24 September 1831: Dedication of Mount Auburn Cemetery

Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst

The creation of Mount Auburn cemetery outside Boston is generally credited with beginning the "rural cemetery" movement (sometimes also and more accurately called "park cemetery" or "garden cemetery", though the former term was the one that stuck):  carefully landscaped burial places that replaced their rather unkempt and desolate Colonial predecessors and served the needs of the living as much as those of the dead.  It is from this prototype that most of us derive our image of a cemetery, and indeed, it was then that the term, "cemetery," began to replace "graveyard" and "burial ground."

These attractive, peaceful spaces reflected a new attitude toward death and were seen as tools of aesthetic and political education--as Nehemiah Allen put it in 1834, "a feeling of the spontaneous goodness of God." "Man should learn from Him, to be the same everywhere that he should choose to be in the sight of his fellows, and to have all his actions proceed from a deep, uncompromising conviction of duty, and love of what is right, rather than from a hope of reward." Humble monuments to ancestors and local worthies were viewed as appropriate to a republic, a constant spur to patriotic citizenship. An anonymous writer said of the Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury in 1855, "The spot where their fathers and friends are buried, if it possess those charms which impress the heart and gratify the taste, will never be forgotten, and the land which contains it, though it have no other attraction, will yet be dear [to the living] for this."

The rural cemeteries were so popular that they became the destination of outings. In the 1840s, when Lady Emmeline Wortley visited the President of Harvard, she recalled that the first trip was to Mount Auburn, and afterward "we went to see a little of the colleges." So popular were the new spaces, that they spurred the creation of urban parks, in part in order that the veneration of the dead and recreational activity might better be separated.

Wildwood Cemetery (1888) in Amherst is our local exemplar, in contrast to West Cemetery, whose oldest portion, at least, preserves a rare piece of untouched Colonial topography and the feel of a Colonial cemetery.

Although Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed the Town Common, declined the invitation to perform a similar service for the new cemetery, he did make recommendations of appropriate native plant species, which Austin Dickinson (brother of the poet), who took a leading role in establishing the new institution, followed.

Carpenter and Morehouse, in their venerable but standard history of the town (1896), say, "Nature has made of Wildwood cemetery a garden-spot for the living, a noble sepulcher for the dead.  The best that man can do is to preserve therein the beauties of Nature's handiwork."

Resources: Mount Auburn Cemetery; Mass Moments entry

20 September 1918: Birth of Historian George Mosse

Mosse's grave, Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wisconsin

George Mosse, one of the most influential historians of modern Europe, was born into a distinguished German-Jewish publishing family in Berlin at the end of the First World War. (His grandfather was Rudolf Mosse, who revolutionized advertising in the German periodical press and brought out the famous liberal newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt, among other titles.)

After emigrating to the United States via England, Mosse studied early modern history and established his reputation as a Reformation scholar in the 1950s. He liked to note, with a mixture of pride and irony, that all of his examinations at Harvard were in fields prior to 1700. It was ironic because he became best known for his work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. He was in fact, a co-founder and -editor of the Journal of Contemporary History.

When, in the course of his early employment at the University of Iowa, and then Wisconsin, students asked him to talk about and teach the Weimar and Nazi eras, he both turned to and revolutionized another field. Mosse was among the first to take fascist and Nazi thought seriously, more interested in understanding its origins and functions than in judging its intellectual sophistication or lack thereof. Having set forth his views on the relation between high culture and popular attitudes in his influential text on The Culture of Western Europe (1961), he proceeded to show how racist and fascist ideologies--particularly German völkisch and antisemitic thought--far from being the mere ravings of a lunatic fringe, in fact corresponded to deep-seated needs of societies wracked by change and seeking reassurance and meaning. Rejecting both old-fashioned intellectual history as pedigree-hunting, and the abstractions of political sociology, Mosse located fascist thought squarely in the European cultural tradition. By stressing the nature of fascism as a politics of consensus based on true mass movements and popular support, he moved beyond simple notions of dictatorship and terror, offering an interpretation that was far more complex and ultimately far more disturbing. In the final phases of his career, Mosse turned to the history of sexuality and gay studies, again showing how cultural stereotypes and sharp oppositions between the putatively "normal" and "abnormal" in popular culture led to the conflation of difference and hierarchy and informed a host of practices, from the personal to the political. Again, a deeply disturbing revelation: social manners, antisemitism, and anti-homosexual prejudice all derived from similar notions of respectability, which were in turn linked to deeply held values of class and nation.

Although Mosse thus gravitated to many epochs and subjects in succession, there was in fact a deep and underlying unity to his research. As he always told us, the historian was best advised to focus not on a time, place, or topic, as such, and rather, on a significant question. For him, one of the most profound questions had to do with the ways that people find or make meaning in their daily existence--and reconcile themselves to the constraints of living in society; hence his definition of culture as "a state or habit of mind which is apt to become a way of life." Everything was therefore of a piece for him: His studies of Protestant and Baroque Catholic ritual and liturgy helped him to make sense of nineteenth-century nationalist monuments and the Nuremberg rallies. Observing popular Christianity in Mexico--he liked to recount stories of peasants splattering chicken blood on churches at Easter--provided him with insights into other syncretic forms of thought. The fixation with the artistic legacy of Classical Antiquity shared by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and Nazis alike led him to connect ideas of beauty with acts of brutality.

Mosse's work contributed greatly to the introduction of the study of collective mentalities into the study of modern history. An immensely learned man who wore his learning lightly, he eschewed the sort of complex theoretical discussions favored in some other branches of the profession (particularly those influenced by francophone scholarship), instead preferring to illustrate the workings of theory through its application to concrete examples, presented in eminently readable prose.

Mosse was one of the most popular professors at the University of Wisconsin, where he came to hold the position of Bascom Professor of History. Following his death, the Humanities Building, in which he had worked and taught, was renamed, "The George L. Mosse Humanities Building." Today, however, the forty-year old modernist structure is threatened with the wrecking ball--a fate that has provoked debate among academics and historic preservationists.

Resources:

the Wikipedia entry presents an admirably solid and comprehensive portrait of the man, his life, and his work.

George Mosse Teaching Fellowship, University of Wisconsin History Department

neighbors in life and death: 

graves of George Mosse and his colleague and political sparring partner, Marxist Harvey Goldberg

It's Reigning Khazars! Lost Capital Update

AP: Mansur Mirovalev, "Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital"

Details on the discovery of the long-lost Khazar capital are starting to come out in the popular news media, and this piece contains several color photos of the site and artefacts.

The article includes a statement from Khazar researcher Kevin Brook to the effect that he is convinced this is the correct site. Most of the discussion turns on the nature of what was found (architectural remains and material culture, rather than texts). Based on the statements cited here (though their representativeness remains to be determined) one could speculate as to which themes or debates will emerge: on the one hand, a long-overdue positive recognition of the Khazar role in Russian history; on the other, a potentially regressive questioning of the Jewish character of the Khazar empire.

As promised, a more extensive round-up of coverage will follow in the near future.

Dickinson Break-in Update: Finally, the Facts

Press stories at last confirm what early clues suggested: that the break-in at the Dickinson Museum early this month was a random act of antisocial behavior.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette reported Saturday that the man who broke into the Museum was the same one who attempted a break-in at a private residence a short time later:

A University of Massachusetts student faces criminal charges for allegedly causing $600 in damage at the Emily Dickinson Museum after attempting to force his way into the building in the early morning hours of Sept. 5. Police say he was very drunk at the time.
[ . . . . ]
The man first smashed a window and door at the museum in an unsuccessful attempt to get inside, and in the process lacerated his right hand and bled extensively. A bookcase inside the museum was tipped over when he reached inside to unlock the door. Police said the cost of cleaning up the broken glass and the blood was $600.

(Full story: Scott Merzbach, "Man to face charges for museum damage")

Dickinson Break-in Update

No news, actually.

The Amherst Police Arrest and Call Log records the initiation of a breaking-and-entering incident at the Museum as of 8:30 a.m. on Friday, 3 September (incident # 08-545-OF), and today's Amherst Bulletin notes same in its famous police blotter. However, no details are available, and no reports seem to have appeared yet in the traditional media.

6 September 1841: Birthday of Antonín Dvořák

Dvořák's grave at Vyšehrad
in Prague, where many of
the greatest Czech cultural
figures are buried


Antonín Dvořák is one of the most sympathetic modern musical figures: a man of lower middle-class origins who attained the height of fame yet never lost his connection with the common people, a Czech nationalist who proudly refused lucrative offers to compose operas to German texts, yet never succumbed to chauvinism.  He is also one of the most underappreciated modern composers.  Often relegated to second-class status and treated as part of an ethnic sideshow to the Germanic main event, he was in fact in the eyes of many contemporaries second in importance only to Brahms. Indeed, he achieved the rare distinction of having won the respect and eventual friendship of Brahms, who was by no means easy to please.

Dvořák, who came to the United States and served as Director of the National Conservatory of Music, caused an international controversy when he proclaimed in The New York Herald in 1893 that the future of American music lay in its African-American traditions:

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies.  This can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.  When I first came here I was impressed with this idea, and it has developed into a settled conviction.  These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil.  They are American.  They are the songs of America and your composers must turn to them.  All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people. Beethoven's most charming scherzo is based upon what might now be considered a skillfully handled negro melody.  I myself have gone to the simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious work. Only in this way can a musician express the true sentiment of the people.  He gets into touch with the common humanity of the country.  In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.  They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, gracious or what you will.  It is music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose.  There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a themetic [sic] source here.

What then seemed to many to be a reckless prediction or even harebrained idea today seems prophetic.

He also maintained that soup was the foundation of a good meal.

Further Resources:   Dvořák American Heritage Association

Community Preservation Act Dollars at Work: West Cemetery Gravestone Restoration Underway

Restoration work on headstones in Amherst's historic 1730 West Cemetery began this July and is now in full swing.

The work, carried out by Monument Conservation Collaborative of Norfolk, CT, is financed by an appropriation of $ 150,000 from Amherst's Community Preservation Act fund.

The team takes a break on a hot day: 

Irving Slavid (President), 

Allison Blake Schofield (intern)

Martin Johnson (Conservator, partner),

applying a biocide to remove

moss, fungus, lichen, and other

surface growth:

before

after

adhesive repair of fragments,

using epoxy

relamination of split slates, 

using flowable grout

Breaking News: attempted break-in at Dickinson Museum

There was an attempted break-in this morning at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, specifically, the 1813 Dickinson Homestead in which the poet spent most of her life.

Partial and unofficial information suggests that this was a case of disorderly and antisocial behavior (one might speculate about alcohol or drug abuse) rather than any sort of attack on the museum, as such.

The publication of Brock Clarke's provocatively titled and darkly comedic novel, Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England(2007)--which begins with the narrator's confession, "I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts"--of course set preservationists everywhere on edge, though he was welcomed to the Valley as part of his book tour last year.

Fortunately the Dickinson Museum is adequately protected and well monitored, but the incident underscores the need for vigilance.  Many other small museums and historic structures, whether due to meagre resources or for other reasons, lack proper security measures against both human mischief and natural disaster.  Installation of such systems even in the best of cases poses stiff aesthetic and technical challenges.  And of course, large-scale natural disasters can overwhelm even the best security measures.  Preservationists breathed a sigh of relief when Hurricane Gustav failed to develop into the catastrophe that was Katrina. They are still struggling, not without controversy, to save what can be saved from the destruction of three years ago.

The near misses this past week in both New Orleans and Amherst remind us just how fragile and precious our historic resources are. That they have survived this long is due in no small measure to good luck, but we cannot rely on good luck alone to protect them in the future.

It's Reigning Khazars! Breaking News Update: Long-Lost Jewish Capital Found

The Khazar Empire, from J.-H. Schnitzler,

“L’Empire de Charlemagne et celui

des Arabes . . . au commencement du

IXme siècle . . . . (Strasbourg, 1857)

Agence France-Presse announces, “Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital.”

The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz recently reported the discovery of ruins of the walls of Jerusalem dating from 2100 years ago. Those archaeologists, however, were Israelis, and there is of course nothing long-lost about a Jewish capital in Jerusalem under the Second Commonwealth (debate centers instead on the age, nature, and extent of any historical remains associated with the biblical accounts of David and Solomon.)

What is noteworthy about the French report is that the long-lost capital happens to lie within the boundaries of the Russian Federation.

This exciting archaeological news provides a welcome opportunity to introduce a new rubric that I had long intended to add.

The history of the Khazars is so dramatic and mysterious that someone encountering it for the first time could be excused for dismissing it as a fiction or fantasy—as many have indeed done.

A Turkic people, who maintained their independence in the face of both the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Caliphate, the Khazars blocked the advance of the Arabs and Islam in eastern Europe—a development every bit as fateful as, though far less well-known than, the parallel achievement of Charles Martel and the Franks in the west at Poitiers in 732. In the early ninth century, stunningly, the Khazars converted—en masse, it is now believed—to rabbinic Judalsm. At its height, this Jewish empire dominated the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, controlling the lower Dnieper, Don, and Volga rivers, and stretching from Kiev in the west to Khwarizm in the east. Indeed, the Caspian Sea was known as the “Khazar Sea,” a term that survives in Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi usage, among others.

Khazaria, celebrated for its military prowess, agricultural riches, economic influence, and religious tolerance, became a mediating force and buffer between the realms of Islam and Eastern Christianity and rivaled the Byzantine and Carolingian empires in extent and power. In the second half of the tenth century, the ascendant Russian state in effect destroyed the Khazar empire, the severely truncated remains of which succumbed to the Mongols nearly three centuries later.

The Jewish character of the Khazar empire is now irrefutably proven through textual sources, but archaeological evidence, for a variety of political as well as practical reasons, has until recently been relatively scarce or poorly diffused. Numerous individual artifacts survive (often in obscurity or secrecy), but scientists continue to seek intact complete settlements. The great fortress of Sarkel, on the Don, was only partially excavated by Soviet researchers before it was submerged under both a reservoir and a cloak of silence during the Stalin era. The holy grail of the archaeological quest (to borrow an image from another cultural tradition) has therefore been the final and greatest of the three historic Khazar capitals, Itil (or Atil), at the mouth of the Volga near the Caspian Sea.

According to AFP, it has now been found:

MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian archaeologists said Wednesday they had found the long-lost capital of the Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, a breakthrough for research on the ancient Jewish state.

"This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organiser Dmitry Vasilyev told AFP by telephone from Astrakhan State University after returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea.

"We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that period -- how the Khazars actually lived. We know very little about the Khazars -- about their traditions, their funerary rites, their culture," he said.

The city was the capital of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic peoples who adopted Judaism as a state religion, from between the 8th and the 10th centuries, when it was captured and sacked by the rulers of ancient Russia.

At its height, the Khazar state and its tributaries controlled much of what is now southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan and large parts of Russia's North Caucasus region.The capital is referred to as Itil in Arab chronicles but Vasilyev said the word may actually have been used to refer to the Volga River on which the city was founded or to the surrounding river delta region.

Itil was said to be a multi-ethnic place with houses of worship and judges for Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans. Its remains have until now never been identified and were said to have been washed away by the Caspian Sea.

Archaeologists have been excavating in the area if Samosdelka for the past nine years but have only now collected enough material evidence to back their thesis, including the remains of an ancient brick fortress, he added.

"Within the fortress, we have found huts similar to yurts, which are characteristics of Khazar cities.... The fortress had a triangular shape and was made with bricks. It's another argument that this was no ordinary city."

Around 10 university archaeologists and some 50 students took part in excavations in the region this summer, which are partly financed by the Jewish University in Moscow and the Russian Jewish Congress.

The essence of the Khazar story is familiar to scholars in mediæval and Jewish studies, and lineaments of it have also furnished the stuff of legend, (including cultural classics from Yehudah ha-Levi in Muslim Spain to Pushkin in nineteenth-century Russia), but the details of this historical episode are virtually unknown to the general public. In part for that reason, the mysterious rise and disappearance of the Khazars and their empire have prompted a great deal of speculation, most of it fanciful, some of it vicious. Among the latter, the two most prominent beliefs are, in brief (I’ll return to them in future postings):

(1) European Jews are mainly descendants of Khazar converts, and therefore not “Semites” of Middle Eastern origin, as a result of which a Jewish state in that region is illegitimate.

(There is a historical debate to be had here—or was, at any rate: all the documentary, and now, genetic evidence refutes this theory of Jewish ethnicity. In any case, the assertion should be irrelevant to political debates because it negates neither the ancient history nor the obstinate modern fact of a Jewish state in Israel.)

(2) The Khazars—whether defined as a discrete ethnic subgroup or employed as a synonym for European Jews or Zionists, tout court—represent a distinctly sinister force in world history. Until recently, this paranoid view was confined to the lunatic fringe that one associates with the John Birchers and their anticommunist ilk, fascists and white supremacists old and new, and contemporary Arab and Islamist hate groups.

What is most disturbing is that elements of the two political claims (one cannot dignify them with the name of “arguments” or lines of “reasoning”) are gaining currency and converging. When the creation of Israel by the United Nations—an institution regarded by progressives as a force for anti-colonialism and the general good—can again be seriously called into question more than half a century after the fact, both the founding and survival of the Jewish state can only appear the more mysterious. As a result, the distance between the quasi-respectable rants about the “Israel lobby” by Walt and Mearsheimer (1, 2) and the outré conspiracy theories of 9-11 “troofers” and hatemongers of all stripes is smaller and more rapidly traversed than one would have cared to imagine.

For these reasons, as well as because of its intrinsic historical importance, then, the story of Khazaria earns a place among the rubrics of the present blog.

One shudders to think how reactions to the news story may develop on the internet.

For the moment, though, let us hope that the emphasis will be on serious science and the celebration and further investigation of a great discovery.

realm of the Khazars and designation

of the Caspian Sea as the Khazar Sea,

from Conrad Malte Brun, “Géographie

Du Moyen Age principalement au

IXe Siècle” (Paris, 1837)

Resources:

The Jews of Khazaria (now out in a second edition; Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), by Kevin Alan Brook, provides the single most convenient and comprehensive overview of the growing but widely dispersed specialized literature on the Khazars. His website, www.khazaria.com, offers an overview of Khazar history as well as regular updates on new historical and archaeological discoveries.

Breaking News: Agence France-Presse announces, “Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital.”