This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
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While putzing around the Internet I came across an obscure but interesting Wikipedia article which, I believe, has great relevance to the world of our time. The Wikipedia authors gave it the Latin title "Translatio Imperii," whose precise meaning is "transfer of command." A French historian of the Middle Ages, Jacques LeGoff, is credited with describing translatio imperii as a typically medieval idea. Undoubtedly some medieval political entities, such as the so-called Holy Roman Empire, founded by a German King named Otto, were based on that idea: as various empires have risen and fallen, the imperial names, ruling dynasties, geographic centers of power, and sometimes the official languages have changed, yet proceeded in a clearly traceable linear sequence. I am convinced that this is a useful and helpful theory of a process which applies far beyond the Middle ages and began long before, and makes it less difficult to make sense of the complex geopolitical events of our time, and of history. Here are two examples:
The Roman Empire: Romans described their empire as a "public thing," a res publica, from which our word republic was derived, as in today's constitutional republics, Islamic republics, and people's republics. The Roman term for military command, imperium, was the origin of the words empire and emperor. The late Roman Empire as described by historians split into eastern and western empires, of which the western was rapidly broken apart by Germanic peoples, eventually leading, in an attempted Germanic restoration, to Otto's Holy Roman version. The Eastern part, where Greek rather than Latin was the dominant language, became the Byzantine empire (more about that later). Later, during the Renaissance, Spain, Portugal, England, Germany, and Austria among others inherited part of the imperial power of what used the be the Latin-speaking western Roman Empire.
Following the conquest by Spain, Portugal, France, and England of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a new power eventually arose, the USA, today often termed a "hyperpower", huger than a superpower; yet the US sphere of influence is not often called an empire. However, Lenin, in his book "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism," added the USA to his list of imperialist, if not imperial, powers, and Lenin's description of the USA as an imperialist power has been repeated ad nauseam in the press worldwide.
Greece. Originally a pluralistic group of competing and occasionally warring city-states, most of Greece (with the exception of Sparta and a few other places) came under the leadership of Philip of Macedon by 336 BCE. His son Alexander the Great completely defeated the huge Achaemenid Persian Empire by 328 BCE. Following Alexander's death, the Greek empire he had created split into three parts: Egypt, Greece proper, and a huge Syria-based empire named after Alexander's general Seleucus, which basically replaced the Persian empire. Gradually the three Greek empires fell under the domination of Rome, from which the eastern portion, still Greek-speaking, became the Byzantine empire mentioned above following the founding of Constantinople by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 330 CE, on the site of the ancient Greek town of Byzantium. The people of the Byzantine empire simply called it the Roman Empire, in Greek of course.
During the Middle ages Turkic-speaking and Slavic-speaking peoples poured into the Byzantine-controlled areas and other Christian kingdoms. Most of the Turkic-controlled areas converted to the Islamic religion (one became Jewish) and a branch of the Turks, the Ottomans, captured the Byzantine capital, Constaninople in 1453, preserving many of the Byzantine traditions, not including the Greek language or the Greek Orthodox Christian official religion.
Meanwhile the Slavic-speaking migrants created their own empires, based on the Seleucid/Roman/Byzantine model, including a Bulgarian empire which no longer exists. The most important of these Slavic-speaking empires was Imperial Russia, commanded by a Caesar (Tsar), and retaining a Russian version of the Greek Orthodox religion.
Today, the single world superpower (hyperpower if you like, or if you don't like) is the USA, a constitutional republic, which, by the principles of translatio imperii might be viewed as the latest heir to the Western Roman Empire. Russia, which now calls itself a federation of independent states, might be viewed as the heir to the Greek imperial model. Greece itself is a now merely a smallish European nation with a rapidly increasing population of non-Greek immigrants, while Rome today is but the capital of Italy, another such nation with a growing population of non-Italian immigrants. (The ancient empires had many such immigrants too, some of whom, including Constantine himself, became emperors.)
There is much more to be told about the story of translatio imperii, however: specifically, Persia, China, the Arabian empire, and the Turkic empires. Pick up any newspaper any day of the week and you will read about certain Persian, Chinese, and Arab political figures who are openly planning to exert their power beyond the boundaries of their ethnic nations. For this reason I am planning a Part 2 and a Part 3 of this blogpost on translatio imperii.
As for Turkey and the Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union, I think of them as sleeping giants, especially Turkey, the name of whose capital, Constantinople, named after the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, was not officially changed to Istanbul until 1930.
I've added a new category to the Coffeeblog: Nations and Empires. Originally I had thought of adding a "history" category. Then I realized that everything I post to the Coffeeblog is some kind of history: the history of Bettie Page and the Kefauver Commission, or the history of Andres Serrano and his "Piss Christ" image with the resulting kerfuffle. Even a movie review is a history of sorts. Thinking it over, I realized that the kind of history that has begun to interest me lately is the history of empires and the nations, peoples, tribes, ethnic groups, language groups, and other societal entities engulfed, absorbed, or instrumental in the development of such empires. I would have never predicted such an interest as a college freshman who felt overwhelmed by the huge reading assignments of my required basic history course. But back then there was no hypertext, Internet, or Wikipedia. Why such a powerful interest now, so late in life? It has to do with the world events swirling around us about which the dead tree media and the idiot box generally keep us in abysmal ignorance. Why do Shia and Sunni Muslims attack each other in Mesopotamia (the dead tree pundits call it Iraq)? There are reasons for it. "Civil war" the treekillers call it. Sort of like Antietam or the Battle of Bull Run? Please. And then there's Central Asia, the route of the Silk Road, where the focus is not silk any more but petroleum., land of many fallen empires. To paraphrase George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to write for CNN."
Like most Coffeeblog topics, "Nations and Empires" turned out to be much more complex and hard to pin down than I expected. I found that the best starting point was the idea of empire itself. It comes from the Romans and their Latin word imperare, which simply means "to command." It's a military term. Commanding officer and all that. From imperare came imperium, which the was the legal concept of the power to command, vested not only in officers but in magistrates. The Romans, unlike the founding fathers of the USA, did not advocate separation of powers. Roman politicians served simulatenously as magistrates (judges), Senators, and military commanders. They had the imperium. The Romans used the same word to describe their empire: Imperium Romanum. The power derived, in principle, from the Senate and the people: Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR). In the 1960's, I saw manhole covers in Rome with SPQR on them.
Because Roman law codified the principles of empire, the Roman empire (east as well as west) is a good example to study, and that includes Roman imperium during the years of the republic before the first Emperor, Augustus Caesar. But Rome was by no means the first. Rome inherited (hijacked might be a more accurate term) the empires of Carthage and Alexander the Great, who in turn took over that of the Persians, who had taken over the kingdoms of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Persian Empire (actually a series of empires) might be the best prototype of an empire to study, but for the fact that languages in which its history have been recorded are less accessible in Western translation than the Greek and Roman histories, if they were written at all. Along the Silk Road and to the north and south have been empires that are forgotten (Khitans, anyone?) and others which some want to forget (the Huns and Mongols).
OK. So what? A point I want to make is that we are still coming off the nineteenth-century political pipe-dream high of nationalism and nation-states. In their purest forms, nation-states are not multicultural, and by definition, not multinational. Empires are both. That's the difference. Nation-states sometimes engage in ethnic cleansing to stay pure. A nasty habit. But what is a nation? The question has always been easier to ask than to answer. The word nation also comes from Latin, and it means a birth. The birth of a nation, perhaps? (That was a 1915 movie honoring the Ku Klux Klan, by the way.) Presumably a nation consist of people born sharing a common heritage, meaning language and culture. Nations, however, are almost never homogeneous, like homogenized milk, and they are never static. They change. The idea of a nation is better understood by using the word for nation in Greek: ethnos. Yup. An ethnic group. And there is a Hebrew word for nation, goi, often used Biblically in the plural, goyim, "the nations." When the Bible was translated into Greek, goyim was translated as the plural of ethnos. As many know now, goyim in Yiddish means people who are not Jewish, in other words, the "other nations," and I have read that ta ethne, the Greek plural, has been used to mean non-Greeks, the barbarians, and among Christians, the opponents of Jesus.
So, my friends, perhaps nations are not all good and empires are not all bad. As Rodney King asked, "Can we all get along?" Excellent question. And I would add to it, "Can we all get along without empires? And if not, which empires?"
Recently when the Olympic Torch passed through San Francisco, city officials engaged in well-intended skulduggery when they extinguished the original torch and successfully routed a second torch in another part of town. On the announced route, fans, onlookers, and angry demonstrators on both sides of the "Free Tibet" issue had gathered to show their enthusiasm and outrage. It turned out that the rerouting subterfuge prevented violence, but I was struck by the era-defining implications of this event, and other demonstrations which had begin on March 10 in China's Tibet Autonomous Region and soon after had become internationalized. I decided to write something about this in the Coffeeblog, and this is it. The more I learn about Tibet, however, the more complex the issue appears. Read on.
As an old-timer, I remember the days when the People's Republic of China was generally viewed as a international bad guy or villain in most of the American press and the general American consciousness. Then, in 1972, President Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong, the legendary Communist leader. Since then, with some notable exceptions, China's reputation has become generally favorable in the USA, as a manufacturing titan and "most favored nation" on a voyage, no matter how slow the boat, to freedom, democracy, and rights for the individual. Now, it appears, with the convergence of the Tibet issue and the Beijing Olympics, once again China's Communist leadership is being seen here as an international malefactor.
Why, when some of the regime's other warts and blemishes (like mass murder and the attempted extinction of individual rights and groups like Falun Gong) tend to generally pass unnoticed in the international press, has the "Free Tibet" campaign gained some traction? Has it reached the point of international humiliation of the folks in the once-Forbidden City before, during, and after the Olympics? A good starting place to answer such questions is Tibetan Buddhism itself, of which the Dalai Lama is the acknowledged spiritual leader outside of China. The Wikipedia asserts:
"In the wake of the Tibetan diaspora, Tibetan Buddhism has gained adherents in the West and throughout the world; there are estimated to be tens of thousands of practitioners in Europe and the Americas. Celebrity Tibetan Buddhism practitioners include [movie actor] Richard Gere, [Beastie Boy] Adam Yauch, [martial artist] Jet Li, [the late beat poet] Allen Ginsberg; [composer] Philip Glass, and [movie actor] Steven Seagal (who has been proclaimed a [reincarnate lama himself])."
And, yes,the near-legendary Italian-American director Martin Scorsese had made a 1997 film called Kundun about the life and exile of the Dalai Lama.
Add to that the events in the Tibet Autonomous Region beginning March 10 of this year, when rumors of beatings and killings of monks by Chinese government authorities reportedly triggered violent retaliation. The Dalai Lama stated, "we remain committed to taking the Middle Way approach and pursuing a process of dialogue in order to find a mutually beneficial solution to the Tibetan issue," after being accused by high China officials of having masterminded the the violent conflict stemming from the high-visibility "Free Tibet" campaign
In my view, another international generation, heirs of the 1960's counterculture, and sympathetic to Buddhist ideals and peaceful solutions to problems, has now reached maturity as a huge critic of the methods used by the Chinese Communist gerontocracy.
But, as the Dalai Lama also said, "The problem of Tibet is very complicated." Yup. It is. Let's roll back the time machine. The recent Tibetan uprising included violent attacks on otherwise innocent members of the ethnic groups moving into the Tibet area in increasing numbers, presumably with the approval and encourangement of Beijing officials. These not only include Han Chinese (members of the majority nationality in China, and known worldwide simply as "Chinese.") Many of the migrants to Tibet include Chinese citizens of a nationality know as Hui.
Hui? Who are Hui? Several sources tell met that Hui are predominantly Chinese-speaking Han Chinese individuals with one important distinction: they are Muslims, descended from Muslim traders, Islamic Mongol and Turkic warriors and settlers, and even from far-eastern Nestorian Christians.
OK. So? Aren't they just Han Chinese like the rest of those moving into geographical Tibet? Well, yes and no. The no part is that their religion, Islam, appears to be not only tolerated, but approved by the Beijing communists, whose Marxist view is reportedly promotion of atheism. This pro-atheist, anti-religious view could be cited as a reason for exiling the Dalai Lama and his "lamaist" followers from Tibet.
Do Chinese communists promote atheism in the same way it was promoted by Stalin in the Soviet Union? A good question. Marx had called religion the opiate of the people. But a multiculturalist perspective might consider a religion to be a colorful folk custom of an ethnic group. Is that the Chinese view, before and after Mao Zedong?
Is there a double standard in Beijing? Do Chinese communists view religion as OK among Hui Muslims, but not among Tibetan Buddhists? Is Han chauvinist piggery a factor? Or are there history-based political reasons for Beijing's perceived, and probably accurately perceived desire to crush Tibetan lamaism and even the Tibetan ethnic group itself.
Supposedly, the Dalai Lamas have been backed by the Mongols, who had taken over the Beijing empire during the Yuan Dynasty, before being ousted by the Han-led Ming Dynasty in 1368, 604 years before Nixon visited China. A Mongol khan, Altan, reportedly bestowed the title of Dalai Lama on the third one in 1578 when the Mings still ruled. Is Beijing still steamed about the Mongol-Dalai Lama alliance? Are the lamas still steamed about the way the Hans treated them and their allies?
Hey, don't ask me. I'm just a guy in a cafe with a laptop and a cappuccino. I doubt that Nixon knew back in 1972. I have a pretty good hunch, however, that the Dalai Lama knows something about this. And, assuming that his karma is as good as it's cracked up to be, perhaps even Steven Seagal knows too.
Eagles are a family of birds knows as raptors, from a Latin word for "robber." The words rob, bereft, rapid, and maybe even the slang term "rip-off" are all related. Eagles have very good eyesight, the better to spot their prey from far off, with sloping brows to protect the eyes from the sun. They also have strong heads and necks, and huge sharp, curving beaks. Romans who had noses like eagle-beaks (aquiline) were associated with nobility. Eagles have a no-nonsense look which has given them iconic status throughout history. The mythological Native American thunderbird was like an eagle, but large enough to create thunder when it flapped its wings. The European gods Zeus, Odin, and Jupiter also were said to have the power of thunder and lightning, and eagles were associated with these gods in stories and as symbols. In military terms, the eagle, King of Birds, could be said to have "air superiority," although I doubt an eagle needs to waste energy fighting other birds. I find this all fascinating. Even more than fascination, however, my primary motivation for blogging about eagles is the fact than an extraordinary event is taking place as I write this, an event whose outcome is unknown, which I will address in the last few paragraphs of this blogpost.
On the ground, the role of the most noble of the animals (the King of Beasts) was usually assigned to the lion. The ancient Persians and other peoples imagined a creature with a lion's body and cat ears, and the head and wings of an eagle, known as the griffin. Family crests, coats of arms of ruling dynasties, and the official symbols of nations are loaded with eagles, lions, and griffins. Lions, for example, are symbols of Britain, Venice, Iran, and Judah (the Jews.) But enough about lions: let's have a closer look at eagles.
Gaius Marius, an extraordinary politician of the Roman Republic (he served seven terms as Consul, the highest office), lived until 86 BCE. He reorganized the army, allowing commoners to become career soldiers, with the result of a permanent surge in the army's power and efficiency. There is a story that Marius as a youth found an eagle's nest with seven chicks in it, predicting his seven terms as Consul. In 102 BC, Marius declared the eagle to be the symbol of the Senate and People of Rome (Senatus Populusque Romae, abbreviated SPQR.) From that time forward, Roman Legions carried standards with an eagle (aquila) on top, an eagle that soldiers had to protect with their lives.
There are many places where two-headed eagles, often with elaborately spreading feathers, are the national symbol. One such place, mentioned in a previous Coffeeblog post is Albania, where the two-headed eagle on the Albanian flag is the symbol of their national hero Skanderbeg. Another such place was Österreich-Ungarn, also known as Osztrák—Magyar Monarchia, and in English as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismantled after its defeat in World War One. The double-headed eagle was the symbol of Austrian imperial might. Currently, the coats of Arms of Austria and the city of Vienna feature a single-headed eagle. However, curiously, a march called Under the Double Eagle (Unter dem Doppeladler) written by Josef Franz Wagner and admired by John Philip Sousa, the US March King, has becomel part of the US marching band repertoire. As for two-headed eagles, the English language Wikipedia has a good website on them, but don't miss the images in the German Wikipedia.
Two-headed eagles, by the way, have been symbols of non-Christian and non-European nations, including the Seljuk Turks, and one-headed eagles are associated with Arab countries including Egypt, and even the new post-Saddam Hussein Republic of Iraq. But the two-headed varieties are associated with the Roman Empire after it was divided into two parts, and especially with the Eastern Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople. A two-headed eagle was on the crest of the Palaeologus family, the last ruling dynasty of that Empire, which is called Byzantine by Western scholars. Interestingly enough, a two headed eagle is currently one of the symbols of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose main headquarters is still in Istanbul, the former Constantinople.
But what about the Bald Eagle, the national bird of the United States of America? Once an endangered species, it was removed from the official list of threatened and endangered species in 2007, after an effort by many Americans to protect the bird and its habitat. Is the Bald Eagle, like the Aquila and the Doppeladler a symbol of empire? Well, not officially. The USA is a constitutional republic, or as I recited daily as a schoolboy while pledging allegiance to the flag, "the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible [later they added "under God"], with liberty and justice for all." However, like all great nations, the USA has its "spheres of influence." Perhaps it even has two hemispheres of influence. None of its rivals are empires either. China, no longer having an Emperor, is a people's republic. Iran, having inherited the Persian Empire of antiquity, is now merely a republic too, that is, an Islamic Republic, that is, a Shia Islamic Republic. And Russia, having shed its Czar and its Soviet ruling apparatus, is merely a federation. Russia's coat of arms, for what it's worth, features a double-headed eagle, while Iran has removed the lion from its flag and replaced it with the Arabic name "Allah," the central letter of which looks very much like a sword. China has no swords, eagles, and lions on its national emblem, but a sheaf of wheat, a gearwheel, five stars, and Tienanmen, the Gate of the Heavenly Mandate, under which the Emperors once ruled.
And that brings us to the event which is taking place as I write this. Votes are being counted in primary elections which are highly likely to influence the election of the President next November. It appears fairly certain that the next president will be one of three candidates, all of whom are extraordinary, and all three of whom are elected US Senators. One of these candidates, the wife of a former President, is a woman who has probably never worn a skirt during her adult life, and is very popular in the state of New York which elected her. Her charismatic husband is said to be even more popular outside the United States than within. Another of the candidates, a Senator for twenty years, is the son and grandson of former Admirals of the US Navy, and is a former pilot of attack aircraft. He reportedly survived four crashes of the planes he flew including one which led to his prolonged imprisonment and maltreatment in North Vietnam. The third candidate, perhaps the most extraordinary of them all, is the Christian son of an African Muslim, perhaps a distant cousin of a powerful Kenyan politician. His mother, now deceased, was a white American woman from the Kansas heartland. He is a master orator, extremely charismatic, and commanding a huge, loyal following.
After one if these candidates is elected and inaugurated, he or she will make all public appearances under the Presidential Seal, upon which is depicted an eagle, the Bald Eagle, with spread wings. In one of the eagle's talons is the olive branch of peace. In the other is a cluster of arrows. When the President appears, the band will play the official anthem, Hail to the Chief. Though most Americans probably have never heard them, there are words to this anthem, of which the final verse is:
Yours is the aim to make this grand country grander, This you will do, that's our strong, firm belief. Hail to the one we selected as commander, Hail to the President! Hail to the Chief!
Later in life I'm becoming a history buff. In college I considered the study of history burdensome, with all those details to memorize for the exam, but now, whenever I hear a news headline about some world trouble spot, I want to go immediately to the Internet to get the background. This impulse has led to previous Coffeeblog posts such as The Right-Left Politics Meme, Anselm Kiefer's May-Beetle, and Ismail and the Safavids. Well, it's happened again. This past week or so, the new nation of Kosovo declared its independence, following which it was recognized by the US, following which there were huge demonstrations in Serbia against the US, plus riots by angry Serbs who set fire to a US Embassy office, a McDonalds restaurant, and multiple American Flags. "So what else is new?," you might be saying if you're a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist, who has not kept up-to-date on your Serbian history. "Of course the Muslims are burning the US Embassy. That's what Muslims do. The US must have been caught flushing another Koran or something." But guess what? The Serbs are not Muslims. They are Christians (Serbian Orthodox) or atheists too. So why are they angry? Well, the brand-new nation of Kosovo is populated primarily by ethnic Albanians (there is also an independent nation of Albania}, and most of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are Muslims. So the US supports a new Muslim nation and the Christians burn our flag? Well, yeah. For me, that means it's Google time again.
So what did I learn? Lots. I'll skip over the part where Putin and the Russians, who are traditional allies of the Serbs, are capitalizing on the huge anti-American sentiment in Serbia, and get to the history part. And that takes me to the story of Milos Obilic (pronounced mee-losh o-bee-litch: sorry, my software can't do the Serbian Cyrillic or diacritical marks). The Albanians call him Millosh Kopiliq. There is a stadium named after him in Belgrade. Obilic was a Serbian knight who died on or about June 15, 1389. How did he die? He was executed by the Ottoman Turks. Why? Because he assassinated the Turkish Sultan, Murad I, that's why. There is some dispute about how or why he was able to do this deed, but Turks and Serbs reportedly agree that he did so. There is a fresco of Milos Obilic on the wall of the Mt. Athos Greek Orthodox monastery which I used for the Coffeeblog illustration above. The Greek Orthodox, Russians, and Serbs seem to be very fond of Milos Obilic, but I would guess that there are probably no stadiums named after him in Turkey or Albania. So what was this assasination all about? And that takes us to the First Battle of the Blackbird Field.
The field, named for the blackbirds who apparently like to forage there, is located in an area called Gazimestan, about 5 km. from Pristina, the capital of the new nation of Kosovo. In Serbian, "kosovo" means "of the blackbird," hence the name of the field, the region, the new nation, and the battles. Yes, there have been multiple battles of Kosovo, and, frankly, I think we have not seen the last of them. The first battle, the one in which Milos Obilic died in 1389, was a battle between the Serbs with their Christian allies, and the Turks. The Serbs lost.
Now, generally, it is the winner of the battle who generally gets to write the history, but there are some exceptions. Remember the Alamo? That was a battle between Texans and the centralist government of Mexico, in which the Texans lost. They were all killed, but the Alamo is still there, and it is a kind of shrine to Texans, located in San Antonio, Texas. Another battle where the losers got to write the history was Thermopylae, in Greece, where the Greeks lost after being outnumbered by a huge Persian army. The Blackbird Field was such a place where the losers got to write the history, at least the history as taught in Serbia, and in Greek monasteries. The larger theme, of course, was the jihad by some Muslim rulers to spread Islam in Europe, and the crusades by some Christian rulers to resist the jihad.
The Ottoman Empire, in fact, ruled Kosovo for a time as the Vilayet of Kosovo, and later, Kosovo was integrated into Serbia, and then Yugoslavia. The land that is today Albania was controlled by the Ottoman Empire from 1385 until 1913, a lot of time for many Albanians to identify thoroughly as Muslims. In 1443, an Albania hero named Skanderbeg led a rebellion against the Ottomans under a flag which was derived from the Byzantine double-headed eagle of the Palaeologus family. That flag is still the national flag of Albania. The majority of Albanians are reportedly Sunni Muslims, but there is a long pre-Muslim history of Christianity and pre-Christianj religions, and during the 20th Century Communist regime of Enver Hoxha, atheism must have been the official religion. The proportion of Muslims in the new nation of Kosovo might even be higher than in Albania proper. Will they fall (or have they fallen) under the influence of Muslim preachers who denounce the USA as the Great Satan? We will find out, probably sooner than later.
As of six days ago, Israel announced they would not recognize Kosovo "for now." As of 11:58 AM today in Washington, where allegations of horrific Serbian massacres of Muslims in Kosovo have been taken very seriously since the Clinton Adminstration, it was announced by the US State Department that Kosovo will "never again" be part of Serbia. Never again? Please. In the Balkans or the Middle East, there is always a high risk that those words might have to be retracted.
It's Hanukkah again, 5 candles tonight. For Jewish children living in Christian lands, Hanukkah has become a substitute for Christmas. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. The Jewish holiday is celebrated on the 25th day of Kislev, which is a Babylonian name for a month which occurs around the same time as the Roman month of December. The resemblance ends there. The first Hanukkah commemorates an event which took place in Jerusalem 164 years before Jesus was said to have been born nearby in Bethlehem. The event was the rededication of a temple rebuilt on the site of a previous temple built by King Solomon. The word Hanukkah, in fact means "dedication." There is a villain in the story: the king of Syria, Antiochus IV, whose admirers called Epiphanes, meaning "shining" in Greek. The Jews had another Greek name for him, Epimanes, which, translated into the contemporary American vernacular, means "Nut-Job."
The rededication of the Jerusalem temple had become possible because of regime change. The Jews had deposed Antiochus IV the Nut-Job and replaced him with their own Jewish royal dynasty, the Hasmonean Dynasty, which lasted until the Romans put their client king Herod on the throne 102 years later.
Did Antiochus deserve the epithet Nut-Job? The historical record suggests that he was overly fond of stirring up trouble unnecessarily for his subjects and for his kingdom, which he had inherited from one of Alexander the Great's generals by the name of Seleucus. Upon Alexander's death, the generals divided up his empire, and Seleucus got a huge area whose capital was Antioch (named after an earlier king Antiochus), then in Syria.The Seleucid Empire, as it was called, extended to half of today's Turkey, all of today's Iran and Afghanistan, and a chunk of India. Rule was passed down from one king to the next, but Antiochus IV the Nut-Job wanted more than what he inherited, and made war against Ptolemy IV of Egypt, heir to another of Alexander's generals. In between Syria and Egypt, as it is today, was Jerusalem, with its temple, which no longer exists. (Destroyed by the Romans after the time of Jesus, the temple lay in ruins until a Muslim caliph built a mosque on the ruins in the year 687 of the Christian Era.)
Antiochus IV Epimanes at first successfully conquered Egypt, but when he went back for yet even more, the Romans, who at the time had a republic, not yet an empire, decided to draw the line. In that case, the line was literal, a circle drawn in the dirt around Antiochus himself. A no-nonsense Roman diplomat named Gaius Popillius Laenas informed Antiochus that he must make a decision before stepping out of the circle: pull out of Egypt, or consider his kingdom at war with Rome. Antiochus thought about it, then told Popilius that he would cooperate fully with the Roman Senate, and stepped over the line to seal the deal by shaking hands with Popilius.
Antiochus Epimanes did withdraw from Egypt, but on his way back he decided to vent his frustration on the Jews. That, dear readers, is what led to the first Hanukkah. He imposed new taxes on them, and then went on a murderous rampage, torturing Jews (cutting out their tongues, stuff like that) and banning the possession of Jewish scriptures. (Remember, the Jews are called the People of the Book.) In case that there was any doubt that Antiochus was Epimanes, he took over the Jewish temple and rededicated to Zeus, chief god of the Greeks. Finally he had his men sacrifice pigs in the altar of the Jewish Holy of Holies.
Now, if you're looking for trouble, one very easy way of finding it is to invade the most sacred building belonging to a middle-Eastern monotheistic sect of people descended from Abraham, and sacrifice a pig inside it. Trouble is what Antiochus Epimanes was looking for, and trouble was what he got. In this case the trouble arrived in the form of a man named Judah "The Hammer" and his brothers, of the Hasmonean family. They and their Jewish guerilla fighters basically booted Antiochus and his Syrian army out of the Land of Israel, and the rest is history. Except for one thing: the oil.
Now oil in those days was not pumped out of wells in the earth, but manufactured by pressing olives. Though not used for transportation purposes, it was used for lighting, cosmetics, anointment of kings, and of course, food. It was precious. Most importantly, for the purpose of rededication of the temple, the Jews had to obey a Biblical commandment:
And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always. (Exodus 27:20-22)
When the Jews cleaned the pork, lard, and other chazzerei out of the temple, they found a small container of oil left over from better times. It appeared to contain enough oil for a day, which meant that the light would go out before they could get enough olives and equipment to press more oil for the lamp. After all, it was called then, and now, the Eternal Light, and was symbolic of the eternal God. Watching the lamp go out would have been horrendously demoralizing to the Jews who has seen their relatives tortured and their books confiscated. And that's when the Miracle happened. No, the Miracle was not merely Jews expelling insane, violent Syrians from their territory. That's not a miracle. That's just business.
The Miracle, attributed by believers to God, was that the oil lasted for a full eight days, before the end of which, more oil was pressed, blessed, and readied for the lamp. And that's why Hanukkah lasts for eight nights and days, with candles burned until eight candles are burning on the eighth night. And, oily food must be consumed. There is no such thing as a low-fat Hanukkah. In Israel they eat jelly donuts, but us Jews from Northern Europe celebrate by frying spoonsful of grated potatoes and onion. Gastronomes might call them "fritters", but we call them latkes. And whenever we eat latkes we think of many things, and one of the things that we think about is this: It could happen again. The oil could run out. Because of the insane behavior of some nut-job.
Photo Credit (for the Hanukkah lights): Beth Brewer (Flickr)
As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania I felt like a small Jewish fish swimming in a vast, boundless sea of Christians, while Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus were the stuff of storybooks. Now, however, I am repeatedly encountering the idea, on the Internet and in the mass media, that Christianity is running out of time. Today I Googled the phrase "demise of Christianity" and got 766,000 hits. The themes under that category included secularization of former Christians; the choice not to have children; a preference for personal spirituality over organized churches, and escalating geographic relocations due to competition from other, more assertive religions. Many believe that Christianity is not only vanishing from places like Lebanon and Iraq, but drastically losing numbers in Italy, the UK, and elsewhere. These dramatic current events described aroused my curiosity about where all of the Christians came from in the first place, and that led me to the story of the Roman emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, and that of his mother Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta.
The short version of those fascinating stories is that Helena (sometimes called St. Helen in English) became a Christian and influenced her son, a powerful and dynamic leader who reunited a broken Roman Empire, legalized Christianity in that empire (lions, remember?) , and rebuilt the ancient Greek town of Byzantium as a city in his own name, which kept the Roman Empire going until 1453. (No, the occupation of Rome by Germanic tribes in 476 was not the end of the empire, but of the western, Latin-speaking half. The Greek-speaking eastern half survived until Constantinople was occupied by the Ottoman Empire under the Sultan Mehmet II.) Constantine convened a council of Christian bishops in 325 in Nicaea, a town on the Asian side of the Bosporos strait, and it was this council, perhaps more than any other historical event, which turned Christianity into an "organized" religion. Sixty-six years later another emperor, Flavius Theodosius, proclaimed the Christianity of Nicaea as the state religion of the whole Roman Empire. Theodosius banned worship of the ancient pagan gods, closed their temples, and, in 391, extinguished the "eternal" fire of the Vestal Virgins.
Helena Augusta, who was made a saint by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity (there is a popular visitor's destination in the California Wine Country named after St. Helena), was reportedly the daughter of an innkeeper who bore the imperial son of Constantine's father, also named Constantine. The father later abandoned Helena for a political marriage, and St. Helena is now a patron of divorced people. However, Helena's greatest claim to fame, other than gaining her son's sympathy for Christians, was an extraordinary journey at the age of eighty to Jerusalem in search of the same cross upon which Jesus of Nazareth was said to have been crucified. With the help of a bishop, and the permission of her son the Emperor, Helena began an archaeological dig at a Temple of Venus, believed to have been over the tomb of Jesus. (She has also become the patron saint of archaeologists.) The remains of three crosses were found. But which one was the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified?
If such a question were to be answered today, a huge database of historical information and the use of scientific techniques such as radio-carbon dating and DNA testing would be invoked. Helena had none of these tools, so she employed a method more in the spirit of the time. Taking samples from each of the three crosses, she made rounds of the sick, touching each patient with a cross sample. One woman suddenly recovered from her illness. By the "science" of the time, the True Cross had been identified. Kept for a while in Jerusalem, it eventually suffered from being cut into pieces, which were fought over by an Iranian Shah, crusaders, and countless churches. In a church in Spain, a relic is currently considered to be the largest remaining piece of the True Cross.
As for Constantine himself, who was not baptized until he was near death, a notable story was the decisive battle of the Milvian Bridge, a stone structure across the Tiber on the Via Flaminia. A rival emperor of the divided Empire chose the bridge as the battleground to keep Constantine's troops out of Rome. According to various legends, Constantine had a vision, or a dream, in which he saw a powerful symbol, and heard the words in hoc signo vinces, "in this sign you conquer." He is said to have had the sign painted on the shields of his men before the battle. But what was the sign? To some, it was a cross, but apparently the most popular version is that it was the letter X superimposed over the letter P (the labarum), which are also the Greek letters chi and rho, which are also the first two letters of the Greek word christos, meaning "anointed." That, of course, is that name by which Jesus of Nazareth is known throughout the Christian world: Jesus the anointed Christ.
In the year 1258, the Mongol Il-Khan Hulagu ordered the sack of Baghdad, which for 508 years had been the capital of a Muslim empire, ruled by a Caliph, and called the Abbasids after `Abbas ibn `Abd al-Muttalib, paternal uncle and companion of the Prophet Mohammad. The Abbasids were staunch Sunni Muslims. Baghdad, prior to Hulagu's arrival, was renowned for its architecture and culture, including the House of Wisdom, a huge library and scholarly institution housing works in, and translated from Persian, Syriac, and Greek in the fields of astrology, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and philosophy.
By the time of Hulagu's arrival, the once-huge Abbasid empire had been whittled down to the provinces of Iraq and Syria, and was ruled by a Caliph, Al-Musta'sim Billah, a mellow fellow who had been convinced (says Wikipedia) that the Mongols could be driven off with stones tossed by the women of Baghdad. As it happened, Hulagu had assembled the largest army in Mongol history. His February 10, 1258 conquest of Baghdad was a cakewalk. Superstitious about spilling the blood of the heir of Mohammad (although Hulagu was not a Muslim, and had a Christian mother and wife), according to legend he had the Caliph wrapped in a carpet before having horses trample him to death.
The context of all of this was that a Khagan, that is, a Khan of Khans or Emperor of the Mongols, Güyük, grandson of the first and most famous Khagan, Genghis, had wanted the Mongols to end the Abbasid Caliphate and extend the Mongol Empire to Egypt, but, being an alcoholic who died prematurely, did not live to realize this dream. The honor, as it were, fell to Hulagu, another grandson of Genghis Khan, but of lesser rank, an Il-Khan, who had already conquered Persia and established an Ilkhanate dynasty in the Iranian lands. It seems that he picked up a lot of support from Iranian Shia Muslims on the way. There are even stories that Musta'sim, the Caliph who ended his life rolled up in a rug, had thrown the manuscript of a poem by a respected Shia poet into the river, and the that the vizier, or adviser, who convinced Musta'sim that women throwing stones at the Mongols would drive them off, was a Shia mole for the Mongols. Whatever, the case, Hulagu had serious Shia backing, and having conquered Baghdad, now needed an exit strategy.
For most of history, there was a custom of giving conquering troops a time-limited opportunity to loot a conquered city, grabbing as much of the good stuff as they could. There was also a custom of killing men who could arm themselves later and cause trouble. Finally, Mongols, who lived most of their life on horseback, living in small, portable shelters, had no tradition at the time of taking over cushy palaces and villas and living the soft life. That made Hulagu's exit strategy a no-brainer. His men, including his Iranian Shia supporters (either enthusiastically or merely following orders) trashed Baghdad, which has never been the same since, slaughtered staggering numbers of Sunni men, women, and children, and dumped the contents of the House of Wisdom into the river. The legend is that the river ran red from the blood of the Arabs and black from the ink of the library's books.
Another aspect of Hulagu's exit strategy was to intimidate future victims into surrendering, as the Persians did, rather than resisting and suffering mass executions and ruthless destruction. That worked when Hulagu moved on to Damascus, Syria soon after Baghdad. But it didn't work when he tried to take over Cairo as part of the Khagan Güyük's grand plan. For centuries, the Abbasid Muslims had captured slaves and recruited them as slave-soldiers, called Mamluks (Mamelukes), who were converted to Islam and then trained as cavalry. Eventually the Mamluks had taken over Egypt, and they were there to defeat Hulagu at the Spring of Goliath (Ain Jalut) in the Valley of Jezreel, now part of Israel. The Mongol Empire, once the largest contiguous empire in all history, went into decline after Ayn Jalut, and rapidly disintegrated into smaller empires. Today, Mongolia is an independent nation, 85% of whose population are ethnic Mongols, and half of whose population are Tibetan Buddhists. Genghis Khan is still revered there. As for the descendants of the survivors of Hulagu's 1258 sack of Baghdad, there is still said to be bad blood between some Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between some Arabs and Iranians.
While working on a Coffeeblog post about theocracies I discovered that the word, Greek-derived (meaning dictatorship of a god) appeared in the writing of T. F. Josephus, a fascinating fellow who was born in the land of Israel around 37 years before the Christian era. Descended from priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, he wrote in Greek and became a citizen of Rome. Having written about Jesus, his writing has become part of the controversy among secular scholars and historians whether Jesus actually existed. I find Josephus fascinating for a variety of reasons, shedding light on contemporary tensions between religion vs. secularism, empires vs. "national liberation," and theocracy vs. liberalism. His life also makes vivid the nature of the Near East before Mohammad, and how those pre-Islamic cultures impact the region, and the world, today.
Josephus is described as a historian, but the accuracy of his writing has been disputed. Bear in mind that in Italian, the word for history is storia, which also means a story. I just started Josephus' first chapter in a freebie Google Books download, and what struck me immediately is how a studio could make a great action movie from it. Josephus was a rip-roaring storyteller. (It is my belief, by the way, that the capacity for storytelling is what most distinguishes the human species from other mammals.)
Having started out as a teenager choosing among the three sects of Judaism, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the monastic, ascetic Essenes, as an adult Josephus was caught up in the politics of the Galilee region, where local rulers, the Roman empire, and religiously inspired Jewish insurgents clashed with much bloodshed. It seems that Josephus was caught in the middle. When an insurgent band robbed a traveling wealthy Roman woman's caravan, intending to divide the spoils, Josephus kept the loot intact, planning to return it to the victim, or, if necessary, to sell it and spend the proceeds on rebuilding local infrastructure, depending on which way the local political winds were going to blow. He was thus proclaimed a traitor by young militant insurgents (Jewish, of course), who tried repeatedly to kill him. After much adventure and the passage of time, during which a full-scale war broke out between Judea and Rome (the first of three), Josephus became a client of the Roman Emperor Vespasian.
What did it mean to be a client in the Roman Empire? The word does not mean a "customer" in the modern sense. The Romans lived by patronage and clientage, relationships which continue today primarily among politicians and in the Cosa Nostra. For example, if you are a Sopranos fan, consider Paulie Walnuts. In the ancient Roman tradition Paulie would have been considered a client of Tony Soprano. As Vespasian's client, Josephus took the names Titus and Flavius, honoring Vespasian's family. In fact Vespasian was known as the first of the Flavian emperors, and Josephus' documentation about Jesus is known among Christian scholars as the Testimonium Flavianum. It was Vespasian's successor, Titus, who finally crushed the Jews and renamed Judea as Palestine.
Today is Good Friday, the Christian anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus. This year, Greek Orthodox Christians as well as Roman Catholics and Protestants will be celebrating Easter on the same Sunday. Greeks call it Pascha, the name of the Jewish holiday Pesach, which is still going on as I write this, celebrating Jewish liberation from slavery in pharaonic Egypt. Both Easter and Pesach are descendants of pagan holidays celebrating the arrival of spring, the resurrection of dormant vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere, and the birth of many animals and birds. Both Pesach and Easter are celebrated with eggs; in the Greek tradition the eggs are colored red. I wrote about Easter eggs in Jonathan's Coffeeblog last year.
I have also written about solstices being celebrated with bonfires, lights, and fireworks. A few days ago a strange headline attracted my attention: "Police detain 30 and seize 250,000 explosives in past week on Crete". No less than a million fireworks were reportedly confiscated in Athens. The use of fire to celebrate equinoxes (the first day of spring and fall) didn't surprise me: the Brits celebrate the onset of autumn with a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire. I was surprised, however by the sheer quantity of Greek Easter fireworks reported, and the serious crackdown by Greek police. Then I remembered something called Greek Fire.
The Eastern Roman Empire, called Byzantine by scholars because its capital Constantinople was originally called Byzantium, lasted from the years 286 to 1543 of the Christian era. One reason it lasted so long was that it had a secret weapon. Amazingly, the weapon is still secret. How they did it is still unknown. The weapon, essentially a large naval flamethrower, was called Greek Fire.
Is there any connection between modern Greek fireworks and the Greek Fire of the Eastern Roman Empire, other then the fact that they are both a form of pyrotechnics? I am not aware of any such connection, but an ancient custom on the Greek Island of Chios intrigues me. The custom is called Rouketopolemos, which can be translated without a dictionary as "rocket polemics." As it turns out, however, "polemos" in Greek means more than mere heated rhetorical argument. It means: war. And how is Rouketopolemos celebrated? Rockets are used by the polemicists to try to knock down the bell towers of their opponents' churches. Hmmm… It may not be Greek fire but is certainly is Greek firepower. And then I thought of Prometheus, the Titan (supergod) of Ancient Greeks, who was punished for giving fire to mankind. And of course of thought of the recent movie hit about the Battle of Thermopylae. In any case, to the polemicists of Chios, and to everyone else, I offer a hearty Kalo Pascha. That's Greek for Happy Easter. I'll think of the Greek Easter on the next Fourth of July.
A fascinating cultural phenomenon is unfolding before us. A battle fought 2,486 years ago, chronicled by a Greek known as the Father of History, resurrected from the dusty basement of academia by a cartoonist who turned it into a 1990's comic book series, has now hit the movie theaters in a groundbreaking mash-up of cinematography and computer graphics, a blockbuster hit, which inspired an cry of outrage from the spokesmen for a Middle Eastern theocracy, who are blaming the whole thing on (that's right) the Jews.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have purchased the book, which is a hardbound edition combining the five comic books in which Frank Miller's "300" were originally issued in 1998 by Dark Horse Comics. In the year after it came out, "300" received the Comics Industry Will Eisner award, named after an industry legend, father of the Spirit series. (Will Eisner is not to be confused with Disney exec Michael Eisner.) For fans of cartooning, comics, comix, and graphic novels, of which I am one, the reprinted Miller work is a superblly collectible example of the art, and well worth the $18 Amazon price.
At Thermopylae, a narrow pass in Greece blocking access to the vast Persian army under Xerxes I (the great shah Khashayar, remembered annually in the Jewish holiday of Purim), a confederation of Greek warriors held off the Persians long enough to enable a Greek victory in a later sea battle. The Spartan warriors who held off the Persians at Thermopylae all perished in the process, having created one of those rare moments, like the Alamo and the Battle of Kosovo, where the losers got to write the history. The graphic novel, vividly colored by Lynn Varley, conveys the testosterone-powered drama of the great battle while laying no claims to historical accuracy in the portrayal of either Greek or Persian dress and accessories of the time.
Greater Iran, called Iran Zamin, at times a powerful empire beginning 2700 years ago, has rarely been defeated by invaders from either the East or the West, notable exceptions having been the British, the Arabs, the Mongols, and Alexander the Great. Iran was for millenia the far eastern limit to the Roman Empire, and by implication, Western hegemony. Thermopylae, for the West, has become symbolic of Western resistance to the Eastern "hordes" which included Huns, Mongols, Arabs, and Turkic Muslims, but not, until now, Iranians. This fact has not been lost on the current Arab-admiring theocratic and militant Shia regime in Tehran, which issued a statement condemning "Warner brothers, which belongs to the rich and famous American Jew." Do they mean Jack Warner? He died in 1978.
Perhaps the original and ultimate Continental breakfast consists of coffee, milk and a croissant, the crescent-shaped flaky pastry of debatable origin. Here and now, I will reopen the debate. The word croissant is French for "crescent," the way the moon appears when lit by the sun from the back and side. In France the croissant is a kind of viennoiserie, a bread-like pastry which has been sweetened like a cake. The term is associated with Marie Antoinette, the Austrian archduchess who married the French King Louis XVI.
Like milk being steamed in a coffeehouse, the plot thickens. According to legend, the Viennese version of the croissant was created as a celebration of the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Empire on a hill outside of Vienna in 1683. Vienna's coffeehouses are said to have been started with coffee left behind by retreating Turks. The Ottoman flag at the time had a golden crescent on a red background. Today's Turkish flag has a crescent with a star on a red background, and is called AyYildiz, translated as "moon star." The crescent, with or without the star, is often considered to be a symbol of Islam, as in the Red Crescent organization, the equivalent of the western Red Cross in Muslim lands.
The plot, however, thickens more. As far back as 670 BCE (before Christianity and Islam), the citizens of the Greek city-state Byzantium reportedly declared the crescent moon as their state symbol in honor of Artemis, goddess of the moon and of hunting. (Wikipedia). The crescent long before that had been the symbol of goddesses including Artemis. In the photocollage above, a statue of Artemis is shown along with the Turkish flag and a coin from Byzantium, which even includes the star, long since associated by non-Muslims with Aphrodite (Venus) and the Virgin Mary (Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea). You will note that Artemis, sculpted as shown (the Artemis of Ephesus) might not remind you of a croissant, but she sure makes you think of a latte. The Wikipedia says that the Ottoman Turks adopted the symbol of Byzantium after they captured Constantinople, the name of the same city when it was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Today it is the capital of Turkey and is called Istanbul. (From Jonathan's Coffeeblog).
Followers of current events in Iran may be surprised to hear that there has been a close relationship between Jews and Persians (Iranians) for thousands of years. For Jews familiar with their own history and religious holidays, however, this is no surprise. In fact, it is celebrated in the festival called Purim, which in 2006 will begin at sunset on March 13. Purim celebrates a narrow escape from annnihilation for Iranian Jews thanks to a Jewish woman named Myrtle (also called Esther and Hadassah). Esther, who had become the queen of Persia, persuaded the king to stop a plot to massacre the Jews. No, I'm not making this up— it's all there in the Judaeo-Christian bible, where Esther has her own book, called, as one might expect, the Book of Esther. The events took place in the ancient capital of Susa (Hebrew Shushan, moderrn Shush).
The king, who was probably the same powerful king known to the West via the Greek language as Xerxes (Khashayar Shah in Persian and Ahashverosh in biblical Hebrew), ruled a vast empire. An Agagite (whatever that was) named Haman hatched the plot to exterminate Jews by hanging them on gallows his men had constructed, and the plot came to the attention of Esther's cousin Mordechai, who tipped off Esther, who, in turn, tipped off the King Xerxes. The king took no action himself against Haman and his faction, but what he did was extraordinary: he gave the Jews of Persia his royal permission to defend themselves against Haman, which they promptly did, and Haman and his co-conspirators perished on the gallows that had been set up to kill Jews. The tomb of Esther and Moredechai is one of the landmarks today in the city of Hamadan, Iran.There are many Persian Jews living today, including the President of Israel (not the same office as the Prime Minister); and many exiled Iranian Jews, as well as other exiled Iranians, live in Los Angeles.
Jews celebrate this unique festival in a unique way: they encourage the liberal consumption of alcoholic beverages. (As far as I know, not even St. Patrick did that, although if you visit an Irish bar on the saint's day, coming up this year right after Purim, you might think otherwise.) The goal of Purim's hard drinking is to assist the celebrants to forget all about Haman and his ilk. The Book of Esther, known as the Megillah, is read aloud in Hebrew, having given rise to the Jewish phrase, "The whole megillah," meaning roughly, "the whole enchilada." There are special Purim cakes, three-cornered crusts filled with poppy seeds, prunes, or apricots, called hamantaschen. Purim is also an occasion for Jewish children to dress up in costumes, like Hallowe'en. But festivity aside, the whole history of Purim has an eerie resonance with what is happening today. As the French are quoted all too often, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:" the more things change the more they stay the same.
[Sometimes the oil lasts longer than you might expect]
Last year I wrote about a miracle on the "festival which dare not speak its name", when my favorite cafe was open on the morning of December 25. This year, there's another Christmas miracle, due to occur when the sun goes down on December 25. Well, technically it's a Hanukkah miracle. This year, you see, Hanukkah begins after sunset on Christmas day. And, you see, the Jewish feast of lights Hanukkah, which is a Hebrew word for "dedication", is dedicated to a miracle. And what was that miracle, you might ask? (I would hope you would ask.) The miracle was that a tiny container of olive oil for the Jerusalem Temple lamp, approved by the High Priest for ritual purposes, burned for a full eight days, long enough to prepare more.
But why, you might ask, did the temple's supply of oil run so low? Aha! At the time, the land of Israel was ruled by the Seleucid king of Syria, an heir to a kingdom established at the breakup of Alexander's the Great's empire. This particular king had decided to stamp out Judaism in Jerusalem, focusing on the hill where the Second Temple stood, the Temple Mount. (The idea of stamping out Judaism on the Temple Mount, BTW, still has its advocates today.) The king had converted the Jewish temple to a Greek-style temple dedicated to Zeus, eliminating all Jewish sacramental paraphernalia, including lamp oil. The Jews fought back, led by the Hasmonean family, including the militant commander Judah "The Hammer" Maccabee. They recaptured the temple and found the small container of oil overlooked by the Seleucids.
What, however, does this have to do with Christmas? Aha! More than you think. You see, just as the Seleucids tried to stamp out Judaism in Jerusalem, there are those today who want to stamp out Christianity in the little Middle Eastern town of Bethlehem, in parts of Europe, and even in the US. You know who you are. Which brings us to the "Merry Christmas" controversy, a theme so mindlessly overplayed that it gives meaning to the word "meme." Yes, I said a year ago that I didn't buy the Hanukkah-Christmas connection. As a Jewish kid, I once felt that Christmas was being rammed down my throat by the popular culture. I am now more concerned that the opposite is happening. If a Muslim wished me "Eid mubarak", I would not be offended. Why should I? It now appears that those who would wish me a "Merry Christmas" are being made to feel guilty. And that's just not right. Therefore, on this particular Christmas day, I would hope that everyone who feels they are under attack for what they consider sacred would take inspiration from the Hanukkah miracle. Sometimes the oil lasts longer than you might expect. And, oh, yeah, Merry Christmas!
