19 January 1749: Birthday of Isaiah Thomas: Patriot, Printer, Founder of American Antiquarian Society

Mass Moments tells us:

On this day...in 1749, the Patriot printer Isaiah Thomas was born. In 1770, Thomas established the Massachusetts Spy, the first newspaper aimed at middle-class readers. While other papers were happy with 400 subscribers, the Spy had a circulation of 3,500. Thomas used the Spy to rally support for the cause of independence. Targeted by the British, he smuggled his press out of Boston to Worcester a few days before the Battle of Lexington and Concord. There, he continued publishing his newspaper. After the war, Thomas became the foremost publisher and printer in America. In 1812, he established the American Antiquarian Society, which today is one of the nation's most complete collections of printed work. (read the rest)

As both printer and patriot, Thomas was indeed a major figure in the history of Massachusetts and the early Republic. (for further information on Thomas and a copy of the paper, see this post from last summer) was a factor in the Revolution and carried an early account of the battles of Lexington and Concord.  Thomas's History of Printing in America (1810) remains a valued and still reprinted reference work.

Thomas performed yet another great service for the region and the nation.  As Mass Moments puts it:

In 1812, he used his considerable wealth to establish a society dedicated to preserving the "literature of liberty"— the newspapers, broadsides, books, pamphlets, and letters that had shaped public opinion during the revolutionary period. He donated his private library and a generous endowment. Then he personally visited newspaper offices and purchased as many back issues as he could. He believed that newspapers were the single best records of the thoughts and actions of common people — the people who made the revolution a success.
Located in Worcester, Thomas's American Antiquarian Society is today the most complete private repository of American printed works through 1876 and a lasting tribute to one man's passionate faith in the power of the printed word.

Here, my battered but treasured copy of the List of Officers and other members from 1814, when the Society was but two years old.

Among the names (for membership was by invitation only, and restricted to notables and distinguished men of learning), we find:

Hon. John Adams, L.L.D. Quincy, late President of the United States.
Hon. John Quincy Adams, L.L.D., Boston, Minister to the Court of Russia.
Hon. Dewitt Clinton, L.L.D. Newyork.
Rev. Timothy Dwight, D.D. L.L.D. President of Yale College, Connecticut.
Hon. Christopher Daniel Ebeling, Professor, Hamburgh, Europe.
Rev. Ebenezer Fitch, D.D. President Williams College, Williamstown.
Hon. Thomas Jefferson, L.L.D. late President of the United States, Monticello, Virginia.
Hon. John Marshall, L.L.D. Chief Justice, U.S. Virginia.
Hon. Gouverneur Morris, Morrisiana, Newyork.
Major General Thomas Pinckney, Charleston, S.C,.
Hon. Bushrod Washington, Judge Supreme Court U. States, Mount Vernon, Virginia
Hon. Daniel Webster, Portsmouth, Newhampshire.

Our town is represented in the person of:

Noah Webster, Amherst.

The document includes a record of "Articles Presented to the Society." The list begins by noting Thomas's founding donation of 8,000 volumes from his personal library and then records acquisitions of the past year.

Several items may be of particular interest:  The books are a miscellaneous lot; we find one incunable, a 1487 Venetian Bible.  Among the periodicals is a collection of the Massachusetts Spy, donated by Thomas himself.

Most noteworthy, perhaps, are materials from the personal library of the Mather family of distinguished Massachusetts clergymen (pp. 23-25): a major portion of the books, and among the manuscripts, "Upwards of 900 single sermons," as well as sermon notes, diaries, and other writings. Indeed, the AAS can today boast of the "preeminent" collection of works by the Mathers.

Among the manuscript material (p. 25) we also find "Compilation of Historical Tracts, in British America, written above 100 years ago," by the "Hon. Thomas Jefferson of Monticello."  One longs to know whether Mr. Jefferson (a busy man, by all accounts), read the publication and noted, barely two inches below his own name:

Original Copy of an Almanack, for 1792, in the hand writing of the author, a negro man, in Maryland, by the name of Banniker.

In any case, the Sage of Monticello had become acquainted with that book and its author nearly a generation earlier, for it is of course the work of none other than the many-talented Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806). It is ironic in more ways than one. Among Banneker's numerous achievements was assisting in surveying the land for the creation of the nation's capital in 1791. As PBS explains,

A notice first printed in the Georgetown Weekly Ledger and later copied in other newspapers stated that Ellicott was "attended by Benjamin Banneker, an Ethiopian, whose abilities, as a surveyor, and an astronomer, clearly prove that Mr. Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments, was without foundation."

And the very manuscript preserved in the AAS collections likewise played a role in that early debate over race:

In 1792, Banneker published an almanac, based on his own painstakingly calculated ephemeris (table of the position of celestial bodies), that also included commentaries, literature, and fillers that had a political and humanitarian purpose. The previous summer, he had sent a copy of the ephemeris to Thomas Jefferson, along with a letter in which he challenged Jefferson's ideas about the inferiority of blacks.

Banneker declared it self-evident

that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.

Counting on Jefferson's reputation for being more liberal-minded in this regard,

I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties ; and that however variable we may be in society or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.

The lengthy letter deserves to be read in its entirety.  Thanking Banneker for the gift and the sentiments, Jefferson replied:

no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedt. humble servt. Th. Jefferson

It's a virtual parallel to the debates over Jewish emancipation (1, 2) unfolding concurrently in Europe.  Condorcet urged the abolition of slavery during the French Revolution, though his gradualist stance on emancipation remains the subject of debate. In any case, a serendipitous pairing of documents as we embark upon the celebration of Black History Month.

Finally, we encounter the odds and ends:  "Coins, Medals, and Paper Money," and the (for modern librarians and archivists) most dreaded "Various Articles" (pp. 25-27).

To be sure, there are the expected sorts of items:  engravings of Columbus and a depiction (medium not identified) of the Mather arms, various "Indian Utensils," and the like.

Then there are the some unexpected and intriguing items:  "A Silver Trinket for a Lady, supposed to have been made 700 years ago" (this, donated by Thomas himself), "part of the tobacco box used by Sir Walter Raleigh," "Two small pieces of Palm Leaf, on which are written with a stylus, several lines on the Malayan language," and "A Highland Dagger, used in the rebellion in Scotland, in 1745."

The mention of a twelfth-century piece of metalwork or a dagger associated with Bonnie Prince Charlie naturally quickens my pulse. The palm leaf manuscripts also pique my interest:  were they collected as mere curios (and how?), or was there some specific interest in the content or their significance for the field of linguistics or paleography? We have no idea. All we know is that the AAS was stuck with them, along with other and sundry objects, including some 800 coins from various regions and epochs, acquired since October 1813. And that was when the AAS was only two years old.  

One wonders how the previous owners acquired the artefacts and why they thought a new institution dedicated to "the literature of liberty" in the United States would want or need them. The real question, then, is: do they belong there?  In fact, it sounds all too familiar: as anyone involved with libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies knows, one of the biggest challenges is determining what is kept, finding the space for it, and arranging for its appropriate display and/or preservation. All too often, these institutions—especially the small, local-oriented ones—became dumping grounds, the equivalent of the town's attic or junk drawer. Many institutions have had to contend with numerous worthless gifts, but even intrinsically signficant ones (who wouldn't want a piece of medieval silver?) can be a problem if they are not in harmony with an institution's core mission or if the institution cannot properly care for them. As a result, there is new emphasis on developing appropriate collections policies (e.g. 1, 2, 3 ). And, understandably but more controversially, deaccessioning policy is also one of the hottest topics in the museum and library field.

And so, from a small and humble document, a glimpse into the intellectual world of the early republic that reminds us how much has changed and how much has not. Mr. Jefferson's doubts notwithstanding, we have an African-American president (which is not to say that our racial problems have disappeared). And, as Jefferson, the inveterate accumulator of books and much else, would have understood, collections management, too, remains a challenge.

Then as now, the American Antiquarian Society was an elite organization whose membership was small and included only the prominent.Fortunately, the collections and programs of the AAS are open to the general public and have become a chief resource for scholars of print culture as well as New England and American history. It is home to the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and hosts numerous other programs, seminars, and public lectures. Among the many online resources are the Catalogue of American Engravings and the 19th Century American Children's Book Trade Directory. Just this past year, Cheryl Harned, one of the students in our UMass/Five College History Graduate Program, created a web site on the history of reading in order to make additional resources from the collections more widely available.

It's well worth a visit, whether on the web or in person.I think Isaiah Thomas would be proud.

2 January 1782: Emperor Joseph II of Austria Issues Edict of Tolerance (with some reflections on assimilation and ethnic identity)

The "Edict of Tolerance"[1] toward the Jews, which Joseph II issued at the start of 1782, was one in a series of his comprehensive reforms of the Austrian Empire.  In the preface to the document, Joseph declared:

From the ascension to Our reign We have directed Our most preeminent attention to the end that all Our subjects without distinction of nationality and religion, once they have been admitted and tolerated [aufgenommen und geduldet] in Our States, shall participate in common in public welfare, the increase of which is Our care, shall enjoy legal freedom and not find any obstacles in any honest ways of gaining their livelihood and increasing general industriousness.

Because, however, "the laws and so-called Jewish Regulations [Judenordnungen] pertaining to the Jewish nation [Nazion]" were "not always compatible with these Our gracious intentions," the present Edict would serve to amend them.  It followed the "Patent of Toleration" of 1781, which granted additional but not full rights to non-Catholic Christians in the Habsburg Empire. Initially applicable only to Lower Austria, the Edict was eventually extended to the rest of the realm. It still fell short of full citizenship in the Empire (that lay some three generations ahead; 1, 2), but it was a milestone:  Joseph's religious reforms were the most advanced in Europe, and mark the tentative beginning of Jewish emancipation there.

Medal commemorating toleration and coexistence of the various faiths, 1782. Tin with copper plug, 42 mm.

It has been assumed that the medal was struck at the Imperial Mint in Nuremberg.

(a separate medal explicitly celebrated toleration of Protestants and Jews, but with the erroneous date of 1781)

Obverse: Bust of Joseph II, with the name of the engraver ([Johann Christian] Reich) in the cutoff of the arm.

At the bottom, in scroll:  "Tolerantia Imperantis," denoting the new policy of toleration on the part of the ruler.

Reverse:

A Catholic bishop (center), Protestant pastor (left), and Jewish rabbi (right), raise their hands in blessing. The bishop holds a chalice of communion wine. The cross surrounded by rays above it resembles, whether deliberately or not, resembles a monstrance holding the second divine essence in the form of the communion wafer. 

The pastor and rabbi each hold their sacred books in the left hand.

The toppling architectural remnant to the right is seen as a reference to Joseph's restrictions on the monasteries.

Above, the Imperial eagle beneath the triangle of divinity with all-seeing eye of God clutches a banner reading, "In Deo."

The motto around the upper edge reads, "Sub Alis Suis Protegit Omnes," Beneath His Wings, He Protects All.

In the exergue:  "Ecce Amici,"  Behold These Friends, with the date 1782.

The Edict did many things, chiefly creating new but limited economic and educational opportunities. Jews could now learn or practice "all kinds of crafts or trades," though Christian masters were allowed rather than compelled to accept Jewish apprentices, and the Jews were to remain "without however the right of mastership or citizenship." Jews could live in rural regions only if they wished to pursue trades or establish factories, and secured the appropriate permission (§ 7, 10-15). The goal was to wean them away from finance, petty trade, and other supposedly characteristic unproductive, exploitative, and undesirable economic activity. For that matter, the Edict made it clear that its purpose was not to increase the number or collective status of Jews in the capital; they were  to be granted residence privileges in the traditional manner, family by family, rather than recognized as a community. To that end, they had no right to public worship or printing presses (§ 1-6).  Jews could now attend secular primary and secondary schools, and the earlier right to higher education was confirmed. They could also open their own schools, but under government supervision (§ 8-9). And, "Considering the numerous openings in trades and manifold contacts with Christians resulting therefrom, the care for maintaining common confidence requires that the Hebrew and the so-called Jewish language [i.e. Yiddish; JW] and writing of Hebrew intermixed with German be abolished . . . the vernacular of the land is to be used in stead." (§ 15)

The document stated (§ 25), "by these favors We almost place the Jewish nation on an equal level with adherents of other religious associations in respect to trade and employment of civil and domestic facilities." Although that language may grate on modern ears, the word, “almost,” was in fact intended to signal just how unprecedented and generous the measures were. There should be nothing surprising in any of this, for the rationale was motivated as much by pragmatism as principle:

As it is our goal is our goal to make the Jewish nation useful and serviceable to the State, mainly through better education and enlightenment of its youth as well as by directing them to the sciences, the arts, and the crafts, We hereby grant and order. . . .

The Edict was followed by other regulations that both curbed the traditional autonomy or communal rights of the Jews and allowed them entry into national life, e.g. service in the military (1787) and the adoption of stable German names (1788). 

What I said with regard to the latter could apply to all, for such was the nature of the bargain:  "On the one hand, it implied equality of citizens and broke down the old barriers of both parochialism and exclusion. On the other hand, it made clear that the price was adherence to a unitary norm and a forced assimilation to the dominant culture." This was not entirely a bad thing, but neither was it an unproblematic thing, and that complexity, those contradictions need to be acknowledged.

As Derek Beales has shown in his masterful and definitive study, Joseph managed to be at once enlightened, despotic, and revolutionary. The enlightened absolutist state (like the early modern state, tout court, but with more vigor) was concerned above all with creating productive and loyal subjects and therefore sought to assert a unitary authority over all aspects of public life. The Jews now had to be brought into that process. Justice demanded that most discriminatory measures be removed, but there was no positive valuation of a Jewish collective identity or persistence of a Jewish culture. And the new rights—always granted rather than something to which the Jews were entitled, for we are still quite some philosophical distance from the American or French Revolutions—moreover always came with the requirement that the recipients reform their supposedly atavistic or even immoral ways and prove themselves worthy.

For good reason, it calls to mind many of the debates about African-Americans and citizenship in the United States. It was what Leo Spitzer[2] (25) called the “’conversionist’ approach” typical of the era:

its ideology was unequivocally saturated with cultural chauvinism: an unquestioned faith in the superiority of the dominant culture. According to the emancipators, the emancipated, to be truly liberated from subordination, had to ‘become like us.’

The Jews were to be brought into the modern world, whether they liked it or not.  Some did, many did not—at least at first. As Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz observe in their annotations to the 1782 decree (40), "Although generally hailed by the upper-class and secularly educated Jews, these edicts were viewed by the vast majority of Jews as sinister attempts to undermine traditional Jewish life."

The integration of the Jews into the cultural mainstream—which included the secular and scientific knowledge, of which they had been largely deprived since the Renaissance, was certainly to their benefit. Even the forced assimilation into German culture (which, after all, did not exclude the use of their traditional languages for internal affairs) was part and parcel of that endeavor. And it had far-reaching consequences.

The aforementioned observations by Leo Spitzer come from his provocative comparative study of assimilation and marginality among West African Creoles, Austrian Jews, and Afro-Brazilians.[2] Simply put, Spitzer argues that the West, circa 1770, offered marginal groups a bargain: inclusion at the price of assimilation. With the rise of scientific racism, beginning a century later, and through the Second World War, those who had accepted the bargain found themselves both cut off from their roots and irrevocably rejected by the dominant culture. In each case, the marginal group had adopted a different assimilationist strategy: in the case of African former slaves, conversion to Christianity and adopting the manners of the proper Englishmen; in the case of Jews who rejected conversion, adopting the cultural values of the bourgeoisie; and in the case of Afro-Brazilians, “whitening,” or intermarriage with lighter-skinned partners. The forward-looking Austrian Jews moved, over the generations, from commerce into industry, and then, into the liberal professions and even the arts, in part because of opportunity and in part in order to flee the ghetto stereotype and establish their credentials.

Here, yet another parallel suggests itself. In his famous proposal for colonial Indian education (1835), Thomas Babington Macaulay was notoriously dismissive of indigenous Indian culture, and yet, in both imposing and making available English as the language of instruction for a British and western curriculum, he expressed full confidence in the intrinsic equality and potential of the colonial subjects. The aim, he said, was to create a new indigenous intermediary group, “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” He thereby set in motion a process that is to no small degree responsible for the technological and academic prowess of the elite of the world’s largest democracy.

In the case of the German-speaking Jews, the forced cultural marriage eventually engendered a genuine passion and prodigious progeny. As the brilliant Gershom Scholem observed in a classic but all-too-little-known essay, it was a unique constellation of factors:

The Jewish passion for things German is connected with the specific historical hour in which it was born. At the moment in time when Jews turned from their medieval state toward the new era of enlightenment and revolution, the overwhelming majority of them—80 per cent—lived in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Eastern Europe. Due to prevailing geographic, political, and linguistic conditions, therefore, it was German culture that most Jews encountered on their road to the West. Moreover—and this is decisive—the encounter occurred precisely at the moment when that culture had reached one of its most fruitful turning-points. It was the zenith of Germany's bourgeois era, an era which produced an image of things German that, up to 1940, and among very broad classes of people, was to remain unshaken, even by many most bitter experiences. Thus a newly-awakened Jewish creativity, which was to assume such impressive forms after 1780, impinged upon a great period of German creativity. One can say that it was a happy hour, and indeed, it has no parallel in the history of Jewish encounter with other European peoples. The net result was the high luster that fell on all things German. Even today, after so much blood and so many tears, we cannot say that it was only a deceptive luster.  It was also more, both in fact, and in potentia. (33-34)

Indeed, one has but to recall the names of the great German-Jewish authors, from Heine to Kafka, or the scholars of literature and the humanities.  Citing Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod, who suggested the ideal of love at a critical distance, Scholem observes that the Jews loved without distance, and the Germans kept their distance without love. The tragic end of the unrequited love affair is all too well known.

* * *

[1]Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz,eds., The Jew in the Modern World:  A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (NY and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 36-40↩>

[2] Leo Spitzer, Lives In Between:  Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil, West Africa 1780-1945 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989)↩>

• Gershom Scholem, "Jews and Germans," Commentary, November 1966, 31-38

1 January 1788: Jews in the Austrian Empire Required to Assume German Surnames

On this date in 1788, Jews of the Austrian Empire were required (by a decree of the preceding August) to assume permanent given names and surnames and maintain communal vital records in the German language. It was a portentous step in more ways than one. It embodied all the contradictions of enlightened absolutist policy (and by extension, Enlightenment doctrine itself). On the one hand, it implied equality of citizens and broke down the old barriers of both parochialism and exclusion. On the other hand, it made clear that the price was adherence to a unitary norm and a forced assimilation to the dominant culture.

Most Central and Eastern European Jews had no stable surnames, referring to themselves in the traditional religious manner as son of so-and-so, identifying themselves by place of birth/residence, or both. (Thus, for example, the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelsssohn was originally known as Moses Dessau—after his hometown—and even his secular surname or pen name, literally, "son of Mendel," was a Germanization of the Hebrew patronymic: his father was known as Menachem Mendel Dessau). One can readily understand why this situation would prove vexing for a centralizing state intent upon exercising an ever greater and more homogenizing authority over the lives of its subjects. The name law was part of the series of comprehensive reforms enacted by Emperor Joseph II.

Emperor Joseph II (detail of copper engraving; Frankfurt, 1781)

A friend once told me he had heard a German remark that the Jews got all the loveliest German names. It is true, for example, that many such names relate to gemstones and the beauties of nature: sapphire (Saphir), diamond (Diamant), gold (Gold, Goldfarb, Goldstein, etc.), ruby (Rubin, Rubinstein, etc.), amber (Bernstein), field or valley of flowers (Blumenfeld, Blumenthal), valley of lilies (Lilienthal), roses (Rose, Rosenblum, Rosenfeld, Rosenthal), and so forth.

In fact, of course, the Jews also got some of the most comical or unattractive names: Galgenholz (gallows wood), Pulverbestandteil (component of powder), Maschinendraht (machine wire), Saumagen (sow's stomach), Wanzenknicker (bug cracker), Hungerleider (starvling), Wohlgeruch (good smell), Fresser (glutton), Einhorn (unicorn), Mist (manure), Küssemich (kiss me), Groberklotz (rough block of wood), etc. etc.

There have been many assertions about the nature and consequences of the Josephine name decrees. As tradition has it, unsympathetic and mercenary officials assigned Jews names depending on whim or the applicant’s ability to pay.

When I was in college, the great German-Jewish historian (and inveterate ironist) George Mosse once said, in a lecture:

And there was some poor little Jew from the ghetto who stank to high heaven, and they named him "Tülpenfeld" [field of tulips] or "Veilchenduft" [fragrance of violets] and thought it was hilarious.

It's like an old German-Jewish joke from Central Europe:

The decree is issued that Jews must take on German names.
The husband comes back from the naming office.
The wife, with curiosity: "So, what are we called now?"
The husband: "Shirthead."
The wife: "Vey iz mir! Couldn't you have chosen a more respectable name?!"
The husband: "What do you mean, 'chosen,' with this band of thieves? I paid 50 Gulden extra for the 'r' alone!"

It is puzzling at first sight. The law and its subsequent additions did not speak of assigning names, although they did prohibit the use of place names or common or distinguished German surnames. (A list specified only acceptable given names.) Surprisingly, there was long no authoritative explanation of how the policy actually worked, and most of what passes for accepted fact is merely received wisdom that has to be viewed with a certain skepticism.

The Austrian Empire, from Conrad Malte Brun, Atlas Complet (Paris, 1812). Galicia is the yellow-bordered region to the northeast

To the extent that we now better understand the actual origins and patterns of Jewish names in Galicia (home to the largest Jewish population in the Empire), it is thanks to the outstanding work of Alexander Beider (2004), which follows on his pioneering studies of Ashkenazic given names and Russian and Polish Jewish surnames. Beider, who eventually inventoried some 25,000 Galician names, notes that he was originally reluctant to take up the topic: The names of Polish and Russian Jews reflected their own choices and life-ways as well as intriguing multilingual etymologies that begged for decoding. The creation of Galician Jewish names,” by contrast, “was due principally to the whim of Austrian Christian officials,” and developing an inventory presumably “would be equivalent to copying a German dictionary.” To his surprise, he found that there was more than met the eye, and not just because Galicia produced “a large body of notables in Jewish culture” whose legacy deserved to be commemorated (the more so, as many names had disappeared, whether through extermination, assimilation, or adoption of new identities in Israel). The names, contrived as they may be, constitute “an important link between generations” and, by permitting “geographic localization,” serve as a crucial resource for genealogists and historians exploring the deeper past. And, it turns out, the patterns that originated here “heavily influenced those used later during the mass surnaming procedures in other European countries.” (vii-viii)

Beider reproduces as well as analyzes the only detailed description of the naming process, written a century after the event by Austrian man of letters Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904). Although the lengthy piece is more literary than scholarly and contains a few obvious errors, Beider concludes that it is too detailed and precise to be “purely the fruit of the author’s imagination.” (11) Because the policies prohibited Jews from taking common German surnames yet insisted that each family in a locale have a distinct surname so as avoid duplication, the naming commissions strove for diverse and unusual names. Some Jews resisted the new regulation, either out of fear of additional civic burdens or simple reluctance to give up their “sacred” names. Some also may not have been able to understand the law or communicate their intentions adequately in the new language. In such cases, the commissions were empowered to assign names. Franzos offers numerous examples, and observes, “One can really, therefore, not be astounded that the specific auditor let his fantasy roam free, and when it was starting to flag, he stimulated it with curious leapfrogs, so that eventually, anti-Semitism, barrack humor, as well as greed often found their expression.” (78)

As Beider shows, the records allow us to determine the “When” and “Where” of surname origins, but the “What, How, Why, and Who” remain a matter of judicious inference or speculation. The Jewish names derive mainly from common words, given names, and less commonly, place names (the prohibition on the latter notwithstanding). The Jews were largely free to propose their own surnames, although what happened after that could vary considerably, as it might involve the approval or intervention of a Jewish or an Austrian Christian official. (17-20)

Most modern Jewish names are “artificial,” i.e. not based on the personal attributes of the first bearer, and Galicia displays the highest proportion of such names in Jewish Europe (ranging from 62 to 82 percent, depending on the district). (27) Many of these artificial names were presumably the choice of an official rather than the applicant. Still, one must be cautious in drawing conclusions. As an example, Beider explains that the name “Gold” could be an artificial name, or it could be derived from the occupation of the head of household (goldsmith) or even the name of the mother (Golde). We simply cannot generalize with any certainty.

Beider’s rigorous method allows him to debunk some of the received wisdom regarding artificial names: For example, it is commonly asserted that the more attractive names could be obtained only through a steep payment—and thus reflected the higher socio-economic status of their bearers. Bribes played a role, but one that seems to have been exaggerated. Statistics show that derogatory surnames are “rare exceptions” and the supposedly elite “surnames derived from the names of flowers or precious stones” are in fact “the most common” throughout the region. (12) Myth busted.

Among perhaps the most striking points in the 624-page book is a matter of established background rather than new conclusions. As Beider explains, one reason the subject initially did not attract him was that “these names were of little interest to their bearers; viewed by them simply as official labels.” “a majority of Jews, until the beginning of the 20th century (and most orthodox Polish Jews until World War II), paid no particular attention to the surnames imposed on them by Christian officials.” (vii, 12-13)

The whole naming process, then, raises intriguing questions. As Avital Feuer puts it, “The Jews’ linguistic history is characterized by di- or heteroglossia and multilingualism.” That is, Jews used Hebrew only as a sacred language or language of internal official affairs, while, in their day-to-day lives, they spoke one or more languages of the surrounding society as well as a vernacular of their own such as Yiddish. They moved readily between several languages and cultures. The fact that they clung to their Hebrew or Yiddish names therefore speaks volumes about their sense of identity as they negotiated multiple cultural worlds.

One is thus also tempted to wonder about similar cases in other contexts. First and foremost, one thinks of African-Americans. They were deprived of their history and liberty in ways that even the Jews were not, yet members of both groups operated in multiple cultures, acquired new names, and then experienced emancipation in the course of the “long nineteenth century.” Has anyone explored this? Are there any deeper parallels?

A final irony: although the Jews may at first have been indifferent to the new German names that the external world imposed upon them, many came to feel a deep attraction to and identification with the German world, which for them represented the pinnacle of civilization.  More on that in a forthcoming post.

What's in a name?  A great deal of history, and a bit of mystery.


Resources

• A genealogical website posts the German and Polish texts of the first Josephine decree here, with English translation of the latter and explanation of the extension of these regulations to West Galicia.

• Alexander Beider,  A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia (Avotaynu, 2004)


Update

And what, by the way, are the most common Austrian and German names today?

Austria

Gruber
Huber
Bauer
Wagner
Müller

Germany

Müller
Schmidt
Schneider
Fischer
Meyer

So, Is the US Invasion of Iraq Like the Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia? (did anyone actually say it was?). On the problem of historical analogies

Even though or perhaps because I had by chance recently been posting a lot about the history of Czechoslovakia under the Nazis (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), I almost missed the furor that erupted over an analogy to the Sudeten Germans and the Third Reich in a discussion of the Iraq war last week. (h.t.: BHB)

One just wants to shake one’s head, except that it would hurt: anyone foolhardy enough to plough through Glenn Greenwald's “universality of war propaganda” in Salon, the riposte by Joe Klein in Time, and the responses they provoked—including, at last count, 405 and 161 talkbacks respectively—is bound to end up with a bad headache. I’ll summarize, but you really have to read the originals in order to savor the full aroma.

Continuing his long-running feud with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg over this, that, and almost everything else (mainly the Middle East), Greenwald reacts vehemently to Goldberg’s invitation to visit Kurdistan and see the benefits of the US entanglement in Iraq, retorting: Well, of course the Kurds are happy because outsiders came in, and in a war fought mainly elsewhere in the country and at the expense of other citizens’ lives, defeated their enemy and secured for them a good and even favored status. For him, this is just rank apologetics by “the neocon fabulists who cheered on the Iraq War” (as he refers to his bugbears in one of his 6 “updates”). “It's difficult to find an invasion in history that wasn't supported by at least some faction of the invaded population and where that same self-justifying script wasn't used.”

He goes on to employ a series of historical analogies (most involving Nazis):

That's true even of the most heinous aggressors. Many Czech and Austrian citizens of Germanic descent, viewing themselves as a repressed minority, welcomed Hitler's invasion of their countries, while leaders of the independence-seeking Sudeten parties in those countries actively conspired to bring it about. Did that make those German invasions justifiable?

This predictably provoked impassioned criticism, for example, by Time’s Joe Klein:

This is obscene. Comparing the Kurds, who had been historically orphaned and then slaughtered with poison gas by Saddam Hussein, with Nazi-loving Sudeten Germans is outrageous. Comparing the United States to Nazi Germany is not merely disgraceful, but revelatory of a twisted, deluded soul

As to Greenwald’s built-in disclaimer—“It should go without saying, but doesn't: the point here is not that the attack on Iraq is comparable to these above-referenced invasions”—Klein says, “No, it's not irrelevant. If he's going to compare the U.S. in Kurdistan with Nazi Germany in Sudetenland, Greenwald can't just slink away by saying those actions "may or may not be comparable."

Klein does himself no favors when he speaks of Greenwald’s “patented, vile, intellectually dishonest jihads” (why that noun?), and the latter repays the courtesy by deriding (less felicitously) “those who want to deliberately distort what you say and/or whose reading comprehension skills are extremely impaired.” The point-counterpoint really goes downhill fast, culminating in an irrelevant and dilettantish debate among their respective supporters about whether Germany actually “invaded” Austria, the Sudetenland, the rest of Bohemia, and Slovakia, much of it based on second-rate sources and third-rate reasoning. Historians everywhere must be averting their faces.

So, who’s right?

Greenwald didn’t really quite say what Klein and others accused him of (“Glenn Greenwald Compares The Iraq War to the Nazi Conquest of Europe,” was the title of Goldberg’s response [cf. this]). Still, Klein is within his rights in shooting back with the charge of disingenuousness. It’s just that he misdirects his fire.

Goldberg’s point was that Saddam’s regime was oppressive and its elimination a good thing, as measured—for instance—by the improvement in status of the Kurdish minority. Greenwald disagrees, but he distorts and trivializes the argument by reducing it to the assertion “that if you can find some citizens in an invaded country who are happy about the invasion, then it demonstrates the aggression was justifiable or at least morally supportable.”

What, in the end has been proven?
Little, if anything.

Is it true that “Those who perpetrate wars of aggression invariably invent moral justifications to allow themselves and the citizens of the aggressor state to feel good and noble about themselves”? Yes, indeed. But it is no less true of those who engage in defensive or other justified wars (that’s implied in “universality”).

Since we’re all using Nazism as the gold standard of evil, and the fight against same as the gold standard of goodness, let’s return to some basic historical facts: The World War II Allies did not fight fascist Germany out of a desire to advance the cause of human rights and roll back repression. The British and the French appeased the Nazis until it was no longer possible credibly to do so, given their treaty obligations to Poland. Few were eager “to die for Danzig” (as the saying went). Stalin cynically partnered with the Nazis in carving up Poland, and it was only the incursion of German troops in 1941 that caused the two erstwhile allies to clash. As for the US, President Roosevelt did all he could to aid the beleaguered British. However, immediately after Pearl Harbor, Congress declared war on Japan alone. The foolhardy German declaration of war  three days later forced the US to follow suit (an inept Republican got in trouble over his ignorance of the latter not long ago). In other words, the four major Allied nations went to war because they were forced to do so, and not on some abstract moral grounds. Once they had entered the fray, they found ample justification for their cause, and portrayed it as the struggle of freedom against tyranny. Cynical and belated? Perhaps. Propaganda (in the original or other sense of the word)? Sure. Nonetheless true and justified? Absolutely.

It is perfectly legitimate to make an analogy and specify a limited application. Most of us do that from time to time. However, if the only point is that the welcoming of an invader by any part of the population is no proof of the morality of the invasion, then that’s unexceptionable because it’s banal and utterly uninformative. In that case, citing 5 duplicative examples from the Third Reich (along with pictures, for excess) really does start to look disingenuous, as if the writer seeks to avail himself of the full moral opprobrium of the Nazi analogy while at the same time maintaining plausible deniability.

It would be pedantic and uncharitable to focus on the multiple historical misstatements, but for the fact that they reveal the shoddiness of the historical reasoning.

Anyone who is historically literate will stumble over the phrase, “independence-seeking Sudeten parties in those countries”—twice. In the first place, the Sudeten German Party by definition existed only in Czechoslovakia, and not in Austria (“Sudetenland” was an artificial term for the western borderlands of the former, in which ethnic Germans predominated). In the second place, the German ultranationalists in both countries did not seek “independence.” On the contrary, they sought union with their larger kindred neighbor: their battle cry was “Heim ins Reich!”—“Homeward into the Reich!” Similarly, the phrase, “citizens of Germanic descent, viewing themselves as a repressed minority” will raise an eyebrow or two. It applies perfectly well to many of the so-called Sudeten Germans, but it is the first time I have heard it applied to Austria—and for good reason. Germans made up only 33% of the population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but fully 95.3% of the population in the small Austrian republic created after World War I. Even the innumerate should be able to tell the difference. To the extent that Austrians welcomed Anschluss with Germany (and a rigged plebiscite notwithstanding, most clearly did), their complaint was not that they were a “minority.”

The sloppiness reveals an inability to rein in the instinctive desire for overkill, heedless of the merits. As David Hackett Fischer observed in his now-classic Historians’ Fallacies, “The word ‘analogy,’ in modern usage, signifies an inference that if two or more things agree in one respect, then they might also agree in another.”  My concern here is not with the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war (about which decent people, pace Greenwald, have disagreed), and instead, about the right or wrong use of history.

If one employs a historical analogy, it really has to fit, and one has to be aware of both its strengths and its limits. This is a tempting but dangerous enterprise, as Hackett Fisher demonstrates. “The fallacy of proof by analogy,” he says, “is a functional form or error, which violates a cardinal rule of analogical inference—analogy is a useful tool of historical understanding only as an auxiliary to proof. It is never a substitute for it, however great the temptation may be or however difficult the empirical task at hand may seem.”

Greenwald is too smart to maintain that the Sudeten Germans are like the Kurds or the Nazis like the Americans. Unfortunately, he is unable or unwilling to use history in any meaningful way. It could have been productive to pursue the analogies rigorously: Was the US invasion of Iraq more like the German conquest of Europe or the Allied invasion of Normandy? How?  On what grounds is it justifiable to intervene militarily in another country’s affairs? What were the motivations: Was it “aggression” or “liberation”? How do we measure the consequences: What is the moral and practical trade-off between the benefit to a portion of the population and the suffering of the rest?

Greenwald sets up a whole display window full of straw men in which history is but cheap and incidental decoration. Instead of furnishing the fabric for a robust analysis, it just dresses up a rant.

As James Bryce famously said, “The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” And, from implausible and gratuitous ones, we might add.

How to Deal With Infantile Leftists (a lesson from history)

Lenin famously denounced ultra-radical pseudo-leftism as an "infantile disorder." Although he had something very specific in mind, namely a doctrinaire adherence to forms or slogans and an inability to see changing content or conditions, the general problem is in a certain political sense timeless. There have always been "radicals" and "activists" who lay great stress on symbolic gestures but either don't think them through or haven't the will to follow through.

Writing up the posts on the Heydrich assassination prompted me to go back to one of my favorite historical sources, the recollections of the former head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, František Moravec. (J. C. Masterman called it, "the best book on espionage and counterespionage which I have read since the war ended.") I was therefore amused to read again his account of how he dealt with this challenge. In the closing phase of the Second World War, the Soviets and their domestic allies were pressuring his government-in-exile to undertake largely symbolic resistance operations even though logistical conditions were unfavorable and the actions would have brought about vicious retaliation without corresponding military gain:

At the request of the President I made a public speech in London explaining this. The hall was full, but the audience consisted primarily of Communists who, when I was finished, screamed their disagreement. However, it was not difficult to quieten them. They were mainly youngish office workers whose comfortable jobs provided them deferment from military service. I made them a proposal: those who wished could be immediately enrolled for a special course, trained as parachutists and dropped into occupied territory. There they could put into practice what they were now so fiercely advocating in theory. The hall swiftly emptied.

Master of Spies: The Memoirs of General Frantisek Moravec (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 225

Problem solved.

Who's Trying to Strangle Obama? (Introducing Cultural Literacy Check)

No, that's not a question about his political enemies, but instead, a question about the representation of the question.

When I came across this cover on The New Republic, I was both amused and intrigued. To me, the point of reference was obvious because it's drawn from my field, namely European cultural history: the famous Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön, priest of Neptune, and his sons, being strangled by serpents, as described in literary accounts of the Trojan War (notably the Aeneid).

For the pioneering aesthete and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, writing in his immensely influential treatise of 1755, its "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" epitomized the spirit of Classical Greek art. The sculpture entered still more deeply into the realm of aesthetic theory when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing employed it as the centerpiece of his famous critique of Winckelmann, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry; 1766). Since Lessing's time, other critics have appropriated the title for aesthetic treatises of their own.

Once among the most famous works of art in the world—at any rate, among the cultural elites—the sculpture may not be anything like a common reference anymore.

Fortunately, in the case of the TNR cover, one doesn't really have to understand the allusion in order to get the point (though if one did, one might ponder the appropriateness of the analogy): It looks as if Obama is in trouble, and to help you out, there's a caption.

In other cases, knowing the reference may matter more.

This got me to thinking about the larger issue of cultural literacy: not in the sense of defending or opposing canons, but simply as a practical matter. It can have some import. For example, in the classroom, I cannot assume that the historical allusions I make—even if they deal, say, with the comparatively recent era of the 1960s and —will be readily understood.

This was brought home in striking fashion when Sam Wineburg, a noted scholar of historical pedagogy from Stanford, gave a series of workshops here earlier this semester. One of his fundamental points is that historical thinking is a skill that is anything but natural and has to be learned. In order for it to be learned, however, historians have to teach it. In order to be able to teach it, historians have to remind themselves that they cannot take what they do or say for granted. All too often, they approach a history class with the tacit assumption that students may lack historical knowledge but at least understand how to think historically. On the contrary, since no one has ever told the students that they have to do this, much less taught them how, the results are often disastrous or at the least unnecessarily but unavoidably frustrating.

One of Wineburg's noted techniques is therefore to watch how people teach and learn, film the process, and show it to them and others. He will ask scholars and students alike, for example, to read a passage of a historical document, but not in the ordinary way. Rather, he forces them to pause repeatedly to reflect on what they are doing as they are doing it: to state out loud how they are approaching the text, to explain their reaction—their assumptions and questions alike—as they encounter a given fact, formulation, or idea.

On other occasions, he will ask a diverse group to respond to an image. In one example, he showed us how a student and her parents offered their off-the-cuff interpretations of a photograph. This one happened to be a Vietnam-era demonstration by "hard hat" construction workers calling for support of the government and military. To any of us who are of a certain age (I am getting disturbingly familiar with that phrase) or have studied any recent history, the interpretation was obvious. It seemed equally obvious to the student, but it turned out she was dead wrong. She could could not conceive of such a thing as a pro-war demonstration (though they have occurred even in recent years), and believed that the workers were therefore demonstrating against the war. Accordingly, to the extent that their signs backed the President, she could only assume that he was an advocate of peace and withdrawal. Unfamiliar with the then-prevalent denunciation of soldiers as "baby-killers," she knew only the modern left's vapid and rather disingenuous call to "support our troops by bringing them home." Even the American flags were not a tipoff, because she had been raised in the era after liberals and leftists decided to reappropriate the flag rather than cede the symbol to the Republican right. To an older or historically literate audience, as I said, the message was all too clear: these were reactionaries whose idea of patriotism was not "dissent," but "America, love it or leave it!" and whose idea of a good time was breaking a few "hippie" or "pinko" skulls. All of that was completely unfamiliar to her.

A sobering lesson.

What do we talk about when we make cultural and historical allusions? Can we really be certain that we fully understand one another?

I'll return to the larger theme of cultural as well as the example of Laocoön here and elsewhere. In the meantime, let the quest begin.