“Bear me up on angels’ wings, and other transcendental things. Where the golden walls still glow, let my people go to Jerusalem”.
Jerusalem is all about faith and passion, and there is no city on Earth that people get more passionate about. The light is luminous. In high summer it almost shimmers. The very air is full of prayer and politics, passion and pain, and the rocks and stones virtually sing a hallelujah chorus of history. I am not a religious person, but I cannot help getting excited by the place – although I do not transcend to transports of delight and delirium. Some folk love Jerusalem so much, they go mad.
‘Twas was in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair, ’til Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her, her, her…yeah! Led Zepellin, Ramble On
And the embers of Eden burn. You can even see it from space. Bruce Cockburn
In September last year, as the Tarkeeth drama unfolded, I published Tolkien”s Tarkeeth – Images of Isengard. The aggressive forestry harvesting practices employed by Forestry Corporation New South Wales conjured up images of the sorcerer Saruman’s devastation of the forests of Isengard.
On Tuesday 11th April, Forestry Corporation set ablaze the debris left over from its clear-felling. That evening, Gwaihir, the Lord of the Eagles, flew over the burning hills of Bellingen Shire. This is what he saw:
JRR had never heard of the Tarkeeth Forest, but if he had, I am certain he would have had some harsh words for the clear-felling and burning big that is razing our forest even as I write.
In 1962, he wrote:
“Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies”.
In 1972, just over a year before his death, he wrote:
“Dear Sir,
With reference to the Daily Telegraph of June 29th, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’, especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.
It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.”
JRR Tolkien Letters 241 and 339
Yes, he really did say “Forestry Commission” – an old British statutory authority that bears no relation to our own government-owned Forestry Corporation, but keep Sauron and also Saruman in mind as you read the following.
As I survey the desolation of the Tarkeeth, I remember the words of poets long-departed.
Thomas Hardy, in his poignantly uplifting ‘The Darkling Thrush’:
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
And TS Elliot, in ‘The Wasteland’, a title so prophetically apt when I view the impact of clear-felling on what was until barely a week ago was a diverse ecosystem that had prospered in a failed monoculture plantation (See: my post ‘If You Go Down To the Woods Today‘):
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
“Byzantium, Byzantium, Constantinople, Kostaniniyye, Istanbul – The City has tangled with or represented an “idea” for so many, its influence has spun so far that her story, whether imperial, spiritual, cultural or political, frequently ends up being played out anywhere and everywhere other than in the city itself”. Bethany Hughes , Istanbul – A Tale of Three Cities
As we observe Turkish president Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s apparent drive to reestablish Ottoman autocracy, those who take a longer view of history will assert that there is nothing new under the sun. There is nothing unprecedented about Erdogan’s apparent urge to don the imperial purple, and join the long cavalcade of colourful emperors and sultans that ruled the land that now constitute modern Turkey.
Richard Fidler reminds of this as he literally walks us through the streets of Istanbul.
Part father-son quest, part travel story, ‘Ghost Empire’ is at once a history, and a treasury of tales both true and far-fetched. The Australian author and broadcaster, and onetime member of the comedy trio, the Doug Anthony Allstars, has written a blend of popular history and meditation on the significance of history.
Although ‘Ghost Empire’ might in seem in parts overly breezy and lightweight, as an introduction to the ancient and wondrous city of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul, it is an highly informative portal to weightier albeit less entertaining books. This is not to say it is without its more harrowing moments. Fidler dwells as much on the gory as on the glory. And indeed, for many, particularly the sons of emperors and sultans, confidants and conspirators, life could indeed be nasty, brutish and short.
Whilst Fidler’s primary focus is the story of the Byzantines, concluding with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he travels back and forth in Istanbul’s long and storied history, between the violent past and the tumultuous present, from Julius Caesar and Constantine the Great, and the power couple Justinian and Theodosia, through Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent, to Ataturk and Erdogan, and captures the magic and at times, mayhem of the fabled metropolis that inspired WB Yeats to write:
“Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come”
If Ghost Empire has whetted you appetite, i would recommend Bethany Hughes’ more substantial – “encyclopedic ” would a better description – Istanbul – A Tale of Three Cities (Orion 2017). It is a lengthy, comprehensive and fascinating journey from the prehistoric past to the polarizing present.
There is also Simon Sebag Montefiore’s documentary, which personally, I found disappointing after his Jerusalem – The Biography.
Istanbul, from Galata Tower Cruising the Golden Horn The Sulaymaniya Mosque Aya Sofya The Hippodrome and the Blue Mosque The Fortress of Europe Valen’s Aqueduct Galata Tower Aya Sofya Aya Sofya Aya Sofya Aya Sofya Halfden the Viking’s Grafitti in Aya Sofya Aya Sofya Aya Sofya Sulaymaniya Justinian’s Cistern
As I contemplate my annual review of In That Howling Infinite, I am reminded, with clichéd predictability, of that well-worn Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times”.
A torturous and seemingly endless US election campaign defied all the pundits by producing an colourful and unpredictable POTUS. In the UK, the unthinkable Brexit came to pass, dividing the polity and discombobulating the establishment. Next year is certainly going to be worth watching.
The slow and tragic death of Syria continued unabated with Russian and Turkey wading into the quagmire alongside Americans, British, French, Australians, Iran, Lebanon, Gulf tyrants, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Da’esh might be on the the ropes in Iraq, but the long term survival of the unitary state is doubtful. And the proxy wars of the Ottoman Succession have spread to Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle Eas as Gulf tyrants face off against Shia Iran’s alleged puppets, and, armed and abetted by British and American weaponry, South American mercenaries, and Australian officers, bomb the shit out of the place.
Whilst the grim reaper scythed through the world from Baghdad to Berlin, from Aleppo to Ankara, the Year saw the passing of a record number of icons of the seventies and eighties, two of whom who have provided a continuing soundtrack for my life, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. We shall not see the like of them again.
In our little corner of the cosmos, we endured the longest and most boring election campaign in living memory, resulting in an outcome that only accentuates Australians’ disenchantment with a lacklustre Tory government, a depressingly dysfunctional political system, and politicians of all stripes who, blinkered by short-termism, and devoid of vision, insist on fiddling whilst the antipodean Roman burns.
Meanwhile, in our own rustic backyard, we find that we too are “going up against chaos”, to quote that wonderful Canadian songster Bruce Cockburn. For much of the year, we have been engaged in combat with the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales as it proceeds to lay waste to the state forest that surrounds us. As the year draws to a close, our adversary has withdrawn with only half of its proposed harvest completed. But it will return in 2017, and the struggle will continue – as it will throughout the state and indeed the nation as timber, coal and gas corporations, empowered by legislation, trash the common treasury with the assent of our many governments.
And yet, life on the farm remains pleasant and delightful, though dams are low and rain would be most welcome. The bird and reptilian life continues to amaze us, and an ironic corollary to the clear felling of the Tarkeeth Forest is that “refugees” are seeking shelter here. Wallabies rarely seen on our land are now quite common, whilst echidnas, and, we suspect, endangered spotted quolls have been sighted hereabouts
We took time out mid-year to revisit Israel and Palestine, and road-trip through the two countries was much an education as a holiday. We certainly got our history and archeology fix, and in travelling through the Golan and the Negev, we found respite in a stunning natural environment. But the answers to our many political questions merely threw up more questions. We have unfinished business in this divine but divided land, and will return.
In That Howling Infinite addressed all these concerns during 2016, and matters more eclectic and exotic.
And so, to the year in review:
The new year commenced with a reprise of our memorable journey to Hadrians Wall, and of the Victorian lawyer who helped preserve it for posterity, the saga of the viking Harald Hardraga and also, my subjective overview of world history. In a more lighthearted vein, I indulged in an unscholarly discussion of how film and fiction have portrayed or distorted history, and in a review of Mary Beard’s superlative history of Rome, I asked the immortal question “what have the Romans done for us?”
In April, in response to a discussion with a Facebook friend in Oklahoma, I wrote a trilogy of exotically-titled posts examining the nature of rebellion, revolution, and repression: Thermidorian Thinking, Solitudinem Faciunt Pacem Appellant, andSic Semper Tyrannis. The origin of these Latin aphorisms is explained, by the way, in the aforementioned Roman review.
Our travels through Israel and Palestine inspired numerous real-time posts, and a several retrospectives as we contemplated what we had experienced during what was as much an educational tour as a holiday. Historical vignettes included a tribute to bad-boy and builder King Herod the Great, a brief history of the famous Damascus Gate, and its place in Palestinian national consciousness, and a contemplation on the story of King David’s Citadel which overlooked our home-away-from home, the New Imperial Hotel. Thorny contemporary issues were covered with an optimistic piece on theJerusalem Light Rail, a brief if controversial post about Jewish settlers in the Old City, the story of Israel’s ‘Eastern’ Jews, the Mizrahim, and what appears to be a potentially problematic Palestinian property boom. Th e-magazine Muftah published an article I wroteabout the conflicting claims to the city of Hebron. And finally, there is a poem recalling our visit to the Shrine of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and honouring the Righteous Gentiles who saved thousand of Jewish lives during the Shoah.
Wintertime passed with our minds on the Tarkeeth Forest. I had the pleasure discovering the history of our locality, and connecting via Facebook with the relatives of the Fells family of Twin Pines. But the latter half of the year was very much taken up with enduring and bearing witness to the clear- felling of the forest to our east. “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, you’ll never believe your eyes”. And you’d ask “what would JRR Tolkien have thought?”
The UK And US paroxysms fascinated and exasperated the mainstream and social media in equal measure, whilst the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the presidential election has initiated an a veritable orgy of punditry. Never have so many column inches and kilobytes been spent on loud sounding nothings as the sifting through the entrails of such events as Brexit, the US election, and the Australian senate! With half a dozen elections coming up in Europe, Trump’s inauguration and the triggering of Article 50 to take Britain out the European Union, we’re gonna have to endure a lot more. I confined my posts to two insightful pieces by respected right-wing Australian commentators, Paul Kelly’s Living in Interesting Times, and Greg Sheridan’s The Loss of American Virtue, and my own reflection on the right-wing media’s strange fascination with “insiders” and “outsiders”.
Finally, in comparison to last year, this year was very light on music and poetry. But American satirist Tom Lehrer got a retrospective, and murdered Pakistani qawwali singer Madhaf Sabri, an obituary, whilst an abridged and vernacular version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost told the tale of Lilith, the first and greatest femme fatale. In the words of the gloriously-named jockey Rueben Bedford Walker III says in EC Morgan’s magnificent The Sport of Kings, the subject of my first post for 2017, “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man”.
On that wise note, I wish the world a Happy New Year – and may it be less interesting than this one.
In That Howling Infinite is now on FaceBook. Check it out. And just for the fun of it, here’s my review of 2015.
The great political lesson of the “black swan” 2016 year of disruption is the tearing apart of the political centre and the rise of radicals, populists and frauds from opposing ends of the political spectrum defying conventional wisdoms and up-ending weary orthodoxies. Continue reading →
When I first visited Israel in the early ‘seventies, it was a white man’s land with the look and feel of a European colony transplanted in Levantine soil.
The European Ashkenazim (literally, “German” Jews), the returnees of the diaspora, were in the majority. They had dominated politics and culture from the days of the first Zionist immigration, and through the mandate years of the Yishuv when Eastern Europeans predominated in the movement and in the fledgling military. The republic that the Ashkenazim prepared for during the Mandate and then built after 1948 was, in intent and in actuality, a white, secular, socialist outpost of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Sephardim, Jews who had lived in Palestine for centuries, and up to a million Jews expelled from Arab countries after 1948, were, for some forty years of Israel’s existence, a disadvantaged minority. The name itself was misleading. ‘Sephardi’ originally described Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. But it came to be applied to anyone who was not Ashkenazi. They were discriminated against in many spheres of Israeli life, regarded as primitive, backward, ill-educated, and poor – and more like Arabs than Jews.
And this was indeed the case in many respects. Jewish communities had been an integral part of Arab society for centuries. From Morocco to Iran, they had lived, thrived, and prospered among the their Muslim neigbours. The Jewish communities in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran were old and populous, and indeed often predated Christianity. From high to low, they were entwined in their local politics and economics.The lower classes were as poor and as downtrodden as their Arab neighbours. The professional and mercantile middle class lived very comfortable lives, and under late Ottoman rule, and British and French suzerainty, enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Embedded in the heart and soul of their Arab homelands, they shared the same history, suffered the same depredations, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, made and listened to the same music. Many of their values and cultural norms had more in common with the east than the west.
Oriental Jewish culture was based on three pillars: the community, the synagogue and the father. Faith was the cornerstone and family paramount, and with these, the authority of the rabbi and the head of the household. Piety was respected, chastity honoured, modesty and decorum observed, and marriages arranged. Religion, tradition and patriarchy preserved the community for a millennium. It did not experience European-style secularization, western enlightenment, or a revolt against religion. Even when modernization came, the father and the rabbi remained dominant.
There was harmony between Arab and Jew. Life had order, meaning, and a timeless rhythm. No one imagined that one day, they would have to abandon their lives, their homes and possessions and the graves of their ancestors. Never did they contemplate having to flee, in fear of their lives from the people among whom they had lived for generations, and seek refuge in a fledgling European, secular, modern state on the edge of the Mediterranean.
After 1948, the relatively charmed existence of oriental Jews in North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia ended, and thousand year old communities disintegrated. A million Jewish Arabs were uprooted, their world destroyed, their culture ruined, their homes lost.
In an ironic twist, their Aliyah (literally “ascent” to Eretz Israel) confounded the Zionist model. Israel was created to be the home of European Jewry – until the Shoah brought those Jews to the brink of extinction. Young Israel had to populate or perish, and whilst designed for a European population and culture, it had no choice but to accommodate an oriental one. .
In yet another ironic twist, the creation of the State of Israel doomed the Jews of the Middle East by making mortal enemies of its Arab neighbours. But by giving these exiles refuge, Israel saved them from a life of repression, misery and backwardness in an unstable and violent Middle East. And yet, even as their numbers rose from under ten percent of the population to over fifty today, they were looked down upon, humiliated, discriminated against, neglected, and indeed, ignored by the secular Ashkenazi establishment. They were the Israeli “other”.
Destitute and grieving for their lost world and their old identities, and for the manner in which their longtime Arab compatriots turned on them, they were like flotsam on the shore of a new land. But it was an unfamiliar world, a world made for and ruled by European Zionists with an ethos alien to their own. This was a pioneer society, spartan yet permissive, that valued the individual and his or her contribution to the new state’s collective enterprises above the ties of family, custom and congregation. And for sound if not satisfactory reasons: the ties that bound European Jews to their centuries-old communities had been severed in the killing fields of Mitteleuropa – so many had few or no surviving relatives and friends from the prewar days – and new loyalties forged in the displaced persons camps of Europe, the mass Aliyah into disputed Palestine, and the cauldron on the Independence War.
The immigrant nation of Israel was conceived as a melting pot. The goal of the education system, the exclusive use of a reinvented and modernized Hebrew, and mandatory national service in the IDF, was to assimilate all who made Aliyah as Israelis. To make them Ashkenazis, in fact. The Ashkenazi social engineers encouraged European Jews to get over the Diaspora and the Shoah, and the struggle for independence and national survival, and to get on with the challenges of nation building. These orphans of Europe neither appreciated nor accommodated the eastern Jews’ attachment to their Arab identity, tradition, and culture. And indeed, may have resented, both consciously and subliminally, the fact that these Arab Jews had not come through the Holocaust or fought in the War of Independence
In the national project, the easterners were banished to existential shadow lands. Isolated, marginalized, dispersed, and cut off from their roots and heritage, their rabbis and synagogues, they were consigned to arid development towns in the Negev, to remote villages, and to the impoverished suburbs of the major cities. The state provided refuge, housing, schooling, and jobs. But it took away community, honour and tradition, the social and normative structures that kept Jews together in the eastern diaspora. They were given few tools to deal with the new world of physical and economic hardship, no authority, no bearings, no compass, no meaning. They took low paid, menial jobs, and a lost generation of youngsters drifted into crime and gang culture, drugs and prostitution.
Decades later, these “forgotten people” rose up against the (self)chosen race in a political and cultural revolution that saw “downstairs” gate crash the “upstairs” party. In the political turmoil that followed the Yom Kippur war, they found a political voice and demanded a seat at the top table. They backed Likud against “born to rule”, secular, Ashkenazi Labour, and precipitated a new political dispensation based on faith and values-based political parties and shifting and opportunistic coalitions. They were the working class, the factory hands, the tradies, and the small business owners. They were the parvenus, the usurpers, the nouveau riche, rising about their station, and as such, were scorned and maligned by many Ashkenazim. But they were now the majority. Through immigration and natural increase, their numbers grew, and with it, their political clout. One no longer heard the term ‘Sephardi’ – but rather, ‘Mizrahim’, literally ‘easterners’ – the descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern countries. Their values, interests and expectations were different to those held by the secular, liberal-minded Ashkenazim.
The Garibaldi of this Mizrahim Risorgimento was the charismatic Moroccan Jew Ariyeh Deri who formed the ultra-Orthodox Shas party – Shomrei Sfarad, literally, “(Religious) Guardians of the Sephardim”. Through the late nineties and into the twenty first century, Shas has become a pivotal political player. In the hurly-burly of Israeli coalition politics, its Mizrahi constituency has delivered parliamentary numbers that can make or break governments, and through the torturous wheeling and dealing, it influences policies as diverse and as critical as education and defense.
One of Binyamin Netanyahu’s key people in the current right-wing government is his Minister of Culture Miri Regev, whose family came from Morocco, a former brigadier general in the IDF, where she served as chief spokesperson during the Gaza pullout. She is a member of Likud, not Shas, and Netanyahu needs her backing in order to maintain his support among the Mizrahim. Regev likes to rail against what she calls “the haughty left-wing Ashkenazi elite” and once proudly told an interviewer that she’d never read Chekhov and didn’t like classical music. She has sought to give greater prominence to Mizrahi culture and to deprive “less than patriotic” artists of government subsidies. Many of the government’s recent actions appear designed to address the traditional disenfranchisement of the Mizrahim and of citizens living in the country’s “periphery” (that is, far from the central Tel Aviv–Jerusalem corridor), whilst other measures are aimed at promoting social mobility amongst these “outsiders”.
A changing world
Which brings me back the present and to my return to Israel after an absence of thirty years.
The dazzling sunlight reflected off the limestone brickage was the same. The history literally oozing from the stones was still exhilarating and addictive. The dry heat of summer in Jerusalem was as ever cleansing and enervating. The sociability, conviviality, argumentativeness, and at times obstreperousness of Israelis was the same. But Israel, as a society, had changed – and not just the cosmopolitan cafe and restaurant strips, the vibrant arts scene, the high-tech, wired-to-the-world communication systems, and the ever-present security presence.
Israel’s complexion has changed. Over half of the Israeli population are now Mizrahim (and some twenty percent are Arabs), and Russians and Ethiopians have come in by tens of thousands. There is intermarriage between Jews of all colours and cultures, and the place has taken on a coffee-coloured hue. Israel became the multicultural country it is now.
And it is changing still. As more and more foreign workers come in to work here – one of the consequences of the lock-down and separation that followed the 2002 Intifada, as Chinese and Southeast Asians replaced Palestinian Arabs in many sectors of the booming economy, there will be an increasing number of Israelis taking Filipina, Thai and Indonesian brides..
On our recent visits, we noted the high proportion of Mizrahim, and also, to a lesser degree, Ethiopians – most particularly, among young people. In the street, in the cafes, on the light rail, and especially with respect to the conscript army in which all young Israelis, boys and girls, must serve when they turn eighteen (with the exception of the ultra-orthodox Haredim and Israeli Arabs).
We had been contemplating why in recent years, and particularly, during the last Israeli election, right wing politicians were able to capitalize on an anti-Arab sentiment so incongruent (to liberal-minded outsiders, at any rate) among a people that proclaims itself to be conscious of its history of victimization and oppression. Why Israeli street protests and social media feature virulent tirades and slogans against the country’s Arab citizens and Palestinian neigbours (such inflammatory sentiment is returned with equal if not more vigour on the Arab street, on tabloid television, and from the mana-bir of mosques during Friday sermons). And why, therefore, Bibi Netanyahu’s election dog-whistle was so effective, resulting in a coalition government that is probably the most nationalistic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian in memory.
Commentators have suggested that the political shift to the right and to an increasingly authoritarian character has been due in part to the influx during the nineties of tens of thousands of Russian Jews who have no experience, appreciation and empathy for the occidental democratic model established by Israel’s founding fathers. It has also been said that the shift has been propelled by the exigencies of the security state that has perpetuated a pattern of fear and retaliation with respect to internal and external threats, be these Palestinian resistance to the occupation, as in the violent street protests and and bombings the first and second intifadas, and the lone-wolf vehicle attacks and stabbings of recent times, the ongoing rocket attacks and tunnel construction of Gaza, or the calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity by the Iran and its Hizbollah proxy, and by the televangelists and shock-jocks of the Muslim media.
It may well be “all of the above”, but there is also possibly the Mizrahi factor.
Now the majority of voters – this is where I am going out on a polemical limb with an argument that runs counter to what I have written above about the Mizrahim and their oriental legacy – Mizrahim don’t want Arabs – as friends, as neighbours, as fellow-citizens. Although Arabs and eastern Jews are literally ‘brothers under the skin’, although they shared the same lands, cultures and lifestyles for centuries, have they grown so far apart that the chasm has bred contempt?
They have grown up with the stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ own Nakba, the Arabic word for “the Catastrophe” of the 1948 war, when their families were cast out of their oriental Eden, expelled from Arab countries amidst threats and pogroms, murder and plunder. They spend their military service as conscripts and as reservists either serving in the occupied territories, or subject to deployment there or in Gaza when tensions flare, as they do frequently. They are aware of Arab mainstream and social media denigrating Jews and Israelis and calling for the destruction of their country. They know that any time, they and their loved ones, including particularly their soldier children, could be attacked by car, knife or bomb, or worse still, killed or kidnapped. Young – and not so young – Mizrahim have been hearing all their lives from their families and from the Arabs themselves that “they want to kill us”.
Nowadays, in many quarters, the Arab pogroms of the twenties and thirties appear to feature more prominently in Israel’s creation story than they did in earlier decades, providing an historical leitmotif to contemporary acts of violence. Times past, it was always the about the Zionist pioneers and, inevitably and unavoidably, the Shoah (and left-wing, peacenik Jews are predominately Ashkenazi of pioneer or Shoah heritage). Back then, there was also the image of triumphant David fending off five Arab armies and killing and expelling Arab Palestinians to create a contiguous national territory. Over half of Israel’s Jewish population has no connection to the Shoah, and to the secular and socialist Zionist ethos and once-powerful foundation institutions like the Kibbutz and Histradrut. The Israel of today, and the average Israeli, indeed, are very different to those of forty, fifty, sixty years ago, as are their perceptions and prejudices.
Perhaps the “victim” narrative appeals to and exploits atavistic fears of Arab hordes threatening to push the Jews into the sea. Maybe, too, it is a function of Israel’s dysfunctional place in the turbulent and bloody Arab world: a garrison state of citizen soldiers on a permanent, war-footing, the only democratic nation in these parts that nevertheless, paradoxically and immorally, maintains a military occupation of a conquered people, and sustains politically, financially, and among many Israelis, ideologically and spiritually, a neocolonial settler society. But in a sinister twist of fate, it is a narrative that would have been music to the ears of those long-gone Revisionist Zionists who harkened to the call of Zeev Jabotinsky and his Eastern European Ashkenazi crew who had resolved during the Mandate years that there could only be one people in Ha’Aretz, and that The Land would range from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Zeev’s vision inspired the vicious Irgun and Stern Gang, and these morphed in time into Likud, which is now effectively the ‘party of government, and the driver of all things intransigent.
One thing’s for sure: the Mizrahi factor adds to the many complications that hinder a just and permanent solution to the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
In writing this piece, I am indebted to Israeli journalist and author Avi Shavit and his controversial and enlightening “My Promised Land – The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” (Scribe 2014). Shavit wrote a brief, sad sequel in March 2015:
Veteran Zionist, humanist, journalist, and fighter for justice Uri Avnery wrote the following in February 2017: “When and how the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Rift was born”. It is well worth reading:
http://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156
hthttp://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
In the statistics cited herein, there was no distinction made between Sephardim and Mizrachim. (If the Sephardim, Mountain Jews and other non-European groups are included in the Middle East and Asian group, then Middle Eastern and Asian Jews outnumber European and American Jews by a margin of 52 to 48
On a musical note:
From way back, I was particularly familiar with world-famous Israeli singers of eastern origin – Esther Ofarim, of dubious ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’ fame, (with her then-husband Abi, who was, incidentally, of Russian heritage), the late, sublime Ofra Haza, Noa, and latterly, Ladino diva Yasmin Levy].
As far as we know, Meniscus Diabetes was born in Rome in 25 CE, and acquired his poetic licence during the reign of Emperor Claudius. He had an abiding interest in Rome’s eastern provinces, and one of his surviving manuscripts is this epic ballad. See Roman Holiday – The Perils of a Poet in Nero’s Rome.
Lilith is a retelling of the “Legend of the Fall”. The style of Lilith differs markedly from that of other poems attributed to Meniscus – most notably the Hebrew Heroes cycle (again, refer to Roman Holiday), and was evidently written for a different manner of presentation. It was most likely written to be recited rather than sang (as were his other “story songs”). Recitations were a common form of entertainment in the middle Roman period, owing their popularity to the enduring reputations of the “classical” writers of the time, Ovid, Horace and the like. It was not uncommon for such recitations to last several hours. But Meniscus, mindful of the fast moving times, and also of the attention span of his audiences, appears to have honed his pieces down to between ten or fifteen minutes.
If Meniscus’ tale of Adam, Eve, Lilith and Lucifer has not been lost to literature until its very recent discovery, one wonders whether John Milton would have bothered to retell it in such lengthy and verbose detail.
Lilith, however, has been around for thousands of years. In the Talmud, she is described as a winged demoness with a human appearance. She appears in the bible, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in Hebrew folklore, and has been mentioned in black magic treatises. The apocryphal story is that Lilith was Adam’s first wife. God made Adam from dirt and clay. Adam bored, requested a companion, and God obliged with Lilith. Legend has it that her dirt was dirtier than Adam’s, but put that down to patriarchal prejudice and propaganda. More likely, she had the dirt on him! But I digress. Apparently, Lilith was not as inferior to Adam as he wanted. She wanted to be her own person, not Adam’s wife-slave. The story is that when Adam insisted on the missionary position, Lilith refused, saying “Why must I lie beneath you? We are both equal. We come from the same earth”. Adam got mad, and Lilith took off.
Because of this, she was banished from Eden and became a spirit associated with the seductive side of a woman. Eve came in her place to stand behind Adam, not beside him. Lilith became the timeless femme fatale, preying on the easily tempted weaker sex, the fabled incubus who comes at night upon men as they sleep. It is not for nothing that she has been hailed the (informal) goddess of wet dreams.
The legends are many and various. If you buy into the Lilith theory, you will see her cropping up throughout history in a variety of guises. In biblical times: Delilah, Salome, and Potophar’s wife. In fact and fable: Sheherazade, Lucrezia Borgia, Mata Hari, Evita Peron. Hollywood’s screen ‘sirens’ like Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. All of them antitheses to secular saints like Eve, Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Jackie Onassis, Mother Theresa, and Princess Diana.
Long time ago In a time before time,
When man was an atom in primeval slime,
When darkness lay hard on the face of the deep,
God called for his angels to sing him to sleep.
God made these angels from the fire ‘neath his throne,
Gave them existence and thought them his own.
‘Til one fiery angel professed discontent
At the whole pointless purpose to which he’d been sent.
He expressed his dissent towards God’s Constitution,
Fomented unrest and unleashed revolution.
The shackles of God he now deigned to throw off
With his old black beret and his Kalashnikov.
So Lucifer made for celestial hills,
Preaching an end to society’s ills;
Whilst God, declaration of martial law made,
And dispatched forthwith Michael’s Archangel brigade.
They tracked down the rebels to their mountain lair,
And challenged them forth for to give battle there.
Brave Lucifer fought and at terrible cost.
God, Paradise saved; he, Paradise lost!
From fire he came and to fire he descended,
And thus the battle for Paradise ended.
And bold Lucifer from sight of God, now rejected,
Reduced down to basics a mate he selected.
Having fought hard and failed, life just wasn’t the same,
So he sought to continue the family name.
He gathered the girls of his wandering band,
To choose the best and the brightest in his new found land.
He chose Lilith the Fair, he chose Lilith the wild,
Lilith the wonderful archangel child.
The grace and the charm of this heavenly belle
Did brighten the darkness of exile in Hell.
Her beauty brought visions of Heaven so bright;
Her songs fired the furnace of Hell’s fiery night;
Her dancing filled all of the exiles’ desire,
And upstaged the flames of the infernal fire.
But Lilith, a gypsy, quite soon got the shits
With the workaday life of her husband’s hot pits.
She yearned for adventure, she longed for to run
Naked and nimble, ‘neath God’s newborn Sun.
So she ventured to Earth and quite soon did perceive
That a fellow called Adam was fed up with Eve.
He’d never forgiven, he’d let his heart harden
Since she’d let him down badly that day in the Garden.
And Lilith knew well in her womanly way
That Adam was close to going astray.
She took off her wings and right at him, she hurled,
As if he was the only man left in the world.
(Which he was, in a way, in a manner of talking –
His sons, Cain and Abel, had not started walking.
And the Daughters of Eve, were infants at best –
And none had discovered the art of incest).
So Lilith moved in with her serpentine charm.
Poor Eve was pushed out in a state of alarm.
But you don’t press the point, you don’t try to shrug off
The aim of old Lucifer’s Kalashnikov!
She bunked up with Adam for seven score years
and pandered to all of his passions and fears.
But just like a man, he took her for granted
‘Til she said, “No more”! And her cloven feet, planted.
She made his life hell, (well, she knew all about it).
Poor Adam was grieved and rushed outdoors to shout it:
“Oh God, must you let me go through this alone?”
A voice said: “This party is not on the ‘phone!”
Then one day she took off , went to live with her sister
And true to his kind, our pal, Adam, he missed her.
He prayed to the Lord for to fetch his girl back
So the Lord sent three angels to pick up her track.
Now, Lilith went wild, when she found she was followed;
Fled into the night, and in shadows was swallowed.
And from that day to this she has been on the run,
Ne’er more to gaze on the face of the Sun.
Banished forever from Lucifer’s bed,
She wanders the world seeking mortals instead.
And in darkness of night when tired mankind is sleeping,
Out of the shadows, fell Lilith comes creeping.
Taking revenge for old Adam’s conceit,
She searches the land town by town, street by street.
House by House, ’til alone in your bed, you’re discovered;
In the wink of an eyelid, by Lilith you’re covered.
You’re caressed with the touch of a cold, seizing hand;
You’re rocked by a tremor you don’t understand;
You’re fastened upon with a grip of a vice;
And her lips are like coals and her body’s like ice;
And you’re trapped in your bed with no strength to resist,
Yet you feel that this moment’s too good to be missed.
And you wake in the morning, a terrible mess,
And you know then that Lilith has found your address!
JRR had never heard of the Tarkeeth Forest, but if he had, I am certain he would have had some harsh words for the clear-felling that is razing our forest even as I write.
In 1962, he wrote:
“Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies”.
In 1972, just over a year before his death, he wrote:
“Dear Sir,
With reference to the Daily Telegraph of June 29th, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’, especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.
It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.”
( JRR Tolkien Letters 241 and 339)
Yes, he really did say “Forestry Commission” – an old British statutory authority that bears no relation to our own government-owned Forestry Corporation, but keep Sauron and also Saruman in mind as you read the following.
Images of Isengard
As I survey the desolation of the Tarkeeth, I remember the words of poets long-departed.
Thomas Hardy, in his poignantly uplifting ‘The Darkling Thrush’:
The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.
And TS Elliot, in ‘The Wasteland’, a title so prophetically apt when I view the impact of clear-felling on what was until barely a week ago was a diverse ecosystem that had prospered in a failed monoculture plantation (See: my post ‘If You Go Down To the Woods Today‘):
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.
Tarkeeth Burning
In posts to this blog, I endeavour as much as I can to maintain balance, and to avoid overly partisan positions. Today, please forgive me as I break my rule, and reproduce an open letter to the people of Bellingen Shire, the place I call my home, by local farmer, counsellor, forest protector, and mother, Susan Weil. It is a detailed but succinct explanation of what is happening right now in the Tarkeeth Forest.
Read on…
Tarkeeth morning, Tarkeeth evening What a difference a day makes
The Birds are screaming! Listen!
Tarkeeth Forest – Wrong Method, Wrong Place
There are consistent misconceptions in our community about the Tarkeeth State Forest. One of them is that we (forest community & concerned peoples) don’t want a single tree cut down (a bit silly for anyone to claim this given our appetite for timber products) and that we are making a big fuss about a plantation whose sole purpose for being there is to provide a consistent supply of quality hardwood products for our community, generating jobs and boosting our local economy.
Some facts: There are between two to three harvesting machines on site ( that translates to three employees) the rest of the jobs are for the haulage truck drivers and a few onsite operation managers. If we are talking about jobs perhaps we should be asking many of the out of work loggers that have been here for generations, many of whom would consider themselves conservationists. Perhaps if we have a conversation with any of these men they would take pride in telling you how well they managed our forests for many years prior to mechanisation and without the environmental fallout associated with clear felling.
They logged selectively and if they did their job properly their methodology would actually help stimulate forest re growth, preserve habitat and support forest diversity. None of these men are being employed by forestry, in fact many of them have been replaced by mechanised corporations like forestry and their livelihoods have been made redundant. So if you’re jumping up and down about job security perhaps you’re just talking about haulage drivers and a small handful of operators not the actual loggers themselves, because I can assure you their not benefitting from clear felling. In fact if we stop clear felling and work with best practise which is selective logging and revert back to more traditional methods then our haulage contractors would be employed far more regularly and consistently then they are currently.
If you’re talking about good quality timber, again you’re mistaken, the majority of all of these forests are flooded gum and as such there will be no profits made from this project. Forestry corporation have admitted that our “Jewel in the crown” as they keep referring to our valley is going to be an assett to them in 40 years time, thats an asset for them not us.
Forestry is currently clear felling the Tarkeeth, Kallang, Tuckers Nob, Newry and Pine creek. That’s a massive cumulative effect of aggressive clear felling in a small valley that sits between the Bellingen river, the Kalang and the Never Never Rivers. You don’t need a science degree to understand the effect that cumulative clear felling will have on our waterways and environment long term as the near extinction of our river turtles showed last year.
I’m hard pressed to find a boost to our local economy (Bellingen itself) bar a few employees for a limited period of time. This operation will end in a few years and provide minimal employment for another 40-50 years. Responsibly managed, selective logging would provide far more jobs far more consistently for this community.
In theory, plantations are an excellent idea in helping to preserve our native forests, but like all good theories in the wrong hands and with poor foundations it doesn’t always translate that well into reality. For instance, the current Plantations and Reafforestation Act 1999 was created by the very same governmnet that currently owns Forestry Corporation. The current Act allows Forestry Corporation to conduct their business with minimal community opposition and one has to wonder about the integrity of any business that can operate in whatever manner they choose without any accountability.
Forestry Corporation claims they have consulted closely with local residents to balance the needs of all stakeholders. The true translation of this means they sat down with the community and told them what they were going to do and ignored and rejected all of the residents requests that would impede their project. Thus grossly betraying the community consultation process. But it’s true they did consult with the community.
They told us they worked closely with the local indigenous community to balance their needs. Whilst I can’t and won’t speak for our indigenous community, suffice to say I think this has been grossly miscommunicated and very poorly managed on all fronts.
The Plantation and Reafforestation Act hasn’t been amended since 1999 (other then to change the name to a Corporation in 2012) and as such lacks current environmental and social standards that are being upheld in the private plantation act and native forest act, both of which are far more stringent in their assessment processes. Why hasn’t the Act been updated in 17 years to reflect current world views and environmental standards?
Forestry Corporations Plantation and Reafforestation Act works on a state wide minimum standard, which means that if there is a plantation in an area of high risk such as all of those found in Bellingen ( steep slopes and high rainfall) they do not have to make any special provisions for these deviations to the standard. They can continue to operate under the same standards regardless of the location. How can this be considered best practise?
One of these standard states a 20m buffer zone for riparian zones. This is hardly ample given the amount of chemicals they plan to use and our high rainfall and steep slopes. You don’t need to be a genius to do the math to see the shortfall and the consequences of that insufficient standard.
The harvest and haulage plan stipulates that Forestry Corporation will commence replanting their new seedlings between 12-18 mths after harvesting, now I’m a farmer, and no decent farmer would ever leave 128 hectares fallow with our heavy rainfall, it would be over run by a myriad of fast growing weeds hence their need to use a chemical cocktail of thousands of litres of glyphosate,metsulfurin, liase and pulse penetrant to manage the weed problem. If a methodology adopted creates another environmental problem such as this how can we accept this as best practise when clearly it is in breach of this? This happened in Gladstone State forest two years ago when as a result of the leaving the forest fallow in excess of 18 months they wanted to deal with the weed infestation (they created ) by aerial spraying. Have Forestry Corporation learned nothing from their previous mistakes? Yet the Tarkeeth harvest plans show no amendment to previous errors, which is obviously very concerning for us. Best practise would demand they replant immediately after harvesting thus mitigating the need for the use of any chemicals in the first place.
Forestry Corporation continues to talk about sustainability when it comes to their forest management plan, but in actual fact, they are only referring to the fact that they will be replacing the existing crop with another. That’s not sustainability that’s just called succession cropping. Sustainability should infer methodology.
One of the definitions of sustainability is “The endurance of systems and processes which includes the four interconnected domains: ecology, economics, politics and culture.”
Sustainability should relate to Forestry Corporations capacity to preserve and look after the environment (soils, habitat, wildlife, waterways and communities) to engage in meaningful dialogues with local community members and adopt their ideas and concerns into their plans, to provide long lasting and consistent employment for local community members and to show respect and care for indigenous sacred sites and artefacts.
Forestry Corporation should be using “best sustainable ” practises such as selective logging to minimise soil disturbance and erosion, to promote biodiversity within the forest and to do away with the need to manage weeds via chemical applications which would not be a problem if the earth were not disturbed in the first place.
Sustainability should include ongoing jobs for ethical logging practises and should include a meaningful dialogue with residents that provides outcomes for everyone’s interests not just the agenda of the corporation itself. We call that best practise.
According to the Forestry haulage and harvest plan they are replanting a chemical dependent monoculture plantation of Blackbutt (90%) and tallowood (10%). This is an interesting point. Forestry has claimed there were no koalas residing in this forest despite statutory declarations provided by residents sighting them and including an independent field study conducted by an ecologist for a Tarkeeth resident. Yet forestry plan to plant tallowood for the same koalas they believe aren’t there and then they plan to destroy the habitat and food source in 40 years.
A research study conducted by forestry commission stated that Tallowwood was slow growing and failed to thrive in this region that white mahogany and Black Butt were the preferred species. Given that, why would Forestry choose to plant this species given its poor performance and in doing so attract a threatened species only to have its habitat and food source removed? It doesn’t seem to add up, whichever way you look at it.
Under the inadequate Plantaction and Reafforestation Act Forestry Corporation can legally behave as corporate vandals, their not breaking any laws because they created a document to protect themselves from any community backlash. Why?
Well we now know the answer to all of our concerns. In 1999 when the Act was created on the back of an environmental push from activists to protect native forests and move towards plantations (a move we support) the government did not want to allow any room for communities and environmentalists to challenge or impede their business. They knew that a plantation if left for 40-50 years to mature would build its own ecosystem, that the native forest would compete and a native understory would develop attracting native wildlife making it hard to tell if indeed it was just a plantation or a diverse forest.
So, to ensure there was no opposition they created a guaranteed harvest plan, to ensure that nothing and no one could impede or prevent a harvest from being carried out. Hence the current Plantation and Reafforestation Act 1999. They created an Act that makes it impossible for anyone to legally challenge their methodologies or practises and it prevents them from being sued as the Act is so lax that it’s impossible to hold them accountable as their not breaking any laws. They wrote their own law.
As a community we have the right to say NO this is not okay, this is not best practise and this is not good for our town long term. We understand their running a business but we want them run it better. Is that unreasonable of us to ask for that?
As a community we have a right to protect our “Jewel in the Crown,” we are in fact protecting Gumbaynggirr land, always was always will be. I believe we can do so for the benefit of all the stakeholders involved. I don’t believe that we need to compromise for the sake of a Corporation that legally manages this land on OUR behalf and is not following best practise and is simply serving their own agenda.
This community would support a well run, responsibly managed selective logging business that balances the needs of all. Why would we not demand that they manage OUR land better? Why is this community squabbling over a plantation when what we are really talking about is ending clear felling and adopting better methodologies and best practise that allows us to have our cake and eat it too. What’s not to support here? Am I missing something ?
To remedy this situation we need accountability and responsible governance – but therein lies the root of this problem. To do that we need to change the laws and amend the Act. That is not an easy process in itself and to do that we need community support.
It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and commentate on this issue, it’s clearly divided opinions in our community and that’s always challenging to deal with. But for those whose lives are being directly impacted by this it’s hard to really understand the anxiety, sadness and fear they face on a daily basis. We rarely act on something unless it affects us directly, I guess that’s human nature but please try and have some compassion for the people who are dealing with this day in and day out as they watch a place they love and cherish being torn apart by a corporation that really doesn’t give a damn.
To feel powerless to affect change is a horrible place to live and whilst it’s easy to get caught up in the semantics of this campaign try and remember that people we care about are hurting over this. I don’t know if the community will ever see eye to eye on this for a myriad of reasons but I hope that within this process we can still hang on to our humanity and see beyond the story.
Susan Weil, Bellingen, 17th August 2016.
Nothing quite prepares you for the devastation of clear felling. Joby, a Gumbaynggirr elder, surveys the Tarkeeth
When we were in Istanbul in 2014, we were particular keen to see the famous Viking graffiti on a rail of the gallery of the beautiful Aya Sofya basilica. And there indeed it was, carved by Halvden, a 9th Century soldier of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, an elite force of Viking mercenaries. The name Varangian derives from the Greek via Old Norse væringi or ‘pledge’.
This year, we visited York, successively a Roman, Saxon, and Viking city.
I have an intense interest in connections, in the valences that link people, times, and places. And in York, there were many. Constantine, the creator of the Byzantine Empire, and founder of Constantinople, was declared emperor here on the death in York of his father. His statue sits (literally) outside York Minster. The Roman brickage we saw in Ephesus, Palmyra, and Jerusalem was replicated here in York, and in the forts of Hadrian’s Wall. And it was exciting to discover another connection to Istanbul, and that long-departed Viking warrior.
Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
My story recalls one the most famous dates in English history, the the Battle of Hastings. But I shall not retell the story of that battle, nor of the battle at Stamford Bridge which preceded it. Rather, I will describe one particular Viking’s adventurous journeying before he met his doom near York in September 1066.
Harald Sigurdsson, named Hardrada (“Stern Counsel” or “Hard Ruler”), was born about 1015, and he was the first King to perish in 1066. King of Norway, his appetite grew with the eating, and he made unsuccessful plays for the thrones of Denmark and England. Failing the first, he invaded and raided east of what was then Eoforic (formerly Roman Eboracum, Viking Jorvik, and today, York – and there is an isolated hamlet on the plateau to our west in northern New South Wales called Ebor). His protagonist that day was one Harold Godwinson of Wessex, otherwise known as Harold II, King of England. Harold marched his army all the way up to Eoforic to confront his almost-namesake and Harald’s ally, one Tostig Goodwinson, Saxon turncoat and also, Harold’s embittered brother. In four days, Harold marched his army 180 miles from London, meeting and defeating Harald and Tostig at Stamford Bridge, just east of York. Hearing that William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy had landed near Hastings to challenge his claim to the English throne, King Harold then marched his army south again. 241 miles this time. The rest, as they say, is history.
King Harald is not hard to find on the Internet. There are websites, histories, and even novels that tell his story in lesser and greater detail – I republish a review of Don Hollway’s imaginative The Last Viking below. And, rumour has it, Leonardo DiCaprio is pondering the prospect of making a movie about him, and possibly starring in it. There are also many resources dealing with the Varangian Guard. I recommend Frank Westenfelder’s succinct blog history of mercenaries, Soldiers of Misfortune. So what follows is my own sensationalist synopsis, written as much for entertainment as for education.
As a teen Harald was caught up in internecine warfare between battling Viking eorls. Brothers and half-brothers, rebels and pretenders fought for lands and crowns in the realms that now constitute Scandinavia. Young Harald often fought and failed, and on failing, he fled. He washed up in Kyivan Rus on Lake Ladoga, east of present day Petersburg, and then entered the service of Grand Prince Jaroslav or (Yaroslavl) the Wise in Novgorod. The principality of Kyivan Rus, by the by, was the predecessor of today’s Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia, and was established and ruled for over a century by Viking warriors. Harald captained the Grand Prince’s soldiery and, so the sagas sing, paid court to Jaroslav’s beautiful daughter Elesiv (Elisabeth). Ukrainian historians maintain that Yaroslavl actually ruled in raked in Kyiv and that his daughter was called Yelizaveta; but they tell the same story.
In Jaroslav’s service, Harold fought Poles, Estonians, Turkic nomads, and Byzantines. He eventually took five hundred Viking warriors to Constantinople – the Norsemen called it Mickelgard, or Great City – where his martial reputation saw him rise to head the Varangian Guard, that same mob that our Istanbul graffitist served in. Whilst this was specifically the emperors’s bodyguard, as an elite force, it fought on the empire’s frontiers against Arab pirates and raiders, marauding nomads from the steppes, Saracens, Normans and Bulgarians. The sagas say that Harald even traveled to Jerusalem – the Vikings called it Jorsalberg – protecting caravans of Christian pilgrims. Just picture it. A brigade of Norseman slashing and bashing their way through the wadis and wastelands of Syria, fifty years before the first crusaders put Jerusalem to the sword.
Harald passed twelve years in Byzantium departing a wealthy warrior. Not that his leaving was without complications. Implicated in murky financial dealings (including a fair amount of looting and blackmail), Byzantine power struggles, and, possibly, an illicit love affair with the Empress Zoe, he fled with his men in two ships. One was trapped by the famous chain that was strung across the Bosporus (see below for more details). but his boat reached the Black Sea and sailed thence to Rus’ once more, and the lovely Princess.
Elisef’s father, the renowned Jaroslav ‘the law giver’, was in fact the son of a Viking Varangian, and this may have been a reason he gave Harald sanctuary and employment in the first place, and encouraged him to seek service in Constantinople. Whilst there, Harald had secured sufficient funds to finance a bid for the Norwegian throne. After much battling and bargaining, he succeeded, and indeed, ruled Norway for twenty years until he made the fateful decision to try his hand in England.
Tostig was angry that Harold has taken the earldom of Northumbria away from him, and so encouraged Harald to challenge his brother’s disputed claim to the English throne. It is mooted that Viking Harald and French William each believed that he had been promised said crown by the dying English king, Edward the Confessor. Both therefore came ashore with their forces to claim what they reckoned was their inheritance. Which was why the unfortunate Harold did his exhausting round-trip in September and October of 1066.
At Stamford Bridge, Harald’s long run of good fortune ran out. the Norns, having long ignored him, decided to cut his thread. The Viking army was heavily beaten, and Harald himself was struck in the throat by an arrow and killed early on in the battle in a state of “berserkergang” or “battle rage”. He wore no body armour nor carried a shield, fighting fiercely with both hands clutching his heavy sword. Dying thus, sword in his hand, he was assured entry into Valhalla.
And so our story ends. Scholars have considered Harald’s death in battle as the end of The Viking Age. He is also reckoned to have been the last great Viking king, indeed, the last great Viking.
There is a song for every occasion, and with our our sojourn in York, and Viking fact and fiction echoing along its ersatz City Walls, I would like to share my very own Viking saga:
Further Reading
The Saga of Harald Hardrada
The original source for much of what we know of Harald is The Heimskringia Saga. therein is much more fascinating detail of his adventures, including the full story of his escape from Constantinople. All of Harald’s Varangians piled onto two ships and rowed like crazy for the chain. As they approached, he had every man who wasn’t rowing pick up any baggage he had and run to the back of the boat, so that the prow of was raised and the stern lay low in the water. Thus, the ships managed to run themselves halfway up onto the chain, whereupon all the vikings at the stern ran to the front with their gear, so that the ships tilted forward and came down on the other side. At least, that was the plan. Harald’s ship made it but the other broke its keel and sank, along with half of his men. The Saga is available in the online Gutenberg Library. Go to Saga 8, The Saga of Harald Hardrade.
Anglo Saxon Varangians
An exciting addition to the saga of the Varangian Guard is recent evidence that in the wake of they Norman Conquest, Saxon exiles emigrated from conquered England and joined the Emperor’s bodyguard. They acquired quite a reputation for martial prowess, and were believed to have established a city in what is today the Crimean Peninsula. Read Caitlin Green’s well-written post:New England on the Black Sea
The Vikings of Rus
The principality of Kyivan Rus, with its capital at Kyiv, was established and ruled for over a century by Viking warriors who ventured south down the great rivers of today’s Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia. The Viking age lasted from the end of the eighth century to the latter half of the eleventh.
The vikings raided and traded, subjugated and ruled whole countries or parts thereof, transforming existing politics and creating new ones. In so doing, they butted up against the Byzantine Empire, even reaching the gates of Constantinople itself. Envoys of the king of Rus first came to the city in 838, offering peace, friendship and trade. But there was also conflict. In 860, Vikings besieged the city and passing through the Bosporus into the Mediterranean, plundered Byzantine-controlled islands. This was repeated in 959.
Over time, relations became much more cordial. Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kyiv converted to Christianity in 988, a purely political move to secure the goodwill of the Byzantine empire, his most powerful and dangerous neighbour. He adopted the Byzantine orthodoxy, thus drawing him closer to the empire, and proceeded to convert his subjects. Alliances of mutual benefit were formed, with Vikings fighting Byzantium’s border wars, and were often sealed with marriages between Viking lords and Byzantine princesses.
Constantinople was like a lode star to the Vikings. The princes of Kyivan Rus were attracted to its wealth and commerce, and also to the power, prestige and high culture. Indeed, they endeavoured to replicate it on the Dnieper. Voldymyr’s grandson Yaroslav/Jaroslav (he’s acclaimed by both Ukraine and Russia) rebuilt Kyiv in Byzantium’s image, in brick and stone, built a magnificent cathedral modeled on Theodosius’ Aya Sofia, naming it Saint Sofia, and a raised a Golden Gate like that in the Great City. Princes in other cities followed Kyiv’s example.
Everything was violently undone in 1238 when the Mongols invaded Kyivan Rus, and Kyiv itself was devastated in 1240, and did not recover its former importance and prosperity for centuries. Yet, the cathedral of St Sophia still stands in the heart of Kiev, as it has done for almost a millennium, its golden domes a symbol of the advent of Christianity in eastern Europe.
There’s a fascinating account of Kyivan Rus See Serhii Plokhy’s history of Ukraine,The Gates of Europe.
If you love heroic fantasy a la George R.R. Martin, you’ll love ‘The Last Viking’
Michael Dirda, Washington Post September 22, 2021
Harald Hardrada, the 11th-century Norse adventurer of Don Hollway’s “The Last Viking,” led an iron-hammered life of struggle, travel, scheming and violence. Especially that last. As Tom Shippey observed in his history of Viking culture, “Laughing Shall I Die,” everything the ax-wielding warriors of the North did “was based on violence. That is what Vikings were good at, especially good at, spectacularly good at.”
And none more so than Harald Hardrada, Harald the Hard-Ruler or Tyrant, whose marauding ways came to an end in England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, near York, in the pivotal year of 1066. In effect, the 51-year-old invader, by then the king of Norway, was caught by surprise. The Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson unexpectedly quick-marched his army north, covering 200 miles in four or five days instead of the usual two weeks. Hollway calls this “one of the greatest feats of military tactics in medieval history.” Yet even though Harald, the “thunderbolt of the North,” was defeated and killed, he unknowingly exacted a cold revenge. Immediately after this costly, hard-fought victory, the Anglo-Saxon king and his remaining, exhausted troops were compelled to hurry back south to face William of Normandy — soon to be William the Conqueror — at the Battle of Hastings. A fresher, bigger army might have changed English history. As it was, in just three weeks both the age of the Vikings and the reign of the Anglo-Saxons reached a blood-drenched close.
When we think of Vikings, we generally picture dragon ships raiding the coasts of England and Scotland or intrepidly sailing westward across the Atlantic to Iceland and, quite probably, North America. Yet Harald passed much of his young manhood in the wild, wild East, where this “almost legendary Norse hero”— as John Julius Norwich calls him in “Byzantium: The Apogee”— served as a mercenary in the Byzantine Empire’s elite Varangian Guard, eventually becoming its de facto commander. He also participated in diplomatic missions and military actions in the Holy Land, Sicily and Constantinople itself. Beyond that, matters grow somewhat hazy.
Much of what we know about Harald derives from Icelandic sagas, poems and histories, supplemented by Byzantine sources, such as Michael Psellus’s “Chronographia.” In “The Last Viking,” Hollway, a journalist specializing in military history, dramatically weaves together all the facts and most of what is conjectured about the Viking, the result being at once a biography and “a melding, comparison and recounting of the old tales.” Was the handsome blond warrior a favorite of the aging, lustful Empress Zoe? Did he gouge out the eyes of the pusillanimous Emperor Michael V? Was he the secret lover of the Emperor Constantine IX’s mistress? Might the imperial throne have actually been within reach of his sword-arm? Though it’s impossible to be sure, all of these questions could plausibly be answered “yes.” That’s what the skalds and chroniclers believed and that’s the riveting story Hollway tells.
In the year 1030 Harald was 15 years old when he joined his much older half brother Olaf, the deposed king of Norway, in the latter’s attempt to regain his throne. Just before the climactic battle of Stiklestad, Olaf told Harald he was too young for the upcoming clash of arms, to which the teenager reportedly countered, “I will certainly be in this battle. I’m not too weak to handle a sword. If necessary my hand can be strapped to the hilt.” During the fighting, Olaf was killed and Harald left for dead. But the boy survived, recovered from his wounds, and with a small company headed for Russia, traveled up the Neva River to Lake Ladoga and then on to Kiev, where his kinsman Prince Yaroslav ruled. Three years later, only 18, Harald captained that prince’s household guard. Recognizing that he could rise no higher in Kiev, this ambitious, natural-born commander sailed and portaged down the river Dnieper, then crossed the Black Sea to Miklagard, the Big City, as the Scandinavians called Constantinople.
“The Last Viking” author Don Hollway
Hollway devotes half his book to Harald’s adventures and machinations during the decade he spent with the Varangian Guard. Toward the end of those years, the Viking and his closest lieutenants were cast into a lightless dungeon, yet nonetheless managed to break out, kidnap the emperor’s mistress and commandeer two galleys. But so what? Escape by sea was blocked by a heavy barrier chain stretched across the estuary known as the Golden Horn. Ever resourceful, Harald ordered his men to row toward it with all their might just as he and the others on board all rushed to the ship’s stern. This raised its bow high enough so that the vessel rode halfway over the chain, at which point everyone immediately raced forward to elevate the galley’s back half, allowing the ship to slide down into open water.
Once back in Kiev, Harald married Yaroslav’s pretty daughter Elisaveta, then journeyed homeward to seize power in Norway and attempt to subjugate Sweden and Denmark. Up to this point, the Viking could be construed a hero or at least a brilliantly audacious and quick-witted soldier of fortune, but in his unrelenting drive to be ruler of all Scandinavia he soon grew treacherous and cruel, looting and burning Danish cities, murdering any nobles who stood against him. His battle standard, white silk bearing the image of a black raven, became known as Land-Waster. The chance to bring England under its sway ultimately led to Harald’s last stand at Stamford Bridge.
A fencer and historical reenactor, Don Hollway excels at describing medieval weaponry, shield walls and battle tactics. Yet this isn’t just a book for military history buffs. If you love Frans Bengtsson’s picaresque masterpiece, “The Long Ships,” Robert Graves’s intrigue-suffused “I, Claudius,” or heroic fantasy in the mold of Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin and Howard Andrew Jones, you owe it to yourself to pick up “The Last Viking.” It’s that exciting, that good.
Michael Dirda reviews books for Style every Thursday.
The Last Viking – the True Story of King Harald Hardrada, Don Hollway, Osprey.
What? Caligula didn’t really put his horse Incitatus into the Senate, order his legionaires to gather seashells for his combat with Neptune, God of the Sea, or sleep with his sister and later kill her? Nero didn’t fiddle whilst Rome burned, or attempt to drown his mother in a collapsible boat? And kicking his pregnant wife to death may have been domestic violence carried too far.
What? Julius Caesar didn’t cry “Et tu Brute?” to the leader of his assassins? Augustus’ second wife Livia was not the arch-poisoner portrayed by Robert Graves in “I Claudius”?. Tiberius wasn’t won’t to swim with naked little boys nibbling at his naughty bits? Claudius wasn’t a gentle old duffer who wouldn’t hurt a fly?
In her highly readable, popular history of Royal, Republican and Imperial Rome, acclaimed British historian Mary Beard consigns these and other popular Roman apocrypha to the Urban Legend file. Which may cause a certain degree of distress for those of who like their history garnished with a few saucy anecdotes (click on Roman Holidayin the menu above this post).
She attributes these highly entertaining stories to prurient scandal-mongering, sensationalism, and the vicarious pleasure of folks with dirty minds, and, significantly, to political spin and perception-management on the part of the kings, tyrants and emperors, and of heirs and successors responsible for creating, embellishing, and sustaining the public record. At one point, she states matter-of-factly that those who were assassinated were portrayed post-mortem as tyrants, sadists or perverts – or in a case of “the worse the better” “all of the above”! No wonder Roman emperors portrayed in “sword and sandal” movies from ‘The Robe’ and ‘Barrabas’ to ‘Gladiator’, are, like Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.
Caligula may or may not have been the bad lad we know so well, via Bob Guccione and John Hurt. Beard insists on calling him by his proper name, Gaius, rather than his childhood nickname, the horrorshow-sounding Caligula. The amiable, bookish Claudius was as ruthless and as brutal an autocrat as any of his predecessors and successors, dispatching scores of recalcitrant or lecherous senators to Hades (incidentally, it was Domitian who liked hurting flies). So too was Marcus Aurelius, the “philosopher king”, author of wise sayings and aphorisms, and beloved of adolescent philosophers.
Nero might not have been any worse or better than the others. Indeed, Beard argues, the fact that several Nero pretenders popped up, lyre and all, in various places after his death, demonstrates that he mightn’t have been all that unpopular, particularly in the provinces. Indeed, Beard suggests, Rome’s subjects in far-flung provinces would have had very little knowledge of or interest in the political shenanigans and sexual peccadillos of their rulers. Their only acquaintance with their emperor would have been with statues and the royal visage on the change in their pockets.
With Rome’s tabloid icons falling like flies (Domitian liked to torture them, by the way), thank Zeus Mary kept her revisionist hands of my all-time favourite classical baddie, King Herod the Great.
SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome – challenges assumptions and preconceptions about the history of Rome, about the expansion of its empire, and about its citizens. For example, the accepted belief that the Romans were more rapacious and war-like, and much better organized than their neighbours – in early days, those who lived near the city state, neighbouring lands in Italy, and after a very short time, kingdoms, states, and chiefdoms as far apart as Caledonia in the west and Armenia in the east.
Rome’s neighbours and rivals were indeed just as aggressive, territorial, and acquisitive as the early kings who expanded their territories throughout Italy, the republican consuls and imperial generals who pushed the frontiers into Western Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Middle East. Rome’s rivals, peers and enemies included formidable leaders and war lords with names like early contemporaries like Alexander and Artaxerxes. Enemies like Hannibal Barca, Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Armenius, and Boudica.
But SPQR isn’t all just about personalities and geopolitics. Beard delves into the dynamics of power in the state itself. How Rome, the city state and later, the empire were actually run. How powerful and influential individuals collaborated and collided in their quest for wealth and influence. And how rewarding and also how tenuous and dangerous life at the top could be. Whilst Beard would question Robert Graves’ portrayal of the Augustine emperors, she would not quibble with his take on the tension, uncertainty and risk endured by ambitious Romans who gambled for high stakes rather than going with the flow and keeping their heads down.
Most, indeed, did choose to keep their heads down, and endeavour to live a quite normal life. A life which, for those at the top of the social and economic ladder, could be very comfortable indeed. For those further down the socio-economic staircase, all was not so pleasant and delightful. Rather, for both free man and slave it was a life of toil and hardship literally from the cradle to the grave. Child Labour, long hours, unsafe working conditions, seven days a week. No weekend rest, no retirement benefits, no insurance cover. Ordinary people worked as soon as they could hold a pick or shovel, until injury, age or infirmity rendered them unproductive and expendable. But there was time for leisure, and contrary to modern preconceptions, it was not always bread and circuses. As in our own day and age, folk were more likely to have sought solace in the bottle and good fortune in the dice.
Using the limited archeological sources available – whilst the lives of important Romans are well examined, those of ordinary people are rare indeed – Beard illuminates her narrative with snapshots of the everyday lives of regula Antonys and Antonias. Although bits and pieces have been unearthed in settlements from North Africa to the Balkans, Pompeii and Herculaneum are a particularly rich source, as are the forts along Hadrian’s Walls, on the northern edge of empire. The wonderful Vindolanda tablets have preserved a picture of the oh-so-normal lives of transplanted souls so far away from home. See my earlier post, Roman Wall Blues.
The vignettes of Pompeii and Vindolanda illustrate one of Beard’s leitmotifs – the fact that Rome and Romans were much, much more than the city founded by the wolf-raised twins Romulus and Remus. Roman-ness and Romanization were as much a state of mind as a temporal, political imperium. People of all races, tribes, nations, and faiths from Spain to Syria, from Caerleon to Carthage, adopted Roman ways, institutions, commodities, food and beverages, artifacts, and even Latin names, to a greater or lesser degree depending on their proximity to Roman camps and towns, to Roman trade routes, and ultimately, to Roman authority. And many acquired Roman citizenship. And they entered Rome’s service, as soldiers, scholars, public servants, and politicians. By the end of the second century, some fifty percent of the senators were provincials.
Other histories of Rome have ended with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 337 CE signaling the end of pagan antiquity, or with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths 410. Beard closes instead with the “culminating moment,” in 212 when the emperor Caracalla declared every free inhabitant of the empire a full Roman citizen – almost thirty million provincials became Roman overnight in one of the the biggest grants of citizenship in the history of the world. Beard comes to no definitive conclusion as to why the underwhelming Caracalla made this move, but it’s effect was momentous insofar as it eroded the distinction between the Romans and the people they had conquered, colonized, and ruled – the culmination of a process that had been going on for almost a millennium.
The final pages describe how in form, function, and faith, the Rome that departed the Third Century was not the one that Augustus built and Caracalla bequeathed to the many, short lived emperors who followed him in rapid succession during a time of political and social instability, rebellion and civil war, barbarian invasion and plague – until Constantine established his capital in the east and built the Roman world anew. And this new Rome, the Byzantine Empire, with its capital Constantinople, was to endure until it fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. The Holy Roman Empire, in Central Europe, was brought down by Napoleon in 1806, but as Voltaire observed, it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Take that!
Unexpectedly, Beard does not conclude her thought-provoking, and entertaining survey of Rome’s first millennium with a catalogue of the many ways we have benefitted or suffered from our Roman heritage. We do not have much to learn directly from the Romans, she writes, but we have much to learn about ourselves and the past by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments. “We do the Romans a disservice if heroize them, as much as we if we demonize them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously – and if we close our long conversation with them”.
On that note, concluding an invigorating walk down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, I will leave the last word to Monty Python.
Postscript
This post is my own take-out of an entertaining and educational ride through Roman history. Every published review approaches it from different angle according to the perspectives and passions of the writer. And I have done likewise.
In That Howling Infinite 