Silliness: Chaucer Spoke Yiddish?

Like a lot of people, I know enough random words in Yiddish to embarrass myself in mixed company. One of those words is shanda—or shonda, shondah, shande, however you want to spell it. It means “shame” or “scandal.” Open up a Philip Roth novel and every other page there’s a stereotypical overbearing Jewish mother yelling at her son that he’s a shanda to the family. How dare he look at a shiksa that way! (one time that comment was made in real life, and I was the shiksa in question. Nice, huh?)

Anyway, for some reason I started to wonder if the word shanda had become an accepted English word, so I looked it up on dictionary.com. Here’s what I found:

Shonde
\Shonde\, n. [AS. sceond. Cf. Shend.] Harm; disgrace; shame. [Obs.] --Chaucer.

Chaucer?!

If you’ve read the Canterbury Tales, you’ll know that one of the stories—the Prioress’ tale—depicts Jews as bloodthirsty childkillers, and there’s very little in the text to indicate that Chaucer actually disagreed.

His feelings about Jews aside, I’m still confused as to how that word migrated into Chaucer’s Middle English vocabulary. Did Yiddish even exist in the 14th century? I was under the impression that the language coalesced from German and Hebrew; did Chaucer borrow the word from either of those languages? If he borrowed from Hebrew, how the hell did he know Hebrew? It was my understanding that after the Dark Ages, Northern Europeans did not study Greek or Hebrew until the Renaissance.

There’s no real point to this post, just thought I’d point out something odd. The English language is fun to study because it has evolved so much, picking up and dumping words from other languages. I’m glad it is not closely regulated like French or some other European languages—amputating huge chunks of vocabulary would be a shanda to the lexicon.

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Your Own Postcolonial Jesus

As most of you should know, I hate The Passion of the Christ. The drunky that put it together, Mel Gibson, thought he was clever because he used subtitles, but it's still a pointless visual onslaught that takes one image--Christ on the cross--and bludgeons you with it. The movie doesn't enrich or complicate the audience's understanding of Jesus as a divine figure, and it certainly doesn't go so far as to make any connection between the crucifixion and a moral code that Christians are supposed to observe. The Passion is a Christian movie just for Christians, a masturbatory exercise in which born-again yobs can revel in their own self-righteousness, which they direct at the Romans and the Jews without any moral restraint or attention to historical/theological context.

Wanna know a Jesus movie worth seeing? I'll tell you: The Last Temptation of Christ, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Note: I have not read the book, so I can't say if it's better or worse. Now, on to the film:

To be fair, the movie could stand to lose thirty minutes off its length, but the first ten minutes were just fabulous in posing the Jesus question in an almost purely political light. To wit: Jesus is a Jew. Jesus is a carpenter. Carpenters build things, like crosses. The Jews are under occupation by the Romans. In building crosses, Jesus is collaborating with the enemy, acting against his own people. The idea of Jesus undermining the Jewish political cause mirrors his position with respect to the Jewish religion. After all, Jesus claims that he came to "fulfill" the Jewish law, but not everyone agrees. His "fulfilling" the law can be seen as simply a happy-sounding euphemism for disregarding the law (I suspect this would be the mainstream Jewish opinion on the matter. For the record, I'm a Lutheran-raised atheist). On the other hand, many Christians celebrate his fulfillment of the law, to the point where they refuse to recognize that the old law had any value at all--and so a group of people worshipping a Jew become anti-Semitic. From these two points of view, Jesus works against Jews.

Jesus is aware of his difficult position, and struggles with it. Called by the God of Israel to lead his people, it's sometimes unclear what will happen when he does. In a temple Jesus cries that "God is not an Israelite. God is for everyone!"--that's great, but what does it do for the folks waiting for the Messiah to come an lead the Jews to victory over Caesar in battle? Jesus also struggles with the sacrifices he will have to make to fulfill his calling: no sex, no marriage, no children, no growing old. His doubts about his own worthiness mix with anxieties about the fate of his people, and this collision of the political and the psychological gives the Christ story a much-needed freshness.

This sense of urgency can explain why everyone acts, as my boyfriend described it, "like they're totally on drugs." In addition to the religious visions, which necessarily look hallucinagenic, this movie is full of paranoia, as the characters grapple with the political and religious threat Jesus poses to the status quo. These people are not the unnaturally solemn, silent Biblical figures we've drawn from Christian art, or from Gibson's movie, where he paid Monica Bellucci and others to stand around look "holy" for two hours. In this picture, the figures run around, shouting and arguing, sometimes pushing Jesus into a confrontation. Sometimes Jesus pushes back.

Although the film departs from Scripture, I imagine The Last Temptation of Christ would probably have a greater impact upon Christian viewers than would The Passion. I say this because Scorsese's film recontextualizes the Christ story, partly in colonial/nationalist terms, thus challenging and enriching the viewer's understanding of the subject. Also, by giving Christ and his followers a sense of crisis, and stripping away the smug self-assurance that was added by theologians in the following two thousand years, the story once again becomes powerful, inspiring gut emotion AND elevated thought.
Take that, Mel!

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You talkin' to me?

Everyone does that line--and a lot of them haven't seen Taxi Driver. I just saw it myself, but I've never been one of those people that quoted the line, so....there! And another thing...

Most people don't realize that in Taxi Driver, De Niro doesn't sound like a New York Italian-American (much). He tries to maintain a Midwestern accent, and it falters, but still, the thick New Yawk inflections that imitators assume don't come from Travis Bickle but from our general idea of who we think De Niro is. As for Travis, he's a dispossessed country boy, stuck in a city that is foreign and menacing to him. He internalizes the indifference and outright hatred he encounters until it totally separates him from any any moral anchor he may have had. Indeed, Bickle's violent apotheosis toward the end of the movie calls highlights how feelings of righteousness, while still maintaining their ferocity, can become morally inverted and paradoxical. Bickle is a guy that hates the violence of the city, and he carries guns; he hates unhealthiness, and he pops pills; he hates vulgarity, and he takes his date to a porno. Bickle is not the fast-talking wiseguy hero (or even anti-hero) that exists in the popular imagination; he is a venomous creature turned in on himself.

I'll dispense with my usual ten paragraphs on why this is a good movie and say this: It's a good movie. It's a great movie. Unfortunately, too many people think that they know what's it's about, so they never bother to see it. This is a mistake. Go see it. Until you do, I'll leave you with this:

"I had black coffee and apple pie with a slice of melted yellow cheese. I think that was a good selection."

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Bloody Hell

Why am I obsessed with fashion exhibits in NYC museums? Who knows. But here's another:

Starting Sept. 9 the Museum of the City of New York will be showing an exhibit called "Black Style Now," a presentation that an NYTimes article claims is based on "the groundbreaking exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2004." Well kiddies, I went to see the V&A exhibit and I have to say I find it sad that people feel the need to recreate such an exhibit in the US. And since you're dying to know, I'll explain why...

Let me digress for a moment (ok, for a few paragraphs) and talk about the V&A Black Style exhibit. The blurb on the exhibit's publication (which cost 20 quid, mind you) says, "The dress culture of people of African descent is rich in history and cultural significance and has had a significant global impact." African descent? This refers to black people. All of them. Black people from Jamaica, black people from Nigeria, you get the idea. Never mind that they come from different national and cultural backgrounds, apparently, they all have a single "dress culture." Bully for them. Also, the paragraph where I found this sentence mentions "global impact" and the African diaspora, which calls to mind not the UK proper but a transatlantic world that includes the UK, Africa, the Caribbean, the US, and so forth. So now apparently we're talking about all black people everywhere; they all have style. Brilliant. I'm glad I paid an extra ticket price to learn this.

As you've probably inferred from my oh-so-subtle sarcasm, I think that constructing a single black culture that disregards different national origins, immigrant histories, religious backgrounds, and generational divides, reinforces an essentialist view of race that should be an outdated cliche by now, in the US and the UK. To be fair, I've worked in a state-funded museum and I know that a lot of times intellectual nuances are sacrificed to political demands. Maybe someone told the curators they had to make an all-inclusive presentation about black people to satisfy a misguided sense of political correctness, and that is how they ended up making such sweeping generalizations. It can happen.

Either way, it was strange reading museum placards that had statements like the following: "This beautiful party dress has been included in the exhibition to reiterate that black people like to dress well in all aspects of their life." Such naive-sounding descriptions made me think they should have titled the exhibit "Black People: They're Just Like Us!" or "Black People: Not Really from Mars." A naivety was also present in the exhibit's incorporation of fashions associated with popular music:


[V&A Caption]: "This jacket refers to the seminal 1986 hip hop album Paid in Full, by African-American rap artists Eric B and Rakim. The men featured on the front of the album cover are both dressed in fake Gucci tracksuits, accessorised with giant gold medallions, Dukie ropes and knuckle duster rings." Ah, the obligatory hip-hop reference, very nice. The album referenced is 20 years old, but the outfit is timeless: overembellished designer ripoff with flashy gold jewelry. As a stereotype it worked in 1986 and it works now. The very fact that the notion of a hip-hop aesthetic has survived for this long suggests that while it may have coalesced from different trends in predominantly black communities, it has since been seized upon by record companies and other corporations that use a sensationalized image of "ghetto" blacks in order to sell their products to a wider audience. Of course, none of this is mentioned in the V&A exhibit. I mean, that would suggest that issues of identity are, like, complex or something. Can't have that!

The V&A exhibit was very confused; it was either trying to do too little or too much, and it ended up recycling some of the offensive racial imagery that (I imagine) it strove to dispel. In general, the Black British Style presentation appeared to rely on the apparent novelty of putting the words "black" and "British" next to each other, which I think is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the UK. I never would have thought anyone would think that it's a good idea to make a similar exhibit in the US in 2006, but I guess that shows how much I know. If anyone is in NYC in the next few months and sees the exhibit feel free to fill me in.

Relevant Links:

Black British Style - V&A
Black Style Now - MCNY
Who Put the Black In Black Style? - NYTIMES

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