Is Joseph Massad a “white,Christian-looking” man?   I ask because in the latest edition of Massad-speak, he asserts that “Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the Holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians…”

Massad means to place the Holocaust within the context of post-colonial studies by asserting that Europeans were horrified by the Nazi genocide only because of their “horror at the murder of white Europeans.”      For the record, pre-war Jews were both rich and poor, but mostly poor.   And not merely because we’re talking about the Great Depression in Poland and the Soviet Union.   In a part of the world where poverty was rampant, Jewish poverty was enhanced in the 1930′s by  virulent  Polish and Soviet  anti-Semitism that deprived Jews even of  the meager opportunities open to non-Jewish Soviet and Polish citizens.    

But Massad implies that it was somehow somehow illegitimate for post-war movie directors to depict the typical Holocaust victim wearing ordinary clothes.    “Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious)…”     But although Massad implies otherwise,  the great majority of Jews were secular; only a minority of pre-war Jews were religiously observant, and only some of those wore identifiably Jewish dress.

This is typical Massad-speak: a facile abuse of logic and evidence in the service of canard.

It gets worse.   Massad criticizes movie directors for depicting, “Jewish victims of Nazism as white.”    What is he talking about?     Nazis did not care what color a Jew  was.   They murdered Jews: blue-eyed, blond-haired Jews, brown-skinned, dark-haired Jews, and little Jewish children with freckled faces and curly red hair.  

Massad also misinforms us that the Hollywood depiction of Jews as secular, middle-class people in ordinary clothes, “Explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.“

Whoa.

In America, anyone can built a museum or memorial.   America has many, many more than 40 Holocaust memorials and museums.  They were built  and funded by American citizens.   The United States has so many of them because America granted citizenship to so many survivors of the Nazi genocide.

America  also has  multiple memorials to the Armenian genocide, the Irish Famine,  the Katyn Massacre, and to many other horrors and tragedies.    These exist because groups of Americans have come together to build them.

Massad appears to be unaware that America  has a long tradition of building memorials and museums with private donations  but with such broad public support that  it was deemed appropriate to make public land available for their construction.     Grant’s Tomb, the magnificent tribute of a grateful nation to the man who won the war to end slavery, is such a memorial.      It is a deeply moving commemoration of the willingness of white and black Americans, to fight and die in that war.     Grant’s Tomb was entirely funded by private donations.     It is located only a few  blocks from Massad’s office on the Columbia campus.   I hope that he will visit it before he writes another misleading paragraph on American National Memorials.

The “major museum” Massad refers to, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is, like Grant’s Tomb,  built on public land but it was and is funded by private donations.    It is only one of the National Memorials built in recent decades with private funds on public land,  they include the  National Japanese American Memorial, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.   Other recent official National Memorials, including the Flight 93 Memorial,   and the World War II Memorial were built  with a combination of public and private funds.

But back to today’s classic Massad-speak assertion that although there is a holocaust museum there is “not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans.”   The idea that America is at fault for not dedicating museums to the “holocaust” of “Native Americans or African Americans” is a red herring.

There is in fact a Black Holocaust Museum and there have been efforts to build an American Indian Genocide Museum.   They are minor efforts because American blacks and Indians have not chosen to support them; they do not agree with Professor Massad’s version of history.

Americans of every hue and cultural background continue to grapple with the quesiton of how to understand  American racism and slavery, and we continue to grapple with the question of how to understand the interaction between Amerindians, and Americans whose ancestors arrived after 1607.   The United States has scores of monuments, museums and major collections dedicated to American Indian history and culture, hundreds of museums and memorials of African American history.

More importantly, the Massad-speak implication that America honors the Holocaust more than it honors its black or native heritage is  is  a red herring because he omits an enormous fact.   The fact is that there are two and  only two official, government-operated national museums built on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and  dedicated to single ethnic or cultural groups.   They are the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Massad-speak, a intellectual shell-game to delude the gullible.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Mohammed Ali Alayed had little in common, unless, of course it turns out that the Tsarnaev brothers viciously slit the throats of Jewish friends in the service of jihad two years before they planted bombs at the Boston Marathon.     

Alayed is the son of a Saudi millionaire, a rich kid with an allowance of $60,000.00 a year from Dad who liked to drink and meet girls.    He was a student at Houston Community College when he became friends with a fellow student named Ariel Sellouk, the son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco.   The two were close for a couple of years, until Alayed became an observant Muslim. 

Sellouk hadn’t seen his former friend for over a year when, in August 2003, he phoned and the two spent an evening together, part of it at a bar.    They walked back to Alayed’s apartment together.   Alayed’s roommate says that there was no sign of tension between the two.   Then Alayed pulled out a 6” butterfly knife and cut Sellouk’s throat with such force that the head was nearly severed from his body.   

No motive has been proposed, except for the idea that jihad inspired by Alayed’s new commitment to Islam and exposure to Islamist ideas may have been involved.   Investigators suspected an Islamist hate crime because of the strange details: no motive, the phone call to a Jewish friend the murderer had not seen for over a year,  the newly devout Muslim spending an evening in a bar, and the brutal throat-slitting.   Islamists have a bizarre fascination with murder by beheading.

There was no trial.   Alayed was allowed to plead guilty and sentenced to life in prison.    Few Americans have ever heard about the bizarre and unexplained murder. 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not a rich kid.  He was the son of immigrants, a boxer of some promise, a college drop-out, and a flashy dresser who liked to drink and party.    He sparred regularly with Brendan Mess, a man he once introduced as his “best friend”.   

On September 11, 2011, Brendan Mess (Catholic) and two young Jewish men, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken were murdered in Mess’ apartment. Two unidentified men had been seen entering the building near the time of the murders, but there was no sign of forced entry.     Oddly, the murderer(s) strew thousands of dollars in cash and thousands of dollars worth of marijuana over the dead bodies. Their throats were slit so brutally that their heads were nearly severed from their bodies.

Some among Mess’ circle of friends though it odd that Tsarnaev chose not to attend the funeral, but he was not questioned by the police.    No one was indicted.  

After the Marathon bombing, however, the Boston Globe called attention to the unsolved triple murder of three men, one of them a very close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and to the odd facts that the murders took place on 9/11, and involved near-severed heads.  

The District Attorney reopened the case.   On May 10 ABC News reported that investigators had “mounting evidence” tying both Dzhokhar and Tamerlan to the crime, including the preliminary results of DNA evidence from the crime scene.   Cell phone records also place the brothers in the area where the murders took place at the time of the killings.

And I cannot help asking whether a more thorough of this throat-slitting murder back when it occurred on 9/11/11 might have prevented the Marathon Bombing.

During a trip to England two years ago I drove up to Bradford to see the old synagogue.    I have an interest in historicist architecture – identity statements made in stone – and a passion for Islamic architecture.

Bradford is perhaps the most authentically Islamic of the many Jewish synagogues built in what is known as the Moorish Revival Style.   Handsome Moorish synagogues like the one in Bradford  a dual statement: we are part of the public life of this community, and we are a people with ancient roots in the East.    According to Sharman Kadish, the  Jewish community of Victorian Bradford was mostly made up of Reformed Jews from German-speaking communities in Central Europe, where Moorish synagogues were extremely popular.

A member of the synagogue had agreed to meet me and let me into the building; he very kindly waited as I made several wrong turns, calling him on my cell as I bumbled through roundabouts and no-right-turn signs before finding my way to  Manningham, a south-Asian neighborhood of substantial Victorian town houses and a lovely park bursting with daffodils.  I finally located the synagogue.      The building’s Lombard stripes, Ogee arched windows, and Hebrew inscriptions were unmistakable.

The interior is beautiful, especially the Torah Ark set into an exquisitely carved horseshoe arch.

The Bradford synagogue was part of an admiring wave of Orientalism that swept Europe in the nineteenth century.   Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra was a great best-seller.   Artists flocked to the paint the dazzlingly exotic Near East.   And Westerners built exotic orientalist buildings, like P. T. Barnum’s  house in Connecticut, Iranistan.   The Royal Pavillion at Brighton, England.   Exotic Olana on Hudson.   And the Arab Hall at Leighton House, London.

But the greatest number of Moorish revival buildings were  synagogues.   There were over two hundred Moorish revival synagogues, although a complete count has never been made and some of the smaller European examples may go unrecorded.   A surprising number survive, including  the  Budapest’s exquisitely beautiful  Rumbach Street synagogue, an eight-sided architectural homage to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock designed by the great Viennese architect Otto Wagner, which, like many old world synagogues, is far more magnificent inside than out.     Americans may know   the soaring minarets of Cincinnatti’s Plum Street Temple, the onion domes of  Temple Beth-El in Corsicana, Texas or the funky Moorish roof line of the little synagogue in Owensboro, Kentucky.

The Bradford Synagogue can take its place among the most handsome and authentic buildings of the Moorish revival, but it must  have looked dramatically exotic in the Bradford of 1880.     On the day I visited the neighborhood, there were a smattering of people in western dress, but the streets of Walsingham at midday on a Thursday were filled with mothers in hijab pushing baby strollers, and clusters of men and boys in shalwar kameez.

The congregation has been kept open until now by the sentimental attachment of members and the children of former members who live elsewhere.   It opened a suburban location years ago; that building has recently closed.

Whether the old Moorish revival building on Bowland Street can continue to function as a synagogue, even with the help and support of its Muslim neighbors, is an open question.    If it does not, it will make a handsome mosque with an exquisite mihrab in the center of one of Britain’s liveliest Muslim neighborhoods.

Brent Nongbri explains how the West constructed  a category,  and came to believed that it was a valid description of the real world.

Modern Conceit; Review by William T. Cavanaugh in May, 2013  First Things.

In the divisive, tensely political years when ungrateful colonists destroyed private property of the Boston Tea Party, when mobs attacked His Majesty troops the Boston Massacre and unruly subjects took up arms against a legitimate Parliamentary government and the American Revolution, public commemorations were a tool used by advocates of American rights to increase commitment to their cause.    The revolting Americans celebrated the anniversaries of the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Bunker Hill,  and April 19th – the day a political struggle turned into war at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.   These celebrations were not holidays; they were pro-Independence political rallies.   In 1777 the Fourth of July joined them as one more pretext to rally the sometimes fading enthusiasm of ordinary men and women to support the fight for independence.

After independence was won and the Treaty of Paris signed, Americans lost interest in celebrating the Fourth of July.   The holiday was  revived to by political activists fighting for and against a proposed Constitution that would replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal government.       New York and Rhode Island were implacably opposed to a federal constitution.    If you read the Constitution carefully, you will find that it says, “Done… by unanimous consent of the states present” at the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787.  What is actually means is: done without Rhode Island and New York.

The fight over ratification was famously bitter in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, South Carolina and New York.   (Rhode Island didn’t have enough pro-Federalists to stage a debate.)    By mid-June 1788, nine states including Massachusetts, New Hampshire and South Carolina had ratified.   Formally, 9 was enough.  But it was clear to everyone that with New York saying ‘nay’,  if Virginia also refused to ratify the new federal government would be too weak to function.   By June everything hung on Virginia.   Virginia ratified on June 26.

This was the eighteenth century.    The telegraph had not yet been invented.   News of Virginia’s ratification did not reach Albany until the July 3.   On the morning of the Glorious Fourth, feelings were running high as the Anti-Federalists fired the customary 13 salutes, and ignited when they burned a copy of the Constitution.     Federalists – who had  drunk more than was good for them  -  fired 10 salutes in honor of the 10 states that had ratified and were marching home when they met anti-Federalists – who were also three sheets to the wind.   The anti-Federalists were mad as hops over the politically-motivated firing of 10 salutes instead of 13; and they were  armed with clubs, stones, and a field-piece.   The battle lasted 20 minutes.  The Federalists won.  Several men were wounded, one killed. (Appelbaum, The Glorious Fourth, pp. 30-32.)

That, however, was as violent as the battle over the Constitution got.   The fight was  bitter.  Federalists and anti-Federalists formed two opposing political parties and refused to sit down together for dinner on the Fourth of July.   Towns had two speeches, two dinners, two celebrations.    The invective of Federal-era politics can make today’s scurrilous  tweeting sound downright genteel.   But before 1860 and since 1865, the fiercely held differences of opinion over how this country should be governed have been settled by persuasion, compromise and vote.   Not by violence.

Holidays are part of that debate, subject to being used as political tools the way both pro- and anti-Federalists once used the Fourth of July.   Columbus Day, for example, was created as part of the Italian American political struggle to gain recognition as “real” Americans.   It became so popular that Amerindian activists now use it to stake their claim for redress of the  grievances of conquest.  Politics is noisy and messy and groups that enlist holidays to enhance their message may or may not carry their point.

A right-wing group has attempted to appropriate Patriots Day by inverting the nature of the American Revolution, particularly the role of the minute men at Lexington and Concord.

Far from being a set of rugged individualists, the men who stood up to the British Army at Lexington Green were the democratically organized male population of the town of Lexington.   And Lexington was not unique.   In Massachusetts a political consensus was reached long before anyone picked up a musket.    A decade of intense political debate, rallies, marches, Liberty Trees, lithographs, and provocations like the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party had resulted in a population democratically committed to standing up to the Crown in defense of their right to self-government.

Gun powder was stored in church towers at a time when the congregation and the citizenry in most Massachusetts towns were virtually identical, the citizen militia of the Commonwealth was  pledged to act together should the British attempt to impose the imperial will by armed force, and  almost the entire membership of the Massachusetts legislature had convened in Concord, not in the capital at Boston.  Moving the Massachusetts legislature to Concord was not exactly secret, it was clandestine, against the will of the Crown, and done with the full backing of the great majority of the citizens.    The battle, when it came, was not an act of  individuals, it was the consensus decision of the people and government of Massachusetts.

If the modern movement that calls itself a militia and claims to stand on Patriots Day in the footsteps of the men on Lexington Green  really believe that they know how America should be governed, they should do what Sam Adams did and devote themselves to the hard, political  work of persuading their fellow citizens to agree with them.

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An odd thing happened to the Kings of Bavaria in 1832.   Greece had just won a war of national liberation from the Ottoman Empire with a major assist form the British and French navies, and both Britain and France felt that providing the new nation state with a  constitutional monarchy would be the best way to ensure stability.   But where to find a King?   The King of Bavaria, Ludwig I, happened to have both an extra son and ancestors who belonged to Byzantine imperial families.   And so Prince Otto of Bavaria became King of Greece, and the Kingdom of Bavaria became the European state with the greatest enthusiasm for  Greek Revival architecture.

Visitors to Munich can see the Bavarian enthusiasm for  the idea that a local boy had become King of Greece on display in the Neue Pinakothek, (museum for nineteenth century art) where entire rooms are filled with views of Greece; in the Bavaria National Museum (a decorative arts museum), where a model of Otto stands in full costume tsolias; at the enormous  Hall of Fame that Ludwig built in Greek Revival style featuring a monumental statue of Bavaria cast from Turkish bronze cannon captured at Navarino (the battle that liberated Greece); and – this is the segway to Nazis -  at the Koenigsplatz (Royal Square).   Here Ludwig built a large plaza  with a monumental ceremonial arch in the style of the entrance to the Acropolis at one end, and two, grand, Greek Revival buildings facing one another across the broad plaza, one designed  to hold Ludwig’s genuinely spectacular collection of Greek antiquities.

This is how the plaza stood in 1933, three monumental sides; the fourth, an unfinished canvas, when Adolph Hitler decided that he was an Aryan, somehow a descendant of the ancient Greeks.   He finished the Koenigsplatz by filling the fourth side with a pair of Ehrentempels (Honor Temples), edifices in an Art Deco version of Greek Revival dedicated to the worship of the Nazi spirit, represented by sarcophagi containing the bodies of the Nazis who died in the Party’s failed 1923 attempt to take over the government (the Beer Hall Putsch).   Flanking the Ehrentempels were a pair of large office buildings known as the Fuhrer Buildings housing Nazi Party operations,  and beyond them,  an entire neighborhood of buildings that housed Party operations.  The most notorious was the Braunes Haus (Brown House), the building that became Nazi Party headquarters in 1930.     The old Konigsplatz had become the heart of darkness, the center of National Socialism, the place where the great Nazi rallies were held.

The Baunes Haus was destroyed by war.   In 1947 the American Army of Occupation dynamited the Ehrentempels.   The art deco columns are gone, but the solid, stone foundations remain, covered by weeds.

The post-War German government altered the Konigsplatz by planting grass in place of the pavements where the Hitler Youth had marched.   The Fuhrer Buildings still look much as they did when Hitler knew them, both are still in use,  one as an art school.

Sixty years passed and the question of what to do about the foundations of the Ehrentempels remained.   To many, the best solution seemed to be to root them out of the ground and build something new in their stead.   But as time passed a consensus grew around the idea of treating them as Germany has treated its Nazi past.   That is, to admit that it happened, that Germans once enthusiastically built and worshipped at these shrines of race-hatred, face the past, and build a better future.

That future is now rising beside the overgrown foundations of the old Ehrentempels, on the site of the Braunes Haus where Hitler once had his office.   The building of the NS Dokumentationszentrum München (Documentation Center of National Socialism, Munich), a new museum of the Nazi period, is under construction.

G. W. Bowersock has written a  little book (in an Oxford series of short books about iconic objects) pegged to a sixth century monument in the form of a stone throne erected by an Axumite (Ethiopian) king in the ancient Red Sea port of Adulis.  The book is nominally about the politics of the Red sea region and Arabian peninsula in the period  shortly before the birth of Muhammad, but it is written in a way that make it appear that Bowerstock is still fighting the political battles of the sixth century, or making that century a pretext to put forward his views of twenty-first century politics.

The great powers of the period, the Zoroastrian Sassanian Empire of Persia and the Christian Byzantine  Empire were, as Bowersock has described them elsewhere, “Empires in Collision“, with all the messy wars, massacres, and refugee flows that such collisions entail.     The regional powers along the Red Sea were the Monophysite Christian Kingdom of Axum (modern Ethiopia), sometimes allied with the Byzantines.   And the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar (modern Yemen), sometimes allied with the Sassanian Persians.

Christianity was, of course, a religion of converts in its early years in Ethiopia, but in the fourth century it became the state religion.   Himyar is understood  to have followed a parallel path,  converting to Judaism by the late fourth century (p. 87).   But since Himyar did not  continue to be a Jewish kingdom, even less information about the conversion period has been preserved than in Ethiopia.

The Jewish kingdom of Himyar  arose in the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, flourished, then fell to an Ethiopian invasion backed by the Byzantine Empire.   In the 520s it was led by  Jewish king named Yusuf (Joseph).   Archaeologists have found a fourth century synagogue in the ancient seaport of Qana in the Hadramaut. (p. 80)    But the Jewish kingdom itself left no historical records, and, while some inscriptions have been found, most of what is known of it comes from Syrian Christian sources notable for their hostility to Judaism.  Scholars in Persia and Byzantium had little interest in writing about this relatively unimportant region.

Bowerstock is part of a small group of scholars drawing on ancient sources and a growing but still small number of recently unearthed inscriptions to increase our knowledge of the Arabian region before Islam.  But the number of sources is so few, and so much of what we do have from ancient sources was produced by partisans in the clash of empires and faiths, that most scholars approach sixth century Arabia with extreme caution.

Bowerstock was asked to write a  a small book about a single very interesting object addressed to a general audience, and this may account for the oddly sweeping and definitive nature of a number of his statements.

In this period of intense competition between two great empires, it does not seem strange that the Axumite kingdom should have converted to  Monophysite Christianity, or the the Himyar kingdom should have converted to Judaism.   Each conversion event gave the converting dynasty the advantage of leaving pagan practices to join the rising trend toward monotheism, while not coming directly under the control of the Byzantine church.   And, possibly, in the case of  Himyar, of offering a new , monotheistic state religion  that would enable the small, border kingdom of Himyar to seek the Sassanian aid necessary to maintaining independence form the Byzantine Empire.   The sources are so paltry that the political and popular pressures on a fourth century Himyarite king are largely a matter of guesswork, but it is jarring to find Bowerstock describing the conversion of the Himyar kingdom to Judaism as  “improbable” and “bizarre”.(p. 4)    It is difficult to see why it is   “bizarre” that a Jewish, monotheistic kingdom (Himyar) should have arisen on the eastern side of the Bab-el-Mandeb, but not bizarre that a monotheistic (monophysite) Christian kingdom like Axum should have arisen on the western side.

Bowersock then categorically asserts -  citing scholarship on Sabaic epigraphy – that “from 380 onwards polytheism utterly disappeared form South Arabia”.(p. 83)   Even if we discount the possibility that pagan  inscriptions may yet turn up, the absence of pagan inscriptions is hardly the same as the absence of pagans.   Further archaeology is extremely likely to turn up ongoing use of polytheistic images and practices, unless Arabia is unlike every other part of the ancient world.  Such sweeping assertions may be the result of attempting to summarize great swaths of material for a popular audience, but they make the reader acutely uncomfortable.

The “traditional Arab pagans” are portrayed in this book as passive victims of Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish powers, Bowersock asserts that they  are  “the only losers”  (p. 5) in these wars.   Yet surely it is an an oddly exclusive judgment when writing about a Jewish kingdom decisively conquered by a Christian army, that was itself chortly to be conquered by the armies of Islam.

In a very short book with little detail beyond the in depth analysis of the Throne of Adulis itself, Bowerstock makes space to engage in extensive discussion of Jewish atrocities, including what he describes as an “anti-Christian pogrom” that attained notoriety in ancient and medieval Christian texts.   “Pogrom” is an oddly archaic term to apply, but Bowerstock cites it and a series of 38 martyred Christian bishops, priests and monks apparently killed in the early fifth century  to assert “that the Azqir and Najran martyrs constitute incontestable evidence for the persecution of Christians by their Jewish overlords.”(p. 85)   According to Bowerstock, it was  this “brutality”   – and not imperial ambition – that “provoked” the Ethiopian invasion to which Arabian Christians “owed their salvation.”(p. 86)      Christian, Zoroastrian and polytheistic armies and kings do not commit atrocities in this book.

The struggle for control of Himyar was protracted, and since few details are known, Boserstock is forced to paint with a broad brush, first “a Christian presence… somehow managed to supplant the Jewish rulers and assume control of the country in the early sixth century” (p. 93), followed by “subversive Jewish activities against the relatively new Christian regime.” (p. 95)   At this point according to Bowerstock, with a Jew again on the throne of Himyar,  “Confessional solidarity would have undoubtedly impelled the negus (Axumite king) to undertake this campaign…”(p. 95)

Well, maybe.   What we know about Ethiopian motivation comes from Christian  sources,  notably the inscription on the Throne of Adulis, and the text is unsurprisingly “triumphalist.”    Bowerstock assures us that this triumphalist “tone…  accords well with (the king’s) mission of avenging the deaths of many Christians at Narjan  and of assuring the security of many Christians who would reside in Arabia”.(p. 103)    Bowerstock  appears to this reader, at least,  to be defending an early sixth-century invasion which I will assume was as bloody and destructive as other ancient wars of conquest, on the grounds that it would make Arabia safe for the “many Christians who would reside there” once the existing Jewish kingdom was destroyed.

The Throne of Adulis suceeds in opening a small window into the Red Sea region before the advent of Islam, but Bowerstock writing, especially his  hearty approval for the “energetic Christian ruler”  who attacked a Jewish kingdom in what appears to have been an unprovoked war of imperial expansion, striles what can only be described as a very odd note.