Some Doings at Other Blogs

• I've generally stayed away from the Mearsheimer and Walt controversies since they preceded the era of this blog, but Stephen M. Walt offers an "I Don't Mean I Told You So, But . . ." response to Tony Blair's testimony on the roots of the Iraq war. [UPDATE: See the comments for Martin Kramer's rebuttal link to the Walt post. Let's let both sides have at it.]
  

• The indispensable Qifa Nabki has a post he calls "Matters of the Heart." The basic story and his comments thereon:

  “A member from the Zoaiter family fired two RPGs in the air in Baalbek’s Sharawneh neighborhood after he failed to kidnap a girl.”

  I love these guys. Anybody else would just shrug his shoulders if he failed to kidnap a girl. But not the Zoaiter boys. They don’t repress their rage; they express it in a healthy cathartic exercise involving shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.

  And “kidnap”? Really? I think that’s a little bit much. What it sounds like to me is that this guy asked a girl out on a date, and she told him to get lost. So he put a bag over her head and tried to stuff her in the trunk of his car, but she kneed him in the groin and fled. I’d hardly call that attempted kidnapping. As a friend wrote to me this morning, “In my day, we called it ‘a-courting’…”

  I’m waiting for some enterprising graduate student to write a dissertation on the place of RPGs in the tribal customs of the Bekaa valley. Getting married? Graduating from high school? Celebrating a golden anniversary? An RPG makes everything just a little bit more meaningful.

• From a poster known as Alex at Syria Comment, a lengthy, closely argued post on "The Case or Syria." Is it pro-Syrian? Yes. Will everyone agree? Of course not. But it's detailed and worthy of your attention.
  

Cultural Stereotype Department: Camel Beauty Contest

Here's a BBC piece on a camel beauty contest (including video) in the "remote Western region" of the UAE.

Normally, there's nothing there but sand, but the al-Dhafra Festival filled the arid desert with breeders and their herds, some of which had been driven from as far as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Actually, camels are serious business in the UAE, though arguably falcons are even more so.

I do submit, however, for Arabic-readers, the home page of the Dhafra Festival, and for the English readers, this semi-official UAE report.

Now, Zayed City, where the festival is held, is on the road from the coast to the Liwa Oasis, but it's the capital of Abu Dhabi's Gharbiyya (Western) province, and I'll admit I've never been there, but I suspect the "Normally, there's nothing there but sand" remark would offend the Chamber of Commerce. (No web page of its own but phone and E-mail under the Abu Dhabi Chamber.)

And "some of which had been driven from as far as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain" gives the impression that these camel herds were driven across the desert. That may be so (though it must have caused traffic jams on the Bahrain causeway), but I wonder if some were "driven" in trucks with animal trailers. And Qatar and Saudi Arabia aren't that far, and the roads are good.

The Gulf is one of the most culturally conservative regions in the Arab world, and camels, like falcons, are taken very seriously, but the subtle differences between the BBC report and the UAE ones are worth noting.

Oh, and before someone screams hypocrisy, yes, I know the Middle East Journal cover currently shown at the upper right shows camels against a sunset (or perhaps sunrise). But it's illustrating an article on Syrian bedouin tribes, and it's a fine photo. There's nothing stereotypical about the article, by an Oxford anthropologist.

On the Eve of 22 Bahman

Added: Don't forget Twitter, the key Iranian communications medium last summer. #22 Bahman is probably the most important, but #bahman, #iran, #iranelection, .and others are worth following. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of Facebook traffic too.

We're still snowed in and the Federal Government is closed again tomorrow. I'll keep blogging, however.

Since tomorrow is the big celebration of the Revolution and the day of expected confrontations in Tehran, and since the government is threatening some very serious crackdowns, I thought I'd point you to some on-the-eve pieces at Tehran Bureau, at The Daily Beast, and at Enduring America. These are sites that, from varying perspectives, have followed the opposition movement closely. I'll be posting my own reactions tomorrow as well, but they will be devoting more time to it than most.

The New Samaritan High Priest; The "Cohen Gene"

Since I'm adrift on an Arctic ice floe again (or at least it feels like it), it seems like time for one of my extended posts on a really obscure subject. (Also, they say there'll be high winds today, which could increase power outages. So far the one thing I've been able to do is blog. That could change.)

I noted on Friday the death of the Samaritan High Priest, since I see the "Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context" subtitle up there as something of a mission statement, and also because I have a personal fascination with the smaller remnant historical communities that still dot the region.

You'll find more about the late High Priest and his successor here (the new High Priest is at left), in a Samaritan online English newsletter. (The biographies are readable enough, though one or two other stories in the newsletter seem to have been machine translated.)

The new High Priest is the same age as the one who died (both born 1927). The reason, explained in the link, is that until 1624 the Samaritan High Priesthood descended from father to son in the line of Aaron's son Pinchas (the line of High Priests in Orthodox Judaism as well, the kohanim), but with the shrinking of the Samaritan population, the last Pinchas descendant died out in 1624 and the line shifted to the descendants of Aaron's other son, Itamar (the Levites, in traditional Jewish terms, though the kohanim also originate from the Tribe of Levi). On the Levite line, unlike the earlier one, the oldest surviving member of the priestly class succeeds. Hence, he's the same age as his predecessor.

The Samaritans have always claimed that they preserve the genuine tradition of the Northern Kingdom of Israel; while mainstream Judaism claimed they represented a bastardized population planted in the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians and who gained in strength during the Babylonian exile of the Judaeans.

It is, of course, fairly natural to assume that a lot of this is legendary: Aaron was Moses' brother, after all. But lately some strange things have been happening in DNA studies.

Now, let me emphasize that I don't like discussions of race or even ethnicity: the 20th century was plagued by the "scientific racism" that classed people according to skull shape, skin tone, or imagined ancestry, and the horrible results were eugenics in the West and the Holocaust in Germany and its conquests. Race is a social construct. My daughter was born in Hunan, but the discussion I had with her last night on Alice in Wonderland was utterly free of any genetic predispositions. I don't believe in race.

But DNA can tell us something about historical traditions. I don't care if you're a Cohen or a Jones or Smith (my mother was a Jones), but the emerging genetic maps from the study of DNA are telling us some interesting things.

First, they're telling us we're all close kin. Old notions that the alleged "races" evolved separately have long since faded away. A few Western Europeans have some traces of native American DNA; go figure. DNA isn't race; race is a construct.

But DNA does have some curious tales to tell. Speaking of Samaritans and others tracing descent from Aaron, it gets really weird, at least for those of us who aren't fundamentalist/literalist in our approach to religion. There is a DNA haplogroup (a category of genetic descent widely shared) that has been dubbed popularly the "Cohen Gene" or more officially the "Cohen Modal Haplotype." The technical material is mostly dealt with at the Wikipedia entry "Y-Chromosome Aaron."

Now the so-called Cohen gene is not found exclusively among Jewish people named Cohen (or translated names like Kaplan, Kagan, etc.), but also among other Jewish and also broader Arab and other Middle Eastern populations, and even beyond. But it is highly intensively found among persons whose names are traditionally considered priestly in Jewish communities. And it is found in Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi communities in slightly differing proportions, but still heaviest among the Cohen families.

Now I'm no geneticist and no statistician, and I'd refer you to the link earlier for the statistical and scientific details, but clearly the Cohanim have higher correlations on many genetic points than do Jews generally (from the Wikipedia link above) (I hope this appears properly in all browsers as it does in mine):

	xDE[3]	xDE,PR[4]	Hg J[5]	CMH.1[4]	CMH[4]		CMH.1/HgJ	CMH/HgJ
Ashkenazi Cohanim (AC):	98.5%	96%	87%	69%	45%		79%	52%
Sephardi Cohanim (SC):	100%	88%	75%	61%	56%		81%	75%
Ashkenazi Jews (AI):	82%	62%	37%	15%	13%		40%	35%
Sephardi Jews (SI):	85%	63%	37%	14%	10%		38%	27%

Intriguingly, even a southern African tribe called the Lemba who have some vaguely Jewish traditions and claim to be of priestly descent, though as black as their neighbors and speaking the same languages,

The Wikipedia article on the Lemba contains this:

A recent genetic study in 1996 suggested that more than 50% of the Lemba Y chromosomes are Semitic in origin;^[10] a subsequent study in 2000 reported more specifically that a substantial number of Lemba men carry a particular polymorphism on the Y chromosome known as the Cohen modal haplotype (CMH), which is indicative of Y-DNA Haplogroup J found amongst some Jews, and in other populations across the Middle East.^[11]

One particular sub-clan within the Lemba, the Buba clan, is considered by the Lemba to be their priestly clan, while among Jews, the Kohanim are the priestly clan. The Buba clan carried most of the CMH found in the Lemba. Among Jews the marker is also most prevalent among Jewish Kohanim, or priests. As recounted in Lemba oral tradition, the Buba clan "had a leadership role in bringing the Lemba out of Israel" and into Southern Africa.^[12]

Weird, huh?

Now, as for the Samaritans, which is how I got dragged down this back alley in the first place, they seem to have elements of the Cohen gene but not the same y chromosome descent as the mainline of Cohens. But note, above, that their High Priesthood shifted from the Pinchas line to the Itamar line in the 1620s, according to their own acknowledgment.

And of course the punchline: they say the "Cohen Modal Haplogroup" suggests a common male ancestor in the Y-chromosome line about 3000 years before the present. That's several hundred years after most Biblical historians would date Aaron, but it's still pretty impressive. Kohanim from all known Jewish populations do have a common male ancestor, and he may not be all that later than Aaron. Hence the geneticists' coinage of "Y-chromosome Aaron" for the unknown male ancestor.

Keeping Up With Technology

Saudi Arabia's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (AKA the religious police) are on to the emerging moral dangers posed by the Blackberry.

I will leave you to provide your own comments.

Wait till they figure out IPhone apps.

MB Deputy ‘Ezzat a Takfiri? An Emerging Theme?

Okay. I'm not expert on the Muslim Brotherhood. But this story in Al-Masry al-Youm (Arabic) herec claims that the arrest of MB Deputy Supreme Guide Mahmud ‘Ezzat was because he heads a Takfiri wing in the Brotherhood. And the recent Al-Ahram Weekly (English) summary of the new leadership emphasized ‘Ezzat's support of the late Sayyid Qutb. Qutb is generally credited with the basic takfiri idea that Muslims who don't live up to Islamist standards should be treated as unbelievers (kuffar) and thus they are enemies of Islam.

I'm unaware of any current MB leaders who practice or preach takfiri doctrine. Perhaps ‘Ezzat was indeed a follower of Qutb: that was a long time ago (he was executed in 1966) in an Egypt far, far away (Nasser pre-1967 war).

But this seems to be an emerging rationale for rounding ‘Ezzat up now.



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Vancouver Has a Snow Shortage; Take Mine, Please

Off the topic of the Middle East for a moment (except to reiterate why one should go into Middle East studies): it seems the Winter Olympics has a shortage of snow.

And I can't get out of my driveway for the past three days in Virginia, heart of the Old South, with more snow falling now. Over 30 inches in many places last weekend; talk of 10 to 15 more on top of the (still unplowed in my subdivision) existing piles. I cleared my driveway of course and can now drive as far as the end of my driveway, and the buses aren't running.

Vancouver is welcome to clear my street and keep all the snow.

Symbolism Alert: Burj Khalifa Closed

This is the sort of story journalists can't resist because it is so easy to work heavy symbolism into it: the Burj Khalifa (ex-Burj Dubai) has been closed to the public only a month after opening. Something about unexpectedly high traffic (though I believe only the observation level was open so far, since no tenants have moved in). And electrical problems.

As a symbol of Dubai's troubles, the story writes itself. Let's count how many times "Tower of Babel" gets mentioned in editorials.

Is the Latest Nuclear Rhetoric about February 11?

Iranian President Ahmadinejad's recent announcement that Iran will begin enriching uranium to 20% has gotten a lot of attention, but is it really aimed at domestic consumption on the eve of the big February 11 Victory Day celebrations/confrontations? The Green opposition forces are ramping up for another round of demonstrations and the Guards Corps and Basij are bracing for a crackdown. Reza Aslan says it's for domestic consumption and calls Iran's announcements "a joke" given its problems enriching to five percent. And Juan Cole has a quote from ‘Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, that suggests this is a negotiating position to persuade the West to accept Iran's terms, rather than a new level of confrontation.

This is a tense week in Iran due to the internal pressures as the holiday approaches; certainly I'd rather they didn't mix in nuclear brinksmanship, but I thought it worth calling these alternative interpretations to your attention.

Remembering the Lost Nubia

As part of the 50th Anniversary of the Aswan High Dam the Egyptian media has been writing a lot about the period. Here's an interesting interview in Al-Masry Al-Youm's English pages with a Nubian displaced by the High Dam, remembering the lost villages of Nubia and showing distinctly mixed views of Nasser.

The Kalashnikov Index is Bullish

This is a few days old, but The National reports that the price of AK-47s in Beirut is reaching new highs. If true, that probably isn't a good sign.

The Real Reason to Go Into Middle East Studies

So far this winter, DC, which sometimes gets through a winter with only four or five inches of snowfall, has had well over four feet. And now they're forecasting another ten inches or more Tuesday into Wednesday.

The Federal Government, which shut down early Friday and was closed today, has just announced that it will be closed tomorrow, too. I assume MEI will follow suit as they generally follow the Feds, but the point is that the buses aren't running, at least in Virginia, and Metrorail is only running to the below-ground stations, which are far from me. My neighborhood hasn't been plowed, and cars keep getting stuck on our street. And more is coming tomorrow night.

So while it may be a good opportunity to blog, it's a mess otherwise. Schools are closed, buses aren't running, cars can't move out of the neighborhoods (though the main roads are fine).

This never happens in Dubai. Of course, I wouldn't want to be outdoors in the Gulf in August either, but one advantage of the Middle East is they usually don't have four feet of snow.

For purposes of illustration, our dog, Coco, contemplating a snow wall (where our driveway is being shoveled out) several dachshunds deep.

More from Ice Station Virginia as it develops.

Lynch on the Handshake

Marc Lynch has some useful observations on the continuing flap over the Ayalon-Turki handshake. As he notes, Saudi-Israeli contacts have occurred for some time, but they are generally unpublicized, and the highly public nature of this handshake at a time when Israeli policies toward Gaza have particularly inflamed the Arab world is embarrassing to Prince Turki and the Saudis. He has links to a number of Arab world reactions.

Senior MB Leaders Arrested

Some 14 (or 15, depending on the source) Muslim Brotherhood figures, including Deputy Supreme Guide Mahmud ‘Ezzat and new Guidance Office members ‘Essam El-Erian and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Barr. Accounts here and here, among others.

Crackdowns on the Brotherhood leadership wax and wane, and there have been some suggestions that this is a warning to the new leadership installed in recent weeks, or is intended as a preliminary to Shura Council (Upper House) elections in April. Or it just may be State Security flexing its muscles. In any event most of the senior MB leadership have been through it before.

The Ayalon-Prince Turki Handshake

We're still digging out here from the big storm and the Federal Government (and MEI which follows the Feds) will be closed tomorrow, though I'll be posting here. First though, in case you missed it, one of the big subjects of discussion in the region is the handshake at a security conference in Munich between Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon and Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal (former head of Saudi Intelligence, former Ambassador to London, former Ambassador to the US — and he was a year ahead of me at Georgetown). Here's Ha'aretz here, Kuwait's Al-Qabas here, Jerusalem Post here, and Prince Turki's explanation of the handshake to the Saudi Arab News here.

It's in the first six or seven seconds of this YouTube video; Turki is obviously seated in the front row and Ayalon is on his way to join the panel.

Into the Snows for the Weekend

I don't usually post on weekends, and I won't promise to do so this weekend, but then, we're in for a record-setting snowfall here in Washington, and we'll all be pretty much hermits. It was during the pre-Christmas snowstorm that I embarked on our little study of Arab bagpipes, so if I find myself climbing the walls this weekend, who knows what I may end up sharing.

Death of Samaritans' High Priest

The High Priest of the Samaritans, Elazar ben Tzedaka, has died at age 83. His official obituary at an English-language Samaritan site is here. That site identifies the new high priest (kohen gadol) as Aharon ben Ab-Hisda.

The Samaritans are one of the smallest of the Middle East's many small relic minorities, groups that once flourished but today hold on tenuously. Divided from Judaism since the Babylonian exile and still claiming to be the rightful heirs of ancient Israel, and familiar to most people from the New Testament (the Good Samaritan, Jesus and the Samaritan woman), they live mostly either on their historic Mount Gerizim, which rises above Nablus in the West Bank, or in Holon near Tel Aviv. The Wikipedia article says they numbered only 712 in 2007.

Unlike mainstream Judaism, they have retained the institution of the High Priest, who claims direct descent from Aaron, as well as animal sacrifices and an archaic version of the Hebrew alphabet.

Like many other Middle Eastern minorities — Mandaeans, Yazidis, to name a couple — they retain their own identity despite the small size of their community.

A Tense Arba‘in Day in Karbala

Update: As feared, there have been more bombings.

Today is the arba‘in, or end of the 40 days of mourning for Imam Hussein following ‘Ashura, and with hundreds of thousands of Shi‘ite pilgrim faithful flocking to Karbala despite a bombing aimed at pilgrims on Wednesday in the holy city where Hussein is buried.

I even find myself agreeing with Hizbullah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah (with whom I agree on few if any other things) in deploring these sectarian attacks. The term he uses in his remarks, takfiri, means declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, and in this context means those Sunni Islamists who consider Shi‘ites to be heretics or worse.

Clearly sectarianism is still running deep at least between the Shi‘ite controlled Iraqi government and the hard-core Sunni resistance, especially the remnants of Al-Qa‘ida in the Valley of the Two Rivers. Major violence on a Shi‘ite holy day, however, could be a bad augury for the upcoming elections, now just over a month away.

The Facebook Fatwa That Wasn't

I'm glad I didn't post anything earlier on this story, since it's now been pretty much denied. There's been a ruckus on the Internet about an alleged Fatwa by an Azhari sheikh in Egypt banning Facebook. It didn't make much sense when I first saw it, given the fact that Egypt has one of the biggest Facebook communities. And as Marc Lynch observes, the sheikh in question and the Fatwa Committee both deny the story. As he also notes, TV preacher Sheikh al-Qaradawi has 82,000 Facebook followers, so it must have some value for Islamists.

Lynch has also found the ideal illustration, which I hereby brazenly steal with due credit given, showing teachers and students in the traditional Azhari turban working on computers.

I have no idea how stories like this get started. Perhaps the sheikh made some remarks about the potential moral dangers of social networking generally and it got turned into a fatwa by some journalist. Westerners tend to assume any sheikh anywhere who issues a fatwa is some sort of Pope speaking for all Muslims, but neither this sheikh nor the Fatwa Committee claim to have issued any such ruling, and even if they had, in Sunni Islam it would be more a guidance than a binding rule, and even so Egypt has a Grand Mufti who wasn't involved in this. (And a "Mufti" is "one authorized to issue fatwas," literally.) And it wasn't just the Western media (though it made the Israeli press); this started in Arab media.

Anyway, Sheikh Qaradawi and others on Facebook, it looks like you don't have to leave.

Winter 2010 Issue of MEJ

Those of you who subscribe to the hard copy of The Middle East Journal should have gotten your copies of the Winter 2010 issue in January, but due to technical issues, our web hosts for the electronic version, Ingenta, have just now gotten it up. So it's time to link to it. The main page for the issue is here. If you are a subscriber and have not used the electronic version before, this link explains how to activate the electronic subscription for individuals or institutions. (Non-subscribers may purchase individual articles for download.)

The articles are:

1. Hashem Ahmadzadeh and Gareth Stansfield, "The Political, Cultural, and Military Re-Awakening of the Kuridish Nationalist Movement in Iran." We hear a lot about the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, but since the Iranian Revolution information on Kurdish movements in Iran has been sparse. This article helps fill that gap.
2. Dawn Chatty, "The Bedouin in Contemporary Syria: The Persistence of Tribal Authority and Control." An anthropologist's work on Syrian tribes today.
3. Ioannis N. Grigoriadis, "Friends No More? The Rise of Anti-American Nationalism in Turkey." The title tells the story.
4. Caroline Montagu, "Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector in Saudi Arabia." Adding information on an important but still little-documented aspect of Saudi society.
5. Silvia Borzutsky and David Berger, "Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don't: The Eisenhower Administration and the Aswan Dam." Applying modern theories of policy formation to an old standby of the modern Middle East.
6. The Book Reviews, with the main essay by William Hale, "Nationalism, Democracy and Islam in Turkey: The Unfinished Story," reviewing six books on Turkey.

Plus, as always, the Chronology of the quarter, and other departments.

One Small Step for a Rat, Two Turtles and Some Worms . . .

Iran has launched a white rat, two turtles, and some worms into space. Although some wire services are reporting this as a satellite launch, and it came on the anniversary of Iran's first satellite launch, other accounts suggest that while Iran was testing a potential satellite carrier rocket, it was not an orbital mission, though there seems to be a suggestion the animal package was recovered. Here's a YouTube video:



The West is already expressing concern about Iran's space capabilities because obviously satellite launchers are also long-range missiles. But Iran's peaceful exploration of space ought not to be in itself a cause for alarm. They aren't going to shoot turtles at us.

Iraq Candidate Ban Lifted; Back from the Brink

Updated: Juan Cole has some cogent thoughts and a theory.

That ban on some 500 mostly Sunni candidates in Iraq, which was threatening to wreck the elections, has been overturned by an appeals court. Stories here and here. Reidar Visser's take here; Marc Lynch's here.

For the moment, it looks like the triumph of the rule of law over an attempt by the Shi‘ite-dominated government to exclude its opposition. But it may also be more of a pragmatic recognition that the US was quite displeased with the disqualification — apparently made clear during Vice President Joe Biden's visit. Whether the whole affair is a warning sign that once the US is out of the picture, sectarian conflict will resurface is debatable. But it seems clear that if Sunni participation is not thwarted, there is a chance the elections could produce a representative cross-section of parliamentarians. If the Sunnis are alienated from the system, the elections would be seen as a sham in many quarters of the Arab world.

So, for now, it's back from the brink. But the brinksmanship on display so close to the elections is not encouraging.

Remembering Oum Kulthum 35 Years Later

Back when I was posting Arabic Christmas carols by Fairuz, I noted that she was perhaps the greatest living Arabic female vocalist, but that Oum Kulthum, an Ascended Master, would be discussed another time.

One of my readers has nudged me with the reminder that February 3, 1975, 35 years ago today, was the date Oum Kulthum left the building. (And Elvis references are not at all out of line: she was that big in the Arab world, perhaps bigger. Though a lot different to be sure.) Certainly during her lifetime she was a superstar unlike any other, and Arab Gulf potentates would fly to Cairo to hear her concerts. Here's her Wikipedia entry in English. Here's Arabic Wikipedia. And here's an article called "Oum Kalthoum for Non-Arab Ears."

Her name can appear as Umm Kulthum, Oum Kalthoum, Oum Kulsum, and so on, for reasons we have discussed before. She was born Fatima Ibrahim al-Baltagi. She's still called Kawkab al-Sharq, the Star of the East, and Cairo has a museum devoted to her.

She also made movies, which I haven't seen but I suspect that, like Elvis' movies, they were mostly vehicles for letting her break into song. (I'm pretty sure they're not like Elvis movies in any other ways.)

Since some of her songs could go on for an hour or more, she's not necessarily ideal for short sampling, and my own lack of sophistication in Arab music probably makes me a poor commentator anyway. So I'll let YouTube do it. [Note: the second one I posted earlier had no vocals, so I've substituted one that does.]

Ouch!: A Comment on the Gaza Wall

Ursula Lindsey has a post at The Arabist linking to an article she has published at MERIP on "Egypt's Wall."

She illustrates her post with this (from an original here):


"The high one (or highly-esteemed one) built the High Dam; the low one (or "low-down" one) built the low barrier." (The word for "dam" and for "barrier" are the same in Arabic.)

Ouch.

A Note on Yiddish in Israel and Elsewhere

This Jerusalem Post obituary for a major Lithuanian/Israeli poet is entitled "Avrom Sutzkever: Master of a Dying Language." It's a reminder of the curious relationship between the State of Israel and Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern European and Russian Ashkenazi Jews. While not entirely unjustified, even in Israel I'm not sure that Yiddish is a "dying" language; some of the more ultra Haredi ("Ultra-Orthodox") groups cling to it insistently, and among more recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, it, alongside Russian and the three Baltic languages, plus Belarussian and Ukrainian, still flourishes. In parts of Brooklyn and Queens, it still reigns. Much of what follows is an area on which I have only very secondary and derivative knowledge, so if I get anything major wrong, go ahead and pounce on me in the comments.

But the obit does remind us of the profound bias Israeli secular Zionism had against Yiddish. The project of creating a state for all the world's Jews demanded a language that was not constrained to a particular continent but was universal among Jews: Hebrew, the liturgical language for all Jews but a language no one had spoken in daily life for some 2000 years or more, was the obvious candidate.

In the meantime, Jewish variants of local languages had taken over. First Aramaic (the language of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds), then the Greek of Alexandria, of Philo and the Septuagint, and in time the emergence of such languages as Yiddish (a Jewish dialect of German), Ladino (a Jewish dialect of Spanish, or at least Romance, common in the northern Mediterranean), Judaeo-Arabic in various forms from Morocco to the east, etc. These languages were usually the local language, usually written (like Yiddish) in an adapted square Hebrew character and with Hebrew and Aramaic loan-words. But they were not Hebrew, and a Sephardic Ladino-speaker would not understand a Polish Yiddish-speaker or a Mizrahi Judaeo-Arabic speaker, unless they all had studied Hebrew and/or Aramaic, the scriptural/Talmudic languages.

The father of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, seems to have streets named for him in every town in Israel (the bigger the city, the more important the street). Yet to most of us, reading his biography, he seems a monomaniacal tyrant, a single-minded obsessive who managed to create a national language through sheer self-will.

The Wikipedia article I linked to notes that he insisted that his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda ("Son of Zion son of Judah," a loaded name to begin with: he later changed it to Itamar), was the first person raised entirely in Hebrew. This was because Ben-Yehuda insisted his family speak Hebrew even though no one else could speak it, other than the rabbis. The Wikipedia article tells only part of the story, noting that he rebuked his wife for singing a song in Russian to Ben-Zion when he had forbidden his son to hear any language other than Hebrew. The story as usually heard (perhaps Wikipedia didn't feel it was sufficiently documented) is that Ben-Zion spoke not a word until he was four years old or so. Then, when his father rebuked his mother for singing that Russian song, the boy suddenly spoke his first word: "Avi!" ("Father!") in rebuke of his father. True or not (it's not in Wikipedia), it suggests that Ben-Yehuda's single-minded devotion to Hebrew may have influenced his parenting skills.

The rebirth of Hebrew is unparalleled. Lots of other languages that want to restore their ancient glories have tried to model themselves on the renaissance of Hebrew. I'm told that the Welsh language enthusiasts even call their schools for learning Welsh ulpans using the Israeli term for the Hebrew schools for immigrants. I've also heard anecdotally that some of the former Soviet republics have asked Israel for advice on reviving their own Russian-swamped languages. But these countries generally already have a dominant language (usually English or Russian), and while there are hopes for survival (I fondly remember standing in a pub in a provincial town in Galway years ago and hearing teens and young adults chatting each other up in Irish, a sign the young are keeping it up in the Gaeltacht at least), there is no exact analog to Hebrew in Israel.

One of the victims has been Yiddish, a language with a great literary tradition, well down into the 20th century.

But the influx of ex-Soviet immigrants (including folks like Avigdor Lieberman), the haredi population growth in Israel, and the continuing rich Yiddish tradition in New York and a few other places, may not mean that Yiddish is really a "dying language." I tend to belong to the school of thought that says when a language dies, something of a culture dies. Of course people will always read Yiddish, as they read Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, or as they read Hebrew until Ben-Yehuda almost single-handedly revived it.

Oh, perhaps I should note that I'd never actually heard of the Lithuanian-Israeli Yiddish poet I just used as a starting point for this longish post. It was the headline in the Jerusalem Post that set me off.

Imagine That: Police Book Exhibit That Doesn't Sell Anything Doesn't Draw Crowds

Hmm . . . I think I might be able to speculate on the answer this gentleman's puzzlement:

"I don't understand why no one is interested in our booth," he said. "Maybe it's because the material on display here isn't for sale."

It's the Interior Ministry's Police Book Exhibit at the Cairo International Book Fair in Nasr City. Yeah, not selling anything might have something to do with it. Also:

The pavilion proudly displays a host of books — both old and new — on a wide range of subjects, including the history of Egypt's penal system and human rights issues, along with copies of the ministry's official magazine. The publications are only available for browsing, however, and not for purchase.

Human rights issues? Well, they should have more documentation than anyone. The history of Egypt's penal system? I'll wait for the movie. But I suspect the fact that they don't sell their wares (so why are they there?) is part of it, and so maybe is this:

The booth is lavishly decorated, featuring an impressive mural of President Hosni Mubarak and a large golden eagle--the ministry's logo--above the entrance.

If I were Egyptian, I think the logo of State Security would surely draw me in to browse titles I can't buy in any event, but perhaps I'm not average on that. (I'm guessing it's the one in the circle in the following Ministry graphic):


There may be some folks who aren't lured in by the image of a raptor descending to strike. And I doubt that it was the only "impressive mural of Husni Mubarak" on display at the fair.

Overseas Copts Call for Boycott of Mubarak, NDP

Two activist organizations of Copts abroad, the Free Copts and the National American Coptic Assembly, have called on Copts in Egypt to refuse to vote for President Mubarak or other National Democratic Party candidates, charging that the NDP and State Security were guilty of "connivance" in the Nag Hammadi killings on Christmas eve. The Bikya Masr link also discusses the increasing activism of other Egyptian groups abroad.

What is significant here is the fact that I have noted on a number of earlier occasions, namely that Coptic Pope Shenouda III has been a public supporter of Husni Mubarak and has virtually endorsed Gamal Mubarak's succession. Since the late 1970s there have been tensions between the overseas Copts, who clearly have a lot less to lose by expressing their views, and the Church at home. (There is also something of a tradition of rivalry between the Church hierarchy and the influential Coptic laity, but that's a different, if related, story.)

Meanwhile, the campaign to portray the Nag Hammadi killings as the actions of common criminals instead of sectarian violence has included press allegations suggesting that the main killer's gang had previously had dealings with Bishop Kirillos, who was the seeming target of the attack, and public statements by a number of leading government figures dismissing the events as some kind of Upper Egyptian gangland vendetta. The local NDP Deputy, it has been suggested, knows more than he has publicly discussed. Christmas eve, however,makes it a bit difficult to assume sectarianism was completely absent. A lot of this has appeared in the independent opposition press and a lot of it may be disinformation from one or more of the interested parties, but it's clear that the government wants to spread the idea that there's some local feuding going on rather than a national issue.

Meanwhile Al-Masry al-Youm emphasized remarks of the Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom to Fox News suggesting that Egypt might face sanctions as a result of recent events.

The problem is not that the Copts have many legitimate complaints — they, and Muslim Egyptians as well, have plenty of government abuses to complain of — but that when Copts abroad attack the government, the backlash is sometimes bad news for their co-religionists at home.

And the timing of this is bad, since Mubarak's busy basking in the glory of Egypt's having won the Africa Cup for the third year in a row. Here he is greeting the team:

Khomeini's Return in Video

Still on the 31st anniversary theme, an Iranian video:

More on the Ten Days of Fajr

I thought I'd add a bit to what I said in my previous post about the period February 1-11 in 1979 and in Iranian practice since. Known as the "ten days of Fajr" (dawn) in Revolutionary parlance, they were marked by a rapid transformation of the situation and the utter collapse of what remained of the Pahlavi regime.

You can find a timeline here. The Shah left the country January 16. He had previously appointed Shapour Bakhtiar as a reformist Prime Minister. Bakhtiar sought to keep a reformist but non-Islamist government in power, but had little choice but to agree to allow Khomeini to return from exile.

The arrival of Khomeini on February 1 was the catalyst for one of the Middle East's true revolutions — as opposed to classic military coups that are officially proclaimed "revolutions" — and things moved swiftly.

On February 4, Khomeini named his own Prime Minister: Mehdi Bazargan. A former aide to Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, Bazargan was a liberal reformer. From the fourth, there were two rival PMs, Bazargan and Bakhtiar.

On the ninth of February, fighting broke out between the Imperial Guard and Air Force units loyal to Khomeini. On the 10th, there were further clashes and Bakhtiar proclaimed martial law; Khomeini ordered his followers to ignore it. On the next day, the military declared its neturality and the last semblances of the Bakhtiar regime collapsed. February 11 is celebrated as Victory Day, the pinnacle of the ten days of Fajr. The long progression of revolutionary turmoil began, with several non-clerical figures replacing each other in office until, after the beginning of the hostage crisis later that year, the Constitution of the modern Islamic Republic was put in place.

I need hardly point out that the symbolism of the 1979 events are very much in the minds of the regime and of the opposition, since opposition leaders such as Mir-Hossein Moussavi were very much a part of all this. In a way the two sides today are each trying to claim the legacy of the Revolution. It could be a tense ten days, especially now that Ahmadinejad has promised that Iran "will deliver a harsh blow to the Global Arrogance" on February 11. That seems to be revolutionary rhetoric, but a regime on the defensive at home might make a miscalculation internationally.

More Anniversaries in Iran

Today, February 1, marks the 31st anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's return to Iran on this date in 1979. Over the ten days between now and February 11, the anniversary of the final triumph of the Iranian Revolution, Iranians will be watching closely to see how the opposition's efforts to rally on the 11th are coming together. In their attempt to portray themselves as the real inheritors of the Revolution and the present regime as its betrayers, the opposition has sought to awaken some of the spirit of those days. But because it lacks a unified leadership, the message is not always clear.

It is, however, clear that February 11 is the next major date for demonstrations, and that traditionally the countdown to that date began historically with Khomeini's return on the first.