Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by | 2 November 2009 · 6:56 am

Salonica’s Muslim-Jewish Syncretism

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 72-74:

Most of [Sabbatai] Zevi’s followers—like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan—never did convert [to Islam] and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.

HUNDREDS MORE, HOWEVER, did actually follow Zevi into Islam—some at the time, and others a few years later—and by doing so they gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious communities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Dönmehs (turncoats [cf. Turkish döner kebap, Greek gyros for rotisserie meat]), a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Ma’min—the Faithful—a term commonly used by all Muslims. (In Hebrew, the term is Maminim; in Turkish Mümin. Ma’min was a Salonica derivation.) There were small groups of them elsewhere, but Zevi’s last wife, Ayse, and her father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Salonica, and after Zevi’s death, they returned there and helped to establish the new sect which he had created. By 1900, the city’s ten-thousand-strong community of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims was one of the most extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional mosaic of the late Ottoman empire.

Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the Sunni-Shia split in mainstream Islam, the internal divisions of the Ma’min stemmed from disagreement over the line of succession which followed their Prophet’s death. In 1683 his widow Ayse hailed her brother Jacob—Zevi’s brother-in-law—as the Querido (Beloved) who had received Zevi’s spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions. Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi’s birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and left Salonica to make the haj in the early 1690s but died during his return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out, both the Izmirlis and the Yakublar (the followers of Jacob Querido) saw themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had “withdrawn” himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology. A few years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and artisanal classes, broke off from the Izmirlis to follow another charismatic leader, the youthful Barouch Russo (known to his followers as Osman Baba), who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi’s spirit but his very reincarnation.

Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.

Over time they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. (Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?) They prayed to their Messiah, “our King, our Redeemer,” in “the name of God, the God of Israel,” but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city—certainly well into the nineteenth century—was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.

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Filed under Balkans, Greece, Islam, Judaism, Mediterranean, migration, Turkey

by | 22 October 2009 · 6:48 am

Orthodox Salonica’s Surrender to the Turks, 1387

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 26-27:

The Turks’ attitude to religion came as a pleasant relief to many Orthodox Christians. Held captive by the Ottomans in 1355, the distinguished archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, was surprised to find the Orthodox Church recognized and even flourishing in the lands under the emir. Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship of the two faiths with him and the emir organized a debate between him and Christian converts to Islam. “We believe in your prophet, why don’t you believe in ours?” Muslims asked him more than once. Palamas himself observed an imam conducting a funeral and later took the opportunity to joust over theology with him. When the discussion threatened to overheat, Palamas calmed it down by saying politely: “Had we been able to agree in debate we might as well have been of one faith.” To which he received the revealing reply. “There will be a time when we shall all agree.”

As Byzantine power waned, more and more Orthodox Christians felt caught between two masters. Faced with an apparent choice between the reviled Catholics (their sack of Constantinople in 1204 never to be forgotten) and the Muslim Turks, many opted for the latter. Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was in fact a powerful one for the Ottomans, who could be seen as protectors of Orthodoxy against the Catholics. The hope for political stability, the desire for wealth and status in a meritocratic and open ruling system, admiration for the governing capacities of the Ottomans, and their evident willingness to make use of Christians as well as Muslims explain why administrators, nobles, peasants and monks felt the allure of the sultans and why many senior Byzantine noble families entered their service. Murad II‘s grand viziers were well known for their pro-Christian sympathies; Murad himself was influenced by dervish orders which preached a similarly open-minded stance, and the family sheykh of the Evrenos family was reputed to be a protector of Christians. In the circumstances, it is not surprising why surrender seemed far more sensible an option than futile resistance against overwhelming odds, and why the inhabitants of Salonica themselves were known, according to at least one Byzantine chronicler, as “friends of the Sultan.”

In the second half of the fourteenth century, one Balkan town after another yielded to the fast-moving Ottoman armies; the Via Egnatia fell into their hands, and even the canny monks of Mount Athos submitted. Salonica itself was blockaded for the first time in 1383, and in April 1387, surrendered without a fight. On this occasion, all that happened was that a small Turkish garrison manned the Acropolis. The town’s ruler Manuel Palaeologue had wanted to resist, but he was shouted down by the inhabitants, and forced to leave the city so that they could hand themselves over. Manuel himself paid homage to the emir Murad, and even fought for his new sovereign before being crowned emperor.

Had the city remained uninterruptedly under Ottoman control from this point on, its subsequent history would have been very different, and the continuity with Byzantine life not so decisively broken. Having given in peacefully, Salonica was not greatly altered by the change of regime, its municipal privileges were respected by the new rulers and its wealthy monastic foundations weathered the storm. The small Turkish garrison converted a church into a mosque for their own use, and the devshirme child levy was imposed—at intervals Turkish soldiers carried off Christian children to be brought up as Muslims—which must have caused distress. But returning in 1393, Archbishop Isidores described the situation as better than he had anticipated, while the Russian monk Ignatius of Smolensk who visited in 1401 was still amazed by its “wondrous” monasteries.

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Filed under Balkans, Greece, religion, slavery, Turkey, war

by | 16 October 2009 · 6:43 am

Salonica Jewish Language Baggage

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), p. 51:

[Salonica’s Jews] worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-established homelands—Ispanya, Çeçilyan (Sicilian), Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan (Italian), Otranto, Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others—which survived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917. Their family names—Navarro, Cuenca, Algava—their games, curses and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate Pan d’Espanya (almond sponge cake) on holidays, rodanchas (pumpkin pastries), pastel de kwezo (cheese pie with sesame seed), fijones kon karne (beef and bean stew) and keftikes de poyo (chicken croquettes), and gave visitors dulce de muez verde (green walnut preserve). People munched pasatempo (dried melon seeds), took the vaporiko across the bay, or enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.

For this, the primary conduit was language…. In Salonica there was a religious variant—Ladino—and a vernacular which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as “Jewish” (judezmo), and quickly became the language of secular learning and literature, business, science and medicine. Sacred and scholarly texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because “this language is the most used among us.” In the docks, among the fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon, Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, Italian and Provençal. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest. “The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, Venice and other commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not better,” noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of Toledo, found that the city’s Jews “speak Castilian as fine and well-accented as in the imperial capital.” They were proud of their tongue—its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive.

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Filed under Greece, language, Mediterranean, migration, religion, Spain, Turkey

by | 15 October 2009 · 6:42 pm

Herta Müller on Securitate Spies and Friends

On 31 August 2008, before the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, signandsight.com published an excerpt from Herta Müller‘s latest novel, “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” (“Atemschaukel”). Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt that captures the ambiguities of close friendships in police states, at least judging from our own experience in Romania in 1983-84.

The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing [from my Securitate file]. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. For two years I sat with four bookkeepers in the office. They worked out the wages of the workers, I turned the pages of my fat technical dictionaries. I didn’t understand the first thing about hydraulic or non-hydraulic presses, levers or gauges. When the dictionary offered three, four, or even seven terms, I went out onto the factory floor and asked the workers. They told me the correct Romanian word without any knowledge of German – they knew their machines. In the third year a “protocol office” was established. The company director moved me there to work alongside two newly employed translators, one from French, the other from English. One was the wife of a university professor who, even in my student days, was said to be a Securitate informant. The other was the daughter-in-law of the second most senior secret service officer in town. Only those two had the key to the file cupboard. When foreign professionals visited, I had to leave the office. Then, apparently, I was to be put through two recruitment tests with the secret police officer Stana, to be made suitable for the office. After my second refusal, his goodbye was: “You’ll be sorry, we’ll drown you in the river.”

One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place had been taken by an engineer, and I was no longer allowed into the office. I couldn’t go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, I defiantly sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase that joined the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I wasn’t working. The office staff walked past me in silence. My friend Jenny, an engineer, knew about what was happening to me. Every day on our way home I explained it to her in detail. She came to me in the lunch break and sat down on the stairs. We ate together as we had done before in my office. Over the loudspeaker in the yard we could always hear the workers’ choruses about the happiness of the people. She ate and cried for me, I didn’t. I had to be strong.

On the third day I installed myself at Jenny’s desk, she cleared a corner for me. On the fourth day too. It was a large office. On the fifth morning she was waiting for me outside the door. “I am no longer allowed to let you in the office. Just think, my colleagues say you are a spy. ” “How’s that possible,” I asked. “But you know where we’re living,” she reasoned. I took my dictionaries and sat down on the stairs again. This time I cried too. When I went out onto the factory floor to ask about a word, the workers whistled after me and shouted: “Informer”. It was a witches’ cauldron. How many spies were there in Jenny’s office and on the shop floor. They were acting on instructions. There were orders from above to attack me, the slander was meant to force me to resign. At the beginning of these turbulent times my father died. I no longer had a grip on things, I had to reassure myself that I really existed in the world, and began to write down the story of my – these writings formed the basis of the short stories in “Nadirs”.

The fact that I was now considered a spy because I had refused to become one was worse than the attempt to recruit me and the death threat. I was being slandered by precisely the people that I was protecting by refusing to spy on them. Jenny and a handful of colleagues could see the games that were being played with me. But those who knew me less well could not. How could I have explained to them what was going on, how could I have proved the opposite. It was completely impossible, as the Securitate knew only too well, and that is exactly why they did it to me. They knew, too, that such perfidy would be far more destructive than any blackmail. You can even get used to death threats. They are part and parcel of this one life we have. You can defy anxiety to the depths of your soul. But slander steals your soul. You just feel surrounded by horror.

How long this situation lasted, I no longer know. It seemed endless to me. It was probably just weeks. Finally, I was sacked….

My file at least answered one painful question. A year after my departure from Romania, Jenny came to visit in Berlin. Since the time of the harassment in the factory she had been my closest friend. Even after I was sacked we saw each other almost daily. But when I saw her passport in our Berlin kitchen, and the additional visas for France and Greece, I confronted her directly: “You don’t get a passport like that for nothing, what did you do to get it?” Her answer: “The secret service has sent me, and I was desperate to see you again.” Jenny had cancer – she is long dead now. She told me that her task was to investigate our flat and our daily habits. When we get up and go to bed, where we do our shopping and what we buy. On her return, she promised, she would only pass on what had been agreed between us. She lived with us, wanted to stay for a month. With each day my distrust grew. After just a couple of days I rummaged through her suitcase and found the telephone number of the Romanian consulate and a copy of our door key. After that I lived with the suspicion that in all probability she had been spying on me from the outset, her friendship just part of the job. After her return, I see from the file, she delivered a detailed description of the flat and of our habits, as “SURSA (source) SANDA”.

But in a bugging protocol from 21 December, 1984, a note in the margin, next to Jenny’s name, reads: “We must identify JENI, apparently there is great trust between them.” This friendship, which meant so much to me, was ruined by her visit to Berlin, a terminally ill cancer patient lured into betrayal after chemotherapy. The copied key made it clear that Jenny had fulfilled her task behind our backs. I had to ask her to leave our Berlin flat at once. I had to chase my closest friend out in order to protect myself and Richard Wagner from her assignment. This tangle of love and betrayal was unavoidable. A thousand times I have turned her visit over in my mind, mourned our friendship, discovering to my disbelief that after my emigration, Jenny had a relationship with a Securitate officer. Today I am glad, for the file shows that our intimacy had grown naturally and had not been arranged by the secret service, and that Jenny didn’t spy on me until after my emigration. You become grateful for small mercies, trawling through all the poison for a part that isn’t contaminated, however small. That my file proves that the feelings between us were real, almost makes me happy now.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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Filed under Germany, language, literature, Romania

by | 10 October 2009 · 11:00 am

Salonica’s Polyglot Boot-blacks

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 12-13:

IN THE 1930s, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.

But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers—drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure—penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century—though no earlier—there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands—maps. As for the archives, they are endless—Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American—compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multiconfessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world—as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages—to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.

The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that elsewhere Greeks too lost out—in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon, Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of 1922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.

Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe—in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw, Vilna and Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trauma caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of nation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property after 1948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier? Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the remnants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country garden an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving their memories of a city that is long gone.

By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica’s Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street pedlars are entering Salonica’s bloodstream. Many of them quickly learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city’s position within the modem nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to Greek hands has become ancient history.

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Filed under Balkans, economics, Greece, labor, language, migration, religion, Turkey

by | 3 October 2009 · 11:25 am

Salonica: National vs. Personal Histories

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 10-11:

I found Joseph Nehama’s magisterial Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The arrival of the Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica’s emergence as a renowned centre of rabbinical learning, the disruption caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers, who followed him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Eviiya Chelebi noted, called the city “our Salonica”—a place where, in addition to Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants “know the Jewish tongue because day and night they are in contact with, and conduct business with Jews.”

Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew of the home of Saint Dimitrios—”the Orthodox city”—with the Sefardic “Mother of Israel,” it seemed to me that these two histories—the Greek and the Jewish—did not so much complement one another as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from 1962 which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its capture from the Turks contained almost no mention of them at all; the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians masterminding the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias Petropoulos excoriated as “the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek bourgeoisie,” for whom the city “has always been Greek.” But at the same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the other was of Jews.

As for the Muslims, who had ruled Salonica from 1430 to 1912, they were more or less absent from both. Centuries of European antipathy to the Ottomans had left their mark. Their presence on the wrong side of the Dardanelles had for so long been seen as an accident, misfortune or tragedy that in an act of belated historical wishful thinking they had been expunged from the record of European history. Turkish scholars and writers, and professional Ottomanists, had not done much to rectify things. It suited everyone, it seemed, to ignore the fact that there had once existed in this corner of Europe an Ottoman and an Islamic city atop the Greek and Jewish ones.

How striking then it is that memoirs often describe the place very differently from such scholarly or official accounts and depict a society of almost kaleidoscopic interaction. Leon Sciaky’s evocative Farewell to Salonica,the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul Hamid, begins with the sound of the muezzin’s cry at dusk. In Sciaky’s city, Albanian householders protected their Bulgarian grocer from the fury of the Ottoman gendarmerie, while well-to-do Muslim parents employed Christian wet-nurses for their children and Greek gardeners for their fruit trees. Outside the Yalman family home the well was used by “the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians of the neighbourhood.” And in Nikos Kokantzis’s moving novella Gioconda, a Greek teenage boy falls in love with the Jewish girl next door in the midst of the Nazi occupation; at the moment of deportation, her parents trust his with their most precious belongings.

Have scholars, then, simply been blinkered by nationalism and the narrowed sympathies of ethnic politics? If they have the fault is not theirs alone. The basic problem—common to historians and their public alike—has been the attribution of sharply opposing, even contradictory, meanings to the same key events. Both have seen history as a zero-sum game, in which opportunities for some came through the sufferings of others, and one group’s loss was another’s gain: 1430—when the Byzantine city fell to Sultan Murad II—was a catastrophe for the Christians but a triumph for the Turks. Nearly five centuries later, the Greek-victory in 1912 reversed the equation. The Jews, having settled there at the invitation of the Ottoman sultans, identified their interests with those of the empire, something the Greeks found hard to forgive.

It follows that the real challenge is not merely to tell the story of this remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence—in the early twenty-first century such long-forgotten stories are eagerly awaited and sought out—but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative. National histories generally have clearly defined heroes and villains, but what would a history look like where these roles were blurred and confused? Can one shape an account of this city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities—the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and genocide—which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a rime when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a “museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions.” Since then what he called its “hybrid spirit” has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it is worth trying again.

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Filed under Balkans, Greece, migration, nationalism, religion, scholarship, Turkey

by | 26 September 2009 · 6:42 pm

Ukraine’s Sure Got Talent in Sand Animation

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Filed under art, Ukraine

by | 18 September 2009 · 12:50 pm

Balkans & Papua New Guinea: Sprachbund issues

The following draft of a paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (FoCAL), in Suva, Fiji, in August 1984, under the title “The Balkans and Papua New Guinea: Language Contact Issues.” It briefly touches on some of the new (and disturbing) ideas about Sprachbund issues that I encountered during my Fulbright year in Romania in 1983–84. It was a frustrating year for linguistic research, but a wonderful year for language learning—and for travel, it being my first trip to Europe.

Introduction

To many who limit themselves to the study of European languages, “the Balkan languages represent a unique case of evolution from genealogical divergence toward typological convergence” (Saramandu 1979:177). It is likely, however, that any large language family has some members who have to some extent forsaken their relatives for their neighbors. One such group in the Austronesian (AN) language family comprises the New Guinea Oceanic languages. (I continue to use “New Guinea Oceanic” as a typological, not a genetic, label.)

The Balkan Sprachbund may receive more publicity than its counterpart in Papua New Guinea, but in neither area are the issues anywhere near resolved. I intend here to outline some of these issues and to compare the progress being made toward resolving them in each of the two areas of study. The Balkans will receive greater attention because I assume that most Austronesianists are less familiar with that area.

Composition

The core of the Balkan Sprachbund is composed of five languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Modern Greek, and Romanian. Compared to the hundreds of languages involved in New Guinea, the number seems quite manageable. Moreover, Bulgarian and Macedonian are sufficiently close that they can be considered together for most purposes. More peripherally involved in the Balkan Sprachbund are Serbocroatian and Turkish. Turkish is usually considered only as an outside donor language, but it would be interesting to compare Balkan or western Turkish with eastern dialects or with other Turkic languages to see to what extent it may also have acquired Balkan, or at least European features.

In order to determine what is specifically “Balkan” about the core languages, one can compare Bulgarian with the other Slavonic languages and with Old Bulgarian (that is, Old Church Slavonic) dating from the 9th to 11th centuries A.D. (Rosetti 1978:480). One can compare Romanian with the other Romance languages and with Latin. The earliest documents in Romanian itself date from the 16th century (Rosetti 1978:482). Records of Greek go back millennia, so it is perhaps the most tractable of the Balkan languages. Albanian, being an isolate with only a brief written history, is harder to deal with, but at least there are two dialects to compare. The southern (or Tosc) dialect shares more features with Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian than does the northern (or Gheg) dialect. (Comrie 1981:198.)

The surviving languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, then, all belong to different branches of Indo-European. For most of these branches, there is some documentary or comparative basis for sorting out areal features from genetic features. (Comrie 1981:198.) Matters are considerably complicated, however, by the knowledge that the original Balkan substratum did not survive. The most common terms used to refer to this substratum are “Thracian”, “Dacian”, and “Illyrian”. No one is sure whether these are different names for the same language, different dialects of the same language, or three different languages, each with separate dialects. Assumptions vary from linguist to linguist. So does the importance assigned to the role of the substratum in accounting for the similarities shared by the present-day Balkan languages. I shall discuss the substratum issue in greater detail shortly.

Intertranslatability

Early studies of the Balkan languages taken as a unit perhaps tended to overstate the similarities among them. Sandfeld, in his classic synthesis on the subject (1930), says that, “in going from one of these languages to another … one is struck by the fact that the manner in which things are expressed remains essentially the same throughout the entire territory covered by these languages” (1930:6-7; Grace’s [1981:27] translation).

First, let me illustrate the kinds of explanations I had hoped to find, by briefly summarizing the loss of the infinitive.

In the Balkan languages, finite verbs are used where other European languages would use the infinitive. The loss of the infinitive in Greek can be explained on language-internal grounds. Loss of word-final [n] in Greek made the infinitive formally identical to the 3d person present indicative form of the verb. Distributional evidence suggests that this innovation spread north from Greece. Bulgarian lacks an infinitive entirely. Citation forms of verbs are usually 1st person present indicative. The infinitive exists in Albanian but is used more in the northern dialect than in the southern one. In Serbo-Croation, Serbians prefer to use subordinate finite verbs where Croatians use the infinitive. In Romanian, too, more northern dialects use the infinitive more than the southern ones. I believe there is general agreement on this question.

Unfortunately, not many other issues are as well resolved.

One can say almost the same thing about some areas of Papua New Guinea, but only where the languages involved are all from the same family. The convergence between AN and Papuan languages is on a much grosser level, at least in most cases.

More recent work on Balkan languages, especially that by scholars from the Balkan countries themselves, seems to pay more attention to the differences among the various languages. One reason may be that the Balkan scholars have a greater concern for questions of their own national identity than did the outsiders who originally popularized the concept of the Sprachbund. In fact, Dumitru Macrea, a Romanian scholar, has expressed the view that the whole concept of a Balkan linguistic union being somehow comparable to a language family had its origin in the desire of Germany and Austria to propagate the idea of a unitary Balkan area which those powers then planned to dominate politically, economically, and culturally (Macrea 1982:284).

Another reason more recent scholarship may emphasize the differences among the languages is that there is simply much more data available than there used to be. Finer differences have become more salient. The same thing is happening with regard to Papua New Guinea languages too, as more data becomes available. I suspect that detailed study of the Kupwar village languages would also turn up many, many cases in which those languages are not as perfectly intertranslatable as they are often assumed to be. Even if many texts are morpheme-for-morpheme translatable, I suspect comparable morphemes are never full synonyms.

This raises an important issue. Is absolute convergence necessary? Is it desirable? Is it even possible? What kinds of differences are most tolerable? If fluently bilingual speakers maintain one of their languages solely for emblematic purposes, that is, solely to mark themselves off from speakers of other languages, what portion of their language will serve that emblematic function? Will they be content to say, “You say tomayto and we say tomahto,”, or “You call it eggplant and we call it aubergine”? Or might they also focus on larger differences, like “You put object complements before the verb and we put them after,” or “You have all those heart idioms and we have all those liver ones”? Virtually any recognizable difference would seem sufficient to be emblematic.

Unifying factors

What is it that accounts for the unity that does exist among the Balkan languages? It is significant that no mention at all is made of the possibility of a common Balkan substratum in two recent general works in English that devote some attention to Balkan areal features. These two works are Comrie’s (1981) introduction to typology and universals and Bynon’s (1977) textbook in historical linguistics. Bynon mentions the Byzantine Empire and Greek Orthodox church as unifying factors, while Comrie emphasizes the mutual bilingualism that enabled innovations to spread across language boundaries. Schaller’s (1975) introduction to Balkan linguistics (in German) also tends to discount the role of the substratum and appeal more to the Greek and Latin adstrata as unifying factors. The over dependence on substratum by earlier linguists to explain language change seems to have made many western linguists shy of using the term.

Substratum is generally given a more prominent role, however, by those linguists for whom it is not just an academic issue but also a question of national ethnogenesis. Romanian linguists, for instance, often talk of the history of their language in geological terms. Romanian is said to consist of an autochthonous (pre-Roman Dacian) substratum, a core stratum from Latin, and a superstratum of Slavic. To some, the central problem in Balkan linguistics is the identification of pre-Roman, pre-Slavic, autochthonous elements in the Balkan languages (see Brancus 1978). In spite of much effort, not much progress has been made in this direction (Brancus 1978:374). The only records we have of the Dacian language are a handful of proper names and between 10 and 20 Dacian glosses in two Greek lists of medicinal plants (Academia R.S.R. 1969:314-316).

Al. Rosetti, the Romanian linguist who has concerned himself most with Balkan linguistics in the broader sense—that is, the study of the Sprachbund as a whole, not just the attempt to reconstruct the pre-Roman substratum—nevertheless uses the term “substrate influence”, rather loosely to designate any sort of interference between two languages (Rosetti 1978:205). This perhaps parallels the use of loaded terms like “mixed language” or “language mixture” to describe any sort of contamination between AN and Papuan languages in the New Guinea area.

Gheorghe Ivanescu, one of the principal Romanian Indo-Europeanists, holds a fascinatingly particular view that requires a substrate motivation for each and every sound change. He attacks the “neolinguist” view that phonetic changes are imitative and therefore transferable across language boundaries (1980:735). He asserts instead that a phonetic change is realized only by a change in the “base of articulation”, that is, by a change in the characteristic shape of the oral cavity at rest within a given population (1980:8). He attacks the structuralists for failing to recognize the innateness of certain articulatory tendencies, and suggests that phonetic similarities between some Caucasian languages and Romanian (such as the presence of phonemic schwa) “are to be explained by the anthropological relationship between the peoples of the Caucasus and those of the Carpathians” (1980:733).

An interesting corollary of Ivanescu’s view is that languages do not change at a constant rate. Instead, language change depends on external changes in the speaker population. The “base of articulation”, for instance, changes over time “through changes in the quantitative relationships between the component human types [of a population], as well as through mixtures with other populations, maybe even through biological mutations between one generation and the next” (1980:9).

However, according to Ivanescu (1980:11), the “articulatory basis” of a language can be suppressed. “It does not manifest itself in those eras in which there exists an intense traffic of goods and people” (1980:11). It “cannot manifest itself either in the capitalist era or in the socialist era, except in popular speech … [It] only shows itself in eras in which there is a natural economy, thus in the primitive-commune and feudal eras” (1980:11). For instance, “the adaptation of Latin to the articulatory and psychological bases of the romanized populations, thus the birth of the Romance languages, was not possible except with the change from a trade economy during the slavery era to a natural economy during the medieval era” (1980; 11). (This “natural” economy was organized on a feudal basis in the West and on the basis of village collectives in the East [1980:11].)

A “natural” economy, however, does not allow languages to attain their “natural” condition. In a “natural” economy, divergent local bases of articulation are free to influence phonology, while divergent local temperaments are free to influence morphosyntax (1980:13). These influences are “completely avoided only in eras of intense circulation” of people and goods, thus in eras of higher technological development when unitary literary languages are born (1980:13). “[O]nly in such eras can languages completely attain their natural condition: that of relative stability” (1980: 13).

I’ve lingered over Ivanescu’s views somewhat more than might be necessary for two reasons. In the first place, we often tend to take our shared assumptions for granted. It is healthy sometimes to bring some of them into sharp relief by considering radically different viewpoints. Second, the divergence of assumptions among those of us working on New Guinea language history is relatively narrow compared to that encountered among those working on Balkan language history. Let me give a few more illustrations:

I have already mentioned Macrea’s opinion that Germanic imperialism is responsible for propagating the Sprachbund idea. Macrea (1982:285) and Ivanescu (1980:48 ff.) see similar forces at work in an early hypothesis that attempted to explain the particularly close similarities between Romanian and Albanian. The hypothesis was that the Romanian language and people originally took shape south of the Danube close to where the Albanians are now. A corollary assumption is that when the armies of the Roman Empire retreated south of the Danube in A.D. 275, the whole Romanized population came with them. One can see why this hypothesis would weaken the historical argument for Romanian territorial claims. Although this hypothesis is still kept alive by some Hungarian irredentists (see Du Nay 1977), it is no longer considered seriously by any present-day Romanian linguists. Instead, Romanian linguists are inclined to attribute the similarities between Romanian and Albanian to a common Thraco-Dacian substrate, on the theory that the Romanians continue that portion of the substrate population that adopted Latin as its mother-tongue, while the Albanians continue that portion that borrowed a lot from Latin but did not switch over to Latin (Ivanescu 1980:57).

Romanian linguists, then, are far less reticent than their Western counterparts about appealing to a common substratum as a unifying factor in the Balkan Sprachbund. I believe that part of the appeal to substratum as an explanatory factor is motivated by the desire to establish prior territorial claim to present Romanian-speaking areas. So far, historical linguistics in the New Guinea area has been relatively free from involvement in territorial claims. I hope that situation continues.

Other unifying factors mentioned in the Romanian literature are:

(1) similar conditions of life among the Balkan peoples, particularly the relative mobility their livestock-centered economy afforded them;
(2) exposure to Byzantine civilization, especially the Eastern Church;
(3) subjugation to the Ottoman Empire, a condition which actually reinforced the church as a unifying factor;
(4) widespread bilingualism (Saramandu 1979).

Saramandu (1979), a younger Romanian Balkanologist, distinguishes what he calls “passive” and “active” bilingualism. The distinction is not unfamiliar, but I would use the terms “restricted” and “unrestricted” to describe the two types. By “passive” bilingualism, Saramandu means bilingualism restricted to certain social occasions (religious services, for instance) or certain social strata (priests, administrators, itinerant merchants or craftsmen). The mass of the population would presumably recognize but not use another tongue. By “active” bilingualism, Saramandu means the bilingualism of a person who masters and uses two or more languages in more or less equal measure.

I’m not sure that, for a given population, the end result of either of these types of bilingualism would be very different, except that the second permits the possibility of complete language shift. On an a priori basis, one might suppose that the foreign languages in which a population is passively bilingual might contribute more loanwords or loan translations, and have less effect on phonology, morphology, or syntax; while the foreign languages controlled actively by the mass of a population would influence the phonology and phraseology as much as the lexicon. But French, for instance, seems to have penetrated into every corner of English (except perhaps phonology) even though the great mass of Anglo-Saxons after 1066 were certainly no more than passively bilingual. If sufficiently influential, active bilinguals can spread foreignisms among their own passively bilingual kith and kin at least as efficiently as foreigners can.

Here ends the draft of the paper I presented but never submitted for the conference proceedings. The only record I preserved was a hand-annotated printout from the Wang word processor at the accounting firm where I was working (the Honolulu office of Deloitte). Unfortunately, the bibliography seems to have gone missing. I scanned, OCRed, and then cleaned up those pages to get the text above.

My wife and I began that fascinating year teaching summer extension courses in Yap, Micronesia, during a severe drought that had us bathing out of buckets in our air-conditioned hotel room. Little did we realize at the time what types of shortages we would face during our long, cold, dark winter in Romania. We both made the trip to Fiji, where we stayed in a village near the conference hotel, along with several other participants from far corners of the globe. For the two of us, especially after Romania, that Pacific Island village made us feel we were back home again.

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Filed under Balkans, language, nationalism, Papua New Guinea, scholarship

by | 16 June 2009 · 6:29 am

Civil Wars on the Eastern Front, 1940s

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 455-457:

Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours’ property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews’ Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country’s invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.

The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted….

Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelic had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like Jasenovac.

Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, nationalism, religion, war

by | 12 June 2009 · 8:46 pm

Kim Jong Un: Apollo of the Amnok, Titan of the Tumen, …

Whenever I wonder what Romania might be like now if Nicolae Ceauşescu had somehow managed to survive long enough to pass his kingdom on to his son, Nicu (alas, poor Nicu!), I just turn my gaze to the royal succession in the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea, which fits Tony Judt‘s characterization of Ceauşescu’s Romania only too well.

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

But now it looks as if the heralds of the Kim dynasty are preparing for another royal succession by echoing the epithets of the Genius of the Carpathians in describing a Brilliant Comrade, the Grandson of the Sun, the Dauphin of Dokdo, the Titan of the Tumen (or Dionysus of the Duman), the Apollo of the Amnok, the Priapus of Paektusan, the East Sea of Ecstasy, the Yorik of the Yalu, the Need-shaper, the Wisen Heimer, the Un, etc.

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