv ( (·) ) };C7 { reflex ( ord ( (·) ), mutual ( ord ( (·) ), act ( ord ( (·) ), pass ( ord ( (·) ), pass ( may ( (·) ) }.

This many-to-many relation between the set of conjugations and the set of verbal aspects in Hebrew is not unique. Consider the verbal suffix -ettan in Old English.9 “In nine instances, less than one-eighth of the total, the -ettan suffix appears to have had causative force”.10 “In two instances -et-tan apparently functioned as a diminutive”. “The frequentatives, however, present by far the most imposing list. There are in all twenty-six verbs which describe actions characterized by frequent and relatively regular repetition”, e.g., “bealcettan ‘to belch’, blīcettan ‘to glitter, quiver’, bo-rettan ‘to brandish, move to and fro’, brogdettan ‘to quiver’, clæpettan ‘to vibrate’, cloccettan ‘to throb’, droppetan ‘to fall in drops’, flogettan ‘to flutter’, fnærettan ‘to breathe heavily’, hālettan ‘to greet’”, where the latter verb “[t]ranslates resalutato in Gregory’s Dialogues. Other citations support the idea of effusive and repeated greetings”.11

There are four other verbs, crācettan ‘to croak’, gealpettan ‘to gulp’, grunnettan ‘to grunt’, and hafettan ‘to clap’ (used of the flapping of a fowl’s wings in one citation), which might be classed with the frequentatives. Note that all four are used to indicate animal sounds or reflexes which could conceivably occur as a single or isolated action but which do in fact occur more often in repetition, and in every instance but one the citations bear out this frequentative concept. Closely related to the frequentatives and often classed as such is a group of verbs which I have chosen to label unsustained duratives.12

9 I quote from Albert H. Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan in Old English”, Lan-guage, 18.4 (1942), pp. 275–281.

10 This and the next three quotations are from Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, p. 278.

11 Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, p. 278, fn. 13.12 Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, pp. 278–279.

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“There are in addition six other verbs whose inclusion within the fre-quentative class rests wholly upon the context in which they appear”.13 “It is safe to say, however, that of the total of seventy-six verbs, an absolute minimum of forty indicate repetition of action either at regular or irregu-lar intervals”. “There is next the problem of the intensives, a term which seems to mean many things”.14 “There is finally the problem of the disap-pearance of these verbs and of the suffix -ettan as an active verb-forming element”.15 “Its disappearance as an active verb-forming element in the 12th century in all probability resulted from the Early Middle English neu-tralization of unstressed vowels”.16

3. A Caveat about Hebrew Terms

Cassin explains: “We have not explored all the words there are, or all lan-guages with regard to a particular word, and still less all the philosophies there are. We have taken as our object symptoms of difference, the ‘untrans-latables’, among a certain number of contemporary European languages, returning to ancient languages (Greek, Latin) and referring to Hebrew and Arabic whenever it was necessary in order to understand these differenc-es” (xvii). Concerning “Hebrew and Arabic whenever this was necessary”, I cannot say this was a success, even though I appreciate it that, for exam-ple, under the header INTENTION, the Arabic terms ma‘nā and ma‘qūl do appear (500), with a discussion on pp. 506–507 (cf. on p. 508), includ-ing in Box 1 on intentio and ma‘nā. The entry INTENTION is splendidly complex (500–511).

An entry whose headword is Arabic is TALAṬṬUF, whose approxima-tions include the English ‘felicitous ability’ (111). Quite surprisingly, there is an entry whose two headwords are TORAH (in Hebrew) and ŠARĪ‘A (in Arabic), which frankly is absurd, given the premises of this book. Sepa-rate entries should have been written, and the entry for the Jewish concept

13 This and the next quotation are from Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, p. 279.14 Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, p. 280.15 Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, pp. 280–281.16 Marckwardt, “The Verbal Suffix -ettan”, p. 281.

should not have been as rudimentary – apart from the fact that if anything, Hebrew hălākhā (for ‘rabbinic jurisprudence’) comes closer to šarī‘a than tōrā does.

Another entry with a Hebrew headword is ‘ŌLĀM, which neither posi-tively dissatisfies me, nor really satisfies me, and not only because of the of-ten wrong spellings in the Hebrew script one comes across in entries about Hebrew words.17 It is not enough to point out that this word for ‘world’ also denotes “the length of life (cf. English ‘old’) of a man” (733). In fact, may I add, “in His world” (bĕ‘ōlāmō) of homiletics is clearly distinct from the early rabbinic juridical usage of the same inflected word for “during his lifespan”, typically about whether, say, a child was already born when a particular man was alive.18

17 The entry for ‘ŌLĀM has no bibliographical section. The following could have been included: Ernst Jenni, “Das Wort ‘ōlām in Alten Testament”, Zeitschrift für die Alttes-tamentliche Wissenschaft, 64 (1952), pp. 197–248.

18 More informally, when a friend, a professor of applied chemistry, Prof. Aron Vecht here in London, at one time used to teach a divinity class at our university, and point-ed out to future Anglican reverends this Jewish homily of his, of which he is fond: ‘ōlām has a spatial extension (Mí še’amár vĕhayá ha‘olám, “He who said, and the world came into being”), a temporal extension (lĕ‘olám va‘éd, ‘forever’, literally ‘to world and witness’), and, he adds, the principle of uncertainty of quantum theory, as in the wording bĕhe‘além davár ‘the thing not being known’. Sure, to linguists it is at most a corradical, or then the same sequence of three radical consonants may be dif-ferent lexemes, but wordplay plays a conspicuous part in the history of Jewish ideas, because of its place in late antique homiletics, where it provides the homilete with the opportunity to convey novel understandings, or novel ideas (such as contemporary social commentary). The device of wordplay in traditional Hebrew texts or their em-ulations is still productive, as one can see from the example I gave in this note.

I have dealt with the device in various studies, e.g., E. Nissan, “Kidor: A Talmudic Onomastic Pun, and Hypotheses Concerning the Etymology” (2 parts), Studia Ety-mologica Cracoviensia, 20 (2015), pp. 139–180, 181–206; Id., “Nativised, Playfully Aetiologised Literary Zoonymy” (3 parts), in: Nachum Dershowitz and E. Nissan (eds.), Computational Linguistics and Linguistics, Vol. 3 of Language, Culture, Computation: Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka (Lecture Notes in Computer Sci-ence, 8003), Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2014, pp. 593–611, 612–641, 642–779; E. Nissan and Y. HaCohen-Kerner, “GALLURA and the Challenge of Combining Phono-Semantic Matching with Story-Generation: Zoonomastic Illustration”, ibid., pp. 780–866. Cf. E. Nissan, “Asia at Both Ends: An Introduction to Etymythology, with a Response to Chapter 9”, Chapter 10 in: Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (ed.), Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publish-ing, 2012), pp. 202–387, + pp. 5–7, 12–13, 17–18; E. Nissan, “Conniving with the

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Typos throughout the book under review are very few, and far apart.19 I do not include among typos, however, Hebrew misspellings, which are evidently due to ignorance, not mistyping. There is a weakness in how Hebrew terms as treated – even in their sometimes gross misspelling. When coming across as stunning a misspelling as (instead of

‘the world to come’) on p. 733, am I to insist on the wrong di-acritical marks on the same page in (instead of ‘those who come into the world’, i.e., ‘those created’), and the missing gemi-nation dot in (for ‘this world’, as opposed to ‘the world to come’)?

We come across an entry headlined “LËV [ ], lëvav [ ]”, and the only conceivable reason for a dieresis to appear over the E is that the He-brew diacritical mark for a long e is two dots side by side under the conso-nantal letter. That is a very poor reason to use the dieresis in transcription.

On p. 103, “berīt” for ‘covenant’ should be “bĕrīt”, by the transcrip-tion conventions adopted in the book, and the verb “karat” for ‘he cut’ should be “kārat”. Again on p. 103, “tapĕqîd” is most definitely wrong,

Learned: Gerson Rosenzweig’s Humour on New York Communal Life, in his Tal-mudic Parody Tractate America” (with the pre-headline: “2014: The Centennial of the Demise of Gerson Rosenzweig”), International Studies in Humour, 3.1 (2014), pp. 15–93; Id., “The Sweat of the (Low) Brow: New York Immigrant Life in Ger-son Rosenzweig’s Satire. Facets of his Talmudic Parody Tractate America” (with the pre-headline: “2011: The Sesquicentennial of the Birth of America’s Top Hebrew Humorist”), Israeli Journal of Humor Research, 1.2 (2012), pp. 29–85.

19 Most conspicuously, the entry ATTUALITÀ is signed in boldface “Charles Alunnil”, but just below one finds in the bibliography the correct spelling “Alunni”. On p. 8, col. 2, “spiritual decline” erroneously begins a line with a small indent, even though this is in mid-sentence. On p. 59, col. 2, line 16 from the bottom, a hyphen is out of place in “occu-rrence”. On p. 69, in Box 1, col. 1, “autosogetto” should be “auto-soggetto” (a term from Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy), and “pensa-mento” should not have the hyphen. In the bibliography of the entry ATTUALITÀ on p. 71, s.v. Spaventa, the Italian word tra became “tr”, and s.v. Franchini, “Salerne:” should be “Salerno:” rather than the French form of the place-name. S.v. Di Giovanni, “neoi-dalismo” should be “neoidealismo”, and “Laterza: Bari” should be “Bari: Laterza”. S.v. Vitiello, “comminciamento” should be “cominciamento”. On p. 71, col. 2, line 4, read the Italian conjunction “e” for ‘and’, instead of “et” in “Il torto et il diritto”. On p. 321, col. 1, line 6, “samurais” should be “saurais”. On p. 342, col. 1, line 10 from the bottom, in “( Pessoa,” there should not be a blank space. On p. 500, under the header of the entry INTENTION, for the Arabic terms ma‘nā and ma‘qūl confusingly the apostrophe or rather apex ́ was used.

as the ĕ should not be there, breaking the consonantal cluster; the Hebrew noun “tafqīd” (pronounced as tafkíd) denotes ‘task’.

On p. 1156, col.1, the Hebrew word ḥoq is given in the so-called scriptio plena, and should more correctly be in defective spelling, (the way it would appear as a headword in a Hebrew dictionary), reflecting the phonemic form being /ḥuqq/ rather than /ḥoq/. The plural ḥuqqīm is given as but should rather be (with a the dageš forte, i.e., the gemi-nation dot),20 whereas the root should have been indicated as for ḥqq rather than in the awkward form

The latter suggests that the person who made the error indicated it the way it would be recorded in Arabic with a šadda diacritical mark for gem-ination above the letter qāf (but then, using the Arabic script). This is not the usage in Hebrew grammars, in a situation such as the present one. (True, in texts in Hebrew linguistics, or then in scholarly transcriptions from Arabic, one does find on occasion the Arabic šadda diacritical mark above such letters that cannot by standard prescriptive grammar take the dageš forte, the dot inside the letter that indicates it is double, but clearly this was not the situation at hand, nor was it on the mind of the entry’s author.)

The noun “ḥuqqāh” should have been spelled ḥuqqā, and in the He-brew script it has been wrongly given as instead of (in this case, this is likely to be a typo indeed, because of the exchange of two similarly shaped letters). But then again, the root awkwardly given as should

20 In a book discussing wordplay in Plautus’ Latin comedies – Michael Fontaine, Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) – Fontaine claims that when faced with Plautus’ wordplay, our disadvantage is that “Plautine comedy is for us a textual experience, and we lack the benefit of original punctuation or independent stage directions to indicate what the playwright intended” (7). Fontaine illustrates this by naming a claim concerning a passage in a particular play in whose protagonists are twins. That passage is the declaration that even though the subject graecissat (i.e., is about things Greek), it does not atticissat (Atticise, like in Athens), but rather sicilicissitat (Sicilianises: in Sicily at the times of the Roman Republic, Greek was spoken). Fontaine argues that there is a portmanteau formation here with sicilicus, the name of “a small diacritical mark above a letter to show that it counted double” (10). This is like a dageš forte dot in the Hebrew script, which in the last dozen centuries has been used to indicate that the consonant inside which it is written, is to be pronounced double. Likewise, the Arabic script has the šadda (‘tying’) diacritical mark above a letter, and that mark indicates that consonant is to be pronounced dou-ble. Plautus’ double sense is then not only that the protagonists were born in Sicily (which they were), but also that it is a comedy of twins (gemini, just as the sicilicus is a geminationis nota, an ‘indication of twining’).

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rather be (špṭ): the Hebrew phoneme /p/ has two allophones, [p] written as when diacritical marks are present, and [f] (the letter represent-ing it is without the dot), and one wonders what the writer was thinking, when putting a dot inside the letter for /p/, as though it was there to render the allophone [p] in particular, something absurd in a Hebrew lexical root.

In the entry PLEASURE, one finds: “Its Latin spelling, jubilatio, is borrowed from the Hebrew term that designates the ram’s horn (yôbhei), the trumpet that is blown for great and solemn events” (798). The Hebrew term is definitely wrong. Phonemically, it is /yobel/, and the spelling is usually romanised as yōvēl. Its present-day standard pronunciation is yovél. A jubilee volume is séfer ha-yovél. A jubilarian (jubilaris in Latin) is bá‘al ha-yovél in present-day Hebrew. That the L became i in the sur-prising “yôbhei” (leaving the L in jubilatio unexplained) just shows, once again, that Hebrew is the Cinderella of the otherwise admirable book un-der review. There could be hardly a sharper contrast between the Hebrew spellings, so unfortunate that had this been a book to which Hebrew was more central (it is not at all), would have deservedly earned it the Italian qualification infortunio editoriale (don’t ask me to translate), and what is for the rest a splendid book and a reason for pride.

The few entries about Hebrew terms and concepts are by a professor of Arabic philosophy. For sure Jewish studies have major exponents in relevant areas, who could have contributed to the original French edition, as authors or co-authors? At the very least, such shortcomings should have been fixed in the American edition.

Even considering that the French edition was conceived as a Diction-naire européen des philosophies, one cannot excuse the frankly perfunc-tory, tiny number of entries allowed for Arabic and Hebrew headwords. The respective cultures did thrive in Europe, and did have an impact on medieval Latin philosophy (think of the Jewish translators from Arabic). It would have been quite rewarding to consider how the concepts considered mutated at cultural boundaries – definitely within the remit of the book under review. For sure, a much bigger book would have been necessary, to do justice to more than the concepts it does cover.

4. How Enlightening, the Enlightenment? The Thing, and the Entry

4.1 The Entry for the Enlightenment, and the Box for the Haskalah

ENLIGHTENMENT and LUMIÈRES are not headwords (“enlighten-ment” appears in the index, quite tangentially). There is a good entry whose headline (576) is LIGHT/ENLIGHTENMENT, under which there are ap-proximations in Danish (only lys), Dutch (only licht), French (both lumière and Lumières), German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Span-ish. In that list, the only Hebrew term included is – transcribed in an absolutely wrong manner,21 as haśĕkālâ – but inside the interesting entry LIGHT/ENLIGHTENMENT, we find an on balance reasonably good box about the Jewish Enlightenment. Its headword is, alas, the mistranscribed “Haśĕkālâ” (580).

The first column of the three of Box 3 on p. 580 discusses the term “Haśĕkālâ” (sic) as being derived from śēkel (recte: śēkel [‘sexel]) ‘rea-son’, as opposed to derivation from ’ôr ‘light’. I would like to say in addi-tion that in relatively recent scholarship in Hebrew some prefer the term ne’orút (cf. na’ór ‘enlightened’), which in turn is derivative of or indeed, for ‘Enlightenment’, instead of tnu‘át ha-Haskala (literally, ‘the movement of the haskalá’), by preferring to reserve the term haskalá for ‘education’, such as in haskalá gvohá ‘higher education’. The etymon (which the box mentions indeed) of Haskalá /haśkala/ for ‘Enlightenment’ is sékhel (pho-nemically /śekl/) for ‘mind’, but here ‘reason’. Cf. hiskíl (hiśkīl) for ‘to

21 Instead of haśkālâ (haskalá, Haskalah). The ĕ (for the so-called schwa mobile break-ing a consonantal cluster) in haśĕkālâ is damning evidence that the “expert” on He-brew who supplied it does not possess the basic knowledge that ĕ cannot come before

– this being, because of the dot inside the letter, the forte allophone [k] of the phoneme /k/, the other being kh, the lenis allophone. It sounds jargon, but is some-thing that beginners are supposed to realise: if comes after a consonant, what we have is a consonantal cluster. There is zero, not ĕ, between the ś [s] and the k [k]. Quite possibly, this is an error of hypercorrection. In Hebrew present-day standard pronunciation, the schwa mobile is not pronounced (i.e., its articulatory realisation is as zero), so the person who produced the mistranscription inserted an ĕ for the schwa mobile even where it should not appear. This also explains the wrongly transcribed word “tapĕqîd” on p. 103, which we have signalled in the previous section.

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be smart’ or ‘to become smart’. In present-day scholarly English usage, Haskalah, and in German usage, Haskala, are standard forms and denote ‘Jewish Enlightenment’. May I mention a linguistic feature of Haskalah writings whose language was Hebrew: they stood out, as the stratum they adopted was biblicising, rather than rabbinic.

In the box on p. 580, only the German Haskalah gets some treatment. The Haskalah of Eastern Europe does not. It is somewhat surprising (but come to think of it, efficient, too, for the sake of economising space), that the two bibliographical entries chosen for that box are a book by Hermann Cohen, and the memoirs of Gershom Scholem – reflecting some intellec-tual German Jewish thinking of the early 20th century (see below). It must be said, in praise of the book under review, that throughout its entry or box bibliographies (and the general references at the end of the book as well) – including in the box about the (German) Haskalah – English-lan-guage editions are painstakingly indicated, where the original book priv-ileges editions in French.

Box 3 on p. 580, the one devoted to the Jewish Enlightenment, is un-signed. I do appreciate what it does manage to condense, but in a sense it hopelessly confines itself to the movement’s later developments in Germa-ny, and this may be quite misleading for readers who do not already know about what the Jewish Enlightenment actually was, historically. Its two bib-liographical entries, as mentioned, are Herrmann Cohen’s Religion der Ver-nunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, and Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem’s memoirs. As it is the current German and English editions of Hermann Cohen’s book that are indicated, with no indication of the original year of publication, some readers may fail to situate him in the proper period: Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was the founder (with Paul Natorp) of the Neo-Kantian philosophy school of Marburg, continued by Ernst Cassirer. Apparently, readers are expected to know the basics about philosophers. It is a book that, though not only catering to philosophers, was conceived with them in mind as readership. As for Scholem, he towers in the 20th-century history of scholarship researching the history of Jewish mysticism,22 a field

22 See e.g. Joseph Dan, “Jewish Studies After Gershom Scholem”, Encyclopaedia Ju-daica Year Book 1983–1985, Jerusalem: Keter, 1985, pp. 138–145; Id., Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History (New York: New York Uni-versity Press, 1987); Id., “Gershom Scholem: Between History and Historiosophy”, Binah: Studies in Jewish History, Thought and Culture, vol. 2 (ed. J. Dan, New York: Praeger 1989), pp. 219–249; Peter Schäfer and J. Dan (eds.), Gershom Scholem’s

much more advanced now, two generations later in terms of professors’ tenure.

A Jewish studies scholar active around the mid 19th century, M. [Moritz, Moshe] “Steinschneider, as Gershom Scholem asserts, ‘did not hide the fact that in his eyes the function of the science of Judaism [i.e., 19th-century Germany’s Wissenschaft des Judentums]23 consisted in burying the phenom-enon with dignity’.24 (Scholem had planned to write an article, that would in

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Paul Mendes-Flohr (ed.), Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work (Albany: State University of New York Press and Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Hu-manities, 1994); P. Schäfer and Gary Smith (eds.), Gershom Scholem Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1995); J. Dan, “Gershom Scholem: Between Mysticism and Scholarship”, The Germanic Review, 72 (1997), pp. 4–23. In a sense, Dan is Scholem’s successor.

23 See e.g. Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany and the Science of Judaism in France in the Nineteenth Century: Tradition and Modernity in Jewish Scholarship”, in: Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufman (eds.), Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts [SchrLBI], 66; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 39–49, with comment by Nils Roemer on pp. 49–53.

24 Clearly this is a signal example of secularisation. It has been claimed that a secularis-ing trend had developed since the early modern period, but much depends upon what is meant by the secularisation. At any rate, secularisation in the early modern period, or for that matter, the relation between secularisation and modernity, are fraught top-ics. “Quite a few scholars have cast doubt on the so-called ‘secularization thesis’, and even its supporters no longer see secularization as one homogeneous linear process common to various societies. Nor it is clear any longer that ‘secularization’ is an es-sential part of ‘modernization’ at all (modernization itself being a highly problematic concept)”. This quotation is from p. 229 in Michael Heyd, “The Collapse of Jacob’s Ladders? [sic] A Suggested Perspective on the Problem of Secularization on the Eve of the Enlightenment”, in: Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner (eds.), Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe; Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), pp. 229–238. Cf. William H. Swatos, Jr. and Daniel V.A. Olson (eds.), The Secularization Debate (Latham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Olivier Tschannen, “The Secularization Paradigm: A Systematiza-tion”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 3 (1991), pp. 395–415; D. Yamane, “Secularization on Trial: In Defense of a Neo-Secularization Paradigm”, ibid., 36 (1997), pp. 109–122; Frank J. Lechner, “A case against Secularization: A Rebuttal”, Social Forces, 69.4, 1991, pp. 1103–1119; and in the opposite camp: Rodney Stark, “Secularization R.I.P.”, Sociology of Religion, 60.3, 1999, pp. 249–273 (also in The Secularization Debate); Peter E. Glasner, The Sociology of Secularisation: A Critique

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fact never appear, to be titled ‘Sebstmord des Judentums in der sogenannten Wissenschaft des Judentums’” (580). Notwithstanding Scholem’s “uncom-promising judgment” (580), bear in mind that – regardless of the personal at-titudes of Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907) and the like, which Scholem held to constitute a cultural suicide – scholarly publications by members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums are still cited in Jewish studies current re-search. For example, a medieval text’s edition by Steinschneider has honour of place in a book of mine in progress. When Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem (1897–1982) moved to pre-state Israel in 1923, becoming a librarian and next, an academic in Jerusalem (he was professor of Jewish mysticism in 1933–1965), some still considered Jewish studies and Judaism antithetical, whereas to perceive visually how absurd such an antithesis would be in re-cent decades, all one has to do is to spot how many skullcap-wearing men can be found in academic posts at Israeli academic units In Jewish studies.

Notwithstanding Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786)25 achieving a respected status as a philosopher in the Germany of the Enlightenment, as well as his being the most visible exponent of the early Jewish En-lightenment, it was the European Enlightenment that – reversing in the

of the Concept (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). Also see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), and its critique in M. Warner, J. Van Antwerpen, and C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secular-ism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

25 See Alexander Altmann’s monumental volume, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographi-cal Study (Alabama University Press, 1973; reprinted in paperback in London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell & Co., on behalf of The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). For responses to contributions by Jews to the European Enlightenment, see e.g. J. Colin McQuillan, “Oaths, Promises, and Compulsory Du-ties: Kant’s Response to Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 75.4 (2014), pp. 581–604. Clearly, Moses Mendelssohn was the one thinker who was quite visible in both the German Enlightenment, and the Jewish German Enlighten-ment. See e.g. Shmuel Feiner, “The ‘Happy Time’ of Moses Mendelssohn and the Transformative Year 1782”, in: Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner (eds.), Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe; Essays in Hon-or of David B. Ruderman (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), pp. 282–293.

Concerning the broader context of Enlightenment in religious attitudes (which is but one facet of Mendelssohn’s significance), see: David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Id., The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

18th century the considerable interest shown by 17th-century Christian Hebraists for postbiblical Judaism (even though this sometimes rever-berated in their later readers)26 – denied its respectability as a subject of

26 Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE) is an early medieval homiletic work. It was com-posed around 750 C.E., but incorporates material from late antiquity. Something approaching a critical edition was published in instalments by M. Higger, “Pirkê Rabbi Eliezer”, Horeb, 8 (1944), pp. 82–119; 9 (1946–1947), pp. 94–166; 10 (1948), pp. 185–294. Ilana Pardes, “Remapping Jonah’s Voyage: Melville’s Mo-by-Dick and Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature”, Comparative Literature, 57.2, 2005, pp. 135–157, suggests on p. 136 that something that the New York-born Herman Melville wrote in his 1851 novel Moby-Dick reflected lore from the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer account of Jonah inside the fish. She suggests that Melville was aware of the idea that Jonah saw the submarine environment through the win-dow-like eyes of the fish. I quote from pp. 135–136:

In constructing his grand interpretation of the Book of Jonah in Moby-Dick, Mel-ville, true to his hermeneutic position, responds to diverse readings of Jonah: Cal-vin’s commentaries on Jonah, popular sermons of a Calvinistic bent (Mapple’s sermon is modeled on this genre), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Crusoe is regarded as a sinful Jonah from the very opening of the book […]), Pierre Bayle’s account in Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), and John Eadie’s entry on “Jonah” in Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (1845), among them. Less traceable Jonahs also peep out at different junctures. Ishmael’s ruminations about the possi-bility of painting Jonah’s eye looking through the “bow window” eye of the whale in Captain Colnett’s picture may be an allusion to the famous midrash on Jonah’s sightseeing through the window-like eyes of the big fish while traveling in the deep. And one could conjecture, in light of Sterling Stucky’s studies on Melville’s expo-sure to African-American culture, that Melville was not unaware of Jonah’s major role in African-American spirituals in his shaping of Pip as Jonah […]

How could Melville possibly know about the Hebrew source? Pardes explains in in fn. 1 to p. 136: “This midrash appears in Midrash Jonah and in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, Chapter 10. It is quoted in Pierre Bayle’s entry on Jonah in Dictionnaire historique et critique.” References cited in the quotation include John Kitto, A Cy-clopedia of Biblical Literature, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1845; and Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle, 1734–1738 (2nd edn., New York: Garland, 1984). Also see: Pirḳê de Rabbi Eliezer (The Chap-ters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great) According to the Text of the Manuscript Belong-ing to Abraham Epstein of Vienna Translated and Annotated with Introduction and Indices by Gerald Friedlander; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.; New York: The Bloch Publishing Company; 1916. As for Jonah, see: Bezalel Nark-iss, “The Sign of Jonah”, Gesta, 18.1, Papers Related to Objects in the Exhibition “Age of Spirituality”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 1977–February 1978) (1979), pp. 63–76. Both of the latter two bibliographical entries, as well as the paper by Pardes, are now accessible on the Web.

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scholarship, a prejudice that was totally overcome in academia only in the last quarter of the 20th century. Biblical Hebrew was still to be studied by Christian scholars,27 to the extent that it elucidated matters of concern to the history of Christianity, but later Judaism and its writings had lost the respectability that some in the 17th century had recognised to them.

Box 3 acknowledges this in a way: “How, though was the sometimes frenzied anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, sadly exemplified by Vol-taire,28 compatible with a knowledge of Judaism and with a recognition of

27 Ladislau Gyémánt (infra) points out the following on pp. 160–161:

Interest in Hebrew began mainly in Germany and the Netherlands with the birth of the humanist movement. The Nordic version of this movement laid the foundations for the study of Hebrew in the modern Christian world. As far back as 1506, Johann Reuchlin published a Hebrew dictionary and grammar to facilitate study of the Bible in the original. The Romanian-born humanist Nicolaus Olahus, who served as the Queen of Hungary’s secretary in the first quarter of the sixteenth century and accompanied her into exile in the Netherlands after the Battle of Mohács in 1526, established ties with Dutch Hebraists and Jewish scholars who were contemplating translating some of the books of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin. The dawn of the Reformation in the late sixteenth century, with its emphasis on a reliance on the original Hebrew version of the Holy Scriptures rather than the official Latin Vul-gate, gave further momentum to this movement. Indeed, by the nineteenth century, there were over 1,500 Christian Hebraists in Europe, and 100 in Transylvania alone.

Ladislau Gyémánt, “The Jews of Transylvania from Roman Times to the Nineteenth Century” (in English, trans. from Hebrew by Y. Murciano), in: P. Cernovodeanu (ed.), The History of the Jews in Romania, I: From its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Cen-tury (Publications of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Book 171. Tel Aviv: The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2005), pp. 129–163. A Hebrew edition of the same book was published in 2002.

28 Isaac Pinto (1715–1787) retorted in an apologia, Réflections critiques sur le pre-mier chapter du septième tome des oeuvres de M. de Voltaire, au sujet des Juifs (1762). Also consider Anon. [Antoine Guénée], Lettres de quelques Juifs portugais et allemands à M. de Voltaire (Paris: Laurent Prault, 1769). Pinto had a common acquaintance in the Hague send Mendelssohn a copy of Pinto’s new treatise, Pré-cis des arguments contre les matérialistes (Amsterdam, 1774), and Mendelssohn, writing back to the friend at the Hague, stated: “Could the [Jewish] nation show ten authors like Pinto, the Voltaires would speak about us in a different vein. Pinto must not take offense if we Ashkenazim, too, are proud of our achievements” (Alt-mann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, pp. 425–426), the latter being a biting reference to Pinto’s parochialism in his apologia of 1762, as Pinto was claiming superiority for Sephardic Jews (of Iberian background) over Ashkenazic communities (of German background). There was a pattern of such attitudes, just as in Italian there is the

the status (social, political, and legal) of European Jews? This was one the inherent tensions of the Haskalah […]” (580).29

This is a complex and nuanced topic, in respect of the general En-lightenment as well as to the Jewish Enlightenment. Jewish emancipa-tion was advocated in an epoch-making treatise by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820).30 The Enlightenment saw both more openness among

collocation albagia spagnolesca ‘Spanish haughtiness’. Ashkenazim had reason to resent the haughtiness of their brethren of Iberian ancestry.

29 Cf. e.g. Noga Wolff, “Antisemitism and the Enlightenment? The Traditional View Chal-lenged by Uriel Tal”, Yad Vashem Studies, 41.2 (Jerusalem, 2013), pp. 211–241; Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), in which he “shows how the widespread and enthusiastic fascination with Judaism prevalent around 1650 was largely eclipsed a century later by attitudes of dismissal and disdain” (from the blurb); Id., “Judaism and the Paradox of Enlightenment Toleration”, in: R. Rabinowitz (ed.), New Voices in Jewish Thought (London: Limmud Publications, 1998), pp. 55–69. Cf. Diego Lucci, “The Suppression of the Jesuits and the Enlight-enment Discourse of Jewish Emancipation: Two Parallel Historical Phenomena”, in: James Bernauer and Robert A. Maryks (eds.), The Tragic Couple: Encounters Between Jews and Jesuits (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 87–102; Ilana Y. Zinguer and Sam W. Bloom (eds.), L’Antisémitisme éclairé: Inclusion et exclusion depuis l’époque des Lumières jusqu’à l’affaire Dreyfus (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

30 Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (‘On the Civil Improvement of the Jews’), published in Berlin and Stettin in 1781 (a second volume of Dohm’s treatise appeared there in 1783). Cf. an English translation: Christian W. Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College, 1957). Concerning Dohm, see Ch. 2 in Paolo Ber-nardini and Diego Lucci, The Jews, Instructions for Use: Four Eighteenth-Century Projects for the Emancipation of European Jews (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).

Jean Bernoulli published a French translation of Dohm’s first volume in 1782. Mira-beau the Younger (1749–1791), who in France was the speaker (president) of the Third Estate, visited Berlin, befriended Dohm, and included an adaptation of Dohm’s treatise in: Honoré Gabriel Victor de Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la réforme politique des juifs: Et en particulier sur la révolution tentée en leur faveur en 1753 dans la Grande Bretagne (London: s.n., 1787), the latter alluding to the “Jew Bill”, which the British government passed but then repealed, because of the furore it caused. How the matter of Jewish rights evolved is the subject of Paolo Alatri and Silvia Grassi (eds.), La Questione ebraica dall’Illuminismo all’Impero (1700–1815) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994).

In Italian, Dohm’s book appeared as Riforma politica degli Ebrei (Mantua: Tipografia Virgiliana, 1807). It wasn’t the first call, in Italian, for Jewish emancipation. The rest of this paragraph is based on Alessandro Galante Garrone, “L’antisemitismo, I lumi e la Rivoluzione francese”, Ch. V, Sec. 2 in his Amalek: Il dovere della memoria (Milan:

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some to accepting the Jews, and (as opposed to Christian Hebraists from the 17th century), haughty dismissal of their having a culture of any value, even though even in this respect, there was a countertendency.31 A step

Rizzoli, 1989), pp. 102–106. An anonymous author – Franco Venturi, in a study, “La riforma dell’Alcorano, ossia il mito italiano dello sceicco Mansur”, in the Rivista Storica Italiana, 98.1 (1986), pp. 47–77, identified the author as Filippo Buonarro-ti – published in the Gazzetta Universale (Florence) in 1786, and in a pamphlet on that same year (typeset at that periodical’s printers), proposed reforms putting on the same foot all faiths, through the fictional device of a Muslim rebel, Mansur. (Cf. Filippo Buonarroti, La riforma dell’Alcorano, ed. Alessandro Galante Garrone and Franco Venturi, Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.) In the summer of 1790, during the debate, at the Constituent Assembly in Versailles, about religious freedom (Mirabeau proposed freedom, but his peers preferred mere tolerance), again an anonymous author (in all likelihood, Buonarroti) wrote in the Gazzetta Universale, arguing for religious free-dom, and in favour of disestablishment of the established church. A few months later, Buonarroti left Tuscany for Corsica, where he published the Giornale Patriottico di Corsica, whose only author he was. He chose for himself a Jewish pen-name: Abram Levi Salomon. In one issue he published a fictional story, about a Jew disembarking in Corsica because of a storm, meeting him, and inquiring about his Jewishness, to which Abram Levi Salomon replied by refusing parochialism and advocating univer-sal humanitarianism.

Filippo Buonarroti (b. Pisa, 1761, d. Paris, 1837), a utopian socialist, was expelled from Corsica in 1991, was imprisoned in Tuscany, and then moved to Paris in 1793, was made to organise Italian revolutionary expatriates in Nice, was imprisoned dur-ing the Thermidorian reaction, then freed by Napoleon when he was First Consul. During the Bourbon Restoration, he lived in Brussels; during the July Monarchy, in Paris. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

31 At any rate, to put things in perspective, consider that nevertheless: “The most sig-nificant contributions to the debate on the Jews in Germany came from scholars of religious history and Jewish traditions” (Paolo Bernardini and Diego Lucci, The Jews, Instructions for Use: Four Eighteenth-Century Projects for the Emancipation of European Jews, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012, p. 94), including the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus about Jewish to Christian continuity (he was harshly critical of both religions), Johann David Michaelis (who on the other hand, had a role in racial discourse) concerning the juridical traditions of the Jews, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and Anton Friedrich Büsching. These “contributed to making the Jews more acceptable in the eyes of the educated people who were still influenced by anti-Judaic stereotypes – although most of those scholars were not devoid of prej-udices against the Jews” (ibid.). Concerning Michaelis, see: Jonathan M. Hess, “Jo-hann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Anti-Semitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany”, Jewish Social Studies, 6.2 (2000), pp. 56–101.

backward from the Enlightenment came when German Romantics reject-ed the premises of the Enlightenment, and, valuing tradition over reason, would for example deny that Jews had any dignity, so when insulting a Jew, if the latter, being acculturated, requested a duel, this would be re-fused. In this sense, evaluation is relative, and we evaluate the Enlighten-ment against the backdrop of what had been in existence before it, as well as of what came after it.

For that matter, one even comes across a retired German politician who in January 1770, writing anonymously32 but by now cogently identi-fied33 (he is known to have been influenced by Christian millenarianism) entertained privately the idea of restoring the Jews to their land. In reply, Moses Mendelssohn considered the idea majestic, but explained percep-tively why, under the prevailing circumstances, the idea was impractica-ble,34 one of the reasons being opposition on the part of some powers.35

An epigraph facing the table of contents of Bernardini and Lucci, The Jews, Instruc-tions for Use, is from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793): “I see no way to give the Jews civil rights except to cut off their heads in one night and replace them with heads containing not a single Jewish idea”.

32 Signing himself “Your devoted, though unknown admirer” in a letter to Moses Men-delssohn dated January 1770, its author, who asked for his anonymity to be pre-served, and for secrecy in case Mendelssohn disagreed with the proposal, out of a love for humanity asked for his opinion about the reestablishment of the Jewish state (Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, p. 424).

33 A cogent identification (which Altmann accepted) of the proponent with Count Ro-chus Friedriech of Lynar, a former statesman and diplomat, was made by Bertha and Bruno Strauss, “Wer ist der ‘Mann von Stande’? Eine Untersuchung zu Moses Mendelssohns Briefwechsel und zur Geschichte der Judenstaatprojekte”, in: Bruno Schindler and Arthur Marmorstein (eds.), Occident and Orient: Being Studies in Se-mitic Philology and Literature, Jewish History and Philosophy and Folklore in the Widest Sense, in Honour of Haham Dr. M. Gaster’s 80th Birthday (London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1936), pp. 518–525.

34 Mendelssohn considered implementation impossible under prevailing circumstances, because of (a) Jewish unpreparedness (being used to enduring, rather than to action to gain freedom), (b) the current unavailability of a spirit of unity, (c) insufficient wealth to fund such a big enterprise, and (d) the expected intervention of some power in order to make this to fail (see in the next note).

35 In consideration of things to come in the first half of the 20th century, it is interesting that in reply to his anonymous correspondent, Mendelssohn remarked that “such a project has a chance of realization only at a time when the major powers of Europe are involved in a general war and each one has to take care of itself. In a quiet period such

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And yet, as a devout Jew, Mendelssohn himself longed for Jewish resto-ration.36 Crucially, he pointed out disunity as being a major obstacle; it must be said however that it was precisely in the 18th century, that strides toward united concerted Jewish efforts across the intra-communal divide were made, that by the next century would enable national action.37

as prevails now a single jealous power (and there would be not a few of them) could bring the project to grief ” (Altmann’s translation, p. 426 in his Moses Mendelssohn, 1998). Altmann remarks: “Mendelssohn’s judgment was undoubtedly correct. The Jewish people had first to be emancipated before it could embark on the scheme placed before Mendelssohn by the well-meaning but somewhat unrealistic count” (426).

36 In the mid-1750s, Mendelssohn contributed German translations of medieval He-brew poetry to the journal Beschätfigungen des Geistes und den Herzens, edited by Johann Georg Müchler (1724–1819). “One of these was of Jehuda Ha-Levi’s beau-tiful elegy Tsiyyon ha-lo tish’ali … (‘Zion, dost thou not ask for the peace of thy captives?’), in which the age-old yearning of exiled Jews for a return to the Holy land is given sublime expression” (Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, p. 80).

37 Whereas disunity expressed itself, e.g., in how the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux took their distance from the Ashkenazic Jews of Alsace in their dealings with the French authorities, nevertheless the 18th century saw the beginning of the united concerted effort (coordinated in Constantinople by officials, and like much in communal affairs in the Ottoman Empire, controlled by the clergy, in this case the rabbinic establish-ment) at fundraising for welfare for the Jews of the Land of Israel, this being known as the Ḥaluḳah or Halukah (ḥălūqā, now usually pronounced as khaluká). Jews were a clear majority in Jerusalem during most of the 19th century. The rise in numbers followed a crisis in the first two decades of the 18th century, after in 1700 hundreds of immigrants, led by R. Judah Ḥasid, arrived as a group from the Holy Roman Empire but had their assets frozen there, so they became indebted with the locals while in Jerusalem. This led to a synagogue being burnt down by a mob in Jerusalem, while exponents of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities in Jerusalem – considered by the creditors to be surety for the newcomers, were arrested (so that as an effect, others left in fear). Afterwards, as an effect of this turn of events, the Jewish community in the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, undertook to organise regular fundraising for the Jews of the Holy Land. Eventually, such Ḥaluḳah (literally, ‘distri-bution’) funds enabled growth. That development was not part of the Enlightenment, but it was a major step in the direction of globally concerted efforts of the Jewish diasporas.

Lehmann has shown how difficult it was to overcome particularisms. Mathias B. Lehmann, “Rabbinic Emissaries from Palestine and the Making of a Modern Jewish Diaspora: A Philanthropic Network in the Eighteenth Century”, in: Envisioning Ju-daism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra’anan S. Boustan, Klaus Herrmann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri (collab. Alex Ramos), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013, Vol. 2, pp. 1297–1246.

Take the experience in Germany of R. [= Rabbi] Ḥaim Joseph David Azulai, known acronymously as Ḥida. He was a genuine emissary and already a rabbinic scholar of some standing (later to become famous as such, and the father of Jewish bibliogra-phy). He was born in Jerusalem in 1724, and died in Livorno in 1806. Azulai identified himself as a Sephardi. On his father’s side, he was descended from a rabbinic family from Castilia that in 1492 was forced to move to Morocco, with members moving into the Land of Israel at different times, e.g., the mystic R. Abraham ben Mordecai Azulai (b. Fez, 1570, d. Hebron, 1643), who made that move in the early 17th century. Ḥida’s father was a Sephardi rabbi. His mother however was from an Ashkenazic rab-binic family: her father, R. Joseph Bialer, had moved to Jerusalem in 1700, with the ill-fated group whose woes inspired the institution of the Ḥaluḳah. Ḥida’s eldest son, Raphael Isaiah Azulai (ca. 1840–1826) was Ancona’s rabbi from 1785 on, and his own Ancona-born son Isaac Leonini (d. London, 1800) studied in Prague, and resided in Berlin and Copenhagen, before settling in London; a writer and pedagogist, in 1794 he published in Berlin the Spanish play El delinquente honorado.

Ḥida was an emissary on behalf of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel in general, and of the Hebron Sephardic community in particular, in 1753–1757 and 1773–1778. Lehmann, “Rabbinic Emissaries”, relates how Ḥida was, as he was to write, met with suspicion and refusal to contribute by the notables of the Jewish community of Fiorda, i.e., Fürth in southern Germany, because he was preceded by another emissary (an impostor whom they took for genuine), and that other one had convinced them to only contribute for the benefit of fellow Ashkenazim (he pocketed the money to benefit himself). When later “[t]he Ashkenazim of Jerusalem them-selves soon dispatched another emissary, Shneur Feivish, to Germany, Poland, and Italy, who denounced Yeroham as an impostor to the rabbinic court in Vienna” (Leh-mann, p. 1239), Yeroḥam tried to kill him, absconded with the money and fled to Tur-key. That latter episode was preserved by Jacob Emden (about whom, more below). Lehmann concludes: “Establishing trust and solidarity across cultural and linguistic divides and making the contemporary Land of Israel the common point of reference, the philanthropic network of the eighteenth century made it possible for the Jews to become (or imagine themselves) as a nation in the nineteenth century” (1246).

Other than in Hebrew, works about Azulai include: Haïm Harboun, Les voyageurs juifs du XVIIIe siècle: Haïm Yossef David Azoulaï (2 vols., Aix-en-Provence: Éditions Massoreth, 1997–1999); Theodore Friedman, The Life and Work of Hayyim Joseph David Azulai: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Ph.D. dissertation, New York: Co-lumbia University, 1952); another article by Matthias Lehmann, “Levantinos and Oth-er Jews: Reading H.Y.D. Azulai’s Travel Diary”, Jewish Social Studies, new series, 13.3, 2007, pp. 1–34; H.Y.D. Azulai, Ma‘agal tov (Il buon viaggio), trans. Alberto M. Somekh (Livorno: Salomone Belforte, 2012); Yaacob Dueck, “A Jew from the East Meets Books from the West”, in: in: Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner (eds.), Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), pp. 239–249. Dueck is concerned with Azulai’s stay in Paris and his reading at the local Royal Library; so

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Amelioration in Jewish social conditions was also in some relation to the retreat of professional guilds, which in the medieval and early modern West excluded Jews. Let us consider an example. In July 1779, August Hennings reported to Moses Mendelssohn from Denmark that the guild of the stocking weavers was abolished. Therefore, licensed weavers who were non-members came to be on a par, including a few Jewish-owned facto-ries (Jews were allowed to be licensed owners, but not journeymen). The status of those factories was enhanced, and this resulted in disturbances and widespread resistance within the professional category. The outcome of that hostility “was the granting of permission to Jewish factories to employ Jewish workers as apprentices and journeymen”,38 something that

also do Maurice Liber and Alexander Marx, “Le séjour d’Azoulai à Paris”, Revue des Études Juives, 66 (1913), pp. 243–273.

Jacob Emden (b. Altona, 1697, d. Altona, 1776) was a famous rabbi based in Altona (where his relations with the city’s rabbinate were rife with tension), the son of the fa-mous Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi (the Ḥakham Tzvi, b. Habsburg, Moravia, 1656, d. Lviv/Lemberg, 1718, based in Altona in 1690–1709, and Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Amster-dam in 1710–1712). The Ḥakham Tzvi was in London in 1714, and was grandfather of London’s chief rabbi Hart Lyon, and great-grandfather of the first chief rabbi of the British Empire, Solomon Heschel. In 1765–1780, Jacob Emden’s son Meshullam Sol-omon, rabbi of the Hambro’ Synagogue in London, was one of two competing claim-ants to the chief rabbinate of the United Kingdom. Both Emden and his father were keen to fight crypto-Sabbatean heretics, and Emden also recorded how an awkward heretic of another hue paid him visit at home while he was in the loft. As the visitor proceeded to expound his ideas, Emden, angered, threw him downstairs.

Emden, a traditionalist, was definitely not a member of the Enlightenment (neverthe-less, Mendelsson, one generation younger, used to consult him reverently). Emden however was responsive to the ideas of toleration (except within Judaism), and in fact, he considered both Christianity and Islam to be providential instruments for the betterment of humankind (an idea already found in the medieval Maimonides), and Paul of Tarsus to have been well-meaning. Emden was a pioneer of modernity within Jewry in one sense: he left an autobiography, a tell-it-all autobiography. See: Megilat Sefer: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776), translated by Sidney B. Leperer and Meir Henoch Wise (Baltimore, MD: publishyousepher.com, 2011) That translation was made on the manuscript. A Hebrew edition of Megillat Sefer ap-peared in Warsaw in 1897. Cf. Jacob J. Schacter, “History and Memory of Self: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden”, in: Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron and David N. Myers (eds.), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hannover, New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 428–452.

38 Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, p. 432. The waning of the guilds as a social force eventually became a general phenomenon. In Eastern Europe the problem was

not as acute for Jews, as there were Jewish guilds as well. Liberalisation of access to the professions was uneven, both geographically, and by professional category. Posts in academia are a case in point, and progress was very difficult. Bear in mind that in the United States of America, in the 1970s there was a general perception among local Jews that in some sectors (in the oil industry, and in banking) they stood little chance of being hired. We are talking about things in living memory, not just in the 19th, let alone 18th, centuries. Concerning the guilds in Europe, consider that regurgi-tations of professional exclusion through professional organisations took place with the racial laws in the 1930s up to 1945, and then again with the waning of the trade unions’ negotiating power for improving workers’ status, since 1980. It is symbolic that on 25 June 1982, during a march of 300,000 workers through the streets of Rome in what was to be the last such event in twenty years, columns of participants number-ing around 300 left the main courtege and proceeded to Rome’s central synagogue, leaving an empty bier under the commemorative plaque for the Jews deported from Rome in October 1943, thus expressing a death wish for Jews that was fulfilled in the autumn, when a bomb went off at that synagogue during a festive ceremony of blessing the children. It is significant that in his later years, Guido Fubini – not the famous mathematician (Venice, 1879 – New York, 1943), but rather a Turin law-yer (1924–2010) who was president (1994–2010) of the reconstituted Movimento d’Azione Giustizia e Libertà, had been active in the leftmost faction within the Ital-ian Socialist Party and, having led in the 1960s and 1970s difficult and sometimes clamorously unsuccessful legal or political initiatives in protection of Jewish rights at a time when the most senior levels of the judiciary were insensitive on such issues, and who later on revitalised as an editor Italy’s journal of Jewish studies – rather disconsolately authored a book about the reasons behind working-class antisemitism, which he explained as having a consolatory function (Guido Fubini, L’antisemitismo dei poveri, Florence: La Giuntina, 1984). On Fubini, see the papers in thematic sec-tion “Guido Fubini: l’impegno di una vita”, in La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 77.3, Florence: Giuntina, 2011.

A resegregationist trend clearly emerged in the early 2000s and has persisted since then in Britain’s trade unions, which have used boycott motions for marginalising local Jews from membership (rather like “constructive dismissal” in employer/em-ployee relations), with activists gloating over the disappearance of the “Zionists” (a code name for Jews). A pro-union tribunal sentence in 2013 found no fault with such policies: R Fraser v University & College Union (Employment Tribunal, London central, case no. 2203290/2011) ended with a disconcerting motivation (22 march 2013), rather cavalier about explicit wording in extant legal provisions, disconcert-ingly teorising about Jews and Judaism, and which caused scandalised commentary (including by lawyers) in the Anglo-Jewish press. I briefly made considerations in note 61 in col. 1 of pp. 122–125 in Appendix D, “Alive and Kicking: On Some Tra-ditional Motifs in Ethnic Typecasting”, in E. Nissan, “A Sketch of the Pragmatics of the Devouring Mob”, La Ricerca Folklorica, 66, 2012 [2014], pp. 97–132. I am now making a different remark. In 1942, in the review of a book by Flavio Lopez de Oñate, La certezza del diritto, the great Italian jurist Piero Calamandrei (1889–1956)

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was not previously permitted. Besides, Hennings reported that the King of Denmark had settled a few dozen (non-Jewish) agricultural workers as free peasants (rather than serfs) around a castle, endowing them with land and tools. Mendelssohn’s reaction was enthusiastic.

We have elaborated about somewhat contradictory attitudes towards the Jews, during the Enlightenment. Also consider that likewise, the phi-losophes introduced a lasting notion (it is still with us today) of Eastern Europe’s supposed backwardness and uncivilised status (replacing with a West/East divide the old North/South perceived divide inside Europe).39 For example, “the Count de Segur, a hero of the American Revolution, travel[ed] across eastern Europe in 1784–85 to serve as the French am-bassador to the court of St. Petersburg. Having left Prussia and entered Poland, he declared in a statement characteristic of his contemporaries,

wrote something risky for those years, about the situation of a judge who has to apply a law with which he morally disagrees, and is therefore tempted to interpret it the way he would prefer the law to be (Galante Garrone, Amalek, p. 149). Calamandrei was thinking of a judge’s humanitiarian moral sense, in the years of the racial laws. With bitter irony, Calamandrei’s words could be recycled (when the law is good and decent and provides for the protection of the dignity of the unpopular Other) for the urge some members of the judiciary qua human beings may experience in scrinio pectoris, to dodge statutory provisions and thwart the law out of deference to some advocacy, through some quite latitudinarian hermeneutic, or even by simply skipping inconvenient wording in the statute.

In a longue durée perspective, resegregationist trends are rather unsurprising, given the history and foundational myths of Western civilisation, and considering the fact that there is a shortage of genuine reflection about the historico-cultural import of acting on irrational impulse in some quarters (such as trade unions, or even such seg-ments of the academic work-force who make up for lack of scholarly engagement with activism, indirectly and arguably sometimes unwittingly influenced by an old tradition of Jewish exclusion in academia).

A myth may wane, but its effects remain: just think of that part of the population of formerly Byzantine territories in the seventh and later centuries who changed religion to be on the victor’s side, and yet did not modify their culture-bound negative emo-tional attitudes toward the Jews, for the simple reason that such neophytes were not required to do so. This is also something that in Western Europe survived secularisa-tion, be it in the 18th century, or in the 20th.

39 Larry Wolf, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Cf. its review by Thomas J. Hegarty, H-Net Reviews, July 1995, URL: <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=119>.

that ‘he had moved back ten centuries’ and had ‘left Europe entirely’”.40 But at least, some conceded, Eastern Europe could improve.

40 Hegarty, ibid., p. 2. This also had an effect on how non-Jewish and acculturated Jew-ish intellectuals in Germany as early as the Enlightenment referred to Polish Jews, especially in relation to their being traditional. On the other hand, French Enlighten-ment ideas about Eastern Europe also had to do with how visible non-Christians or supposed Asians were there.

In my early teens in the late 1960s in Milan, a geography teacher taught us that Russia is in Europe geographically, but in Asia culturally, as well as that her sailor brother informed her that Far Easterners are inscrutable. When I disproved her claim that Israel borders also on Saudi Arabia, she would not accept it (the Jordanian port of Aqaba is in the middle). Other teachers were not as unsophisticated, but I try to show how pervasive a misconception can be, that originated in the Enlightenment.

It was more sinister, at any rate, that the textbook for children aged eleven taught in passing that the conflict between the Romans and the Carthaginians was the first clash of Aryans and Semites (such ideological survivals are not too surprising, if one consid-ers that the first president of the country’s new Corte Costituzionale, in the 1950s, had formerly been president of the Tribunale della Razza: cf. Massimiliano Boni, “Gaetano Azzariti: dal Tribunale della razza alla Corte costituzionale”, Contemporanea: rivista di storia dell’800 e del ’900, 17.4, 2014, pp. 577–607, Bologna: Il Mulino; Gian Antonio Stella, “L’incredibile caso di Gaetano Azzariti”, Il Corriere della Sera, 4 Nov. 2014). The textbook’s statement is inaccurate, both because Hannibal was an ally of the Hellen-istic Seleucid dynasty of Syria (as opposed to Judaea being Rome’s ally), and because in Jewish hymnography, a rare epithet for the Temple of Jerusalem is góren-Aravná, “the threshing floor of Arawna”, the Jebusite king who gave the terrain on which King David hoped to built the Temple built instead by his son and successor, Solomon. King David acquired (apparently bought) the area of the future Temple he intended to build, from Arawna (Ărawnā), the no longer sovereign Jebusite king. I am saying nothing new when pointing out that by one opinion, the name Arawna appears to be “Aryan” in the histori-cal sense (it may be in relation to Indo-Iranian personal names), as opposed to the mod-ern Aryan myth. About the latter, cf. E. Nissan, “Revisiting Olender’s The Languages of Paradise, Placed in a Broader Context”, Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 3 (2010), pp. 330–360. Jerusalem was a city of which the prophet Ezekiel could point out the origins (which he did tauntingly): “Thy (f.) father is the Emorite, and thy mother is a Hittite” (Ezekiel 16:3). The Hittite community in the Land of Canaan was a carrier of an Anatolian culture with Indo-European affiliations. (Abraham, when he buys the field and Cave of Machpelah, deals with the local Hittites in Hebron, by conforming with the Hittite style of business negotiation, indulging in ceremonious compliments, as opposed to the dry style of business negotiation from Mesopotamian cultures.)

The major Hebrew poet Shaul Tschernichowski (1875–1943), some of whose poems adopt an either Hellenic or Canaanite neo-paganism – or then a neo-pagan view of na-ture somewhat akin to the panismo of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) – did write an obscure, artistically lesser poem about Hannibal, decrying his fall, and unwarrant-edly imagining that this spelled doom for the Hebrews, too, presumably by prolepsis (anticipation, flash-forward), because of their later subjugation by the Romans.

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On the other hand, there was the rationalisation, by means of “scien-tific” racial categories, of the status of plantation slaves,41 whereas on the other hand, in the same period humanitarian concerns were coming to the fore among others,42 or even, contradictorily, in the same authors, such as Buffon. And yet, notwithstanding his role is giving respectability to racial hierarchy on a supposedly scientific basis, “Buffon explicitly questioned the brutal treatment of slaves by European masters. Finally, he defended the concept that all human beings were perfectible”.43 Unlike the polygenist Voltaire, Buffon “underscored the enormous differences between humans and apes as well as a monogenist vision of a unique stock of human beings spread all over the globe”.

Besides, “Buffon broke with the common vision of Jews as dark-skinned people; he clearly stated that they adapted to different climates, and only Portuguese Jews maintained a dark skin color, while the German

41 Also subserviently to the politics of subjugation, which in the case of France in the 18th century applied to slavery in Haiti, Enlightenment scholarship had already care-fully taxonomised racial hierarchies to a hallucinating extent – as shown by Joan Dayan, “Codes of Law and Bodies of Color”, New Literary History, 26.2 (1995), pp. 283–308 – with a scientific aura of authoritativeness provided by combinatorial calculations of the admixtures of white and black (these however had fully developed antecedents in Hispanic America). In that perspective, neither language, nor displays of emotions such as shame constitute the border between (pre-eminently white) hu-manhood and the non-human status afforded by any admixture of non-white “blood”. In the following, where Dayan describes Buffon, the celebrated naturalist, decreeing that “the anomalous Geneviève, […] this figure of reproductive variety is a trick of nature, or as Buffon puts it, a ‘monster by default’” (p. 303):

Buffon met Geneviève in April 1777, when she was about 18 years old. Well-pro-portioned and totally white, she has the same features as “black négresses”. Though Geneviève’s lips and mouth are negroid, they are as white as the rest of her body. But as we saw with Moreau, language gets more intense when dealing with skin color. The locale for identifying vice always resides in its texture or hue. Her whiteness is “a white like tallow that has not been purified, or if you prefer, like a matte-white, wan and lifeless; meanwhile a light tint of rosiness could be seen on her cheeks when she approached the fire, or when she was roused with shame at being seen naked”

by the enlightened scientist. In the given pragmatic situation, the cloak of scholarship, let alone racial status in a slave-holding society, apparently prevent, both deontically and ontologically, the scholar’s own experience of shame (or at least its reporting).

42 Cf. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

43 Bethencourt, Racisms, p. 256. The next quotation is also from that page.

Jews had become white”.44 As for Voltaire, Bethencourt claims that – whereas “Voltaire’s perception of Jews, to which he held despite con-stant exchange with several members of the community, especially Isaac Pinto, is a reminder of the extent of public prejudice45 that bubbled under the surface throughout the eighteenth century”46 – “these prejudices are far from the ferocity attributed to Voltaire by Léon Poliakov. The phi-losopher’s target was, as usual, the Jewish origin of Christian supersti-tion”.47 As I hope to show in the next subsection, apart from that goal of Voltaire, one can also detect something worse, as far as the Jews are con-cerned. His urging to preventatively send the Jews, if unreconstructed Jews, rowing on galleys lest in some future they may hurt “Turks” in or-der to recover their former lands, let alone that they would gladly kill the Christians as well only retaining their daughters, is something different

44 Bethencourt, Racisms, p. 255. Interestingly, one finds in the Mishnah (from around 200 or 210 CE), tractate Nĕga‘ím, 2:1, the statement, ascribed to Rabbi Ishmael, that Jews “are like boxwood (eshkĕróa‘). They are neither black nor white skinned, but of an intermediate colour”, presumably like the prevalent skin colour of people in the Near East (including many present-day Jews from families that lived in Arab countries). The concept of “whitening” has had various acceptations and uses since the Lumières. From the abolition of slavery in Brazil to the rule (in the 1930s and later) of Getúlio Vargas (dictator in 1930–1945, and elected president in 1951–1954), who dispensed with the notion (while not adopting an anti-Black attitudes, notwith-standing his instituting a corporatist regime, in line with his Axis sympathies: in some cases, he was responsible for the extradition of Jews to Nazi Germany), there was an ideal of assimilation by which Brazil’s Blacks would be gradually whitened. On the other hand, concerning the United States, scholars have sometimes referred to as whitening – of Italo-Americans or American Jews – to the co-opting in the 1950s and 1960s of immigrants from Europe other than from the British Isles, to form a new American White identity as opposed to Afro-Americans and Chicanos/Latinos.

45 Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, shows on pp. 329–331, 342–343, how as devoted admirers and friends of Mendelssohn as the likeable (and Voltairian) Danish official August Hennings (1746–1826) – a Danish subject, but a German ethnic from Schle-swig-Holstein – and his older relatives were not immune to anti-Jewish bias: “Obvi-ously he was discriminating between Jews in general and those who appealed to him” (331). Also see, e.g., Ritchie Robertson, “The Limits of Toleration in Enlightenment Germany: Lessing, Goethe and the Jews”, in: Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (eds.), Philosemitism, Antisemitism and “the Jews”: Perspectives from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, Hampshire [now Farnham, Surrey, England]: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 194–214.

46 Bethencourt, Racisms, p. 256.47 Bethencourt, Racisms, note 8 on p. 411.

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altogether. Whereas the argument concerning coveting gentile girls is something familiar from Nazi propaganda, in contrast the argument pro bono Turcorum anticipates the main form of present-day Western anti-semitism, clad in the discourse of humanitarian concerns, even when the claimed beneficiaries are ultimately a pretext.

Nevertheless, I find Alessandro Galante Garrone cogent, when – while conceding that Voltaire’s attacks on the Jewish people are discon-certing – he argues48 that on balance, what was really influential in Vol-taire’s opus was advocacy of tolerance: “Ma soprattutto, se vogliamo fare un discorso seriamente storico, dobbiamo rilevare che quel che ha vera-mente contato nell’immensa e spesso discorde opera di Voltaire, ciò che più ha inciso sui contemporanei e sui posteri, è stata l’aperta difesa della tolleranza”, including in his Traité sur la tolérance (of which, more in the next subsection). Galante Garrone was reacting to various publications which toward the end of 1988 in Italy, during the commemoration of the racial laws of 1938, had insisted on antisemitism in the writings of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Galante Garrone mentioned how it had been mentioned that during the trial of Xavier Vallat, the commissioner for Jewish affairs under France’s Vichy regime, Vallat had stated that he had been influenced by Voltaire’s antisemitism. Galante Garrone remarked ironically that once again, one would say that La faute c’est à Voltaire.49

4.2 An Example of Current Uses of the Lumières: Chapter XVIII from Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance

For example, by prolepsis (a projection into the future), Voltaire50 in his Traité sur la tolérance of all places, argued in Ch. XVIII that as the Jews’

48 Galante Garrone, “L’antisemitismo, I lumi e la Rivoluzione francese”, p. 105.49 On p. 106, Alessandro Galante Garrone (1909–2003, a historian and a former judge)

mentioned a defence of the Enlightenment by another highly respected author, the jurist Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004), in his article “I lumi contestati”, in La Stampa (Turin) of 13 November 1988. Bobbio disagreed with a speech of the Burgmeister of Frankfurt who in September 1987, claimed that rather than Christian anti-Judaism, it was the path of the German people since the Enlightenment that had led to the German catastrophe. Bobbio did not find it difficult to disprove this, by quoting from a shrill, extreme clerical invective from the 17th century.

50 I have discussed a different facet of Voltaire in a Jewish studies context, in E. Nis-san, “Reading Candide, and the Talking Raven in the Dream: Trying to Make Sense

restoration would of necessity, when they would try to achieve it, involve the assassination of all “Turks”, it would be much better to send the Jews rowing on the galleys right away:

Seuls cas où l’intolérance est de droit humain

Pour qu’un gouvernement ne soit pas en droit de punir les erreurs des hommes, il est nécessaire que ces erreurs ne soient pas des crimes; elles ne sont des crimes que quand elles troublent la société: elles troublent cette société, dès quell’elles inspirent le fanatisme; il faut donc que les hommes commencent par n’être pas fanatiques pour mériter la tolérence. […]

Les juifs sembleraient avoir plus de droit que personne de nous voler et de nous tuer: car bien qu’il y ait cent examples de tolérance dans l’Ancien Testament, cependant il y a aussi quelques examples et quelques lois de rigueur. Dieu leur a ordonné quelque-fois de tuer les idolâtres, et de ne réserver que les filles nubiles: ils nous regardent comme idolâtres, et, quoique nous les tolérions aujourd’hui, ils pourraient bien, s’ils étaient les maîtres, ne laisser au monde que nos filles.51

of an Episode in Agnon’s ‘Ad Henna (To This Day)”, Revue européenne des études hébraïques (REEH), 16 (2011), pp. 149–198.

51 Voltaire’s statement that that “they consider us to be idolaters” is a notion denied by the medieval Provençal Rabbi Menachem ben Solomon Meiri (1249–1315). Like Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), the Spanish-born philosopher, physician, and rab-binic authority who was the communal leader of the Jews in Ayyubid Egypt, also the traditionalist rabbi Jacob Emden in Altona, Germany (1697–1776), considered both Islam and Christianity to be providential instruments for the spread of monotheism. See Harvey Falk, “Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Views on Christianity”, Journal of Ecumen-ical Studies, 19.1 (1982), pp. 105–111. This is remarkable, as Emden’s temperament was rather abrupt and passionate (which was also the case of his father; they both were keen to exclude from the Jewish fold overt or crypto-Sabbateans). See Mortimer Joseph Cohen, Jacob Emden: A Man of Controversy (Philadelphia: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1937).

By claiming that “they consider us to be idolaters” followed with “and, even though we tolerate them at present, they could well, if they were to become the masters, only leave alive our daughters”, Voltaire was perfidiously turning on its head the biblical story of the women of Moab and Midian luring at Shittim male Hebrews into cultic fornication for the purpose of involving them in idolatry and therefore cause them to become the object of their God’s wrath – cf. E. Nissan, “Risks of Ingestion: On Eat-ing Tomatoes in Agnon, and on the Water of Shittim”, Revue européenne des études hébraïques (REEH), 14 (2009 [2011]), pp. 46–79. Death spreading epidemically en-sues as punishment, and Moses sends an army against Midian (see below) that comes back with women captives, which triggers an irate response from Moses, as they had been the main culprits. The result is further killing. What is left, is basically female toddlers, taken to be innocent, and assimilatable into the Hebrew fold (by ancient

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Near Eastern social conventions, and even some present-day Near Easterners’ ideas, a male toddler instead, once adult would be the natural avenger of the grievances of the identity he retains. The biblical text does not state that much. In medieval Jewish thought, one comes across the notion that the smitten children were innocent, and therefore were rewarded with Paradise. This notion is telling, as it reveals queasiness and an emotional or moral need for amends).

While definitely not a nice story to read, one needs to consider that national loss of face is, precisely because the Hebrew Bible points out (which typically is reproach-fully) unflattering things in historical national behaviour, culturally salient in Jewish religious culture (national loss of face is also salient in Italian national culture, while almost unthinkable in Britain in public pronouncements). At any rate, the telos of the narrative is precisely how dangerous lust is. Voltaire implies the opposite, in “ils pourraient bien, s’ils étaient les maîtres, ne laisser au monde que nos filles”. What to Judaism are unique, unrepeatable, historicised events, to Voltaire is a blueprint for future action to be taken by Jews.

Importantly, Moses fights Midian, while not Moab: he is on order to avoid armed confrontation with the Moabites (Moab, unaware of this, had felt threatened, hence their King Balak approaching Balaam for him to cast a curse); and Moses is also on order to punish Midian, Moab’s ally: the inferred rationale is that Midian had tried to harm the Children of Israel without being or feeling threatened by them. Therefore, just being idolatrous, which both Moab and Midian were, was not per se the trigger, contra Voltaire.

Having mentioned the attitudes of Meiri, Maimonides in the Middle Ages, and Jacob Emden in the 18th century, may we mention the 1921 classic book The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), a German philosopher whose religious views were Jewish, and who basically was a dispensationalist: he assigned both Judaism and Christianity distinct, important roles in comprehending reality and in the spiritual structure of the world. (Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemp-tion, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.) Of course, this is much later than Voltaire.

Let us turn to an Italian rabbi from the 17th century: Judah Assael Del Bene, a rabbi in Ferrara, and whose father, Eliezer David Del Bene, had also been socially and cul-turally prominent. “After centuries of oblivion, scholars have recently noticed Judah Assael Del Bene from very different standpoints. For some, Del Bene provides an example of the peculiar tension between rationalism and antirationalism which is supposedly immanent in Jewish culture. As such he represents a typical throwback to a centuries-old medieval posture within the baroque context of the seventeenth centu-ry. He personifies the Jewish way of resisting outside seduction toward acculturation and ultimate self-effacement. For others, Del Bene represents instead one of the most vivid manifestations of the inception of modernity within Italian Jewish culture. He thus emerges as a prototype of an organic assertion of Jewish cultural self-conscious-ness within the spirit of the epoch” (p. 67 in Robert [= Roberto] Bonfil, “Preaching as Mediation between Elite and Popular Cultures: The Case of Judah Del Bene”, in: David B. Ruderman, ed., Preachers of the Italian Ghetto, Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1992, pp. 67–88; reprinted as Paper VII in R. Bonfil, Cultural Change Among the Jews of Early Modern Italy, Variorum Collected Studies Series, Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010). An example Bonfil gives (pp. 72–75) is of Del Bene interpreting the wording from Jacob’s deathbed blessing for the tribe of Dan, “Dan is a serpent” (Genesis 49:17), as giudizio e discrezione, “judgement and discretion”, as Dan literally means “he who judges”, and by a pun, the root of the He-brew word for ‘serpent’ is also associated with ‘to guess’. “In pictures and emblems of Del Bene’s period, the snake also signified the virtue of prudence. In presenting the snake as a symbol of prudence and judgment, Del Bene was therefore using current Christian symbolism. His message [from the pulpit] was thus homologous to the one included in Kiss[’]ot le-Veit David [‘Thrones of the House of David’, Verona, 1646]. In one of the essays included in that book, Del Bene commented upon the success of Christianity as an integral part of the providential design to defeat paganism and has-ten the redemption. In his view propounded there, Christianity was an agent of civi-lization and progress, as indicated by the Christian acceptance of the Hebrew Bible. It is not surprising that, without of course explicitly mentioning Christianity from the synagogue pulpit, he assumed some kind of conceptual affinity between Judaism and Christianity. If so, in a very sophisticated way, perhaps in part even unconsciously, Del Bene was contributing from the pulpit to bring Judaism and Christianity under the same conceptual roof. As I have argued elsewhere, he was by no means alone in pursuing that path” (Bonfil, ibid., p. 74). Cf. Giuseppe Sermoneta, “Le opere di Leon da Modena and Jehudah Del Bene nel contesto culturale del Seicento italiano”, Italia Judaica, 2 (Rome, 1986), pp. 17–35; and cf. pp. 20–21 in Roberto Bonfil, “Change in Cultural Patterns of a Jewish Society in Crisis: Italian Jewry at the Close of the Sixteenth Century”, Jewish History, 3 (1988), pp. 11–30, reprinted in his Variorum collected papers as Paper VI. In the latter, Bonfil wrote e.g. on p. 21: “A striking ex-ample of Judaism and Christianity being brought together under the same conceptual roof is Rabbi Moses Zacuto’s use of Christian metaphors to describe Jewish concepts. As has been noted [in a Hebrew study: Yosef Melkman, “Moshe Zacuto’s Play Yesod Olam”, Sefunot, 10, (1966), pp. 299–333], in his drama Yesod Olam [‘A Foundation of the World’] Zacuto used imagery adopted from the Christian Passion Play to de-scribe [the extra-biblical narrative] of Abraham’s trial and condemnation [by Nim-rod] to the burning furnace for having challenged idolatry in his father’s home: … and Thistles a crown upon his head / the streets, to be mocked, he was led”. Zacuto was “the outstanding kabbalist of baroque Italy” (Bonfil, ibid.). Although against the grain (as displays of wariness-induced boundary maintenance are more usually ex-pected), the examples made by Bonfil are extremely significant of the extent of the acceptance of cultural co-existence, as such conceptual compenetration was de facto yet deliberately conceded.

Jewish texts, in Italy in the 17th century, sometimes resorted to Christian concepts clad in Jewish garb. One case in point is Leon of Modena’s Ṣémaḥ Ṣaddíq, “a typically medieval collection of moral fioretti, fior di virtù, containing a great deal of Christian lore presented in Jewish guise” (Bonfil, ibid., p. 20). “Some years later Abraham Yagel put out a similar booklet, the Lekach Tov, a Jewish catechism that drew heavily upon

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Ils seraient surtout dans l’obligation indispensable d’assassiner tous les Turcs, cela va sans difficulté: car les Turcs possèdent le pays des Éthéens, des Jébuséens, des Am-orrhéens, Jersénéens, Hévéens, Aracéens, Cinéens, Hamatéens, Samaréens: tous ces peuples furent dévoués à l’anathème; leur pays, qui était de plus de vingt-cinq lieues de long, fut donné aux Juifs par plusieurs pactes consécutifs; ils doivent rentrer dans leur bien; les mahométans en sont les usurpateurs depuis plus de mille ans.

Si les Juifs raisonnaient ainsi aujourd’hui, il est clair qu’il n’y aurait d’autre réponse à leur faire que de les mettre aux galères. Ce sont à peu près les seuls cas où l’in-tolérance paraît raisonnable.52

Voltaire claims that Muslims are usurpers (in the Jewish view). “If the Jews reason that way at present, clearly the only response would be to send them rowing. These, more or less, are the only cases when intoler-ance appears to be reasonable”. When Voltaire claims “tous ces peuples furent dévoués à l’anathème”, he may well have been aware it was false, because (for the very reason that it is long) he had taken the list of Ca-naan’s progeny from the Table of Nations which follows the story of Noah in Genesis.53 They mainly are ethnic identities from Syria’s or Lebanon’s

the Jesuit catechism of Peter Canisius. The adoption by Jews of this Christian genre played a mediating role in narrowing the distance between Judaism and Christianity. Yagel succeeded in presenting Augustinian maxims on human salvation and Jesuit definitions of Jewish faith as authentically Jewish, and he even supported them with relevant Talmudic passages. Thus, he effectively bridged the chasm separating Judaism from Christianity. Unwittingly, he made Jewish and Christian believers into virtual allies opposing deism, naturalism, and other forms of contemporary belief ” (ibid.).

52 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance (1762), Flammarion, 1989, pp. 122–123. Also in: Voltaire, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Garnier, Vol. 25, Ch. 19, p. 98. It must be said that another prominent Frenchman, Jules Michelet (1798–1874), disbelieved the narrative of the Hebrew exterminating the Canaanites, and this because of his own prejudic-es about the national character of the Jews and others: “Jules Michelet, nineteenth- century France’s foremost historian, […] expressed radical doubt concerning the massacres alleged by the Bible to have been perpetrated by the Hebrews upon the tribes of Canaan, for ‘their numerous servitudes rendered them far removed … from the warrior’s life of the Arabs and their glorification of carnage’”. This is quoted from p. 210 in Elliott Horowitz, Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, his unbracketed ellipsis dots, my brackets).

53 The list of Canaan’s offspring (in a broader genealogical context of historia gentium) appears in both Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1. Much of it is about city-states outside the territory conquered by Joshua. Out of either sloppiness, or longer lists being more impressive, Voltaire did not select the shorter, and relevant, list from Exodus 23:23 or 33:2, or Deuteronomy 20:17.

coast and interior. In the same passage, Voltaire takes it for granted that for Judaism and for the Jews, the fate of the Canaanites is an archetype for treating others, regardless of the historical period54 (in 1982, a cleric char-acterised Israel as following the model of Joshua, in an Italian newspaper, and a polemic with some young Jews developed);55 whereas we already find that decretum horribile problematised in some Roman-age rabbinic texts,56 and in medieval Provence, the biblical exegete David Ḳimḥi (also acronymously known as Radaḳ, b. 1160?, d. 1235?), in his long gloss to 2 Samuel 24:23 used the existence of the Jebusites in Jerusalem under

54 Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, writes: “It is now commonly suggested that Judaism, or in another formulation, the Old Testament, is at the root of Zionist [supposed] criminality” (ibid., pp. 518–519), and quotes several examples, and then points out (p. 519): “It dehistoricizes the Hebrew Scriptures, […] it disregards the rabbinic ruling that the scriptural injunction against the Canaanites was limited to those particular people in that particular place and time, and is thus no longer applicable”.

55 Gianni Baget Bozzo, “L’ebraismo tra profezia e storia”, Il Manifesto, 25 August 2010, pp. 1–2, with a critical letter by a group of Roman Jewish students, and Baget Bozzo’s rejoinder, “Ebrei e violenza, parola e storia”, Il Manifesto, 14 September 1982. The former appears on p. 71, and the latter (the students’s protest and the rejoinder) on p. 74 in Adriana Goldstaub (ed.) and Laura Wofsi Rocca (assist.). La guerra nel Libano e l’opinione pubblica italiana: confusione – distorsione – pregiudizio – antisemitismo (6 giugno – 8 ottobre 1982). Dossier di documenti (etc.). Milan: Centro di Documen-tazione Ebraica Contemporanea, “gennaio 1983 – ristampa – ciclostilato in proprio”. Originally printed in late 1982.

56 On the evidence of pagan reference to an inscription supposedly found in North Af-rica and referring to “Joshua the robber”, there apparently was Hellenistic and Ro-man-age propaganda stemming from Lebanon’s coast. That the early rabbinic debate was partly in response to such Hellenistic Phoenician propaganda is a hypothesis put forth by Philip S. Alexander, The Toponymy of the Targum with Special Reference to the Table of Nations and the Boundaries of the Land of Israel. D.Phil. Thesis, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, 1974 (BLDSC reference no. D11587/75). In my opinion, the propaganda of intellectuals in what is now Lebanon was spurred by the rivalry of Tyre (within whose economic sphere the Galilee was) and Judaea when the latter (with eventually the Galilee) was ruled by the Hasmonaic dynasty. That propaganda, questioning the legitimacy of Jewish statehood and possession of lands ruled by the Hasmoneans, was enabled by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, providing access to the Joshua narrative, just as in Hellenistic and Roman-age Egypt some were livid at the portrayal of Egypt in the Exodus nar-rative. There is a fleeting reference, in Alexander’s dissertation, to some similarity to the present-day situation.

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King David’s rule (something Voltaire does not mention) as evidence that it was legitimate for ancient Israel to let the Jebusites and other Canaanite live, provided they renounced idolatry (presumably polytheism and iconic cult) and accepted not Judaism, but the very general laws of the Children of Noah shared by humankind (ironically, the deism of the Lumières would have done). If anything, this suggests that to Ḳimḥi that letting the natives of Canaan live would have been a preferable state of affairs.57 Ḳimḥi also was an apologete in debating with Christians (and Christian Hebraists cit-ed him concerning Hebrew grammar), but in the given text, his intended readership was Jewish.

There is what would not be excessive to call somewhat fraudulent, in this passage by Voltaire, in more than one way: take “le pays des Éthéens”, which in biblical terminology is definitely outside the territory conquered by Joshua: it is in northern Syria, in an area where there used to be Neo-Hittite kingdoms.58 There were Hittite colonies in, as far as is known from the biblical record, Hebron and Jerusalem, but the latter was mainly associated with the Jebusites. These survived not only Joshua’s conquest, but also King David’s occupation of the city (2 Samuel 5), and their king pacifically sold or at any rate transferred to David his threshing

57 David Ḳimḥi’s long gloss to 2 Samuel 24:23 states, among the other things: “And this Jebusite was not of the Seven Nations [of Canaan], but of the Philistines de-scended from Abimelech [who made a covenant with Abraham], as I explained in the Book of Joshua [15:63], and it was permissible to let them reside in the country, once that had undertaken not to worship idolatry, and [to observe] the other pre-cepts concerning which the Children of Noah were warned. And even of the Seven Nations, they could reside in the country at the same condition, as it is stated ‘They shall not reside in thy country lest they cause thee to sin toward Me’ [Exodus 23:33]. Therefore, as long as they do not sin, as they accepted the Seven Precepts [of the Children of Noah], it is permissible to let them reside in the country”. Interestingly, of the precept in Deuteronomy 23:16, forbidding to consign a fugitive slave to his master, and prescribing to let him reside wherever he wishes, rabbinic interpretation has it that this even applies to a Canaanite slave who flees from abroad to the Land of Israel: asylum must be granted.

58 Curiously, these are known as Karkamish and Palistin (or Padastini), the latter in an unclear relation to the name of the Philistines. See: M. Weeden, “After the Hittites: The Kingdoms of Karkamish and Palistin in Northern Syria”, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies [of the University of London], 56.2 (2013), pp. 1–20; T.P. Harrison, “Neo-Hittites in the Land of ‘Palistin’. Renewed investigations at Tell Ta‘yinat on the plain of Antioch”, Near Eastern Archaeology, 72.4 (2009), pp. 174–189.

floor (2 Samuel 24), on which the Temple was later built by Solomon. These are things Voltaire could find in the Bible, but he could not bother, as his argument was not ad veritatem.

The Emorites59 did not remain after Joshua’s conquest, but existed in the region: the term has a wide denotation. I did not manage to find the name Jersénéens used other than by Voltaire, by searching the Web. Did he mangle the name by quoting from memory? The Girgashites60

59 Rabban Shim‘on ben Gamliel is made to say, in Tosefta, Shabbat 7 (8) 25, “You will not find among the nations a nation more obliging than the Amorites, for thus we have found that they put their trust in the Holy One, and went into exile in Africa” and so forth. Philip S. Alexander, The Toponymy of the Targum, on p. 95, takes that quotation to be a credible ascription to that sage (Jacob Neusner, who is sceptical about attributions to early rabbinic sages, could be expected to disagree). It is in reply to a disparaging consideration about the Amorites made by R. Yose ben Yasian. To Alexander, “This shows that the tradition about the emigration of the Canaanites was current in Rabbinic circles before AD 140” (The Toponymy of the Targum, p. 96).

60 By one version, the North African “reward” for the Canaanites was taken to specifi-cally apply to the Girgashite (which is the tradition retained by the medieval exegete Rashi, and is a strand known from the Palestinian Talmud, Shebuo‘ot, 36c.55, // Levit-icus Rabbah 17:6, and Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:14). Exegesis for Exodus 13:11 in the Mekhilta at Pisḥa 18 (ed. Lauterbach 1:157–158) (// Numbers Rabbah 17:3 (143b.9)), analysed by Philip Alexander, has it that “Canaan merited that the land should be called by his name, for when Canaan heard that Israel was entering the land, he got up and moved away from before them. The Lord said to Canaan: You have moved away from before the face of my sons, so I will call this land by your name, and I will give you another land as good as your present land. What land is that? It is Africa.” That is, North Africa. The quotation in translation appears on p. 93 in Alexander’s dissertation. Alexander argued cogently that rabbinic lore about the Girgashite was responding to anti-Jewish apologetics on the part of some Hellenised Near Easterners.

Alexander, having also discussed the strand of the tradition that confines to the Gir-gashites the emigration to Africa. notes that “run[ning] all the way through” this tra-dition, “Firstly, there is a strong apologetic tone throughout. These texts appear to be answering an accusation that the Jews stole the land of Israel from its rightful owners, the Canaanites”; “Secondly, we find commonly an attempt to justify from Scripture the right of the Jews to live in Israel”; and “Finally, widespread in the tradition is a recogni-tion of a link between the Canaanites and the inhabitants of north Africa.” (ibid., p. 97). Importantly, this mention of Africa – “What land is that? It is Africa.” – was not taken by Alexander to be a reference to Phrygia, which according to him (ibid., pp. 107–108) is the case of some early rabbinic references to Afriqi (presumably with the stress on a different syllable).

One realises the fuller significance of this when considering that Othniel Margalith, in The Sea Peoples in the Bible (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1988), in his section about the Girgashite

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are associated with a Roman-age rabbinic tradition that Carthage and her acculturated littoral were granted to the Canaanites as a reward of Providence for having vacated the Land of Canaan so that the Children of Israel could settle there.61 The Hivites were part of the populace west of the Jordan occupied by Joshua, but very little is known about them. The Arkites or Archites (which in Voltaire’s French are called Aracéens) inhabited Arqa, a city in what is now northern Lebanon. They were not affected by Joshua’s conquest. The Sinites (Voltaire’s Cinéens) are now identified as the inhabitants of Sianu, a city in what is now northern

(Sec. 4.1, pp. 59–63), provided for the locus from the Palestinian Talmud the inter-pretation “that the Girgashite emigrated at the times of Joshua to Afriqi, that is to say, to Phrygia, on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor” (ibid., p. 59), which Margalith combined with an extant identification proposal of the Girgashites with Qrqyš’, a Sea People of western Anatolia, allied with the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh against Ramses II, citing to that effect (among the others) A. Götze, Kleinasien zur Hittiterzeit (Heidelberg, 1924, pp. 19–20), and G.A. Wainwright, “Some Sea People and Others in Hittite Archives”, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 25 (1939), at p. 149. Margalith also connects both ethnic identities (which to him are the same) to Herodotus’ state-ment that the inhabitants of the western Anatolian town of Gergis were Teucrians, and to Athenaeus’ and Xenophon’s reference to the Gergites of western Anatolia. Based on ancient Egypt’s Ven-Amon narrative about the Thekeru inhabiting Dor (on Palestine’s coast), to Margalith (ibid., p. 6) the Gergites, being “the remnant of the Teucrians” (in Herodotus’ words about Gergis) were part of the Thekeru at Dor. The importance of Dor in connection with the Greek invasion and Egypt’s revolt against the Persians (in 460–449 B.C.E.) led Margalith to provide an interpretation about Ezra being sent by the Persians to Jerusalem (rather than, like Nehemiah, being allowed to go by his own initiative): Ezra was sent right after Memphis’ conquest by the Greeks, and Ezra was forbidden to continue and build the walls of Jerusalem soon after the quelling of Egypt’s revolt, and Persia and Athens reaching a peace agreement. At that stage, the Persians had no longer a perceived interest in strengthening any further the Jews in Judaea, Persia’s loyalists (Margalith, ibid., pp. 62–63).

Publications about Dor include e.g. E. Stern, Dor: Ruler of the Seas (Jerusalem: Is-rael Exploration Society, 1994; previously, Hebrew edn., Jerusalem: The Bialik Insti-tute, 1992); Id., “Phoenicians, Sikils and Israelite in the Light of Recent Excavations at Tel Dor”, in E. Lipinski (ed.), Studia Phoenicia XI: Phoenicia and the Bible (Ori-entalia Lovaniensia Analecta), Louvain: Peeters, 1991, pp. 85–94; A. Raban, “The Constructive Maritime Role of the Sea Peoples in the Levant”, in: M. Helzer and E. Lipinski (eds.), Society and Economy in the Eastern Mediterranean (1500–1000 B.C.), Leuven: Peeters, 1988, pp. 261–294.

61 By contrast, on the evidence of the ethnography of modern Judaeo-Berber culture, Jews from that cultural milieu have traditionally referred to the Berbers and to their language as ‘Philistine’.

Lebanon. Whereas Voltaire could not know that much, readers of the Bible in his times would have had no difficulty understanding that part of the list of ethnic identities identified by Genesis as being Canaan’s offspring were not part of the Promised Land, and were not affected by Joshua. Voltaire’s “Hamatéens, Samaréens“ are the Hamathite (the peo-ple of an extant city in Siria)62 and the Zemarite,63 the people of a place in northern Lebanon.64 Pointing that much is called for philologically, but is a moot point in respect of debating with Voltaire: far from being bothered with truthfulness, the thrust of his argument was to advocate extreme measures against the Jews because of some ascribed future crime. A sub-stitute for deicide, it also explicitly provides what is claimed to be the only permissible (indeed, dutiful) exception to tolerance in a treatise on tolerance.

There is a reason I devoting space to the given passage from Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance. It is an archetype of a prominent strand of antisemitic

62 “The Hamathite” (Hebrew haḥamatí) refers to the inhabitants of the still extant city of Ḥama in Syria. The Kingdom of Hamath used to be in what is now western Syria and northern Lebanon.

63 Zemar or Zumur was a Phoenician city at the time of the Al-Amarna tablets (ca. 1400 B.C.E.). The town’s Egyptian name was Smr, The Biblical Hebrew ethnic name (with the determinative article prefix) is haṣṣĕmārī. In Akkadian it was Sumuru, and in Assyrian it was Simirra. The entry for the Zemarite in James Orr (ed.), International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Chicago: Howard-Severance Co., 1915 (repr. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989) states the following:

zem'-a-rit (ha-tsemari; ho Samaraios): A Canaanite people named in Genesis 10:18, 1 Chronicles 1:16. The occurrence of the name between Arvadite and Ha-mathite gives a hint as to locality. A place called Cumur [recte: Zumur] is men-tioned in the Tell el-Amarna Letters along with Arvad. The name probably survives in that of Sumra, a village on the seacoast between Tripolis and Ruwad, about 1 1/2 miles North of Nahr el-Kebir. We may with some certainty identify this modern vil-lage with the site of the town from which the inhabitants were named “Zemarites”

In 1957, Zemar was linked by Maurice Dunand and N. Salisby to the archaeological site of Tell Kazel. See: Leila Badre, “Tell Kazel – Simyra: A Contribution to a Relative Chronological History in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, 2006 (<http://www.jstor.org/pss/25066965>).

64 Ancient Israel had relations with the coastal cities. This is why ‘Canaanite’ is used as a synonym of ‘merchant’ in the Book of Proverbs. See e.g. F. Briquel-Chatonnet, Les relations entre les cités de la côte phénicienne et les royaumes d’Israël et de Juda. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1991.

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discourse65 that clads itself as human rights discourse, which has become prominent in the West in the second half of the 20th century, and in the 21st (and by this, I do not mean fair criticism or fair use of human right con-cepts). To the extent that there are elements of the Lumières that are with us today, Voltaire’s lines deserve attention, because of how they deny tolerance in the name of tolerance.

At the end of his webpage “Tolérance et fanatisme voltairiens”, an ar-ticle from the Paris periodical Objections of the Association pour la Diffu-sion de la Culture Chrétienne, Abbé Christophe Héry66 quotes the passage by Voltaire we have discussed, and gives it the apt headline “L’antisémi-tisme fanatique de Voltaire”. The brief article itself is mainly concerned with Voltaire’s attack about the beliefs of the Church (e.g., “Dès l’origine, la tolérance voltairienne est une arme sémantique qui vise non pas à pro-mouvoir la paix civile; elle est engagée dans un combat, spécialement di-rigé contre l’Infâme, l’Église et ses certitudes superstitieuses”). In a sense, Héry perceives, like some religious Christians of Voltaire’s own times, that Voltaire attack on biblical Judaism is subservient to Voltaire’s attack on the Church, which in the main is the case indeed. Therefore, quoting the passage we discuss67 and placing it at the end of the article and describing it as “L’antisémitisme fanatique de Voltaire”, is rhetorically apt, as a way to discredit Voltaire, because right-thinking people at present would certainly find those lines of Voltaire jarring. At the same time, another way to attack Voltaire is to show that his goal is to enable “le culte de Mammon” (and this echoes some far right discourse from the 19th century and later):

65 In could be said, that those using Voltaire as authorisation for what they are bent to do to the Jews, by decontextualising his original intent (debunking religion in 18th-cen-tury Europe), are resorting to the same fallacy of his own argument in the chapter we have been considering, in his Treatise on Tolerance, by extrapolating from Joshua to the Jews of his own days. One could apply to this something pointed out on p. 519 in Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: that this (using against the national state of the Jews, the Hebrew Bible) is “holding historically and materially defined local practices of a culture far away and long ago as responsible for the […] practices of cultures entirely other to it, simply because those later cultures used those practices as their authoriza-tion”. Julius refers to some early modern practices of Christian Europe as using such authorisation (think of the slave trade).

66 Objections, 5 (April 2006), <http://revue.objections.free.fr/005/005.036.htm>.67 But in quoting the passage, the word “Hamatéens” was misquoted as “Mamatéens”,

by consonant assimilation.

Le Dictionnaire philosophique (Genève, 1764), ouvertement dirigé contre l’Église, définit ainsi la tolérance: «C’est l’apanage de l’humanité. […] Pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises, c’est la première loi de la nature» Chacun a intérêt à pardonner son voisin s’il veut faire affaire avec lui. L’aspect doucereux et commiséra-toire est mis en avant. Mais aussitôt, Voltaire illustre son propos. Le haut-lieu de cette vertu unique n’est rien d’autre que «la bourse d’Amsterdam, de Londres, ou de Su-rate ou de Bassora», où «le banian, le juif, le mahométan, le déicole chinois, le chré-tien, le quaker […] trafiquent ensemble». Cette définition marque la fin ultime de la tolérance: le travail et libre marché. Il en va de même dans Zadig (scène du «Souper») où la dispute religieuse entre marchands est résolue par la reconnaissance commune d’un Être suprême, qui leur permet enfin de conclure entre eux d’excellentes affaires. Dans la 6e Lettre philosophique, le lexique religieux est emblématique: la tolérance substitue le culte de Mammon à celui de Dieu et de Jésus-Christ. […]

By contrast, a supposedly pro-Palestinian part (actually with a very hos-tile focus on Jews) of a website in Italy found better, in a thoroughly and coarsely prejudiced document about the supposed nature of Zionism (a priori monstrous, and to be rejected unlike other nationalisms: “C’è nazi-onalismo e nazionalismo”, as the title of its Sec. 2 in Ch. II states), found nothing better than quoting those lines from Voltaire as the pamphlet’s opening epigraph, setting the tone of the attack on the Jews or “Zionism” (even though its conclusion purports to seek their good, by claiming that for them, being in the diaspora is better). The downloadable .pdf document “La natura del sionismo”68 – it purports to be a book, has 86 pages, was

68 <http://www.reteccp.org/primepage/2013/palestina13/naturasionismo.pdf> As be-ing a practising Jew who speaks (along with other languages) a Judaeo-Arabic dia-lect at home, and whose grandfather was a colonel in Iraq and director of its Royal Arsenal (he even was one of the three young officers who were made to enthrone, by declaring him king, the first king), before in the 1930s the country embraced far-right attitudes and eventually turned into a Grand Guignol (erasing in the process the Jewish community, which had begun in Assyrian times), I would like to signal the huge damage done to both Jews and Arabs (including those of Palestine) by powers or schools of opinion turning their conflict (which has an objective basis as a turf war) into a war by proxy. (One can trace the deleterious influence of European far-right ideas in Ottoman lands, e.g., Syria, since the Restoration.) It is fair to say that for adepts in Europe of some oppressive ideas about Jews, the only interest Palestinians or other Arabs offer is as an expendable proxy. (I recall a poster declar-ing Egypt’s peace-making president Anwar Sadat a “TRAITOR” in 1977 in Milan, before proceeding to announce the participation in a rally of Achilli, a politician who would be defence minister in 1982, a year whose last semester was the most demeaning climate experienced by Italian Jewry since the end of the Second World War to the present – and was denounced in a noble article, “Tutti zitti i letterati”,

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authored by Mauro Manno, and is dated October 2006 – is part of a web-site which purports to be about human rights, and hosted by an institute that has “peace” in its name.69 Just to give an idea of the level of the attack, Ch. V enumerates (invented) types of collaboration between Zionists and various sorts of far-rightists,70 such as the SS.

This is a case of pacifism being a misnomer. Notwithstanding strands of pacifism that historically were under Soviet influence, or then in re-lation to the World Council of Churches, I would not say there is any consistent legacy of pacifism per se in respect to attitudes to Jewish matters. It is a different story with the Greens, where an ideological thread is somewhat more clearly detectable. It is worthwhile to mention that the problematic attitudes that Green parties tend to have in Jewish matters is based on the fact that Green is not a synonym of environ-mentalist. Greens also have a social ideology, with ideological origins in the early German Romantics’ attitudes toward the woods, with the

in La Repubblica of 15 October 1982 by the writer Alberto Arbasino, reminiscing about the xenophobic climate of 1940.)

For example, when in the summer of 1929, massacres of Jews (especially from the old local communities) occured in various places in the British mandate on Palestine because (that was the reason offered by attackers) Jews had dared sit on a bench while fasting and praying at the Western Wall (the “Wailing Wall”), Romania’s far-right Archangelists discovered a useful ally to whom they had previously not giv-en a thought. The Legion of the Archangel Michael, the future Iron Guard – also campaigned specifically (through the so-called Ad Hoc Committee for Positive Arab Propaganda set up by the Legion) in favour of the perpetrators of those same atroci-ties, and in so doing were invoking religious arguments (the Leader of the Legion was portrayed as a Christ figure). That episode was discussed on p. 124 (see in particular fn. 43) in T. Armon, “Antisemitic Trends: Economic Background” (English, trans. by Z. Ofer) in: L. Rotman and R. Vago (eds.), The History of the Jews in Romania, III: Between the Two World Wars (Publications of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Book 173), Tel Aviv: The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Tel Aviv University, pp. 109–142. A Hebrew edition of that book was published in 1996.

69 “Benvenuto nel sito dell’Associazione di Promozione Sociale / Istituto di Ricerca per la Pace (Italy) – Rete Corpi Civili di Pace -IPRI rete CCP / I CCP fanno riferimento ai Diritti dell’Uomo, con lo scopo di contribuire alla costruzione di una politica estera, non armata e nonviolenta, capace di realizzare un’alternativa di Pace per l’Europa di domani.”

70 Interestingly, in the United States, a leader of the “pacifist” flotillas of the early 2010s (a set of initiatives that declined once refused insurance because of expected engage-ment of their ships in war action) declared that Zionists had murdered millions at death camps in Europe. Once confronted with this, she claimed she was mixed up.

opposition between city (and Roma) and the forest (and Germania, and – under the Restoration and in the rhetoric of the Second Reich, unified imperial Germany – Arminius). The historian and ideologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–1897) is central to the transition to later peri-ods.71 His views had many adepts on the right and among the ultrana-tionalists,72 but also on the left, one adept being Walter Benjamin.73 I would suggest that the Green legacy or present-day manifestations par-ticipate of both an aesthetic and a moral,74 with antipathy for cultural aspects and agents in urban society. Traditionally, Jews were perceived to be such agents. Having said that, it is important to reassert the dis-tinction between Green full-rounded ideology or cluster of ideas,75 and

71 See pp. 95–119 in: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Per-ennial, 2004, originally: HarperCollins, 1995). “Riel was phenomenally successful, […] The Natural History went through twelve editions, with many of its axioms, including its anti-semitism, forming the core of a whole array of anti-urban and anti- modernist ideologies. Riehl himself became an intellectual grandee” (115).

72 Perhaps the only major ruling party (at any rate, in the first half of the 20th century) that adopted “Green” ideas about the environment and health were the Nazis. “It is, of course, painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious the most barbaric regime in modern history actually was. Exterminating millions of lives was not at all incompatible with passionate protection for millions of trees” (Schama, Landscape and Memory, 2004 edn., p. 119). This does not mean there is a filiation to Green parties the way we know them – “This is not to make an obscene syllogism: to imply in any way that modern environmentalism has any kind of historical kinship with totalitarianism” (ibid.) – but there is, may I add, antipathy for urban society, and tra-ditionally the Jew has been perceived to be even more of a pollutant, for those uneasy about urban modernity and bourgeois capitalism.

73 Schama, Landscape and Memory, 2004 edn., p. 117. For sure however, in the U.K. the Greens now consider themselves as having a combination of an environmentalist agenda and a left-of-Labour agenda on other matters.

74 With reference to Léon Blum’s statement that fascism is an aesthetic, socialism a moral, and communism a technique.

75 During the electoral campaign in April 2015 in Britain, the Jewish Chronicle published a report (Sandy Rashty, “Green and Ukip Candidates at Odd over Israel”, 21 April 2015) about a Green candidate who targeted Jewish voters in her constituency with memories of her Jewish Austrian father, a refugee from Nazism, but she also endorsed her party’s policy of boycott, and tried to minimise it. She evidently did not feel it ob-scene or illegal at all for her party to have in its platform a precept of exclusion based on race; rather, her point was that it is contingent (actually it has been going on for al-most the entire 21st century thus far), and only targets some Jews (Israeli intellectuals: being born in Israel and a dual citizen, this encompasses me, too). In contrast, another candidate for the Greens in London, identifying herself as Jewish, published in the

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Jewish Chronicle an article of radical dissent from her party’s policies concerning the boycott (Andree Frieze, “Israel is a Red Line for Those of Us Who Have Gone Green”, 26 April 2015). It is dubious that it would have convinced her party, but it would have put her personally in a good light with some voters she was targeting.

Because of Britain’s first-past-the-pole electoral system, in May 2015 the Greens were only able to send to the House of Common a tiny parliamentary party, notwith-standing their not indifferent total number of voters, whereas the separatist Scottish National Party (the SNP), with roughly the double number of voters, sent to the Commons members of Parliament (MPs) for all Scottish seats except three. The SNP policies against Israel are quite similar to the Greens, but in the case of the SNP, argu-ably the enablers were the boycott policies of the Presbyterian churches (in Scotland and North America) in the 2000s, and a traditionally less tolerant regional culture – something counteracted by more friendly attitudes on the part of earlier MPs who lost their clout with the rise of the Scottish nationalist tide. Hostility has affected how safe Jewish students feel at Scottish universities. Violence was reported when a burning chemical was thrown by a gang of youth at a Romanian teenager, Iona Geor-gianna, who had moved to Scotland from Greece one month earlier, and who dared to sell Kedem cosmetics (these are manufactured in Israel) in a booth at Glasgow’s St Enoch Centre, this being after leaflet distribution against that stall over the previous month (“Kedem staff member doused in ‘burning’ chemical in hate attack”. CFCA. <http://antisemitism.org.il>/article/91865/kedem-staff-member-doused-‘burning’-chemical-hate-attack dated 5 Nov. 2014; cf. Cameron Hay, “Hate Crime: “‘Chemical’ Attack on Stall Girl”, The Sun, 3 Nov. 2014, p. 19: “Iona’s quick-thinking colleague Gosia Wachnik, 22, rushed to her aid and tipped five litres of water over her to wash away the substance”, that had “felt like my face was melting” and blurred vision).

Of the four nations of the United Kingdom, Scotland is the one where the boycott is actually mandated by the state in part of the territory, by decree of some local councils: Clackmannanshire Council, and even the city of Dundee: either all Israeli products are banned, or specifically books are excluded from libraries because of their place of publication. It flies in the face of European law, and of the ruling of a European court against a French mayor who attempted the same. This is all the more remarkable, as unlike in England, belonging to the European Union is popular in Scotland, whose politicians nevertheless perceive no contradiction with their urge to make their informal patterns of prejudice into formal precepts of exclusion.

It is in the nature of things that race-based exclusion actually exceeds its declared lim-its. In an article in two parts, “Jewish angst in Albion”, in the English-language edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz of 18 January 2002, David Landau discussed a range of inputs assessing how signs of “anti-Semitism are rife in Britain these days”. Stephen Pollard, a BBC broadcaster (now editor of the Jewish Chronicle), was quoted as relating how colleagues he used to consider friends, and about whom he would have “sworn these people did not have a racist bone in their bodies”, did admit to him to boycotting goods from Jewish-owned firms (not only Israeli goods), and these repeating canards about Jews and lumping him together. I must stress that the exclusion of persons from employment or even presence owing to their background nationality (something overtly

environmental concerns, such as those entertained by scientific experts,76 or then as entertained by other political players77 – and a platform

advocated) is much worse than the exclusion of goods, and I am talking from personal experience.

Of course, the United Kingdom being the former colonial master of the country whose people (including its expatriates) are targeted, and the de facto persistence of the im-perial episteme among many here in the U.K., and the related awkwardness of some on the right and some on the left in how to relate to the rest of the world, play a major part in the U.K. being a central setting to the resegregationist advocacy of some quar-ters – along with the conviction of many (including the clergy) in the U.K. as well as in Scandinavia (where Jews are now much more uneasy than in the U.K.) that during the Second World War they had been good to the Jews. Too good? Overstretched? At any rate, with a supposedly resulting higher moral ground. (This is not the place to expatiate on the inaccuracies of such flattering self-perceptions, such as the adhesion of a segment of Sweden’s clergy to one of the two pro-Nazi organisations of the Protestant clergy in Germany, or then the sequence of massacres which British troops refrained from stop-ping notwithstanding their presence and duty to do so: the Nazi-inspired massacre in Baghdad on 1–2 June 1941 which my family survived; then in Tripoli, Libya, in Novem-ber 1945; and then again in Libya on 12 e 13 June 1948; in Aden on 2 December 1947. And while Palestine was still under British rule, British observers were guaranteeing the evacuation of the besieged Jewish staff, students, and patients from the university and hospital campus on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem, on 13 April 1948, but these guarantors did not interfere as these civilians were massacred.)

Interestingly, Jewish wartime refugees, e.g. from Denmark, were settled by Sweden in Malmø, a city that in the 2000s came to be considered by some to be the capital of antisemitic attitudes in Europe (hastening the local Jews’ leaving for Stockholm), until a new mayor promised to do something to tackle the situation.

In a sense, it is an example of the interaction of local factors with global trends, which goes by the name glocalization. It is an approach I applied in E. Nissan, “Aspects of Italy’s Jewish experience, as shaped by local and global factors”, in Cathy Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman (eds.), Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation, a special issue of the European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire, 18.1 (2011), pp. 131–142; published again in: C. Gelbin and S. Gilman (eds.), Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation (Abingdon, Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 2015 [2014]), pp. 131–142.

76 Consider the astonishing levels of opposition in some quarters in the United States to sound scientific claims about climate change – in relation to more general local diffidence towards science, something that was not mainstream in right-wing quarters during the 1960s–1970s, when there was quite widespread pride in the achievements and furthering of (American) science.

77 It is important to distinguish between environmental(ist) concerns and the Greens as a school of thought with a full-rounded vision, and the following example, which involves not the Greens, but Claire Short, a Labour minister for overseas aid who re-signed her post in Tony Blair’s government over her opposition to the Iraq war: On one

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of forestation was, after all, a major plank in the rhetoric of Israel’s state-building.78

The passage by Voltaire that Manno’s “pacifist” 2006 Italian-language document used in the original French, with such sentences as “Les juifs sembleraient avoir plus de droit que personne de nous voler et de nous tuer” and “Ils seraient surtout dans l’obligation indispensable d’assassiner tous les Turcs, cela va sans difficulté”, appears as an untranslated epigraph on p. 3, under the title of the book and before the “Introduzione”. Above the epigraph, the title of Ch. XVIII from Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance is given: “Seuls cas où l’intolérance est de droit humain”.

Voltaire takes it for granted that any restoration of the Jews must be violent, so criminally violent that extreme measures must be taken against

occasion, she identified Israel as being the culprit for… global warming. The British- born, Jerusalem-based historian and researcher of antisemitism Robert Wistrich cited that as being an eloquent example of virulent statements in the British Left, in an interview he released (“Antisemitism embedded in British culture”, Jewish Center for Public Affairs, no. 70, Jerusalem, July 2008; the interviewer was Manfred Gerstenfeld). Considering Israel’s diminutive size and the nature of its industries, that this country is a major player in global warming cannot be by any stretch of the imagination. “The Jews are guilty of everything” used to be an idea pervasive in anti-semitism from the 1880s to the 1940s. In Short’s case, the association with the natu-ral environment suggests a vision of Israel as cosmic evil, something also suggested by her physically presenting the Political Cartoon Society’s Political Cartoon of the Year Award for 2003, on the premises of the weekly The Economist on 25 November 2003, to Dave Brown for his cartoon in The Independent of a naked Israeli prime minister devouring a child (clearly a manifestation of the old motif of the child- eating Jew, which in the history of ideas was identified with Saturn/Kronos in other respects as well). The winning cartoon selection however was not by Short, but by rep-resentatives of British journalists. See Ephraim Nissan and Abraham Ofir Shemesh, “Saturnine Traits, Melancholia, and Related Conditions as Ascribed to Jews and Jewish Culture (and Jewish Responses) from Imperial Rome to High Modernity”, in Alessandro Grossato (ed.), Umana, divina malinconia, a thematic issue of Quad-erni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 3 (Alessandria, Piedmont: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010), pp. 97–128.

78 It is not difficult to see why. Once airplanes overfly the country’s Mediterraneran coasts, a striking vision is the centrally located rocky hills, visually barren as though, of the West Bank. Whereas the southern part of those hills marks the transition to the de-sert indeed, consider the biblical evidence to the pristine state of the northern hills, in the context of the Book of Joshua relating about the complaints of the large tribe of Ephraim, to the effect that the area was insufficient for them because of the forest. Josh-ua instructed them to cut down the trees, so the space would suffice (Joshua 17:14–18).

them right away, lest their hopes come to fruition in some indeterminate fu-ture. And yet, during the commotion about Sabbateanism (the movement of a self-proclaimed Messiah from Smyrna) in West European Christian circles in the mid-17th century,79 some had contemplated with horror the possibility of the Turk peacefully giving away the Holy Land to the unarmed Jewish Messiah: “car quand le Turc aura admis & Couronné & cédé la palestine [sic] à un Juif desarmé, qui jusqu’icy n’estoit que l’abomination du monde”, and so forth.80

79 See, e.g., Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Michael McKeon, “Sabbatai Zevi in England”, AJS Review, 2 (1977), pp. 131–169.

80 Gabrielle Beck-Busse, “‘Rome tremble, & les Cardinaux, & tous les Evesques’: à propos de Sabbataï Zevi (1616–1676), faux Messie de Smyrne”, in W. Busse and M.-C. Varol-Bornes (eds.), Hommage à Haïm Vidal Sephiha, Bern: Peter Lang, 1996, pp. 445–464, is concerned with the first impact, in northern Europe, of the news on the nascent Sabbatean movement, i.e., on the appearance of a self-appointed Messiah in Smyrna in 1665. She quotes from French letters from the collection of manuscripts (especially on the Wars of Religion and on the Reformation) that belonged to the “premier secrétaire de l’Académie, Valentin Conrart” (p. 453); some corrections in the handwritten letters “laissent penser que les copies – tout au moins celles des textes que j’ai choisis – ont été écrites sous la dictée” (ibid.). In December 1665, a letter from Liège to the Count of Merodes claimed: “Rome tremble”. Presumably, it wasn’t only the emotions in Smyrna, Constantinople, or Rome that were involved: the account betrays the writer’s excitement or concern. In a letter from Mars the 18th, 1666 – “écrite peu après que les nouvelles de Smyrne eurent atteint Amsterdam où régnait alors un grand enthousiasme” (p. 454) – apparently, the last paragraph is less coherent, perhaps because the copyist had grown negligent at that point (p. 455). The paragraph formulates a scenario where the Sultan and the Moors would reverse their valence towards a people they are used to despise, but for that matter, the copyist’s affect toward the Moors (as well) could be expected to have been negative, which explains perhaps the following slip of the hand: “[…] car quand le Turc aura admis & Couronné & cédé la palestine [sic] à un Juif desarmé, qui jusqu’icy n’estoit que l’abomination du monde, la chose la plus exécrable pour les Maures, Il faut juger que” [Zachariah 8:23 is fulfilled] (p. 458). In a footnote, Beck-Busse remarks that the word for ‘Moors’ was first written “morts” (i.e., ‘the dead ones’), and then corrected into “Maures” (i.e., ‘Moors’). Homophony under dictation misled the copyist, but the textual context (after words for abomination and execration) and mention of the deeply resented Other (Jew or Moor) must have played a facilitating role for misper-ceiving the word intended.

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4.3 A Haskalah Multifaceted by Geography and Period

Arguably, little would readers suspect, based on Box 3 on p. 580 in the book under review, that there was more, to the Haskalah, than the German Haskalah.81 In the early phase, there also were the Prague Haskalah,82 or for that matter Trieste was a stronghold of the Jewish Enlightenment: the leadership of the Jewish community of Trieste was favourable to Josephinism,83 and reacted favourably to the educational reform that the Emperor required, and which a controversial pamphlet by Hartwig Wessely advocated.84 The Haskalah in Italy,85 as well as how

81 The first issue of the periodical Ha-Me’assef, the literary organ of the Maskilim (Enlighteners) in Germany, appeared in 1783. Its language was Hebrew, but it had a German appendix. Cf. Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay, “The background of the Berlin Haskalah”, in: Joseph L. Blau, Philip Friedman and Arthur Hertzberg (eds.), Essays on Jewish Life and Thought Presented in Honor of Salo Wittmayer Baron (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, pp. 185–188.

82 The journal Jewish Culture and History has published a special issue entitled Jewish Enlightenment in the Czech Lands (Volume 13, Issue 2/3, 2012). Concerning the Prague Haskalah, also see: Sharon Flatto, “A Tale of Three Generations: Shifting Attitudes toward Haskalah, Mendelssohn, and Acculturation”, in: Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner (eds.), Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman (Pittsburgh, PA: Uni-versity of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), pp. 294–306. Cf. Louise Hecht, “Reevaluation of the Jewish Pantheon: Josephus Flavius and Jewish Historical Writings in Bohemia”, in: Marcela Zoufalá (ed.), Jew-ish Studies in the 21st Century: Prague, Europe, World (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), pp. 95–111.

83 Emperor Joseph II’s policies on religious toleration are the subject of Joseph Karniel, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josephs II (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1985).

84 See e.g. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, pp. 477–478 and 481–481.85 For the Jewish Enlightenment in Italy see, e.g., Isaac E. Barzilay, “The Italian and

Berlin Haskalah”, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 29 (1960–1961), pp. 17–54. Barzilay, p. 18, defined Haskalah as: “The succumbing of the Jews to the influences of the local milieu and its culture, and a show of readiness on their part to limit somewhat the area of their own uniqueness while widening the area of communication with the dominant culture”.

Concerning the Italian Haskalah, also see: Marida Brignani and Maurizio Bertolotti (eds.), Benedetto Frizzi. Un illuminista ebreo nell’età dell’emancipazione, Florence: Giuntina, 2009 (I reviewed it in Tsur 2012, under the title “Between the Mantuan Countryside and Trieste: A Jewish Italian Polymath of the Age of Enlightenment. On a Paper Collection about Benedetto Frizzi”). Concerning Frizzi’s controversy in polit-ical economics with an anti-Jewish treatise by Giovanni Battista Gherardo, Marquess

the Enlightenment affected Dutch Jewry,86 are also tantalising subjects.

d’Arco, also see Paolo L. Bernardini and Diego Lucci, “On the Influence of the Ghetto in the State: Count D’Arco and the Jews of Mantua”, being Ch. 3 in their The Jews, Instructions for Use: Four Eighteenth-Century Projects for the Emancipation of Eu-ropean Jews (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), and consider there, on pp. 155–160, a discussion of Benedetto Frizzi, Difesa contro gli attacchi fatti alla nazione ebrea nel libro intitolato “Della influenza del Ghetto nello Stato” (Pavia: Stamperia del Monastero di San Salvatore, 1784; facsimile reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1977). Frizzi was mostly active in Trieste, and, a pioneer of social medicine, was vis-ible among local intellectuals, but because of the circumstances of his civil marriage his status vis-à-vis the local rabbinate was problematic.

86 See Irene E. Zwiepa, “Jewish Enlightenment (Almost) Without Haskalah: the Dutch Example”, Jewish Culture and History, 13.2/3 (2012), pp. 220–234. She draws a comparison to “the Prague Haskalah as a movement in its own right, by briefly ana-lysing another tradition that, like Prague, has often been presented as deeply indebt-ed to the project of the Berlin Maskilim: the Dutch Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Contrary to common opinion, which has always emphasized the German origins of the ‘Dutch Haskalah’, this ‘Haskalah’ was not imported from Berlin but had been inspired first and foremost by contemporary Dutch (Christian) enlightened discourse” (from her abstract). She concedes: “Of course one Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment was not the other Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment”, and by way of illustration, she “compares four ‘enlightened’ publi-cations, i.e. historical biographies, by four prominent Dutch-Jewish intellectuals who operated in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Their varying treatments of Judaism’s role in (universal) history serve to illustrate the complexity of enlightened experience in the Netherlands, where the Jews had received civic equality as early as 1796, thus facing the challenge of building new communal infrastructures and forg-ing a new, at least partly Dutch identity” (ibid.).

Actually, the European Enlightenment relation with the Jews or Judaism is clearly earlier than the appearance of the Berlin Haskalah. Concerning the Netherlands, see: Jonathan Israel, “Philosophy, Deism, and the Early Jewish Enlightenment (1655–1740)”, in: Yosef Kaplan (ed.), The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Nether-lands in Modern History (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 173–202; J.I. Israel, “Was There a Pre-1740 Sephardic Jewish Enlightenment?”, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, 48 (Lisbon and Paris, 2004), pp. 19–20; Peter van Rooden and J.W. Wes-selius, “The Early Enlightenment and Judaism: The Civil Dispute between Philippus van Limborch and Isaac Orobio de Castro (1687)”, Studia Rosenthaliana (Amster-dam), 21 (1987), pp. 140–153.

“Early Enlightenment” vs. “early Haskalah” requires clarification, in the present con-text. Traditionally, by “early Haskalah” the state of affairs in the last quarter of the 18th century used to be meant. Things have changed in recent years, with the matura-tion of studies considering Jewish early modernity as a period. The pioneering book by Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (London

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What about Paris?87 Or what are we to say of Anglo-Jewry’s way to the Enlightenment?88

Whereas some important relevant literature about the Haskalah, other than in Hebrew, existed of course earlier than 200489 – which is when the book under review was published in France – some important books or other publications have appeared meanwhile,90 and it is a pity the American

and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell & Co., on behalf of The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), focuses on external factors, mostly leaving out internal cultural factors, and is therefore complemented by David B. Ruderman, Early Mod-ern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, PJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). The second section in Ch. 6 in Ruderman’s book is “Early Haskalah, Early Modernity, and Haskalah Reconsidered” (pp. 198–202). Some historians since around 2000 have introduced a period roughly falling between 1720 and 1770 called the early Haskalah, as opposed to the Haskalah proper, which from the 1770 was ideological. Ruderman goes further: to him, even Moses Mendelsshon was part of the early Haskalah group of Jewish intellectuals. “Jewish scholars, without ideological agendas other than to educate themselves and their students more broadly in multiple disciplines and to integrate and reconcile this knowledge within the framework of Jewish tradition were part and parcel of the cultural profile of early modern Jewish elites” (200).

87 See Frances Malino, “Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin and Paris”, in: Michael Bren-ner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufman (eds.), Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts [SchrLBI], 66; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 27–38.

88 For England, see: David B. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo- Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, repr. pbk 2012).

89 An enlightening (pun intended) treatment of communal dynamics in Berlin is to be found in Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Fam-ily and Crisis, 1770–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). An extreme exponent, who eventually even envisaged a “dry baptism” to Lutheranism provided the Jews would be exempted from some Christian beliefs, was David Friedländer; see on him: Steven M. Lowenstein, The Jewishness of David Friedländer and the Crisis of Berlin Jewry (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1994).

Also see: Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and Eu-ropean Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1967); David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Generally, cf. Karlfried Gründer und Nathan Rotenstreich (eds.), Aufklärung und Haskala: in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht (Proceedings of a symposium held 21st–24th March 1983 in the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem by Lessing-Akademie. Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, 14. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider 1990).

90 For example, Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2004 (considering that the Hebrew original is entitled Mahpekhát

reworked version of the book, the version we are reviewing, did not take this in consideration, as well as correcting the inadequacies of the coverage of Hebrew or Jewish terminology in the book itself.

Concerning the Berlin Haskalah of the last three decades of the 18th century, consider the following. “There had been Maskilim [Jewish intellectuals whose interests were not only rabbinic] in Berlin long before [the 1770s], of course”91 – one case in point was the physician Marcus Elieser [Eliezer] Bloch (1723–1799),92 who “achieved world-wide fame as an ichthyologist”: “his magnum opus in twelve volumes, with four hun-dred and twenty-two magnificent illustrations,93 counted King Frederick the Great among its sponsors”; Bloch “remained a loyal member of the Berlin [Jewish] community, and throughout his life retained a keen inter-est in Jewish literature. These men were extraordinary figures, however. As avant-couriers, they indicated the shape of things-to-come but did not constitute a movement. In the 1770’s the picture changed: a more or less cohesive group of Maskilim began to come into being”.

ha-Ne’orút, ‘The Revolution of the Enlightenment’, it is onomastically apt that the translator was Chava Naor, the adjective na’or meaning ‘enlightened’); also in Ger-man: Haskala, Jüdische Aufklärung: Geschichte einer kulturellen Revolution (trans. from Hebrew by Anne Birkenhauer. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007). Cf. Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe, trans. C. Naor (Philadelphia, 2011); Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (eds.), New Perspectives on the Haskalah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Concerning Germany, see: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013 (they were not necessarily part of the Jewish Enlightenment); Gerhard Lauer, Die Rückseite der Haskala: Geschichte einer kleinen Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). Also see the thematic issue Haskala et Aufklärung: philosophes juifs des Lumières allemandes in Revue ger-manique internationale, new series, 9 (Paris: CNRS, 2009).

91 The quotations in this paragraph are from Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 1998, p. 346.92 See e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Elieser_Bloch>.93 Copper engravings are accessible at <http://www.philographikon.com/blochfish.html>

based upon Bloch’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische “with 432 excellent copper etching plates of fish, published in Berlin between 1781–1795 in 12 volumes. This was the most important work on ichthyology in the 18th century”. Publication was in Berlin: Aus Kosten der Verfassers, und in Commission in der Buchhandlung der Realschule, 1785–1795. It also appeared in French translation (made by Jean Charles Thibault de Laveaux), in ten volumes, as Ichtyologie, ou histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des poissons. Avec des figures enluminées, etc. “par Marc Éliéser Block” (Berlin: Chez l’Auteur, et chez François de La Garde, Paris, 1801).

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The Haskalah loomed large in Eastern Europe.94 In order to provide an idea in a nutshell of the course the Jewish Enlightenment took in Hapsbur-gic and Tsarist Eastern Europe, consider the following lines I am excerpting from the entry “Haskalah” by Immanuel Etkes in the YIVO Encyclopedia:95

Although the Berlin Haskalah declined, the movement began to grow in Eastern Europe, beginning in Galicia (a Polish region annexed to the Austrian Empire in 1772) in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The Galician Haskalah was centered mainly in Brody, Lemberg (Lwów), and Tarnopol, where a Jewish economic and social elite lived, including mercantile and banking families who supported the movement. […] From the beginning, a prominent characteristic of the Haskalah in Galicia was an uncompromising struggle against Hasidism. In the early nineteenth century, Hasidism was expanding in Galicia, attracting many young people to its ranks. Maskilim saw this as a major obstacle in the path of reform. In their assault on Hasidism,96 they not only composed literary works but also attempted to enlist the support of state authorities. […] In his satirical works, which were parodies of Hasidic books, [Yosef] Perl [(1773–1839)] endeavored to present Hasidim and their ways as grotesque and ridiculous. Yet, from between the lines of these anti-Hasidic satires, the power and vitality of Hasidism are manifest. […] The history of Haskalah in Russia can be divided into three periods: from the early nineteenth century until the 1840s; from the 1840s until 1855; and from 1855 until the advent of the Jewish nationalist movement in the early 1880s. […] In Russia, as in Eastern Europe in general, the Haskalah was characterized by a complex of attitudes and beliefs regard-ing Jewish tradition, the Hebrew language, and acculturation into European society. Theologically, maskilim sought to develop a rational conception of Jewish beliefs in the spirit of the philosophy of the time; and they proposed reinterpretations of classic sources. In particular, they took a critical attitude toward the antiquity and authority of Kabbalah. […] The traditional centrality of Torah study was set aside in favor of a functional conception that confined specialization in halakhic [i.e., religio-legal] literature to those who were planning to become professional rabbis. Emphasis was instead placed on the Bible, which was viewed as expressing universal human val-ues. […] A new, romantic attitude regarded the Hebrew language as the sole, most valued remnant of a glorious past, and thus of great and elevated importance as an object of study and research. […] Despite its novel, even revolutionary, elements,

94 Especially for Eastern Europe, consider e.g. Janine Strauss, La Haskala: les débuts de la littérature hébraïque moderne (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1991).

95 First published in print (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008), now at <http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org> The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York is the leading institution for research into Yiddish.

96 See e.g. Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confronta-tion in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985 (translated from Hebrew, and this from Yiddish).

it is still appropriate to term the Haskalah in Eastern Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century as “moderate.” For one thing, maskilim continued to accept the principle of divinely revealed Torah and followed the requirement to observe the commandments. […] The most prominent expression of the change in the character of Haskalah during the 1860s and 1870s was the emergence of a radical form. […]97

Interestingly, a comparatist scholarly perspective has considered side by side the Jewish and the Armenian cases in relation to the Enlightenment and modernisation,98 and this because of the diasporic circumstances of both peoples.

5. On Some Relations Between Ancient Alphabets

In the nice thematic entry GREEK, by Lambros Couloubaritsis, “linguis-tic system” is not the mot juste when he is actually writing about script: “The unity of Greek was acquired piecemeal: first, through the shift from a syllabic linguistic system (the writing called Linear B) to an alphabet-ical system (inherited from the Phoenicians, who may themselves have gotten it from the Greek)” (416). The latter hypothesis is unlikely, because of how the letters of the alphabets were named in Greek,99 and also, even

97 The Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe is the context of: Jeremy Dauber, Anto-nio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004); Francisca Solomon, Blicke auf das galizische Judentum: Haskala, Assimilation und Zionismus bei Nathan Samuely, Karl Emil Französ und Saul Raphael Landau (Vienna: Lit, 2012. N.B.: the life span of the literati in the subtitle, respectively was 1846–1921, 1848–1904, and 1870–1943, so they came “late in the day” vis-à-vis the Haskalah).

98 Richard G. Hovannisian and David N. Myers (eds.), Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1999. The Armenian case is discussed e.g. in the chapter by Boghos Levon Zekiyan, “The Armenian Way to Enlightenment: The Diaspora and Its Role”.

99 The following is quoted from p. 186 in John Pairman Brown, “Proverb-Book, Gold-Economy, Alphabet”, Journal of Biblical Literature, 100.2 (1981), pp. 169–191 (my brackets enclosing his notes):

Eusebius [Praeparatio Evangelica 10.5.1–12 (ed. K. Mras)] already pointed out that the names of the Greek letters must be originally Hebrew because only in He-brew were the 22 letter-names meaningful; he tried to build them in sequence into

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though this other argument is not as solid evidence,100 because how the Greeks and Italy’s populations used the alphabet radically differs from how it is used for Semitic languages: such letters whose consonants were not needed by the Greeks, Etruscans, and Italics, were turned into vowels. The morphology of Semitic languages is such that it was less important to record the vowels. Moreover, the consonantal scripts apparently enhanced interintelligibility across the linguemes of the Semitic family. Semitic lan-guages eventually developed an alternative use (as matres lectionis) for a few letters they also use as consonants, in order to indicate the position of some vowel out of a subset of vowels. Only Arabic regularly uses the letter alīf for the long a, the letter yā for the long i, and the letter wā for the long u. Not as consistently, and with considerable variation even allowed at present (i.e., Israeli official documents use matres lectionis more parsimo-niously than the newspapers do), Hebrew sometimes uses the letter aleph for [a] (seldom for [e] in final position, but then it actually is a radical glottal stop that turned mute), the letter he to signal [a] or [e] at the end of a word (Arabic also has such a use for its letter ha), and the letter yod

sentences. As Greek alpha-betos uses the letters at the beginning of the alphabet to name it, it is often thought that Latin elementa “letters of the alphabet” incorporates the three letter names beginning its second half: el, em, en. [Brown cites for the latter Michael David Coogan, “Alphabets and Elements”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 216 (1974), pp. 61–63.]

100 Brown, “Proverb-Book, Gold-Economy, Alphabet”, states the following on p. 185 (my brackets):

The second introduction of script to Greece from the East brought in the new princi-ple that each consonant was identified. It is not clear how the identification of vowels, begun in Ugaritic but discontinued in Phoenician-Hebrew, was carried out consist-ently in Greece. […] The marvel which has never been fully explored is how social conditions can have been enough alike in Israel and Hellas so that the businesslike script brought in by Levantine traders flowered in each into a new level of language. At least we can say that in both places the simplicity of the new script got it out of the scribal monopoly into the hands of individuals who had something radically new to say – in part because of its existence. The Hebrew Bible nowhere describes other writing systems, and the Greeks and Romans seem unaware of cuneiform: Ctesias knows there is an inscription at “Mount Bagistanon” [i.e., Behistun] in “Syrian let-ters”, but does not describe the letters or know the true content of Darius’s inscription (Diodorus 2.13.2); Pliny (7.193) knows that Babylonian astronomy was on baked bricks, but does not describe the script. Egyptian hieroglyphics were far more ac-cessible; Diodorus (3.3.5) is aware that only the Egyptian priests knew the hiera grammata and had a hard task of memorization.

sometimes to signal [i] or [e]. Eventually the Carthaginians (and much later, the Yiddish script using the Hebrew alphabet), no longer needing the letter ‘ayin for the voiced pharyngeal, used it with the role of the vowel [e].

Interestingly, by the time the consonantal alphabets made their ap-pearance in the Northwest Semitic linguistic area, both the Egyptian hieroglyphic and the Hittite writing systems already resorted here and there to matres lectionis.101 Somewhat ironically, by the time the earli-est consonantal alphabet(s) were emerging among Northwest Semitic speakers, the Egyptian scribes were already blasé about the consonantal use they had been making of part of the hieroglyphs, and were turning to-ward a more prestigious and difficult syllabic use, apparently out of pro-fessional pride. This suggests that the matres lectionis were not invented after all late in the day by users of the consonantal Northwest Semitic alphabet, even though throughout the more ancient epigraphic record, the defective scriptorial use (without matres lectionis) is preserved, and the use of the plene spelling is only documented from later periods.102

101 James E. Hoch, in “The Development of Group Writing” Part II, Ch. 6 in his Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 487–504, discussed the occurrence of hieroglyphs in the role of mater lectionis in the Egyptian hieroglyphic script in the Middle Kingdom (before the reform of the script in the New Kingdom, when Egyp-tian scribes adopted more complex conventions). “Although these biconsonantal CVC do occur, the vast majority of signs are alphabetic or combinations of alphabet-ic signs” (ibid., p. 489). “Middle Egyptian group writing is not limited to execration texts” (ibid., p. 490). “Perhaps the term ‘vocalic orthography’ would be better, since ἰ and w seem to be used vocalically” (ibid., p. 490, fn. 23). Hoch claims (ibid., p. 491): “The groups rendering syllables with i- and u-vowels thus use, for the most part, not the original bi-consonantal signs as CV signs (e.g. rw), but rather the alphabetic sign followed by (w) to represent a u-vowel, or (ἰ) to represent an i-vowel.”

102 See W. Weinberg, “The History of Hebrew Plene Spelling” Hebrew Union College An-nual, 46 (1975), pp. 457–487; 47 (1976), pp. 237–280; 48 (1977), pp. 291–333; 49 (1978), pp. 311–338; 50 (1979), pp. 289–317 (1975–1978). Matres lectionis in the Ara-bic script when representing Arabic text, are applied systematically in order to represent long vowels, and are omitted for short vowels. When writing Hebrew using the Hebrew script instead, usage of matres lectionis is rather fluid, even within the same text. Israeli official texts (e.g., the Declaration of Independence in 1948) have historically tend-ed to use matres lectionis more sparingly (i.e., adopting a scriptio defectiva, defective spelling) than the Israeli newspapers do (where one can expect to find a scriptio plena, plene spelling), but the textual corpus in which in the spelling matres lectionis abound the most, is the Roman-era Qumran manuscripts (whose spelling is, we may say, hyper-plene, at least in the most extreme cases, with even consecutive matres lectionis).

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The most plene use (called hyperplene) of all times is documented from the Qumran texts.

The Greek language inherited, for its own alphabet, the Northwest Semitic names for letters, at any rate for some of them. Those names are fairly transparently interpreted as naming a pictogram: ālef/alfā for ‘head of cattle’ corresponds to the shape of a horned head (still recognisable in the shape of an A), and so forth.

Further to what I have just written, concerning a claim in the entry GREEK, about the relation between the Greek and the Phoenician alpha-bet, providing some elaboration in the present section is arguably useful.103 Herodotus credited the Phoenicians who had come with Cadmus with the introduction of the alphabet into Greece. Perhaps the author of the entry GREEK had considered the argument that the corpus of Phoenician in-scriptions from Greek areas is quite large, not inferior to the corpus from Lebanon. It is possible, indeed likely, that the Phoenicians transmitted an alphabet invented by non-maritime (or not as maritime) societies in Syria as meant in the broader sense (such was already the opinion of Diodorus Siculus, who while reporting it, ascribed it to the Cretans). It is a moot question however, whether the Phoenicians merely transmitted an alphabet developed in the Northwest Semitic area. Southern Arabia also developed a consonantal alphabet, perhaps inspired by the northern one.

Pay attention to the considerations that Theo Vennemann makes, con-cerning the names for Germanic runes in relation to the Semitic names of letters of the Punic alphabet from which, he shows, the shapes and sounds of runes were derived. (After all, Neo-Punic inscriptions are found even in Wales: see Karel Jongeling and Robert M. Kerr, Late Punic Epigraphy: An introduction to the study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic inscriptions, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). The plosives /b, g, d/ of Northwest Se-mitic have a weakened (spirantised or fricative) allophone, which in Punic became even more weakened. For example, /g/ was weakened into in Punic. This was reflected in how letters were adopted into the runic systems. The Punic letter for G resembles the hump of a camel, and the Greek letter name gamma resembles Aramaic gamla ‘camel’, just as

103 A useful reference is Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (English edn.), Jerusalem: Magnes Press & Leiden: Brill, 1982. Cf. its review by J. Wansbrough in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 46.3 (October 1983), pp. 539–540.

the Greek letter name delta resembles the Northwest Semitic name for ‘door’ (which the shape of the Greek letter Δ resembles indeed). The runic letter for u resembled but its name was semantically remotivated from another animal possessing a hump. In Sec. 3 on pp. 10–11 in his article “The mediae (b g d) in Punic and in the futhark”, Sprachwissenschaft 38 (2013), pp. 1–30, Vennemann writes:

Looking at the names of Phoenician G and runic u, and of Phoenician D and runic þ, it is difficult not to gain the impression that semantic acrophony played at least a sub-sidiary role in the adaptation process. The name of Phoenician G (in Hebrew Gimel ‘camel’) had no exact Germanic equivalent, because camels were not known in the north;104 with the explanation that it was a very big wild or semi-domesticated animal with a hump, they may have associated the aurochs, +ūruz in their own language, which converged nicely with the sound value of the letter G.

The name of Phoenician D (in Hebrew daleth ‘door’) translated into Germanic as +dur-i- and +dur-a-n (cf. German Tür ‘door’ and Tor ‘gate’); but since D was adopted to represent Germanic /θ/, runic þ, the acrophonic principle required a name with þ as onset. Hence the +dur- word had to be replaced by a different noun, ideally a þur- word. It so happened that both the +dur-i- and the +dur-a- form of the model word were acrophonically adjusted, to +þuris-a-z ‘giant’ in the Scandinavian tradition and to +þurn-a-z ‘thorn’ in the English tradition.

104 Nearly one millennium later, Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179), an abbess, thinker, medical author, and zoologist (one attentive and accurate concerning animals she could observe directly), claimed of the camel that it has three humps, each one con-taining a bone. “L’abbesse commence dans son Livre des subtilités et des créatures di-vines, le chapitre consacré aux animaux terrestres par l’éléphant, le chameau et le lion avant même les animaux plus familiers, comme l’ours qui arrive en quatrième posi-tion. […] Elle prend bien soin de distinguer les trois (!) bosses du chameau. Elles dé-tiennent respectivement la force du lion, du léopard et du cheval. L’os de la première, râpé dans de l’eau, soigne les douleurs, la deuxième les maux de rate, la troisième la gale et les fièvres”. The quotation is from Jacques Voisenet, “L’animal et la pensée médicale dans les textes du Haut Moyen Age. In a thematic issue: Actes du XXXVIIIe Congrès International de l’APLAES: «L’animal, un modèle pour l’homme» dans les cultures grecque et latine de l’Antiquité et du Moyen-Age»”, in the journal Rursus: Poiétique, réception et réécriture des textes antiques, 1 (Nice, France, 2007), acces-sible online at <http://revel.unice.fr/rursus/document.html?id=50&format=print> See in Chapter 2, (on the camel), in Hildegarde de Bingen, Livre des subtilités des créatures divines, Le livre des animaux, trans. C. Mettra (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1994).

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In contrast, in order to represent the plosives b, g, and d, three different runes were added at the end of the futhark (i.e., runic) alphabet; Venne-mann considers various hypotheses in turn as for how they came into being; e.g., his Sec. 5 is entitled “The g and d runes as adaptations of Punic emphatic Ḳ and Ṭ”, but later on in the same article, he prefers a shape-doubling theory.

Some reservation is needed when giving the name of the Hebrew let-ter as gimel. In fact, gímel is an Ashkenazi pronunciation now current in Israeli Hebrew, whereas the same letter was traditionally called gīmāl (with the tonic stress on the last syllable) by Iraqi Jews whose vernacu-lar used to be Baghdadi Judaeo-Arabic. They distinguished between the fortis and lenis allophones of Hebrew (and Jewish Middle Aramaic) /g/ by calling them gīmāl we- īmāl. The Hebrew name for ‘camel’ is gāmāl (as opposed to Aramaic gámlā and to Arabic jámal). The Roman-age and medieval Hebrew name for the Greek capital letter gamma, Γ, was gamma or also (unless this is an unrelated term for ‘joint’, ‘angle’, which was related by commentators to the Greek letter) gam /gamm/, and its shape was called kĕ-mīn gám ‘as a sort of gamma’, i.e., ‘in the shape of a right angle’ (Jerusalem Talmud, Pesaḥim, I, 27b, bottom; Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim, 8b and ‘Eruvin 55a).

Such variation of lexical forms is, of course, unsurprising within a lingueme, let alone the Northwest branch of the Semitic language fam-ily. Concerning names for ‘camel’ within a particular lingueme (Italo- Romance), I remember witnessing the following while commuting, around 1980, on board of the tram of the line 23 (which was going from Milan’s centre to the east of the city, and then to the conurbated village of Lambrate). While the tram was on the eastern border of the city cen-tre – in Piazzale Cinque Giornate, and about entering Viale Premuda – a little girl of primary school age, standing between the knees of an old woman, presumably her grandmother, said un cammello ‘a camel’, in the most prestigious pronunciation of standard Italian, with the L properly geminated. The old woman, a Lombard, probably a peasant, and (based on what she said) most certainly an illiterate, rebuked the girl in a mix of interregional or northern spoken Italian, with dialectal interferences: Siyòkka! (for sciocca ‘[you] fool’, f.). Non si dice «un cammello». ‘One must not say un cammello’. Then, lowering somewhat her eyelids, she said in a lowering tone, as though teaching: Un camèw. Un camèw. This is a dialectal form of the term. This woman was mixing standard and

dialectal Italian in her speech, but she had no notion of their mesolect/basilect relation. The child stared at her without replying, presumably thinking that her grandmother was unworldly, ignorant, a fool, or all those things together – quite unlike her role model, her teacher.

6. Envoi

Other than what I have signalled in Section 2 and the beginning of Sec-tions 3 and 4, Cassin’s Princeton book is a triumph – it is the very fact that there is so much in it to be savoured, that makes me regret that it is, in a sense, a sample. Otherwise, it would have had to be a multi-volume work, to be completed in more than one generation. Barbara Cassin is aware of that, on the evidence of things she states in her introduction. As things stand, we need be grateful that this book exists at all. It is such a bonanza, and the shelves were poorer before it came into being.

This article has explored different themes, inspired by the book. In particular, we have developed a discussion of the Enlightenment in rela-tion to Jews and the Jewish Enlightenment, trying to clarify the impact of the former up to the present in a longue durée perspective – something made necessary because of recent polemics about whether sinister facets or the better known benign developments ought to be considered the over-riding factors when assessing the role of the Enlightenment in the history of ideas. We have tried to show that actually the picture is inescapably nuanced.

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