Traditional Disguising Games in Southeastern Europe
Au second verre de slubovitz, l’eau-de-vie du pays, leurs
officiers en conviennent avec la plus grande franchise : «Le Bulgare, me
disent-ils, de sa nature essentiellement paresseux, voleur, cruel et sale…»[1]
At the second glass of slivowitz, the
local brandy, the Russian officers declared with the greatest of freedom: ‘The
Bulgarian,’ they said to me, ‘is by nature essentially lazy, a thief, cruel and
filthy...’.
According to Zvi
Keren, in his recently published history of the Bulgarian city of Rusçek,[2]
an event took place in the year of 1868 which was “particularly shocking.” This
incident appears in the report sent by the Prussian consul, Dr. Kalisch, to Otto
von Bismark, the Prime Minister in Berlin. Dr Kalisch begins:[3]
“Last week an act of vandalism was perpetrated in our town by several
Bulgarian-Christian youths. “Though we cannot be sure whether “vandalism” is an
appropriate term for what is described, it does suggest a nefarious deed, much
more than youthful high-jinx; it is something that shocked the Prussian consul
as it does the modern historian. The report continues by an attempt at social
analysis: “To my mind this phenomenon points to the lack of culture and
inferior education of the Bulgarian people”. While again “phenomenon” may be a
mistranslation for the original German used, it does point towards something
more than a single action by particular individuals, perhaps a generic
manifestation of anti-social behaviour characteristic of a nation still
primitive in the eyes of Western or Central European observers. After a brief hiatus (the passage cited by
Keren uses three full stops indicative of a deleted portion of a sentence
rather than one or more full sentences), Dr Kalisch describes the incident:
A
group of some 20 youths made their way to the Jewish cemetery and dug up the
cadaver of a Jewish child. They ripped the freshly buried corpse to shreds,
scattering its limbs around the cemetery [...]. Later the unfortunate father
came and collected the body parts. He reburied his son according to the
dictates of his faith [...].
Without
knowing what has been elided from the citation by either Keren or his
informant, what we can say is that this little narrative is bursting with
implications and resonances to our own contemporary news as well as to more
ancient historical events and conventions. First, this is not the action of a
single demented individual but of twenty adolescents. Second, it seems like a
ritual performance with several stages: the entrance into the Jewish burial
grounds, the choice of a freshly dug grave, and the dismemberment and
scattering of the corpse, after which the perpetrators of this crime depart.
Sometime afterwards, the father of the child whose body has been disturbed and
desecrated comes to the cemetery, gathers up the body parts, and reburies his
son. We further know this ritual desecration took place early in 1868, in late
winter, but whether it was at night or in the evening or early light of dawn
remains unclear. We are also given no information to determine how the father
knew about the scandalous act and so came to the burial grounds to make some
effort to undo the harm done. What is hinted at and which we shall try to
explain through midrashic means of interrogating the language of the text,
seeking analogies and traditional contexts, is that what is described here is a
local parody of a classical anti-Jewish slander.
Before
we begin our own midrashing[4]
of the narrative, however, let us examine further what Keren copies down from
the translated version of Dr. Kalisch’s consular report.
After
this loathsome deed was committed local authorities succeeded in laying their
hands on the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. While being questioned
one of the young criminals explained to the court what had motivated him and
his fellows. He claimed it was the outcome of what they learned from their
teachers at school. In reply to the judge he added that the teachers told them
how the Lord Jesus Christ was tortured and murdered by the Jews [...].
Consequently, the youth continues, out of their desire to be avenged the group
decided to behave as they did in the cemetery./ The court sentenced the
ringleaders to imprisonment in the local jail (Rusçek, 26 March, 1868).
It
is now more evident that the event occurred in mid-March, probably before
Easter, and the youths had been learning the story of the Passion in their
Eastern Orthodox Christian school. The context extends further since, as Bat
Ye’or points out, the rules of jihad still obtained in the Ottoman
Empire, so that Christians and Jews were legally dhimmi peoples.[5]
What that means in terms of mentality provides the textures in which pogroms
and folk plays of social purgation continue in Bulgaria, especially in border
towns like Rusçek.[6]
Distrust, hypocrisy, deception and rivalry prevailed amongst the minority
peoples, and Christian churches especially attempted to curry favour and
protect their congregations by spying and reporting on each other and above all
on the Jews. In individual situations, of course, Jews, Christians, and Muslims
could trade together and on occasion socialize, although this kind of
fraternizing with the enemy was contrary to koranic principles and those who
indulged risked severe punishments.
Because
jihad is not a spiritual war or an external struggle against enemies of
the faith, it cannot be understood as a “just war” in Christian terms or even
as a determination to impose the true faith on the world.[7]
But it is, as Jacques Ellul explains, “an institution... an organic piece of
Muslim society”, and thus “the only possible relationship with the outside
world”, that is, a war either active or latent, and “a constituent part of
thought, organization, and structures of this world”. [8]Whether
it involves persuasion or violence, jihad confronts the outside world as
an other—the world of warfare—eventually
to be converted or destroyed; the end justifies the means, so that any deceit,
trickery or prevarication may be used, and indeed the whole relationship to dhimmis
must be taken as a temporary and temporizing situation of suspended war. Thus
there is no means in Islam, as there is in Christianity, to bring about a state
of peace through love and forgiveness, which lead towards all men and women
recognizing Christ as their saviour; nor as in Judaism through justice and
truth—the rabbis do not require the rest of the world to convert or submit
themselves to the Torah, since every nation and people may and will eventually come
to God in their own way in the course of history.
[1] Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, Eibron Classics/Adamant
Media Corp. , 2006; originally Paris: G. Charpentier, 1879) tome I: 148-149.
Reinach’s first and lasting impression of Rusçek, or Roustchouk, which he
visited on 12 -13 September 1879, that it was a place where time moved very
slowly if at all: “Les rues en sont tortueuse et malpropres, les maisons basses
et d’aspect miserable, le tout d’un gris mélancoliques, sous un ciel
impacablement bleu [The streets were tortuous and unclean throughout, the
houses low and of a miserable appearance, the whole a melancholy gray, under an
implacably blue sky]” (p. 147). A decade after the events described by Dr.
Kalisch and discussed here, Reinach, though a Jew himself with background in
Central Europe, makes no mention of the anti-Semitic pogroms or folkplays that
occurred. What he does talk about is the “savagery” of the Bulgarian masses
against the Turks: “En l’absence des troupes russes, ce que les Bulgares ont
commis d’horreurs, ce qu’ils ont tué de musulmans après les avoir torturés, ce
qu’ils ont violé de femmes et brûlé de villages, on ne le saura jamais [In the
absence of Russian troops, what the Bulgarians committed in terms of horror,
that they killed Turks after torturing them, that they raped their women and
burnt their villages, one would never believe]” (p. 149). It is within the
matrix of this political violence in the wake of the withdrawal of Ottoman
suzerainty over the region that the symbolic, but yet no less physical attacks
on Jews takes place. Ironically, as a French senator, Reinach travelled
precisely to examine the Eastern Question, or what he nominates “La Question
d’Orient en Orient” (2006/tome II: 359-406). As an assimilated Jew, he avoids
identifying with his fellow Jews, either the impoverished majority or the
richer mercantile classes. He recognizes anti-Semitism in the theatres, the
newspapers and the discussions he has in the larger cities—Vienna, Bucharest
and Istambul—but does not delve into the causes or implications. His literary
and cultural allusions are secular or Christian and his judgments on the
poverty, injustice and violence he sees are those of an educated French citizen.
[2] Zvi Keren, The Jews of Rusçek: From Periphery to Capital of the Tuna Vilayet,
trans. Shulamith Berman (Istanbul: isis Press, 2011; org. in Hebrw, 2005). The
text cited comes from the original manuscript document, only a short passage of
which has ever been published. The translation is by Ms. M. Lecheva of the
Bulgarian State Archives who passed it on to the author. “To the best of our
knowledge,” Keren writes, “it appears here for the first time” (2011: 211, n.
1).
[4] Developed from the noun midrash, a rabbinical mode of exegesis
that expands, enhances and explores the secret dimensions of sacred text, the
term midrashing describes the
processes by which secular texts and textualizable experiences (such as
festival performances, folkplays and rituals in general) may be subject to
similar modes of analyses. See Norman Simms, “Fantasia, Enargeia and the
Rabbinical Midrash: The Classical Way to Read Jewish Texts” Literature
& Aesthetics 19: 2 (December 2009) 10-24.
[6] Elias Canetti devotes the first
part of his three-volume memoires to the city of his birth, “Ruschuk,
1905-1911” in The Tongue Set Free (1977). Although the author recalls the city in terms
similar to those described by Reinach a generation earlier as “dusty and
dismal,” the key to his memories are in his comments on his grandfather’s
house, the nature of the Sephardic Jewish community, and the relations between
the diverse peoples who inhabited the city and interacted with the many
cultures that intersected there: “Most of the Sephardim were still Turkish
subjects. Life had always been good for them under the Turks, better than for
the Christian Slavs in the Balkans. But since many Sephardim were well-to-do
merchants, the new Bulgarian government maintained good relations with them...”
(The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a
European Childhood, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, printed in one volume as The Memoires of Elias Canetti [New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000] p. 7). Yet, Canetti explains further, speaking
as an adult and not as the toddler he was in the days he has in personal
recollection, “The loyalties of the Sephardim were fairly complicated” (ibidem) by the variety of people,
cultures and languages around them—his grandfather could speak nineteen tongues
in order to trade in the city and up and down the Danube—and with other Jews,
Ashkanizim as well as Spanish-speakers, and with so-called good and bad
families. For further discussion see Simms 2009: 43-70.
[7] Andrew G., ed. Bostwick, The
Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 2005)
[8]
“Introduction” to Bat
Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern
Christianity). On the background and meaning of the word jihad, see pp. 37
ff.
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