[Marxism] Norman Cantor

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From today's NY Times:

Norman F. Cantor, 74, a Noted Medievalist, Is Dead
By WOLFGANG SAXON

Norman Frank Cantor, a prominent American medievalist whose books, like
his classic "Civilization of the Middle Ages," were widely read in the
classroom and beyond, died on Saturday at his home in Miami, where he
retired four years ago. He was 74 and a former resident of Greenwich
Village.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Mr. Cantor retired in 1999 as a professor emeritus of history, sociology
and comparative literature at New York University, where he had been
since 1978. Just before that he was on the faculty of the University of
Illinois as vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Mr. Cantor has won high praise for his fluent, graceful prose style and
the narrative drive that made his books unusually readable.

"The Civilization of the Middle Ages" has been in print ever since it
was first published in 1963. It most recently came out in 1994 in a
revised edition from Harper Trade, with new research focused on
contemporary concerns like women's role in society and history.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/21/obituaries/21cantor.html

===

Altogether missing from the Times obit is any mention of one of Cantor's
most important books, "The Sacred Chain: the History of the Jews",
something that is germane to our ongoing discussion. Although Cantor was
hostile to the left and directed many barbs at Edward Said in this work,
it is an extremely useful debunking of Jewish hagiography around shtetl
life. Here's an excerpt:

"From 'Fiddler on the Roof' the audience gets no sense of the downside
of the Jewish Reformation as it left its impress on Jewish life in the
Pale in the nineteenth century.

"The Jews had their Torah to comfort them, although women were rarely
taught Hebrew so as to be able to read it. They had their Talmud to
guide them, although only a small minority of males and no women had the
privilege of Talmudic study. they had rabbis and zaddikim to turn to for
inspiration and personal counseling, but frequently these leaders were
indifferent to the miserable conditions of the ordinary Jewish men and
women, and were more concerned with their own power and affluence than
with the physical and moral needs of their followers. What you do not
learn from Sholem Aleichem is the superstition and the ignorance and the
general ambiance of cruelty and deprivation, of fatalism and magic, and
of comatose squalor that characterized the culture of the shtetl."


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