Ersatz Elgin

The V&A has a superfluity of plaster casts of sculptures. I haste past them as fast as crowds permit. The BM has a hall full of damaged carvings off the blown-up Acropolis: again, impressive, cluttered with rubberneckers all believing they are seeing Great Art, but all a bit Meh!

To Venice, and we see:

Like the Elgin Marbles, the Quadriliga are plundered goods, twice. They originated in Constantinople, until the Venetians sacked the city in AD1204 and nicked them, only to be claimed by Napoleon and lifted to Paris between 1797 and 1805. But the horses we see on the façade of St Mark’s are naff replicas: the originals were removed inside to protect them — and (as I recall) visitors pay extra to get close and personal.

Two-and-a-quarter hours on the train, and we are in Florence, and we ritualisticly view Michaelangelo’s towering David:

Again, we are being sold a pup. The original is, quite properly and securely, indoors in the Galleria dell’Accademia. Admission by ticket only.

In each case, the snappers happily record the views from Piazza San Marco and Palazzo della Signoria, tick the pages in their tour guides, and move on to the next Star Attraction.

Were the Elgin Marbles reunited back in Athens, for most tourists the disadvantage would be nil. Thanks to lowcost airlines and package holidays, getting to Athens (even for most native Brits) is as cheap and convenient as hiking to London.

If Kaiser Wilhelm could order up the Pergamonmuseum (though not survive in office until its completion), and it could prosper with its massive ‘reconstructions’, London could have a fully-falsified metops and frieze of the Acropolis in unauthentic resin. And peace with Greece would be restored.

Ísland, shaken and stirred

It had been on my bucket list. From her school trip (nominally geographic, but …) #3 daughter, the erstwhile Pert Young Piece, won her Uni bar’s competition for ‘most exotic food ever’ with roast puffin. I’ve always had a bit of a yen to invetigate Icelandic as a Germanic root language.

But:

Settlement

Again, the problem is where to start. Perhaps it should be with Moses Mendelssohn, autodidact and all-purpose scholar. He was a prime mover in the ‘Enlightenment’, whereby Jewish philosophers engaged with wider Western culture, with Voltaire, Rousseau, and then Goethe and Kant. From that came the freer-thinking of the Reform movement. Driving the trend was civil emancipation: The French Constituent Assembly granted citizenship to Jews in 1791. Jewish reformers headed in all kinds of directions: some to nationalism, others to socialism (Marx, Engels …), a significant few to anarchism.

It all hinges on settlement. Where Jews were allowed in Czarist Russia — that’s the ‘Pale of Settlement’ (which, incidentally, runs down to the Crimea, and explains why so many Jews were induced to move to Odessa) :

The May Laws of Czar Alexander III (we’ll come to those in a moment) defined those as Koloniya, Jewish agricultural communities. Jews, it seems were acceptable as long as they stayed down on the farm, the shtetl. Unfortunately education was reaching even there.

The Alliance Universelle Israelite was founded in 1860, from the notions of the like of Rabbi Hirsch Kalischer. Such visionaries had a romantic belief in the ‘Return’, that by making fertile the dry lands of Palestine it would facilitate the ‘Redemption’. [No: I’m not going theocratic; just recording what seems to be ascertainable history.]

Kalischer specifically expected Jewish soldiers would be there to defend Jewish settlers. Umm …

Kalischer pleaded with Sir Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds to finance these settlements. Money came in slowly; but in 1870 the Alliance set up an agricultural training facility near Jaffa. A few arrivals came out of the Pale.

Easter Week 1881 was marked, horribly, by pogroms across western Russia: a hundred and sixty Jewish villages were burned, with considerable attrition. The Laws of 1882 then made many aspects of Jewish life, even survival, impossible. Jewish immigration into Palestine didn’t yet become a flood. It seems, in 1880, there were barely about twenty or twenty-five thousand Jews in Ottoman Palestine — itself a massive growth since the start of the century, mainly an in-gathering from the wider Middle East. The number doubled with immigration, mainly from the Pale, by the end of the century. It was run by several operations, collectively the Hovevel Zion.

There was, as yet, no cohesive or coherent political leadership (the financiers were not sympathetic). In here, though, was where the future Israeli state was spawned.

Meanwhile there were more than flickerings of British interest.

Prince Eddy, later Edward VII, went touring the Holy Land in 1862.

The Palestine Exploration Fund was established in 1865. Nominally for Biblical research, such research conveniently required military surveying, and had a degree of sponsorship in the British War Office. The most notable attachment was Colonel Conder, said to be the foremost British Biblical scholar since William Tyndale. The maps, but naturally, would be used by Allenby in 1917-18.​

There was the extraordinary Laurence Oliphant, in turn well-travelled diplomat, novelist, Member of Parliament, adopter of romantic lost causes. After a peculiar excursion into American utopianism, he was back in Britain, and became involved in just a scheme to advance those Jewish settlements in Palestine, a ‘Plan for Gilead’. Disraeli was on board, so was the Marquess of Salisbury, with many ofthe Great and the Good. One almost thinks we have a concerted semi-official intent by the British government. So (1880) Oliphant is off to Constantinople to get approval from the Sublime Porte; and totally failed.

When things turned really nasty in the Pale, Oliphant in London had a second wind. A Mansion House Committee was gathering funds. Oliphant had an article in The Times. The Mansion House Committee gave him a titular position as ‘commissioner in Galicia’. He was established as something of a folk-hero among the shtetls. He set up homes in Haifa and Mount Carmel.

“The Eastern Question”

Just don’t expect an answer to a topic which usually takes over an entire academic course.

Since this is a very personal opinioneering (think teenaged Jane Austen in 1791, rather than Malcolm Yapp), and since I have no intention of involving myself in the Balkans (which of course is the main conundrum posed in the Eastern Question), I hope to get away with a once-over-lightly.

But where to start?

Well, one moment might be Czarina Catherine and her government expressing an acute interest on the Ottoman fort of Khadzhibei and the Oczakoff District. Major alarums in the European court and chancellery:

For that implied Russia having a warm-water port on the Black Sea, and was a clear intimation of future ambitions towards Constanstantinople and the eastern Mediterranean.

Pitt (the Younger, of course) huffed and puffed, and was — as ever — wholly antipathetic to Catherine. He took Britain to the verge of war, won a slither of a majority in Parliament to that end; but was outflanked by the Russian ambassador Semyon Vorontsov’s PR campaign. British opinion was not with Pitt, so he pulled back: Catherine then built Odessa on the disputed site.

Pitt had glued British interests in the Near East to the sticking point by the India Act of 1784 (effectively, ‘nationalising’ the East India Company). Note, carefully, the date. The loss of the American colonies meant British expansionism swerved away from the Atlantic (except for the profitable sugar and slavery rackets) to the new possibilities in India and beyond. If India and that sub-continent, then any major power in the Near East threatened Britain’s ambition. And, naturally, the French and the Russians were up for that challenge.

General Buonaparte intervenes

In 1798 the French Revolutionary Directory, on Napoleon’s advice, revived Baron de Tott‘s scheme which had been pigeon-holed since 1777. The intent was the capture of Malta, Cyprus and Alexandria. The ends were to enhance French trade and influence, but — more geopolitically —

Having occupied and fortified Egypt, we shall send a force from Suez to the Sultanate of Mysore, to join the forces of Tipu Sultan and drive away the English.

It didn’t quite work out: Cairo revolted at French authority, thus provoking a massacre; the French fleet was roundly sorted at Aboukir Bay, thus prodding the Ottomans into action and despatching two armies. Napoleon headed north into the Levant, and indulged in another massacre at Jaffa. Plague was into the French army. The French advance brought them to Acre, which had been the last stronghold of the Franks in AD1187.

Here we encounter a remarkable irony: a reversal of the earlier siege. Pitt had an understsanding with Constantinople, to support the Ottomans against the French (self-interest, but of course). Inside Acre was a garrison of Ottomans, commanded by Jezzar Pasha. Along comes a Royal Navy flotilla, led by HMS Tigre, 74 guns, captured from the French, and commanded by Sir Sidney Smith (who provided a part-model for Forester’s ‘Hornblower’). The marines of Tigre brought ashore some of the ship’s cannon, and generally added backbone to the successful defence. The flotilla bombarded the coast road, and saw off a French counter-force.

After two months, Napoleon recognised the inevitable, and retreated to Egypt, forever blaming Smith for denying his ‘moment of glory‘. Napoleon returned to France, heading for greater things, and his Armée de l’Orient were left to their pague-ridden misery.

He would be back.

An anticipation

As he was marching towards Jaffa and Acre Napoleon issued a proclamation, addressed to the Jews as the ‘rightful heirs to Palestine‘. The proclamation has gone missing, except for a German translation (see Kobler) and a couple of mentions in Le Moniteur Universal . Here we have the first statement by a European national leader of the right to a Jewish homeland.

That, and the import of numerous French savants to fire the craze for all things Eyptological, is the legacy of Napoleon in Egypt.

Not quite Tancred

My previous approached a key moment: the Crusades. Which causes me no end of problems, if only because I’m dubious of their impact on ‘England’.

On the one hand, some of the Norman upper classes were heavily involved: all those monumental effigies of knights and their ladies, with legs significantly crossed (the mark of one who had crusaded). Richard Coeur-de-lion was the crashing hero of lower-school history. Richard was offensively French, and spent as little time — it calculates as seven months — as possible in his Kingdom of England. Henri II Plantagenet , his son Jean Sans-terre, and Jean’s son, Henry III of Winchester, all took the vow; but each had more pressing business. The exceptions had the cut of Simon de Montfort.

Some thirty English ships joined the First Crusade — though William of Malmesbury (a generation later) reckoned:

But let no one who has had a fuller knowledge of these events, accuse me of want of diligence, since we, who are secluded on this side of the British ocean, hear but the faint echo of Asiatic transactions.

Here’s a later commentary: by a good protestant divine, Thomas Fuller, B.D. prebendarie of Sarum, late of Sidney Colledge in Cambridge. In the troubled 1640s he wrote the first English history of the Crusades, The historie of the holy warre, and was remarkably cynical in doing so:

I quite like the Reverend Fuller.

I’m assuming that, on the whole, the Norman-French in England, and the British populace had other concerns:

• making this innovation of French-style ‘feudalism’ work;
• finding a status-quo between absoute monarchical power (particularly when, as with Richard, that power was distant) and ‘squirarchical’ local administration — the crown-and-state conflict which has marked English and British constitutional history for a millenium; and
• the other irreconcilable, Church versus State.

While the Tancreds and other younger sons were chasing across the Mediterranean basin, and incidently carving up bits of southern Italy and Sicily for themselves, the Anglo-Normans had Ireland to occupy, much closer.

Or, perhaps, the salvation of their immortal souls could be bought without massacring Seljuks.

Still, the crusading period would all provide material for nineteenth-century romantic writers (and then Hollywood scriptwriters with horse-opera drafts). Another mystery: Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (18i8) wrestles with christian-jew relationships. We are led to anticipate Rebecca, the feisty heroine, being worthy of Ivanhoe, but he gets lumbered with the insipid Rowena. A cop out,say I.

However, it’s the direction I’m heading next.

In the beginning …

… was the name. And the name was Gomer.

What this is about is my passing interest in the horrors of the Near East; and — more so — why Britain gets much of the ordure for recent history. Which means an awful lot of history: not just the Mandate from 1929-1948, but the centuries of precedence that led to that.

What I found myself considering is this sad story isn’t a piece of string, with a begunning and an end: more a nightmare Möbius strip with repetitive reinventions and inversions.

A Lost Tribe

When I was young,  you might still find an occasional outbreak of a mental disorder called ‘British Israelites’. I take it on trust from wikipedia there are still chapters of the operation in outlying parts. It all stems from the ten ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. One of which is that the British are the descendants of Ephraim, the son of Joseph (Genesis 41.52). Really forcing the issue gets us to ‘Saxons’ as ‘Sac’s sons’, the sons of Isaac. The ‘Saxons’ came from Denmark, which (on a really nutty day) self-evidendently indicates another descent from the tribe of Dan, who got to Britain with etymological leaps via the Danube, and any other location with that syllable, to London.

I did warn you this was bizarre.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey

This is equally outré.

I once spent happy hours playing with genealogy. My father’s lot got me back to Derbyshire at the end of the seventeenth century: since they didn’t move about much, they turn up in parish records and graveyards as far away as … ooh! … Nottinghamshire and even south Yorkshire. My mother’s proved far more fertile (in every sense), and branches inter-related to a whole varity of bods, a few good, but many less so. Marriages took the line in some surprising places. Were I to believe such stuff, I’m descended from the Conqueror, St Margaret of Scotland, and — through Scots royals — to the High Kings of Ireland. I affect to wear such nobility lightly.

What small relevance there might be in that preceding paragraph is: we all want a point of origin. As a nation, the early chroniclers went looking for one — and inevitably found one. Wecome to the wonderful world of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his imaginative De gestis Britonum, which we can date to around AD1136.

Churchill is quoted:

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Geoffrey had the same intent, but had a blank page, a tabula rasa (except for the likes of Gildas and Bede and Nennius). Geoff knew that a historian needed sources: his was

a book written in the British language

and given him by Archdeacon Walter of Oxford. Walter was a real person, attested by his signature on documents. The ‘book’, perhaps less so.

Borrowing just a name from Nennius, Geoffrey then enhanced the progenitor of Britain: Brutus the Trojan. Virgil gave us Aeneas, whose son, Ascanius, settles in Italy. The bold Geoff adds that Ascanius had a son, Silvius.

Aha! There has to be a phophecy, and this one sounds very like Homer doing over Alexander/Paris. SIlvius, we learn, was doomed to cause the death of his parents, but would ascend to great honour. Sure enough, his mother died in child-birth; and Silvius caused his father’s death by a misdirected arrow (shades of William II Rufus, in AD 1100). So a swift emigration was needed: King Pandrasus marries Silvius (now renamed as ‘Brutus’) to his daughter Ignoge (an unwilling bride, but her name slithers to Innogen and so, tyographically, to Imogen). The happy-or-not couple lead a band of Trojans, led by Corineus and encountered somewhere near the Pillars of Hercules, to find a new land of their own. A vision at a convenient Temple of Diana directs the party to Albion, which Brutus renamed for himself (hence ‘Brittonia’), Corineus gets Cornwall, where he sees off Gogmagog, the last of the Giants.

Brutus’s line extends for numerous generations, and arrives at one we all recognise — Leir, whom Geoffrey ascribes as the founder of Leicester. Obvious, really. And, of course, Leir is the great (x 10) grandson of Aeneas.

More generations, something like three dozen, most of whom get scant treatment from our Geoff, until we arrive at King Lud, who rebuilds Kaer-Lud, is buried under Ludgate, and is succeeded by his brother Cassivellaunus.

Cassivellaunus is, at last, tangible and fights Julius Caesar.

Finally, Gomer

The Elizabethan historian (and by his time, the genre was escaping from pure mythology), William Camden went the Biblical scenic route. Noah has three sons, one of whom is Japheth, and Chapter 10 of Genesis divides the post-Flood world into their descendants:

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

Camden does his own bit of linguistic legerdemain. The Gomerians (from the grandsons of Noah, therefore) become the Cimbri. Milton improves further by accepting the Gomerians (now a people, not just an individual) populating northern Europe.

A conclusion(?)

All this amounts to ‘Britain’ being spawned by a grandson of Aeneas and a grandson of Noah.

Totally unhistorical; but persistent and nostalgic and romantic enough to have the Ralgex and jock-strap whiff of the sixth-form corridor of a minor English public school (which may have been reminiscent of Bede’s cell).

And that is where I go to next.

No longer ‘the German Ocean’

Should we be worried?

Y’see, my early homelife was not so book-infested as my retirement. There were books, few in number, but all very worthwhile, and many morally-uplifting. Among them was a very ageing atlas. It sticks in my memory because it used a term strsnge to me:

Even at that age, I understood the change of usage went with ‘Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ becoming ‘Windsor’, with dachshunds being ‘sausage-dogs’ and all the other crysallis-sheddings of the First World War.

So I looked at the Conhome blog, on the good principle of Tha’s gotta kno’ wha’ t’enemy’s thinkin’ [© Ralph Copley of Aston]. And found this:

I see the full alphabetic soup has now extended to a full ten characters: ‘LGBTQIA2S+’ (no! I ‘m not answering questions on that one!).

But in which direction is the North sea transitioning?

It never rains in Southern California…

Albert Hammond’s song from 1972, so just past my core moment. The lyric concludes:

It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya?
It pours, man, it pours.

I was once through Palm Springs: we had two daughters desperate for a Mickey D’s, came off Interstate 10 onto 111, and found a plethora. And then continued. Impression: no great shakes.

The daughter #3 (the younger of the two then present) rose to the dizzy heights of Geography A-level:

GCSE Geography, colouring in; A-level, shading in; BA degree, cross-hatching.

Not fair. She was au-fait with H2G2, so the teacher’s cryptic message of ‘Slartibartfast’ was received, understood, and decoded as ‘Today, it’s fjords’. Anyhoo, she did her degrees in History. And then Law.

Her take on California was dismissive: if the earthquake didn’t get you, the mud-slides might, with a side-menu of numerous other natural disasters.

So I read that Palm Springs had more rain in an hour than its previous entire record, I-10 was blocked with flood water, and warnings of flash flooding continue.

Grandson #6 is about to commence at the Univesity of Southern California. His parents, including daughter #1 have changed plans and are renting in Florida: tax reasons, despite gators, romping pythons and occasional hurricanes.

Puts dismal grey skies in the UK in perspective. Though Storm Betty made a fair show.

… into the fire

A few years back (just before the Great Covid inertia) we made a quadrangular trip: Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, Seville, and back to Málaga for the flight home. I’d have liked to use trains — but Renfe’s Alta Velocidad stations seem to be inconveniently out of town centres: the trip would have required changes, and was slower than the coach routes (which seem to work very well across the whole peninsula). So we went by bus. Which also explains why Ronda, Jerez and Cádiz remain on the bucket list.

The leg from Córdoba to Seville is around 150km by the A4 motorway, and about 1hr45 by bus. Yes: I know there is a faster AVE train, but it involves less convenient termini and timings. Half way we arrived at the small city of Écijia (the pronunciation of which defeats me).

This, we were told, was El Sartén, ‘the frying pan of Spain’. It had once, apparently, recorded a temperature of 51 degrees. That image, showing how the city in enclosed by mountains, suggests why. I recall it was more than warm, even though we were out of high season, and we gladly returned to the air-conditioned coach. All around are the olive groves; and their oil was one of the products the Roman Empire exploited — so Écijia, on the Via Augusta from Gades/Cádiz to Narbo Martius/Narbonne, was one of the regional capitals of the province: Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi.

So I’m wondering how the city is surviving the heat-wave, but fully appreciate the municipal badge:

Utility

Einstein writes a letter to The Reporter magazine, 1954:

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a pedlar in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.

And now this: