History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented.
by Bernard Lewis.
Princeton University Press. 128 pp. $6.95.
If the task of the poet is to interpret our souls to ourselves, and that of the national historian to transmit our past to our present, the historian of foreign nations has the more difficult task of recounting the past of others, and explaining it to our own present. The difficulty is compounded when the historian’s chosen subject is not merely a different nationality, but a different civilization. The narrative procedures may be no different and the selection of the evidence presents the same problems, but it is much more difficult to represent accurately the ideals and ideas which inform human conduct across the cultural barrier. Such ideas cannot be baldly stated, for then they would be meaningless or bound to be misunderstood. The transcultural historian cannot limit himself to the translation of words without in some sense betraying the truth. Instead he must interpret, and then explain, by evocation and suggestion rather than direct statement.
To write the history of other civilizations, then, means to contend with difficulties at every turn, but if the difficulties are confronted, there is a hidden compensation in the endeavor: with the search for valid interpretations of the ideas of others, an illuminating perspective on our own may be acquired. Having long since turned the peculiar difficulties of the transcultural historian to his own full advantage, Bernard Lewis has emerged as a historian tout court, and of the very first rank. On the solid foundation of the documentary research of his specialized work, Lewis has built an edifice of interpretative studies of Middle Eastern history which have given him a worldwide reputation even among those entirely unfamiliar with his writings on the Ottomans and the Turks. Among his many significant works are The Middle East and the West, The Arabs in History, and The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Now that Lewis has himself been translated from the University of London to Princeton, we have among us not only one of the world’s great scholars, but a master of English style in whose writing great elegance and extreme verbal precision are found in easy communion with an exceedingly subtle sense of the ironical.
This short book, the revised text of the Gottesman Lectures given at Yeshiva University, is a work not of history but of historiography. Lewis is here concerned not with what happened but rather with the variegated processes whereby the past is recorded or forgotten, recovered, explained, or explained away: through folk memory and ceremonial commemoration; through the reconstruction of archeological, epigraphic, numismatic, or textual evidence; or by the energetic interpretation of facts, in order to make the recalcitrant past conform to the political order, or collective self-image, which dominates the present.
The search for identity in real or imagined history is a powerful and universal impulse. But like the quest for identity of the alienated man, it may create more problems than it solves: the past identity may not conform to expectations, and different historical identities may be in conflict. Lewis, for instance, writes of the phenomenon of present-day Egyptian territorial patriotism, inspired by the recovery of the pharaonic past, and of the tension between the “pharaonic” and the Islamic identity in the Egyptian psyche of today. The Koranic version of the Exodus story symbolizes this tension, for the Koran sides with the Jews, the favored of God, while the Pharaoh—the first anti-Zionist—is cast as the villain. During the 1967 pre-war crisis—at a time of high and rising Islamic fervor—an Egyptian writer found it necessary to justify the policy of the ancient Pharaoh against the Koranic verdict in an article for the mass-circulation paper, Al Ahram.
While some self-defined human groups suffer deep anxieties because they lack any historic identity at all, and others have to endure the clash of two conflicting identities, the modern process of national definition, inspired by 19th-century European ideas, has in some cases imposed a need to choose among multiple historical identities. In this book Lewis returns to the fascinating case of modern Turkey, where no fewer than three identities competed for adoption—the Ottoman, at once political and religious, which embraced multiple languages, many peoples, and much geography; the “Anatolian,” which corresponded to the geography of post-1922 Turkey, but whose borders would not frame the ancestral home of the Turks, relative newcomers; and the Turkic, which correlated with language and people, but not with territory. Each of these identities implied a national program for Ataturk’s Turkey: imperial revanchism for the Ottoman identity, expansionist pan-Turkism for the ethnic identity, and territorial patriotism for the geographic identity. Ataturk, no Nasser, chose the last, preferring to annex the unresisting past rather than to attempt the recovery of the vast lands of the Ottoman empire, or to contest Soviet control of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Thus all the civilizations that had occupied Anatolia back to Hittite times (minus Greeks, Jews, and Armenians) were granted retrospective naturalization into Turkish citizenship, by constitutional fiat. The alternative identities would have launched Turkey on a course of open-ended conflict.
In the opening chapter, “Masada and Cyrus,” Lewis discusses the ways in which the memory of things past is sometimes lost and then recovered. He explains why the rabbinic tradition preserved no mention of Masada—the desert fortress where in 73 C.E. a desperate group of Jewish men and women committed suicide rather than surrender to a besieging force of Roman soldiers—and he describes how the event was recovered in Jewish history (and Jewish popular consciousness) from secular history, before the place itself was recovered and excavated.
Seeking to explain the poverty of Jewish historiography, Lewis focuses on the deliberate opposition of the rabbis of late antiquity who, drawing their own authority from the legitimacy of the revealed oral law and its interpretation, were naturally inimical to the developmental analysis which is intrinsic to the writing of history. Rabbinic culture, which became the sole culture of a people who for centuries were without power, was preoccupied with spiritual and legalistic themes (and with the tension between the two). By contrast, the political and military themes which form the natural core of historiography were foreign to Jewish life. Until European ideas of nationality came to pervade Jewish consciousness, Jewish identity was primarily religious and not national. It was only when European-style nationalism was internalized among Jews—a process which Zionism promoted and made operational—that there was a corresponding awakening of interest in ancient Jewish history. In Israel, of course, this takes a territorial form and is manifest in the mass interest in archeology.
In this short book, Bernard Lewis introduces the reader to the essential problem of historiography, the relationship between the surviving evidence of the past and the preoccupations of the present which induce us to take an interest in the past—or rather in carefully selected segments of the collective past. At once deeply learned and quite genuinely entertaining, this short work is a gem.
