hello my tender comrades
The meeting with my tutor went bizarrely well. HOWEVER, this post is not about that. This post is about being bewildered about how much racism I keep finding in Jewish stuff lately
So like right I am Jewish and I think that's pretty rad and I like learning about the culture and history of my ~people~ and stuff, right. As you do! I was reading a lot of stuff about various old Jewish quarters and areas in London, and I came across a guide to visiting Important Old Jew Places. Soooo I was reading the info, and it all sounded interesting until I got to this part: "The several hundred Jews who remain here, who still call the East End home, now live among a Muslim population - a latter day immigration of Bengalis, Pakistanis, and assorted Arabs. Some synagogues have been converted into mosques; many of those, like the one at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, preach a fundamentalist Islam that has no use for outsiders and even less use for Jews."
I beg your fucking pardon???? WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS SHIT, YOU GUYS. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN. It's not like the Jews got kicked out of the East End - they lived there cos it's a place where poor immigrants traditionally are ABLE to live! Many of them moved to places that were not holes! Then other immigrant groups moved in! THIS IS OFTEN HOW IT WORKS! Also no one just... appeared in the night, STEALTHILY, and STOLE those synagogues, hiring hundreds of SECRET NIGHT CONSTRUCTION WORKERS to turn them into mosques while NO ONE WAS LOOKING!!! It's not like the East End has been the victim of like secret STEALTH MUSLIM ACTION or something oh my god!!!
And yes, no Jewish groups are ever fundamentalist or exclusive. (YOU SEE THIS IS ACTUALLY A JOKE BECAUSE MANY OF THEM ARE)
So, whatever. I was disappointed that my keenness in learning stuff about Jews in London was interrupted by SURPRISE RACISM but I moved on. Fast forward to about a week later: I was looking at my book shelf (read: haphazard book stack) for something to read on the tube. I did not feel like heavy-handed Word Of God crap that morning, so I grabbed an anthology of stories and legends of the Russian Jews in lieu of Les Mis. In my experience, Jewish folktales and so on are clever and humorous and passed down for ages and ages! I thought I was going to be safe :( BUT NO
TURNS OUT the book I selected was EVEN WORSE at doing the horrible heavy-handed 19th century WORD OF GOD voiceover narration - and not even in a humorous or interesting or thought-provoking way like Mr Hugo generally is. I got extremely wary when, in the introduction, the guy who compiled the stories said that Jewish tales "in point of inventiveness can vie with the Arabian NIghts' Entertainments, and in ideality and moral elevation far surpass them", but I thought... maybe it was just a passing dickhead remark by some bitter contemporary compiler-of-stories and did not signal anything about the contents of the actual narratives. OH HOW WRONG I WAS.
The very first sentence in the very first story goes thus: "Tangier is held by the Moors to be the most beautiful city of the European hemisphere, and their patriotic conceit is explained by the circumstance that very few of Moslem birth go to the trouble of crossing the Strait to look even at the great fortress of Gibraltar."
...I'll just let that sink in a moment. Right. Okay. So at this point I am like "fml" but I kept reading that one for a couple of pages just in case. The narrator goes on and on about how fucking great Gibraltar is for a while, and then circles back to Tangier, stating that "During nine months of the year the climate along the Moorish coast facing Spain is delightful. Yet, notwithstanding the benignity of the skies and the fertility of the soil, man vegetates here in squalor, poverty, and ignorance, the historic trinity of Oriental barbarism."
A few lines later it refers to the "superstition, fanaticism, and indolence" which are "common plagues of unenlightened Islam". I HATE EVERYTHING.
By that point I had progressed rapidly through shock, disbelief, anger, and offense, and landed squarely in "oh my god I can't believe I am holding this book in public". Really most of my feelings, though, can be summarized as let down. How hard is it to find interesting historic and cultural artifacts or information about the group of people whose culture I share without encountering offensive bullshit like this? Can I please get some Jewpride WITHOUT the side order of horrible anti-Islam rhetoric? FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I did try to read some of the other stories which DIDN'T have stuff about Islam in them but they were just trite boring morality tales about people building giant fire-breathing iron golems to kill other people. Which might have been somewhat interesting (we all know how much I like golems and over the top apocalyptic ~REVENGE!!!~ nonsense) but it was just bitter and uninteresting. And it takes a lot to make me disinterested in golems. TRULY.
I am so disappointed, you guys. Why weren't these humorous folktales about wise Rabbis telling townsfolk to invite goats into their houses or about poor men going to banquets and pouring soup into their boots??? WHERE ARE THE AMAZING JEWISH FOLKTALES OF MY YOUTH :( :( :(
So fuck this, the next book about anything remotely Jew-related I read will be this one. It probably doesn't have golems, but you cannot win them all.
So like right I am Jewish and I think that's pretty rad and I like learning about the culture and history of my ~people~ and stuff, right. As you do! I was reading a lot of stuff about various old Jewish quarters and areas in London, and I came across a guide to visiting Important Old Jew Places. Soooo I was reading the info, and it all sounded interesting until I got to this part: "The several hundred Jews who remain here, who still call the East End home, now live among a Muslim population - a latter day immigration of Bengalis, Pakistanis, and assorted Arabs. Some synagogues have been converted into mosques; many of those, like the one at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, preach a fundamentalist Islam that has no use for outsiders and even less use for Jews."
I beg your fucking pardon???? WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS SHIT, YOU GUYS. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN. It's not like the Jews got kicked out of the East End - they lived there cos it's a place where poor immigrants traditionally are ABLE to live! Many of them moved to places that were not holes! Then other immigrant groups moved in! THIS IS OFTEN HOW IT WORKS! Also no one just... appeared in the night, STEALTHILY, and STOLE those synagogues, hiring hundreds of SECRET NIGHT CONSTRUCTION WORKERS to turn them into mosques while NO ONE WAS LOOKING!!! It's not like the East End has been the victim of like secret STEALTH MUSLIM ACTION or something oh my god!!!
And yes, no Jewish groups are ever fundamentalist or exclusive. (YOU SEE THIS IS ACTUALLY A JOKE BECAUSE MANY OF THEM ARE)
So, whatever. I was disappointed that my keenness in learning stuff about Jews in London was interrupted by SURPRISE RACISM but I moved on. Fast forward to about a week later: I was looking at my book shelf (read: haphazard book stack) for something to read on the tube. I did not feel like heavy-handed Word Of God crap that morning, so I grabbed an anthology of stories and legends of the Russian Jews in lieu of Les Mis. In my experience, Jewish folktales and so on are clever and humorous and passed down for ages and ages! I thought I was going to be safe :( BUT NO
TURNS OUT the book I selected was EVEN WORSE at doing the horrible heavy-handed 19th century WORD OF GOD voiceover narration - and not even in a humorous or interesting or thought-provoking way like Mr Hugo generally is. I got extremely wary when, in the introduction, the guy who compiled the stories said that Jewish tales "in point of inventiveness can vie with the Arabian NIghts' Entertainments, and in ideality and moral elevation far surpass them", but I thought... maybe it was just a passing dickhead remark by some bitter contemporary compiler-of-stories and did not signal anything about the contents of the actual narratives. OH HOW WRONG I WAS.
The very first sentence in the very first story goes thus: "Tangier is held by the Moors to be the most beautiful city of the European hemisphere, and their patriotic conceit is explained by the circumstance that very few of Moslem birth go to the trouble of crossing the Strait to look even at the great fortress of Gibraltar."
...I'll just let that sink in a moment. Right. Okay. So at this point I am like "fml" but I kept reading that one for a couple of pages just in case. The narrator goes on and on about how fucking great Gibraltar is for a while, and then circles back to Tangier, stating that "During nine months of the year the climate along the Moorish coast facing Spain is delightful. Yet, notwithstanding the benignity of the skies and the fertility of the soil, man vegetates here in squalor, poverty, and ignorance, the historic trinity of Oriental barbarism."
A few lines later it refers to the "superstition, fanaticism, and indolence" which are "common plagues of unenlightened Islam". I HATE EVERYTHING.
By that point I had progressed rapidly through shock, disbelief, anger, and offense, and landed squarely in "oh my god I can't believe I am holding this book in public". Really most of my feelings, though, can be summarized as let down. How hard is it to find interesting historic and cultural artifacts or information about the group of people whose culture I share without encountering offensive bullshit like this? Can I please get some Jewpride WITHOUT the side order of horrible anti-Islam rhetoric? FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I did try to read some of the other stories which DIDN'T have stuff about Islam in them but they were just trite boring morality tales about people building giant fire-breathing iron golems to kill other people. Which might have been somewhat interesting (we all know how much I like golems and over the top apocalyptic ~REVENGE!!!~ nonsense) but it was just bitter and uninteresting. And it takes a lot to make me disinterested in golems. TRULY.
I am so disappointed, you guys. Why weren't these humorous folktales about wise Rabbis telling townsfolk to invite goats into their houses or about poor men going to banquets and pouring soup into their boots??? WHERE ARE THE AMAZING JEWISH FOLKTALES OF MY YOUTH :( :( :(
So fuck this, the next book about anything remotely Jew-related I read will be this one. It probably doesn't have golems, but you cannot win them all.