Frenchness and Jewishness, Eternally Incompatible?

James McAuley, The House of Fragile Things:

Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

(Yale University Press, 2021)

In The House of Fragile Things, Washington Post Global correspondent James McAuley examines the place of Jews and the role of anti-Semitism in French history and culture, from the perspective of four prominent Jewish families and their art collections.  The four families—whose histories he details over the course of an approximate hundred-year period, from the second half of the nineteenth-century through the first half of the twentieth—are the Camondos, Reinachs, Cahens d’Anvers, and, most familiar but least important to the story, the Rothschilds. All four families migrated to France from points further east; all amassed huge fortunes in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, mostly in the banking and financial sectors; and, as befit France’s upwardly mobile bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all pieced together extraordinary art collections, displayed in opulent houses and châteaux which they designed.  From one generation to the next, moreover, their young men and women regularly married among themselves.

McAuley uses the four families’ experiences to highlight the tension between France’s official adherence to the universal republican values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—based on the equality of all men (and sometimes even women!), all simply “citizens” in the French Republic, without regard to other identities—and the ever-present force of anti-Semitism, sometimes hidden, often overt.  In its most virulent form, anti-Semitism held that Jews, including the wealthy Jews who are the subject of the study, could never be fully French.  Understanding the world of these Jewish families and their battles against anti-Semitism, McAuley argues, constitutes a key to “one of the central and unresolved dilemmas in modern French history: the place of minority communities in a society of ‘universal’ citizens … that emerged from the French Revolution” (p.6).

The families McAuley portrays demonstrated their allegiance to France by embracing wholeheartedly the republican values of the Revolution.  They were “careful architects of an identity that sought to present Frenchness and Jewishness as symbiotic, and perhaps even as natural extensions of each other” (p.6).  They collected art, especially pieces with a noble provenance and history, as “testimonies to the specific people they were but also to the proud identity this milieu sought to build—Jewish and French, particular and universal” (p.7).   As different as the collections might have been from one another, they constituted for their collectors a public statement—their attempt to write Jews into France’s national narrative, buttressing the argument in favor of the “eternal compatibly of Frenchness and Jewishness” (p.188).

But rather than being eternal, McAuley soberly concludes, the compatibility of Frenchness and Jewishness proved to be an illusion.  The conclusion became inescapable with the fall of France in 1940, when the invading Nazis found a willing partner in the collaborationist Vichy regime, a regime which undertook the “great undoing of the French Revolution [as] a nationalist rejoinder to the excesses of liberal democracy and the impotence of a decadent society” (p.215).   Within months, the “entire social world” that the families had assiduously constructed over the course of a century revealed itself as a most “fragile thing” indeed, a social world that was “quickly and deliberately destroyed with the approval—and even the encouragement—of the same nation they had championed”  (p.217).

* * *

The French Revolution provided citizenship to France’s sizeable Jewish population.  But it also induced a strident conservative reaction, based on a vision of France as Catholic, aristocratic, and monarchial, a country deeply tied to the land and rural life.  In nineteenth-century French conservative circles, the universal values of the Revolution came to be perceived as a “discourse about Jews,” McAuley writes, who were viewed as the “victors of the Revolution” (p.49).  As the four families prospered in the second half of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism waxed and waned, but came unambiguously to the forefront during the century’s last decade with the polarizing treason trials of Alfred Dreyfus (in 2012, I reviewed here three works on the Dreyfus Affair).

Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew with an impeccable military record, was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans.  In 1899, after the zealous campaign of the “Dreyfusards,” led by Emile Zola and his famous tract J’Accuse, Dreyfus was pardoned and released from prison. He was then given a second trial in which he was again found guilty despite evidence strongly supporting his innocence. It was not until 1906 that a military commission officially exonerated him.  Joseph Reinach, a prominent member of McAuley’s elite Jewish milieu, became France’s most consistent and fierce defender of Dreyfus after Zola, writing a detailed and authoritative account of the affair.

Except for Reinach’s writing, however, the elite milieu remained mostly silent about the “collective wound” (p.67) of the Dreyfus affair, retreating into a “fierce clannishness” that “transcended the injunction to marry within the Jewish community” (p.163; marriage outside the faith was not only a recurring source of friction for the families; in the case of women, it may have been a way of asserting independence from the families’ tribal patriarchy).  The Dreyfus affair jeopardized the four families’ “carefully constituted social positions” (p.65) and forced them to see themselves as others saw them, underscoring the “fragility of their illusions” (p.64).  For McAuley’s families, Dreyfus constituted what he terms a “bitter reminder that the world as they understood it was not the world as it was, and that in fact it never had been” (p.65).

As the families sought escape from late-nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, art collecting came to be seen more as a necessity than just a rich man’s pastime, providing the collectors with a “profound sense of solace and sanctuary” (p.7).  In the Dreyfus era, France’s most acerbic anti-Semitic commentators frequently expressed their disdain for Jews and Judaism in material terms, criticizing the Jewish collectors and their collections as “inauthentic,” the work of “outsiders” who could never acquire true French aristocratic taste.  For Edmond de Goncourt, a prominent anti-Semitic journalist of the 1880s and a “self-appointed arbiter of taste,” Jews were “fundamentally counterfeit, doomed to a mimetic parroting of a national identity that could never be theirs” (p.47-48; the annual Prix Goncourt, awarded today for France’s most imaginative literary work, is named after Goncourt and his brother).  Léon Daudet, another virulently anti-Semitic journalist, attacked Jewish collectors through the objects they bought and the houses they owned.  They were no more than “facsimiles of Frenchmen,” Daudet contended, “truncated, hybrid beings … in search of an impossible nationality” (p.48).

The opportunity to refute the premises of the era’s anti-Semitism once and for all came with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, less than a decade after Dreyfus’ exoneration.  McAuley quotes an historian who wrote that 1914 was the moment when elite Jews “definitively considered themselves emancipated in the spirit of 1789 and fully integrated into the nation” (p.91).  Most members of the four families felt a “profound sense of obligation to contribute to the French war effort in whatever way possible” (p.94).  There was “almost a sense of romance in conscription” (p.80), McAuley notes.  Some of the families offered their homes as military hospitals, with Jewish women often working as nurses.  For the elite milieu of the four families, World War I was the “moment when they definitely proved their Frenchness—at least in their own eyes” (p.80).

But the war’s potential for social redemption and personal glory quickly gave way to harsher realities.  Adolphe Reinach, the son of the Dreyfusard Joseph, was killed in the  Ardennes in August 1914.   McAuley, however, gives more attention to the death of Nissim de Camondo in 1917, shot down at age twenty-five in aerial combat somewhere over Lorraine.  From the time of Nissim’s death, McAuley’s often sprawling narrative focuses increasingly on the Camondo family: Nissim, his sister Béatrice, and their parents, Moïse and Irène Cahen d’Anvers.

* * *

Moïse de Camondo, born in Constantinople, in addition to directing and adding to the family’s banking fortune, became the foremost art collector among the four families.  In 1910, Moïse inherited a house from his mother on Paris’ rue de Monceau, at the edge of the Parc Monceau in the 8^th arrondissement, which he remodeled after the Petit Trianon at Versailles.  As dedicated as he was to republican values, Moïse entertained a nostalgia for the eighteenth-century aristocratic era, an “imagined social world in which elites, as they had been before the French Revolution, were free to pursue lives of dalliance and refinement at the same time as they controlled the natural order that afforded them such pleasure” (p.107).

Moïse’s wife Irène became the center of a widely publicized scandal when she left her husband and two children to marry an Italian count, and at the same time converted to Catholicism.  As an eight-year-old, Irène had been the subject of a famous Renoir portrait, La Petite Irène, to which McAuley refers throughout the narrative.  The portrait was seized by the Nazis; for a time became part of Hermann Göering’s personal collection; was recaptured by Irène after the war; and was then sold to a Ger­man-born Swiss arms man­u­fac­tur­er who had col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Nazis.

Nissim, Moïse and Irène’s only son, had been expected to take over the family business, but had not shown himself particularly adept at finance.  He seemed to look at military service in wartime as an escape from the listless existence of a rich but aimless young man.  The news of Nissim’s death devastated Moïse, who for a while stopped eating and sleeping, and refused initially to accept that his son was not coming back.  When Nissim’s body could not be located, denying him a proper Jewish burial, Moïse set out to reclaim his son’s remains with “more vigor than any other object he ever sought” (p.101).  It took him years, but he eventually arranged to steal the body and bring it back to Paris.

In the 1930s, Moïse donated both the rue Monceau house and the collection it contained to the French state.  The house became the Musée Nissim de Camando, designed both to memorialize Moïse’s fallen son and to celebrate the “ancien régime aesthetic” that Moïse had “tirelessly pursued for decades”  (p.192).  McAuley considers the museum—today part of Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs—as Moïse’s rejoinder to Goncourt and his ilk, demonstrating that a Jew “could not only be French but proudly so, a credible arbiter of what Moïse called the ‘glories of France’” (p.195).  A significant number of Jewish collectors established private collection museums in France in the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1935, the same year that Moïse bequeathed his house and collection to the state, Charles Cahen d’Anvers donated his country estate, Château de Champs, to France. The château was transferred to the Ministry of Culture in 1971.

* * *

In an inter-generational study that contains multiple portraits of individuals from the four families, Béatrice de Camondo—Moïse’s daughter and Nissim’s sister—stands out as McAuley’s lead character, featured both at the book’s opening and its closing.  A prominent Parisian socialite when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Béatrice had two children, Fanny, then twenty years old, and Bertrand, seventeen.  In 1940, she was already separated from and in the process of divorcing her husband, Léon Reinach, an aspiring musician who was the son of Joseph Reinach’s brother, Théodore, a wide-ranging intellectual who had given his Greek-themed Villa Kérylos on the Cote d’Azur to the Institut de France in the 1920s.

Béatrice was also converting to Catholicism. She was typical of her generation of elite French Jews who felt little attachment to the Jewish faith or Jewish communal life.  She didn’t take particularly seriously the Vichy government’s edicts about Jews, which in her view were aimed at recent immigrant Jews, whom she and her family looked down upon.  Nor did she see any need to try to escape.  In September 1942, she wrote with emphasis that she was “certain” that she would be “miraculously protected” by God and the Virgin “for years”  (p.231).  In fact, McAuley notes, Béatrice’s protection lasted exactly three months.

Despite her claim to no longer being Jewish and her standing in the right social circles, despite her family’s contributions to French artistic and cultural life over generations, Béatrice was arrested and sent to the notorious holding camp at Drancy, outside Paris.  From there, she and her two children were deported to Auschwitz, where they died in early 1945, just weeks before the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army. In a cruel irony, Béatrice’s ex-husband Léon also wound up at Auschwitz, and he too perished, in late 1944.

What Béatrice had failed to realize, McAuley writes, was that the establishment of the Vichy government and its persecution of France’s Jewish citizens was the end of the “hybrid identity that earlier generations had sought to refine and, ultimately, to display” (p.217).   From that time forward, Jews, including those who had strayed from Judaism, were “confined into a single identity category,” told in no uncertain terms that they no longer belonged to France, and that “in fact they never had” (p.217).  As part of his research, McAuley was able to uncover Béatrice’s death certificate, which stated that she had “Died for France” (“Mort pour la France”), the usual inscription for fallen soldiers like her brother Nissim.  Béatrice died not for France, McAuley writes indignantly, but “because of France, and specifically because she had been Jewish in France” (p.256).

The Moïse de Camondo line was extinguished entirely at Auschwitz.  As to those elite Jews who survived the war, the betrayals of the Vichy years irreversibly undermined the faith of many in the “nominally universal values of the French republic.”  Some renounced any kind of Jewish identity, while others left France for the United States, Great Britain, and South America.

* * *

Without mentioning specifically Eric Zemmour, McAuley alludes to the current French presidential candidate’s argument that the Vichy government protected French-born Jews as a matter of principle, targeting only foreign Jews (Zemmour has also questioned Dreyfus’ innocence).  Most historians agree that French-born Jews fared better than foreign-born Jews under the Vichy regime, with approximately 75% surviving.  But that still means that 25% did not survive, McAuley notes, and his emphasis on Béatrice de Camondo’s fate brings the point home graphically.  By reminding us how extensive France’s unforgiving anti-Semitism was under Vichy, McAuley not only sheds light on a discomforting slice of French history.  He also provides a timely contribution to France’s polarizing contemporary debates about what it means to be French.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

January 17, 2022

 

Deciphering a Confounding Thinker

 

 

Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil:

A Life in Five Ideas (University of Chicago Press)

 

Simone Weil is considered today among the foremost twentieth-century French intellectuals, on par with her luminous contemporaries Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. And yet she was not widely known when she died at age 34 in 1943. Although she wrote profusely, only small portions of her writings were published during her lifetime. Much of her written work was left in private notebooks and published posthumously. It was only after the Second World War, as Weil’s writings increasingly came to light, that a comprehensive picture of her thinking emerged —comprehensive without necessarily being coherent. In The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Robert Zaretsky attempts to provide this coherence.

Indeed, Weil was a confounding thinker whose body of thought and the life she lived seem awash in contradictions. As Zaretsky notes at the outset, Weil was:

an anarchist who espoused conservative ideals, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of solving a problem, [and] the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction of the self (p.2).

 Zaretsky, a professor at the University of Houston and one of the Anglophone world’s most fluent writers on French intellectual and cultural history, aims not so much to dispel these contradictions as to distill Weil’s intellectual legacy, contradictions and all, into five core ideas encapsulating the body of political, social, and theological thought she left behind. These five ideas are: affliction, attention, resistance, rootedness, and goodness—each the object of a separate chapter.

Unsurprisingly, these five Weilian ideas are far more intricate and multi-faceted than the single words suggest, and they are inter-related, with what Zaretsky terms “blurred borders” (p.14).  Moreover, the five ideas are presented in approximate chronological order: the first three chapters on affliction, attention, and resistance concern mostly Weil in the 1930s; while the last two on rootedness and goodness primarily cover her wartime years from 1940 to 1943—her most productive literary period.

Each chapter can be read as a standalone essay, and Zaretsky would likely discourage us from searching too eagerly for threads that unite the five into an overarching narrative. But there is one connecting thread which provides context for the apparent contradictions in Weil’s life and thought: collectively, the five ideas tell the story of Weil’s transformation from an exceptionally empathetic yet otherwise conventional 1930s non-communist, left-wing intellectual—Jewish and secular—to someone who in her final years found commonality with conservative political and social thought, embraced Catholicism and Christianity, and was profoundly influenced by religious mysticism. Although not intended as a biography in the conventional sense, The Subversive Simone Weil begins with a short but helpful overview of Weil’s abbreviated life before plunging into her five ideas.

* * *

Weil was born in 1909 and brought up in a progressive, militantly secular bourgeois Jewish family in Paris. Her older brother André became one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished mathematicians. She graduated in 1931 from France’s renowned École Normale Supérieure, the same school that had accorded diplomas to Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron a few years earlier.  After ENS, she took three secondary teaching positions in provincial France, and also managed to find her way to local factories, where she taught workers in evening classes and with limited success did some of the hard factory work herself.

In 1936, Weil joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and was briefly involved in combat operations before she inadvertently stepped into a vat of boiling cooking oil, severely injuring her foot. After she returned to France to allow her injury to heal, she had three seemingly genuine mystical religious experiences that set in motion what Zaretsky characterizes as rehearsals for her “slow and never quite completed embrace of Roman Catholicism” (p.134).  When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, Weil and her parents caught the last train out of Paris for Marseille, where they stayed for almost two years before leaving for New York. While in Marseille, Weil was deeply influenced by Joseph-Marie Perrin, a nearly blind Dominican priest, and came close but stopped short of a formal conversion to Catholicism.

Weil left her parents in New York for London, where she joined Charles de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, with ambitions that never materialized to return to France to battle the Nazis directly. While in London, her primary responsibility was to work on reports detailing a vision for a liberated and republican France. Physically frail most of her life, Weil suffered from migraines, and may have been on a hunger strike when she died of complications from tuberculosis in 1943, in a sanatorium south-east of London.

* * *

Malheur was Weil’s French term for “affliction.” This is the first of the five ideas that Zaretsky distills from Weil’s life and thought, in which we see Weil at her most political. Her idea of affliction appears to have arisen principally from her experiences working in factories early in her professional career.  Yet, affliction for Weil was the condition not just of factory workers, but of nearly all human beings in modern, industrial society—the “unavoidable consequence of a world governed by forces largely beyond our comprehension, not to mention our control” (p.36).  Affliction was “ground zero of human misery” (p.36), entailing psychological degradation as much as physical suffering.

The early Weil was attracted politically to anarcho-syndicalism, a movement that urged direct action by workers as the means to achieve power in depression-riddled 1930s France, with direct democracy of worker co-operatives as its end. In these years, Weil was an “isolated voice on the left who denounced communism with the same vehemence as she did fascism” (p.32), Zaretsky writes, comparing her to George Orwell and Albert Camus. With what Zaretsky describes as “stunning prescience” (p.32), she foresaw the foreboding consequences of totalitarianism emerging both in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

Attention, sometimes considered Weil’s central ethical concept, involves how we see the world and others in it. But it is an elusive concept, “supremely difficult to grasp”  (p.46).  Attention was attente in French: waiting, which requires the canceling of our desires.  Attention takes place in what Zaretsky terms the world’s salle d’attente, its waiting room, where we “forget our own itinerary and open ourselves to the itineraries of others” (p.54).  Zaretsky sees the idea of attention at work in Weil’s approach to teaching secondary school students, where her emphasis was on identifying problems rather than finding solutions. She seemed to be telling her students that it’s the going there, not getting there, that counts. Although not discussed by Zaretsky, there are echoes of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship in Weil’s notion of attention.

Zaretsky refrains from terming the Spanish Civil War a turning point for Weil, but it seems to have been just that.  Her brief experience in the war, combined with a growing realization of the existential threat which the Nazis and their fascist allies posed to European civilization, prompted her to revise her earlier commitment to pacifism. This is one consequence of resistance—Zaretsky’s third idea — which aligned Weil with the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, who taught their followers to resist recklessness, panic and passion. For Weil, resistance was an affirmation that the “truly free individual is one who takes the world as it is and aligns with it as best they can” (p.64), as Zaretsky puts it. Weil’s Spanish Civil War experience also gave rise to a growing conviction that “politics alone could not fully grasp the human condition” (p.133).

Rootedness—the fourth idea—arises out of Weil’s visceral sense of having been torn from her native France.  Déracinement, uprooting, was the founding sentiment for The Need for Roots, her final work, in which she emphasized how the persistence of a people is tied to the persistence of its culture—a community’s “deeply engrained way of life, which bends but is not broken as it carries across generations” (p.99).  Rootedness takes place in a “finite and flawed community” and became for Weil the “basis for a moral and intellectual life.” A community’s ties to the past “must be protected for the very same reason that a tree’s roots in the earth must be protected: once those roots are torn up, death follows” (p.126).

There is no evidence that Weil read either the Irish Whig Edmund Burke or the German Romantic Johann Herder, leading conservatives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Nonetheless, Zaretsky finds considerable resonance between Weil’s sense of rootedness and Burke’s searing critique of the French Revolution, as well as Herder’s rejection of the universalism of the Enlightenment in favor of preserving local and linguistic communities.  Closer to her own time, Weil’s views on community aligned surprisingly with those of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, two leading early twentieth-century French conservatives whose works turned on the need for roots. Zaretsky also finds commonalities between Weil and today’s communitarians, who reject the individualism of John Rawls.

But Weil also applied her views on rootedness to French colonialism, putting her at odds with her wartime boss in London, Charles de Gaulle, who was intent upon preserving the French Empire.  She perceived no meaningful difference between what the Nazis had done to her country—invaded and conquered—and what the French were doing in their overseas colonies.  Weil was appalled by the notion of a mission civilisatrice, a civilizing mission underlying France’s exertion of power overseas. It was essential for Weil that the war against Germany “not obscure the brute fact of French colonization of other peoples” (p.111).  Although Weil developed her idea of rootedness in the context of forced deportations brought about by Nazi conquests, she recognized that rootlessness can occur without ever moving or being moved. Drawing upon her idea of affliction, Weil linked this form of uprooting to capitalism and what the nineteenth-century English commentator Thomas Carlyle termed capitalism’s “cash nexus.”

Zaretsky’s final chapter on Goodness addresses what he terms Weil’s “brilliant and often bruising dialogue with Christianity” (p.134), the extension of her three mystical experiences in the late 1930s.  The battle was bruising, Zaretsky indicates, because as a one-time secular Jew Weil’s desire to surrender wholly to the Church’s faith ran up against her indignation at much of its history and dogma.  “Appalled by a religion with universal claims that does not allow for the salvation of all humankind,” Weil “refused to separate herself from the fate of unbelievers. Anathema sit, the Church’s sentence of banishment against heretics filled Weil with horror” (p.135).  Yet, in her final years, Catholicism became the “substance and scaffolding of her worldview” (p.34), Zaretsky writes.

But Zaretsky’s emphasis is less on Weil’s theological views than on how she found her intellectual bridge to Christianity through the ancient Greeks, especially the thought of Plato.  Ancient Greek poetry, art, philosophy and science all manifested the Greek search for divine perfection, or what Plato termed “the Good.”  For Weil, faith appears to have been the pursuit of Plato’s Good by other means. The Irish philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who helped introduce Weil to a generation of British readers in the 1950s and 1960s, explained that Weil’s tilt toward Christianity amounted to dropping one “o” from the Good.

* * *

Simone Weil was a daunting figure, intimidating perhaps even to Zaretsky, who avers that her ability to plumb the human condition “runs so deep that it risks losing those of us who remain near the surface of things” (p.38).  Zaretsky, however, takes his readers well below the surface of her body of thought in this eloquent work, producing a comprehensible structure for understanding an enigmatic thinker. His work should hold the interest of readers already familiar with Weil and those encountering her for the first time.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

July 31, 2021

[NOTE: A nearly identical version of this review has also been posted to the Tocqueville 21 blog, maintained in connection with the American University of Paris’ Tocqueville Review and its Center for Critical Democracy Studies]

 

 

Geopolitical Angle to Muslim Sectarian Intolerance and Violence

 

 

 

Kim Ghattas, Black Wave:

Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unraveled the Middle East

(Henry Hill & Co) .

“What happened to us?”  That is the question that Kim Ghattas asks at the outset of Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unraveled the Middle East.  It is a question that “haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world” (p.1), she writes.  Ghattas, a Lebanese journalist who once worked as Middle East correspondent for the BBC, remembers hearing from her parents and her parents’ generation about a time when young people in the Muslim world spent their days  “reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism late into the night in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad” (p.1). That halcyon world is gone.  Today the same Arab and Muslim world is defined and divided by religious sectarianism, intolerance and violence.  Ghattas seeks to explain how and why the world of her parents became “unraveled,” to borrow from her title.

Ghattas’ title indicates that much of the explanation can be found in the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  The two countries are presently locked in what she terms a “destructive competition for leadership of the Muslim world, in which both countries wield, exploit, and distort religion in the more profane pursuit of raw power” (p.2), fighting proxy wars in such places as Syria, Iraq and Yemen.   Religion, and more specifically the religious schism between Shiite and Sunni branches of the Islamic faith, lie inescapably close to the core of the Iranian-Saudi rivalry.

Shias are roughly 10% of the world’s Muslim population, centered in and near contemporary Iran, with most of the rest of the Muslim world adhering to some form of Sunni Islam.  Saudi Arabia, predominantly Sunni but with a Shiite minority in its eastern region, is home to Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, and considers itself the world guardian of the Islamic faith (the Shia-Sunni schism dates back to differences which arose in 632 CE about who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the new faith).

Ghattas traces the beginnings of Middle Eastern unraveling to the moment in 1979 when Iran startled the world by overthrowing the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi and establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran, the triggering event for her narrative.  In February of that year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then 79 years old, emerged from exile as the new republic’s officially designated “Supreme Leader,” the guardian of the holy law of the prophet.  Shia Islam, not Islam generally, was officially declared the state religion.  The unraveling process is in large measure what Ghattas terms the “ripple effect” of the Iranian revolution.

From that starting point in 1979, Ghattas weaves together an intricate story that takes her well beyond the borders of Iran and Saudi Arabia, with chapters on Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, digging deeply into  how the Iranian-Saudi rivalry affected the internal politics of each (Ghattas frequently uses the term “Greater Middle East” to include Pakistan and Afghanistan).  She casts light on numerous familiar events and how they were shaped more than commonly realized by the Iranian-Saudi rivalry. She shows Iran making little effort to hide its interest in exporting its Islamic revolution, with the Saudis opposing Iran’s adventures and advancing their own goals more furtively.

Ghattas leavens the story’s necessary intricacy by introducing her readers to a host of activists and ordinary citizens fighting against sectarian intolerance and violence.  The people she features, from almost every country in the region and many walks of life, rarely know one another and most will not be known to Western readers (although assiduous readers of this blog will recognize at least two: Masha Alinejad, leader of the movement to give Iranian women the option of not wearing the veil; and Sharin Ebadi, Iranian civil rights lawyer — and judge prior to the Khomeini regime making women ineligible for judgeships — who won the Nobel Peace prize in 2003; both wrote memoirs reviewed here, Alinejad in December 2019 and Ebadi in October 2017).  Even if they do not know one another, these individuals are all “fighting the same battles” (p.3), Ghattas writes.  Amidst so much reason to despair, she finds her hope in them.  They constitute a “sample of a large majority that given the opportunity and the space will seize the occasion to rise against the forces of darkness that have impoverished the region” (p.334).

* * *

Prior to 1979, the Sunni-Shia schism lay mostly dormant throughout most of the Muslim world, even though clerics from each branch generally dismissed the other’s brand of Islam as heretical.  Further, up to that time, Saudi Arabia and Iran had been twin pillars in American policy to counter the spread of Soviet influence in the region.  But the revolution in Iran upended this equilibrium.  Once in power as Iran’s Supreme leader, Khomeini proceeded in the name of Islamic purity to crush ruthlessly all opposition.  “Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God” (p.36),  he once proclaimed.  The dictatorship of the Shah was replaced by what Ghattas terms an “autocracy of the holy law” (p.36).   Khomeini, a man whom she describes as not just a “theocrat” but an “irredeemable monster” (p.37), served as Iran’s Supreme Leader until his death in 1989.

The Saudis initially greeted the regime change in Tehran with equanimity, only to be rebuffed by Khomeini, who saw the Saudi royal family, the al Sauds, as unworthy custodians of Mecca and Medina – mere “camel grazers” (p.168).  By year’s end, the Saudis were “determined to position themselves as the sole defenders of the Muslim faith, at all cost, and on every front, from education to politics, from culture to the battlefields” (p.82).   But the 1979 revolution in Iran was only the first of several events that shook up the Greater Middle East that year.  Two others stand out for Ghattas: Saudi religious zealots’ siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca in November and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December.

The rebels who seized the Mosque in Mecca, also in the name of Islamic purity, launched the first direct challenge to the al-Saud dynasty in its history.  Although labeled “deviants” in official Saudi circles, the rebels were well-groomed products of training received from homegrown clerics representing Wahhabism, the ultra-conservative, uncompromisingly puritanical Sunni interpretation of Islam.  With rumors circulating that the United States was behind the takeover — rumors that Khomeini encouraged – the Saudis at the behest of their American allies issued a tepid denial of foreign involvement.  Ghattas terms the denial a “cowardly effort to deflect attention for as long as possible from the kingdom’s own responsibility in creating the monster that had hijacked Islam’s holiest site” (p.64).  Obfuscation and feigning of ignorance became typical of Saudi responses in the years to come, a form of subterfuge designed to “evade responsibility for any violence or intolerance connected to the kingdom” (p.64).

After the embarrassment of the siege of Mecca, the Saudis saw Afghanistan as an “opportunity to rebuild their reputation as the champions of Islam against the godless communists” (p.84).   Afghanistan became the first battleground in modern times for jihad, now commonly thought of as Islamic holy war against infidels, Muslim and non-Muslim.  The cumulative effect of the Iranian revolution, the siege in Mecca and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the same year was, Ghattas writes,“toxic, and nothing was ever the same again . . . Nothing has changed the Arab and Muslim worlds as deeply and fundamentally as [these three] events of 1979” (p.2).

 Since the early 1980s, the Iranian imprint has been most visible in Lebanon and Syria.  Lebanon became what amounted to an outpost of the Iranian Revolution, with Khomenei’s image and Iranian flags ubiquitously displayed. Syria, under Hafez al-Assad, its president from 1970 to 2000, was the first country to recognize Khomeini’s victory in 1979.  With an ally in Iran, Assad, a member of the obscure Alawite minority, a tenth-century offshoot of Shia Islam, saw the potential of an Iranian-Syrian axis as a tool to “scare and blackmail countries like Saudi Arabia” (p.86).  Today, Iran continues to support the regime of Assad’s son Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s seemingly interminable civil war.

Saudi Arabia’s early efforts to undermine Iran may have included providing Saddam Hussein with a green light in 1980 to launch the Iran-Iraq war, Ghattas suggests.  Hussein, who rarely traveled outside Iraq, took a 24-hour trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with Saudi King Khaled in August of 1980 and declared war on Iran the following month, a war that lasted eight years and turned out to be a gift to Khomeini, who used it astutely to “solidify his grip on the country in the face of an external enemy” (p.88).

Death for apostasy was introduced into Islam in 1988 when Khomeini issued a fatwa declaring Indian writer Salmon Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous and calling upon Muslims to find and execute Rushdie.  But the revolt against the novel actually started with Saudi-funded demonstrations in northern England, led by clerics primarily of Saudi and Egyptian origin.  In Iran, the book had been translated into Persian and sold freely in Tehran.  It was only after watching demonstrations against the novel on television that Khomeini issued his fatwa.

Rushdie survived the fatwa, but his Japanese and Turkish translators, along with a Norwegian publisher, did not.  With no basis in the Quran, Khomeini’s fatwa represented what Ghattas terms a “strange twist in the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia to position themselves as the standard-bearer of global Islam. But Saudi Arabia’s dubious contribution would be forgotten; the fatwa against Rushdie would become solely an Iranian story” (p.181).

Khomeini’s doctrine of death for apostasy reached new and savage heights in Pakistan in the late 1980s with the systematic killings of Shias by Sunnis, the “first premeditated, state-sponsored attack by one sectarian militia against another sect” (p.145).   The sectarian killings in Pakistan were the product of the “provocative zealotry” (p.145) of Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq, a staunch American ally who, with Saudi encouragement, had imposed a particularly severe version of Sharia law on his country during the fateful year 1979.  The sectarian violence, “born out of the seeds of the Iranian Revolution and its clash with Saudi Wahhabism,” marked not only the beginning of a proxy war in Pakistan between Khomeini and the House of Saud but also the “start of modern day Sunni-Shia sectarian violence” (p.146-47).

After the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s fall, Saudi Arabia predictably denied any responsibility for the Sunni-Shiite violence that erupted.  As Ghattas notes, the Saudis had plausible deniability.  Although the state was “not organizing anything,” individual Saudis were donating money to the cause, “just as they had during the Afghan war, and fiery preachers in the kingdom were not silenced even while they exhorted their brothers to fight infidels in Iraq” (p.233).   The sectarian violence in Iraq gave rise to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, still a presence in Syria’s on-going civil war.  ISIS’ grisly executions and “bizarre, misguided obsession with breaking statues and shrines” (p.289) invited comparisons to Saudi Wahhabism.  Official Saudi Arabia vehemently rejected such comparisons.  But, Ghattas notes acidly, ISIS is inescapably “Saudi progeny.”  The Saudi kingdom “may not have directed the rise of this cult of fanatics,” she writes, but it had done “more than enough” to feed them (p.290).

Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Saudi journalist and activist, was a personal friend of Ghattas and another of the individuals she features.  In a long and heart-breaking portrait, she includes what she has been able to learn about his gruesome end in 2018.  Her friend, she writes, underestimated both his own importance and “how brazen and evil”  (p.324) Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Sultan, MBS, and those around him had become, willing to punish anyone seen as a dissident or critic of the regime.  She also notes that MBS appears to be the most hardened anti-Iranian in power in Saudi Arabia in the post-1979 era.

With MBS seemingly on course to become Saudi king when his ailing father dies, the prospects for a diffusion of tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia could be written off as unrealistic.  Ghattas would like to see Saudi Arabia moderate its anti-Shia rhetoric within the kingdom and curb the influence it seeks outside its borders “in the form of money spent on mosques and teachings that hone close to the kingdom’s understanding of Islam.” (p.333).   In the end, however, defusing the “paranoid, vengeful insecurities” of Saudi Arabia and curtailing the “militant ardor of those [Saudis] who feel threatened by Iran’s expansionist designs” (p.333) is likely to require something akin to regime change in Iran.  Sharin Ebadi, the Iranian civil rights lawyer and Nobel Prize winner, has suggested that this could start with a constitutional change removing the position of Supreme Leader, a suggestion Ghattas appears to endorse.

* * *

Despite Ghattas’ hopes for the activists fighting against the darkness in today’s Greater Middle East, her kaleidoscopic yet dispiriting account demonstrates persuasively that there is no easy road to arresting an unraveling process propelled by religious intolerance and sectarian violence.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

May 10, 2021

 

 

 

 

Deciphering Buber’s Judaism

 

 

Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber:

A Life of Faith and Dissent

(Yale University Press)

From the late 1890s through the mid-1960s, Martin Buber seemed to be in the middle of every public debate over what it meant to be Jewish and how one could be a good Jew in the modern world.  Although he resisted being labeled either a “theologian” or a “philosopher of religion,” Buber fashioned his own idiosyncratic version of Judaism, a version that rejected most traditional Jewish ritual.  He rarely observed Yom Kippur, and in general disdained the liturgical practices associated with the Jewish faith.  Buber rather spent his adult life searching for what he termed the “primal spirituality” of Judaism, all the while encouraging Jews to embrace people of other faiths.  Buber’s version of Judaism, sometimes referred to as “Jewish humanism,” sometimes more lightheartedly as “religious anarchism,” seemed to some of his critics geared to appeal more to Christians than to his fellow Jews.

I first encountered Buber in an undergraduate comparative religion course, where we were assigned his best-known work, “I-Thou,” generally thought to be the foundational text for what has come to be known as Buber’s “philosophy of dialogue.”  I remember thinking I was in way over my head in trying to decipher what seemed like a deeply serious but altogether inscrutable work.  Now, several decades later, Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has provided me with another chance to get a handle on Buber.  In his recent biography, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent, Mendes-Flohr charts Buber’s multifaceted intellectual journey, emphasizing how Buber’s thinking and writing evolved over the years.

Buber, a quintessential product of what the Germans call Mitteleuropa and its vibrant late 19^th century Jewish culture, was born in Vienna in 1878.  He spent most of his youth in the city then known as Lemberg (today Lviv, part of Ukraine), at the time the capital of Galicia, a province within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a substantial Polish-speaking population.  But it was in Germany where Buber made his professional mark.

Buber lived through Germany’s defeat in World War I and its post-war experiment in democracy, the Weimar Republic.  He survived the early years of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime after it assumed power in Germany in 1933.   Although required as a Jew to cede a university position, Buber continued to write and speak in Germany as a highly visible spokesman for Judaism until 1938, when he fled with his family for Jerusalem, in what was then termed Palestine.  Jerusalem was his home base for the remainder of his life, but he traveled extensively in the post-World War II era, including numerous trips to the United States, up to his death in 1965.  What was arguably the single most consequential event in Buber’s long life occurred in Vienna at age three.

* * *

Buber’s parents separated and his mother eloped with a Russian military officer when he was three years old.  The young Buber witnessed his mother leaving, but she did not bid him farewell and he did not see her again.  Buber never recovered entirely from this early childhood trauma. Images of motherhood appeared in his writings and speeches throughout his adult life, indicating that he was still feeling the “enduring impact” of yearning to be reunited with his “inaccessibly remote mother” (p.3), as Mendes-Flohr puts it.  After his parents’ breakup, young Martin moved to Lemberg, where he lived with his grandparents until his teenage years.

Solomon Buber, Martin’s grandfather, was a successful businessman who was also a recognized Jewish scholar and interpreter of Jewish texts. Solomon taught his grandson Hebrew and the panoply of rules and customs required in an observant Jewish household.  Buber’s subsequent rejection of much of formalized Judaism probably had its roots in a rebellion against his grandfather’s pedagogy.  At age 14, Buber moved back with his father, who by then had remarried and moved to Lemberg.  While the young Buber as an adolescent and young adult remained largely estranged from his grandfather, the two reconciled prior to Solomon’s death in 1906.

Although the emotional scars left from his mother’s early departure never left him, while a university student in Zurich in 1899 Buber fortuitously found the woman who would always be there for him, fellow student Paula Winkler.  One of the few women in the university, Winkler was from a Catholic family and considerably taller than the diminutive Buber.  Their romantic attachment quickly produced two daughters, born in July 1900 and July 1901.  Buber did not inform his father or grandparents of Paula or his daughters until after the couple married in April 1907 and Paula had converted to Judaism.  By then, grandfather Solomon had died.

Despite its unconventional beginnings, Buber’s marriage to Paula endured until her death in 1958, at age 81.  Throughout their years together, Paula served as her husband’s confidante, editor and general sounding board for much of the thinking that he put to paper or delivered to audiences, while doing much writing on her own.   Buber found in Paula, Mendes-Flohr writes, “not only the mother figure he longed for, but also a soul mate; they were bonded by both romantic love and their enduring intellectual and spiritual compatibility” (p.13-14).

When Buber first met Paula, he was already active in Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.  His attraction to Zionism was due in no small part to his relationship with Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), often considered the founder of the modern Zionist movement. Buber initially saw Zionism as a way to maintain solidarity with his fellow Jews even as he rejected most communal Jewish religious practices.  The young Buber was fascinated with the idea of a Jewish renaissance and saw in Zionism a means to revitalize the spiritual and cultural life of the Jewish people.   Zionism provided Buber and many young Jews of his generation with a “revolutionary, secular alternative for maintaining a Jewish national consciousness and solidarity” (p.22).

But Buber and Herzl had a personal falling out, and by 1905 Buber had ceased to be involved in Zionist activities.   He signed onto a letter that denounced the conventional Zionist vision of a future Jewish state arising in the ancient homeland as “aping Euro-Christian culture” while “utterly bereft of Jewish content” (p.38). For Buber, the movement had come to be based on what he termed the “bonds of blood alone” (p.88). Yet he still saw in Zionism a potential to “reintroduce contemporary Jews to the ‘Jewish spirit’” and to Judaism’s “spiritual and cultural resources” (p.32), becoming what Mendes-Flohr terms a “cultural” rather than  “political” Zionist.

The German experience in World War I further shaped Buber’s approach to Zionism. Like many Jews of his generation, Buber saw no conflict between his allegiance to Judaism and his allegiance to Germany.  That young Jews were joining the war ranks on equal terms with other Germans was initially a positive feature of the war effort for Buber, presenting an opportunity to bring about a higher degree of national unity.  But as the conflict endured, Buber came to oppose not only the war itself, but all forms of chauvinistic nationalism.

These views crystallized when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which it asserted its support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.  Buber’s opposition to the Declaration placed him at odds even with fellow cultural Zionists. If a Jewish state were to materialize in Palestine, he contended, it should be “for humankind . . . for the realization of Judaism” (p.115-16).  For the remainder of his life, Buber continued to criticize Zionism –and the State of Israel when it came into existence in 1948 — for what he  considered its “self-enclosed, parochial nationalism” (p.199).

Buber’s festering doubts over the Zionist project prompted him in 1919 to begin work on a manuscript that aimed to establish what he termed the “general foundations of a philosophical (communal and religio-philosophical) system to which I intend to devote the next several years” (p.131).  He was alluding to I and Thou (Ich-Du in the original German), the work with which Buber would be identified for the rest of his life and thereafter, first appearing in 1923 but not translated and published in English until 1937.

 I and Thou probed the ramifications of the German word Begegnung, meeting, which for Buber meant, in Mendes-Flohr’a words, an “interpersonal encounter between individuals that occurs in an atmosphere of mutual trust” (p.3).  Buber himself once wrote that “[a]ll real life is meeting” (p.3).  His call to engage the world in dialogue, our life with others, “also recognized the painful truth of how difficult it is to achieve, how often life’s journey is filled with mismeetings and the failure of I-Thou encounters to take place” (p.3-4).

Buber’s notion of “I-Thou” and his “philosophy of dialogue” can be understood only in relationship to “I-It,” the opposite of “I-Thou.”  These are Buber’s “two fundamental and dichotomous modes of relating to the world” (p.141), Mendes-Flohr explains..  The human person “achieves the fullness of being by experiencing both modes of existence” (p.262-63).  I-It entails the “physical, historical, and sociological factors that structure objective reality,” in other words the “labyrinthine world we often call ‘reality’” (p.262-63).  To attain the fullness of life, our relationships with other human beings cannot be based on an object — It — but on Thou, as an “automatous subject with a distinctive inner reality” (p.263), as Mendes-Flohr puts it.

As if to show the I-Thou principle in action, much of Mendes-Flohr’s narrative involves Buber’s exchanges with thinkers, colleagues and friends over the course of his long life, among them such luminaries as early Zionist visionary Herzl, Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, and David Ben-Gurion, modern Israel’s founding father who served as its first prime minister.  But his most influential exchanges were with two men whom he also considered  friends, Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929).  Landauer led Buber away from Judaism and into mysticism, while Rosenzweig took Buber out of mysticism and helped him reach what Mendes-Flohr considers his most mature understanding of the Jewish faith.

A leading early 20^th century German anarchist, Landauer knew Buber from 1900 onward, although their friendship deepened as World War I broke out.  Landauer, who had by then withdrawn entirely from formal Judaism, helped steer Buber away from the nationalist sentiments he had entertained at the outbreak of the war.  Landauer imparted to Buber his interest in Christian mysticism and Buddhism, aiding Buber’s search for the “essential spiritual unity of all beings” (p.53).  Landauer was active in Kurt Eisner’s revolutionary coup d’etat in Bavaria in 1919 and was murdered by counter-revolutionaries in that conflict.   Buber was “deeply shaken by the tragic death of his friend; he viewed Landauer as a martyred idealist, a gentle anarchist who had sacrificed his life in a doomed effort to herald an era of politics without violence” (p.127).  Landauer was, in Mendes-Fllohr’s view, Buber’s ”intellectual and political alter ego” (p.51; he was also the paternal grandfather of American film-director Mike Nichols, born several years after his death).

Rosenzweig, eight years Buber’s junior, was already making his mark as an iconoclastic German philosopher when he first met Buber in Berlin in 1914.  Their friendship blossomed after 1920, not coincidentally after Landauer’s death (Rosenzweig had by then famously backed out at the last minute of a conversion to Christianity, discussed in Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind, reviewed here in 2017).  Mendes-Flohr credits Rosenzweig with helping Buber get past his infatuation with mysticism.  The pair undertook to translate the Hebrew Bible into German, a project that was both lingual and theological.  Their task was complicated when Rosenzweig contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known to Americans as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”), which killed him in 1929.  Buber’s friendship with Rosenzweig led to what Mendes-Flohr considers the maturation of Buber’s understanding of Judaism, in which genuine spiritual renewal lies neither in “culture” nor “religion” but rather in the “lived everyday” (p.164).  The sensibility we sometimes call “faith,” Buber wrote, “cannot be constituted by the inwardness of one’s soul: it must manifest itself in the entire fullness of personal and communal life, in which the individual participates.” (p.209).

Buber also met several times after World War II with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).  Although one of Germany’s most original and complex 20^th century philosophers, Heidegger’s professional reputation was permanently tainted by his affinity for Hitler’s Third Reich in the 1930s.  Buber was aware that Heidegger had supported the Nazi regime and studiously avoided the “difficult questions attendant to Heidegger’s Nazi past” (p.281).  Heidegger for his part eagerly engaged with Buber, motivated by his desire to receive at least an implicit exculpation for his Nazi past.  Buber’s meetings with Heidegger tested his vision of reconciliation, “undoubtedly shaped by a Jewish theological sensibility that there can be no divine pardon for offenses against others until one has turned to one’s fellow human beings whom one has offended, and not only asked their forgiveness, but also adequately repented for the wrongs done to them” (p.286).

The Heidegger meetings failed to rise to the level of what Buber considered genuine dialogue, making reconciliation unattainable.  Buber and Heidegger entertained “divergent horizons of expectations” that reflected “very different conceptions of grace and atonement,” (p.285).  In a subsequent lecture, delivered in 1960, Buber argued that through his uncritical embrace of Nazism, Heidegger had neglected the interpersonal responsibility of one individual to the other, “even to a stranger who bears no name, allowing for the excessive celebration of ‘superpersonal’ social and political institutions in our ‘disintegrating human world’” (p.290; Heidegger’s post-World War II attempts at reconciliation with his former girl friend Hannah Arendt are analyzed in a work by Daniel Maier-Katkin, reviewed here in 2013),.

In 1938, when he was 60 years old, Buber and his family immigrated to Palestine, where he began a professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Although Jerusalem was  Buber’s home until his death in 1965, he was never fully at ease there.  His appointment at the Hebrew University was in “Philosophy of Society,” in which he was to draw upon the “principles and methods” of sociology.   With no formal training in sociology, Buber used his university position to stress sociology’s ethical dimensions, very much at odds with its general character as a value-free discipline.

When the State of Israel was created ten years later, in May 1948, a civil war broke out between Arab and Jews, leaving Buber aghast.  With his World War I era objections to the Balfour Declaration and political Zionism resurfacing, Buber wrote that when he had first joined the Zionist movement 50 years previously:

[M]y heart was whole. Today it is torn. The war being waged for a political structure might become a war of national survival at any moment. Thus against my will I participate in it with my own being, and my heart trembles like any other Israeli.  I cannot, however, even be joyful in anticipating victory, for I fear that the significance of Jewish victory will be the downfall of Zionism (p.250).

Buber words were directed at least in part to Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), with whom he had developed an odd friendship.  The pair disagreed upon almost every issue that Israel faced in its early days, starting with the fate of displaced Arabs, yet they were bound to one another by a deep reservoir mutual respect.  Buber lobbied Ben-Gurion in 1961 to spare the life of Adolph Eichmann after his capture in Argentina and trial in Jerusalem, to no avail (Deborah Lipstadt’s account of the Eichmann trial was the subject of a review here in 2013).

Buber subjected himself to searing criticism in Israel in 1951 when he accepted, in abstentia, the Goethe Prize from the University of Hamburg for his “promotion of supranational thinking and humanitarian endeavors in the spirit of Goethe” (p.270).  Many in Israel considered Buber’s acceptance of the prize as exonerating Germany for its extermination of six million Jews, contending that he should have ostentatiously refused the prize.  Buber responded that by rejecting the prize, he would “undercut the commendable efforts of those Germans ‘fighting for humanism’ and thereby play into the hands of their enemies, even to those guilty of mass murder” (p.271-72).  As a Jew and an Israeli citizen, Buber considered it his duty to “acknowledge (and thus encourage) the German advocates of a rededication to the humanistic tradition associated with Goethe” (p.272).

Then, in 1953, Buber came under further fire when he accepted a prize and gave a lecture in what had once been St. Paul’s church in Frankfurt, destroyed in the war and the city’s first public building to be rebuilt afterwards.   The building had not been used for religious purposes since 1848, a fact that was “ignored by or unknown to some of Buber’s Israeli critics, who excoriated him for speaking in a church” (p.276).  In his lecture, which was attended by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Huess, Buber acknowledged the vast pain and immeasurable suffering which the Nazi regime had inflicted upon his people.  Yet, he recognized that not all Germans had acquiesced in the Nazi horrors.  Some had resisted, others had assisted and protected endangered Jews. “Reverence and love for these Germans now fills my heart” (p.278), Buber told the audience.

Buber’s wife Paula, who never felt accepted in Jerusalem as a Jew despite her conversion, died unexpectedly in 1958 in Venice, where the couple had stopped en route back to Jerusalem after a tour in the United States that had included a stint for Buber at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies.  Paula was buried in the 13^th century Jewish cemetery on the Lido.   Buber had a  difficult time resuming his work in the aftermath of his wife’s death.  In his twilight years, he “increasingly cherished friendships and visits, particularly by youth from abroad and Israel” (p.304).  On the occasion of his 85^th birthday in 1963, Buber indicated to well wishers that he wanted to be remembered as a “naturally studying person,” someone  for whom “learning and study are an expression of human freedom” (p.320).  Two years later, at age 87, Buber died in his sleep in his Jerusalem home.

* * *

Throughout his long career, Martin Buber’s idiosyncratic version of Judaism sought to sharpen the spiritual sensibilities of his fellow Jews while urging their expanded commitment to the larger family of humankind.  But with his  complex and often portentous thinking, Buber’s writings and lectures were never easy to grasp.  Paul Mendes-Flohr is therefore to be lauded for ably distilling Buber’s thought in this penetrating biography, a work that should appeal even to readers not schooled in Jewish history and culture.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

October 20, 2020

 

Reading Darwin in Abolitionist New England

 

Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America:

How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (Viking)

In mid-December 1859, the first copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species arrived in the United States from England at a wharf in Boston harbor.  Darwin’s book explained how plants and animals had developed and evolved over multiple millennia through a process Darwin termed “natural selection,” a process which distinguished On the Origins of Species from the work of other naturalists of Darwin’s generation.   Although Darwin said little in the book about how humans fit into the natural selection process, the work promised to ignite a battle between science and religion.

In The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation, Randall Fuller, professor of American literature at the University of Kansas, contends that what made Darwin’s insight so radical was its “reliance upon a natural mechanism to explain the development of species.  An intelligent Creator was not required for natural selection to operate.  Darwin’s’ vision was of a dynamic, self-generation process of material change.  That process was entirely arbitrary, governed by physical law and chance – and not leading ineluctably . . . toward progress and perfection” (p.24).  Darwin’s work challenged the notion that human beings were a “separate and extraordinary species, differing from every other animal on the planet. Taken to its logical conclusion, it demolished the idea that people had been created in God’s image” (p.24).

On the Origins of Species arrived in the United States at a particularly fraught moment.  In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown had conducted a raid on a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry (then part of Virginia, today West Virginia), with the intention of precipitating a rebellion that would eradicate slavery from American soil.  The raid failed spectacularly: Brown was captured, tried for treason and hung on December 2, 1859.  The raid and its aftermath exacerbated tensions between North and South, further polarizing the already bitterly divided country over the issue of chattel slavery in its southern states.  Notwithstanding the little Darwin had written about how humans fit into the natural selection process, abolitionists seized on hints in the book that all humans were biologically related to buttress their arguments against slavery.  To the abolitionists, Darwin “seemed to refute once and for all the idea that African American slaves were a separate, inferior species” (p.x).

Asa Gray, a respected botanist at Harvard University and a friend of Darwin, received the first copy of On the Origin of Species in the United States.  He passed the copy, which he annotated heavily, to his cousin by marriage  Charles Loring Brace (who was also a distant cousin of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the anti-slavery runaway best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin).  Brace in turn introduced the book to three men: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, a part-time school master and full-time abolitionist activist; Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator and loquacious philosopher, today best remembered as the father of author Louisa May Alcott; and Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s best known philosophers and truth-seekers.  Sanborn, Alcott and Thoreau were residents of Concord, Massachusetts, roughly twenty miles north of Boston, the site of a famous Revolutionary War battle but in the mid-19^th century both a leading literary center and a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.

As luck would have it, Brace, Alcott and Thoreau gathered at Sanborn’s Concord home on New Year’s Day 1860.  Only Gray did not attend. The four men almost certainly shared their initial reactions to Darwin’s work.   This get together constitutes the starting point for Fuller’s engrossing study, centered on how Gray and the four men in Sanborn’s parlor on that New Year’s Day  absorbed Darwin’s book.   Darwin himself is at best a background figure in the study.  Several familiar figures make occasional appearances, among them:  Frederick Douglass, renowned orator and “easily the most famous black man in America” (p.91); Bronson Alcott’s author-daughter Louisa May; and American philosophe Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor and friend.  Emerson, like Louisa May and her father, was a Concord resident, and Fuller’s study takes place mostly there, with occasional forays to nearby Boston and Cambridge.

Fuller’s study is therefore more tightly circumscribed geographically than its title suggests.  He spends little time detailing the reaction to Darwin’s work in other parts of the United States, most conspicuously in the American South, where any work that might seem to support abolitionism and undermine slavery was anathema.   The study is also circumscribed in time; it takes place mostly in 1860, with most of the rest confined to the first half of the 1860s, up to the end of the American Civil War in 1865.  Fuller barely mentions what is sometimes called “Social Darwinism,” a notion that gained traction in the decades after the Civil War that purported to apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the competition between individuals in politics and economics, producing an argument for unregulated capitalism.

Rather, Fuller charts out the paths each of his five main characters traversed in absorbing and assimilating into their own worldviews the scientific, religious and political ramifications of Darwin’s work, particularly during the tumultuous year 1860.   All five were fervent abolitionists.   Sunburn was a co-conspirator in John Brown’s raid.  Thoreau gave a series of eloquent, impassioned speeches in support of Brown.  All were convinced that Darwin’s notion of natural selection had provided still another argument against slavery, based on science rather than morality or economics.  But in varying degrees, all five could also be considered adherents of transcendentalism, a mid-19th century philosophical approach that posited a form of human knowledge that goes beyond, or transcends, what can be seen, heard, tasted, touched or felt.

Although transcendentalists were almost by definition highly individualistic, most believed that a special force or intelligence stood behind nature and that prudential design ruled the universe.  Many subscribed to the notion that humans were the products of some sort of “special creation.”   Most saw God everywhere, and considered the human mind “resplendent with powers and insights wholly distinct from the external world” (p.54).  Transcendentalism was both an effort to invoke the divinity within man and, as Fuller puts it, also “cultural attack on a nation that had become too materialistic, too conformist, too smug about its place in history” (p.66).

Transcendentalism thus hovered in the background in 1860 as all but Sanborn wrestled with the implications of Darwinism (Sanborn spent much of the year fleeing federal authorities seeking his arrest for his role in John Brown’s raid).  Alcott never left transcendentalism, rejecting much of Darwinism.  Gray and Brace initially seemed to embrace Darwinian theories wholeheartedly, but in different ways each pulled back once he fully grasped the full implications of those theories.   Thoreau was the only one of the five who accepted wholly Darwinism’s most radical implications, using Darwin’s theories to “redirect his life’s work” (p.ix).

Fuller’s study thus combines a deep dive into the New England abolitionist milieu at a time when the United States was fracturing over the issue of slavery with a medium level dive into the intricacies of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.   But the story Fuller tells is anything but dry and abstract.  With an elegant writing style and an acute sense of detail, Fuller places his five men and their thinking about Darwin in their habitat, the frenetic world of 1860s New England.  In vivid passages, readers can almost feel the chilly January wind whistling through Franklin Sanborn’s parlor that New Year’s Day 1860, or envision the mud accumulating on Henry David Thoreau’s boots as he trudges through the melting snow in the woods on a March afternoon contemplating Darwin.  The result is a lively, easy-to-read narrative that nimbly mixes intellectual and everyday, ground-level history.

* * *

Bronson Alcott, described by Fuller as America’s most radical transcendentalist, never accepted the premises of On the Origins of Species.  Darwin had, in Alcott’s view, “reduced human life to chemistry, to mechanical processes, to vulgar materialism” (p.10).  To Alcott, Darwin seemed “morbidly attached to an amoral struggle of existence, which robbed humans of free will and ignored the promptings of the soul” (p.150). Alcott could not imagine a universe “so perversely cruel as to produce life without meaning.  Nor could he bear to live in a world that was reduced to the most tangible and daily phenomena, to random change and process”(p.188).  Asa Gray, one of America’s most eminent scientists, came to the same realization, but  only after thoroughly digesting Darwin and explaining his theories to a wide swath of the American public.

Gray’s initial reaction to Darwin’s work was one of unbounded enthusiasm.  Gray covered nearly every page of the book with his own annotations.  He admired the book because it “reinforced his conviction that inductive reasoning was the proper approach to science” (p.109).  He also admired the work’s “artfully modulated tone, [and] its modest voice, which softened the more audacious ideas rippling through the text” (p.17). Gray was most impressed with Darwin’s “careful judging and clear-eyed balancing of data” (p.110).  To grapple with Darwin’s ideas, Gray maintained, one had to “follow the evidence wherever it led, ignoring prior convictions and certainties or the narrative one wanted that evidence to confirm” (p.110).  Without saying so explicitly, Gray suggested that readers of Darwin’s book had to be “open to the possibility that everything they had taken for granted was in fact incorrect” (p.110).

Gray reviewed On the Origins of Species for the Atlantic Monthly in three parts, appearing  in the summer and fall of 1860.  Gray’s articles served as the first encounter with Darwin for many American readers.  The articles elicited a steady stream of letters from respectful readers.  Some responded with “unalloyed enthusiasm” for a new idea which “seemed to unlock the mysteries of nature” (p.134).  Others, however, “reacted with anger toward a theory that proposed to unravel . . . their belief in a divine Being who had placed humans at the summit of creation” (p.134).  But as Gray finished the third Atlantic article, he began to realize that he himself was not entirely at ease with the diminution of humanity’s place in the universe that Darwin’s work implied.

The third Atlantic article, appearing in October 1860, revealed Gray’s increasing difficulty in “aligning Darwin’s theory with his own religions convictions” (p.213).   Gray proposed that natural selection might be the “God’s chosen method of creation” (p.214).  This idea seemed to resolve the tension between scientific and religious accounts of origins, making Gray the first to develop a theological case for Darwinian theory.  But the idea that natural selection might be the process by which God had fashioned  the world represented what Fuller describes as a “stunning shift for Gray. Before now, he had always insisted that secondary causes were the only items science was qualified to address.  First, or final causes – the beginning of life, the creation of the universe – were the purview of religion: a matter of faith and metaphysics” (p.214).  Darwin responded to Gray’s conjectures by indicating that, as Fuller summarizes the written exchange, the natural world was “simply too murderous and too cruel to have been created by a just and merciful God” (p.211).

In the Atlantic articles, Fuller argues, Gray leapt “beyond his own rules of science, speculating about something that was untestable” (p.214-15 ).  Gray must have known that his argument “failed to adhere to his own definition of science” (p.216).  But, much like Bronson Alcott, Gray found it “impossible to live in the world Darwin had imagined: a world of chance, a world that did not require a God to operate” (p.216).  Charles Brace, a noted social reformer who founded several institutions for orphans and destitute children, greeted Darwin’s book  with an initial enthusiasm that rivaled that of Gray.

Brace  claimed to have read On the Origins of Species 13 times.  He was most attracted to the book for its implications for human societies, especially for American society, where nearly half the country accepted and defended human slavery.  Darwin’s book “confirmed Brace’s belief that environment played a crucial role in the moral life of humans” (p.11), and demonstrated that every person in the world, black, white, yellow, was related to every one else.  The theory of natural selection was thus for Brace the “latest argument against chattel slavery, a scientific claim that could be used in the most important controversy of his time, a clarion call for abolition” (p.39).

Brace produced a tract entitled The Races of the Old World, modeled after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which Fuller describes as a “sprawling, ramshackle work” (p.199).  Its central thesis was simple enough: “There is nothing . . . to prove the negro radically different from the other families of man or even mentally inferior to them” (p.199-200).  But much of The Races of the Old World seemed to undercut Brace’s central thesis.  Although the book never defined the term “race,” Brace “apparently believed that though all humans sprang from the same source, some races had degraded over time . . . Human races were not permanent” (p.199-200).  Brace thus struggled to make Darwin’s theory fit his own ideas about race and slavery. “He increasingly bent facts to fit his own speculations” (p.197), as Fuller puts it.

The Races of the Old World revealed Brace’s hesitation in imagining a multi-racial America. He couched in Darwinian terms the difficulty of the races cohabiting,  reverting to what Fuller describes as nonsense about blacks not being conditioned to survive in the colder Northern climate.  Brace “firmly believed in the emancipation of slaves, and he was equally convinced that blacks and white did not differ in their mental capacities” (p.202).  But he nonetheless worried that “race mixing,” or what was then termed race “amalgamation,” might imperil Anglo-Saxon America, the “apex of development. . . God’s favored nation, a place where democracy and Christianity had fused to create the world’s best hope” (p.202).  Brace joined many other leading abolitionists in opposing race “amalgamation.”  His conclusion that “black and brown-skinned people inhabited a lower run on the ladder of civilization” was shared, Fuller indicates, by “even the most enlightened New England abolitionists” (p.57).

No such misgivings visited Thoreau, who  grappled with On the Origins of Species “as thoroughly and as insightfully as any American of the period” (p.11).  As Thoreau first read his copy of the book in late January 1860,  a “new universe took form on the rectangular page before him” (p.75).  Prior to his encounter with Darwin, Thoreau’s thought had often “bordered on the nostalgic.  He longed for the transcendentalist’s confidence in a natural world infused with spirit” (p.157).  But Darwin led Thoreau beyond nostalgia.

Thoreau was struck in particular by Darwin’s portrayal of the struggle among species as an engine of creation.  The Origin of Species revealed nature as process, in constant transformation.  Darwin’s book directed Thoreau’s attention “away from fixed concepts and hierarchies toward movement instead” (p.144-45).  The idea of struggle among species “undermined transcendentalist assumptions about the essential goodness of nature, but it also corroborated many of Thoreau’s own observations” (p.137).  Thoreau had “long suspected that people were an intrinsic part of nature – neither separate nor entirely alienated from it” (p.155).  Darwin now enabled Thoreau to see how “people and the environment worked together to fashion the world,” providing a “scientific foundation for Thoreau’s belief that humans and nature were part of the same continuum” (p.155).

Darwin’s natural selection, Thoreau wrote, “implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation” (p.246).  The phrase “constant new creation” in Fuller’s view represents an “epoch in American thought” because it “no longer relies upon divinity to explain the natural world” (p.246).  Darwin thus propelled Thoreau to a radical vision in which there was “no force or intelligence behind Nature, directing its course in a determined and purposeful manner.  Nature just was” (p.246-47).

How far Thoreau would have taken these ideas is impossible to know. He became sick in December 1860, stricken with influenza, exacerbated by tuberculosis, and died in June 1862, with Americans fighting other Americans on the battlefield over the issue of slavery.

* * *

            Fuller compares Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to a Trojan horse.  It entered American culture “using the newly prestigious language of science, only to attack, once inside, the nation’s cherished beliefs. . . With special and desolating force, it combated the idea that God had placed humans at the peak of creation” (p.213).  That the book’s attack did not spare even New England’s best known abolitionists and transcendentalists demonstrates just how unsettling the attack was.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

May 18, 2020

 

New Thinking in the Islamic Heartlands

 

 

Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment:

The Islamic Enlightenment:

The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times 

          Christopher de Bellaigue is one of the leading English-language authorities on the volatile Middle East, an elegant stylist with an uncanny ability to explain that bewildering swath of the globe in incisive yet clear prose.  Heis the author of a perceptive biography of Muhammad Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister deposed in 1953 in a joint American-British covert operation, reviewed here in October 2014.  De Bellaigue’s most recent work, The Islamic Enlightenment: The StruggleBetween Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, tackles head-on the widespread notion that Islam, the Middle East’s dominant religion, needs an intellectual, secular awakening similar to the 18^th century Enlightenment which transformed Western society.  De Bellaigue delivers the message forthrightly that Islam has already undergone such a transformation.  Those who urge Enlightenment on Islam, non-Muslims and Muslims alike, are “opening thedoor on a horse that bolted long ago” (p.xvi; disclosure: I have argued in these pages that Islam needs  a 21^st century Enlightenment).  

          For the past two centuries, de Bellaigue writes, Islam has been undergoing a “pained yet exhilarating transformation – a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once,” an experience of “relentless yet vitalizing alternation – of reforms, reactions, innovations, discoveries, and betrayals” (p.xvi).  The Islamic Enlightenment, like its Western counterpart, entailed the “defeat of dogma by proven knowledge, the demotion of the clergy from their position as arbiters of society and the relegation of religion to the private sphere,” along with the “ascendancy of democratic principles and the emergence of the individual to challenge the collective to which he or she belongs” (p.xxiv).  Although influenced and inspired by the West, the Islamic Enlightenment found its own forms.  It did not follow the same path as the European version.

          De Bellaigue concentrates almost exclusively on three distinct Islamic civilizations, Egypt, Iran (called “Persia” up to 1935, although de Bellaigue uses the word “Iran” throughout), and the Turkish Ottoman Empire.  These three civilizations constitute “Islam’s heartlands” (p.xxvi), the three most consequential intellectual, spiritual and political centers of the Middle East.  Although he barely mentions such major Islamic areas as North Africa or East Asia, there is logic and symmetry to de Belliague’s choices, starting with a different language in each: Arabic in Egypt; Persian (or Farsi) in Iran; and Turkish in Ottoman Turkey.  Egypt and Iran, moreover, represent full-strength versions of Sunni and Shiite Islam, respectively, whereas the Sunni Islam of the Ottoman Empire interacted with Christianity as the empire extended its suzerainty well into Europe.

          The Islamic Enlightenment had a clear starting point in de Bellaigue’s account: Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, in which the Corsican general brought with him not only several thousand military troops bent upon conquest but also the transforming ideas of the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment.   The French occupation was short-lived.  The British dislodged the over-extended Napoleon from Egypt in 1802 and retained a foothold there that became full colonial domination in the latter part of the 19^th century.  But the transformative power of the new ways of thinking embodied in the French Enlightenment could not be so easily dislodged.  

          De Bellaigue begins with three chapters entitled “Cairo,” “Istanbul,” and “Tehran,” concentrating on Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the first half of the 19^th century.   Here he demonstrates how, in a recurrent pattern throughout the first half of the 19^th century,  the new ways of thinking arose in the three locations largely as unintended bi-products of regimes where relentless leaders pursued institutional modernization, particularly of the military to defend against foreign incursions.  The succeeding chapters, entitled “Vortex,” and “Nation,” treat the three civilizations collectively, and  center on the increasing interaction and integration between the three in the second half of the century, up to World War I, along with their increasing servitude to the West at a time when European colonial acquisition began to run up against Muslim resistance.  De Bellaigue contends that World War I marked the beginning of the end for the Islamic Enlightenment, setting in motion the forces that undermined the liberalizing tendencies of the previous century.  His final chapter, termed “Counter Enlightenment,” takes us up to the dispiriting present.

          Unlike many works on the Western Enlightenment, de Bellaigue goes beyond a history of ideas.  He is interested in how the new thinking of the Islamic Enlightenment was utilized in the three civilizations as an instrument of transformation — or “modernization,” his preferred term.  His work contains much insightful reflection on the nature of modernity and the process of modernization, as he  addresses not only the intellectual changes that were afoot in the Islamic heartlands during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but also political and economic changes.  This broad focus renders his work something close to a comprehensive history of these lands over the past two centuries.  Along the way, de Belliague introduces an array of thinkers and political leaders, many also religious leaders, few of whom are likely to be familiar to Western readers.

* * *

           By way of background, de Bellaigue begins with a revealing picture of the three civilizations prior to 1798.   Many Western readers will be aware of the flowering of Islamic civilization from approximately the 9^th century onward, a period of “glory, prosperity and achievement” (p.xxvi), in which the faith of the Prophet Muhammad created an “aesthetic culture of sophistication and beauty, excelling in architecture, textiles, ceramics and metallurgy” (p.xviii), along with mathematics — the study of algebra originated in the Arab world during this period, for example.  Dynamic centers of learning permitted the “unfettered exercise of the rational mind” (p.xviii) in a way that was unthinkable in Europe during what was considered Christendom’s “dark ages.” But sometime in the 15^th century, Islam began to molder and decay, falling victim to the same wave of superstition and defensiveness that had beset Christian Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

          Egypt at the time of the Napoleonic conquest, nominally a province of Ottoman Turkey, “hadn’t produced an original idea in years.  Of the world outside Islam – the world of discovery and the Americas, science and the Industrial Revolution – there was a virtual boycott” (p.2).  Napoleon, inspired both by the prior intellectual vigor of Egypt and the transformative potential of the French Revolution, strove to restore the country to its earlier glory under France’s “benign tutelage” (p.4).  Napoleon brought with him a retinue of scholars who acted in the field of knowledge “as his army had acted on the field of battle, pointing to the future and shaming the past” (p.2).  The short-lived French occupation set in motion new ways of thinking that altered Egypt indelibly and, in de Bellaigue’s interpretation, jump-started the Islamic Enlightenment across the Islamic heartlands.

          The first of the Middle East’s “coercive modernizers” (p.18) was Muhammad Ali Pasha.  Although De Bellaigue resists the temptation to label Muhammad Ali the heavyweight champion of 19^th Middle Eastern modernization, that is a fair summation of the man who served as the Ottoman Sultan’s viceroy in Egypt from 1805 to 1849.  Ali packed more reforms into the first half of the 19^th century than had been carried out in Egypt over the previous 300 years. He reined in Islamic clerics and reformed the state bureaucracy, agriculture, and education.  Above all, he modernized the military, with the Egyptian army becoming “both a symbol and a catalyst of the new Egypt”  (p.21). 

          Muhammad Ali showed little interest in fostering the Enlightenment spirit of irreverence, skepticism and individual empowerment.  But this spirit nonetheless arose as an irrepressible component of modernization.  The interaction with French scholars convinced Hassan al-Atta, arguably the first major thinker of the Islamic Enlightenment, that the progress which had surged through Europe was a universal impulse that could gain traction anywhere, and was in no way foreclosed to Muslim civilizations.  Spellbound by the Frenchmen he met in the aftermath of the Napoleonic conquest, Al-Attar spent many formative years in Istanbul.  When he returned to Egypt, he took up the task of reconciling Islam with secular knowledge in fields as diverse as logic, history, science, medicine and geography.  One of al-Attar’s students, Rifaa al-Tahtawi, known as Rifaa, received from al-Attar “what may have been the most complete education available to any Egyptian at the time,” (p.29), and went on to build upon his teacher’s efforts to show that the Muslim faith was compatible with progressive ideas. 

          Rifaa became the first 19^th century Egyptian to study in France, spending five years there in the 1820s.  He wrote a seminal travelogue, the first comprehensive description in Arabic of post-revolutionary France.   Rifaa’s time in France “convinced him of the need for European sciences and technologies to be introduced into the Islamic world” (p.39).  Rifiaa sought to close the distance between modern ideas and the capacity of Arabic to express them.  De Bellaigue characterizes Rifaa as a translator in the “broad sense of someone who fetches ideas from one home and makes them comfortable in another” (p.42).  His translated works had a “huge impact on the engineers, doctors, teachers and military officers who were beginning to form the elite of the country; they were the forerunners of the secular-minded middle classes that would dominate public life for much of the next two centuries” (p.43).

          In the sprawling, multi-faith Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was but one province, Sultan Mahmud II was the approximate equivalent to Muhammad Ali, and Ibrahim Sinasi the complement to Rifiaa.   As the 18^th century came to a close, Ottoman Turkey, although not nearly as backward as Egypt, had suffered a handful of painful military loses to Russia that convinced Mahmud II that the empire sorely needed to upgrade its military, not least to quell separatist tendencies emanating from Muhammad Ali’s Egypt.  But the reforms instituted under Mahumd’s rule went well beyond the military, extending to education, statistics, modern sociology, agricultural innovation and political theory, with some of the most stunning innovations occurring in the education of doctors and the practice of medicine. 

          Like Rifaa, Sinasi spent time in Paris, where he saw the inadequacies of the Turkish language.  Sinasi gave birth to modern Turkish prose and drama.  Emulating Victor Hugo, Sinasi popularized concepts like freedom of expression and natural rights.  Cosmopolitan, outward looking, and drawn to questions of human development, Sinasi was one of the first in the Middle East to “define rights not as conferred from above, but as inseparable from the growth of a law-based society,” making him a “pioneer of a new mode of thinking,” (p.80-81). 

          Iran was more isolated than Turkey or Egypt in the first half of the 19^th century, and entered the modern era later and more sluggishly.  Yet, Iran had to contend throughout the century with the persistent meddling of Russia in its affairs, with Britain becoming equally meddlesome as the century progressed.  Iran in the first half of the 19th century had no forthright, determined and durable modernizer comparable to Muhammad Ali or Mahmud II.  It sent no fledgling intellectuals or future leaders to Europe for education.  Powerful Shiite clerics, proponents of “obscurantism, zealotry and fear” (p.129), served as a check on modernization.  

          But Nasser al-Din, who ruled as Iran’s Shah for 48 years, from 1848 to 1896, longer than either Ali or Mahmud II, found an engineer of reform in his tutor and then Chief Minister, Amir Kabir, 30 years older.   During a tenure that lasted only three years, Chief Minister Kabir pursued industrialization and manufacturing, introduced town planning, established a postal service, promoted reforms in medicine, education and agriculture, and reined in the Shiite clergy.  Nasser al-Din had Kabir removed from office, then executed, probably because he was perceived to have been too close to British and Russian diplomats.

          Al-Din’s increasingly tyrannical rule after Kabir’s demise saw the rise of Jamal al-Din Afghani, sometimes credited with being the Middle East’s first advocate of pan-Islamism, a complex set of ideas that revolved around the notion that Muslims needed to transcend state boundaries and stand up to Europeans.  Berating despotism and the European presence throughout the Muslim world, al-Din Afghani “embodied the use of Islam as a worldwide ideology of resistance against Western imperialism, knitting the Islamic heartlands together in a way that today seems impossible” (p.230).

            Backward and isolated Iran made the region’s most dramatic move toward modern nationhood when it underwent a constitutional revolution in 1905 that gave rise to a National Consultative Assembly, Iran’s first parliament.  The new powder of democracy was sprinkled over the land, with unprecedented levels of freedom of speech.  But Russia in 1907 signed an anti-German pact with Great Britain, a portion of which divided Iran in half, with Russia having a sphere of influence in the north, Britain in the south, all the while purporting to honor and respect Iran’s independence.  The two powers encouraged Iran to crack down on the constitutionalists, resulting in the installation of a military dictatorship in the name of the shah.  For the remainder of the century, democrats and constitutionalists in Iran were caught in the middle, with those who favored an unchecked monarchy competing with Shia clerics and their supporters for control over public policy.

          Turkey underwent a similar constitutional revolution following a military mutiny in Macedonia in June 1907.  The military officers formed a key part of a group of “young Turks” who came together to demand that the brutally repressive Sultan Abdulhamid revive and reform the Ottoman constitution of 1876.  With the surprising backing of the Sultan, a new legislative chamber met in December 1908, at a time when the Empire’s hold on its European provinces had begun to unravel.  The defeat by Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece in the First Balkan War in 1912 all but ended the Ottoman presence in Europe.   

          As the first decade of the 20^th century closed, Egypt, by then formally a British colony which lacked Iran and Turkey’s experiences with electoral politics, was also developing institutions that might have underpinned a liberal political regime, “if permitted to mature” (p.293).  Across the region, a liberal, modernizing tradition had emerged strongly in the three intellectual and political centers of the Middle East.   In less than a century, de Bellaigue writes, the region had “leaped politically from the medieval to the modern” (p.291).  But World War I constituted an “unmitigated catastrophe” (p.295) for the region.

          The Ottoman Empire, which sided with Germany during the war, ended up as one of the war’s losers and was formally and finally dismantled in its aftermath.  Britain used the war to increase its hold on Egypt and suppress nationalist activity.  Iran, although officially neutral, was violated with impunity during the war, as Turkish, Russian and British armies “ran amok on Iranian soil” in an effort to exploit Iranian oil resources.  By the close of hostilities, Iran seemed “barely to have existed” (p.296). 

          The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France, to which Tsarist Russia assented, divided most of the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence and has come to symbolize the “cupidity and arbitrariness” (p.299) of the Western powers in the Middle East.  But to de Bellaigue, Sykes-Picot was far from being the most consequential among the treaties, declarations, and gentlemen’s agreements that were imposed on the region.  This collection of instruments, “ill-considered, self-interested and indifferent to the desires of its inhabitants” (p.300), created a belt of instability across the region that endures to this day.  The post-war settlements also accelerated the importance of oil for world economies, skewing development and ensuring continued meddling of the West in the region.

          The Islamic counter-Enlightenment which de Bellaigue describes in his final chapter was a “response to the arbitrary settlements that had been imposed by the victors in the First World War” (p.315), expanding revulsion toward the West exponentially across Middle East.  Fueled by the “paradoxical situation of imperialists advocating democracy” (p.315), the revulsion expressed itself in many forms, among them militant nationalism that left little room either for democratic norms or for Islam as a force that could provide internal coherence and strength to the region.

* * *

          Today, de Bellaigue concludes, it is “hard to discern any general movement in favor of liberal, humanist principles in the Middle East” (p.352).  Rather, the trend seems to be toward violence and sectarian hate, which makes it easy to discount the Islamic Enlightenment.  De Bellaigue’s erudite and – yes – enlightening work thus leaves us yearning wistfully that the sparks of new thinking which ignited Islamic civilization in the 19^th century might somehow be rekindled in our time. 

Thomas H. Peebles

Washington, D.C., USA

December 15, 2018

Women Pressing For Seditious Ideas

 

Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free:

My Fight for Human Rights in Iran 

 

Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive:

A Saudi Woman’s Awakening 

             Anyone with an elementary understanding of today’s world knows that there is a major geopolitical tug of war going on between Saudi Arabia and Iran, two regional powers competing for influence across the Middle East.  That same anyone knows that Saudi Arabia and Iran represent home bases for the two major branches of contemporary Islam: Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran.  And of course our anyone knows that Saudi Arabia is a close ally of the United States, whereas Iran is considered to be among the world’s rogue nations, a member of an “axis of evil,’ to use President George W. Bush’s memorable phrase.  Iran is the seat of the ancient and venerable Persian Empire; it became known officially as Iran only in the 1930s.  Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, was carved out of vast tribal areas in the 1930s. Iran shocked the world in 1979 when it overthrew Shah Reza Pahlavi to establish what is formally known as the Islamic Republic, where ultimate power rests in the hands of a theocratic Supreme Leader. Saudi Arabia is ruled by the House of Saud, the “last significant absolute monarchy on earth” (p.12), to quote from Karen House’s incisive study of Saudi Arabia, reviewed here in October 2014.

          Within the last year, a woman from each published a noteworthy memoir detailing her struggle on behalf of human rights in her country: Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran; and Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening.  Ebadi is a human rights lawyer who won a Nobel Prize in 2003 for her human rights work in Iran, especially on behalf of women, children and refugees. She was both the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the coveted award – and later became the first recipient to have her medal confiscated by the state.  Al-Sharif won international acclaim in 2011 for leading a campaign in Saudi Arabia to allow women to drive. That campaign landed the divorced single mother in a Saudi jail, arrested for what Saudi authorities termed, with no sense of irony, “driving while female.”  Just last month, the Saudi government announced that women will be immediately eligible to apply for drivers’ licenses, and will actually be permitted to drive on Saudi roads a mere nine months hence, in June 2018.

        The two authors are a generation apart: Ebadi was born in 1947, al-Sharif in 1979.  But they have much in common. Each is a devout, practicing Muslim. Throughout as-Sharif’s memoir, references to the Prophet Muhammad are invariably followed by PBUH in parenthesis, “peace be unto him.” Each has a deep love for her home country. “The story of Iran is the story of my life,” Ebadi writes at the outset of her memoir. “I am so attached to my country. . . [and] feel a duty to my nation that outweighs everything else” (p.3).  Al-Sharif expresses similar sentiments throughout her memoir.  Yet, today both live in exile far from home, Ebadi in Great Britain, al-Sharif in Australia.

        The two memoirs are of almost identical length. Although they tell very different stories, each author must confront the inescapable reality that in her home country, religion and the state are inextricably intertwined.  Shite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia may be fierce geopolitical rivals, with religious clerics in each dismissing the other’s brand of Islam as heretical.  But in both countries, Islamic law, norms and customs are the touchstone for governance, with individual rights and the rule of law brutally subordinated to perceived national interests.  Neither offers a hospitable environment for resourceful, independent women pressing for seditious ideas like human rights and full equality for all citizens.

* * *

          During the regime of Shah Pahlavi, Shirin Ebadi became a high-ranking judge in Iran, one of the country’s few female judges, even though she had opposed the regime.  Initially a supporter of the 1979 revolution, Ebadi quickly ran afoul of the new, radical Shiite regime. When ruling clerics determined that Islam prohibits women from serving as judges, she was stripped of her judgeship and demoted to the position of court clerk.  She then embarked on a far more perilous career course as a human rights lawyer, a niche within the legal profession which, to put it mildly, was destined to displease Iranian authorities.

          Ebadi used the money from her Nobel prize to found the Defenders of Human Rights Center, a focal point for work on human rights within Iran.  She led a movement to remove landmines remaining from Iran’s eight-year war with Iran, and to provide assistance to victims injured by the mines; she defended religious minorities facing discrimination in the fiercely Shiite republic: and she helped organize a movement termed the One Million Signature campaign, which focused on demonstrating how Iranian laws hurt women of all social classes and religious beliefs.  Her memoir gains momentum when one of its two major villains, Mohammed Ahmadinejad, was first elected president in 2005.

           Ahmadinejad freely used and abused religion to consolidate power. He unleashed religious extremists who filled the ranks of the state’s voluntary militias, “encouraging their most intolerant attitudes and giving them subtle signals that should they wish to punish those who deviated from their strict view of Islam, the state would not get in their way” (p.59). These extremists broke up anti-state lectures, set up check points to harass youth listening to Western music in their cars, and raided private parties where people might have been daring to have fun. At some point during Ahmadinejad’s first term, Ebadi went from being a thorn in the government’s side to what it considered an enemy of the state, part of a global conspiracy to undermine the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

           The task of following Ebadi and seeking to silence her fell to the memoir’s other major villain, Mr. Mahmudi, a particularly enterprising intelligence agent.  Mahmudi began watching Ebadi’s every move with an obsession that never waned. Because she was too visible and too powerful for the state to target directly, Mahmudi and his colleagues systematically undercut all the constituent pieces of her professional and personal life.  Hounded by Mahmudi, the Defenders of Human Rights Center was forced to shut down, closing the “main intellectual and social hub for those in Tehran working on civic activism” (p.103).

             When state authorities took away her daughter’s passport, it became clear to Ebadi that the state had started going after her family. “It wasn’t just content with me anymore. I had witnessed this over the years with many of my clients, dissidents and activists whose relatives suffered state intimidation, were hassled and threatened and sometimes blackmailed or imprisoned, all ‘collateral damage’ in the quest to get the original target – the dissident or activist or journalist in question – to drop their activities. It was the dirtiest of the methods the security agencies used, exploiting these families and their emotional ties” (p.126).

            The 2009 presidential election, pitting Ahmadinejad against reform candidate Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, and one other candidate, proved to be a fateful turning point for Ebadi. Ahmadinejad’s popularity prior to the elections had “sunk abysmally; Iranians widely reviled him for ruining the economy and for the repressiveness of his rule” (p.131). Mousavi seemed to have a genuine chance to replace Ahmadinejad.  Yet, in an election widely considered to have been plagued with irregularities, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner after the first round with 62% of the vote.   Huge numbers of Iranians took to the streets to protest the results.

           Ebadi happened to be in Majorca at a conference in the immediate aftermath of the elections. Her husband and professional colleagues counseled against her returning to Tehran amidst the civil unrest and ensuing government crackdown.  As the crackdown continued, Ebadi came to the realization that should she return to her native country, her passport would surely be confiscated, she would likely be jailed, and perhaps even executed.  She therefore elected to stay abroad, relocating to London with her daughter, who had taken a job there.  But the attempts of Mr. Mahmudi and fellow state intelligence agents to destroy Ebadi intensified rather than diminished while she was out of the country.

          Most heartbreakingly, her husband of more than thirty years was the victim of a state sexual blackmail plot to place him in a compromised position with another woman, a former girlfriend prior to his marriage to Ebadi. The plot marked the beginning to the breakup of what had been a solid, loving relationship.  Disappointed that her husband had succumbed to the state-manufactured temptation, Ebadi writes that she was “even more furious, more floored, by the depth of evil of the intelligence agents. Their malice and cunning truly had no limit: they were prepared to do anything – crush people’s children, their marriage – to achieve their ends.”  She asked herself, “How much could they take away from one person? They had taken my judgeship, my entire life’s ambition; when I resurrected myself and built a human rights center, they took that too; with their violence and electoral fraud, I had lost my homeland.  And now they had tried to take away my husband” (p.166-67).

        Iranian tax authorities subsequently reinterpreted Iranian law to conclude that Ebadi owed taxes on her Nobel Prize, a matter that seemed clearly settled at the time the prize was awarded. This required Ebadi to sell what seems like a very comfortable Tehran apartment to pay back taxes, along with a rural property her family was particularly attached to. The amounts generated by the sale of the properties proved insufficient to satisfy the tax claims, and Ebadi became a formal debtor to the Islamic Republic. The secure family life Ebadi had known in Tehran was thus shattered beyond repair. She was hopelessly in debt to the state for alleged back taxes; she separated and then divorced her husband after 30 plus years of marriage; and state authorities briefly confiscated her Nobel medal, until the international outcry forced them to return it to her family.

            In London, Ebadi became active in the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights, supporting pro-democracy elements in Iran by working with other lawyers who had left Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 protests. The memoir ends with Ebadi in Britain, afraid that the intelligence services will target her directly for assassination there, something they had not quite dared to do directly while she was in Iran.  To this day, Ebadi has not returned to Iran.

        Although Ebadi’s memoir lacks detail on precisely why state intelligence services concluded that she was an enemy of the Islamic revolution, her outspokenness as an independent woman was clearly an affront to state authorities. Whether the state would have been quite so ferociously persistent with a male civil rights lawyer is left to the reader’s speculation, but the overall thrust of the 1979 Islamic Revolution has plainly been to try to redefine the status of women. Somehow, Ebadi emphasizes, Iran was able to retain a “burgeoning, vibrant women’s movement. . . [which] had managed to flourish, despite Ahmadinejad’s emergence” (p.68-69).  Literacy among Iranian girls and young women is nearly 99 percent, she indicates, and women make up over 60 percent of all university students.  “[I]f you walk the streets of any Iranian city at rush hour, you will see women streaming out of workplaces, boarding buses and subways alongside men. They are an active, engaged part of public life and they increasingly often serve as primary breadwinners in their households” (p.264).

        Iran has long suffered from honor killings, forced marriages, and domestic violence although, Ebadi notes, with “far less severity than many of its neighbors” (p.264). But the legal structure of the Islamic Republic, based on medieval interpretations of sharia law, “enshrines gender discrimination and violent punishments, including lashing and stoning . . . Iran remains a country where a man can marry up to four wives, where women face enormous challenges securing a divorce, and where a married woman cannot travel without the written permission of her husband.   The list of discriminatory laws that are unfit for Iran’s modern society is long” (p.254-55).  Ahmadinejad “singlehandedly snuffed out [Iran’s] women’s movement and, most dangerously . . . renormalized the idea that women should be open targets for the state and ordinary Iranians alike” (p.263).

           Consequently, the climate for women in contemporary Iran is “deteriorating by the day” (p.262).  Women can no longer work in Tehran’s cafés and restaurants; female musicians are no longer permitted to perform onstage; and female civil servants in Tehran are no longer permitted to work along side men, on the theory that “women working long hours outside the home in the company of male colleagues undermined family life” (p.262). Ahmadinejad instituted gender quotas in state universities, “making it impossible for women to study physics, chemistry, and tens of other subjects” (p.260).  In 2014, authorities in Tehran forbade women from watching the World Cup in public cinemas and cafés, particularly disappointing for young people. These moves were “part of a stealthy segregation plan, deployed piecemeal over time in and across different spheres, that threatened to remake public life in Iran and push women, who participated vibrantly despite the state’s myriad restrictions, to the margins” (p.262).  Treatment of women in Iran thus seems to be headed in a direction similar to that so firmly entrenched in its bitter geopolitical rival, Saudi Arabia.

* * *

          Manal al-Sharif’s memoir makes clear that the interdiction against driving is but one example of the almost unimaginable control and subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. Saudi women need permission from male guardians to travel, obtain passports, enroll in school, sign contracts, or undergo medical procedures. Most public places, such as parks, beaches, and buses, are rigidly segregated, and public schools are both separate and blatantly unequal. In 2002, fifteen girls died inside a segregated girl’s middle school. The religious police, al-Sharif recounts, barred the girls from exiting through the front door because they were not following proper Islamic dress code. “When the school door was opened and they were finally carried out, it was as charred corpses” (p.66).  At another point in her memoir, al-Sharif describes how she was not allowed to board a public bus because she did not have a male guardian accompanying her. At that point, I screamed to anyone within earshot, using my most profane language, “At least they let Rosa Parks onto the bus, for crying out loud.”

            Yet, in a country ostensibly seeking to modernize, the Saudi ban on women driving stands out as both wildly inefficient and absurdly contradictory. Unless a husband or male family member is available, it requires women to rely upon a male taxi or hired driver for every trip of daily life, such as shopping, commuting to work or taking children to school, not to mention emergency trips to the hospital. Moreover, as al-Sharif points out:

[A] society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone (p.10).

            But al-Sharif’s memoir is about far more than her campaign to allow women to drive.  After beginning with her arrest and time in a Saudi women’s prison, it shifts back to tell her life story before finishing by focusing again on the driving campaign. Her story delivers powerful insight into the challenges of Saudi life, particularly for young and intelligent women.

         Al-Sharif grew up in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, in sub-standard housing, without running water or a telephone. Her mother, born and raised in Egypt, attained only a fourth grade education. Her father was an illiterate Saudi taxi driver. Beatings were a regular part of her family upbringing, mostly by her father, occasionally by her mother. Her mother had a fiery temperament and late in life was diagnosed as a likely bipolar schizophrenic. Yet, she also had an uncommon belief in the value of education for her children, and instilled in al-Sharif a thirst for learning.  Al-Sharif excelled at the girls’ schools she attended.

            In one of the book’s most difficult passages, al-Sharif describes in gut-wrenching terms how she was “circumcised” at age 8, subject to female genital mutilation, a practice designed to protect girls from “‘deviant’ behavior by “removing her desire for sex” (p.57). It was a trauma from which she never fully recovered.  A few years later, when al-Sharif told her cousins about her first menstrual period, they “informed me that I could no longer talk to my male cousins, let alone play with them. If one of my male cousins wanted to a walk past where I was sitting, or even enter the house while I was there, I had to first be hidden out of sight” (p.88).  Saudi females, al-Sharif indicates, pass through two stages in their lives. “First, as young girls, they are supervised and monitored; then, as adult women, they are controlled and judged. Their first menstrual cycle is the abrupt turning point. There is no transition into adolescence” (p.89).

          Al-Sharif further complicated her adolescence through a religious conversion that lasted into her early 20s, becoming an ultra-devout, practicing Salafi Muslim. Even by Saudi standards, she stood out for her religiosity, upbraiding family and friends when they were insufficiently observant.  Although she had previously been “crazy over books” (p.73), she abandoned all but religious reading and urged her brother to give up his interest in decadent Western popular music.  At the heart of the Salafi religious ideology, al-Sharif writes, is a “deep belief in Hell,” which led her to an “all-consuming fear that I, as a Muslim, wouldn’t reach the level of righteousness and devotion required to escape condemnation from the eternal hellfires” (p.96).  But the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, led by young Saudi men of her age, transformed her religious convictions. “I could not believe that God would demand the killing of innocent people,” she writes. “I was done with Salafism” (p.133-34).

         After completing university, al-Sharif landed a job as a computer security specialist at Armaco, once Standard Oil’s Saudi outlet, today owned by the Saudi government. But Armaco remains a state within the state, as it as been since its beginnings in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. Its huge compound, which al-Sharif compares to a “perfect Southern California town” (p.3), was set up to make Saudi Arabia more inviting to expatriate Armaco workers, with housing, shopping and amenities that are unavailable within the rest of the kingdom. Even though the Saudi state now runs Armaco, many of the severe norms and mores of Saudi life do not apply on its compound. For starters, men and women work together in the compound, side by side. Imagine that.

           While working at Armaco, al-Sharif met the man she would marry – and later divorce. Al-Sharif’s account of her courtship is a Saudi version of a more universal eye-on-the-guy tale.  She developed a mad crush on a man she had only seen briefly at work and knew almost not at all.  Somehow, they met and courted in a way that was well at odds with Saudi norms, not least because it was conducted without the initial approval of either family – for a while, without even the knowledge of the families.   But later, both families were brought on board and gave the relationship their blessing.  Al-Sharif and the young man married and had a child together. But they did not live happily ever after.

          Her husband proved to be more traditional than al-Sharif had anticipated in his views of the proper role for a married woman; by Western standards, he was plainly abusive. When the marriage broke apart, al-Sharif was able to maintain something akin to custody over her son. But she had to give him up when Armaco sent her to study in the United States.  Al-Sharif spent a year in New Hampshire, where she learned to drive and obtained not only a driver’s license but also a rental car, paid for by Armaco. It was “no small irony,” she writes, “to think that Saudi Arabia’s largest company was openly paying for a Saudi woman to drive abroad” (p.199).

           Al-Sharif’s year in the United States and her driving experiences there emboldened her.  Upon return to Saudi Arabia, she became active in a group termed Women2Drive, which used Facebook and other social media to attract potential women drivers. Women2Drive followed a 1990 Saudi women drivers’ protest, in which 47 women had driven on city streets for about one-half hour. That protest “stalked them for the rest of their lives” (p.210). The women and their husbands were banned from foreign travel; those who held government jobs were fired; and all became targets of religious condemnation, “denounced as immoral vixens, boldly seeking to destroy Saudi society” (p.210).

          In 2011, the comments on the Women2Drive Facebook page, mostly left by men, were “menacing, saying very directly that our campaign was designed to corrupt young girls and that we were ‘betraying Islam’” (p.214). Al-Sharif nonetheless “clung to the belief that if I could just show Saudi society that no harm would come if a woman drove, many of the other issues surrounding the campaign would simply vanish” (p.221).  She studied the Saudi traffic codes and other relevant legal instruments and concluded that there was no formal legal interdiction against women driving; it was simply a matter of custom.

         In preparation for Women2Drive’s national driving campaign, al-Sharif allowed herself to be filmed driving, with the intention of posting the film on YouTube. She describes her mixed feelings of fear and fearlessness as she pulled out behind the wheel onto a Saudi road in the town of Khobar:

My heart began to beat faster as I turned the key, heard the engine catch, put my foot on the brake, and switched the car into reverse. My decision to drive had been made in a moment of anger, but now I felt pure calm rise up inside me. I was committed to driving because I was convinced, after having read and understood the traffic code, that there was nothing actually forbidding me from doing so (p.224-25).

           Shortly thereafter, however, in the middle of the night, Saudi authorities came to her house to arrest her. She spent nearly two weeks in a Saudi women’s prison, not a pleasant place for women transgressors of Saudi custom and order.  Her imprisonment attracted huge attention within Saudi Arabia and internationally.  The Saudi press accused her of operating as a traitor and spy on behalf of foreign enemies.  Saudi religious clerics denounced her for blasphemy and for seeking to destroy Islam, describing her as a whore.  She was released from prison when her father, two of his cousins, and their tribal chief traveled to the Royal Palace to meet 86-year-old King Abdullah.  Although the King made no commitments at their meeting, al-Sharif was released later that day. By this time, she had become an international celebrity.

          Al-Sharif was named to Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people of 2011 and received the Oslo Freedom Forum’s first Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. She resigned from Armaco when it refused to allow her to travel to Oslo to accept the award.  Notwithstanding her international celebrity status, official Saudi Arabia gave no ground on the issue of women driving. The government endorsed a report in the fall of 2011 warning that if women were allowed to drive, “prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce would ‘surge,’” and “within ten years, there would be no more virgins” in Saudi Arabia (p.270).

         When death threats against her became too ominous, al-Sharif fled Saudi Arabia for Dubai with her new husband, a Brazilian national whom she had met at Armaco.  She left without her son, whom she had to leave in the custody of her first husband.  In 2014, she gave birth to a second son. She lives today in Sydney, Australia, where her second husband relocated for his work, but returns periodically to Saudi Arabia to see her son from her first marriage.

* * *

          Only the most hard-hearted readers will fail to be stirred by these two valiant women and their stories of overcoming oppression and resisting the bullying of religious and state authorities.  But each has been forced into exile, required to work for change from outside her home country.  Although women behind the wheel may be commonplace in Saudi Arabia by this time next year, I finished the two memoirs thinking that women in both countries seeking full rights as citizens still have a long, uphill drive ahead of them.

Thomas H. Peebles

Bayonne, France

October 24, 2017

 

 

 

 

Reporting From the Front Lines of the Enlightenment

Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment

           The 18^th century Enlightenment was an extraordinary time when religious skepticism rose across Europe and philosophes boldly asserted that man’s capacity for reason was the key to understanding both human nature and the nature of the universe.   In Boswell’s Enlightenment, Robert Zaretsky, Professor of History at the University of Houston, provides a highly personalized view of the Enlightenment as experienced by James Boswell (1740-1795), the faithful Scottish companion to Dr. Samuel Johnson and author of a seminal biography on the learned doctor.  The crux of Zaretsky’s story lies in  Boswell’s tour of the European continent between 1763 and 1765 – the “Grand Tour” – where, as a young man, Boswell encountered seemingly all the period’s leading thinkers, including Jean Jacques Rousseau and François-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire, then Europe’s two best known philosophes. Zaretsky’s self-described purpose is to “place Boswell’s tour of the Continent, and situate the churn of his mind, against the intellectual and political backdrop of the Enlightenment” (p.16-17). Also figuring prominently in Zaretsky’s account are Boswell’s encounters prior to departing for Europe with several leading Scottish luminaries, most notably David Hume, Britain’s best-known religious skeptic. The account further includes the beginning phases of Boswell’s life-long relationship with Johnson, the “most celebrated literary figure in London” (p.71) and, for Boswell, already a “moral and intellectual rock” (p.227).

         But Zaretsky’s title is a delicious double entendre, for his book is simultaneously the intriguing story of Boswell’s personal coming of age in the mid-18^th century – his “enlightenment” with a small “e” – amidst the intellectual fervor of his times. The young Boswell searching for himself  was more than a little sycophantic, with an uncommon facility to curry favor with the prominent personalities of his day – an unabashed 18^th century celebrity hound.  But Boswell also possessed a fertile, impressionable mind, along with a young man’s zest to experience life in all its facets. Upon leaving for his Grand Tour, moreover, Boswell was already a prolific if not yet entirely polished writer who kept a detailed journal of his travels, much of which survives. In his journal, the introspective Boswell was a “merciless self-critic” (p.97). Yet, Zaretsky writes, Boswell’s ability to re-create conversations and characters in his journals makes him a “remarkable witness to his age” (p.15).  Few individuals “reported in so sustained and thorough a manner as did Boswell from the front lines of the Enlightenment” (p.13).

* * *

        In his prologue, Zaretsky raises the question whether the 18^th century Enlightenment should be considered a unified phenomena, centered in France and radiating out from there; or whether it makes more sense to think of separate Enlightenments, such as, for example, both a Scottish and a French Enlightenment. This is a familiar theme to assiduous readers of this blog: in 2013, I reviewed Arthur Hermann’s exuberant claim to a distinct Scottish Enlightenment; and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s more sober argument for distinctive French, English and American Enlightenments. Without answering this always-pertinent question, Zaretsky turns his account to young Boswell’s search for himself and the greatest minds of 18^th century Europe.

        Boswell was the son of a prominent Edinburgh judge, Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, a follower of John Knox’s stern brand of Calvinism and an overriding force in young Boswell’s life. Boswell’s effort to break the grip that his father exerted over his life was also in many senses an attempt to break the grip of his Calvinist upbringing. When as a law student in Edinburgh his son developed what Lord Auchinleck considered a most unhealthy interest in theatre — and women working in the theatre — he sent the wayward son from lively and overly liberal Edinburgh to more subdued Glasgow. There, Boswell came under the influence of renowned professor Adam Smith.  Although his arguments for the advantages of laissez faire capitalism came later, Smith was already a sensation across Europe for his view that empathy, or “fellow feeling,” was the key to understanding what makes human beings good.    A few years later, Lord Auchinleck started his son on his Grand Tour across the European continent by insisting that young Boswell study civil law in the Netherlands, as he had done in his student days.

        Throughout his travels, the young Boswell wrestled with the question of religious faith and how it might be reconciled with the demands of reason. The religious skepticism of Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau weighed on him.  But, like Johnson, Boswell was not quite ready to buy into it. For Boswell, reason was “not equal to the task of absorbing the reality of our end, this thought of our death. Instead, religion alone offered respite” (p.241). In an age where death was a “constant and dire presence,” Boswell “stands out for his preoccupation, if not obsession, with his mortal end” (p.15). Boswell’s chronic “hypochondria” – the term used in Boswell’s time for depression — was “closely tied to his preoccupation with his mortality” (p.15).  For Boswell, like Johnson, the defense of traditional religion was “less fear of hell than fear of nothingness – what both men called ‘annihilation’” (p.85).

      Boswell’s fear of the annihilation of death probably helps explain his life long fascination with public executions. Throughout the Grand Tour, he consistently went out of his way to attend these very public 18^th century spectacles, “transfixed by the ways in which the victims approached their last moments” (p.15). Boswell’s attraction to public executions, whose official justification was to “educate the public on the consequences of crime” was, Zaretsky notes, “exceptional even among his contemporaries” (p.80). But if the young Boswell feared death, he dove deeply into life and, through his journal, shared his dives with posterity.

        A prodigious drinker and carouser, Boswell seduced women across the continent, often the wives of men he was meeting to discuss the profound issues of life and death. At seemingly every stop along the way, moreover, he patronized establishments practicing the world’s oldest profession, with several bouts of gonorrhea resulting from these frequentations, followed by excruciatingly painful medical treatments. Boswell’s multiple encounters with the opposite sex form a colorful portion of his journal and are no small portion of the reason why the journal continues to fascinate readers to this day.

        But Boswell’s first significant encounter with the opposite sex during the Grand Tour was also his first significant encounter on the continent with an Enlightenment luminary, Elisabeth van Tuyell van Serooskerken, whom the young Scot wisely shortened to “Belle.” Boswell met Belle in Utrecht, the Netherlands, his initial stop on the Grand Tour, where he was ostensibly studying civil law. Belle, who went on to write several epistolary novels under her married name, Isabelle de Charrière, was a sophisticated religious skeptic who understood the “social and moral necessity of religion; but she also understood that true skepticism entailed, as Hume believed, a kind of humility and intellectual modesty” (p.127). Belle was not free of religious doubt, Zaretsky notes, but unlike Boswell, was “free of the temptation to seek certainty” (p.127).   Boswell was attracted to Belle’s “lightning” mind, which, as he wrote a friend, “flashes with so much brilliance [that it] may scorch” (p.117). But Belle was not nearly as smitten by Boswell as he was with her, and her father never bothered to pass to his daughter the marriage proposal that Boswell had presented to him. The two parted when Boswell left Utrecht, seeking to put his unrequited love behind him.

        Boswell headed from the Netherlands to German-speaking Prussia and its king, “enlightened despot” Frederick the Great.  Zaretsky considers Frederick “far more despotic than enlightened” (p.143), but Frederick plainly saw the value to the state of religious tolerance. “Here everyone must be allowed to go to heaven in his own way” (p.145) summarized Frederick’s attitude toward religion.  Frederick proved to be one of the era’s few luminaries who was “indifferent to the Scot’s irrepressible efforts at presenting himself to them” (p.141), and Boswell had little direct time with the Prussian monarch during his six month stay.

          But Boswell managed back-to-back visits with Rousseau and Voltaire in Switzerland, his next destination. Rousseau and Voltaire had both been banished from Catholic France for heretical religious views. Rousseau, who was born in Calvinist Geneva,  was no longer welcome in that city either because of his religious views.  Beyond a shared disdain for organized religion, the former friends disagreed about just about everything else — culture and civilization, theater and literature, politics and education.  Zaretsky’s chapter on these visits, entitled “The Distance Between Môtiers and Ferney” – a reference to the remote Swiss locations where, respectively, Rousseau and Voltaire resided — is in my view the book’s best, with an erudite overview of the two men’s wide ranging thinking, their reactions to their impetuous young visitor, and the enmity that separated them.

         Zaretsky describes Rousseau as a “poet of nature” (p.148), for whom religious doctrines led “not to God, but instead to oppression and war” (p.149).   But Rousseau also questioned his era’s advances in learning and the Enlightenment’s belief in human progress. The more science and the arts advanced, Rousseau argued, the more  contemporary society became consumed by personal gain and greed.  Voltaire, the “high priest of the French Enlightenment” (p.12), was a poet, historian and moralist who had fled from France to England in the 1730s because of his heretical religious views. There, he absorbed the thinking of Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, whose pragmatic approach and grounded reason he found superior to the abstract reasoning and metaphysical speculation that he associated with Descartes. While not an original or systematic thinker like Locke or Bacon, Voltaire was an “immensely gifted translator of their work and method” (p.172).

         By the time Boswell arrived in Môtiers, the two philosophes were no longer on speaking terms. Rousseau publicly termed Voltaire a “mountebank” and “impious braggart,” a man of “so much talent put to such vile use” (p.158). Voltaire returned the verbal fire with a string of vitriolic epithets, among them “ridiculous,” “depraved,” “pitiful,” and “abominable.” The clash between the two men went beyond epithets and name-calling. Rousseau publicly identified Voltaire as the author of Oath of the Fifty, a “brutal and hilarious critique of Christian scripture” (p.180). Voltaire, for his part, revealed that Rousseau had fathered five children with his partner Thérèse Levasseur, whom the couple subsequently abandoned.

        The enmity between the two men was not an obstacle to Boswell visiting each, although his actual meetings constitute a minor portion of the engrossing chapter. Boswell had an “improbable” five separate meetings with the usually reclusive Rousseau. They were wide-ranging, with the “resolute and relentless” Boswell pursing “questions great and small, philosophical and personal” (p.156). When Boswell pressed Rousseau on how religious faith could be reconciled with reason, however, Rousseau’s answer was, in essence, that’s for you to figure out. Boswell did not fare much better with Voltaire on how he might reconcile reason with religious faith.

          Unlike Rousseau, Voltaire was no recluse. He prided himself on being the “innkeeper of Europe” (p.174), and his residence at Ferney was usually overflowing with visitors. Despite spending several days at Ferney, Boswell managed a single one-on-one meeting with the man he described as the “Monarch of French Literature” (p.176). In a two-hour conversation that reached what Zaretsky terms “epic proportions” (p.178), the men took up the subject of religious faith. “If ever two men disputed with vehemence we did” (p.178), Boswell  wrote afterwards.  The young traveler wrote eight pages on the encounter in a document separate from his journal.  Alas, these eight pages have been lost to history. But we know that the traveler  left the meeting more than a little disappointed that Voltaire could not provide the definitive resolution he was seeking of how to bridge the chasm between reason and faith.

          After a short stay in Italy that included “ruins and galleries . . .brothels and bawdy houses. . .churches and cathedrals” (p.200), Boswell’s last stop on the Grand Tour was the island of Corsica, a distant and exotic location where few Britons had ever visited.  There, he met General Pasquale Paoli, leader of the movement for Corsican independence from the city-state of Genoa, which exercised control over most of the island. Paoli was already attracting attention throughout Europe for his determination to establish a republican government on the island.  Rousseau, who had been asked to write a constitution for an independent Corsica, wrote for Boswell a letter of introduction to Paoli.  During a six-day visit to the island, Paoli treated the mesmerized Boswell increasingly like a son. Paoli “embodied those ancient values that Boswell most admired, though frequently failed to practice: personal integrity and public authority; intellectual lucidity and stoic responsibility” (p.232). Paoli’s leadership of the independence movement demonstrated to Boswell that heroism was still alive, an “especially crucial quality in an age like his of philosophical and religious doubt” (p.217). Upon returning to Britain, Boswell became a vigorous advocate for Paoli and the cause of Corsican independence.

        Boswell’s tour on the continent ended — and Zaretsky’s narrative ends — with a dramatic flourish that Zaretsky likens to episodes in Henry Fielding’s then popular novel Tom Jones. While Boswell was in Italy, Rousseau and Thérèse were forced to flee Môitiers because of hostile reaction to Voltaire’s revelation about the couple’s five children. By chance, David Hume, who had been in Paris, was able to escort Rousseau into exile in England, leaving Thérèse temporarily behind. Boswell somehow got wind of Thérèse’s situation and, sensing an opportunity to win favor with Rousseau, eagerly accepted her request to escort her to England to join her partner.  But over the course of the 11-day trip to England, Boswell and Thérèse “found themselves sharing the same bed. Inevitably, Boswell recounted his sexual prowess in his journal: ‘My powers were excited and I felt myself vigorous’” (p.225). No less inevitably, Zaretsky notes, Boswell also recorded Thérèse’s “more nuanced response: ‘I allow that you are a hardy and vigorous lover, but you have no art’” (p.225).

* * *

       After following Boswell’s encounters across the continent with many of the period’s most illustrious figures, I was disappointed that Zaretsky does not return to the question he raises initially about nature of 18^th century Enlightenment.   It would have been interesting to learn what conclusions, if any, he draws from Boswell’s journey. Does the young Scot’s partaking of the thoughts of Voltaire, Rousseau and others, and his championing the cause of Corsican independence, suggest a single movement indifferent to national and cultural boundaries? Or should Boswell best be considered an emissary of a peculiarly Scottish form of Enlightenment? Or was Boswell himself too young, too impressionable – too full of himself – to allow for any broader conclusions to be drawn from his youthful experiences about the nature of the 18^th century Enlightenment? These unanswered questions constitute a missed opportunity in an otherwise engaging account of a young man seeking to make sense of the intellectual currents that were riveting his 18^th century world and to apply them in his personal life.

Thomas H. Peebles

Florence, Italy

January 25, 2017

 

Stopping History

 

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind:

On Political Reaction 

            Mark Lilla is one of today’s most brilliant scholars writing on European and American intellectual history and the history of ideas. A professor of humanities at Columbia University and previously a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (as well as a native of Detroit!), Lilla first came to public attention in 2001 with his The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. This compact work portrayed eight 20^th century thinkers who rejected Western liberal democracy and aligned themselves with totalitarian regimes. Some were well known, such as German philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, but more were quite obscure to general readers.  He followed with another thought provoking work, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, a study of “political theology,” the implications of secularism and the degree to which religion and politics have been decoupled in modern Europe.

          In his most recent work, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, Lilla probes the elusive and, in his view, understudied mindset of the political reactionary.  The first thing we need to understand about reactionaries, he tells us at the outset, is that they are not conservatives. They are “just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings” (p.xii).  The mission of the political reactionary is to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” Lilla writes, quoting a famous line from the first edition of William F. Buckley’s National Review, a publication which he describes as “reactionary” (p.xiii). But the National Review is widely considered as embodying the voice of traditional American conservatism, an indication that the distinction between political reactionary and traditional conservative is not always clear-cut.  Lilla’s notion of political reaction overlaps with other terms such as “anti-modern” and the frequently used “populism.” He mentions both but does not draw out distinctions between them and political reaction.

            For Lilla, political reactionaries have a heightened sense of doom and maintain a more apocalyptic worldview than traditional conservatives. The political reactionary is driven by a nostalgic vision of an idealized, golden past and is likely to blame “elites” for the deplorable current state of affairs. The betrayal of elites is the “linchpin of every reactionary story” (p.xiii), he notes. In a short introduction, Lilla sets forth these definitional parameters and also traces the origins of our concept of political reaction to a certain type of opposition to the French Revolution and the 18th century Enlightenment.

          The nostalgia for a lost world “settled like a cloud on European thought after the French Revolution and never fully lifted” (p.xvi), Lilla notes. Whereas conservative Edmund Burke recoiled at the French Revolution’s wholesale uprooting of established institutions and its violence but were willing to admit that France’s ancien régime had grown ossified and required modification, quintessential reactionary Joseph de Maistre mounted a full-throated defense of the ancien régime.   For de Maistre, 1789 “marked the end of a glorious journey, not the beginning of one” (p.xii).

         If the reactionary mind has its roots in counter-revolutionary thinking, it endures today in the absence of political revolution of the type that animated de Maistre. “To live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological change, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution,” Lilla writes (p.xiv). For the apocalyptic imagination of the reactionary, “the present, not the past, is a foreign country” (p.137). The reactionary mind is thus a “shipwrecked mind. Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile” (p.xiii).

      The Shipwrecked Mind is not a systematic or historical treatise on the evolution of political reaction. Rather, in a disparate collection of essays, Lilla provides examples of reactionary thinking.  He divides his work into three main sections, “Thinkers,” “Currents,” and “Events.” “Thinkers” portrays three 20^th century intellectuals whose works have inspired modern political reaction. “Currents” consists of two essays with catchy titles, “From Luther to Wal-Mart,” and “From Mao to St. Paul;” the former is a study of “theoconservatism,” reactionary religious strains found within traditional Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and neo-Orthodox Judaism; the latter looks at a more leftist nostalgia for a revolutionary past. “Events” contains Lilla’s reflections on the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo publication and a kosher supermarket.  But like the initial “Thinkers” sections, “Currents” and “Events” are above all introductions to the works of reactionary thinkers, most of whom are likely to be unfamiliar to English language readers.

            The Shipwrecked Mind appeared at about the same time as the startling Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, a time when Donald Trump was in the equally startling process of securing the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States. Neither Brexit nor the Trump campaign figures directly in Lilla’s analysis and  readers will therefore have to connect the dots themselves between his diagnosis of political reaction and these events. Contemporary France looms larger in his effort to explain the reactionary mind, in part because Lilla was in Paris at the time of the January 2015 terrorist attacks.

* * *

            “Thinkers,” Lilla’s initial section, is similar in format to The Reckless Mind, consisting of portraits of Leo Strauss, Eric Voeglin, and Franz Rosenzweig, three German-born theorists whose work is “infused with modern nostalgia” (p.xvii). Of the three, readers are most likely to be familiar with Strauss (1899-1973), a Jewish refugee from Germany whose parents died in the Holocaust. Strauss taught philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1949 up to his death in 1973. Assiduous tomsbooks readers will recall my review in January 2014 of The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy, by Michael and Catherine Zuckert, which dismissed the purported connection between Strauss and the 2003 Iraq war as based on a failure to dig deeply enough into Strauss’ complex, tension ridden views about America and liberal democracy. Like the Zuckerts, Lilla considers the connection between Strauss and the 2003 Iraq war “misplaced” and “unseemly,” but, more than the Zuckerts, finds “quite real” the connection between Strauss’ thinking and that of today’s American political right (p.62).

        Strauss’ salience to political reaction starts with his view that Machiavelli, whom Strauss considered the first modern philosopher, is responsible for a decisive historical break in the Western philosophical tradition. Machiavelli turned philosophy from “pure contemplation and political prudence toward willful mastery of nature” (p.xviii), thereby introducing passion into political and social life. Strauss’ most influential work, Natural Right and History, argued that “natural justice” is the “standard by which political arrangements must be judged” (p.56). After the tumult of the 1960s, some of Strauss’ American disciples began to see this work as an argument that the West is in crisis, unable to defend itself against internal and external enemies. Lilla suggests that Natural Right and History has been misconstrued in the United States as an argument that political liberalism’s rejection of natural rights leads invariably to a relativism indistinguishable from nihilism. This misinterpretation led “Straussians” to the notion that the United States has a “redemptive historical mission — an idea nowhere articulated by Strauss himself” (p.61).

          Voeglin (1901-1985), a contemporary of Strauss, was born in Germany and raised in Austria, from which he fled in 1938 at the time of its Anchluss with Germany.   Like Strauss, he spent most of his academic career in the United States, where he sought to explain the collapse of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism in terms of a “calamitous break in the history of ideas, after which intellectual and political decline set in” (p.xviii). Voeglin argued that in inspiring the liberation of politics from religion, the 18^th century Enlightenment gave rise in the 20^th century to mass ideological movements such as Marxism, fascism and nationalism.  Voeglin considered these movements “’political religions,’ complete with prophets, priests, and temple sacrifices” (p.31). As Lilla puts it, for Voeglin, when you abandon the Lord, it is “only a matter of time before you start worshipping a Führer” (p.31).

        Rosenzweig (1886-1929) was a German Jew who gained fame in his time for backing off at the last moment from a conversion to Christianity – the equivalent of leaving his bride at the altar – and went on to dedicate his life to a revitalization of Jewish thought and practice. Rosenzweig shared an intellectual nostalgia prevalent in pre-World War I Germany that saw the political unification of Germany decades earlier, while giving rise to a wealthy bourgeois culture and the triumph of the modern scientific spirit, as having extinguished something essential that could “only be recaptured through some sort of religious leap.” (p.4). Rosenzweig rejected Judaism’s efforts to reform itself “according to modern notions of historical progress, which were rooted in Christianity” in favor of a new form of thinking that would “turn its back on history in order to recapture the vital transcendent essence of Judaism” (p.xvii-xviii).

          Lilla’s sensitivity to the interaction between religion and politics, the subject of The Stillborn God and the portraits of Voeglin and Rosenzweig here, is again on display in the two essays in the middle “Currents” section. In “From Luther to Wal-Mart,” Lilla explores how, despite doctrinal differences, traditional Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and neo-Orthodox Judaism in the United States came to share a “sweeping condemnation of America’s cultural decline and decadence.”  This “theoconservatism” (p.xix) blames today’s perceived decline and decadence on reform movements within these dominations and what they perceive as secular attacks on religion generally, frequently tracing the attacks to the turbulent 1960s as the significant breaking point in American political and religious history.

         Two works figure prominently in this section, Alastir MacInytre’s 1981 After Virtue, and Brad Gregory’s 2012 The Unintended Reformation. MacIntyre, echoing de Maistre, argued that the Enlightenment had undone a system of morality worked out over centuries, unwittingly preparing the way for “acquisitive capitalism, Nietzscheanism, and the relativistic liberal emotivism we live with today, in a society that that ‘cannot hope to achieve moral consensus’” (p.74-75). Gregory, inspired by MacIntyre, attributed contemporary decline and decadence in significant part to forces unleashed in the Reformation, undercutting the orderliness and certainty of “medieval Christianity,” his term for pre-Reformation Catholicism. Building on Luther and Calvin, Reformation radicals “denied the need for sacraments or relics,” and left believers unequipped to interpret the Bible on their own, leading to widespread religious conflict. Modern liberalism ended these conflicts but left us with the “hyper-pluralistic, consumer-driven, dogmatically relativististic world of today. And that’s how we got from Luther to Walmart” (p.78-79).

        “From St. Paul to Mao” considers a “small but intriguing movement on the academic far left” which maintains a paradoxical nostalgia for “revolution” or “the future,” and sees “deep affinities” between Saint Paul and modern revolutionaries such as Lenin and Chairman Mao (p.xx).  Jacob Taubes, a peripatetic Swiss-born Jew who taught in New York, Berlin, Jerusalem and Paris, sought to demonstrate in The Political Teachings of Paul that Paul was a “distinctively Jewish fanatic sent to universalize the Bible’s hope of redemption, bringing this revolutionary new idea to the wider world. After Moses, there was never a better Jew than Paul” (p.90). French theorist Alain Badiou, among academia’s last surviving Maoists, argued that Paul was to Jesus as Lenin was to Marx. The far left academic movement’s most prominent theorist is Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s “crown jurist” (p.99), a thinker portrayed in The Reckless Mind who emphasized the importance of human capacity and will rather than principles of natural right in organizing society.

         The third section, “Currents,” considers  France’s simmering cultural war over the place of Islam in French society, particularly in the aftermath of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which Lilla sees as a head-on collision between two forms of political reaction:

On the one side was the nostalgia of the poorly educated killers for an imagined, glorious Muslim past that now inspires dreams of a modern caliphate with global ambitions. On the other was the nostalgia of French intellectuals who saw in the crime a confirmation of their own fatalistic views about the decline of France and the incapacity of Europe to assert itself in the face of a civilizational challenge (p.xx).

        France’s struggle to integrate its Muslim population, Lilla argues, has revived a tradition of cultural despair and nostalgia for a Catholic monarchist past that had flourished in France between the 1789 Revolution and the fall of France in 1940, but fell out of favor after World War II because of its association with the Vichy government and France’s role in the Holocaust. In the early post-war decades in France, it was “permissible for a French writer to be a conservative but not a reactionary, and certainly not a reactionary with a theory of history that condemned what everyone else considered to be modern progress” (p.108). Today, it is once again permissible in France to be a reactionary.

          “Currents” concentrates on two best-selling works that manifest the revival of the French reactionary tradition, Éric Zemmour’s Le Suicide francais, published in 2014, and Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission, first published on the very day of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, an “astonishing, almost unimaginable” coincidence (p.116). Le Suicide francais presents a “grandiose, apocalyptic vision of the decline of France” (p.108), with a broad range of culprits contributing to the decline, including feminism, multiculturalism, French business elites, and European Union bureaucrats. But Zemmour reserves particular contempt for France’s Muslim citizens.  Le Suicide francais provides the French right with a “common set of enemies,” stirring an “outraged hopelessness – which in contemporary politics is much more powerful than hope” (p.117).

         Submission is the story of an election in France of a Muslim President in 2022, with the support of France’s mainstream political parties which seek to prevent the far right National Front party from winning the presidency.  In Lilla’s interpretation, the novel serves to express a “recurring European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom – freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one’s own ends – must inevitably lead to disaster” (p.127).  France for Houellebecq “regrettably and irretrievably, lost its sense of self” as a result of wager on history made at the time of the Enlightenment that the more Europeans “extended human freedom, the happier they would be” (p.128-29). For Houellebecq, “by any measure France’s most significant contemporary writer” (p.109), that wager has been lost. “And so the continent is adrift and susceptible to a much older temptation, to submit to those claiming to speak for God”(p.129).

          Lilla’s section on France ends on this ominous note. But in an “Afterword,” Lilla returns to contemporary Islam, the other party to the head-on collision of competing reactionaries at work in the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and their aftermath.  Islam’s belief in a lost Godden Age is the “most potent and consequential” political nostalgia in operation today (p.140), Lilla contends. According to radical Islamic myth, out of a state of jahiliyya, ignorance and chaos, the Prophet Muhammad was “chosen as the vessel of God’s final revelation, which uplifted all individuals and peoples who accepted it.” But, “astonishingly soon, the élan of this founding generation was lost. And it has never been recovered” (p.140). Today the forces of secularism, individualism, and materialism have “combined to bring about a new jahiliyya that every faithful Muslim must struggle against, just as the Prophet did at the dawn of the seventh century” (p.141).

* * *

          The essays in this collection add up to what Lilla describes as a “modest start” (p.xv) in probing  the reactionary mindset and are intriguing as far as they go. But I finished The Shipwrecked Mind hoping that Lilla will extend this modest start. Utilizing his extensive learning and formidable analytical skills, Lilla is ideally equipped to provide a systematic, historical overview of the reactionary tradition, an overview that would highlight its relationship to the French Revolution and the 18^th century Enlightenment in particular but to other historical landmarks as well, especially the 1960s. In such a work, Lilla might also provide more definitional rigor to the term “political reactionary” than he does here, elaborating upon its relationship to traditional conservatism, populism, and anti-modernism.  Through what might be a separate work, Lilla is also well placed to help us connect the dots between political reaction and the turmoil generated by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.  In less than six months, moreover, we will also know whether we will need to ask Lilla to connect dots between his sound discussion here of political reaction in contemporary France and a National Front presidency.

 

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

January 5, 2017

 

 

,

 

Mid-Life Embrace of Judaism

Steven Gimbel, Einstein: His Space and Time 

            In Einstein: His Space and Time, Steven Gimbel, a professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College, offers a highly compact biography of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), well under 200 pages. With numerous Einstein biographies already available, Gimbel’s special angle lies in his emphasis upon Einstein’s Jewish roots – fittingly, since the work is one in the Yale University Press series “Jewish Lives” (and I can’t help wondering whether the editors of the series might be tempted to rename the series “Jewish Lives Matter”). Einstein was born into a Jewish family that Gimbel describes as “anti-observant” rather than simply “non-observant” (p.8). In 1896, as a 17 year old, Einstein repudiated his Jewish heritage at the same time that he renounced his German citizenship. But he embraced Judaism enthusiastically in the 1920s, when he was over 40 years old, realizing that his Jewish heritage was an “inalienable part of who he was and who he was perceived to be” (p.4). As an adult, Einstein lived in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States — along with a short stint in Prague – but disdained the notion of national identity and was never really at home anywhere. In Gimbel’s account, Einstein’s midlife embrace of Judaism provided him with a sense of rootedness he failed to find in national identity or the places he lived.

     Gimbel provides a sharp chronological structure to his overview of Einstein’s life, dividing his book  into four major segments: Einstein’s  early years, from his birth in Ulm, Germany in 1879, to 1905, when he received his PhD degree in physics while working as an examiner in Switzerland’s patent office in Bern; 1905 to 1920, when he rose from the obscurity of a patent officer to international acclaim through his breakthrough theories altering the way we look at space, time, and the universe, to borrow from Gimbel’s subtly clever sub-title; 1920 to 1933, when Einstein embraced Judaism during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s experiment in liberal democracy established after the shock of its defeat in World War I; and 1933-55, beginning with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Einstein’s decision to leave Germany for the United States, where he remained until  his death.  Gimbel’s discussion of the major theories in physics that made Einstein a world famous scientist in his own day and a nearly mythological figure today is limited and laudably designed to be understandable to the average reader. Some readers may nonetheless find these portions of this concise volume slow going. But few should experience any such challenges in absorbing Gimbel’s highly readable account of how Einstein’s Jewish heritage shaped his views of the world and the universe.

* * *

    Einstein’s father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer.  His mother,  Pauline Koch, was a “stay-at-home mom” in today’s parlance whom Gimbel describes as “[s]trong-willed, strong-minded, and sharp tongued” (p.7-8).  In 1880, when Albert was one year old, his parents moved from Ulm to Munich, where young Albert entered a Catholic school a few years later. He began to play the violin at age six and throughout his life considered music “spiritual in the deepest sense” (p.13). When Einstein was in his teens, his family left Munich to pursue business opportunities in Italy. Einstein finished  secondary school in Aarau Switzerland, at the Arovian cantonal gymnasium.

     To avoid military service, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and surrendered his German passport in 1896, ostentatiously renouncing Judaism at that same time.  Later that year, he enrolled at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH in German) in Zurich, studying math and physics. Zurich in Einstein’s university days was a “cosmopolitan playground filled with young people from across the Continent,” where radical new ideas were “in the air, and a sense of openness abounded” (p.22).

     Einstein’s future wife, Mileva Marić, a Serbian national, also enrolled at ETH in 1896. Mileva was the only woman in the math and physics section of the school. She was somewhat like Einstein’s mother, Gimbel indicates, “smart, sarcastic and strong willed” (p.23), with a passion for physics that rivaled that of Einstein. Her friendship with Einstein transformed into romance during their four years together at ETH. Unlike Einstein, however, who was awarded his degree in 1900, Mileva, did not achieve a sufficient level in her studies to warrant a degree. Gimbel describes the Einstein who left ETH in 1900 as a “complicated personality,” brimming with self-confidence and a “strange combination of arrogance and empathy” (p.73). But the young physics graduate searched for work for nearly two years before securing a job as an assistant examiner in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, where he evaluated patent applications.

     Sometime prior to 1903, Mileva became pregnant and went back to Serbia to have the baby, named Liserl. It is not clear what happened to Liserl. As Gimbel explains:

The custom at that time was for the children of unmarried parents to be adopted, usually by a family member or a close friend.  This seems to have occurred, as news of Liesrl continued in correspondence for a little while.  Mileva moved back to Zurich, where she received word that Liersrl had contracted scarlet fever.  We do not know whether she survived. . . but we do know that Einstein never met his daughter (p.30).

Einstein and Mileva married in 1903, and the couple had two sons, Hans Albert and Edouard.

* * *

     While working in the patent office, Einstein studied at the University of Zurich for the PhD degree, which he earned in 1905. In a chapter entitled “The Miracle Year,” Gimbel explains how, in March, April and May of 1905, Einstein published three groundbreaking papers which provided new, revolutionary ways to view matter, light and space. At that time, Issac Newton’s late 17^th century mechanical view of the universe as composed of space, time, motion, mass and energy was the entrenched bedrock of physics upon which to build and expand. Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation had “explained the falling of apples and the orbits of planets, the motion of comets and the rising of the tides” (p.59). His work was considered the “highest expression of the human mind in all recorded history” (p.59).

     Einstein demonstrated in 1905 the centrality of the atom to all of physics. Many physicists in the early 20^th century did not accept theories of physics based on the atomic view of matter. Einstein’s work on atoms “got to the basic constituents of matter and accounted for the concepts of heat in thermodynamics” (p.67). In addition, Einstein presented a new picture of light as a force of constant speed. He contended that physics must “take as a starting point that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same for all observers, no matter their state of motion with regard to the source” (p.54). The speed of light is “not only a constant, it is also a limiting velocity. Nothing can move faster than this speed. . . moving faster than the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy, and that is not possible. Nothing can move faster than light in a vacuum” (p.57).

     Einstein’s work on light “revolutionized optics” (p.67). It led Einstein to establish the equivalence of mass and energy, as captured in the famous equation E = MC², where the mass of the body is a measure of its energy content. Einstein’s three 1905 papers, Gimbel writes, left “no single part of the study of physics, the oldest and most established science, which Eistein did not seek to completely overhaul” (p.59).   Yet, the papers of Einstein’s miracle year failed to attract significant attention, in part because they came from an obscure 26-year-old patent examiner, not a recognized academic physicist.

     Einstein spent the succeeding years looking for a teaching position and over the course of the next decade became an academic vagabond. He found positions in Bern, Zurich, and Prague before returning to Germany in 1914, where he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin.  1914 was also the fateful year when World War I broke out. At the start of the war, Einstein saw his “worst fears regarding the German character coming true. Not only was there a sense that offensive military adventures were justified in the name of German ascendance, but there was near universal support for them” (p.91).

     Yet, the World War I years were among Einstein’s most productive. One hundred years ago this year, in 1916, Einstein published “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” in which his signature theory of relativity jelled — a “radical revision of our understanding of the nature of the universe itself” (p.89). At the heart of the theory was the notion that the “laws of physics should be the same for all observers who are moving at a constant speed in a straight line with respect to each other” (p.54). Gimbel terms Einstein’s insight a “triumph of elegance and imagination . . . Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, space, time, and motion had dominated physics for three hundred years, standing as the single greatest achievement in the history of science. Here was its successor” (p.89).

     Einstein’s theory of relativity attracted world attention in a way that his 1905 papers had not quite done. With the European powers at war with one another, Einstein’s theories of space, time and the universe “caught the fancy of a world tired of thinking about mankind as barbarians and eager to celebrate its creativity and insight. And at the center of it was this curious, unkempt, wisecracking figure who seemed to stand for a different side of humanity” (p.100).

* * *

     As the European powers fought World War I, Einstein began an affair with his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, a divorced mother of two daughters. Mileva returned to Zurich with the couple’s two sons after discovering the affair, and she and Einstein divorced in 1919. Months later, Einstein married Elsa. In Elsa, Einstein saw the opposite of Mileva. Whereas Mileva sought to be a gender-barrier-breaking pioneer and Einstein’s intellectual partner, Elsa, with her “simple charm” and “sunny disposition” put her cousin on a pedestal, “never invading his work but instead caring for his more basic needs” (p.95). Until her death in 1936, Elsa assumed a role which Gimbel describes as Einstein’s “business manager,” serving as his gatekeeper and screening the many people “clamoring to have face time, interviews, and collaboration”with  her husband (p.95).

     In Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Einstein became what Gimbel describes as a symbol of “scientific cosmopolitanism. He was adored, inspiring poems and architecturally bizarre buildings. His science, combined with his politics during the war, gave him the status of the wise elder statesman among young rebels. The fact that people did not understand his theory of relativity did not diminish his social capital; to the contrary, it increased it. By being the keeper of the mystery, he was considered the high priest of modernism” (p.113). But a toxic anti-Semitism plagued Weimar Germany from the beginning, from which even non-observant Jews like Einstein were not immune.

* * *

     During the Weimar years, Einstein began to “view his Jewishness in a new light” (p.109). He was able, as Gimbel puts it, to “become Jewish again in his own mind without having to surrender the scientific world view, the personal ethic, or the metaphysical foundations upon which he rested his physical theories. Being Jewish became . . . an inalienable aspect of his being” (p.109). Weimar anti-Semitism no doubt played a role in leading Einstein to the view that the experiences of Jews everywhere had “core commonalities that united them into a nation” (p.121). Einstein’s rediscovery of his Jewish roots in the early 1920s thus awakened his interest in Zionism, with its aspiration for a Jewish community in Palestine, an aspiration which Einstein had previously resisted.

     Zionism was “not a natural fit for Einstein, who, to the core of his being, opposed every form of nationalism” (p.121). Einstein worried that Zionism would “rob Judaism of its moral core. . . If Zionism became a movement that was focused on the idolatry of a particular piece of land, then the emergence of all of the evils that have plagued Jews across the globe for thousands of years would find a new source in Jews themselves” (p.124). But Einstein seemed to modify his views after a trip to Tel Aviv in the 1920s.  The “accomplishments by the Jews in but a few years” in Tel Aviv, Einstein wrote, elicited his “highest admiration. A modern Hebrew city with busy economic and intellectual life shoots up from the bare ground. What an incredibly lively people our Jews are!” (p.137). Unlike many Zionists of the day, however, Einstein emphasized the importance of achieving parity between the Arabs and Jews living in Palestine.

       Einstein’s first trip to the United States took place in 1921, where he traveled with Chaim Weizmann, the famed Zionist leader who later became the first President of the State of Israel.  Unbeknownst to Einstein, Weizmann was using Einstein not only to raise money for the Zionist cause but also to ward off a challenge from American Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis for leadership in the worldwide Zionist movement. Einstein’s trip to America failed to raise anywhere near the amount of money that Weizmann had hoped, but an “unintended result” of the trip was to “strengthen Einstein’s identity as a Jew” (p.130). Einstein wrote that it was in America that he “first discovered the Jewish people. . . [coming] from Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe generally. . . I found these people extraordinarily ready for self-sacrifice and practically creative” (p.130).

      Einstein visited the United States frequently during the Weimar years and took part time positions at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, in the early 1930s. Teaching at Cal Tech when Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein chose to remain in the United States. In 1935, he obtained a research position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained until his death in 1955.

* * *

    Einstein’s years at Princeton are treated cursorily in this short volume, almost as an epilogue.  Gimbal discusses how Einstein’s concern that the Germans might develop an atomic bomb prompted him to co-sign a letter to President Roosevelt, urging Roosevelt to pre-empt the German effort. This led to the Manhattan Project, in which Einstein was not directly involved. Horrified by the actual use of nuclear weaponry in Japan in 1945, Einstein came to regret his limited role in unleashing this awesome force. Supposedly, he remarked, “I could burn my fingers that I wrote that letter to Roosevelt” (p172), although this quotation has not been verified. Gimbal also notes that Einstein became an ardent supporter of civil rights, seeing similarities between the treatment of African Americans in the United States and Jews in Europe. His support for civil rights prompted J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to open a file on him.

* * *

     Einstein’s last years at Princeton were spent writing and speaking for pacifistic causes, working to help Jewish refugees flee Europe, and continuing to work on a grand unified theory of the universe.  On his deathbed, Einstein uttered a single sentence in German, his native tongue, before he passed away.  An American nurse heard his words but could not understand them.  “In death  as in life,” Gimbel concludes, “Albert Einstein left us a mystery” (p.177).

 

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

September 5, 2016