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Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity

Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity

In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews. But this is hardly the first season for grappling with domestic bigotry and racism. Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II, Americans began addressing some of their own antisemitism and racism problems. They wondered how Americans could fight a war abroad against fascist enemies when they had so many of their own sins of bigotry to reckon with at home. Several popular books—fiction and non-fiction—addressed these issues during the 1940s but are mostly forgotten today. I discuss some of them in my new book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.

Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is the most famous of this group of popular 1940s anti-antisemitism novels; less than a year after publication, Agreement was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. But Hobson was not alone in thinking and writing fiction about American antisemitism. She was inspired by other successful women anti-antisemitism novelists. As Hobson wrote to her editor, Richard Simon, of the publishing house Simon and Schuster, “Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don’t practice that conspiracy of silence at all.”

Several writers were, in fact, working on anti-antisemitism novels. Hobson’s writer-friend Margaret Halsey had published Some of My Best Friend Are Soldiers, a novel attacking racism and antisemitism. As Hobson wrote to Simon, she was also encouraged by the news of the Canadian novelist Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), a popular anti-antisemitism novel, being serialized in Collier’s magazine. And although Cleveland-based novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid) was farther afield from Hobson’s New York literary circles, by 1946 it would be difficult for Hobson to miss the many New York Times references to Sinclair and her award-winning anti-antisemitism novel, Wasteland, published that year. Through different narrative strategies, these women writers made anti–antisemitism into a subject fitting for popular fiction.

These novels also succeeded in making what had been considered a Jewish problem—something for Jewish communal leaders and defense organizations to worry over—into an American problem that required an American solution.

But it was precisely this approach that made some reviewers critical of what Hobson and other anti-antisemitism novelists accomplished. They asked: where was the Jewishness in these novels? Why had novelists not provided readers with more of an understanding of the religious traditions, rituals, and joyous festivals at the heart of Jewish life? To some rabbis and Jewish writers who realized how little Americans understood about the distinctiveness of Judaism, it seemed to many like a wasted opportunity.

Rabbis and other writers invested in Jewish religious life stepped in to fill the void. They seized the opportunity to present Judaism to a readership of Jews and non-Jews. In books with titles such as What Is a Jew? (1953); What the Jews Believe (1950); Basic Judaism (1947); Faith through Reason: A Modern Interpretation of Judaism (1946); and This is Judaism (1944), writers explained the basics of Judaism. In some ways, it is possible to see the anti-antisemitism genre as having paved the way to the “Introduction to Judaism” genre. These primers on Judaism were books and magazine articles that helped explain Jews and their religion to other Americans. In unexpected ways, increased concern over antisemitism led to greater understanding of what it meant to live a Jewish life.

In the past 60 years, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s and the Introduction to Judaism books of the 1940s and 1950s have faded in popularity. These books and articles were very much of their moment. But they forged genres that proved lasting in American culture: anti-antisemitism remained a popular theme in late twentieth century film, with examples such as School Ties (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the Introduction to Judaism genre continued to flourish at this time, with popular examples written by Anita Diamant, Rabbis Irving Greenberg, Hayim Donin, and David Wolpe, as well as Sarah Hurwitz, Noah Feldman, and Rabbi Sharon Brous in more recent years.

The ideas disseminated by these mid-twentieth century genres have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Americans continue to be outraged by antisemitic incidents in this country. There is still a huge discrepancy between the 1920s through early 1940s era, described in Postwar Stories, when antisemitism was much more accepted as part of the American Way—and the post-1940s reality, when antisemitism continued but lessened and was increasingly called out and interpreted as an affront to American values. As a result of the mid-twentieth century “religion moment” described in Postwar Stories, Americans continue to classify Jews as members of an American religion, despite the problems inherent in that categorization: we all know Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but not religious.

Today, we live in a culture that is very much a result of the ideas and attitudes these genres helped to inculcate. With increased antisemitism and questions about the meaning of Judaism during an era when Jewishness has become a more challenging identity, we may find Americans making their way back to these mid-twentieth century genres.

Featured image credit: Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck & Sam Jaffe in a scene from the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections

The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections

India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. The elections to the 543-member lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha) with an electorate, numbering 968 million eligible voters, assumes critical importance as India is going through both internal and external changes that are heavily linked to its rising power aspirations and achievements. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been campaigning on the claim that under his leadership, India’s global status has improved substantially and that he is determined to make India a great power and developed country by 2047, the centenary year of independence. The growing Hindu middle class seems to agree. According to a February 2023 Pew survey, Modi had a 79% favorable approval rating. More interestingly, some 85% of Indians surveyed by Pew think a strong authoritarian leader or military rule is preferable to multi-party electoral democracy, the highest for any country surveyed.

Since its economic liberalization in 1991, in terms of comprehensive national power, including both hard and soft power markers, India has made substantial progress—in some areas more than in others—even though it still lags behind China in many indicators of material power and social welfare. The critical factor is the steady economic growth rate ranging from 6 to 8% over the past three decades. The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030. The tactical and strategic advantages India has made under somewhat favorable geopolitical circumstances are many, but these could easily erode if its soft power foundations, especially democracy, secularism, and federalism, decline even further.

The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030.

The implications of the elections to India’s rise as an inclusive democratic state is potentially far reaching. If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state. India’s status advancement in recent years has benefitted the ruling establishment. Modi’s achievements are built on the foundations laid by the previous Congress Party-led governments of Prime Ministers P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh. India’s 2005 rapprochement with the US and its opening to the world, especially to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, occurred during that period. It was Rao and his Finance Minister Singh who opened the Indian economy to the world through their wide-ranging economic reforms in 1991. The economic growth was also very robust during much of Singh’s tenure. Many of the social programs were started during that period, but Modi has improved on their delivery by introducing direct transfer and also adding new welfare programs guaranteeing the poor subsided rations and cooking gas. Some 300 million Indians were lifted out of extreme poverty during Singh’s term in office alone, and a similar number may have come out during BJP rule. Yet India still hosts some 12% of its 1.4 billion population below the poverty line (considered as $2 a day) while 84% have an income less than $7 a day.  

If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state.

The previous Congress regime’s inability to cash in on their achievements for electoral gains is in direct contrast to Modi’s success in presenting a different image to the public on India’s economic and military achievements and general international status advancement. Skillful propaganda, especially using social media, has enabled this. India’s swing power role in the Indo-Pacific, in terms of balancing China’s rise and aggressive behavior, has helped India’s geopolitical prominence and Modi has astutely used it for his own electoral successes. He has used contentious religious nationalism, including the building of a temple in Ayodhya over a destroyed Muslim mosque, repealing the Article 370 of the Constitution which gave Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous status, and adding programs to allow citizenship to displaced minorities (excluding Muslims) from neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, to solidify his support among ardent Hindu-nationalist groups. The 18 million-strong Indian diaspora contains many pro-Hindu groups that have helped Modi’s efforts by offering financial and moral support.

Although the rising power claim may have helped Modi’s possible third term re-election, there is another side to this story. Some of the BJP government’s internal policies may, in the long-run, undercut the status achievement by putting its legitimacy and sustainability in question. The number one challenge is the democratic backslide that has been happening under the BJP rule. Today India is ranked at 66 as a ‘partly free country’ by Freedom House, and the rating agency V-Dem recently demoted India as an ‘electoral autocracy.’ A number of measures curtailing freedom of expression and other essential democratic rights have occurred under Modi, denting India’s democratic credentials, one of its key soft power assets. Similarly, secularism, another soft power marker of India since independence, has been reduced as there is a direct effort to assert the Hindu majoritarianism as visualized by the BJP and its militant ideological arm, the Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS).

The democratic backsliding presages considerable difficulties to legitimizing India’s status as a liberal democratic rising power. The major challenges to freedom of expression, the party’s increasing ideological control of India’s judiciary, and the attacks on minority rights, as well as harassment an arrest of opposition leaders using governmental agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate, all portend the emergence of an illiberal state even when elections are held periodically. While Hindutva (Hindu-ness) aimed at the hegemony of Hinduism over all other religious groups has increasing sympathy among the Hindu electorate and sections of the diaspora, it is still to obtain any international traction as an attractive ideology or model for political order. It is yet to offer a coherent and convincing agenda for the emerging world order.

The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas such as Ahimsa (non-violence), among others, to develop his model of non-violent struggle. Can Modi in his third term make a conscious effort to develop India as an inclusive, democratic state, and bring peaceful and tolerant aspects of Hinduism to the fore? Or will Indian democratic exceptionalism evolve into an entrenched populist majoritarian system with all its attendant challenges for democratic freedoms, even while India makes substantial material progress? The simultaneous democratic backsliding in many countries, including the US and Europe, does not help India’s prospects in this regard. India may still receive a higher geopolitical position (in the context of China’s rise) and the steady economic growth that would allow it to emerge as a key destination for trade and foreign investment, and a source of technically qualified workforce and migrants for the next two decades or more. India’s greater inclusion in global governance is needed for reasons of equity, efforts at solving many collective action problems, and greater effectiveness of international institutions. The peaceful accommodation of India will alter the historical patterns of rise and fall of great powers through war. Whether it will be a peaceful process internally is yet to be determined. The forthcoming elections will establish India’s trajectory in a colossal way both for its domestic politics and foreign relations.

Feature image by Graphic Gears on Unsplash, public domain

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How well do you know Shakespeare’s plays? [quiz]

How well do you know Shakespeare’s plays? [quiz]

This month, we’re starting to release new editions of The New Oxford Shakespeare series. Combining cutting-edge scholarship from leading researchers with authoritative texts and beautifully illustrated covers, they offer readers a complete guide to the Bard.

But how well do you know some of his greatest plays? Brush up on your Shakespeare with our quiz below!

Which Shakespeare play did Sir John Falstaff first appear in before his starring role in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”?“Henry V”“Othello”“Henry IV Part 1”“Hamlet”Duncan rewards Macbeth by making him…King of ScotlandThane of CawdorLord of InvernessThane of GlamisHow many characters die in “Romeo and Juliet”?106152In “As You Like It”, which character gives the famous “All the world's a stage” monologue?JaquesRosalindTouchstoneOrlando de BoysAs mentioned earlier, Sir John Falstaff first appears in “Henry IV Part 1.” But what was his name in the first version of the play?Sir Herbert Beerbohm TreeSir Henry LollardSir John BeechwoodSir John OldcastleIn “The Tempest”, which witch is the mother of Caliban?SycoraxMedeaCirceMorgan le Fay“Measure for Measure” has been described as a…ComedyProblem playTragedyDark comedyWhich country is Scotland at war with at the beginning of “Macbeth”?SwedenIrelandNorwayEnglandWhat insulting gesture starts a fight at the beginning of “Romeo and Juliet”?A middle fingerA bitten thumbA raised fistA disapproving glareWhat are the names of the shipwrecked servants Caliban conspires with in “The Tempest”?Alonso and AntonioFerdinand and GonzaloAdrian and FranciscoStephano and Trinculo

The Shakespeare plays in this quiz are:

The Merry Wives of Windsor, available here.Macbeth, available here.Romeo and Juliet, available here.As You Like It, available here.Henry IV Part 1, available here.The Tempest, available here.Measure for Measure, available here.

Featured image by Taha via Unsplash , public domain

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Do American family names make sense?

Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually smiths, sons of Jack, residents in Washington, or red-haired. The disconnect between sense and usage in these particular names is mainly the result of hereditary surnaming back in England and Scotland, but this is not its only source. Names change their shapes, get borrowed into different cultures, and are sometimes re-interpreted to mean something other than what they originally meant. The frozen food company, Birds Eye, took its brand name from the founder’s surname, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey. His family had migrated from England to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, and the name’s meaning as a nickname looks obvious. But when it is traced back in English historical records, Birdseye turns out to be a habitational name, an altered form of the Lancashire gentry surname Bardsley, which migrated to Buckinghamshire, England, in the fifteenth century and was simplified there from the sixteenth century onward to Bardsey, Berdsey, Burdsey, and Birdseye.

The underlying cause for the disconnect is that names, unlike words, don’t have to stay meaningful in order to do their job of identifying individuals or groups of people. In fact, most American family names make no sense at all today and it is fascinating to uncover their original meanings and what they tell us about the history of the people who bear them. Hereditary surnames are especially vulnerable to changes in pronunciation that obscure their original senses. Starbuck, for example, seems to be an altered form of Tarbuck, which is recorded in the thirteenth century as the surname of the family who were lords of Tarbock in Lancashire, England. In the 1630s, Edward Starbuck, a coloniser from Derbyshire, England, set up a whaling company on Nantucket Island. Herman Melville borrowed the surname for the chief mate of the whaling ship Pequod in his novel Moby Dick to give his incredible story an appearance of local veracity. It is this fictional character that the coffee chain is arbitrarily named for.

Absence of sense enables names to migrate easily from person to person and into other languages, where they can be further mangled or re-interpreted, nowhere more prolifically than in the United States. American family names have a unique diversity, the living evidence of a country founded on colonization, forced transportation (especially of West Africans), and influxes of refugees and economic migrants from across the globe. The latest edition of the explains over 80,000 of them and includes 35 introductory essays written by experts from countries across the world.

Names as gateways into world history are full of surprises. Trump is a surname from Bavaria in Germany, where in medieval times the now obsolete word trumpe, “drum,” was adopted as a name for a drummer. (Donald Trump’s Scottish connection is on his mother’s side.) Biden probably derives from the place called Baydon in Wiltshire, England, and has been a family name in neighbouring Hampshire since the early fourteenth century. (Joe Biden’s Irish connection is on his mother’s side.) Mancini is from Italian mancino, a nickname for a left-handed person. Wang is chiefly Chinese, from a Romanized spelling of Mandarin and Cantonese words of many senses, including “king, royal” and “yellow, gold.”

Some family names have been created in America itself, where individuals whose own culture had no tradition of surnaming found themselves legally required to have one. Migrants from Muslim countries and from parts of the Indian subcontinent have commonly opted for one of their own personal names. The Dictionary explains that the surname Abdullah, with over 8,000 bearers in the 2010 US census, is an Arabic personal name ‘Abdullāh, “servant of God.” Murthy, with 1,268 bearers in 2010, is from southwest India, where it is a personal name from the Sanskrit murti, “manifestation, image,” that of one of the gods, Rama or Krishna.

Among Native Americans, a different solution was to use their personal name in an English translation. The Cheyenne Mo’ohnah’evaoo’etse, “Elk stands with his wife,” refers to the habit of elks standing shoulder to shoulder, and was Americanized as the surname Elkshoulder. The most common American surname actually in a Native American language is Begay, with 17,533 bearers in the 2010 census. It is an Anglicized spelling of the Navajo word biye’, “his son,” which was originally part of a longer personal name, coming after the father’s name. It was imposed on Navajos by white officials, who mistook it for a surname. Some Native Americans adopted the surname of a colonial administrator. Abeyta is a Hispanic surname mostly found among the Pueblos of New Mexico, where in the 1690s a Spaniard, Diego de Abeytia (or de Beitia), was involved in its recolonization. His surname referred to a place called Beitia in Biscay, Basque Country, in northern Spain.

But most Native Americans assimilated to Anglo-American culture by doing what most of the freed slaves of West African heritage did­—borrowing an existing, commonplace surname like Smith or Johnson. An alternative strategy favored by African Americans was to take the surname of an admired figure, such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, or Washington. The Dictionary reveals time and again that the Englishness of an American surname is not a safe guide to the ethnicity or heritage of its bearers. Immigrants, too, often adapted to their new country through the translation or assimilation an existing non-English name into an English near-equivalent. Yet more sources of Smith are Dutch Smit, German and Jewish Schmidt, and Slavic Koval. Dutch Timmerman was sometimes translated into the English Carpenter, French Boulanger into Baker, and German Goldwasser into Goldwater.

The Ashkenazic Jewish name Kaplan, from German Kaplan or Polish kapłan, “chaplain, curate,” was already a translation of Cohen, from Hebrew kohen, “priest,” before it was assimilated in the American composer’s family to Copland, an English habitational name from either of two northern English place-names. Assimilated name-forms have created countless similar examples of misleading appearances. Sharkey is usually Irish, a shortened, Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Searcaigh, “descendant of Searcach,” from a nickname meaning “beloved,” but it is also an American garbling of French Chartier “carter.”

Family histories can resolve some of the uncertainties. Morton looks English or Scottish, a habitational name from one of the places so named, and it often is. George Morton of Nottinghamshire, England, was one of the Mayflower pilgrim fathers.But, as the Dictionary explains, the name has several other origins as anAmericanization of Swedish, Finnish, French, and Jewish names. John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had a Finnish grandfather called Martti Marttinen—“Martin Martin’s son”— who moved to Sweden, where his name was Scandinavianized as Mårten Mårtensson,pronounced Mortenson, and then to America, where his surname was shortened to Morton.

Another way in which the Dictionary disambiguates the origins of a family name is to note the forenames associated with it in US telephone directories. Lee, with nearly 700,000 bearers in the 2010 census, is the standout instance of an English habitational name that was re-purposed to assimilate names from other languages. They include one each from Irish and Norwegian and six from Romanized forms of Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. The surname is famous as that of a Shropshire family that migrated from England to Virginia in the early seventeenth century and whose descendants were prominent in the American Revolution and the Civil War. But some of its forenames in America—Young, Sang, Jae, Jong, Jung, Sung, Yong, Kyung, Seung, Dong, Kwang, Myung­—alert us to other histories, of later migrations from Southeast Asia.

Is it ever safe to take an American family name at face value? Often yes, even if all you can be sure of is that the name, whatever its original sense, belongs to a specific group of people. But, as you have seen from the names I’ve picked out for discussion, appearances can be very deceptive.

Featured image by Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash.

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From “frog” to “toad”

From “frog” to “toad”

I did not intend to write an essay about toad, because a detailed entry on this word can be found in An Analytical Dictionary of English Etymology (2008), but a letter came from our correspondent wondering whether the etymology of toad is comparable with that of frog (the subject of the previous two posts), and the most recent comment also deals with both creatures. Therefore, I decided to address this question. In the 2008 book, almost nothing is said about frog.

“‘Big and ugly, fat and loathsome she is,’ said the young green frogs. ‘And her brats are getting to be just like her!’ ‘May be so,’ said Mamma Toad, ‘but one of them has a jewel in its head, if I don’t have it myself.’” This exchange occurs in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Toad,” a late tragic version of “The Ugly Duckling,” with an ending echoing that of “The Little Mermaid.” However, “life is so beautiful,” as H. C. Andersen’s Toad said, and etymology is so impersonal that we are justified in making our simple story fully unemotional.

A knot of toads
Image by Plum Leaves via Flickr, CC2.0

Like frog, the word toad was recorded in Old English, and the form was nearly stable, except that the root vowel could be short or long. In Middle English, both tadde and tāde (ā, as in Modern English spa) occurred too. However, two of their lookalikes, both meaning “frog,” also existed, namely, Old English tosca and tocsa (it is really the same word with sc ~ cs alternating by metathesis, a phonetic process, discussed earlier in connection with frog). A few Scandinavian and Low German forms, such as tudse, tossa, and Tutze, resemble both tosca and to some extent, pad ~ padda, the English names of the frog (pad and paddock), also familiar from the previous post. This overlap is not surprising, because, as we already know, frogs and toads often share the same name.

Toads play an outstanding role in folklore and superstitions (much more so than frogs), and no one is in a hurry to notice a jewel in the toad’s head (the aging H. C. Andersen was the rarest exception). Toads are held to be both ugly and poisonous. They are associated with witchcraft and various diseases, from warts to angina pectoralis. Therefore, taboo is prominent in the names of the toad, a circumstance that may be partly responsible for the opacity of Latin būfō and others.

In their search for origins, etymologists always try to find similar words in the language under investigation and in other languages. Greek toxikós “poisonous” has been sometimes cited in connections with toad, but this guess leads nowhere. The same holds for the by now familiar attempts to compare toad with several verbs meaning “to swell.” Equally unpromising is the comparison between tudse and Old High German zuscen “to burn.” (What do toads and burning have in common? Our Germanic ancestors were not familiar with the dangerous cane toad! Or is the reference again to warts?) By contrast, Old Icelandic tað “dung” (ð has the value of th in English the) may have some potential as a cognate of toad.  Surprisingly, dung will soon reemerge in our discussion.

The greatest difficulty in reconstructing the early history of Old English tāde (see this form above) is the long vowel in the root. In Old English, the source of ā is invariably the diphthong ai (compare Gothic stains and Old English stān “stone”). A form like tudse is incompatible with taide (if taide ever exited!), because u and ai never alternated in the same root. For this reason, toad ended up in the by now familiar swamp of words of unknown origin.

Yet it would be a rare coincidence if tāde and tudse, both meaning “toad,” were unrelated. Therefore, in the 2008 dictionary, I suggested (and my suggestion still seems reasonable to me) that under the influence of taboo or emphasis (considering the treatment of toads in old societies) the originally short vowel in tadde was lengthened. The only two common Old English words with spontaneous lengthening (that is, not caused by any phonetic regularity) have an expressive meaning: wēl “well” and fraam “bold.” Dung, to which I promised to return, smells bad. Is this why Old English goor “dung” had an unexplained long vowel? Another expressive word? Such hypotheses cannot be proved. Very few proposals in etymology can be “proved” the way it is done in mathematics, as I keep repeating from essay to essay. At best, one can call them reasonable, credible, probable.

If the root of toad was tad– (with an original short vowel), we find ourselves on familiar ground. English t-d words are numerous. Two weeks ago, I mentioned only tod and toddle, but similar words crop up everywhere, even though most of them are either regional or if “standard,” little-known. Consider tad “child,” tid– in tidbit (or tit-, if you prefer titbit); another tod ~ toddle “a small cake,” tid “a very small person,” tit ~ tid “teat,” and quite a few others. The interjection tut-tut looks like part of that series. In English, some such words are native, while others were borrowed from German or Scandinavian. Most of them are of northern origin. For whatever reason, in Germanic, tattlingand toddling of all kinds suggests pettiness.

Toads have nothing to do with toadstools.
Image via PickPik, CC0.

Toad with a historically short vowel joins the club, along with Danish tudse and Swedish tossa (apparently, from todsa). Perhaps the toad was thought of as a small round creature. Or its warts gave it its name. Equally probable is that the toad’s manner of moving in short steps (toddling or tottering) provided the sought-for connection. Regardless of whether my reconstruction is credible, one should avoid searching for some ancient (Proto-Germanic or Indo-European) root, from which all such words have allegedly developed over the centuries. It seems that the complex tid/ted/tod/ tad varying with tit/tet/tot/tat is always available for engendering more and more words. Someone teds (“lifts and separates”) hay, while someone else needs a tad more salt in the soup for hungry toddlers (tiny tots, also known as tuds, are so choosy!). Life is governed by the tit for tat principle. Some toads have jewels in the head, while others don’t, but the reproduction of short expressive t-d/t-t words seems to be constant.

Nor do tadpoles interest toads: unlike human beings, they don’t care for their future.
Image: Pacific Tree Frog Tadpoles (Pseudacris regilla) by Greg Schechter, via Flickr, CC2.0.

The word toadstool reflects people’s uncalled-for abhorrence of toads. The structure of the word is obvious, even though toads never touch this poisonous mushroom. Tadpole, from tāda + pole, is the opposite: the creature is known to all (I’ll leave it to our readers to search online for the many slangy senses of tadpole!), but the word’s structure is less clear. Pole is here another spelling of poll “head,” probably a borrowing from thirteenth-century German (and again, I’ll leave it to the curious to find out why we “take a poll”), but tad– is toad with a short vowel, not the one I reconstructed in the prehistory of toad, but from a shortened one (this shortening occurred in old trisyllabic words: compare holy and holiday). Toadies are abhorrent, but you could not expect a derivative of toad to be given a fair hearing. I am now saying goodbye to my amphibians from Greece to England and beyond, unless new questions provoke new essays. Questions and comments are always welcome.

Featured image: Hans Christian Andersen by Franz Hanfstaengl, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Understanding the EU’s Law Enforcement Directive

Understanding the EU’s Law Enforcement Directive

If you ask an average European if they may request Google or Facebook to delete their data, they are likely to refer to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They are also likely to turn to a Data Protection Authority (DPA) or even directly to the domestic courts for that matter.

If you ask the same person if they may request the police to disclose if they are processing their personal data and to have these data (e.g, fingerprints, DNA samples, names, etc.) rectified or deleted, the average European might be more hesitant.

Why is this the case?

When thinking about data protection, most of us relate to the GDPR, which entered into force in May 2016. The GDPR is indeed a significant legal act which, amongst others, triggered almost each public and private entity operating in the EU to strengthen its data protection culture. It also gave more powers to private individuals to enforce their rights through the DPAs and courts. It has furthermore resulted in an increasing number of ground-breaking judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

As significant as questions such as “Should Google delete my data from its online search results?”; ‘How should my health record be protected?”; or “What remedies do I have if the misuse of my data concerns several EU Member States?” may be, individuals may not so intuitively ask themselves what happens to their data when processed by the EU Member State law enforcement authorities for the purposes of enforcing criminal law.

Not too many people are aware that in May 2016, next to the GDPR, a second legal instrument—which has remained in the shadows of the GDPR—was adopted. It is namely the EU Law Enforcement Directive (LED). The LED deserves special attention for two main reasons. First, it is the first EU instrument which harmonizes almost all aspects of data protection by police and criminal justice authorities across the EU Member States. Second, it anchors a high number of provisions, which seek to ensure a robust and a modern level of data protection in the criminal law field and which the Member States should have implemented by now in their national laws.

The LED regulates essential questions, such as when and under what conditions may the police collect and further process our personal data and transfer them to other law enforcement authorities outside the EU; when and what information should the law enforcement authorities disclose to the concerned data subjects; how long may these store the data and when are they required to delete them; how should the police differentiate between suspects, victims, and witnesses; how should individuals exercise their data protection rights against the law enforcement authorities; what powers and responsibilities do DPAs have in helping ensure that the LED provisions are fully respected; and when may individuals turn to courts in order to address their data protection grievances. 

Not surprisingly, the LED provisions resemble the GDPR in many aspects, yet there are significant differences. Even similar provisions apply differently in the law enforcement field, as compared to fields such as online commence, due to the peculiarities of the criminal law sector. The national implementations add another level of complexity to the application of its provisions.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that individuals, lawyers, police officers, prosecutors, prison authorities, DPA officers, judges, and academics need guidance on the interpretation and application of the LED provisions. Our LED Commentary contains a meticulous analysis of each and every article of the LED, including practical examples and examples from the implementation of each provision into national law, as well as relevant CJEU case law which interprets a growing number of LED provisions. Last but not least, the volume contains three special chapters, in addition to the article-by-article analysis of the LED. First, there is a dedicated chapter on the criminal law cooperation between the EU Member States and UK after Brexit, highlighting the data protection-related aspects of this cooperation. Second, the volume features a chapter on the role of the Council of Europe and  the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, which dates back to decades preceding the entry into force of the LED and which provides useful guidance about the interpretation of the LED. Third, due to the fact that the LED is a directive and not a regulation, the topic of the national implementations is a central one. It is therefore also tackled in a separate chapter, in addition to the examples from national law examined in each article analysis.

The contributors to the volume are an international team of renowned data protection experts in the field, who have been working especially on criminal law topics. They have included their practical experience, knowledge of national legislation, and data protection expertise, providing an in-depth analysis of each provision, inviting their broad and international audience to use the knowledge generated by this volume in order to contribute to the high level of protection in the criminal law field.

Featured image: Ferdinand Stöhr via Unsplash, public domain.

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Remembering John Hope Franklin, OAH’s first Black president

Remembering John Hope Franklin, OAH’s first Black president

The 2024 OAH Conference on American History begins in New Orleans on 11 April, almost exactly fifteen years after the death of the organization’s first Black president, John Hope Franklin. Franklin’s life embodied the conference theme of “being in service to communities and the nation,” and the annual meeting offers an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary body of work and how it speaks to the present moment.

Franklin’s seven-decade career defies overstatement. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1941, marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, became the president of the OAH in 1975, was named by President Bill Clinton to lead the Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race in 1997, and, in 2006, won the John Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress for lifetime achievement in the humanities. He published over two dozen books and 100 articles. His influence as a teacher and mentor is incalculable.

Franklin came to prominence in the middle years of the twentieth century, and his work during this period, both inside and outside of the academy, continues to resonate as the history profession confronts right-wing attacks on the teaching and study of Black history. In 1947, he published his third book, From Slavery to Freedom, which placed African Americans at the center of a story so long dominated by white figures. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, and other pioneering Black scholars before him, Franklin emphasized what serious historians came to accept as an essential fact: Black history is American history. From Slavery to Freedom revolutionized the field; as historian Paul Finkelman writes in his essay on Franklin for the American National Biography, the book “[made] it possible for African American history to be taught outside of historically black colleges and universities.” It would go on to sell over three million copies across nine editions and remains in print today.

A year later, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Franklin to serve as an expert witness in the case of Johnson v. Board of Trustees of Kentucky, in which African American student Lyman T. Johnson sought to enter the graduate program in history of the University of Kentucky, which only admitted white students. Franklin, with the help of sympathetic white professors at UK, mined official records and showed that the designated Black school, Kentucky State College, did not offer a comparable education. In 1949, the US District Court ruled that Johnson must be allowed to enter the University of Kentucky. In 1998, the university gave Franklin an honorary doctorate.

Marshall called Franklin again in 1953. By this point, the NAACP had won significant victories in Supreme Court cases that eliminated “separate but equal” in graduate and professional programs. Marshall and key NAACP lawyers, including Constance Baker Motley, were readying cases that would force the Court to rule on segregation in primary and secondary schools. He asked Franklin to conduct research on the Fourteenth Amendment to bolster the argument that school segregation was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause. “As only Thurgood Marshall could put it,” Franklin recalled in a 2007 interview with historian Ray Arsenault, “he threatened me in a way that I knew that I was going to be in danger if I didn’t accept his invitation or his command.” Franklin arranged his fall schedule so that he could teach at Howard University Monday through Wednesday morning and then travel to New York to work with the NAACP through the weekend.

The NAACP won the case that became Brown v. Board of Education, but Franklin was “bitterly mistaken, tragically mistaken” in thinking that the Supreme Court’s ruling would force southern officials to integrate schools right away, or, as the Court so vaguely put it the following year, “with all deliberate speed.” Franklin also knew that segregation was not an issue peculiar to the South. Franklin had studied the problem as an historian, but he also had first-hand experience. He moved to New York City in 1956 to chair the history department at Brooklyn College, but he struggled to find a home within walking distance to the school; realtors refused to show him houses because of his race, insurance companies balked at working with him, and banks refused to approve his loan. When he eventually bought a house—thanks to his lawyer’s father being on the board of a bank—he and his family faced constant harassment from white neighbors. The continuous struggle against racial discrimination, past and present, would motivate Franklin’s work for the rest of his life.

Franklin died on 25 March 2009, not three months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country’s first Black president. Bill Clinton spoke at his memorial service. In 2015, at Duke University’s celebration of Franklin’s centennial, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust mused, “For John Hope Franklin, history was a calling and a weapon, a passion and a project.” He understood “history itself as a causal agent and on the writing of history as mission as well as profession.” The OAH conference reminds us to consider Franklin’s legacy. It also allows us to celebrate how historians today have followed in his footsteps, untangling America’s past through honest research and skilled interpretation even as politicians and opinionmakers undermine the teaching of race, slavery, and the diversity of American experiences.

Feature image by World Maps via StockSnap, CC1.0.

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Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies

Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies

In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous. Throughout history, ‘experts’ have put out careless suggestions about the types of people likely to write these letters, with poor people, busybodies, menopausal, repressed women being identified as likely ‘types’. I do not think that particular personality types are more or less likely to write anonymously, but that some people, for various reasons, respond to moments in their lives, or react to social or personal situations by writing such letters.

We must be careful, when discussing anonymous letters, to not assume we have a full or typical sample. The anonymous letters that were considered sensational by the press, or actionable at law, were probably atypical. Very many were disregarded, burned, ignored, or thrown away. In the twentieth century, for example, the media and the police became particularly focused on letter campaigns where there was a female suspect and where letters were sent within a tight neighbourhood, especially if these letters were deemed to be obscene or threatening. Similar letters with an obvious male suspect, or sent to workplaces and not homes, were, in contrast, not the focus of significant legal attention.

In only 39 of the 105 cases I examine in Penning Poison do we have a known writer. Despite the fact that men would have written the vast majority of anonymous letters throughout history (often because of disparities regarding available time, resources, abilities, and money), 17 of these ‘unmasked’ writers were women and 22 were men, implying a much greater focus on identifying female writers. One suspect, Annie Tugwell, was watched around the clock by three policemen for over three weeks in the summer of 1913. This seems to be a disproportionate response. It also appears that material evidence was planted by the police in that case to secure a conviction.

In the Victorian period, there were many assumptions that only the poor would write anonymous letters. In 1870 attention was drawn ‘to the nuisance that the new half-penny post was likely to become by mischievous persons sending obscene, slanderous, or grossly offensive remarks on the open cards’. This came with the assumption that a cheaper delivery system would encourage poor people to write anonymously. However, until the early twentieth century, most of the convicted writers of anonymous letters were affluent men who appeared to be respectable members of their communities. The people in control of the medium—the male, the respected and the rich—were those who appeared to abuse it. In the book, I include the case study of Rev Robert Bingham, the curate of Maresfield in East Sussex, who in 1810 wrote fake threatening letters, penned as though from the ‘Foresters’, local people connected to enclosures in nearby Ashdown forest. These letters threatened arson, and in January 1811 Bingham’s parsonage burned down. Eventually suspicion settled upon the curate himself; Bingham was seen moving stacks of wood the day before the fire, and had planted a flower over his books, buried in the garden. Despite very weighty evidence against him, Bingham was acquitted.

In later cases, the local police, juries, and judges refused to accept that respectable people accused of letter-writing episodes were actually the most likely culprits (unless the accused person was a menopausal woman). In many cases, the legal system first prosecuted a person who seemed to be rough or uneducated, before finally convicting the actual perpetrator, often a person with education and cultural capital who was pretending to be less respectable in their letters. This happened in Redhill, Surrey, in the 1910s, when greengrocer Mary Johnson was repeatedly accused (and twice convicted) of writing letters that were actually penned by her more respectable neighbour, Eliza Woodman. Johnson was hounded out of the town, and settled in Croydon, despite being proven to be innocent. In Littlehampton in the 1920s a similar situation occurred, with Rose Gooding imprisoned for letters written by her more outwardly respectable neighbour, Edith Swan.

Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations could be much better. The majority of speculation as to the mental dispositions of writers (their ‘personality types’), hinged on perceptions of respectability and preconceived ideas about the particularity of feminine malice. An unbalanced fascination with female letter-writers in the twentieth century was influenced by a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women. It was not an epidemic of female mental illness, but British society was not interested in complex societal explanations and instead sought psychological factors—being uptight, sexually repressed, menopausal, having a ‘dual personality’, enviousness. No doubt some of the writers discussed in Penning Poison could have been diagnosed with psychological disorders if they were assessed today, but the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, their mental states were not assessed properly at all and cannot now be reconstructed.

Anonymity creates disinhibition—people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many anonymous letters show the author to be play-acting a role—as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In particular, it is noticeable that in quite a few of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised and often powerless lives within their respective communities. Not signing their name permitted these writers to create an entirely new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (at least in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a street, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience.

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Jonah and genre [long read]

Jonah and genre [long read]

Reading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it seems odd to even talk about it. Indeed, the very phrase “reading according to genre” sounds odd itself, entirely too formal, perhaps suitable for some English or Comparative Literature class, but hardly something that normal people do when reading normal things on an everyday basis. While that is true, to some degree at least, the oddity of the phrasing only underscores the point that we read according to genre so automatically, so intuitively, that we typically don’t even know we are doing it in the first place.

Consider the newspaper. No one expects an Op-Ed piece on the front page, nor a sports column in the classified section (ads, however, can evidently go anywhere!). Why not? Mostly because we know our way around a newspaper, and newspapers have, over the course of time, become structured in certain sorts of ways—with front pages, then pages devoted to sports, cartoons, classifieds, editorials, religion, advice, movies, etc.—all clearly marked and often on completely independent sections. A similar point obtains for letter writing. We know what kind of letter begins with the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” and how it differs from a letter that begins “Dear Sweetie” or “Hey Joe.” We have been raised in the culture and its language and literature so that we have attained, through formal and informal education, a basic competency—not only in the spoken tongue (linguistic competence) but also in the literary forms (literary competence; see John Barton’s Reading the Old Testament). The same holds true even for newer developments in communication and social media. Emails, too, can begin with “Dear Professor” or “Hi Brent,” and that is enough to signal something of their tone and content. It is clear, too, that both of those emails are more formal than a text message that reads “where r u @? c u soon k?” As for those who prefer their newspapers online, distinct webpages usually keep distinct content…well, distinct. The present editorial, for instance, is not found on the same page as the scholarly entries on biblical figures, places, and the like.

All of this makes good sense, but when we turn to ancient literature like the Bible, all bets are off. The Bible comes from a very different culture and was originally composed in languages other than contemporary English. We cannot read the Bible as if it were a piece of modern literature—that is, read it according to our own literary conventions. But just as a Hebrew or Aramaic letter (cf. Ezra 4:11–22; 5:6–17; 7:11–26) isn’t quite the same as an English business letter, the forms and genres of biblical literature aren’t the same as our own. There is overlap, to be sure, but there are also significant differences, even when there is overlap (Hebrew narrative, for example, tends to be more spare than contemporary English examples); and there are cases where there’s little or no overlap at all (prophetic lawsuits, for example, or apocalyptic literature like that found in Daniel 7–12 or Revelation). A real challenge, then, is coming to grips with the genres used in the Bible—becoming literarily competent in those forms so that we can read “with the grain” and aright, rather than erroneously and anachronistically (to put it rather too simply).

Consider the book of Jonah. It is a short book that, despite its brevity, is remarkably well-known—mostly due to its “big fish” story. At the end of chapter 1, Jonah, who is a most reluctant prophet on the run from God’s call to preach to the dreaded Assyrians, is thrown overboard in the midst of a terrible storm at sea that is caused—so the story goes—by God precisely because of the prophet’s disobedience. As Jonah glugs into the deeps, God appoints a “large fish” to swallow him up. There Jonah lasts for three days, uttering a beautiful if rather ill-timed prayer (because it thanks God for a deliverance that hasn’t yet happened) in chapter 2, before the fish vomits him out—perhaps out of disgust, but evidently right on the road to Nineveh, where he finally takes up his task (though evidently still reluctantly) in chapters 3–4. This is a terribly brief summary of what is a remarkably beautiful and deceptively straightforward book, but it suffices to engage us in the key question: what genre is Jonah?

The fish story has attracted a good bit of attention. “Jonah and the whale” almost serves as a cipher or CliffsNotes kind of summary for the book, despite the facts that (1) the book never calls the animal in question a whale but simply a “fish” or “big fish,” and (2) the fish episode is hardly what the book of Jonah is primarily about. Nevertheless, focus on “the whale” highlights the genre question because many people have stumbled over precisely this point. “No one could live in a whale [or ‘big fish’!], not even one day, let alone three!”—some people say, while some others might insist that, for whatever reason (usually a religious one), they see no problem with the story being “true” or “factual” or “literal.”

The last-mentioned term is both instructive and problematic. “Literal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is derived from Old French literal and, before that, Latin litterālis, both of which have to do with “letter.” So, the first main meaning in OED for “literal” is “[o]f or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical.” From this first meaning, OED moves to the second main meaning: “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” On first blush, this second meaning seems to approximate what some people seem to mean when they ask about the “literal truth” of the Bible or a story like Jonah or the “big fish story” in Jonah. However, note that the definition in OED has nothing to do with history or “facticity” per se; instead, the matter is entirely one of words and verbal exactness, not precision in terms of history or events.

The third meaning of “literal” in OED, the one concerned with the use of the term in theological discourse, makes the same point: “Pertaining to the ‘letter’ (of Scripture); the distinctive epithet of that sense or interpretation (of a text) which is obtained by taking its words in their natural or customary meaning, and applying the ordinary rules of grammar; opposed to mystical, allegorical, etc.” The earliest attested instance of this meaning according to OED stems from 1382, in John Wycliffe’s introductory comment on the Bible (Prol. 43), that Holy Scripture has four understandings: “literal, allegorik, moral, and anagogik.” Interestingly enough, Wycliffe goes on to argue that the meanings that are most instructive for people of faith are the allegorical, moral, and anagogical (or heavenly), not the literal. This helps to explain OED’s further statements regarding this third meaning of “literal”:

b. Hence, by extension, applied to the etymological or the relatively primary sense of a word, or to the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage, as distinguished from any metaphorical or merely suggested meaning. [emphasis added]

This can then be used to describe people:

c. Of persons: Apt to take literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony; prosaic, matter-of-fact or writings of various sorts:

d. Of composition: Free from figures of speech, exaggeration, or allusion even in a negative sort of way:

e. literal-minded adj. having a literal mind; characteristic of one who takes a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things. Hence literal-mindedness.

To sum up to this point, reading “literally” is primarily about the words on the page; according to some people, “literal” readings are not the most instructive, even for readers who are interested in matters of belief or faith; in fact, “literal-minded” readers are apt to mistake or misinterpret some of the most important aspects of literature—the “literal” letters (or words) on the page themselves! Returning to Jonah now, the question is how do the letters and words on the page speak to the question of the book’s genre? This is a crucial question because we don’t want to mistake Jonah’s “sports page” for its “religion section” in a “literal-minded” sort of way. So, what genre is Jonah? What kind of literature is it?

First, Jonah is a narrative—a story, comparable to other narrative sections of the Bible such as those found in Genesis or Judges. Second, it is a short story, comparable to other short stories also found in the Bible (e.g., Ruth, Esther, or the Joseph story in Genesis 37–50). Third, it is a prophetic short story, which is to say it is a story involving a prophet as the main character. One might compare the stories about Elijah and Elisha, perhaps, in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 5 which are further examples of “prophetic literature” (see David L. Petersen’s The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction). None of this, however, speaks to Jonah’s overall force or tenor or purpose—that is, is the book of Jonah fiction or nonfiction? And what is its point?

Here is where reading “according to genre” is tricky (see Steven L. McKenzie’s How to Read the Bible). As mentioned earlier, genre is so routinely learned and practiced by members of a culture that recognizing and interpreting genres is almost automatic if not subconscious. That is why we often read ancient genres as if they are modern ones—we are simply intuiting what they must be in light of our own cultural “genre-genes.” But this is also what makes reading ancient genres difficult—not only did the ancients have different genres that we don’t have, even those genres we share with the ancients often differed in antiquity (see above). Moreover, literature typically doesn’t broadcast its genre. It just is the genre it is, and competent readers know as much. When we don’t know a genre type or if we are unsure whether it is coterminous with our own examples—both of which are situations we regularly encounter when reading ancient literature—we must rely on clues to help us determine the genre.

So what further “genre clues” do we get from Jonah? One is the highly artificial nature of the book, by which I mean the evidence that shows the book has been carefully constructed, especially around closely similar and repeating structures (see Phyllis Trible’s Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah for an extensive discussion; more briefly, you can see my essay “Jonah’s Sailors and Their Lot Casting: A Rhetorical-Critical Observation” in the journal Biblica, 2010). Jonah is no quickly jotted down eyewitness account of some event in the Iron Age; it is a carefully crafted work of literature—a literary artifice.

McKenzie has argued that a number of clues in Jonah point to its genre and overall purpose as being one of satire. He highlights elements of humor, exaggeration, irony, even ridicule. For example, Jonah is more an “anti-prophet” than a prophet: he does anything and everything he can do to escape delivering God’s word to Nineveh. To cite different humorous elements: In 1:4, the ship is personified—it thinks about breaking up (NRSV: “threatened to break up”). Meanwhile, in the midst of this “perfect storm,” Jonah is napping! The sailors come off looking far more righteous than Jonah, as do the Ninevites later in the book. Another odd, if not humorous, element concerns the big fish: in 1:17 and 2:10 the fish that swallows Jonah is a masculine noun (Hebrew dāg), but in 2:1 it is a feminine noun (dāgāh)! It is highly unlikely that Jonah’s “whale” was some sort of reef fish, like the clownfish or parrotfish, that can change gender, nor would ancient Israelites have known of hermaphroditic fish. The switch could be some sort of scribal error in the textual tradition, but according to McKenzie, it may be a genre clue as well.

More could be said in support of McKenzie’s interpretation of Jonah as satire. Regardless, there are other good reasons not to read Jonah as a straightforward historical narrative. Key historical details are left out of the story, there are chronological problems in fixing the prophet and the city of Nineveh as described in the story into the history of Assyria as we now know it, and there are even geographical problems with several of the details (e.g., Jonah going to Joppa rather than Tyre, the vast size of Nineveh, and so on).

The end result of these considerations, according to McKenzie, is that Jonah is not “history but satire or parody, a ridiculous story that makes a serious point” (p. 13). To read Jonah as history is to mis-read according to genre—to mistake its real genre and therefore to “misconstrue its primary message” (p. 2), which for McKenzie has to do with the stupidity of prejudice, hatred, arrogance, and bigotry toward others (in this case, the Assyrians). That is a serious message indeed, far more significant and relevant than debating whether or not it is possible to survive under sea for three days prior to the invention of submarines. Whether or not the latter could happen is quite another question—perhaps a live question for some people—but it is not a question that the book of Jonah is primarily interested in answering. To reduce the book of Jonah to that kind of scientific (or historical) question is to make a serious category error: an error of genre, a mistake of misreading. It is to be “literal-minded” in the worst way, taking “literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony” or adopting “a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things” (OED). It may also be an attempt to evade or escape (like Jonah!) from what may be the primary point of the book since bigotry, prejudice, and hatred are very real, very live problems in our time, no less than in antiquity. Finally, Jonah’s “lessons” on these topics are as real via satire as they are via science—more real, in fact. As the Roman poet Horace said about satires long ago: “What are you laughing at? Change the name and you are the subject of the story” (Satires 1.1.69–70).

Featured image credit: “Jonah and the Whale”, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles). Public domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Philosophers don’t often write about the heart

Philosophers don’t often write about the heart

The Heart and Its Attitudes illuminates interpersonal phenomena that are, one the one hand, as local and commonplace as heartfelt connections and their rupture between friends and lovers, or, on the other, as nationally or internationally significant as the emotional injuries of racial and gender oppression and war. It is a work of philosophy that aims for rigor and analytical depth, but one that is unusual in its relevance to so much of ordinary life.

Philosophers don’t often write about the heart. At least, analytical philosophers don’t. Why is this? Philosophers are said to live life “in their heads” rather than “from their hearts.” But even if philosophers tend to be head rather heart people, why don’t they think and write about the heart? It can hardly have escaped their attention that matters of the heart are central to what we human beings value most about our lives.

“Without friends,” Aristotle said, “no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Philosophers write a lot about friendship and love, but they tend to do so in terms that leave out the centrality of the heart and heartfelt connection. They speak rather of commitment to one another and each other’s well-being, or taking each other as ends, or sharing deliberative standpoints or living life together, or a whole host of other things, and much less about mutual emotional vulnerability and sharing and being in one another’s hearts.

Surely one explanation of philosophers’ reticence is that talk of “the heart” seems unavoidably metaphorical. Analytic philosophers look for cash to underwrite metaphorical promissory notes. It turns out to be easy enough, however, to cash the metaphor in if we just take “heart” to refer to a cluster of emotional susceptibilities that have an essentially reciprocal and reciprocating structure. The heart aims at heartfelt connection—at shared experience of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, and other emotions “of the heart.” We seek naturally to share these feelings with others and must suppress our natural tendencies if we wish to avoid doing so. Our heart’s wish is to be open to other hearts in the hope that they will be open to ours, and thereby us, in return.

Of course, we do not want the very same heartfelt connection with everyone. Rejection from some hurts us more than rejection from others; and likewise for heartfelt acceptance. Still, we are not completely indifferent to the indifference or coldness of even utter strangers, and we find it necessary to defend ourselves against it, for example, by humor or anger.

“Cold-hearted” and “warm-hearted” . . . more metaphors. But we know instantly what they mean. Someone is cold-hearted if they hold their emotional cards close to their vest and close themselves to emotional engagement. And they are warm-hearted if they are contrariwise disposed. They are cold-hearted if they act without regard to others’ emotional vulnerabilities, to what will hurt others’ feelings, and warm-hearted if they are considerate of and responsive to others’ feelings, putting them at ease emotionally.

Perhaps you can begin to see the topic opening before you. (Philosophical open-heart surgery?) When we talk about our feelings being hurt, we are not talking about bad sensations, like mere physical pain. “Hurt feelings” appears in P. F. Strawson’s catalogue of what he calls “reactive attitudes” in his justly famous and influential “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson does not really define “reactive attitudes.” He gives some central characteristics (e.g., that they are felt from a “participant” or, as I put it, “second-person” standpoint), and his most influential examples, resentment, guilt, and blame—what he calls “indignation”—mediate mutual accountability. The Heart and Its Attitudes provides a systematic account, arguably the first, of reactive attitudes in general, both those involved in accountability and those that mediate heartfelt connection.

The Heart and Its Attitudes has several intended audiences. I write, in the first instances, for philosophers and students of philosophy, at whatever stage, to try to convince them that the heart and heartfelt phenomena are rich sources of philosophical investigation. I believe this is so intrinsically and also because such investigations can shed light on phenomena that have proven philosophically puzzling. But I also intend this book for the general public. It hopes to show that understanding the nature of heartfelt attitudes and their role in mediating personal and social relations, including in healing profound emotional injuries—wounds to the heart—can help us to see what might repair even terrible harms, such as those of war or chattel slavery and its legacy in the United States.

Feature image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash, public domain.

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