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Jews

HISTORY LESSON

Gaza, according to the Old Testament,

was, directly or indirectly,

frequently in receipt of God’s wrath,

most spectacularly when the Jewish giant,

Samson – who had been there whoring – was blinded

by its unsavoury residents, and bound

to the pillars of their heathen temple.

He brought it down around their ears, and his.

Millennia later, John Milton wrote:

‘Gaza still stands, but all its Sons are fall’n’.

 

***

 

Once, when we were learning about some outrage

or other, our history teacher observed

that there were two types of human being:

those we could imagine invading our homes

in the dead of the night, assembling us

in the street, and harrying us onto the trains

for Auschwitz – and those we couldn’t. Though perhaps

some of my peers wondered who they might be

it never occurred to me I would not be

one who felt for the oppressed: for the Jews,

of course, the Irish, Roma, Kurds,

Palestinians – all the migrant

and indigenous peoples of the earth,

defiled, displaced, diminished, denied.

 

***

 

The history of humankind seems to be one

of small tribes continually warring over

small plots of land that might produce

the odd pitcher of milk and honey.

And, it seems, in any particular place

or time, the tribe that gets to write the book gets

to invent the past or tell the truth, gets to

destroy the present or make it, gets to

determine the future.

 

 

LAKE URMIA

In Old Persian, language of the Shah of Shahs,

Darius the Great, whose inscriptions

extend from Persepolis to Egypt,

and from Romania to Bahrain,

this salt lake, greater than the Dead Sea,

was called Chichast, ‘Glittering’ – sunlight

on the undulating lapidary

of myriads of silver particles.

Urmia – Assyrian Aramaic

for ‘City of Water’ – is high above

the lake on a fertile plateau

of orchards, grape vines, tobacco fields.

The city, a millennium ago,

was diverse, cosmopolitan, tolerant:

Christians, Jews, Muslims; Azeris,

Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, Kurds.

The Christians went first – massacred by the Turks

crossing the border. The Jews left for Israel.


Global warming is turning the lake

into an industrial salt pan the ancients

would have envied. Encrusted pedalos

and stranded diving boards in silent

holiday resort towns around the coast

glare like gargantuan rhinestones.

‘THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE’

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read640 views

Our present government, unfairly perhaps,

is often caricatured as self-serving,

racist and incompetent – and yet,

with a rather modest investment

of taxpayers’ money, has published

a report which may revolutionise

our study of history, showing

not just the costs but the benefits

to victims of great crimes: ‘There is a new

story about the Caribbean

experience which speaks to the slave period

not only being about profit

and suffering but how culturally

African people transformed themselves

into a re-modelled African/Britain.’

 

After ‘THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE’

an ambitious revisionist might write of

‘THE BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE’ – where

half of the ten million were enslaved – then

‘THE REWARDS OF THE U.S. PENAL SYSTEM’,

and ‘APARTHEID: THE BLACK DIVIDEND’.

Next might come three or four new volumes

commissioned under the generic title

‘THE BENEFITS OF GENOCIDE’: as witnessed

in Australasia, the Americas;

by the Armenians; the Uyghurs;

the Roma and the Jews.

 

 

 

 

TOWARDS A DEFINITION

Anti-Semitism is the demagogue’s

canard,  the resort of the populist,

the calculating racist’s dog whistle,

the opportunist’s bigotry, hatred of,

and prejudice against, Jewish people.

 

When Alfred Dreyfus was humiliated

on the Champs de Mars there were three hundred

Jewish officers in the French Army,

ten of them generals. The real spy,

Major Esterhazy, with official

connivance, died in his bed as Count

de Voilement at ‘Holmleigh’, 21

Milton Road, Harpenden, Hertfordshire,

 

Eventually exonerated,

after two trials and Devil’s Island,

Colonel Dreyfus served on the Western Front,

as did his son, Pierre. His granddaughter,

Madeleine, a Red Cross social worker,

frontline member of the French Resistance,

arrested by the French police, held

briefly by the SS at Drancy,

was murdered at Auschwitz.

 

 

 

 

PROPHETS

The evangelist – spiritual aide-de-camp

to Old Glory’s Commanders-in-Chief,

and nostrum-monger of eternal life –

in white shirt, black shoes, socks, trousers, the Good Book

open in his hands, sits astride a donkey

near the Garden of Gethsemane

on Mount Olive. Below him on Temple Mount,

in noonday brightness, is the Dome of the Rock

and the Al-Aksa Mosque and, out of sight,

the Western Wall. He looks at the camera

as one who might say, ‘Behold! When the Jews

hold Jerusalem heaven will open.

Jesus will return on a white horse!’

The donkey’s Arab minder – in slightly

shabby casual wear – steadies the beast

by placing his right arm on its hindquarters.

The goad, which he holds in his left hand,

rests on the creature’s belly. His wrist watch

is exposed. We can almost tell the time.

He smiles or leers at the camera

as if to say, ‘Behold!’

 

 

 

CONTAGION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read486 views

‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe,  and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ Francesco Petrarch

 

Somewhere near the estuary of the Don,

with its mudflats and meanders, north

of the Sea of Azov, and somewhere

near the Volga Delta, with its pelicans

and flamingos, north of the Caspian,

on the steppe lands are black rats and fleas

and yersinia pestis. The rats

like human warmth, and the fleas can leap.

 

The Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde,

recently converted to Islam,

had closed the Silk Road for religious reasons.

Italian merchants in Kaffa, Crimea,

notwithstanding held their fort. The Mongols

besieged the Christians and, withered by the plague,

so it is said, threw the corpses of their dead

over the ramparts. The merchants decamped.

 

The bacterium was borne along trade routes –

in holds of ships and folds of clothing.

In eight years the Black Death killed fifty million.

There was collateral damage – in Strasburg

and all of Rhineland the burning of Jews.

It probably brought about the end

of the feudal system, and undermined

the Pope’s domination, making the world

free for capital, enterprise and invention –

like mariners’ astrolabes, matchlock guns,

the Atlantic Slave Trade.