Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly, and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:
Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.
Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.
But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. […] At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.
Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.
Well, that’s a partial explanation of why there are Hungarians everywhere you look.
Here’s what’s curious about the “getting Magyarized” notion. It sounds like some, maybe most, of these students were at university to pursue vocations as Protestant pastors in multi-ethnic/multi-lingual “Hungary.” Whatever intellectual or society types a Protestant pastor may otherwise mix with, he would have been expected to preach and conduct services in the ordinary language of his parishioners, whether that be Magyar, Slovak, German, or something else (speakers of the other-than-those-three languages then-current in pre-Trianon Hungary would have been less likely to be Protestant but anything’s possible). Moreover, Protestantism came in various not-entirely-interchangeable flavors and in those days you needed to commit to one -you couldn’t be a “generic Protestant” pastor. And within the Hungarian lands, Protestant Slovak-speakers were much more likely to be Lutheran than Calvinist, whereas Protestant Magyar-speakers were much more likely to be Calvinist than Lutheran (to this day, Slovakia’s small Calvinist or perhaps post-Calvinist minority is mostly from the ethnic-Hungarian minority). So Slovaks attending Jena (historically a Lutheran university, although I don’t know if things had gotten sufficiently mixed up by the early 19th century that aspirants to the Calvinist clergy might also go there) as would-be Lutheran pastors were going down a career path where they would be statistically likely need to function professionally in Slovak. Of course, maybe they could function in Slovak at work on Sundays and be Magyarized for social advantage the rest of the week. Or maybe they lost their faith due to exposure to trendy newfangled ideas at university (Hegel and the rest ..) and instead of becoming pastors became the sort of good-for-nothing rootless intelligentsia that tended to fuel 19th-century nationalism.
you couldn’t be a “generic Protestant” pastor.
As Prussia’s Frederick William III learned when he fell into the classic xkcd #927 trap.
Separately, the idea that the actually-existing boundaries of actually-existing France perfectly coincided in Herder’s day with what more ambitious French nationalists thought they ought to be is ahistorical. (The present within-Europe boundaries that most present-day nationalists are I suppose reconciled to are essentially those of the 1860-1870 interlude between a military victory and a military defeat.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_borders_of_France
Yes, and I’m not sure I understand what is “linguistic nationalism” for him.
As I understand the idea is NOT that French intellectuals don’t need it because they’re already linguistic nationalists (par excellence or not).
But then he says, no doubt what language French citizens should speak – that is, he recongises that language is ideologically important (perhaps not only for whatever he calls French “nationalism”, but for this nationalism as well).
Is the idea that it is not linguistic nationalism because the French “have always been like that”, while “nationalism” is invented in 19th century or else it is not nationalism?
Or is the idea that nationalism must necessarily compete with another ideology?
Two more tidbits about the shifting borderlands between French nationalism and German nationalism.
1. Apparently one of the big-deal events in German intellectual-etc. history is the young Herder first meeting and becoming friendly with the even-younger Goethe, which occurred circa 1770 in Strasbourg. Which at that point had been under French rule since late in the previous century but was still a predominantly German-speaking place with, crucially, a university that was still a German-speaking institution (to the extent it had moved on from Latin …) that thus attracted scholars and intelligentsia from all over Germany-as-a-geographical-expression. It was only when the Jacobins replaced the Bourbons that the Universität Straßburg was subjected to linguistic nationalism and transmogrified into the Université de Strasbourg.
2. I had not immediately remembered that in addition to the usual back-and-forth over control of Alsace and Lorraine with the fortunes of war, the instability of the official borders had lasted until 1956, when the French rather reluctantly accepted that they needed to abandon dominion over their post-war Protectorat de la Sarre and allow that piece of territory (sub nomine Saarland) to be annexed by West Germany. Just a prelude to losing Algeria, a certain sort of French nationalist may have thought in hindsight.
@drasvi: I think the idea is that at least in the context of the 19th-century rise of a certain sort of nationalism in Central/Eastern Europe, the French were seen as *already* having exactly the sort of modern nation-state (based on a semi-fictive common ethnicity based on a semi-fictive common language) that certain sorts of Slovaks etc. could only dream about. Which is broadly true, but may overlook or assume away the question of whether France was really that sort of modern-nationalist place before 1789, or only afterwards.
@drasvi: to embroider a bit on what JWB said: i think “linguistic nationalism” is mainly just a phrase to highlight the ways that emerging nationalisms in some places (eastern europe in particular) used language as their key defining element, or/and a specifiying term to point to the ways that nationalisms operate in the linguistic sphere, or/and a term to mark the importance of the invention and imposition of a “national language” to nationalisms’ nation-creating projects.
the first of these is an important phenomenon because by the time the “nation” is invented in the 18thC, the western european states that embraced it had already settled on* a lect to take on the role of “national language” in a comparatively linguistically homogenous area** (and the most prominent movements seeking to become nation-states – the german and italian nationalists – followed suit as soon as they existed) . that allowed the “Land” piece of the nation-defining trinity of Land, Language, and Bloodline to be the core element and starting-point for establishing a nation.
but in 19thC eastern europe, the level of linguistic diversity in any given area was a lot higher, making it pretty much unsustainable to start nation-creation projects with Land. and Bloodline has always been the most transparently fictitious person of the trinity, so nobody really wants to start there***. so Language became the founding principle for those movements, and the past 175 years or so have been about linguistically-defined nationalist movements fighting each other over who gets to make which Land as linguistically homogenous as possible in which direction (and doing internal processes of linguistic homogenization to make the “national language” the only one in use).
.
* spain being the pioneer, with the 1492 grammar of castellano as the key inflection point. but they had the model of standardized/classicized arabic as an imperial language a lot closer to hand than the rest of western europe, and so were able to see the advantages of linguistic homogenization to a state that sought to be imperial long before anyone had the notion of a nation-state.
**often with the most linguistically different lects confined to peripheral areas, and targeted by assimilation schemes (as with euzkadi in france and spain, breton and alsatian in france, or the celtic languages in the english imperial core, for example – and with greek in future-italy as an example from the wave of aspiring nation-states).
*** except the nationalist movements that use religion as a proxy for it, whether in a negative mode like the Young Turks and kemalists and the original german Anti-Semites****, or in a positive mode like Zionism with jewishness and most strains of u.s. white nationalism with protestant christianity (Christian Identity even puts it in their name!).
**** whose profound innovation is obscured by approaches to contemporary Antisemitism that treat it as either a psychological or existential/structural issue rather than a specific, fairly young political ideology (an approach which also makes it basically impossible to effectively combat).
JWB, well, in part it is not true (as you pointed out above), and in part it must mean that the French already were “linguistic nationalists” (after all, it is “linguistic nationalism” and not “modern nationalism”). And in part it is modern mass education/mass media rather than local culture that make it possible.
My problem here is mostly with the concept of “linguistic nationalism” that excludes France. I learned first about it (not the name, just language ideology and ideas of nationhood) as a part of the explanation of the peculiar attitude of French politicians to regional langauges. I was learning Breton. It was presented to me as an uniquely French peculiarity.
Whatever role France played in spread of such ideas, for me they became the Model.
“the ways that emerging nationalisms in some places (eastern europe in particular) used language as their key defining element”
@rozele, yes, in a mixed (wrt some parameter: colour, language, religion) territory the outcome will be different.
Namely, if we assume that our nationalists want to build a state and that they prefer simple shapes to collections of enclaves (simple shapes have some technical advantage, e.g. during wars, but I don’t know if anything about nationalism itself must make a nationalist like them more than kings do), emphasising such a parameter may mean large-scale assimilation or some form of (colour/language/religion/ based) inequality or maybe an alliance of several nationalisms (like: Klingonophones and Vulcanophones are together building a state).
Also I think it can be a langauge like Latin or a conlang and it can be diglossia rather than assimilation (Arab nationalism).
If it assimilation, in such a territory this will imply a really profound change.
But if we’re making a prediction that in such a territory language ideologies are going to be more powerful, it is just not true for France. It is powerful enough there, whether we say they “need” it or not.
“if we’re making a prediction that in such a territory language ideologies are going to be more powerful”
Then our nationalists can choose NOT to associate their nationalism with langauge (“let’s build a Switzerland”), downplay linguistical/ethnic differences – “downplay” not in the sense of forced assimilation and pretending there are not such differences, but in the sense “what do they have to do with politics?” – or else not to choose any approach that requires assimilation for this very reason: too much must be changed, too many opportunities for tensions and conflicts*.
If the territory of the new state is more or less random, we of course can ask if it going to work at all. We also can ask, what about systems where people of cities and peasants (and also “nomads” in the “Oriental” contexts) are different groups. I think they always are different, e.g. in Russia, but in East Europe they could be different linguistically and ethnically as well. Will it work there, given industrialisation and everything?
But still avoiding potentially problematic themes and sharp corners is not an unusual behaviour.
So what I want to say, we expect from a historian that she will ‘explain’ rather than just ‘describe’ historical processes, but the only solid causal link I can propose here is trivial: “assimilation in a very mixed territory implies profound changes”.
*Unless they need either (their new country to be as much unlike what it used to be as possible – or conflicts), which of course does happen with political ideologies:-(
if we assume that our nationalists want to build a state and that they prefer simple shapes to collections of enclaves
these things are pretty much definitional to nationalism. and that’s knowable because nationalism is a deliberately created and deliberately spread ideology that was created as an innovation in the political sphere by very self-conscious activist intellectuals, and spread through processes that have been very thoroughly studied. the idea that it’s some kind of ‘natural’ phenomenon has often been part of that ideology, but is quite transparently an ideological fiction, and not related to actual history.
but/and: while the goal of a state is central to nationalist movements, all contemporary states aren’t nation-states. and trying to look at them as if they were is a sure way to misunderstand what’s going on with them.
a state like switzerland is not the product of a nationalist movement – no such thing existed when it was founded – and is not a nation-state. and as i understand it, the language/lineage groups within it aren’t assembled as constituent “nations” in the way that the language/lineage constituents of, say, belgium, are. what has developed around the preexisting swiss state could be called a “civic nationalism”, but i think is better understood as a racialized/religified (white/christian) patriotism (or stateolatry, if you will) that expresses itself in the language of nationalism because that is the basic language of european statehood at this point.
a state like the u.s., though created during the years when nationalism was being birthed, is also not a nation-state, in a quite different way. the u.s. is certainly, in practice, a state created by and for white christians, and has often sought to create a unitary white christian nation within its imperial core, but it is structured as a state-of-its-citizens, not as a nation-state. in fact, the contemporary movements within the u.s. most committed to the project of a nation-state – the groups that make up the white nationalist far right – are the ones most insistent on the necessity of completely restructuring the u.s. state.
A 19th century Eastern European nationalist wants everyone in his homeland (possibly expansively defined) to speak the true language of the homeland; he doesn’t think everyone in the world really ought to learn it. That’s more than enough to create decades of conflicts and ethnic cleansing, but for a French nationalist (or an American, or even an Arab), it seems kind of unambitious. Surely everyone everywhere, deep down, knows they could become a better person by joining us?
Perfectly true of French, naturally; but of course that rules out all the other candidates. I mean, say what you like about the beauties of Arabic, and I will agree; but at the end of the day there is no getting away from the fact that it’s simply not French, is there?
Certain early-modern Greek nationalists may have once had the more sweeping vision Lameen describes (possessed as they are of a language once known by the more educated sort throughout the then-known world), but most have narrowed their scope due to the various indignities and reverses of the last century or so and content themselves with comparatively modest irredentist claims against immediate neighbors. Far as I can tell, they don’t even want Sicily or Apulia back!
@rozele, but then Herder is not a nationalist! For what I know, his ideas imply break-up of such “monstrosities” as multi-ethnic states rather than assimilation (nothing that a French nationalist could like).
And our author calls his ideas “linguistic nationalism”
Of course we can say that his ideas are nationalistic, while he is not a nationalist – but then our language is messy.
i think the state vs nation thing is getting in the way again. assimilation, in the nationalist imaginary, is something that can only happen with people who are already “naturally” part of the nation, which is supposed to be united by bloodline. so to turn a multi-ethnic empire into nation-states starts with correctly identifying its constituent nations (often using language as a proxy for bloodline), and then dividing the territory among them, just as herder declared. it is only in the context of that effort that those who have strayed from the true national path – speaking slovincian rather than polish, for example, or gascon rather than ‘standard’ french – can be brought back into their proper place within the nation. similarly, as part of that effort, the “alien” elements within the national space – no matter how assimilated – must be removed, lest they continue to damage the unity of the nation. what defines alien-ness is of course endlessly negotiable, both socially and legally: german jews are the classic example, but the experiences of the deportees of 1922 provide a set of examples of how many different ways those negotiations can go.
the role of language in these processes shifts over time: often it’s at first the anchor point for establishing that a nation exists (and debates about what lects are “languages” become central to the question of which groups of people get to be nations – see all the permutations of the “macedonian question”, for example), then becoming secondary to the supposed bloodline whose existence it established, then transforming again into a sign of adherence / alliegance to the nation. but its centrality is maybe most clear in nationalist projects like zionism or u.s. white nationalism that are based on asserting the existence of a nation that unifies settler colonial populations with transparently independent histories. there, the imposition of a single language becomes a key practice to establishing the nation, and then to maintaining its unity, and stubborn retention of families’ or communities’ pre-existing lects is understood (and punished) as an anti-national act.
@rozele
Unfortunately, it is even more complicated than that. The Irish nation is notably not connected by blood, land, language, religion or any other tangible or objectively measurable/quantifiable thing, although nationalists have tried to pin it down that way. Even some Irish version of T.S. Eliot’s cultural hallmarks for Englishness would probably not work. It is probably something like being black, in that there is a self-identification and a validation by a generally accepted in-group (the two may be at variance), with lots of edge-cases and multiple identifications.
An interesting comparison!
A relevant excerpt at Far Outliers:
@PP (and @hat – thanks for the fascinating excerpt!):
yes, absolutely: the “nation” is always something assembled out of pure fiction, actively constructed by a nationalist movement. there is no way to understand any such thing (whether its concrete expression takes the form of a nation-state with imperial ambitions or a tiny and insignificant political movement) in a meaningful way by taking any of the claims that nationalisms make about their desired constituency’s “natural” unity as anything but ideological invention. the gymnastics and contortions that nationalisms devise to construct a nation are wildly varied and always messy. seeking some “tangible or objectively measurable/quantifiable thing” underlying any national project is a mug’s game at best, and only reinforces the common fiction of all nationalisms – that “nations” are “natural” entities that should be the basis for structuring human life (through the form of the state). there’s no preexisting “natural” there there.
blackness is something different, though. there certainly are black nationalisms, some pan-diasporic (like garvey’s UNIA) and some territorially specific (like the Republic of New Afrika), but they’re only one mode of black self-understandings, which encompass everything from explicitly anti-nationalist pan-diasporist thinking (like paul gilroy’s work, or zoe samudzi’s), to more phenomenologically-based modes that are harder to define in conventional political terms (like, in very different ways, the approaches of frank wilderson, hortense spillers, saidya hartman, or bob kaufman). what i – from outside – see them sharing is a focus on the concrete history of colonization and enslavement, and the specific development of antiblackness as ideology and practice (which is to say, the invention of “race” in any form we can recognize). and that basis in the historically concrete has complicated the relationship of blackness to nationalism, even within explicitly black nationalist movements (just as it has and does the various projects aimed at reconfiguration of indigenous politics in the americas into nation-shaped forms in the past 200ish years).
@PlasticPaddy: From what some informed observers have told me, the orthodox attitude toward Irish – that it’s every Irish person’s native language in principle, they just need to rediscover it – has done real harm to it in practice. Students aren’t taught it as the speech of a struggling minority community but as a stuffy old museum piece, and those that do achieve halfway-fluency exert a curious kind of linguistic imperialism, with native pronunciation and grammar being marginalized in favor of the anglicized gaelscoil variety.
Not to mention the petty insistence on correcting anyone who calls the language Gaelic even though countless of its speakers and proponents have called it just that (and that it’s called Gaeilge, not Éireannis, in Gaeilge), or the punctilious reminders that “the Republic of Ireland” is not the state’s name (but don’t say Eire or Southern Ireland, those are slurs), or the berserk button of “the British Isles” (don’t mention Claudius Ptolemy, or the Indian Subcontinent, or that it retains wide currency in the rest of the world because people simply find it less clunky than the (non-)alternatives). I love the Irish and have the one-quarter ancestry legally required to set foot in my state, but goodness if their netizens don’t provide my mental benchmark for the most trivial – and, fortunately, harmless – manifestations of small-nation chauvinism.
Are there any “natural” non-fictive ways of organizing human societies? Or do humans construct communities around fictions the way beavers build lodges out of trees?
To tie together religion in Bosnia and language in Ireland, surely the or at least a common perception of Bosnian Muslims by local non-Muslim nationalists is that they were the unfortunate descendants of weak-willed folks who had in prior centuries collaborated with the foreign occupation (British, Ottoman, whatever …) by adopting the occupier’s religion (language, whatever …) and they thus need to “rediscover” their true ancestral religion (or whatever …) – even though Croats and Serbs might disagree about what that was.
The problem of course is that the nth-generation descendants of those who personally shifted religion or language under duress may themselves feel not the least bit under duress about the situation and instead find that their immediate rather than remote religious/linguistic patrimony is what feels “natural.”
Or do humans construct communities around fictions the way beavers build lodges out of trees?
I’m not sure what you mean here. Trees must exist before beavers can build lodges from them. Fictions are made by humans, so fictions don’t exist before humans make them.
I think it’s safe to say that animal kinds and environment kinds develop together, or hook up together from different origins and possibly continue together for a while.
If all the trees died, it’s not certain that beavers could adapt so as to build lodges from pulp fiction.
Humans don’t need lodges, they find refuge in Cave shadows.
#
So, let’s leave aside the question of how the history of language develops. On a smaller scale, Heidegger certainly thinks that language isn’t merely how we experience the world, for he rejects the idea that we start out with two poles: the world and our perception. No, for him the world is what shows itself to us, and it shows itself to us in the as-ness of language. Language is the house of being. It’s also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.
#
[The language thing or Heidegger made dense]
@Stu: You may have hit upon why humans have a wider geographical range than beavers do.
I cycle around the former Yugoslavia nearly every summer for a couple of months, spending a lot of time talking with local men in village cafes, and I have never actually heard a desire from overtly nationalist Serbs that their Muslim neighbours revert to Orthodoxy, at least not that I can recall. The overwhelming opinion I’ve heard in Republika Srpska or near the Sanjak is that the local Muslims need to just all fuck off to Turkey or wherever, unless (though Serbs do seem a bit ashamed to say it out loud) they just get outright slaughtered when the next big war comes along and Russia rushes in to support the Serbs.
I don’t think that vehemence of opinion is all that surprising after so much water under the bridge. I’m curious how many hard-core Unionists in Northern Ireland, for example, have wanted their Nationalist enemies to see the light of Union instead of just disappearing through one way or another, or mutatis mutandis.
I am pleased to become better informed via Christopher Culver about the current situation in/near Bosnia. I was relying on my memory of various secondary sources that may have been describing a former era (before quite so much water had gone under the bridge) and/or were inaccurate even as to the era they described, perhaps by failing to distinguish between the musings of impractical big-city ideologues and the more practical-if-brutal attitudes of more typical local-village types.
One possibility is that the evolution of a self-conscious Bosniak nationalism and the modernish (post-1878?) ethnogenesis it may have helped engender was pretty explicitly grounded on rejecting the notion that they were wayward Serbs who needed to reconnect with their authentic Serbian roots and that eventually the Serbian nationalists themselves found this so convincing they stopped regarding them as wayward Serbs. By most accounts the (Muslim) Bosniaks got along tolerably well with the Croats during the Ustashe era during which they fell under Ustashe rule – I don’t know how Croatian nationalist theory of the time accounted for them or if pragmatic concerns simply overrode theory in the short-term.
@rozele reminded me
“xenophobia is bad” > “let’s make people alike so xenophobia is impossible” (peaceful evil)
Or (militant evil)
“xenophobia is bad” > “xenoi/ai are bad” (provided that 1. xenophobia inevitably follows from variation 2. we care not about people, xenoi or not, but about “stablity” of our state and it is this stability is put in danger by xenophobia).
One of the most instant cases of ethnogenesis and later diaspora I’ve ever heard of occurred on the Bonin Islands near Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean.
https://faroutliers.com/2004/01/15/the-bonin-islanders-ethnogenesis-and-exodus/
Before the Japanese administration took over the Bonins in 1875, the 70-odd residents there were a motley crew of diverse heritage tracing back to Europe, North America, Africa, and various Pacific Islands ranging from Hawai‘i and Tahiti to Guam and Pohnpei. But, vis-à-vis the Japanese, they abruptly became Bonin Islanders, an ethnic minority subject to the Emperor, like the Ainu in Hokkaido. It was a classic case of ethnogenesis. Until 1945, it behooved the Islanders to identify themselves as Japanese, to intermarry with Japanese settlers, to move to the main islands to pursue educational or business opportunities, even to serve in the military. But when the Americans took over after the war, residual English language skills and non-Japanese heritage conferred more advantage. When the Americans offered them the opportunity to choose U.S. citizenship when the Bonins reverted to Japan, more than a few grabbed the chance and joined the exodus to Guam, Hawai‘i, or California, where they dissolved into the larger population, as did those who remained behind as Japanese. Only subtle traces now remain of their unique, but ephemeral, common heritage.
That is fascinating. Many thanks.
Re Bosnia and Hercegovina:
For pre-1878, there is the very informative “A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia” by Matija Mazuranic. In it, he describes how the Muslim population identified themselves as Turks, while the Christians described themselves as Christians. There was hatred and prejudice borne out of continual wars between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. One could argue that this was either class based (Muslims being the privileged class) or religion based (Muslims being the privileged religion). No single group identified themselves as Bosnian or Bosniak by nationality.
A couple of examples stick in mind: One was about how Christians had to move out of a Muslim’s way when travelling on the road or walking on the street. The other was about Christians not being allowed to live in anything but the most wretched hovels. If they dared build anything better, it was perfectly legal for a Muslim person to drive the Christians out of their house and take it over.
When it comes to language, the Christians had to address Muslims in respectful language as masters.
“A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia” was written during the Illyrian period, ie. during the movement which saw all South Slavs as one nation – Illyrians. This was by and large a movement spearheaded by Croatians, with only some traction in the Orthodox South Slav populations. This is in part why it failed, but also in large part because of the official Habsburg ban and the Hungarian “divide and conquer” policy (which sought to atomize the Slav population in the Kingdom of Hungary into an ever-multiplying number of separate ethnic groups).
Matija Mazuranic was the brother of the Ivan Mazuranic, a highly respected figure in Croatian history who ended up being the first commoner Ban (viceroy).
Matija went into Bosnia as a travelling tradesman in the 1830s sent by his older brothers to ascertain first hand the national consciousness of the population in the province, and to gauge the support for the Illyrian movement.
Here is an excerpt of Matija Mazuranic’s biography from the book:
Matija was born on 4 Februry 1817 in Novi Vinodolski. He attended a German-language primary school, but he was the youngest son and there was not enough money for his further education, so he became a blacksmith. His inquiring mind an natural talent led Matija, however, to browse through his elder brothers’ textbooks. On reaching maturity he became a builder, and studied applied science in Vienna as a part-time student. He spent the next part of his life running a construction firm and building roads in the Croatian Littoral and the Military Border. Being of restless spirit, he frequently went abroad, sometimes for several years. He travelled to Bosnia several times, and to Istanbul, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and all over Austria. In Turkey he acquired a considerable reputation as well as considerable wealth. Having learned to speak Turkish well during his first journey to Bosnia, during his stay in Istanbul he was named Croat-pasha and appointed honorary magistrate in cases involving Croatian people in the Ottoman empire. … He died, mentally ill, on 17 April 1881 in a hospital in Graz, aged 64. He left behind only one written work, A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia, the first travel book of Croatia’s modern period, written in an exceptionally fine prose of the Illyrian period.
zyxt, oh, I think I’ll try to read it. Not as much because of the subject, but travelogues are fun, and a travelogue by a 19th century Croat can be insteresting. As I understand he wrote it in Croatian.
@drasvi
Yes, the original is in Croatian. The title is “Pogled u Bosnu”, first published in 1842.
There is an English language edition which I quoted from, published in 2007 by Saqi Books and The Bosnian Institute, London
Online in Croatian here (pdf).
@zyxt, LH, thanks!
@zyxt, I once read the journal of a guy from Ragusa (I don’t know, Catholic or Orthodox or what) who headed some Russian embassy or mission to China.
The journal is written in Russian, but there is a peculiar grammatical construction: between villages A and B such and such river, crossed over. (perejehali chrez).
Is this normal for old bookish Croatian/FYLOSC or modern Croatian?
One place where there are no Christians on the “Muslim” shore and no Muslims on the “Christian” shore is the western Mediterranean.
It is anomalous, I think. There are Muslim Tatars in Russia/Poland, there are Christians in the Muslim East
But not in Arabia, which is strange! I mean, it is not “strange” for many people because “Arabia is where Islam came from and Arabs are Muslims” – but no, “Arabs” – even in the narrow sense – can be anything. Christianity and Judaism were influential there before Islam and there are Jews there today. As for Christians… Soqotra was Christian until the Portuguese came. Then it was urgently converted.
For the West Mediterranean – and again, people are too used to it but it’s an anomaly – one possible explanation would be the war.
Didn’t the very concept of the Military Border necessitate “atomizing ethnicities”, with its emphasis on privileged, cohesive, small and often transplanted militarized settler groups who would have no loyalty other than to themselves and the central government, because they had no protection from their enemies rather than from the central government? As opposed to broader, bigger frontier polities which possessed enough strength to chart their own political courses and to switch sides as needed?
I think we discussed Aromanians on the Grenze before…
As far as I can tell (which probably isn’t far enough), the only time we’ve discussed the Military Border was here; there’s a lot of interesting material on languages, but (again as far as I can tell) nothing about Aromanians/Vlachs.
Re: Military Border and the Vlachs… It wasn’t easy to find, but I mentioned the Grenzers and their Martolos antecedents and the underpinnings of the Jireček Line (or lines) here
https://languagehat.com/magyar-links-from-sebestyen/#comment-4569659
which in turns links to the discussion of ancient Moesian DNA on the Roman frontier in the Avar mega-thread.
@drasvi: I think there have been previous threads musing inconclusively about why the Christian communities in North Africa west of Egypt eventually dwindled to nothing under Muslim rule when those elsewhere in (many/most) Muslim-ruled areas didn’t. The processes by which overt Musliming in Iberia was suppressed after the end of Muslim rule in a way it was not in e.g. the Balkans are well-documented. And the Mediterranean itself was a considerable barrier to casual migration and population drift (with no equivalent in the undefined steppe-borderland zones between Muscovy and Tartary) until it wasn’t. Although the environment for the remaining Christian population on the southern shore has recently, i.e. since French rule ended in the Maghreb, generally been less salubrious than the environment for the rapidly-increasing Muslim population on the northern shore.
1. “I think there have been previous threads musing inconclusively about why…”
Oh. Wow. I will be totlly grateful to anyone who can tell me where…
2. “in Iberia ” yes, very well documented. (Also Sicily and not only)
3. “Mediterranean itself” – true. But I don’t think this is sufficient (even though it naturally makes modern people think that Muslim Africa and Christian Europe are “natural” somehow).
4. “the remaining Christian population on the southern shore” – I’m not sure who do you mean here.
I suppose not descendants of pre-Islamic African Christians. Is it Ceuta? Descendants of French colonists? Or I don’t know, various modern Russians in Tunisia?
And do you mean local Muslims are not very freindly to those Christians or just that local economy is not very freindly to everyone there?
@drasvi: Well, for example, you can consult https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE_%D0%B2_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B6%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B5 and click through to https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE_%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B2_%D0%A2%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B5
Whether officially Christian or Muslim states persecute Muslims or Christians (respectively) into marginal status has everything to do with the accidents of local history and politics and very little to do with any core doctrines. (We are currently seeing all too much of self-proclaimed “Christian” fascists demonising Muslims as part of their overall project to build power for themselves on the back of spreading fear and hatred, the lifeblood of fascism. The Salafist regime in Saudi Arabia, which lacks any real legitimacy, similarly feels a need to blasphemously misuse religion in the service of power.)
It’s also worth repeating that the victims of violently intolerant Islam are much more often Muslims than Christians.
I’m not sure how many officially Christian states are left on the northern shore of the western Mediterranean. I guess Gibraltar might have an established Church, but France got out of the established-Church business quite some time ago and Spain and Italy have done so within my own lifetime. I guess the Vatican City is “officially” sectarian if you’re willing to go a little bit inland. I can’t be bothered to google about Monaco.
It is certainly true that violence against Christians in post-independence Algeria (subsequent to the expulsion/ethnic-cleaning of most of the Christian population) is mostly an incidental side effect of life in a violent and dysfunctional place with the overwhelming majority of the victims of religiously-tinged violence (as in the lengthy civil war between a supposedly Islamist faction and a supposedly more secular-albeit-very-brutal one) being at least nominally Muslim. And the ideology of the violent men who originally drove out the French and the pieds noirs secured independence had very little that was explicitly Muslim about it and much more that was bargain-basement Marxist.
The only unambiguously Christian state at present seems to be Tonga.
By “Tonga”, you mean “Samoa”?
A serious look at the challenges faced by Christians in North Africa would focus on the small convert groups and the rather larger, if more transient, sub-Saharan migrant communities – legal obstacles, tabloid moral panics, etc. The monks of Tibhirine became so famous precisely for being so unusual – a small group of Frenchmen that not only opted to stay behind after independence (as a significant minority did) but, much more courageously, decided to stick it out through a civil war in what had become one of the most dangerous regions of the country for people of any religion, let alone for foreigners. Most of the 100k-odd victims of that conflict were Muslims, and had far less opportunity to escape it.
Yes! I read Samoa, thought Tonga. I seem to recall Tonga had pretty deeply Christian laws, like invalidating contracts signed on Sundays (including cheques).
the expulsion/ethnic-cleaning of most of the Christian population
…is really not the case. The book Ni valise ni cercueil is a good corrective to this perception, focusing on the experiences of the numerous pieds-noirs who stayed behind after 1962.
@drasvi
Re “perejehali črez”
This isn’t modern Croatian, nor is it pre-standardisation Ragusan. (Standard Croatian is based heavily on the dialect of Dubrovnik/Ragusa).
The Croatian forms would be “prejahali”, “prejašili” or even “prejezdili”.
“Perejehali” sounds like it’s based on Church Slavonic or on East Slavonic.
It also reminds me of Juraj Križanović’s pan Slavic from the 17th century, which was a mixture of Croatian, Ukrainian and Church Slavonic – which he wrote using both the Latinica with a Polish-like spelling and a Ćirilica of Križanić’s own devising.
I seem to recall Tonga had pretty deeply Christian laws, like invalidating contracts signed on Sundays (including cheques)
Seems reasonable … (though to be properly ecumenical, cheques signed on Friday and Saturday should be invalid too. And on Thursday too, for Scandinavians.)
Quite a number of Pacific island states seem to have ended up like this. Fiji (at least as far as the native Fijians are concerned), to judge by Dixon’s Fijian grammar; and Rossel Island, to judge by Levinson’s grammar of Yélî Dnye. Happily, it doesn’t seem necessarily to spell the eradication of the local culture (Levinson reports that the Rossel culture remains very distinctive despite it all. The locals, when not forcibly dispossessed or coerced by colonialists, seem perfectly able to decide for themselves what elements of European culture they want to adopt. Or not.)
I saw something like this in southern Ghana: my first impressions were overwhelmingly of how very Christian everything was compared with the UK, with people reading their Bibles and praying everywhere, but Akan traditional culture is actually very much alive and well. Colin Turnbull’s “Lonely African” is not in evidence.
I’m not sure that he ever was, in Zaire either. Turnbull seems to have had the gift, perhaps not altogether positive in an anthropologist, of seeing whatever he had decided to see. In this case, a projection of European and American deracination …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Turnbull
@zyxt, sorry for a confusing formulation: I meant the placement of črez (in Russian: “over”).
Normally in Russia if you “cross over a river” then the word “river” immediately follows “over”. You don’t say “A river. We crossed over [it].”
But the man uses a formulation which would… er, annoy some English prescriptivists, in every second entry:) And I wonder where did he pick it, is it a trace of his native language or something else.
It is comprehensible but I don’t think I ever encountered this in Russian elsewhere.
@David E
Re legitimacy of the Saudi regime:
My understanding is that the Saudis have been around since the 1700s in the area. How is it that their rule lacks legitimacy?
All absolute monarchies lack legitimacy.
Also, that should be “only since the 1700s” … (the Mamprussi kingdom was founded in the thirteenth century … just a generation before the Kusaasi rebelled and successfully forced the Mamprussi to relocate their capital outside Kusaasi territory.)
“It’s also worth repeating that the victims of violently intolerant Islam are much more often Muslims than Christians.”
Well, I have always understood modern violent movements [political or religious or whatever] in Muslim and Arab world (which replaced the Irish as chief newsmakers) as their problem (a problem of and for Muslims and Arabs respectively). A couple of times I was misunderstood by aforementioned Muslim Arabs (who reacted nervously at a northerner speaking about those violent movements), but the confusion was clarified instantely.
Indeed to my surprise way too many people discuss it as a problem of and for others. (perhaps has to do with the idea that refugees ‘flooded’ Europe in 2015 even though there are just as many in tiny Lebanon)
But that’s when we compare Europe and the Arab world (including local Christians). I don’t think that a “religious minority” is what you want to belong to during wars where religious fundamentalists take a part.
@drasvi
OK, I understand what you’re saying.
In Croatian there is the preposition “preko” = “across” and the adverb “prijeko” = “across, on the other side”.
In my dialect, both are “priko”, with a short “i” in the prep. and a long “i” in the adverb.
In Croatian you wouldn’t normally end the sentence with the preposition, but can end it with the adverb.
Maybe that’s the source of the unusual usage you came across???
@DE, you must prefer relative monarchies then)
@David E
Oh I see…
Not that I don’t disagree.
But if we look at it from their point of view, they’d say their legitimacy derives from, God, tradition, culture, custom, historical right to rule, etc.etc.
I would (naturally) defer to a Muslim on this, but I don’t think an absolute monarchy of the Saudi type is all that easy to square with Islam, either. It was Realpolitik that led to the House of Saud adopting its fundamentalist brand of Islam, to give some religious respectability to its empire acquired by (recent) violent conquest of its neighbours.
The unedifying story of just how Iran became Shi’ite reflects a similar hijacking of religion for state-building purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam
(Once again, the majority of the victims were Muslims.)
@zyxt, thanx!
I found the man in WP, he turned out to be a Serb who was born in Herzegovina but (I think) grew up in Ragusa.
It is not exactly “across”.
In Russian, as in English, you can both “cross a river” and “cross over a river”.
A fragment of the text (Moscow region and some localities that I know – but he continues it all the way to China:) Mostly technicalities, but there are some informative descriptions)
28-го от Рогож до деревни Клязьмы 7 верст. От Клязьмы до деревни Плотавы, х которой ехали полями, и лес самой мелкой и реткой, 15 верст. От Плотавы до деревни Ожерелья 1 верста. От Ожерелья до деревни Микулина 1 верста. От Микулина до деревни Дубнавки 1 верста. От Дубнавки до другой Дубнавки 3 версты. Между помянутыми деревнями лесу не имеется. От Дубнавки до деревни Киржач, в которой речка Киржач небольшая, переехали чрез, 5 верст. …
Or in literal English translation (the only part which is not literal is in curly brackets)
….From Rogozh to village Klyazma 7 verst.
From Klyazma to village Plotava, to which [we] rode by-fields, and forest most small and sparse, 15 verst.
From Plotava to village Ozherel’ya 1 verst.
From Ozherel’ya to village Mikulina 1 verst. From Mikulina to village Dubnavka 1 verst.
From Dubnavka to the other Dubnavka 3 versts.
Between mentioned villages {there is no forest}.
From Dubnavka to village Kirzhach, in which river-DIM Kirzhach not-large, [we] crossed over, 5 versts. ….
https://www.vostlit.info/Texts/Dokumenty/China/XVIII/1720-1740/Russ_kit_otn_18_v_II/81-100/88.htm
A thousand years before the Safavids, pre-Islamic Sassanid Persia became a great center of Nestorianism, viz. a brand of Christianity that was not viewed favorably in the Byzantine/Roman/Rhomaion Empire because heresy. The Sassanid Shahs found it to be consistent with their self-interest to protect a disliked-by-Constantinople sort of Christianity (not sure how many miaphysites were in Persian territory but the same rationale would apply), and indeed the traditional story is that when the Army of Chosroes (or “Khosrow” if you want to be all trendy) captured Jerusalem in A.D. 614 the True Cross was seized as loot and brought back to Ctesiphon as a present for the Shah’s Christian wife, which should give him pretty strong credit in the Thoughtful Husband department.
In any event, Nestorians continued to live in Persia/Iran in substantial if slowly dwindling numbers under Muslim rule, with further Nestorian communities extending out along the Silk Road into China, but the community eventually vanished – the leading theory seems to be that it was as one of many side effects of the chaos and terror caused by the depredations of Tamurlane, but it may also be one of those “due to war and chaos our documentary sources are pretty thin for a few centuries there and when the records get good again things had changed in the interim” situations. So with an asterisk I’m about to get to, you have in Iran the same situation that obtained in the Maghreb but that didn’t obtain in Egypt or the Levant or Mesopotamia, viz. the entire disappearance under Muslim rule of historical Christian communities, but slowly rather than as a short-term consequence of conquest or regime change.
The asterisk is that thereafter you would have (and still have) various smallish Christian communities living under e.g. Safavid or Pahlavi or current-regime rule, but they tended to be Armenian or occasionally Georgian – i.e. marked out from the general Persian/Iranian population as foreign-origin ethnic/linguistic minorities rather being of the majority ethnicity or language but happening to follow a different religion. Which feels like we’re cycling back to the Balkans and how these various group identities get constructed and maintained.
JWB, about the West Mediterranean, Spain etc.
Perhaps my approach is slightly different from what I’m used to.
Usually it is
(a) timeline of decline of Christianity (and the Romance langauge in the West) in North Africa. Full of mystery but presumably distant history
(b) Islam in Europe, in Spain especially. Why “especially”? Because everyone loves al-Andalus. Who does not may in turn like the mythology of Reconquista. Sicilian Muslims etc. are less popular (even Sicilian Normans are less popular but those are famous at least).
Two stories. And I think what most people can say about (b) is that it is “well-documented”.
I wonder if we’re dealing with a system, that is, whether it is ONE story (of mutual intolerance) rather than two. I’m not confident though.
On the Muslim side, the intolerance was not by any means consistent. Not only are some strains of Islam much more tolerant of other religions (particularly Christianity and Judaism) than others, but different historic Islamic states (and indeed different individual Muslim rulers) adopted very different approaches, often for pretty readily identifiable political reasons.
Christianity has, overall, been much less tolerant of Islam historically – and of Judaism, before the Zionist project changed the whole landscape. There were pogroms of Jews in the Islamic world before that (starting very early), but Muslims really couldn’t hold a candle to Christians when it came to violent antisemitism. Amateurs in comparison …
Much of the more repellent strain in modern Islam is surely an indirect creation of Western colonialism. I don’t at all mean this in a wet-liberal woke we-are-to-blame-for-everything mode: it’s just sober cause and effect. Cet animal est tres méchant: quand on l’attaque il se défend.
Safavids
This video has been making the rounds recently. Pardon his French.
Slightly tangential (but only slightly, for LH), this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judar_Pasha
always strikes me as a great example of how things are just much more complicated than the nice simple clash-of-civilisations myths imply.
He was the Moroccan general in command at the fateful Battle of Tondibi that brought down the (also Muslim) Songay Empire. He was born in Castille, baptised with the excellent Christian name of Diego de Guevara. He had eighty Christian bodyguards in his personal detail.
Pardon his French
Improved my Persian vocabulary no end.
Actually, his scenario for the introduction of Islam to Iran works fairly well (mutatis a bit mutandis) for the introduction of Islam in West Africa (the more-Technicolor Jihads were mostly Muslim-on-Muslim affairs.) Life is complicated.
@drasvi
Reading the extract, the style used looks like a list, or a very abbreviated almost telegraph-like style.
I wonder if “črez” here means “through” rather than “across”. The Croatian equivalent is “kroz”.
As in “we rode through the little river” meaning “we forded the river”
@ David E
Re Absolute monarchy & Islam
My understanding is that the caliphate was an absolute monarchy (to the extent that it wasn’t a theocracy).
Indeed, if you disregard the religious aspect of the caliph’s role, the two great empires who Muhammed SAVS & his successors could use as a model – Roman and Persian empires – could also be described as absolute monarchies. So it’s not surprising that model has been used historically in the Islamic world.
Also, there are other Islamic monarchies even today, which lean towards the absolutist end of the spectrum.
(Not a value judgment, just an observation.)
@DE: and in a very similar pattern, as the muslim taïfa states in al-andalus were losing ground to the christian taïfa states*, the muslim forces that were invited in as military supports from the other side of the straits were from religious-political revolutionary reform movements that often get described as ‘fundamentalist’: first the al-murabitun (“almoravids”), and then the al-muwahhidun (“almohads”).
.
* if memory serves,all of this is before the notion of a “reconquest” was invented and deployed to bring conceptual unity to a mess of alliances and conflicts not primarily structured by religion, which (again if memory serves) happened quite late in the process
Re Judar: I was doing some work on the non-Arabic words and phrases in the Timbuktu chronicle manuscripts last year’s and was briefly surprised to realise that, in addition to a few Songhay and Soninke phrases, there was one in Spanish: corta-le (la) cabeza, as I recall. Not a language I normally associate with Timbuktu.
Someone really ought to do a fleshed-out comparison of the Moroccan conquest of Songhay to the Spanish conquests in the New World; it’s not what they achieved, but it’s fairly clearly what they had been hoping for…
@adam
calls the language Gaelic — previous discussion here et seq by per incuriam et al
British Isles … less clunky than the (non-)alternatives — “Britain and Ireland” is hardly clunky, although (a) it ignores the constitutional status of the Isle of Man (b) other languages may require “Great Britain and Ireland”
punctilious … Republic of Ireland — yeah, this is a weird one to me. It seems a Procrustean memo went out at the time of the 1998-9 peace process/constitutional changes that henceforth the state and island were always and only “Ireland” and “Island of Ireland” respectively. If the island was never to be called “Ireland” then the state need never be disambiguated as “the Republic”.
In deference to Lameen I am happy to amend the phrase “the expulsion/ethnic-cleaning of most of the Christian population” to “the abrupt departure of most of the Christian population.” (And an even higher percentage of the Jewish population, but that had been outside the scope of drasvi’s topic of interest.) The 20th century featured multiple such Abrupt Departures by various ethnic and/or religious groups, typically due to the fortunes of war and/or shifting political circumstances, and there are often disputes about how best to label or characterize them. And of course history is complex, there were often both “push factors” and “pull factors” present in a given situation, and it may well be the case that different individuals or families who were part of the same Abrupt Departure had different subjective motivations, and different subjective hopes and fears.
It would be fair to note that you certainly didn’t have to be non-Muslim to anticipate life in l’Hexagone to be less uncongenial than life in post-independence Algeria. I couldn’t quickly google up very reliable-looking numbers but it seems quite plausible that the total number of at-least-nominally-Muslim “regular” Algerians who have relocated to European France since 1962 exceeds the total number of pieds noirs and Jews who did so in a more compressed time frame in the early/mid-Sixties.
“ividing the territory among them, just as herder declared.”
@rozele, just to be clear: I’m not sure Herder ever declared such a thing. I think he generally did not speak much about “states” – which means he is not a “nationalist” as you define them – but he calls multi-ethnic empires monstrosities. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26224133)
There are many things that various people in various contexts call “nationalism”. Today it is natural to apply this label to many people who do not intend to change borders. As result I don’t know who means what by this word.
But Breton (together with Irish modern and old) is the first language I tried to study (as opposed to just using English – and French for textbooks are in French) and the area of my current linguistical interests is NW Africa, that is again Francophone sphere. Each time when the French get ignored as typologically “wrong” nationalism I feel strange…
“that had been outside the scope of drasvi’s topic of interest.” – my suggestion is that a certain military/political dynamics and culture common for both shores made people think that Muslim or Christian (and in some cases Jewish) minorities are undesirable. I do think that Jews could be affected by it too.
But I don’t think this “culture” and “dynamics” continue into modern times.
Or well, in some ways they do.
But now there are Christian/Muslim minorities in the region. As for Jews – I don’t know about Algeria* – but Morocco and Tunisia are about the least anti-semitic Arab countries. And that’s when the region (including Algeria) is also very supportive to Palestianians.
*I mean, simply don’t know. I hope to explore it, but it requires a visa, and I hate paperwork, and also I don’t have close freinds among Algerians who could motivate me.
Morocco and Tunisia are about the least anti-semitic Arab countries.
Wikipedia:
@hat: The substantial numerical diminution of the Tunisian Jewish population is just another of those weird 20th century Abrupt Departures I mentioned above. Who can say what caused it? History is complicated, and you certainly don’t want to be casting aspersions on anyone. Maybe the Tunisian Jews all heard that there was better tv programming available in France and/or Israel or maybe the U.S. although not very many of them ended up here. I did go to law school with a daughter of that particular diaspora, although the most consequential Tunisian Jewish immigrant to the U.S. is almost certainly the late Henrietta Lumbroso Allen (1922-2013), who left when the French were still in charge but is the most likely vector through which her American-born son would have learned an exonym (less charitably characterized as a racial slur) supposedly common among Francophone North Africans of that generation but almost entirely unknown among North Americans that rather improbably may have then caused that son to lose his seat in the U.S. Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_the_2006_United_States_Senate_election_in_Virginia#Allen's_macaca_controversy
The question is not whether Tunisian Jews were facing persecution – of course they were. There’s nothing “weird” about it.
The question is why it only became so intense then as to cause a mass exodus, and not in the previous two millennia.
The answer is really not difficult, and it is transparently related to geopolitics. Aspersions that it has something to do with the intrinsic nature of Islam merely reflect the long history of tendentious Western self-justifying deliberate blindness on these issues.
but Morocco and Tunisia are about the least anti-semitic Arab countries
Reminds me of
[Hatters will recognise a bit of what I believe is called “dramatic irony” here.]
Tunisia still has a visible Jewish community, complete with functioning institutions – not just in the capital, but way out in Jerba – which is more than can be said for just about any other Arab country. Even among the majority who left it for France, many still seem to go back regularly. There is an obvious difference in that respect between Algeria on the one hand and Tunisia and Morocco on the other, however, which can plausibly be traced back to the effects of the décrêt Crémieux but which has its own momentum.
@JWB, er.
My uncle booby-trapped the door in their appartment in Tashkent in early 90s.
That was not because there were actual pogroms – or so they say. That was because local Russians seriously feared those. Nationalism was on the rise. Azeri and Armenian people were killing each other.
Republics [this usage refers to constituent republics of the union of soviet socialist republics] were blaming Moscow and Russians too in all sorts of things.
And hot heads were saying ugly things everywhere.
And what Russians were doing is: sharing with each other all ugly things said about Russians and done to Russians. Staying in touch.
Fearing pogroms, every day.
And a couple of days ago someone was telling in a chat almost same story but without this detail: that what drove my relatives out Tashkent was fear of pogroms. He instead spoke about widespread anti-Russian pogroms.
Every instance of anti-Jewish violence in Tunisia is of course their (Tunisian Muslims’) fault.
Everything thier hot heads say too.
But-1 I think just as with Tashkent, not all of the uncertainty and fear was created by local Muslims.
Jews also knew what was happening in other places. Even in other times.
And took it into account and rightly so.
If Jews were right to an extent, that does not mean that Muslims were wrong to the very same extent.
But-2 you can’t claim that “if they did not leave then there would be pogroms”. First how you can be sure, second not everyone left Tunisia.
Quite a number of Abrupt Departures of the 20th century feature actual expulsions – direct orders to leave or die, sometimes even solemnly written into treaties. Many others are instead catalysed by disorganised violence and fear. I don’t think it’s any reflection on those driven to flee by anarchy (I’ve been one) to distinguish them from those forced to flee by tyranny.
There may be certain parallels between feelings of the people who contemplated leaving post-independence Tunisia vs. post-independence Uzbekistan. Economic dislocation and uncertainty might have required them to change their ways, to start earning their living in different ways or in different places. Add together such a need of life changes, discrimination further restricting the available range of possibilities, and a fear of violence, and suddenly emigration, permanent or st least temporary, to sit out the bad times, starts looking like one of the best options.
My hometown of Moscow didn’t experience pogroms but there was a rising wave of criminal violence and much talk about coming ethnic violence. So when I needed to go abroad to earn some money, my family insisted on going together. Sure, it was far less economically efficient than to.just send one guy for a short stint abroad. But it freed us from the fear augmented by separation. What we didn’t yet realize was that moving abroad as a family made us a lot less likely to ever return.
When it comes to Abrupt Departures, there is also (as Lameen implies with his mention of the décrêt Crémieux) the question of whether your particular group actually has been granted a way to get out of a situation which might be anything from mortally dangerous to just horribly impoverished compared with other options.
Thus, while one can easily see why Soviet Jews might wish to leave the country that gave us the word “pogrom”, the exodus of so many Jews and almost-Jews from Russia to Israel may just possibly have had something to do with the fact that (unlike most of their neighbours) they actually had an escape route at that time.
(I used to know a Russian doctor who had come to Ghana in search of a better life. I think she found one, too.)
When the UK government finally got round to magnanimously granting the people of St Helena actual British citizenship, most of the young people promptly migrated to Britain (as you would, too, in their shoes. I’ve been there, and I agree with them.) An Abrupt Departure, certainly.
My admirable daughter-in-law is herself a refugee from political oppression. She was herself at most personal risk, and was essentially told to get out of the country by her parents for her own safety and their peace of mind. She then worked tirelessly to get them out too. (I only heard the details of all this from her friends at the wedding, who fortunately seemed to think that my son was entirely worthy of her. Eh, they grow up so soon …)
Aha, pogroms happen in Kiev and Warsaw, but “the country that gave” you the word is either USSR or Russia:)
(Just kidding. I mean, it is true of course – your “Irish” example is somewhat strange in the context of Maghreb given since WHEN Jews are there, but is perfectly and literally applicable to imperial Russia: Tsars did not let Jews in. Mostly)
Well, the word “pogrom” is Russian and the pre-1840 attestations in Google books are in the general sense “ransacking, pillaging”, typically resulting from a military invasion, and not specifically in the sense of ransacking minority homes and business.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/%D0%A1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C_%D1%86%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%BE_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2/ndxbAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D1%8A&pg=PA247&printsec=frontcover
Say, 1571 pillaging of Novgorod by Czar’s army, and 1605 pillaging of Moscow by the Impostor’s army, are both described as pogroms in the contemporary accounts. But mob pogroms existed too, say, in 1613 a German merchant complains to the Czar that he was pogrom’d by Polish competitors allied with Russian criminals who burned and destroyed his property.
“is Russian” – you talk as if it isn’t Polish:)
The English word “pogrom” comes from Russian; Polish is neither here nor there.
@LH, unfortunately, today most people learn the word from English. As an English word.
Perhaps some even borrow.
Russian (and especially the country thse Jews emigrated from: the USSR) is neither there not here.
P.S. I don’t know if it is Russian (including the language of then Ukraine and Belarus) or Polish.
I expect “Polish” – because I think borrowings mostly went west-to-east and also intuitively from its form and limited productivity of the root in Russian. But I don’t know for sure.
In Polish itis early 16
Sorry, in Polish it is at least since early 16th cnetury.
P.S. I should correct myself. I said “I expect Polish” – of course it can easily be western East Slavic.
Back then not too different from Muscovite Russian (I guess, despite a few centuries of slow divergence still less so than Novgorod Russian) but also was in close contact with largely mutually intelligible Polish.
If the Czars’ lust for westward imperial expansion had not led to participation in the Partitions of Poland etc. in the first place, they would have continued to rule over a country with very few Ashkenazic subjects and thus presumably also very few anti-Semitic mobs. Perhaps there’s an alternate-reality SF story in which that happened? (They also eventually accumulated Jewish subjects via imperial expansion in other directions, as in what’s now Uzbekistan, but that’s for a different alternate-history storyline.)
Trying to allocate causal responsibility for e.g. the Kishenev* pogroms of 1903 and 1905 is probably a good case study of the sort of situation where the sensible-sounding distinction between tyranny and anarchy proposed by Lameen doesn’t necessarily work very cleanly in practice.
*Perhaps modern-day Russian apologists would prefer to call them the Chișinău pogroms, to help allocate blame to a non-Russian ethnicity? Or we could call them the Kisheneff pogroms in deference to “period” English spelling.
My bad, the OED says it’s partly borrowed from Yiddish and partly from Russian. But you can tell from the first citation that it’s definitely not from Polish:
Also, the word was developed internally in Russian and not borrowed from Polish, unless you prefer to believe your own intuition.
David E. is certainly correct that the feasibility versus infeasibility of an exit strategy (and how nice or not-nice the new location the available exit strategy contemplates appears to be) can be relevant to the occurrence or non-occurrence of Abrupt Departures – one of the “pull factors” I mentioned above. Although I expect, to use one of his examples, that although the fact that Algerian Jews had had the possibility of relocation to European France ever since the décrêt Crémieux in the early days of the Third Republic, the fairly low rate of exercise of that option for the first ninety-odd years of its existence versus dramatically increased exercise circa 1962 shows the comparative importance of the “push factors” in that specific situation.
One might also note the occasional dog-that-didn’t-bark non-occurrence of Abrupt Departures that seem like they could have and perhaps should have happened. Easy example: after the end of the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1991 there was no Abrupt Departure of the large population of ethnic-Russian pieds noirs that had imposed themselves on occupied Latvia (and pretty much ditto for the somewhat smaller population that had accumulated in occupied Estonia), even though there were significant such departures from e.g. newly-independent Uzbekistan. Why not? Well, the “push factors” were mild since the meddlesome great powers leaned on the new Latvian government rather heavy-handedly to not act on the understandable nationalist desire to expel the pieds noirs, and the grumpy nationalists did not engage in any particularly significant amount of informal grassroots mob violence to encourage departure. Perhaps the works of Fanon had not been translated into Latvian? And on the pull side, Yeltsin-era Russia looked like maybe a nice place to live for ethnic-Russians when compared to independent Uzbekistan but a rather less attractive place to live compared to unoccupied Latvia, which was on the pathway to EU and NATO membership etc. Thus, the cost of living under a non-Russian government and receiving occasional glares from dissatisfied Latvian nationalists whose desire for rollback of the demographic consequences of the occupation was tolerable on balance for most of the pieds noirs.
@jwb
I think this may depend on the way Russian or Soviet migrants to the Baltics are distributed. In Estonia, I had the impression a lot of Russians worked in skilled or semi-skilled jobs in specific industries. They might not easily find similar jobs at a similar payscale in Russia and would not be easily replaced by untrained Estonians. Whereas those in less industrialised republics might predominantly hold administrative or educational jobs, which would be vulnerable to repurposing of the government of the new republic. I think these considerations would have also affected the Christians, Jews and Europeans in newly independent colonies.
In 1962, well under 10% of Algerians could read; I don’t think Fanon’s writings were much more influential among the population at large there than in Latvia. A somewhat more explanatory difference between the two lies in the years leading up to independence. By 1990, the initial violence of the Soviet occupation was far in the past, and people, Latvian or Russian, were accustomed to living in relative peace and security as long as they kept quiet. By 1962, people in Algeria had spent eight years living in extraordinary levels of insecurity. Hundreds of thousands had been killed, thousands of villages’ inhabitants had been uprooted and crammed by French troops into resettlement camps, uncounted numbers had been jailed and tortured on suspicion… It would be hard to come up with a situation more calculated to force ordinary people on either side to fear and distrust their opposite numbers.
It goes deeper than that, of course. Working together and spending time together is a great way to build the kind of interpersonal trust that can stand up to political upheavals. I’m not going to pore through the stats, but I suspect that Latvians and Russians were far more likely on average to be working together and living next to each other than pieds-noirs and Algerians. (Maids don’t count.) That’s something that always struck me about Camus, actually: he spent most of his life in Algeria, but he writes as if he was on another planet, in which Algerians might fleetingly be seen at a distance.
“comparative importance of the “push factors” in that specific situation.”
What about
1. Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia
2. Bukhara
?
Almost no Jews in either after 90s. Do we think that both times it was anti-semitism?
Ther are many such places. In some cases Jews have been there since ever, in other cases since recently.
__________________________________
I think there is some powerful factor specific to 20th century (be that cheaper travel, more tense contact with world Jewry in general, spread of information about anti-Semitism, ideology or whatever) that made this happen.
So my suggestion for Maghreb (and also Bukhara etc.) is that you should NOT simply conclude that “if everyone moved out THEN there was agression from local majority” but instead read/listen to their (those Jews’) own personal stories.
Want to understand local push factor? Measure them directly:/ Want to understand local anti-semitism? Same thing.
Having this said, Maghrebi Jews are strongly attached to their African home (perhaps same true for Bukharan Jews, I don’t know), in ways many other Jews are not. They did not really “want” to emigrate. They can miss it.
And as the synagogue in Jerba is still funtioning, there are also annual pilgrimages to there. (having this said, Maghrebi Muslim émigrés also can be quite nostalgic even when the reason for emigration is economical)
@Lameen: I should clarify that I don’t think Fanon-as-such was a significant causal factor in violence in Algeria. However, the Algerian experience as interpreted and publicized to a wider audience by Fanon, who had his own demons and obsessions and was thus predisposed to an interpretation which might have puzzled many rank-and-file actual-Algerian participants in the pro-independence side of the conflict, may have had some subsequent causal influence on violence in other areas. Or at a minimum on the rhetoric used by apologists for various violent factions elsewhere, which is admittedly not the same thing. That many of Fanon’s readers have little independent knowledge of the particulars and complexities of Algeria in the relevant time period compounds the market share held by his interpretation rather than other perhaps more sensible interpretations.
Many armed conflicts attract enthusiastic foreign/outsider volunteers, such as Fanon in Algeria, who have agendas and priorities of their own. When one group engaged in the struggle is shorthanded and underresourced, as is often the case, they understandably don’t always exercise much quality control. (Although e.g. the latest guy arrested in the U.S. as an alleged would-be presidential-candidate assassin allegedly tried to volunteer to fight on the Ukrainian side in the current conflict there but was turned down because he was “clocked” (to borrow a verb from another thread) as too flaky and unstable.)
@drasvi: The Jewish population in Birobidzhanistan had already started dropping dramatically in the 1950’s, with those who had gone there during the Stalin years finding it desirable to relocate to other parts of the USSR (which were not guaranteed to be free of anti-Semitism) even absent good options for leaving the USSR entirely. Whereas by contrast the big drop in the Bukharan Jewish population (much of which now lives in a neighborhood in Queens barely 10 miles from my house as the crow flies) was more post-1991 and generally involved complete exit from any portion of the former USSR. So that should allow some inferences about the differences in circumstances and the push and pull factors involved.
New York City has, of course, also attracted gentile immigrants from the former Uzbek SSR, although they may not form a single cohesive community or represent any immediately obvious pattern in their backstories. (There’s an online memoir by one of them named Abdulaziz Sharipov, whose first name sounds pretty markedly goyische.) Indeed, NYC has several restaurants run by immigrants from the ethnic-Korean minority that had ended up getting forcibly relocated to the Uzbek SSR by Stalin, serving menus that mix Korean and Uzbek cuisines. I don’t know how many if any from that group emigrated to South Korea post-1991 or whether NYC was the obvious better bet from their perspective.
@JWB, yes, but there still Jiddish newspapers in JAO in 90s and I’m not sure if there is a single Jew there now apart fo the governor himself.
Anyway, I did not mean this case is especially interesting in teh context of emigration.
I just wanted to note that there a factor that affected very differetn Jewish groups in very different circumstances. So we can’t merely assume (sarcastically) that if they moved there was (an ugly) reason, and can’t even do that when we know they love the place. We should ask them instead.
(And perhaps some groups in Iran who did NOT leave deserve special attention – but I honestly don’t know how many of them emigrated. I only know that there still Jews in Iran)
Re: Uzbekistani Koreans (Koryoins) in today’s South Korea. There are thousands of such returnees now, still a drop in the bucket, mostly because of how difficult it is to integrate into South Korean society, to overcome discrimination and to gain acceptance there. Despite looming dire shortage of young people in Korea, there is hardly any immigration from anywhere, and the same factors also limited immigration of the Russian-speaking ethnic Koreans from Uzbekistan. Where they do form communities in South Korea, it’s often mixed communities with other Russian speakers of other ethnic origins. Ethnic Koreans from Northern China fare a little better and are more numerous, in hundreds thousand in today’s South Korea.
The BBC recently featured a rare South Korean project to bring more ethnic Koreans from Central Asia to a factory town in dire need of workforce, and integration difficulties
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5mng4z45o
About Maghrebi nostalgy.
1. As I already told, youtube keeps suggesting me various Tunisian singers (even though I have been digging Algerian and Libyan music isntead for quite a while). So there is a duo Ÿuma – I think nothign in particular of them apart of that they somehow remind me Russian rock musing. Otherwise nothing. Not something I ‘like’ or ‘dislike’.
Yet I lisened for one of their songs (which even annoys me in the version I heard first, so it is not a musical recommendation) a few dozen times for a silly reason. I love how the form twa7asht sounds. (the etymology is funny too: a noun from the same root means a monster, beast).
It is even popular: when I logged in VK I searched for it there, and found a remix, then another, then… I found the origianl version and 7 remixes by 7 DJs. Presumably there are more, but I stopped.
Anyway, the version I heard first 1 where the word is quite prominent (with my dynamics) and 2 a version I switched to quickly, which is softer (again with my dynamics) but the phonetics is less easy to discern. It would not have same effect on me… but now the word sounds in my head anyway.
“Wǝḥš” وحش can mean:
1. Missing someone (verbal noun)
2. Monster
The verb sets a trap for unwary travellers: “I missed you” in Algeria is twǝḥḥǝštǝk, whereas in Egypt it’s waḥḥaštini. The subject of the one is the object of the other, and vice versa
Cf. “tu me manques,” so hard for English-speakers to assimilate!
@DP: That is my understanding concerning the situation of ethnic Koreans in Central Asia as well. Rather than allowing them to emigrate to the “mother country” like Germany did with ethnic Germans, the South Korean government financed projects to improve the life of ethnic Koreans in Central Asia and used them as a bridge head for economic influence. (Germany tried that, too, but with the option of emigrating available, most ethnic Germans and their dependents preferred to leave.)
@Paddy: Ethnic Russians in Central Asia tended to be qualified specialists and skilled workers, who would use that advantage to find work in Russia when the economy there stabilized after the chaos of the early 90s. In the joint venture we had in Uzbekistan in the second half of the 90s, every ethnic Russian engineer that we trained expensively for modern digital telecommunications technology left to Russia shortly after. As a result, we stopped sending ethnic Russians to such trainings, which of course made them feel (rightly) discriminated against and also contributed to them looking for the exit to Russia. This is how spirals are created.
so hard for English-speakers to assimilate!
Which is a little odd, considering that if something is “missing”, then really it is “being missed”. The idiom is a relic of a general alternation rendered obsolete by the ending of the prohibition on the continuous passive. It still applies to miss, want, lack, etc.
I have no problem with it. Because it is French.
I mean, Jesus-come-after-me-French, the-skirts-half-up-to-your-bum-French, the-dress-half-down-to-your-navel-French and the gulping and smothering they do with their mouths in their dirty novels French specifically.
Of course they miss the wrong way, they do everything in the wrong way because they’re fashionable French with erotic subtext. No? It even feels right in some
per…fashionable French way! With erotic subtext. Of course.It’s a language you don’t want to speak natively because it may cease to sound suggestive then!
(the MAIN issue with English as new language of international communication is that there is nothing fashionable with erotic subtext about English!:((((( Just in case I’ll add that same is true for Russian. We have spirituality.)
As I remember, some English leanrers – not sure about their L1 – confuse “bored” and “boring”.
When I met my future ex-wife for the first time (she was 19, I was 20-something) she tested my knowlege of French with the only French line she knew, voulez-vous coucher avec moi.
Strangely, I happened to know all the words (because I did not really knew French, I only read Breton textbooks and listened to Brassens – she thought so due to misunderstanding) and I responded something boring and nerdish.
Next time we met 4 years later and it was “where were you when I was 14?” “where were you when I was 14!?” The question where were we when she was 19 and I was 20-something also arises once in a while)
“1. Missing someone (verbal noun)
2. Monster”
@Lameen, assumed these two meanings have to do with each other – though I have no idea how they could possibly evolve (has to do with”wild”?).
I even thought maybe their relationship has some reading synchronously accessible to speakers.
I recently (as a joke) glossed it for the aforementioned ex-wife by inserting Russian verbs for “to go beastly / run feral” in the “missing” construction*.
____
*dichat’ “to run feral” (the root is dik-).
zveret’ is to become beastlike (uncontrollable anger, the root zver’, the verbal stem vowel is common for verbs like krasn-e-t’ “1. redden 2. to show red”) but it is often used unserioulsy for emotions e.g. in the context of boredom:
ya zver-e-yu
“I beast-.-1s from boredom” (boredom makes me want to howl or break something).
I feel like the stereotype of French as the natural language for smut/porn may have peaked some considerable number of decades ago and may not even be a stereotype that The Young People Today are aware of.
I just realised that I’m going to mention boredom for the third time. Because the Russian “missing” verb is the same as used for being bored:/
skuk-a “boredom”
mne skuch-n-o “I’m bored” (to.me [it’s] boring) – the construction used for immediate perception of feelings (from “I’m bored” to “I’m hot”) as something affecting you (like hot air does).
ya skuch-a-yu almost-but-not-quite-same (I be.bored-.-1s). In line with the form, the emotion is less externalised.
It is spoken about as your state/occupation/attitude you can identify with rather a feeling that you percieve or something affecting you. Implies lack of something which you need to feel otherwise (as opposed just finding out that you got bored with something boring and going to do something interesting) – and can also work for missing and longing.
ya skuch-a-yu po tebe “I miss you” (lit. .”..along you”).
And it is somewhat anomalous.
The use of po “along, across the surface” is not: it can express causes as in pochemu? “why?” (along what?) or topics as in po voprosu “on the question [of]”. So it is “~in accordance, in connection”.
But instead of the usual dative, the object can be in locative when it’s a pronoun.
There is a subtle distinction in Russian (and maybe German) between putting something on the table-ACC/laying down on the bed-ACC and putting/laying on the table/bed-LOC.
One feels as put-cup-on-table, an action directed at the table, (“on table” feels as a part of the predicate), the other as {put-cup} {on-table}, the table being the stage where the event took place, adverbially. And of course the cup is on the table.LOC, no directionality and no subtleties.
It is not always ACC: for “behind” the pair of cases is INSTR and LOC.
But apparently directionality of moving “along” (as in idu po doroge “I’m walking down the road”) or even scattering “across”/over (as in razbrosany po plyazhu “scattered over the beach”) is absent sometimes and weak other times. So it is DAT all the time.
And yet this LOC resurfaces!
(sorry for thinking aloud here).
@JWB, that’s because TYPT have switched to English! (Well, I’m afraid the English speaking YPT couldn’t have done so. But even for them it can be a part of the same trend: the French is losing its status)
Also in Russia it is not about porn exactly.
The dream French “make love” rather than practice “sex”. They don’t film it, they do it (enjoy it).
(And the quote above is from Bradbury, about Renoir: not porn either)
Я шагаю по Москве.
I feel like the stereotype of French as the natural language for smut/porn may have peaked some considerable number of decades ago and may not even be a stereotype that The Young People Today are aware of.
I assume English is the global language of smut/porn in the 21st century. Young People Today already think of French as “quaint”.
I was thinking e.g. of the English-language lyric “Like a dirty French novel / The absurd courts the vulgar,” which made perfect sense as alluding to a stock cultural phenomenon/cliche when the song was released in 1969, but maybe now not so much. Another piece of it, I am now recalling, was the Olympia Press et al. phenomenon, where for a certain period from say the early Fifties to the mid Sixties Paris was a key center of the publishing industry for “dirty” books in English (including but not limited to translations from the French) that could not as a legal or practical matter be put out openly by publishers in the major Anglophone nations. But then standards for what could be published became equally loose or “progressive” in N.Y. and London etc., with the Paris-as-dirty-book-capital stereotype probably still lingering in the air for a decade or two after it was no longer literally accurate.
Yeah, I’d guess the last gasp of the “smutty French” meme was “Lady Marmalade” (“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”), which was omnipresent in the mid-’70s and still well-known in the ’80s; I have no idea if Young People Today know it.
The Platonic-ideal* dirty French novel in question “combines the absurd with the vulgar”, IIRC.
* Presumably. I don’t know if Lou Reed had a specific one in mind (English is such an ambiguous language …)
@David E.: There is manuscript variation and perhaps competing philological schools of thought as to which textual variant should be thought canonical. If there even needs to be a single definitive/canonical text, which is I guess another question.
ETA: IIRC back in the early Eighties when the recording in question was out of print in the U.S., you could if you went to a specialized retailer buy an import, but the UK pressings and the French pressings had different takes of the song in question, complete with textual variation in the lyrics.
Further to my prior comment: Not only was there lyrical variation in that specific line between different takes during the recording sessions, there is subsequent lyrical variation between different live performances while Lou was still in the band. E.g. 10/19/69 is the version David quoted but 8/23/70 is the version I quoted (or at least starts that way – Lou may have bobbled or garbled the end of the line and it’s a lo-fi recording). As some interesting evidence of what you might call Apostolic Tradition, the post-Lou performance of 11/19/71 (Doug Yule is singing lead and Sterling has by then left to pursue his Ph.D. so the lineup is Tucker/Yule/Powers/Alexander) uses the version I quoted. A later live performance by Lou (September ’83, unclear which night) seems to skip the relevant verse entirely although quite possibly through sloppiness rather than inability to decide which textual variant to use. There are lots of other bootlegged live versions out there for the scholar who wants to do a more complete study of the manuscript variation.
@hat: Back in the Nineties in Manhattan there was a bistro on the Upper East Side named Voulez-Vous, which was either intended to evoke the song or at least didn’t mind attracting/repelling customers for which it did.* My late first wife and I ate there more than once although I wouldn’t say we were regulars. But googling suggests that it closed some considerable number of years ago.
*Here’s a 1999 piece by a writer who found the name a turn-off but then moved back to Miami … https://www.miaminewtimes.com/restaurants/hardly-a-sinker-6388297
Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Do you realize the amount of work that must be done to get a thousand flowers to bloom ? I can’t even prevail on my three windowsill plants to do their thing.
Might as well say “let pigs fly!” Both expressions imply “it’s not gonna happen in my lifetime”.
They are Platonic Ideal flowers. Much less high-maintenance.
Psoy Korolenko’s The Hit of the Century goes,
“Их бенк нух дир арой”, отвечаю,
Я за тобой ужасно скучаю
But i don’t remember the form скучаю за тобой being common. Apparently it became a lot more popular recently, and also despised as an alleged Ukrainism
@DP, where did you heard that (that it is 1. getting popular 2. bad because Ukrianism as opposed to any regionalism)?
I know the form, when someone used it on a langauge-exchange site (where among other things learners can post essays for correction) I googled for it.
I too wondered if it’s A – I forgot why I thought so. Found it in Chekhov (also described as an B) where
{A, B} are {Ukrainism, South Russian} but I don’t remember which is what.
I just googled and the top links and questions were all in synch, “undesirable”, “became common in Southern dialects but must be purged”, “speaking like the Ukrainians is bad”
https://mel.fm/gramotnost/kak-pisat/638529-miss_u
https://yandex.ru/q/life/293889/
https://gramota.ru/spravka/goryachie-voprosy
(I don’t personally approve of any of these messages, just in case if anyone doubts; and I wonder if the prescriptivist pendulum started swinging even before 2014, because the role of the Southern Russian speakers at the top levels of Russian politics have been shrinking with the Petersburger clans takeover)
To me, “Voulez-Vous” tout court calls to mind the 1979 Abba song, whose title has never struck me as an abbreviation of the Lady-Marmalade question, although it’s just as much a sexual come-on.
Both 70s songs were revived by 90s musicals — Moulin Rouge and Mamma Mia!
@dp
https://youtu.be/NVbED7j1_u0
About 3.00 (it’s long).
I am sure he sings “ikh benk nokh (or nukh) dir azoi” which also is better sense than aroi. But maybe rozele can say.
International fame of Psoi makes me nervous.
In 90s he was a friend of a girl who I liked.
So each time I’m tempted to mechanically think “I missed the opportunity to befriend a future celebrity” instead of “why did not I date that girl?” as usual:) Even though I don’t need any celebrities (but maybe it is not about celebrities as such, just that people I talk to here know him).
Agreed, clearly “azoi”, and it would totally fit Psoy’s style, to compose a collage of poetic quotes, so many of which will remain unrecognized by the regular listeners. This one may be quoting “A malekh veynt”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk1t6PBP-5A
The Klezmatics’ album’s title song, Die krenitse, by the way, is one more favorite tango dancing records. As are a couple covers of Bei mir mistu shein, so the cirle closes!
@DP, thanks. Бррр.
I thought I meet prescriptivists fairly often, but the tone of the first link is unusually harsh for an article. Commenters do often write something like that, so what surprised me about the second link is not what they say but how many of them there are there.
However, this is not what a Muscovite normally hears, so I do expect people to think “it is WRONG!” (irrespectively of relationships with Ukraine).
just chiming in to agree all round!
yes, “azoy”!
and the klezmatics’ version of “a malekh veynt” (the words and music are both by the great symbolist weirdo perets hirshbeyn) would also be my first bet for a source. the phrase isn’t at all unusual (like “how i long for you!” in english) – but knowing psoy, even an even more boilerplate phrase would be pulled from a particular source.
Does he speak Yiddish? If his Yiddish is hundreds of memorised songs (even dozens guarrantee vocabulary of several thousand words), then everything is going to have a source.
P.S.
Indeed, Russian skuchat’ za… used by Psoy becomes a parallel construction if you translate za as “after” rather than “behind”.
o, absolutely – i’d say psoy’s yiddish is better than mine, but still functional rather than fluent (at least, i know some of the cradle-tongue speakers he checks his lyrics with, like most of us in the svive who come to the language as grown people) (all this as of when i last saw him, a few years back). but he’s definitely got a solid repertoire of songs af yidish, and i can attest to what that does to populate your head with both words and phrases like this one! (also, what i understand him to be doing with the yiddish in that number – though i’ve got no russian to understand the overall matrix – is working with and across a bunch of well-known songs)
@mollymooly: ABBA’s star faded more rapidly on this side of the Atlantic. By the time their “Voulez-Vous” was released in mid-1979 it could barely scrape its way up to #80 on the Billboard Hot 100, compared to a #3 peak on both the British and Irish charts. By contrast, “Take a Chance on Me,” released only 18 months previously, had made it to #3 in the US (and #1 in the UK and Ireland). Fame is fickle in the pop-music biz. So outside of niche cultists, that particular ABBA title lacks the same degree of general cultural resonance for Americans of a certain age that “Lady Marmalade” possesses.
@rozele, thanks! Yes, it would be strange if he did not speak it.
___
Thinking about my own claim (that “everything has a [known] source” – of course everything does, but usually we don’t remember it) – I thought it is strictly true when you know a langauge only from songs, but still plays a role when songs are merely an important source.
But I forgot that even when it is just songs, you can combine words from line A with a grammatical construction from line B. Then the source will be harder to find.
But you are not tempted to do that if you don’t talk in this language.
____
I guess when Psoy began, songs were the main source of his Yiddish, and they still remain important. I never talked to him: we came to my friend at different times (her room was stuffed with discs of hasidic music etc.) and only once I grudgingly went to what we call a kvartirnik (that is appartmen-nik, flat-nik, can be unpacked into “appartment concert”, retaining its -n- from the adjectival suffix): a concert in someone’s kvartira, appartments.
“Grudgingly”, because I don’t like crowded places, it very well could be the only kvartirnik i ever attended.
“Lady Marmalade” was covered with rather liberal alterations to the lyrics by All Saints in 1998, which is how I was introduced to the song. But this wouldn’t have been heard in the US. There, it was the 2001 all-star version from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack that was a huge hit, so at least the older millennials will be familiar with the song.
Interesting — I hadn’t realized the Moulin Rouge soundtrack was such a huge hit. But of course being familiar with the song doesn’t imply being familiar with the “sexy French” meme.
By the time their [Abba’s] “Voulez-Vous” was released in mid-1979 it could barely scrape its way up to #80 on the Billboard Hot 100, compared to a #3 peak on both the British and Irish charts. [for earlier Abba]
Because Patti Labelle has a great raspy/funky voice and the song is a terrific Soul number. Abba are at best pedestrian. I had by 1979 abandoned the Brit pop ‘scene’. After Abba and Bee Gees could it get any worse? (Yes, substantially, as it turned out.)
I think we don’t need to appeal to the fickleness of fame so much as the lack of talent or originality.
@AntC: I’m not talking about abstract quality but ubiquity and thus resonance in memory. If ABBA’s “Voulez-Vous” had reached #3 rather than #80 on the US charts in ’79 I would almost certainly remember it the way I remember, to pick a semi-random #3 hit from that year, the Village People’s “In the Navy,” which I would not say achieved anything close to LaBelle-like level of objective quality. Some of this depends on age and social niche in the relevant year, of course. As one gets older it is often easier to structure ones life so as to be blissfully unaware of whatever is currently atop the pop charts.
The “fickleness” point goes to ABBA’s losing their marketing success in the U.S. faster than in Europe (even though their quality was whatever it was regardless), which I would be hard-pressed to argue reflected any consistent superiority in aesthetic judgment by the U.S. mass record-buying public.
In Ireland of course the source of all filth, between the 1926 Committee on Evil Literature and the 1967 liberalisation of censorship laws, was England.
According to this, the filthy and depraved authors with works banned from sale in Ireland included various prominent Americans (Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck …) but perhaps that was window-dressing to help disguise the anti-English focus of the effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Publications_Board_(Ireland)
EDITED TO ADD: although the regulation is in practice much looser it is not completely gone, so it is supposedly still the case in Ireland that a “person convicted of possessing prohibited publications is liable for a fine of €63.49 or six months imprisonment.” Which caught my eye just because of the oddly non-round amount of the fine, which makes me curious about the history. Perhaps a translation of an earlier fine expressed in Irish pounds into Euros at the then-prevailing exchange rate? Or an adjustment of an earlier round-number fine to take account of inflation?
The Village People’s original version of “In the Navy” was vastly inferior to the Muppets’.
So outside of niche cultists, that particular ABBA title lacks the same degree of general cultural resonance for Americans of a certain age that “Lady Marmalade” possesses.
Well, where is the cut off? Must be 60 and above. I know “Lady Marmalade” was apparently a #1 hit, but it had no cultural relevance whatsoever for me and my 8 year old school mates at the time, and by 1979 all of us knew Abba (even if we didn’t admit to liking them) and no one was singing Labelle. This is possibly because we were a niche cult called “New Hampshire”, where disco was uncool, or maybe because to a tween in 1979 songs from 1974 were already very old. Abba, maybe because of being blonde and Swedish and all, got more play on local radio, including ski area lift lines, than chart position would suggest. It’s also possible that due to the still significant French Canadian population in those days, the lasciviousness of “Lady Marmalade” was more deeply felt in New Hampshire than elsewhere, which would of course lead to the song being banned from radio. I first became aware of “Lady Marmalade” in the 80s as a high school student in Germany. I have always assumed it was a European hit, not an American one.
By the same token, I have no recollection of ever hearing the song “Jolene” before this century. We all knew who Dolly Parton was in the 1970s/80s but that song made no headway with teenagers in that era, at least no one I knew. Country music was for old people.
I do remember “In the Navy” as being ubiquitous in 1979, both on television and at the roller rink. I want to say Abba was also played at the roller rink but that could be a false memory created by subsequent Hollywood movies and television shows.
I’m not saying that my cohort (a year or so older and a few hundred miles away from Vanya’s) was unaware of ABBA in 1979! I’m saying we were not specifically aware of the specific newly-released ABBA track (titled “Voulez-Vous”) that had failed to achieve widespread airplay and sales success, in contrast to their hits of a few years earlier of which we were well aware. “Knowing Me, Knowing You” was the ABBA single I had personally owned back in ’77, in a small edge-of-adolescence collection along with more obvious-for-my-demographic-context numbers recorded by the likes of Aerosmith, Queen, and Styx.
At some point in there I like Vanya became aware of Dolly Parton as a show-biz-celebrity figure but not of “Jolene” (or e.g. “Coat of Many Colors”) as songs. Nominally-country artists with enough crossover power that we were aware of specific recordings of theirs circa the late-Carter/early-Reagan years without having sought them out probably included Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbit, Crystal Gayle, and Juice Newton. I was aware by name of Waylon and Willie as guys who were reputed to be cool but who I couldn’t name any specific recording of, and then there were artists you were aware of by name because the dads of some of your friends liked them even though they were obviously way uncool, e.g. the Oak Ridge Boys or the Statler Brothers. I may have on rare occasion been riding in a car where someone else’s dad had control of the radio and tuned it to a C&W station, although I can’t say I retain any recollection of what that station was playing at the time because we were all lobbying to get it turned back to an AOR station.
‘“smutty French” …“Lady Marmalade” (“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”),‘
LH, it can’t be smutty! It is a polite request! Very polite. How can something so polite be smutty?
Also it is one of the first things I heard from my future ex-wife (and I think one of very few innocent things uttered in that company of math students, given what they were doing and discussing that evening). They told me once you get married nothign is obscene anymore… Was I misinformed? (very good if so, marriage still can be fun then!)
“I have no idea if Young People Today know it.” – Apparently young people of yesterday do.
How can something so polite be smutty?
Well:
I wonder if I might trouble you to deny us the pleasure of your company for a moment, while you reenact the Primal Scene as a solo performance? I really would appreciate it, and I thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperative attitude.
ROFL
Phoney naivety may not be its own reward, but it sure does give others a good laff.
@DE, but that’s just reworded “go fuck yourself”, it has nothing to do with sex:/
It won’t become polite because it is an insult, and it not obscene in its original form.
But when two loving hearts met each other and one says “let’s fuck”, that’s vulgar (unless they’re married) and when it is voulez-vous coucher avec moi it is elegant because French and vous. Comprenez-vous?
Pragmatics. La pragmatique!
Also my naïveté is never phoney (or phoné?). The line does sound absolutely innocent:) There’s even a song by БГ inspired by it (and titled with it, and containing it as a refrain) – the tune is sad, the words are vaguely tragic (basically one does not need even to understand the lyrics). I think it illustrates in some what how it sounds from the Russian language/culture except that the playful component is wholly removed and tragic added.
Spotify plays:
* “Lady Marmalade” (1974; Labelle) — 74 million
* “Voulez-Vous” (2008; Mamma Mia! OST) — 86 million
* “Voulez-Vous” (1979; Abba) — 218 million
* “Lady Marmalade” (2001; Moulin Rouge OST [Christina Aguilera, P!nk, Mýa, Lil’ Kim]) — 450 million
Breakdown by user age and region not available to consumer-level subscribers
Plays heard by me, an American of a certain age (a few years old than J.W.):
* “Lady Marmalade” (1974; Labelle) — 1 million
* “Voulez-Vous” (2008; Mamma Mia! OST) — 0
* “Voulez-Vous” (1979; Abba) — 0
* “Lady Marmalade” (2001; Moulin Rouge OST [Christina Aguilera, P!nk, Mýa, Lil’ Kim]) — 0
Breakdown by user age and region not available to consumer-level subscribers
My experience tracks with Jerry Friedman’s.
I’m sensing a resonance here between jelly rolls and marmalade. I’m not sure about this, since I always preferred plain bread.
I am confused by drasvi’s assumption that there is some tension or contradiction between smuttiness and politeness. They seem to me to be measuring or describing things that go along different axes that don’t necessarily intersect at any predictable angle but aren’t presumptively parallel to each other.
@JWB, naked people are obscene when they are not ancient greeks. Information that Joe and Mary made love is obscene unless conveyed in the form “they married” (or “they have children”). Similarly “to make love” may not embarrass some people who do feel embarassed by a variety of other expressions that mean the same.
If it did not work this way euphemisms would be pointless….
@drasvi: Maybe the problem here is that in English of former generations, “smutty” is not quite the same as “obscene” and indeed smuttiness probably flourished best in Anglophone societies the now-bygone era of the decades before the fully obscene actually became fully legal – the smutty was often vaguely euphemistic or indirect for the specific purpose of not actually being illegal. So a certain quasi-politeness could go well with that. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
not obscene in its original form
It is, though (even foreigners with excellent English often underestimate this.)
A case in point is Urs Niggli’s Mooré dictionary, which glosses yẽbe as (French) “coucher avec, avoir des rapports sexuels avec (vulgaire)”, (English) “sleeping with, have sexual intercourse with (vulgar), to fuck.” It (correctly) doesn’t gloss it as “niquer” (or even “foutre”, not that that means “fuck” either); the word may be vulgar, but it is not obscene; it turns up in perfectly respectable proverbs, for example. English doesn’t really have an equivalent in the same register.
@JF, Hat, the Moulin Rouge version of “Lady Marmalade” is worth a few spins. If only so you can impress on/bore Young People of Today that all good music dates to the ’60s/’70s.(which is not to say all music of the ’70s was good).