Lethargic Man (anag.)

Last summer, I was thinking about where we could go as a day trip from London whilst we were visiting the UK, and hit upon the idea of Canterbury, as a city I'd not yet visited. Of course, Canterbury is steeped in history, with the cathedral, and its associations with the murder of Thomas à Becket, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and so forth, but for me a good half the reason to go was the desire to recreate the cover of one of my favourite albums, Blind Dog at St Dunstans by Caravan:

This is one of the cases where reduction in album cover sizes, from 12" LPs to 12cm CDs to tiny thumbnails for MP3s is a real loss; the cover is packed with dog-related jokes most of which you can't see except on a high resolution image. Have a zoom in and see how many you can make out.

Caravan, in case you've never heard of them, were a prog-rock band, part of the so-called Canterbury scene, in the 1970s. (The liner notes on a best of Caravan album describes them as "a break-up product of the Wilde Flowers, one of the most influential bands never to sign a record contract", which phraseology I like.) This album was where they abandoned their prog-rock roots and went poppier, which didn't go down well with fans at the time, but if, like me, you discovered this album (over thirty years ago, good grief!) before their earlier prog-rock material, then you can appreciate the album on its own merits, free from any prior expectations. A few readers might even have heard it without realising: The entire album was part of my playlist at my fortieth birthday party. Here's a playlist for the entire album on YouTube, if you'd like to listen.

Anyhow, I achieved my ambition when I went to Canterbury:

(The camera angle is slightly different because (a) I couldn't stand in the middle of the road, and (b) I was covering up some unsightly roadworks with the position of my body.)

I wrote before about how one of the strengths of Rabbi Ludwig Philippson, in his 1844 commentary on the Torah, is his ability to pull patterns out of what look like random things in the text. I said I wanted to translate two examples, but this turned out to be a much larger undertaking than I expected. In the end, I decided to feed the text into a translation engine, but this also involved a large expenditure of time, correcting the things the translation engine (or the OCRing of the original text) got wrong.

This is actually the second text I wished to translate. (The first might not necessarily be longer, but it's buried somewhere inside the long Schlussbetrachtung zum ersten Buche Moscheh, and I'd need to at least skim translate that to find it.) In this passage, Philippson considers in turn the meanings of the names of the Mishkan, its component spaces, its dimensions, the materials it was constructed from and its colours, before bringing all of this together into a summary of the deeper meaning of the Mishkan, the like of which I have never read.

I'd originally intended to write here: This is a long text; so I suggest that rather than reading it online, you print it out and read during the long drawn-out parts of the High Holydays services. But then life got in the way and I'm only finishing it now. So I suggest instead you print it out and read it during the long dark autumn or winter Friday nights. (Hah, who am I kidding that anyone's going to read a text this long? I suspect I'm translating this mostly for my own benefit to be able to reread easily and fast in the future.) If you do print it out, note that the page with the Tetragrammaton needs to be disposed of in due course in a geniza.

Two comments up front: Firstly, the translation below doesn’t capture one aspect of the original text, which is that it looks like this: in blackletter, with long S’s, and with abſolutely no paragraphing (apart from daſhes to introduce new ſections).

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The other is to raise the issue one word that Philippson makes copious use of, but which I’ve had difficulty translating. That word is Vermittelung. Vermitteln means to impart or mediate, but Philippson uses it to describe the connection between God and Man. I’ve translated it as “intermediation”, or “connexion” (using this spelling for a nineteenth-century feel); I don’t feel this really does the job well, but I can’t think of anything better. (Where you see "connection" spelled with CT, this is not a continuity error, but rather rendering the more unambigous word Verbindung.)

(If you're reading this on a smartphone, now would be a sensible time to start viewing in landscape orientation.)

Flavius Josephus recounts an incident concerning the Hasmonean king Alexander Yannai:

As to Alexander, his own people were seditious against him; for at a festival which was then celebrated, when he stood upon the altar, and was going to sacrifice, the nation rose upon him, and pelted him with citrons [which they then had in their hands, because] the law of the Jews required that at the feast of tabernacles every one should have branches of the palm tree and citron tree.

A similar story is told in the Mishna (Succah 4:9), in which the priest carrying out the water libation poured the water of his feet instead of into the correct bowl (according to Rashi, he was a Sadducee and rejected the Pharisaic procedure), and got pelted with esrogs. ISTR that ArtScroll commentators argue that the both are accounts of the same incident (which makes a pleasant change from ArtScroll's normal ahistorical attitude).

Anyhow, I found this image so striking (and also farcical, if you don't think about what happened next) that I was surprised there wasn't a Renaissance-era painting depicting it. So (after waiting thirteen years for the technology to become available), I got ChatGPT to remedy this:

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Long-term readers may have noted a theme running through my Judaism-related posts, which is my reading ancient texts scouring them for clues as to how much ancient practice of the Oral Torah, which rabbinical propaganda portrays as going back to Moses at Sinai, actually antedated rabbinical Judaism (which arose from Pharisaic Judaism having to reinvent itself following the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, to recentre Judaism upon the home and the synagogue).

Well, I won't be blogging about this any more: I've just read a book that has given me all the answers (along with the sources for them, of which by this point, a surprising number are already on my bookshelf): The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal, by Yonatan Adler. The author's thesis is to sidestep the question of when the Torah was written, and instead look into when the literary and archaeological evidence indicates that people were actually keeping the commandments of the Torah.

Jewish learning notes index

At the end of my coast-to-coast cycle ride in the UK eleven years ago, my parents met me at Tynemouth, and my father offered to give me a lift home. I considered declining, as I had just done 92½ miles, and if I cycled back to their place, I'd achieve my first century (to use the cricketing term). But then I considered that it would be uphill, which I would be finding very difficult by then, and would involve cycling in the countryside without street lights as night fell, so chose to accept the lift.

I went on to spend the next ten years regretting this choice. Last year, it occurred to me I ought to do something about it, as I wouldn't be physically capable of such a long ride indefinitely, as I grow older—something that would be borne out when foolishly pressing on despite knee pain during a sixty-mile ride earlier this year crippled my left knee for a whole two months, and during the course of trying to find out why it was taking so long to heal, I discovered I have arthritis. However, in the end, I decided to give it a go, with the expectation that I might have to abort the ride and take the train back if my knee wasn't up to it (which is why I made no mention of it here or Facebook in advance).

For this ride, I chose to cycle from my home in Berlin to (the closest point in) Poland and back. The border is (since Stalin moved Poland one hundred miles west in 1945) the river Oder:

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Actually, the real clue is the shop selling fireworks. Berlin on New Year's Eve is like a war zone; in an attempt to do something about this, the authorities only permit fireworks to be sold for the three days immediately beforehand (and if the shops sell out, tough). The response of Berliners to this is to nip across the border and stock up on fireworks. The response of the Poles is clearly to sense a market opportunity.

Because this was a little short of fifty miles from home, I continued on a bit, passing through the village of Stary Kostrzynek (Alt-Küstrinchen in German), which allowed me to see somewhere more Polish than this faux Germany. It had some half-timbered houses, but also looked rather run-down.

Factlet I wouldn't have discovered had I not entered Poland this way: In Poland it is legally compulsory for cars (and, presumably, bikes) to have their lights on at all times.

Poland's westernmost point:

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Barely was the ink dry on my last item of self-designed clothing, when inspiration came for a new one:

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The text reads, in German, "Never get between an Englishman and his tea"; the back reads, also in German, "Well, someone has to lend credence to the stereotype".

A dozen years ago, I was returning home from shul on a Friday night in Berlin whilst wearing this outfit plus straw panama, and I overheard a drunk German point out rather too loudly to his companion, „Engländer!“ I thought to myself, if it's that obvious, I'm going to continue dialling it up to eleven.

In furtherance of the same aim, I depicted my tea-drinking self on the tea-shirt wearing a tail-coat, top hat and white bowtie, with a wood-panelled drawing-room in the background. Unfortunately, it's not very easy to see this detail on the photo, unless you click through for a higher-definition image. Indeed, the photo is a bit dark, which was the result of my trying to make the background not steal the limelight, whilst marrying light levels in the foreground and background, which were obviously not shot at the same time. (The latter is in my grandfather's house, which he moved out of in 1981. He had wood panelling installed, including a panel which swung open to reveal a cocktail bar; how cool is that?)

At my company's hack week in Cologne last summer, I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with runes on it. Cool, I thought, and briefly considered the possibility of wearing one myself before concluding it would not be reflective of my culture: none of my ancestors were rune-carving Germanics fifteen hundred years ago.

This led to a contemplation of what the equivalent would be for me. The Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet,^* I concluded, and posted about it on Facebook, concluding "I can feel a T-shirt coming on."

* The alphabet the Jews used before the Babylonian exile, where they picked up the Assyrian one they still use today.

Several months down the line, here's the result:

Now roll on my next T-shirt, for which I already have the idea...

A few years ago there was a big hoo-har when the then (just) Duchess of Cambridge was pregnant with her first child, to get all the Commonwealth countries to agree to change their law so that if that child turned out to be a girl, she wouldn't be disinherited of the throne in the event of the later arrival of a brother.

A propos of very little, I found myself wondering recently how often the principle of male primogeniture had actually disinherited the heir to the throne. The answer turned out to be less often than one might think:

Most famously, the governments of England and Scotland put up with James II and VI converting to Catholicism because the throne would be inherited by his daughter Protestant Mary, but when James had a son, the prospect raised itself of a Catholic succession, which led to the English Parliament inviting Mary's husband William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1684 to invade the country and kick James out. (This is where the term "revolution" in the political sense comes from.)

And, a century beforehand, both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor were skipped over in favour of their younger brother Edward VI, though his death without issue resulted in both of them becoming Queen regnant in due course.

Aside from that, in reverse chronological order, here are the women who but for the subsequent arrivals of younger brothers might have become Queen in the UK or its predecessor countries:

• Augusta, daughter of Frederick, Princes of Wales (whose death before that of his father George II meant he never got to be king); skipped over in favour of her brother George III.
• Elizabeth, daughter of James VI and I; skipped over in favour of her brother Charles I. She married Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine; her grandson would become George I of Great Britain.
• Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, skipped over in favour of her brother Henry VIII. She would become Queen consort of Scotland; her great-grandson James VI would become James I of England.

And that, it turns out, is it, or at least as far back as when England was a third-world country of little account on the fringe of the civilised world, at which point my interest in its history fades away (though I am interested in the ninth to twelfth centuries too).

It won't come as much of a surprise to most of my readership that I am interested in philology. In particular, my engagement with German has prompted me to learn more of where German words came from and their cognates in English. Of course, the two originated as dialects of a common language, dubbed Common Germanic, spoken from about 500 BCE to the fourth century CE^*, which was ancestral to all the historical Germanic languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish.

* Though Old Norse and the East Germanic languages (Gothic, Burgundian, Vandalian) were already splitting off by then.

Philologists talk about languages as evolving to unintelligibility over the course of a millennium, which made me wonder how different Common Germanic must have been to Old English (which is of course unintelligible to non-scholars today). So I headed off to Wikipedia to find out—and here's my findings, essentially boiling down the most interesting bits of what I read into one blog post (which I suspect will mostly be of interest just to me, but now I've got it in a form I can readily refer to in the future).