The Pretty Past

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am working on spiffing up and making small revisions to my first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries, preparatory to reissuing them before I bring out #4 (title still in discussion watch the skies, etc.) One of the things I want to do is add a brief essay to each book about some aspect of the setting (and how, since these are books set in an alternate version of the English Regency, I might have changed it). This had led me to a whole lot of distracting but fun rumination, as well as an examination of why I wanted to write these books in the first place.

One of my favorite bits in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility is a throwaway line: as the Misses Dashwood and their hostess, Mrs. Jenkins, leave a carriage to attend an evening party in London, Mrs. Jenkins says “Mind your slippers, ladies! The horses have been here.”

Why do I love this? The line doesn’t appear in Austen; it’s there to remind the modern audience that this is a different world. It’s not just that social mores have changed. The day-to-day process of life has changed. We don’t get around using horses and carriages, so you don’t have to worry about horseshit soiling your nice dancing slippers. I love it because it’s a very mild antidote to the sorts of romances I grew up reading, which zipped right over the physical difficulties of life in the Olden Days. When I was writing Regency romances I would occasionally be asked (breathlessly) “don’t you wish you lived then?” To which my answer was always “Hell, no.” No painless dentistry, no antibiotics, no central heating, no reliable refrigeration, heating with wood or coal fire… Add to that my certainty that I would not have been the daughter of a wealthy peer, but more likely a maid or factory girl, dying early from a disfiguring disease (although in fact, dying early, particularly in childbirth, could happen to any woman up or down the social scale). The sanitized past of the Regency romances I gobbled by the ton began to annoy me.

One thing I knew when I started writing Point of Honour, the first of the Sarah Tolerance books, was that I wanted it to be largely set in London, and I wanted to at least nod to the physical rigors of life in the Olden Days. T0 the smells, particularly of the Thames, which was breathtakingly polluted, and particularly in the summer had a stench that penetrated to the city, even in the nice neighborhoods. To the waste and the necessity for crossing sweeps (hordes of little boys who haunted street corners and would swee the mud, dust, fecal matter and urine out of the path of a pedestrian willing to pay). To the darkness: gas lamps were installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and there was an ordinance that every house must have a lamp or torch outside the front door, to dispel a little of the darkness. In poorer neighborhoods this law was largely ignored, and the streets could be pitch dark.

Regency romances don’t mention the outhouses, but I wanted to. I wanted to get dentistry (and its lack) and medicine (and its well intentioned and often wrong-headed notions) and to at least reflect the difficulty of daily life for the people who are not in the top tier of society. See, I knew, given the premise of the book, that I would be playing with the social conventions of Regency London. If I–or my Fallen Woman protagonist–was going to spit in the eye of social norms, the least I could do was give her a milieu that was equally brave. And un-sanitized.

And I admit that I have a small frisson of delight in detailing the dental shortcomings and smallpox scars of my characters, and in writing a scene where a “gold finder” (a slang term for the guy who cleaned out your privy when such was needful) disrupts the orderly working of a household. It’s not that the past wasn’t pretty: it’s just that that’s not all it was.

 

 

 

 

 

Your Questions Answered: candles and music

personby Gillian Polack
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I used to answer questions on Livejournal. Most of the time, people wanted to know about matters historical, especially concerning the Middle Ages. When I moved to a blog on my own website, that interaction lessened somewhat and I stopped asking if anyone had questions they wanted me to answer.

I discovered this summer (for yes, it’s still summer in Australia) that I missed that interaction with readers. I asked on Facebook if anyone had any questions they’d like me to answer here. The people of Facebook answered. There were several simple questions (or questions with simple answers) and I’ll reply to them today, but there were two questions that demand more complex answers, so they’ll be posts of their own.

Before I answer those two questions, I would be delighted if anyone reading this have questions of your own. Ask them in the comments.

I’m happy to take questions about Australia and our history, my family history, Australian Jews, Judaism in general, the Middle Ages in Western Europe, medieval magic, food history, my favourite anime, Doctor Who, my writing, my current projects, dealing with many illnesses at once, any of the subjects linked to any of my doctorates, and… to be honest… anything else I have an interest in except certain current issues.

I don’t answer questions about Israel partly because there are others who know a lot more but mostly because I don’t like bullies and there are a lot of people demanding right now “Deny any links to Israel in your family and your Jewish heritage and religion and then we might speak to you.” This is bullying. Also, the fact that I spell out the demand in this particular way says a bunch about my views, so now you don’t need to ask those questions!

Also, I am not going to answer questions at this time (maybe other places and times) about family physically hurt and even killed due to antisemitism and related hate. I don’t have the spoons. I do have such family and the pain I feel for them never stops. And no, this does not mean I don’t care about anyone outside my family. I’m capable of caring for family and for a whole bunch of other people also, oddly. I don’t want to answer questions about them because most of the people who ask such questions have particular platforms and… I do not want the questions to play with emotions and safety. Besides, aren’t my regular subjects sufficiently interesting?

Today I’ll be answering two questions, and they’re quite different from each other. Even if the readers are also friends, I won’t use their names. Privacy matters. If you want to identify yourself, feel free to in the comments.

A reader said, “Oh, I do have a question! It just occurred to me when I was looking at pictures of beautiful menorahs on Bluesky last week. If someone can’t physically light their menorah because of illness or disability, can they use one with battery operated candles. And more generally, how do the rules around not working or using modern technology on the Sabbath work for disabled Jews who want to observe that but need technology to be independent, and don’t have outside support?”

The answer is both simple and complex. Judaism is not a one-size-fits-all religion. We’re taught a bunch of questions we can ask ourselves and make our own decisions about such things, and we can also ask rabbis. Health and well-being matter to us, so if we need a mechanical help then we are not encouraged to forgo it during Shabbat. The decision comes down to the person whose body it is, or, in the case of lighting candles for Chanukah, whose chanukiya it is.

I was taught from my childhood that we’re responsible for our own decisions and that it’s always better if those decisions are informed. For any Jew brought up as I was, there are choices on how to become informed. Some people rely heavily on the views of rabbis. Some read up a lot. Some simply make up their mind what to do and when.

Most of the time, for something like lighting candles, pragmatism rules, I suspect. I can’t speak on behalf of others and tell you what choices they make. Because our understanding of the world and of Judaism matters, decisions on these matters can be hugely varied. Some Jews are so enormously religious that every choice in life requires immense thought and respect paid to both the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Some are casual about the religious side and may not light the candles at all, because they have other things to do with limited capacity. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Even for those of us who fall into the in-between land, the can be huge differences. One of the wonderful things about Judaism is these differences. When I talk to other Jews I find out their traditions and we chat about the reasons behind this choice or that. Learning is part of the Jewish soul and so learning about choices, whether they be choices for how to remain a good human being or choices about the lighting of candlesticks will always throw up interesting insights.

Let me leave you with one of my favourite candle-lighting insights from my childhood. There is a perpetual light inside synagogues. This light reminds us of the holy light that was always kept lit in the Temple. That original light is the reason for the miracle needed on the original days of Chanukah, when that light had to be kept going even when there was no clean oil to keep it going with because so much had been defiled by the worship of a different religion entirely within our holiest of holies. Lo, the oil lasted eights days. Celebrating that light from the Temple before its destruction led eventually to the candles we light for Chanukah. The original light was in an oil lamp, and for a very long time oil and wicks gave us our Chanukah lights. Now, most of us use candles for Chanukah (as you know) and electricity for the memory of the Ner Tamid.

 

The other question I’ll answer this week is quite, quite different. “So, I know you have some extremely talented, but – it’s fair to say – vastly different, musicians in your family history. What is your favourite musical memory from one of your family members?”

Normally I’d give a story about my father’s first cousin, Linda Phillips. Not only was she the per-eminent musician in the family, but she had great stories. Or I’d tell you about my own first cousin, Jon Snyder, who played in Captain Matchbox. My most favourite of all the music stories in my family is all about my father.

My father was a dentist. He claimed he loved going to orchestral concerts because the music gave him a good nap. He was also tone deaf. The first and third sentences are the critical ones in this story.

My sisters and I helped out at the dental practice when we were old enough. We were called “Assistant Dental Nurses.” I was the one responsible for patients who found going to the dentist difficult. I was that person long before I was old enough to be an Assistant Dental Nurse. I was expected to go into the waiting room and chat with people. I was, when I did this, the first stage of my father’s very distinctive version of an anesthetic system. Also, when a patient hurt too much and panicked in the dental chair, I was sent to the waiting room to explain what was happening. A few lucky indivuals react, for instance, to nitrous oxide by making noises that sound as if aliens were burrowing into their skull. Dad always took these patients out from under the nitrous oxide and checked to see if they were fine.

With one patient in particular, she was perfectly fine, both times he checked. She had been telling Dad how fine she was, the first time, and the second, she was singing. She simply had no vocal chord control and she wasn’t listening to what she sounded like and… everyone in the waiting room was freaked out.

I was a teenager and very literal. I still am very literal. My explanation of what was happening, including the warning that this filling might take a little longer than we expected, didn’t just calm people down, they chuckled.

When each of those patients reached the dental chair, they were perfectly relaxed. Then Dad gave his list of choices for anesthesia.

1. No anesthetic at all. Quite a few people opted for this. I did, myself, when I could. These days I am weak as a kitten and need help.

2. Nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. It relaxes me, and no undue and unexpected screaming has ever resulted from me taking it. It’s what I accepted on bad days or if the filling was deep and my teeth sensitive.

3. An injection.

4. A series of jokes by Dad. No-one ever chose this option, because everyone knew my father’s sense of humour. His favourite photocopy jokes were all on display in the waiting room.

5. A rap over the head with a hammer. No-one ever chose this, either.

6. Dad singing them to sleep. Some people chose this. When they realised that Dad sang in many keys, but only used two notes, they stopped him and said “How about we try an injection?”

To be honest, Dad’s list changed according to his mood. Once it reached 9 items, but I can’t remember them.

I do remember the time he decided to sing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the patient asked him if he had an invisible hand, holding the hammer, because he hurt so much from the singing that death might be preferable. From then, when I was Assistant Dental Nurse, I warned people in the waiting room about the list and said, “No matter what you do, don’t let Dad sing.”

The Future We Want

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been putting myself to sleep at night by envisioning the kind of future world I’d like to see. Being a science fiction writer as well as someone who has spent much of my life doing work toward social change, I’m always thinking about better systems.

But the combination of the polycrises we face (I’m deliberately using the plural of crisis here because we not only have multiple crises that affect each other – thus the poly – but each crisis has its own set of multiple components) with the forthcoming grifter/broligarch/religious and right wing extremist government has urged me more in that direction.

Given that the government will not only not be addressing the polycrises but will in fact be doing things that make them much, much worse, I cannot be satisfied by resistance. And given that the status quo was already shaky – very little being done about climate change, inequality, and the cost of housing, not to mention protecting the country from insurrectionists – I’m not feeling pumped up about trying to get back to that.

Yeah, we need the rule of law and the Constitution here in the United States, but both those things have some big flaws that should have been addressed a long time ago. Most of the resistance will be focused on keeping political things from getting too much worse, but it won’t be fixing any of the underlying problems.

So I am trying to envision what we could have. I recently read an essay Donella Meadows wrote in 1994, “Envisioning a Sustainable World,” and it inspired me to do more imagining of what kind of world we could have.

Meadows was one of the authors of the 1972 work Limits to Growth, which provided a guide to the problems we’re facing right now. You can find out more about her work here and download a free copy of Limits to Growth here:

Of course, I’ve been working on envisioning futures all along.  Lately, I’ve been reading some futurist thinking to help expand my ability to do that. You have to be careful with futurists, since many of them are tied in with tech bro thinking, but there are some very useful skills in that area that help you get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point.

You have to get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point before you can open your mind to anything new.

Continue reading “The Future We Want”…

From Little England to New York, not forgetting the Wild West

personby Gillian Polack
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I once wondered what would happen if each time a place was central to a novel what would happen to the place if the mentions carrying charges. If the charges were of fairystuff, then new York and London, more than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, would turn into fairy wonderlands. Japanese anime answered this question for me by making the charges the stuff of detonation and world-changing tragedy. Tokyo has died more times than anywhere else in the Japanese-speaking world.

When I’d explored this notion decades ago, I kept it in mind, and nearly made a map containing all the places that were the heartland of a novel, just to find out more. At that point I entered the public service (this was a long time ago) and there was no time to make maps.

I turned my thoughts to notions that did not need mapping. How much do we centre our narratives around the US and around England? What does this do to our sense of what makes home? How does it affect how we see ourselves? Often it means we see ourselves poorly, because the London and New York publishing industries tend to reinforce the bias from the stories they select for publication. It’s far, far harder for outsiders to get published and have careers without moving to those places and creating networks and being seen. The further one is from a central place, the more difficult it is. In Australia, Sydney, Melbourne (and recently Brisbane) are those central points. People who can travel a lot and create modern networks are less disadvantaged. We know what this does to careers. I’m not sure we have looked deeply enough into what this does for the stories we tell.

Today, I’m thinking about this quite specifically in relation to the US’s story dream of a Wild West and in Australia’s equivalent. In novel terms, my favourite Australian story based in our Wild-West equivalent is Voss. It’s the opposite of anything written by Zane Grey. White won a Nobel Prize and Grey sold more novels than I can count. They are not, to be fair, good comparisons, because they were not simply written at far ends of the world, but they are also at far ends of the literary spectrum. Yet White and Grey are the two writers who always come to mind when I start to think about popular stories that share history. I read them both when I was fifteen and sixteen. I fiercely wanted to understand them. I didn’t want the literary understanding I was being offered at school. I wanted to understand how they tell us who we are and what would happen if we put them in historical perspective.

Both writers demonstrate some of the core stories we associate with European settlement when we’re telling stories that focus on that settlement. Those core stories give me hints on how we shape our own histories to make them distinctive. The publishing tendency to centralise rubs away differences. Publishing tends to limit the range of stories we’re offered and to focus on areas that publishers think will sell. This reinforces a small concept of the past and the reinforces it again and again and again until we think it’s legendary. Those of us who are not in the right region or culture find the legendary passes us by.

When I was twenty-six I accepted that job in Canberra and suddenly the stories of a gunslinging past were staring at me from the roads I walked. Local farmers were descended from famous bushrangers (Australian outlaws). Canberra is on the road from the goldfields to the big smoke. And yet… we didn’t have a big set of Wild West stories. We have some bushranger songs and tales, but they’re not encapsulated in a whole world the way the Wild West stories are. Australia’s writing legacy was through the UK rather than through the US and do, instead of dime novels, we had penny-dreadfuls and their ilk and heirs. We had writers such as Mary Fortune and Fergus Hume and, later, Arthur Upfield. They’re quite different in nature and story style. In many cases, the lives of the writers themselves held elements of that penny-dreadfulness and the books were often set in Melbourne. For Fortune and Hume, the best place to start with with the work of Lucy Sussex. She is also from Melbourne. Melbourne is, these days, a City of Literature, but it still relies on people living there and does not reach out so much to the rest of Australia. Likewise, the earlier Australian popular literature mentions of places do not seem to carry the same charges as novels set in New York or in the Wild West.

For readers, this is a good thing. Each novel can be read by itself and for itself. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s not so good. The pressure remains to write novels set in New York or to tell yet another Wild West science fiction story.

What are we missing with this? I was going to explore this in another post, next week, but I’ve been thinking about it. Would anyone reading this (including Treehouse friends!) like to talk about our histories? We could compare the dates we’re taught as important. We could discuss why the US has the Wild West while Australia has Marvellous Melbourne. We could compare goldrushes and outlaw stories. It could be a great deal of fun. Would anyone like to share a discussion? (Not for next week, for a mutually convenient future time.)

On Gentleness

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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It strikes me once again how much I need gentleness in these fraught times.

The last time the grifter was allowed to occupy the White House, I ended up writing a gentle adventure novel — gentle despite the fact that it was rooted in The Three Musketeers. It’s called For the Good of the Realm and the adventures are had by swordswomen and witches. You can buy a copy here if you’re in need of gentle adventures.

The sequel I’m working on turns out to have more violence and complexity in it, which might be why I’m having some trouble with the messy middle right now. I need gentleness, though not at the expense of trying to force a story to be something it isn’t. I didn’t realize I was writing a gentle adventure with Realm until it was finished, and the current book is opening some doors I never knew existed when I wrote the first one.

That said, it may be tricky for me to write something that’s a little harsher right now because – like I said at the beginning – the times cry out for gentleness as an antidote to what we’re facing.

Now in a world with numerous wars and cruel treatment of refugees and, for that matter, of anyone without enough money — people make homes in tents and old RVs in my neighborhood — gentleness is a privilege.

Probably it has always been a privilege, though when reading about “gently bred” ladies of the English Regency period, I am inclined to think those women were more imprisoned than protected by the concept. Gentleness needs to be freely given and available.

I do not want to ignore the evils of the world. We cannot stop them unless we acknowledge that they exist and act on that.

But at the same time, looking at the horrors and knowing you can’t stop them is hard. Not as hard as living through them, but still hard.

I was brought to this realization by two recent posts on social media. In one, a friend was planning to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, but going to skip Chapter 1 because they can’t face reading it again.

It’s a very hard chapter to read. You must read it when you read the book the first time, but it will likely be so seared in your memory after that that you can skip it and get to the part of the story that shows a better path forward on any re-reads.

Someone else I follow was watching Furiosa, the prequel to Fury Road, and while they love the movie, had to stop because they found it too hard to rewatch knowing what was coming.

I think that’s why I need gentle right now: because looking at what we’ve been through the last few years, I know some of what’s coming. Continue reading “On Gentleness”…

The Right Way to Be a Writer

personby Madeleine Robins
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TLDR: There isn’t one.

I once auditioned to teach a writing course on the community level for a place that offered a bewildering array of classes in everything from becoming a real estate tycoon to becoming a high-end chef. It was pretty clear to me that they syllabus the program wanted was based on the 5- or 7-beat plot (which are essentially the same thing, but the 7-beat-plot breaks the stages down a bit more). So I put together a class outline and taught a sample class and lost the gig. Why? As near as I can tell, it’s because at the end of the class I said something like “Of course, this is only one way to write a novel, and it might not be the one for you.”

Apparently that was heresy. True, in my opinion, but heretical in that situation. Oh well.

I think many satisfying books have a glancing relation to the 5- or 7-beat story (there are many different terms for each beat–one man’s “introduction” might be another man’s “exposition,” etc. But the writer may get there without once thinking in those terms.

These days a lot of the writing advice I see is not about writing at all, but about the business of being a writer. And a lot of that advice is such that I, for one, would never have put pen to paper if I had seen it as a young and tender human. If you are the sort of person who likes to write, but writes slowly, or sweats over crafting a sentence, or thinks in a quirky, non-linear fashion, some of the rules could stop you dead. If you’re the kind of introvert for whom having a Social Media presence gives you shudders the rules could stop you dead. And rules really shouldn’t stop you dead, honest.

I was confidently told last month by someone who I assume is living up to her own dicta, that if I couldn’t publish a book a month–more would be better, but a girl’s got to sleep–then I would never make it as a writer.

Um.

It may be fortunate that I don’t make my living by writing, because I flunk many of the Right Way To Be A Writer tests. The fastest I have ever written a book was a little under three months–from turning in the outline to the editor  (I never outline, but it was a media tie-in book and such was required) to dropping the manuscript on said editor’s desk. Approval of the outline, by the way, came in a week after I delivered the book (the book was needed urgently, as the writer whose work had previously been scheduled for that slot had had to drop out–publishing schedules are sometimes inexorable). So: I am not going to be putting out a book a month, under any circumstances. I don’t, as noted, outline (actually, sometimes I outline when I’m about 2/3 of the way through a book to make sure I know where I”m going). The 5 or 7 steps in my plot are observed only when the book is done and I can say “hey, look! Rising action! I did that!” All in all, in terms of the Right Way shibboleths, I’m a pretty bad writer.

And yet I’ve written more than a dozen books, published 11 of them (I’m polishing #12 as we speak). So somehow, despite the rules, I appear to be a writer.

All this is to say: you are a writer if you write. You may not be an author (I tend to think of authors as persons who have written, and perhaps published. Authordom involves past tense). You may structure your work rigorously according to one metric or another, or wander, as I do, over the landscape of your plot until you find yourself at a satisfying destination. The rules are really just there to help you, not to grade you.

Okay: maybe there is one rule I would say is inviolable: Be yourself and have fun. If you’re having fun, even if it’s the stare-off-into-the-middle-distance-and-swear-under-your-breath sort of fun, then you’re doing it right. If you’re having fun, it’s far more likely that someone else–like the audience–will as well (all things being equal, and the book being written in sentences and stuff).

You can tie your own hands by following the rules; that may make you feel safer. But remember that art is by its nature a risky business.

Endings and beginnings and food and drink

personby Gillian Polack
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Tonight my mood shifted dramatically. I like to think that this signals a better year for all of us in 2025. For certain, it signals that a friend had a birthday and that I got to taste a yuzu saké (light and slightly fizzy and perfectly delightful) and am maybe a little drunk. I seldom get drunk. I used not to be able to (trust me, friends tested this, many times) and now that I can… I don’t care to any more. Tonight was an exception. I avoided the wine and only emerged to taste the various types of saké. I like the sake gin, but I adored the yuzu saké and so I drank two glasses.

All I got from drinking was being very relaxed and talkative (and I am often talkative, so even that was nothing new) and a very enthusiastic discussion of the foodways of Japan and South Korea. I was also given two small bottles of cooking saké. I am supposed to be writing up a literature study now, but my mind is fixated on the best dishes to make with cloudy cooking saké and clear cooking saké. Australian-made. I am thinking chicken. Maybe using the same technique I use to cook chicken with verjuice. Maybe something different. I shall put my dream-brain on the problem and emerge with something wonderful for my first dinner next year. I shall eat the chicken and rice with tabbouli (my grandmother’s recipe).

Quite obviously, me slightly drunk is not a lot different from me slightly sober. I think about food history, pop culture, and what food I should be cooking with cool ingredients. I might do some shopping for more cool ingredients tomorrow, for delivery in the new year, just to provide continuity of thought. And I shall finish my literature review tonight and put the books away so that the friends coming to dinner for Chanukah tomorrow have chairs to sit on. I will be offering them tortillas with various fillings and much salad. Also cherries and apricots and iced tea.

This is maybe the best way possible to spend the second last and last nights of the old year. With friends, having enjoyable conversations, not a single racist in sight, and dreams of what to do in 2025.

May you also have a very fine last two days of a not-so-good year, and emerge into a far more delightful 2025. I know it will be more delightful because I have publications emerging. One of the stories that will emerge is exceedingly sarcastic. This is another very good continuity between two years. I like the thought of all of us dumping the bad and enjoying the good.

Happy 2025!

Need Something to Read?

personby Crow, Editor
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Ambling Along the Aqueduct, the Aqueduct Press blog, is doing its annual series of authors listing their Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024.

You can read Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore’s contribution — Past, Present, and Future — here. She discusses three books that define 2024 for her.

But don’t stop there. The rest of the blog posts are chock full of things to read, to listen to, and to watch, some of them well-known, some obscure.

Check it out. You might find your new favorite thing.

The Complexity of the Future

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I have started a new practice – ahead of New Year’s Resolutions – of reading a book for a short time in the morning and again in the evening. The morning practice started as a way of calming myself after doing my morning exercises before I check my blood pressure, but it is growing into something more, a way of setting up my day.

The evening practice is intended to give my mind something to chew on while falling asleep so that it’s engaged with something besides worry. (Worry is not helpful for falling asleep.)

At the moment I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in the morning and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty at night. This was partly chance – Rovelli’s work is in short chapters, perfect for ten minutes of reading at a time and the Prigogine book is from the library and will have to be returned and is also a book that is best read slowly, in short periods.

Both of them are about time and physics – Prigogine won the Nobel for chemistry, but his work was in thermodynamics – and they do fit together well.

I should point out that I am not a physicist nor have I ever wanted to be that or a scientist of any kind. What interests me about both these books is not the science, but the way the science underlies philosophy and the way our world actually works.

Essentially, I am searching – I am always searching – for different ways to get at deep truth.

One of the things I learned in my many years in Aikido is that it is good to take classes from different people because then you get a glimpse of truth from more than one point of view. That is likewise true of reading a variety of people on a variety of subjects.

Part of what I’m looking for these days is how to deal with the polycrisis – or maybe polycrises – we face these days with the right wing extremists getting in the way of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, misogyny, racism, and other deep problems as well as creating new problems by their very existence.

I no longer think ordinary politics is a useful path. I will leave that to the people who still believe that it might work. I will vote and such, but I will not count on anything done through the U.S. political system to solve any of the real problems or to even get the extremists out of our lives.

So then the question becomes, what can we do? Continue reading “The Complexity of the Future”…

Stories of stories of stories are embedded in Jewish history

personby Gillian Polack
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I am supposed to be asleep. In six hours I have to wake up and buy all my fruit and vegetables at the farmers’ market. It’s the last day I can do this and… I’m tired. My body announced that we’re getting another heatwave. It announced this by pushing my mind into fastplay. Then I got excited by my thoughts: I finally had a reason for something that has been plaguing me for decades. This is why I am writing you all this blogpost at an unholy hour when I ought to be asleep. I’m not at all certain that anyone but me will be excited, but I’m very excited, so this is fair. The world is balanced.

Also, I may be entirely and completely wrong about everything I say here. If I am, please don’t just say “You’re wrong” – tell me how and why. (I’m a bit tired of being I’m wrong with no explanation. This is not you, this is the wider public which is full of opinions on all things Jewish right now. Most of the opinions are not nice.)

Once upon a time, in a moment a bit like the one we’re in now, when the rulers of France and its church demanded that all Jews be their kind of Jew, this view was challenged. “Their kind of Jew” was one which supported that particular branch of Christian theology and the rulers and all sorts of related things. By “supporting” some Jews were expected to engage in very specific debates that were not supposed to demonstrate truths, but demonstrate the Christian truths that were important in that moment and place.

The learned Jews of Paris and its nearby regions had little choice but to engage in the debate because, to be frank, Jews were not given a fair go. They were not full citizens with full rights. What they were is complex to explain so I’ll cheat a bit and explain one view of what Jews were expected to be. We were expected to be (and still are, in some circles) the remnant of those who witnessed the coming of the Messiah. We were important as people who had seen. But Jews are fractious and difficult and were a lot more than that, and, for a variety of reasons, the French king became very aware of this. He was a holy bloke, was Louis IX, and he loved showing off his piety. Place an image in your mind of a rather splendid thirteenth century French king. We will return to him.

Now we travel back in time. We will return to Louis IX.

The thing is, Jewish history is often part of the history of the lands where Jews live, but it also goes its own way. When something troubling happens, we respond.

Once upon a time (an earlier time) Judaism had the Written Law (the Torah) and Oral Law. There was trouble. Much change happened. This was when the Second Temple fell and Jews were enslaved and became part of the Roman Empire. It caused many learned folk to ask, “What happens if we lose all these experts who know the Oral Law?” They also asked, “What do we do without the Temple?” There were answers that had already been considered (because we had lost the Temple once before, I suspect), but that’s a different story. Related, but different. Stories breed stories. History is never simple. And Gillian is full of aphorisms today.

The learned folks who maintained the oral law began writing it down. It took a while. A long, long while. About five hundred years.

Not only was there a lot of oral law to write down, but learned Jews are, were, and always will be opinionated, so those doing the documentation added stuff and it was talked about and… the Talmud is the most amazing document. One of the great feats of literature and story and argument and religion, all bound together into a wildly difficult set of books. I was once told that whoever studies the Talmud is learning about humanity, and to me that sounds about right.

The Talmud comes in two versions of considerably different lengths with considerably different material. One was written in what is now Iraq, by diaspora Jews, and the other was written in Jerusalem. Finally, finally, it was written down (handwritten, all those volumes written down then copied by scribes, one letter at a time) and, as far as I know (this is not something I know enough about) determinations were made about what words and thoughts were part of the official document. And so we had both the Torah and the Talmud in written versions, by the end of the early Middle Ages.

That wasn’t the end of it. Jewish culture contains story and discussions and finding a stupid example and using it to teach and a whole bunch of culture at its core. Also bad jokes. I find it very difficult to explain to the highly serious why one festival incorporates getting drunk and also mocking the story of the Book of Esther, but the heart of this sense of humour and the ability to take religion both very seriously and very lightly can be traced back through the Talmud. What happened next followed the general cultural lines of Jewish thought, and takes us right into the Middle Ages.

The Talmud in its modern printed version occupies whole walls of the houses of very highly learned religious people of Judaism (not me, I am not of the Jewish scholarly elite at all). It takes seven and a half years to read it through once in the regular way, at a page a day. It, in its modern version, is probably the longest written work every published. The Talmud is beyond brilliant and beyond stupid and the best way to read it is in discourse (and probably argument) with other people. I don’t know whether to be infuriated to amused at those idiots who share one page of translated extracts and say “Look how foul Judaism is: their holy book says this.” It’s using a few words to hide the whole document.

You can find a complete translation of the Talmud (but not of the one page that misleads) here. https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

The Torah is the law, and the Talmud is where the law is explained so that we know what to do with it. Medieval rabbis helped us understand how to interpret the Talmud, because placing yourself in front of thousands of pages with no guidance is the sure way to not understand the law.

This is where Europe joins the party. A bunch of learned European Jews gave ordinary Jews (such as myself) technical guides to help with the interpretation. The code breakers that most people know of and may use are the Mishneh Torah, written by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides 1135-1204) who was wildly controversial when he lived and whose legacy has been profound. He lived in what’s now the south of Spain but was forced to move to Egypt and its environs by antisemites. At the end of the Middle Ages or in the Early Modern era (depending on how you define periods) an easier to read codification was written, first in 1563 by Joseph Caro (living in what is now Syria from 1488–1575, he was actually born in Toledo and thrown out along with all other Jews in 1492) and then annotated for Ashkenazi Jews by Moses Isserles (born in Krakow in 1530). I’ve used the English translation and it really is a codification of the complicated that makes much of the standard part of Jewish law accessible to the masses.

How the Talmud began to be read included more than those codifications. This is where things start to get funky. Also, my timeline is warped.

The Talmud as we know it is not simply what was written by 800, of material that was commonly used for Jewish law and education earlier than that. The Medieval book contained commentaries. The most important one is by one of my favourite rabbis of all time, Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki, or Solomon son of Isaac 1040-1105). He was trained in what is now Germany (and if he was born there, he may well have had a secular name as well as a Hebrew name), but most of the work that we know of was done in Normandy. This has a rather important implication for the return of Louis IX, so hold the thought: the most important commentary on the Oral Law was done by a Frenchman.

Rashi’s vineyard helped him earn the money to teach and to study and to write brilliant philosophical, legal and other stuff. He was a genius.

Why do I love Rashi? He gave me proof that young women wore blue eyeshadow to look sexy and how they carefully laced the sides of their dresses to also look sexy. He gives us evidence of hot water machinery and foot braziers and even paper clips. His answers to religious questions incorporated the everyday of his congregants and the general Jewish public. He taught his daughters and they played an important part in the transmission of Jewish learning during his life and after his death. Also, he liked a good pot roast.

Rashi wrote a commentary that was written as part of the frame around the Talmud when it became what we know know it as. His legacy-scholars, the Tosafists, also wrote commentary and that was also made part of the frame. To read the Talmud, then, is to read a chronicle of the thoughts of many major rabbis from the third century to the thirteenth century as a documentation of non-documented Judaism from earlier.

Now we’re back to Louis IX, who lived from about 1226 to 1270. Christianity changed throughout the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century western Christianity had become very interesting indeed. It accepted Judaism, as I said earlier, within limits. There was much debate of the public sort and Louis decided (with the help of those difficult public debates) that the Talmud with all its commentaries transgressed those limits. It was material that Jews had developed since the time of Jesus and this was not permissible.

Twenty-five cartloads of these amazing books were burned. Twenty-five. Cartloads. Each volume had been written by hand and was worth, in modern terms, at least as much as a good EV.

None of this is my big revelation. My revelation is that I finally realise why Louis felt burning books was so imperative.

He didn’t want to destroy Jews. Unlike some other rulers at other times, Louis had a place for us in his theology. What he didn’t have a place for were culturally-developed, successful Jews who did not fit stereotypes. It’s as if Mr Not-Quite-Bright from next door can only accept Jews who are moneylenders or part of a secret cabal that controlled the world. When his Jewish next door neighbours admitted that he was a schoolteacher and she a lawyer, he could not cope and set fire to their shed.

This isn’t an insight into Louis IX. We already knew this about him. He wanted to world to fit his (occasionally generous but usually religious) world view. What has kept me up far, far past my sensible bedtime is that this means that there may have been more Jews in northern France than I thought and that they must have been culturally amazing. I knew this deep down, because scholars like Rashi don’t just appear out of nowhere and leave a vast legacy of learning and writing.

Late in life, Rashi saw some of those who went on the First Crusade murder many, many people he know. I think we underestimate how much hurt was done because we are so used to the world of Jews being torn apart and Jews being murdered. I suspect I need to visit my first area of specialisation and rethink the culture of Northern France. I did this for Germany recently and … I suspect that France was not a Christian country, but a country under Christian rule. Those books were written by people and studied by people and did not emerge from a vacuum. It was, I suspect, the fact that Jewish life was in an amazing stage of growth and learning that triggered Louis the Pious.

When I finish my current projects (this may take a year or so) I shall return to my intellectual homeland and analyse the evidence I thought I knew. Instead of saying, “There are no Jews in the chansons de geste, so there can’t have been many Jews” I shall look for evidence of growth and change and disruption and sudden discovery. I suspect there may be a novel in this, and if there is, I suspect it may contain fairies. I have Reasons.

Before I can explore those Reasons, though, I need to get my paleography books out and find out just how many people we’re talking about when we’re wondering about who copied those Talmuds and how different Hebrew manuscripts were (in terms of labour and time and money spent creating those manuscripts) were to the Latin and Old French manuscripts I know much more about. Look at the dates. Rashi died in 1105. The books were burned in 1242. I need to do some sums. And more. Much more.

I can’t even begin the research until I have finished all my current projects. This is why I am so kindly giving you my sleeplessness. I am sharing the pain of something I can’t even begin to work on at this moment. I’m a very kind person.