[REVIEW] Three Books on Culture Change

[rfmcdonald]

The history of the southern Levant three thousand or so years ago enjoys an importance out of proportion to its geographic area, thanks to the origins of the Abrahmic religion in the writings of the local West Semitic tribes of the period. Arriving at an accurate account of what exactly happened in the area--what cultures rose, what cultures fell, and how the acts of rising and of falling were accomplished--is notoriously difficult because of the emotions involved in determining just what history is correct. (Current disputes over the rightful proprietors of the territory also complicate matters.) William G. Dever's Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? does a good job of examining the evidence, site by site, epoch by epoch.

Dever's reconstruction appears to make sense, avoiding the extremes of denying any historical validity to the Bible or of ascribing complete accuracy to the Bible. (The Book of Joshua comes off particularly badly, given the lack of archeological evidence for any campaigns of conquest, or indeed, of many of the places claimed conquered.) The book's conclusion that, a certain immigration from Egypt aside, the Israelites can trace their origins to highland refugees from the collapse of Egypt's post-Hyksos imperial satellite states in Palestine in the 14th and 13th centuries BCE looks plausible at its conclusion. People more familiar with biblical archeology than me can judge whether or not Dever is indeed the neutral third-person observer he positions himself as, but I was satisfied.





Making Jews Modern, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, is a fascinating book whcih explores the impact of modernity on Jews in southeastern and eastern Europe. Stein is specifically concerned with exploring the ways in which the Yiddish press (in the Russian empire) and the Ladino press (in the former Ottoman sphere) served to create "modern"--consumerist, Westernized, politicized--Jewish populations. The book is a comparative study of these two great lost cultures of the Diaspora, examining how the five million or so Ashkenazic Jews of the Russian Empire and the quarter-million Ladino-speaking Sephardim reacted to the transformations of belle époque Europe on Europe's geographic margins.

Making Jews Modern was interesting in the way that it evoked the impact of mass media on still-traditional cultures, and the way that the mass media were used by members of these cultures to try to propagate their cultures. If Jewish newspapers advertised cosmetics, imperial adventures, scandalous gossip, and advice for Westernized Jewish households, they also communicated news about the latest pogroms, provided religious education, and served as fora for debates on Zionism. I find it hard to disagree, at the end, with Stein's conclusion that whereas the much smaller Sephardic population was declining, sapped by emigration and acculturation (not only to the cultures of the Ottoman successor states, but to the Francophone culture propagated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle), the Ashkenazic population was thriving, growing in numbers and confidence despite the serious problems of post-Great War Europe. The Holocaust changed this, of course.





Between History and Tomorrow is subtitled "Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland." Written by an anthropologist (Gerald Sider) who did extensive fieldwork in Newfoundland, the copy I read is actually the second edition, written after the collapse of the cod fisheries in the early 1990's and the beginnings of a spectacular depopulation of the province. This edition of Between History and Tomorrow reads like a post-mortem analysis of traditional Newfoundland culture, seeking to discover the reasons for the failure of Newfoundland's traditional fishing culture to sustain itself.

Dependency is identified as the key reason for the failure of Newfoundland. There existed, in Sider's convincing reading of traditional Newfoundland culture and Newfoundland history, a nexus of social, economic, and political structures which tied the inhabitants of the outports to outside merchants and bureaucrats, never allowing the former to achieve any degree of autonomy relative to the latter through more favourable rates with moneylending, secure tenure to their land, and so on. This external dependency didn't produce any internal solidarity among the outport residents, though; if anything, there seems to have been a lot of tension, demonstrated by a reluctance to lend aid to anyone not part of one's family or circle of friends. In the end, and despite Sider's suggestion that Newfoundland's fate at the hands of an uncaring wider economy might be replicated in numerous other places (exhausted maquiladora towns on the Mexican border, say), one can't help but feel that Newfoundland was doomed to exhaust its resource-based economy and be thrown back on such other resources as remained.