Why TV's Jewish Women (Characters) Make Me Scream--And Shouldn't.

It's not just his height...it's his insecurity, sensitivity, loyalty...

TV, it is often said, is in a golden age--there is more ethnic diversity, greater depth of story-telling, and more intelligent premises than ever before. And as far as the depiction of Jewish men goes, this has made for a bonanza. Jewish men have always done relatively well on television--Paul Reiser (Mad About You) was always an attractive man, for all his neurosis. (Anyone who calls into question the Jewishness, however unspoken, of a character whose Uncle Lou was in the schmata trade with his cousin Ira, whose Uncle Phil was played by Mel Brooks, and whose dog was named Murray, can sit back and enjoy my violently rolling eyeballs.) Brian Greenberg's Ben Epstein (How to Make it in America) was unabiguously Jewish and possible the hottest and most attractive Jewish character to ever make it to the small screen.

Ben Epstein's ex Rachel:
Hot, yes. Attractive? Hell no.

I'm making a distinction here between hot and attractive: hot is just sexy, and let's face the fact that almost everyone on TV is 'hot'. 'Attractive', however, means that you want to hang out with them--they are actually enjoyable human beings who do not grate on your nerves nor make you want to scream.

And unfortunately, the vast majority of Jewish women on TV still fall into the 'make me scream' category. Now, I'm not asking for frum characters, characters who marry other Jews, observe Shabbat, etc. I'm just asking for some Jewish women that we can actually like.

There are exceptions--Grace Adler (Will and Grace) was explicitly Jewish, and she did not drive me absolutely crazy. But other than that...

Rachel Green (Friends)? That Daddy's-girl with her nose-job and obsession with marrying a doctor...I never liked her haircut, and I never liked her.

Monica Geller (Friends)? Better than Rachel, but she never identified as a Jew like brother Ross. And let's remember how impressive it was that Chandler (the whitest man ever) could deal with her level of crazy.

Fran Drescher (The Nanny)? Ground-breaking, wonderful...but seriously, you want to hang out with Fran Drescher long-term? And her mother? Without ear plugs?

Rachel Barry (Glee)? I hate her so much. I want to drop her blindfolded in Ramallah.

Annie Edison (Community)? One of the best around, but pretty nominal as a Jewish character and with a very high annoyance rating.

I'm only talking about leading or co-starring characters (excluding, for example, Cuddy on House who I rather like). Female Jewish characters in recurring roles are often a thousand times worse than their leading-lady colleagues (Fran's mother, Janice from Friends).   I am also not including Sarah Silverman, who is possibly the best thing since lox and whose work is a category of its own (her characters are always dangerously disturbed, but the woman makes it work).

The recent hot Jewish men have also moved
beyond the genre of the sit-com...although Paul
Reiser may still rule.

This dearth of attractive Jewish females on TV wasn't always so obvious, largely because there used to be no really attractive Jewish men on TV either--I mean yes, they were great for comedy, but that was largely because the extent of their neuroses and the ludicrousness of their families (read, 'mothers') was comic gold. But recently there has been a wave of television that features strong, hot, attractive Jewish men whose foibles and neuroses are not ludicrous but simply part of what makes them human--Numb3rs can be watched as one long meditation on Jewish masculinity, and have I mentioned Ben Epstein? No? Ben Epstein Ben Epstein Ben Epstein.

I don't want women who are flawless--but I want characters who are human. The fact is that the faults of Fran Drescher and Rachel Green are based upon and exacerbate the stereotypes of Jewish women--bossy, high-pitched, Daddy's-girls always searching for a husband, neurotic about their appearance...

Meanwhile Jewish men have been transformed. Their neuroses have become doorways into their sensitivity, and they have been re-figured as ideal husbands and partners (as long as one can keep a distance from their female relatives, of course). They are sexy, strong, creative...but their Jewish relatives and ex-girlfriends (needless to say their wives are never Jewish) are a freaking nightmare.

So can I get a decent Jewish women up in here, please? I'm not asking for her to be perfect. I am asking that she not rely on her father for funds, that her desire to find a partner be no more all-encompassing than TV insists it is for every other 20 or 30-something female and not a produce of financial dependency...Jewish women typically find themselves alone because they are so focused on high-level academic or professional careers that they have little energy in their early twenties to focus on relationships. What about a woman like that?

There is a woman like that on television, on whom I have a deep girl-crush: Mindy Lahiri, the romance-obsessed, terminally disorganized, but ass-kickingly professional gynecologist of FOX's The Mindy Project. Mindy is Indian, but like my imaginary ideal Jewish woman it's not a matter of having her celebrate Diwali or participating in Hindu religious rituals or dating only Indian men--it's simply that her flashbacks have some flavor and her brother's name is Rishi and every once in a while the nature of the expectations that many Indian families have for their children becomes a plot point.

So that's all I'm saying. I'm not looking for a skirt-wearing, challah-baking maven...maybe just someone who gets flustered about telling her mother how much she paid for her shoes, whose brother is a leftie or rightie named Adam/Daniel/Ben, and whose Christmas involves a debate over whether or not to attend the hook-up orgy which is the Matzoh Ball.

Because you know what? Jewish girls are pretty damn hot--and I do mean attractive. The stereotype says bossy? Well, that can also mean fearless in bed, and able to get up at 6.30 the next morning for a meeting. Neurotic? Hell yes, but often painfully aware of their own neuroses and in a constant struggle to mitigate their effects on the partners, friends, and families that they love. Because those high-powered doctors, lawyers, and academics, as well as the brilliantly creative authors, fearless journalists, and innovative businesswomen, are often trying to juggle high-level careers that stimulate and motivate them the deep love of friends and family that makes them show up with food for a grieving friend the night before a major trial or conference, and that inspires them remember to text 'Happy Birthday' to their mother from inside a war zone.

Neurosis are what make us human. And the neuroses of Jewish women can be damn hot, and damn attractive. It's time for TV to wake up to that.

Greek into Arabic: A Transcribed Lecture from Gerhard Endress

Dr. Gerhard Endress

I recently came across a lovely lecture by Gerhard Endress, a man who has revolutionized the study of the transmission of Greek texts, particularly philosophical texts, into Arabic. It is an extremely interesting lecture that runs about 33 minutes, but which I thought might benefit from being made available to those who do not have immediate access to iTunesU.

Therefore, I have made a first stab at transcribing this lecture, which took place on October 3, 2011, as part of the ERC project "Greek into Arabic - Philosophical Concepts and Linguistic Bridges," funded by the European Research Council Ideas Advanced Grant. Their website (linked above) is also excellent.

I truly hope that this transcription will not bother Professor Gerhard Endress or Professor Cristina d'Ancona, both of whom I have the highest respect for as scholars (if you haven't read their work and are interested in Arabic philosophy, do so immediately.) I will always be grateful to Professor d'Ancona for organizing the working group, and for Professor Endress' participation, since the audio recording of that event has been of great help to me in my own work. 

So...please don't sue me! 

By Cristina D'Ancona

By Gerhard Endress

This is a bit of an experiment for me, and is the first time I have single-handedly worked to transcribe an audio recording. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to listen to the original lecture (which is available for free from iTunesU here) and, if you notice any errors in my transcription or are able to correct any of the portions of which I was unsure, please let me know by email or in the comments section below! Let's crowd-source this...particularly since after working on the transcription an attack of carpal tunnel requires me to take a break. Maybe I will lay back and listen to the audio version again...

Enjoy. 

Transmission, Translation, Transformation: Exploring the Sources of our Common Heritage

Lecture by Prof. Gerhard Endress, October 2, 2011. Delivered at a meeting of the Greek into Arabic Working Group. Pisa, Italy.

[Introduction]

Dear colleagues, dear Christina [d'Ancona]: art is beautiful, said Karl Valentin, but it is much work. The same holds for philology. Now this should not be beautiful only, but also useful. We have come to together to present and to provide further planning for a project that cannot prove its usefulness unless it should be completed. Could we hope to attain the age of Nuah [Noah] this could be insured, but let us be humble.

Let us rejoice, nevertheless, because this is a joyful day--if we did not dare have dreams we should dwindle in sorrow. But indeed, this may be a dream come true. When I came to Pisa in 2003 at the invitation of Professor [Der Grunter?] to give a talk on Averroes I was able at the same time to assist in the presentation by our colleague Cristina d'Ancona of the first volume of her Plotino, La discesa dell'anima nei corpi (IV 8[6]) containing the Treatise [?] along with the corresponding Arabic version known as the Theology of Aristotle. This was the result of a long-term study of the neo-Platonic sources--Greek, Arabic, Latin--ranging from the original works of Plotinus and Proclus and the commentary literature of Athenian and Alexandrian neo-Platonism, down to the Arabic versions and commentary paraphrases of their Latin offspring, work done in collaboration with scholars from France (by the name of Father Henri-Dominique Soffrey-- and I must join in deep regret, for he passed away several weeks ago), from Germany (and here again I have to commemorate a colleague who passed before his time, the late Altius Balthus [sp?]), and of course her [Cristina's] own group of colleagues and disciples in Italy, among which I will just mention Dr. Concetta Luna, who Christina used to call her alter ego for sharing her work in the field of Greek neo-Platonism. But, even before there was enough to be proud of, but...if it was not for Cristina's indefatigable efforts and her unfailing optimism, aiming high and thinking big, we would not be here-we, that is, a workgroup preparing a full critical edition of the Arabic Plotiniana, a group of computer scientists under the aegis of Professor [Bodsey?] envisaging for the first time fully functional procedures for digitalizing and analyzing Arabic texts for the purpose of indexing and content analysis, and our own library/laboratory [?] Bochum in Germany, of the Greek and Arabic lexicon, revived and resuscitated after its first conception thirty years ago and now financed by a generous grant from the European Research Council. I will try to give an idea to all those not immediately connected to the project of what it is about. 

[Body]

The reception of the rational sciences--scientific practice, discourse and methodology--into Arabic-Islamic society went through several stages of exchange with the transmission of Iranian, Christian-Aramaic, and Byzantine Greek learning. Translation and the acquisition of knowledge from the Hellenistic heritage, went hand in hand with the continuous refinement of the methods of linguistic transposition and the creation of a standardized technical language, Arabic. Terminology, rhetoric, the genres of construction--demonstration, more geometricum--first introduced by the paradigmatic sciences: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, and deducted by philosophers embracing the cosmology of neo-Platonism, was complimented and superseded by the methods of syllogistic demonstration, in the face of the establishiment of philosophy as the demonstrative science claiming absolute and universal knowledge even in the hermeutical disciplines of grammar, theology and law, depended upon analogical reasoning of Scriptural, took up logical defintion and deduction. 

The Islamic philosophy instituted by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina answering questions of Muslim theology resulted in the integration and unification of scientific and philosophical discourse, and after a process of petition and dispute led to the adoption of the language of demonstration by the scholasticism of later schools of law. The language of philosophy and the sciences illuminates the links, or even constitutes the common denominator between the intellectual traditions of the Mediterranean world--the Near East, North Africa, Southern and Northern Europe--between the peoples who received, revived, and transformed the heritage of ancient Greek. 

After the decline of the ancient languages--erudition and commerce, the translators created a common system of reference which up to today renders possible, in spite of all protestations of Ptolemy and Adamus,  a dialogue about the essential questions of the human condition between speakers of the Indo-European languages--Romance, Germanic, Iranian, and Arabic--between Jews, Christians and Muslims...a dialogue where the words may differ, but the context of science and its conventions continues to convey the same concepts sustained by a constant tradition of teaching and textual transmission. From its first reception into Arabic-Islamic society the sciences, and philosophy as the science of sciences, are presented as demonstrative science, and as such defend their absolute claim of authority yielding power. What is of far-reaching and lasting consequence and that even today provides a sense of unity among the civilizations emerging from true [believers?] of intellectual activity around the Mediterranean, is the rise of demonstrative science as the safeguard of intellectual authority, eclipsing the nominal authorities of the ancient schools. In spite of contemporary protestations of spiritual identity and intrinsic otherness, I would like to insist on this common ground, and this common language. The science of demonstration, the paradigmatic of syllogism, was the approved safeguard of certainty, 'alm el-yaqin, and through this--and here Plato joins Aristotle in time-honored harmony--the only way to ultimate happiness.

Historians of philosophy tend to think about philosophies rather than philosophy--differences rather than unity, change rather than continuity. Cultural critics in turn oppose the claim of one tradition, one civilization, one religion, of whichever side of the Mediterranean or of the Atlantic it represents, to represent such universal values. Traditions and schools of thought which would seem to support such unity are denounced for being vestigious of cultural hegemonism, of colonialism, or of abasent acculturation. I would like to consider not only a point in history supposed to represent Islam, Arab culture, the East or the West as a whole but also traces of continuity based on a billennium of epistemic community if such a community could be shown to exist. The religion, erudition and science of Islam grew on the soil of the Hellenized middle frame. From antiquity to late Hellenism and its reception into the Arabic/Islamic milieu, from the teachers of Baghdad, Cordoba, and Isfahan to the later [readers] of Avicenna and Averroes, philosophy moved between the two poles of Platonism and Aristotelianism, paradigms of the One and the Many, the essence in being and the being of the essence in actual substances. In this way the rational sciences, scientific pragmatism and the global weltweit of Gnostic religion were imbued with the wisdom of Plato, transmitted it is true under the guise of Aristotle--the Thology of Aristotle--of Pythagorus, and some other prosopa of the ancient schools and giving his name to the rational, nay occult texts of the subculture of oriental Hellenism, and they were renewed under the aegis of Aristotle's demonstrative science. 

From Plato and his Arabic heirs was inherited the conviction that contingent being and sensible phenomenon cannot convey but an imperfect perception of the true essences, and further that the final goal of human existence, resulting in true felicity, can only be acheived by rational activity oriented toward knownledge of the good. From Aristotle, that is to say, from the Aristotle of the peripatetic and neo-Platonic commentators, they took the conviction that the gap between the phenomenon and the essences can be bridged by demonstration based upon the first premises implanted in the human reason from its first inception and helped by the Agent Intellect, the famous metaphysical gadget derived from Aristotle's De Anima and identified by the neo-Platonists with Plato's demiurge, the presence of the divine and unchangeable in the human mind. This essence of Platonism was transmitted, or rather was living on, in the ethical, propadeutic, and the mathematical asidogia [?] of the late Hellenistic schools, evident from extant testimonia of the curriculum (this is just a quotation of Melias' lectures on the asidogia, just an excerpt from the complete program of the Alexandrian school) edited from the extent testimonia of the curriculum of the school of Alexandria and its Arabic offshoots. Its object was explored throughout on the basis of the works of Aristotle--Aristotle's logic, physics and metaphysics--deduction of being qua being. The philosophical program, the textual basis, the general systematic framework and above all the scope and aim of philosophy in the early schools of rational science in the Arabic-Islamic milieu were founded upon the teaching of the late Hellenistic schools. The most important change was the shift from Plato to Aristotle as the principle nominal authority of intellectual activity and as ethical guides. In the schools of Athens and Alexandria the principle task had been the exposition of the philosophy of Plato--this philosophy was understood as the summum of a coherent system. The exigesis of Aristotle, the master of demonstrative science, was deemed a necessary prerequisite for comprehending the ultimate truth. Aristotle was thus put into the service of an ulterior ideology. This attitude presupposed a basic concord between the two philsoophies. The teachers in the academia and their Alexandrian successors fervently tried to harmonize the divergences and contradictions within the Aristotelian corpus, and on the other hand to reconcile the Peripatetic ontology and epistemology with the cosmology and theology of Plato and the framework of Plotinus' neo-Platonism, systematized by Proclus and his successors. The authority of leading to true philosophy as a way of life, the only way of life leading to perfect happiness, rests with Plato, the Platonic One, and First Good is the highest object of knowledge and the attainment of this knowledge is the way to true happiness. With the Alexandrian commentators on Aristotle, the unique principle pursued in the philosophy of Aristotle is none other than the neo-Platonic One. In the face of the society and the institutions of a Christian Empire, the authority pf Aristotle sustained by this harmonizing tendency  grew all the more important. Even so, the Platonic theology continued as the religion of intellectuals--under the name of Aristotle, who had become the master of demonstrative discourse, in harmony with the tradition transmitted and elaborated by the commentators, enhanced by the Gnostic elements of popular religion. 

Now the res publica--this is the political legacy neo-Platonism took from Plato-- the res publica is the place where human kind must make its departure towards ultimate bliss, and in the final analysis toward the assimilation to God. The life of humans in the political community makes way for the preparation of the rational soul while in its bodily existence to conform to the intelligible principles of the celestial and physical hierarchy, guided by the philosophers who imitate the divine forms in assuming political functions, shaping the community in accordance with the divine paradigm. In extremis, however, the philosopher would complain that the vita philosophica was impossible in the depraved city as Simplicius did after the closing down of the Academy by the Christian Emperor in his commentary on Epictetus. Ethical texts on the Gnomologia [?] of ancient wisdom, but also texts from the standard propedeutics of ethical instruction survive in great numbers in the Arabic traditions such as Pythagorian [...?], along with its neo-Platonic commentaries. What Christian and Muslim Arabs received at the hands of practiced physicians and scientists, and the translators engaged by the scientists, and well as by administrators and notables of the Abbasid state was not  a unified corpus of doctrines but linked up with the substance of specific philosophical and scientific teaching. The gnomenological  tradition of popular ethics of Christian and also Iranian Hellenism provided models of political ethics and also manuals of the ruling arts and its ancillaries--just an example, the teaching of Iskander of Alexander the Great, known in philosophy as the disciple of Aristotle-- and collections of popular philosophy and collections of the dicta of the sages, as in the case of the famous adab el-falasafa of Hunayn al-Ishak of which we now have here a very nice manuscript from the Munich collection.  Then again the gnostical religion informing the occult  sciences of alchemy and astrology, linked also with the dialectic of Christian dogmatics in apologets and polemical discourse and then on the other hand we have the Galenism of the learned physicians transmitted by the physicians as also Galen's own logic--anthropology and ethics competing with philosophy and pretending to teach an ars vita. In consequence, the philsophic or non-philosophic character of medicine (being a techne, an art, in Arabic sina'a), or, on the other hand, episteme, the true science, arabic 'ilm, was under dispute in apology and polemic from both sides.  And then the mathematician...of course, in the medical tradition we have Aristides, the great teacher of gnostic knowledge of antiquity who is...well.. shown to us like a philosopher teaching his disciples but of course on the model of one the medicinal plants he  has cataloged in his materia medica. And then we come to the mathematicians, the mathematicians and astronomers, and the professional astrologers or geometers who again pretended to universal competence no less than the physician but on a difference scale--on the authority of a time-honored tradition and of an eminent ancestry in the history of philosophy itself. The mathematicians were Platonists and Pythagoreans in the tradition Nicomacheas, Proclus and Iamblicus, but the astronomers cherished the Arsitotelian propedeutic and above all the Arsitotelian cosmology, conjoined with the authority of Ptolemy [shows slide of an early Arabic geometry text].

Hence it was Aristotle who came to dominate the system of the physical world and it was the Peripatetic structure which, since being adopted by Ptolemy, prevailed in the method and the epistemology of professional science--I think you are all familiar with the Ptolemaic  system of planetary movements using epicycles and [?]. Later Islamic philsophy in al-Andalus led to fierce cricism of the Ptolemaic system as being not strictly in conformity with Arsitotle's doctrine of concentric spheres moving steadily and not making jumps in epicycles...but this is a different story. 

In the first instance astronomers developed refined mathematical methods for describing physical reality in accordance with the principles of physics. The variety of intellectual traditions  corresponds to the diversity of professional lines of tradition, and again, not the science, not the philosophy of the ancients reached the Arabs, but concurring and competing schools and systems of the trasmitters. The constructions of identity of the schools emerging from manifold foundations and theories are bound up with their religious origins and political creeds, and their fields of activity between market, forum, and the court. In Arabic-Islamic civilization, the traditions of professional science concur and compete for primacy on the other hand with the clerical traditions of courtiers, administrators and legal-theological expertise. These latter were challenged by the claims of philosophy as being the science of sciences, the science of demonstration, and the ideologyof the rational soul,  claiming supreme knowledge and supreme authority--knowledge of the One and First Cause of the Supreme Good, authority in providing for the community of humankind the way to true happiness ans salvation.

The cosmology of neo-Platonism, integrated into the Aristotelian encyclopaedia and brought into a structure of propositions and demonstrations--more mathematica--by the scholastics of Athens and Alexandria served the philosophic sciences of the early Abbasid society--al-Kinda and his commentators--to legitimate rational science as a superior way to establish the true creed of the Muslims, tawheed, the Islamic creed that there is no God apart from the God, Allah. From al-Kindi to the branches of his schools in the 10th century and [Transylvania?] on the natural sciences, to Jabbir ibn Hayyan's alchemy, to the gnostic cosmology of the Ismaili Book of the Brethren and the Pure Faith (Kitab Ikhwan as-Safa), the signs of proportions of arithmology and musical harmony leads the rational soul on its way to a vision of the absolute, to the word of the infinite. The comic blueprint of this world depicting the progression--creation and regression--on the way to knowledge of intellect through a cosmic hierarchy of ensouled spheres was found in the teaching  of late neo-Platonism, harmonized with the Aristotelean and Ptolemaic models of celestial mechanics. To some degree the monotheist and creationist view of the first and secondary courses prepared in Christian Platonism had seemed to reconcile metaphysics and theology--monotheist theology, that is to say. 

This reconciliation materialized in an interpreted paraphrase of a collection from  Plotinus and Proclus transmitted  under the name of a 'Theology,' theologia of Aristotle,  based on excerpts from Books 4-6 on the Aenneads augmented by copious notes and comments and accompanied by pieces from the Elements of Theology of Proclus, the great systems engineer of neo-Platonism. This conveyed the cosmic model of procession and reversion and of participation of all being of the One and the First. But this 'theologia according to Aristotle' was transmitted in a form simplified and made acceptable for the adherents of a monotheistic and creationist religion, a belief in a God who was both first cause and first intellect and who had willed in time to create the physical world from nothing. Finally, both in his immediate sources and his own philosophical paradigm the influence of John Philoponus was prominent--the Christian philosoopher of Alexandria who in the very year of the closing of the Academy had written his refutation of Proclus On the Eternity of the World and who had driven the pagan gods who proselytized in the neo-Platonic cosmos from the divine heavens. 

Now I  think this school continued among  scientists and administrators of the Islamic East, with its branches in Belch and Nishapur, well beyond al-Farabi's Aristotelian re-interpretation of falsafa and elipsed only by Avicenna's new encyclopedia. Against the universalist claims of the latter, which presented a program of harmonious co-existence between the religious and the rational disciplines--among the characteristic  features of this attitude is the apotheosis of intellect - not the subtle analysis based on the theory of the intellect (23.34?) but straightforward propaganda for intellectual activity as a highway to the upper world in the spirit of al-Kindi's gnosticism, as for example put for forward for example in his [alKindi's] Treatise on the Soul. Intellect is the vice-gerund, the khalife, of God in this world, said al-Arabi, the grandson of al-Kindi in philosophy in the 10th century, interpreting the Qur'anic statement that man is God's representative in this world in a philosophical paradigm. The ethical component of this hikma, the autonomous ethics of the philospher who finds in the Encyclopedia of the Sciences the instructions for educating a soul toward purity and ultimate bliss is fully developed in the Ethics under the title "The refinement of character of Abu 'Ali Miskawe" who died in 1030. Though Aristotelean in many details of ethical categorization and substance, it is based on the same Platonic view of the rational soul and its primary knowledge combined with elements of Galen's De Moribus. To sum up: the readers of philsophy in its first period who naturalized the Alexandrian Aristotle, whitewashed by Christian neo-Platonism in the Arabic-Islamic environment, were mathematicians and physicians and then a widening circle of administrators and high officials of the Abbasid dynasty and its provincial vassals. The rise of Aristotelean metaphysics and epistemology prepared and accompanied by the translation into Arabic of the complete Organon of Logic and its Alexandrian commentaries and social [?] by the rise of the scientific and administrative elite of Islam, to the higher echelon of the administration introduced a different character expounded most prominently in al-Farabi's concept of philosphy as a demonstrative philosophy--al-Farabi who died in 950 and was the founder of philsophy in Islam as a philosophical paradigm of Islam. 

Universals are not held is aposthetized ideas nor in the intelligable representation of such entities and mathematicals. Universals are bound up with real substances but can be injected by intellectual analysis relying on self-evident principles and demonstrative reasoning. This famous collection of the Arabic translations of Aristotle's Organon of Logic is of course one of the main subjects of our endeavors to research the Arabic translations, for we who study the terminology of such translations in their development from the 8th to the 10th centuries, and this Paris manuscript is most prominent in that in this place a teaching tradition is reflected in the notes appended to the margins of Aristotle's text. In the erudition of high administration and the courts, another process of integrating Arabic, Iranian, and Hellenistic elements joined literary adab, erudition, through mastery of the 'arabia, the pure arabic, with Greek gnomologia, religious hermeneutics, with practical science, excluding the philosphical paradigm and worldview and demonstrative method and creating the first draft of encyclopedic erudition where adab el-katib, the erudition of the scribe or the secretary was joined with the gnonomologia of the Hellenistic tradition. On the other hand in the same milieus of the Arabic-Islamic administration disciples of the pioneer philsophers, scientists around al-Kindi, his commentators, and his heirs, created the first draft of a dual cannon of learning where the secretarial arts of the Arabic-Islamic community and the philosophical-scientific heritage of Greek Hellenism tended to harmonious symbiosis, such as in Abu Zayd el-Balkhi and the schools spreading from Baghdad to the East. And in a final developement, philsopher-jurists teaching law in the madrassa and including first outside and then inside the law college the rational sciences into their teaching transformed the old encyclopedia into a curriculum of Islam. So far from my overview that is what it is all about. 

I would have to say another word on our project to creat a lexicon of the Greek translations into Arabic--some of them out of Syriac. We are going to present some of our work this afternoon--our dictionary, our database created on the basis of our materials. Just a closing remark for those of you who won't be present this afternoon...its a long story about how a terminology, how scientific language, how the instruments for treating abstract matters in the language hitherto not adapted to treating such materials--such as ancient Arabic poetry where the concrete natural phenomenon are much more prominent than the abstractions of reason--words of science and literature in everyday usage have their own forturnes and we cannot take their meanings at face value, and each individual technical term is constituted on the one hand by the convention of the community of scholars and scientists, participants in the philosophic or scientific or other professional discourse...but then on the other hand it is embedded in a system of cross-linked connotations which differ from language to language. Language is metaphor. So is a technical term--albeit its primary image upon which the metaphor is based be forgotten and ignored and the meta-meaning has come to prevail [there is still?] content to determine the semantic developement of the term in its new linguistic environment. 

[Conclusion]

What we have done for about thirty years with Professor Dmitri Gutas of Yale University is to work out, first based on many thousand card files and more recently also based on an internet database, a Greek and Arabic lexicon (that is just one page) and this is what we are about to arrive at the end of the letter baa... some of you may know that the letter aleph is very important and very charged but we still have some way to go to the end of the alphabet. So in order to make this material more available we have created a database which has been programmed and is now situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy in Berlin and we have now got a very good new start to the ARC project and will be rushing forward to put our materials at the disposal of scholars who will still find quite a few things they are looking for--Greek leximes, Arabic leximes, Arabic tools--looking for words from specific texts, such as a disgraced testamentum of Aristotle with is transmitted in al-Nadime's list of books, and then you get results according to the Greek or according to the Arabic alphabet, which then again can be set forward through a collection of bookmarks to your own email account so you can readily make a nice lexicon article! [Details of the database.] As I said, we hope to present this is some more detail this afternoon--this was just an opportunity to boast about what we did already, and if you look closer you will detect that there are still quite a few more things left to do.

The Jewish Ghosts of Damascus: Syrian Jews and their Old City Echoes

A reader who recently came across the series that I wrote, A Jew in Beirut, sent me an email asking about Syrian Jews, and I thought it might be appropriate to respond publicly.

I grew up traveling and always ended up on Saturday in the synagogue of whatever place we happened to be. (If you have never seen the synagogue on top of Victoria Hill in Hong Kong, check it out!) When I moved to Syria for a couple of years, I was hoping to get in touch with what I knew would be a miniscule community--not only because I was interested but because...well...it's nice to have dinner with someone on Rosh Hashannah.

This (apparently) is the synagogue I never got to see in
Damascus.

I knew I would have to move slowly--Syria even a few years ago was obsessed with spies, and the secret police were everywhere. There was a man in a leather jacket who seemed to live outside my apartment, and that annoying click-whirr every time I made the first call of the day on my cell phone. Slowly was the only way to move, since while the worst thing that could happen to me was being deported, if I got Syrian or Syrian Jewish friends in trouble they would be well and truly screwed.

The teasers were everywhere. I lived in the old city, and walking down one of the main streets a friend would wave a hand off to his left: "That's the old Jewish Quarter! There is a synagogue there!"

But when I asked if we could go look at it he shook his head. "It is guarded by muhaberrat [secret police]," he said. "They keep people from shooting at it or blowing it up. They also keep track of people who come to see it."

I wanted to wander those streets, maybe six small blocks from where I lived...I wanted to examine doorposts for the diagonal scratches at a particular height that tell anyone who knows that a mezuzah has been removed from the doorpost. I never did.

And then there were conversations about Syrian diversity: "Syria is the most diverse country in the Middle East!" I heard over and over again, "Everyone is here! Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Jews."

"There are no Jews here," I would say sceptically, daring them to continue, to convince me and prove to me that there were Jews here.

"Yes there are! Not a lot but they are here and they are just like us, they are Syrian."

"Do you know any?"

"No, but there is this guy...."

That was how the conversation always went. I was always assured that there were Jews in Syria, and some people even claimed to know or have met a Syrian Jew  but not a single person could actually find one.

The echoes were everywhere in the old city--bits of scroll-work from windows on the old synagogue
would show up in antique stores, and in the stores selling silver throughout the old city the best thing anyone could say about a plate or delicately formed silver mug was that it was 'Jewish'--the renown of the Jewish silversmiths of Damascus lends cache to this art.

But I never found a Syrian Jew. My Rosh Hashannahs and Yom Kippurs were solitary affairs--meaningful, but meaningful partly in their loneliness.

Opposition forces in Syria's civil war reported that government

forces recently bombed and destroyed the 2000 year old synagogue

What is interesting about Syrian Jews is that by and large they did not leave Syria as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel--in fact, the vast majority left before then. While for Jews in Western Europe the 19th century was (largely) a time of emancipation and progress, for Syrian Jews there were still regular accusations of blood libel and murder.

Here's an interesting fact: for the most part, the crimes that the Jews were accused of were crimes against Syrian Christians, not Muslims. In 1940 the Jewish community was accused of the murder of a priest; in 1860, of participating (along with Druze and Muslim communities) in a massacre of Christians. In the later half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th (just as my family was fleeing to the United States from the pogroms of Eastern Europe) Syrian Jews began leaving Damascus and Aleppo, most often ending up in Manchester, UK, or Brooklyn.  Brooklyn, of course, has become the home of the largest Syrian Jewish community in the world, a community that is notoriously stand-offish, isolated, incredibly rich, and generally considered by American Jews to be quite frustrating.

In first half of the 20th century, before the establishment of the State of Israel, things got worse and worse for Syrian Jews. Successive pogroms in Damascus and Aleppo (the centres of Syrian Jewish life) convinced more and more Jews to leave.

When the Partition Plan for Palestine was announced in 1947, an anti-Jewish riot in Aleppo killed 75 Syrian Jews and wounded several hundred more. The Aleppo synagogue was torched, but members of the community managed to rescue the the Aleppo Codex, thought to be the most authoritative extant copy of the bible. Almost half of the codex was lost, but it was eventually smuggled out of the country. (As an aside--there is a thriving illegal antiquities trade in Sefer Torah and Judaica, much of which is incredibly old and valuable and just seem to pop up all over the place in Syria...two torah scrolls were found in the desert while I was there!)

The same year that Israel was established as a state, it emerged victorious against a coalition of Arab countries, including Syria, in what is known as the Arab-Israel War (but really, people just call it "'48"). As a result, Syrian Jews were not expelled (since the assumption was that they would go to Israel and join the enemy) but they were also not allowed to leave (presumably for the same reason.)

In 1949, the Menarsha synagogue in Damascus was bombed, killing at least 12 and injuring many others. In 2000 it was the object of violence again, in a reaction against Israeli use of violence in Gaza. Hence the police in outposts along the street to prevent anyone from trying to bomb it again. 

After the Six-Day War (1967), things got very, very bad. There was another anti-Jewish riot in which at least 65 Jews were killed; Jews were forbidden from a number of professions, including banking or government work; they could not purchase property or obtain drivers licenses; many communities were placed under house arrest.

Four Jewish girls raped and killed while attempting to leave:
Clockwise from top left: Fara and Mazal Zeibek, Eva Saad, Lulu Zeibek

Over the next several decades, during which they were denied the right to leave Syria by the government, many Jews tried to flee. Many were shot and killed trying to make it over the border to Israel--perhaps the most famous incident was the 1974 rape and murder of four Jewish girls who were trying to escape. Numerous covert operations, including the most important civilian attempt by the American Judy Feld Carr, succeeded in getting thousands of Syrian Jews out of the country--Carr reports eloquently on the desperation of parents who were trying to get their children out of the country.


In the 1980s-90s, travel restrictions were lifted and that, combined with aid from Israeli, American, and Syrian Jews in the US and Europe, allowed the majority of the Syrian Jewish community to leave. Many Syrian Jews who were granted exit permits to go to the United States actually ended up settling in Israel--perhaps they thought that it would be more culturally familiar (my guess is that they were rudely surprised.) By the mid-nineties, it was estimated that there were about 300 Jews left in Syria.


A US State Department report from 2001 claims that there is still a tiny Jewish community in Syria that maintains a Jewish school. It also notes that Jews are still barred from government work and obtaining drivers licenses, and are the only Syrian minority to have their religion identified on their government ID cards.

So the Jews of Syria are an echo. My favorite cookbook is by an Aleppen (Halabi) Jew, but I never, over the course of several years, got to sit and eat a meal with another Jew in Syria itself. I hope that I will, in the future. It may not be impossible. Because the echo of the Jews of Syria, the echo that crops up in architectural details, food, stories, the metal trays and cups that people use...it is a loud echo.

The Jews of Syria left for the reason we left all the countries we have left; persecution and violence that meant there was no future for us, or for our children, in the country of our birth. Let's be honest--the atrocious record of Syrian violence against the native Jewish population doesn't make the Syrians worse than anyone else -- French, Spanish, Egyptian, Turkish, Russian, Polish, even Canadian!

But it can still make us sad. Because sometimes those echoes, bouncing across the Old City of Damascus, sounded like the whispers of ghosts.

"You keep using the word 'Straussian': I do not think it means what you think it means."

The face of a man trying not to bitch-slap you for thinking he is a Bush
neo-con...or any kind of politician. Leo Strauss, we're sorry we are so stupid...

I recently opened a twitter account (any way to procrastinate while pretending to be engaged in professional development, right?) As a reader of Leo Strauss, his name was the first thing I plugged into the Twitter search--I hoped to find people who were reading his books and struggling with some of the same things I am: how to assess Strauss' 'pessimistic' view of human nature, the hostile affinity between Strauss and Carl Schmitt, and the ways that Maimonides has informed Strauss' political, philosophical, and ethical theory. (By the way, if you haven't looked at Maimonides' Guide, III. 34 lately, GO NOW!!)

And instead what I found was a bunch of bull-hockey. The kind of bull-hockey that I get from Facebook friends who remind me that "Straussians don't get jobs." The claims are endless and, to someone of a left-leaning sensibility, genuinely disturbing: Strauss is a neoconservative; Strauss is the Bush neoconservative philosophy (said/written with the same inflection used when one refers to Carl Schmitt as Hitler's philosopher), Strauss advocated lying (my post about how shallow and lacking in rigor peoples' understanding of the concept of 'esotericism' is will come later.) Basically, Strauss is the pessimistic Rumplestiltskin demanding the first-born child of American political theorists and the American people. Evil, evil, evil.

To those who make this suggestion...have you ever actually read one of Strauss' books? Have you read his discussion of liberal education, a piece which displays a greater love of human culture, d."
diversity, and history, than almost any other 20th century writer? Have you read Philosophy and Law (and yes, that is eponymous) and his discussion of the ethical problems of modernity? Have you really looked as his commentary on Plato's Republic, at his conversation with Kojeve in On Tyranny, and at why he believes that democracy is at the very least and in the words of Winston Churchill, "the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried."

Reading and taking Strauss seriously does NOT, as Shadia Drury and other lazy, thoughtless, and

My first and perhaps
still favorite Strauss.

publicity-hungry writers have suggested, mean that I am a Bush neoconservative.

It means that I try to read carefully, and that I have the humility to know that the great books that we read can impact our thought and lives in multiple ways and on multiple levels, at different times and in different places.

It does NOT mean that I agree with all of Strauss's conclusions.

It does mean that, even when I think his summaries of other works are lacking (see his description of Ibn Rushd in Philosophy and Law), that an examination of those lacks is incredibly productive for deepening the questions that I ask and the conclusions that I (occasionally) arrive at.

Go on. I dare you to
actually read it.

So here is my declaration of independence: 'Straussian' is not a dirty word. It cannot possibly, preserving any integrity with Strauss' ethical, pedagogical, or political works, mean anything except that one carefully reads Strauss.

On the other hand, maybe you should be afraid--because if being a Straussian means that I read carefully and take seriously the great books of philosophy, literature, politics, and religion, and if this is what characterizes 'Straussians, then these are the kind of people who you are taking on. And in that context, the laziness and lack of probity with which you throw around the word 'Straussian' is going to bite you in the tuches.

P.S. I'll do a more complete follow-up on this topic over the summer.

A Haiku for PhD Exams

Less than two weeks until my comprehensive exams,
and Benjamin and Strauss and Averroes sprawl twisted and ungainly across my desk.
I have three stars in Angry Birds.

Walter Benjamin.
(I know the feeling)

Alternative Title: "Apologia from a Delinquent Blogger"

From An American Jewish Woman, To My American Muslim Sisters

Hi guys.

I don't mean to be presumptuous, and I know many of you might be feeling overwhelmed at the moment...but I just wanted to say one thing:

I'm really sorry if things suck right now.

I know what it feels like, to some degree - I've been in the Middle East when Israel engaged in military actions. I know what it feels like to be just a little bit more aware of every laugh or loud comment, the way people move around me...I've felt judged as I walk down a sidewalk. I've weighed every word and every expression more carefully...and then there is the additional fear, the one I won't address here, that concerns now easily hatred and abuse becomes sexualized when it is directed against women.

But if course, I have one great advantage over you: I can hide.

It's true, I can. For Jewish girls as for Muslim girls, there are a million ways to stay within the combination of traditional and personal boundaries that define what we wear. But I don't have a headscarf. It is one of the strange things about being Jewish - you may know that the people around you hate you, deeply hate you, but they don't know that you are the person they hate. Because there is no particular racial profile, and no one piece of clothing that identifies Jewish people, we can often slide under the radar. This is especially true if we are girls.

You have it harder. You may feel like the people you walk by are talking about you, judging you, or mocking you. Inside your head, you may rehearse over and over again what you might say to someone, how eloquently you could convince them that not all of your faith are evil and violent.

I wish you didn't have that internal dialogue: I wish I could say I didn't understand why. I do.

I'm really sorry if things suck right now. I don't know what else to say.

I do know that I try to do what I can, and I would encourage all of my Jewish brethren to do the same: we know what it is to be a minority perceived as strange, backwards, and possibly evil. So if you are a fellow Jewish woman reading this, try this: if you see an observant Muslim women at your bus stop and you are waiting together, make a little extra effort. Maybe just remember to smile. Be friendly.

For thousands of years and even today, Jews were physically and verbally assaulted for their faith and culture.

When you feel like the world hates you, sometimes a simple smile is enough to remind you that you do belong. We know what it is like to feel alone. We have a responsibility to keep others from feeling that way.

And to my Muslim sisters: those people you are worried about - and who unfortunately do sometimes exist in real life - are jackasses. Seriously. Morons. And you, confident in your faith, and with the artistry, joy, and style that your confident devotion displays, are absolutely and unqualifiedly gorgeous.

They are just jackasses. And if you find yourself alone, with no-one who understands how you feel...well...see if you can find a Jew. Maybe we can understand-and I deeply hope that we will try.

Pseudo-Esther

PS. Apologies for the blogging slow-down recently. :-)

Rosenzweig on Islam: The Star of Redemption

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Following a reading of Gil Anidjar’s text, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, I decided to spend some time trying on the status of Islam in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. This is a preliminary attempt to think through some of that work, and while it would benefit enormously from secondary sources (of which there are few) this analysis will look exclusively at Rosenzweig’s Star (referenced as FR) and Anidjar’s History of the Enemy (referenced as GA). Anidjar, whose reading of Rozenzweig's treatment of Islam in the Star is provocative if only for highlighting a feature of the work often passed over with some embarrassment by readers of Rosenzweig, is unconvinced by claims that what can only be described as vitriolic indictments of Islam can be dismissed as an embarrassment resulting from the circumstances in which the text was writted. (GA 88n.5) Anidjar’s contention that Rosensweig’s anti-Islamic writings need to be closely examined is absolutely correct. However, that does not mean that they can be divorced from the context in which Rosenzweig wrote and the specific work that he was attempting to do. 

Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the
Enemy. Stanford UP, 2003

If one takes Anidjar’s genealogy of the enemy seriously, then by the 13^th century both the Jew and the Muslim [Arab?] had solidified their status as enemies in the eyes of Christian theologians—albeit two very different enemies. (GA 38) The Jews, whom Christian thinkers insisted upon understanding differently from other outsiders or potential enemies, were accorded a particular status by Christians largely as a result of the interpretation of the verse in Psalms, “Slay them not, lest my people forget.” (GA 35) The moment when a certain physical security is extended to the Jews and not the Muslims (although to be fair it was never a very secure security) is also the moment when the Jew is constituted as the theological enemy of Christianity. (GA 35). The Jews may be allowed to exist, but they exist as an example, an exhibit, dangerous enough that they require constant supervision and forceful discipline. The Jew is a passive figure and the exemplary failure, a failure most famously dramatized by Shylock, Shakespeare’s Jew, whose vengeful endeavors are all the result of a desire for a revenge resulting from his own original failure to keep or maintain his household, in the form of his daughter’s virtue. (GA 107)