This book [Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian] sheds new light on the process of the deconstruction of monotheisms as it is affirmed in the nineteenth century, while exploring one of the modern idealities of the production of the history of religion in the West, that which is constituted around the antinomy Israel/Egypt. This exploration is carried out by a method that is inspired by the Freudian perspective. It is inspired by Freud to the extent that it aims at a history of remembering that calls upon the concept of “repression” rather than on a history of facts. It sheds light at the same time on Freud’s most enigmatic book, Moses and Monotheism, and validates certain hypotheses in it that seemed to Freud’s own eyes very weak. “Freud is the one who restored the suppressed evidence, who was able to retrieve lost memories and to finally complete and rectify the picture of Egypt,” Assmann writes (Assmann, 216). The rediscovery of Akhenaton will have been, in sum, a return of the repressed that allows us to read the case for Moses as an Egyptian. From this point of view, J. Assmann carries out something like a psychoanalytic thinking of historicity: human memory cannot only be understood from the perspective of a history of consciousness and its constructions, especially when it is a question of events that affect our relation to alterity, such as the fall of the gods; human memory is not perfected by a knowledge of the completed past, but depends on a time saturated by a “now-time,” as Benjamin writes in his developments on the concept of history. This saturation by “now-time” is the site of memory for psychoanalysis, the site of a temporal block in which the experience of the past and its writing takes place. Recollection bursts the continuity of history and the linearity of the past, and it is in this sense a leap into the anachronistic, thanks to which the event is appropriated and inscribed.
——Fethi Bensalama, Translations of Monotheisms
I have sometimes posited that history claims objects and texts, while memory claims bodies and selves.
History and counter-history as rhetorical coordinations of evidence that assert narratives and counter-narratives regarding trajectories of lost moments: a procedural praxis that concedes its inherent epistemological shortfalls, while nonetheless believing in its own continual refinement as a procedure. (And similar in its distance from its purported object as other such rhetorical procedures are from theirs—journalism & matters of current importance; law & justice—though perhaps a bit nearer than the gap between money and value.)
Memory as the past embodied and ritualized—consumed, performed, enacted, imbibed, expressed.
Of course, they aren’t actually separate procedures.
Historiography and cultural memory are inextricably intertwined. The writing of history occurs in the “now-time” of cultural memory. History, being the work of historians, reflects their biases—because one cannot write everything, so one writes what one wants to write, what one needs to write, what one is hired to write, what one can support oneself by writing, or can write during moments saved up. (I’m writing this at two in the morning because I can’t sleep.) Biases of historiography arise unavoidably in initial formative stages: in the selection of an event or a process to investigate with an eye to explanation.
But while a historian is often imagined as a solitary individual delving into a stack of books, sheaves of documents, or these days sitting with their laptop in front of an archival box of letters in a reading room, engaged in work that is private, all intellectual, and intended to leave a permanent record, and acts of cultural memory are frequently imagined as communal, ephemeral, and experiential, any firm opposition between the two should be rejected. For one, there are certainly ways to do history that don’t rely on any vision of a single heroic author with intense powers of Sitzfleisch and for another: to engage seriously with objects is an experiential process that occurs in its own ephemeral moment.
The rhetorical bias of a given historical narrative is constructed in reference to an authorial subject’s positions with regards to fictional selves: individual, national, cultural, economical—from which the narrative textual objects of history emerge. These then become the scripts and scores for further enacting, expression, ritual embodiment, and contention.
A particular interconnected set of relations to texts—writing & expression, subjective immersion, performative enacting, contention/appropriation/re-writing—is quite common as set of communal textual practices. It’s also a useful lens through which to consider Jewish historiography & cultural memory—a guide to the movement from the “now-time” of memorial rites to the anachronistic hineindenken of the consideration of the distanced objects of historical study, especially because Jewish religious ritual foregrounds the community as reenacting key moments of history in a kind of eternal-present of continuous remembrance, understood through oral traditions and textual objects and heuristics. Shavout is this explicitly.
The gap between a Jewish historiography and Jewish cultural memory has everything to do with a subjective inability to complete the anachronistic leap into the experiential and actual coordinates of the ephemeral and irretrievable past, coupled with the need to commemorate the traces left in experience.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the problematics of Jewish accounts and understandings of anti-Semitic violence. Timothy Snyder makes this explicit:
The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not.
[...]
Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event.
–Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009
This is not merely a void at the center of the common being of Jewish cultural memory: this is also the paradox of an acknowledgment of the inability to enact an identification as a foundation for a fictive kinship. We cannot imagine Bełżec and thus we are forced to continually attempt to imagine Bełżec.
But who is this we?
Similarly: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisiton. Who is this no one? (And why are they such idiots?)
The joke in the sketch has a certain resonance—it attempts to tame the outburst of violence and State/Church repression by displacing it into a “truly” unexpected context: a British milltown shortly before the First World War, which in its anachronistic accoutrément—the modern dishrack—is visibly neither 15th/16th century Spain nor even “itself.”
As if to say: the terror of the Inquisition was indeed the terror of the outburst, the violence of the unexpected, of that which cannot be expected.
This accords with a certain register of Jewish cultural memory regarding the Inquisition—that it was the lachrymose tragedy of the end of the Golden Age of the Convivencia—a view that conforms not only to a 19th century German-Jewish interest in medieval Spain as a model of inter-religious communal life as Ismar Schorsch detailed in his 1989 article “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” but also one that reflects a historiography via the nostalgia of exile. Expulsion from the garden, from the place of relative comfort, from the dreamed home-in-the-world, an imaginary space within diaspora constructed as an image of wealth and abundance, rather than marginalization, exclusion, humiliation, and violence.
The included audience, the we/nobody of the joke cannot be either the perpetrator, who well knows what punitive discipline he plans, nor any subject for whom such violence would not come as a surprise, or who does not imagine themselves as existing in comfort.
Or so it seems at first glance.
Yet, recall that the slogan is spoken and repeated in sketch after sketch by the buffoonish perpetrators. Their bumbling evinces an assertion that this no one includes the Inquisitors, who are stunningly unprepared at every encounter to take on the role of imposing the fear of God and Church and State.
And of course, by the last iteration, the joke smugly inverts itself—now we are neither imagined victims, nor deluded perpetrators, but the audience—and we’ve all heard this one before, the number of times the sketch is repeated during the episode ensures that. We all expect the Inquisition, just as soon as anyone utters the magic words that summon them: the declaration that they are unexpected.
So the joke pulls you into this conspiracy: we cannot psychologically allow ourselves to expect this violence and repression, it is indeed an irruption, and we can’t even expect it if we are supposed to be the ones inflicting it—it’s obvious that we’d be really bad at that sort of thing anyway—and then, from afar, we smugly and voyeuristically come to know how to expect it all along.
So the joke relies on activating, in shifting perspective, the three parts of a sadomasochistic scenario: the victim, the perpetrator, and the voyeur.
But the joke has some further levels of displacement, beyond Spain/England, victim/perpetrator/audience. The Spanish Inquisition of cultural infamy is often remembered as a key anti-Semitic event. Torquemada is a byword. But the written script for this bit identifies Michael Palin’s character as Ximénez—infamous for his actions against the Muslims of Granada, including forced conversions and the burning of Arabic texts. Too often Jews forget to mention that crypto-Muslims were amongst the persecuted conversos. (That the Inquisition was founded to stamp out Christian heresy is well-known but worth repeating here.) The historical we of the victims of the Inquistion ought always be understood to include Jews, Muslims, conversos, Christian heretics, and anyone (potentially) subversive or radical. Do we enact and recall this event as happening to this all of us?
The other major displacement of the clip above affects not the perception of Jewish history, Islamic history, or Christian history, but labor history.
In this scene, the Spanish Inquisition is displaced to Jarrow, 1912. Jarrow, that in 1939 was called The Town that Was Murdered due to the extreme unemployment there during the Great Depression. And Jarrow in 1912: this was presumably during the “boom” years there. New Year’s Eve 1911/New Year’s 1912 is now almost one hundred years removed from where we stand. It was the time of the Suffragettes, the Sidney Street Gang, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Pancho Villa, Sun Yat-Sen, the founding of the ANC, and the wobbly-led Bread and Roses Strike.
It is difficult to imagine this world, Jarrow 1911/12, without a lot of work, especially doubly-removed from it: in time and from across an ocean. And what right would I have to claim this history as my own, if I could begin to imagine it? The question reveals the problematic: the clip enacts not only identifications—the we/no-one of the Spanish Inquisition, but also represses an identification with the location that the irruption of violence is displaced into. This displacement based on dis-identification, as I indicated above, is what makes the joke funny. Those who might identify with the history of the Spanish Inquisition are not supposed to find any connection to Jarrow. And most of the discussions I’ve read about the sketch make no mention of this place and its history at all. Jarrow, which launched a “Crusade” march against mass unemployment in 1936.
I very much wish that they had not used that word, as there is a world of difference between a march of the unemployed for decent jobs at decent pay and the attempts by the medieval Church to direct religious discontent into violent conquest of territory. On a related note: every time I encounter Michelle Malkin’s nomination of the immigrant rights’ movement as an attempt at reconquista, I get incensed. Her usage of this term would seem to draw on a fearful Anglo guilt about the Mexican-American War, but mostly shows little sense of historical understanding and amounts to anti-Hispanic Catholic-baiting. (As if any more evidence were needed of the lasting chilling effect of the actual reconquista: the conversos of Northern New Mexico seem apt.) Any reasonable understanding of the powers at work, their imbalances, their structures, their ability to call upon force, would see that the immigrant rights movement of 2010 has much more in common with the Jarrow marchers of 1936 than it has with Torquemada, Ximénez, Ferdinand y Isabella, or even Cortés and the rest of the conquistadores.
These terms of history and cultural memory—Inquisition, reconquista, crusade, Jarrow, Ximénez—these semantic, linguistic, historical objects invoke and evoke shared practices and imagined communities; they set up fields of allegiance and exclusion, based on accumulated patterns of polity and audience that they draw on.
[I use the term object here in the sense elaborated by Levi Bryant here and here, though I feel compelled to point out that in the first of these links his comments on hermeneutic disciplines betray a seeming ignorance of the historiography of the book, the history of philology, the practices of paleography, diplomatics, etc.]
The problem with the gap between the cultural memory and the history of events or processes of repressive violence like the Spanish Inquisition is not only that the historical memory of survivors and exiles would tend to overvalue the evidence of those who were able to flee and tend to struggle to imagine those who could not, it’s also that the assumptions built into the perspectives that establish the narratives of cultural subjects tend to be blind to how they exclude or marginalize other perspectives of the same events. The moment of identification can be a moment of erasure. A history of remembering can be simultaneously a history of not-remembering—of not being a remembering subject, of not only repressing what can be recalled again, but of not forming a subject that could recall. Historiography and cultural memory are processes that continually shape, refine, and adjust the forms of subjects. We know who we are in part in reference to rituals of shared memory, contention with shared texts, knowledge of history that binds us together. Our understanding of ourselves is constantly shifting as we acquire new information or find reasons to repeat and affirm long-standing patterns.
Historiography and cultural memory are also processes by which subjects new and old encounter objects and events and attempt to account for these. To take an object of history seriously is to try to project oneself into an immersive imaginary state wherein all facets of the object reveal evidence of thought and action. Furthermore, to look for how these evidences are traces of complex networks of other more distant objects and forces. (The object at the top of this post shows no direct evidence of Pancho Villa, for example, and yet by bringing the questions I had to this object, I found myself led to him and to many other things.)
I tend to think that letting an object “speak for itself” means being open to being changed by the encounter. To come to an object not only with existing fictional selves and their narrative frames but also with the intention to keep pushing at the failings of these perspectives, to try to imagine what the same object might mean to someone else. But here the identifications of polity assert themselves again with force—what right have I to speak of some histories and not others? Can I claim this object for my study? Is my position within the memorial systems of my culture established in such a way as to generally permit me access rights to the telling and interpretation of these narratives?
So: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition in Jarrow in 1912.
But what would it mean if they could have? Perhaps they did expect something similar enough. Did anyone in 1970, when this sketch first aired? Do they still?
Do we?
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