Re: [Marxism] Norman Cantor

["andypollack@xxxxxxxx" <andypollack@xxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for this Louis. Irving Howe also had some choice words on the same romanticization of the shtetl in his "World of our Fathers [sic]". Which reminds me (and I'll get to the connection at the end): ever since Madonna and the other musical ninnies jumped on this Kabbalah idiocy I've been wondering when someone would point out that until recently the only reference to that phenomenon was use of the word "cabal" as a generic disparaging of any secretive group planning nefarious activities. Or the word "cabalistic" to describe the same. And the roots were no mystery (see the OED).

One could say it's anti-Semitic to choose the original Kabbalists as the source of such a generic epithet (and I suppose references to Jesuitic logic are not free of anti-Catholicism). But, getting back to Louis et al.'s recounting of Leon, the changing social conditions in the late medieval/early capitalism ghetto DID produce a layer of mystical, secretive, anti-enlightenment fools, among them the Kabbalists.

So it's ironic but fitting that Madonna, in this age of postmodernism, astrological, diss-the-Enlightenment bellygazing, have resurrected this pathetic, anti-humanist tradition.

-- Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 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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