Robin Reads the Internet – Robin Writes

Or why I study the Middle Ages and dress like the 1940s.

If you run in vaguely historical or vintage fashion-oriented circles online, you’ve probably run into the Vintage Egyptologist (whose work I can’t condone) or maybe, more recently, the Overdressed Archaeologist (whose work I absolutely encourage you to check out). These two women combine interests that are seemingly a bit at odds: a love of vintage fashion and style with the informed pursuit of ancient history. Why these things seem at odds is pretty immediately revealing. We often contrast women who are interested in their appearance with women of substance (though they are not mutually exclusive). We also see history as divided into distinct time periods and geographies that shouldn’t be combined – if you are interested in the very distant past, you must not care much for the more recent past, what with all its technology and liberal thought (ha!). But this particular combination of interests also feels very right and I can sum up why in one name: Indiana Jones. The most famous archaeologist, fictional or otherwise, unites interests in the study of the past with the aesthetics of the 1940s, the fantasy of a myth with the truth of what we find in the ground, and the tension between the order of museums/fascism with the freedom of being an American who can run around looting artifacts for a “good reason” and punching Nazis in the face along the way. Indiana Jones is all about fantasizing in two settings at the same time.

“But in Latin, Jehova is spelled with an I.”

You see, we don’t just want to be the discoverers of the past. We want to be people with style, just as we remember the recent past to have been, struggling against the limitations of our society to make sense of a far more distant one. We want to think of ourselves being remembered even as we are doing the remembering. We want to signal our importance by fashioning our personal images more intentionally. And we want to simplify our study of history by framing it, depending on your view of the 1940s, within a time that was either simpler and thus easier to do “objective” history within or with more clearly archetypal politics and thus easier to make current social critiques within. The 1940s (and the century of archaeology and history leading up to it) are an intentional choice for this setting. It was the end of an era, the imperial age, before it became taboo for large powerful nations to go into other countries and, while exploiting their natural resources and human labor, dig up their history and decide what it meant. At least, it became taboo to do that explicitly. It was during this time that the modern concept of history was defined. We looked at ourselves in the present and declared that we were outside of history, separate from the past, and that we could thus determine what the past was with pure objectivity. This is also the reason that time travel narratives don’t really exist in fiction before the late 19th century. This period saw the development of a complex and highly specific understanding of ourselves (by which I largely mean white Westerners) as our own creations, the end point of a series of choices about progress and civilization. As a result, we are both fascinated by and able to investigate all of the prior and “traditional” societies that did not seem to exhibit signs of such intentionality (although they are and have always been just as intentional). It’s for this same reason that a generation later, the kids raised on this kind of thinking and this approach to the past, felt there was nowhere left to go but up. “Space, the final frontier” encapsulates in four words an entire era’s dogma.

As an American medievalist, this period I’m describing from around the mid-19th century to the mid-20th is particularly important, because it’s when my field was created. America doesn’t have a medieval past, at least, not one that can serve as a foil and point of origin for a European society. Rather than find meaning in the Native American past that this country was rapidly erasing, Americans of European descent, particularly those with disposable wealth or some kind of European pedigree, wanted to stake their claim in European medieval history. They did this in very real, material ways, such as by collecting medieval antiquities, including entire buildings. This is a good moment for us to stop and appreciate what this kind of collecting really feels like, since it is the same process by which artifacts from all around the world have ended up in European and American art and cultural heritage institutions, now very controversial. In the wake of WWI, American art dealers traveled to Europe and picked through the remains of French towns destroyed by the war, then brought back everything from illuminated bibles to jeweled crosses to, again, entire buildings, and sold them to wealthy American industrialists like the Rockefellers or financiers like J.P. Morgan, who eventually donated them to museums as a kind of very conspicuous philanthropy. For white Americans, this kind of story might help illustrate why people might be very insistent that museums return artifacts to the countries they were found in – because the taking of those artifacts represents current political conflicts and violence. This is why romanticizing the era in which most of this collecting happened is at best oblivious – the lifestyles of the people who did this kind of antiquities collecting were very much a part of the disregard they exhibited toward the modern civilizations that lived on top of those antiquities. Appreciating archaeology as destruction (a favorite phrase of my college archaeology professor), also helps demonstrate how the perspective of one generation of men could influence a hundred years of the study of history – these objects and manuscripts became the basis for an American understanding of the medieval European past, complete with the idea that Americans have a connection to the medieval European past through our white ancestry. Said plainly – the study of the European Middle Ages in the US is based in white supremacy.

In case you couldn’t already tell, it’s a complicated time to be a medievalist.

When I think about my field, I now can’t help but think about the people who made it, the people whose interests guided how I have come to interact with this material. It’s not just something I’ve inherited. Charles Homer Haskins, the founder of American medieval studies, is the person whose claim I am directly arguing against in my dissertation. He said that we should study the brief period during which Latin Europeans controlled southern Italy in the 12th century because they brought back into Latin a knowledge of the Classical sciences that had been ceded to Arabic and Greek for hundreds of years. He justified an interest in this particular time and place based on the direct value it provided to the place we would come to understand as Europe. He drew a circle around all the people who could read Latin and left everyone else out. He articulated a sense of ownership over knowledge and not just any knowledge. Knowledge of the sciences, the thing that European empires would argue made them great. He told me, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman living a century after him, to find value in a peripheral corner of Europe because it would be the spark that would make Europe dominate the rest of the world in his lifetime. My struggle as a historian has been dismantling every assumption he made, trying to show continuity where he showed rupture, emphasizing diversity where he saw hegemony.

I don’t know that my habit of styling myself based on a mid-century aesthetic originally came out of my interest in medieval history, but both my interests and my aesthetic might have come from the same place. We often talk about our upbringing in terms of what our parents gave us, but I think my grandparents had a lot more influence over how I understood my history. They told me what history was, whether by taking me to museums or bringing me souvenirs from their trips or even by being part of history. My grandparents very much understood themselves or wanted to understand themselves as European, but the reality of being Jewish and American made that a little difficult (even more so in my grandfather’s case, as a Polish immigrant in occupied Palestine). Their generation, the same one as Haskins and Rockefeller Jr., produced all of the experiences through which I came to know about history. Perhaps unintentionally, they made it so that I couldn’t understand what came before them without having to see it through their eyes.

A sarcophagus-shaped pencil case, now sold at the British Museum. My grandmother gave me a very similar one when I started school. https://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/mummy-pencil-tin-nespernub.html

I didn’t start wearing mid-century clothes or wearing my hair in a vaguely Edwardian style until late in my grandmother’s life. As a kid, though, I was always wearing the biggest, fullest skirts possible. In my mind, they were better, more real maybe, because they were more “traditional”. I definitely had the sense that they were medieval, although I think back then the image in my mind was more 17th century. Probably the first spark that launched me into the mindset of the mid century was the movie The Hours, which I know is where I got my hairstyle. My grandmother’s apartment was something of a window into the past for me. I would go there and dig through the closets, finding treasures from what seemed like a very long time ago, like an old pocket camera or boxes of war bonds. I once found a copy of Treasure Island that I brought home and placed on my shelf because I liked the look of the green cover. I was inventing cottage core and dark academia out of the things I found in my grandmother’s closets. After my grandmother died when I was a teenager, I became more interested in understanding the time she grew up in, not for its own events, but for its perspective that had left a mark on the history I was consuming and the reality I was living. That especially became true as I became more aware of world events and struggled to understand her generation’s role in conflicts like Israel-Palestine.

To some extent, I think that the mid-century aesthetic is like an iconographic costume for historians. You put on your mid-century clothing to study history the same way you put on your deerstalker and pipe to solve a mystery.

Seriously, this is quite a visual trope.

But more than that, I think the mid-century is the filter through which we in the 21st century see history. We might acknowledge it more now, or maybe we have made that filter stronger over time. It’s certainly a product of how the history we consume has been written, but it might also reflect the way we choose to understand the ways that history has come to us. Whether intentionally or not, premodern history arrives in the 21st century translated into mid-century, and a lot of us historians (and archaeologists, etc.) need to get into translator mode to understand it. I can’t condone the impulse to try to live in the past – that kind of mental transposing is pretty ignorant and if you’re going to stoke an interest in any time period you have to be aware of what that time period means now. But appreciating the perspective of a past generation is an essential aspect of the study of history, so you might as well enjoy the fashion while you’re doing that.

The other day, a completely innocuous thing happened while I was at work: my coworker complemented my hairstyle. She and I have just about the same hair in color and texture, but that day we had opposite styles – hers was in full fabulous curl, and mine was braided down against the sides of my head. When she said she liked my hair, my first thought was to say “oh God no, I just did this out of practicality”. I had braided it while it was still wet the night before, since it’s growing longer and it keeps getting really tangled while I’m sleeping. But I stopped myself and just told her I liked hers too (which I really did). It is, after all, an accepted greeting among curly-haired women that we assess each other’s hair and then trade styling tips. In my usual manner of overthinking things, this interaction led me down a line of thought that wove together a few different things that have been on my mind lately, and so I thought it was time for a follow up to the last time I wrote about curly hair.

I’ve written before about how complicated it is to be Ashkenazi in the US, both othered to the extreme by virtue of being non-Christian and having features that are definitely NOT considered the American ideal (curly dark hair and big noses being the obvious ones), while also very much passing as white. Growing up in New York, it was easy to ignore or at least shrug off a lot of the American standards that felt othering, because, frankly, most New Yorkers don’t really think of themselves as “typically American” anyway. But despite New York’s tremendous cultural influence and the massive bubble New Yorkers are often able to build around themselves, as Americans we still consume plenty of culture and media that is based in the social and cultural standards of the rest of the country. In fact, having lived in Minnesota and California, I’ve come to realize how much of what I think of as typical American culture is really an invention of California in the 1950s and ’60s, probably due to the fact that the film industry is based here. So, as a kid who was always aware of feeling not quite white and not quite American, I was always drawn to movie and TV characters who were signaled as strange, different, or exotic. And, I realized very recently, the mental gymnastics I performed to help myself identify with them was that I decided that they were all Jewish.

This thought really crystalized as I was watching this most excellent recent video from the YouTube channel BeKindRewind. At one point, the video discusses how two different adaptations of the Addams Family approach Christmas (which, as a colleague reminded me when I attended a Catholic university, is an American holiday). While the 1960s sitcom had the Addamses play out a pretty standard Christmas plot of convincing the children that Santa is real, the original comic and the ’90s movies on which I was raised showed the family pouring a boiling cauldron on carolers. BeKindRewind’s interpretation of this, which I think is probably correct, is that the Addams family is showing its distaste for the saccarine schlock of caroling and its insincere wishes. But as a kid, I thought this gleeful disdain was based in the fact that the family was Jewish. I mean, they hang out in their family graveyard. They wear all black. They perform a family dance called “the mamushka”. Tell me I’m not crazy to interpret them this way. (There’s an argument to be made that the kind of creepiness the Addams Family taps into is the same one behind the original Dracula novel, which some people have also argued is meant to represent a Jew, although it could also be just straight-up Orientalism.)

For me, the Addamses, especially Wednesday, in their refutation of classic Americana, were everything that felt right to me. They were funny and joyful without performing. They celebrated being dark and angsty. They had close and genuine relationships within their very insular family. It also didn’t hurt that my mom looked like Morticia, with her signature long dark hair. And my dad clearly loved these movies for their humor and transgressions, which is why we had VHS tapes of both of them in our regular rotation.

But it wasn’t just the obviously weird outsider Addams Family that I read this way. I always identified with the strong-willed female characters who were visually established as not properly white. And it’s not that much of a jump to see them as Jewish. Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Jasmine in Aladdin, Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Why is Belle singled out in the town as weird? Because she reads and, so the visuals of the movie imply, she’s the only pretty girl with brown hair. If you were raised in an Ashkenazi household, chances are you had the value of education beaten into you, while also being told you were attractive enough despite your “darker” features.

Jasmine, well, she’s… let’s just say Oriental and put the subtext out there, shall we? But she’s also a self-possessed young woman trapped by a structurally sexist society. And my experience of Judaism has very much been that. The Jewish tradition I was raised in is explicitly patriarchal. It also helped that around the time I first watched Aladdin was also when I was learning about my familial connection to Israel. The movie and my experience of the country played off each other in my mind: the market scene where Jasmine first goes out of the palace in disguise, the Jerusalem shouk, and NYC summer street fairs all swirled together into an open air market dreamscape.

Esmeralda is a gypsy (I’m not saying Romani or Roma here because she’s written in the book and the movie as the gypsy stereotype, not the actual Roma ethnic group). That one is a pretty obvious connection. There’s an international club of minority ethno-religious groups that have been systematically abused and shunned by Europeans (and some countries in western Asia), and that includes Jews, the Roma, the Kurds, the Druze… It’s the same association that made me love the Kurdish militia when I first started to learn about them back in high school.

These associations are pretty well-grounded, even if they’re not 100% accurate.

Are you ready for what I realize is probably my strangest interpretation?

Star Wars.

To this day, you can’t tell me that I’m wrong. The Skywalkers are Jewish.

This one is harder to explain. It’s not so much that Luke and Leia tap into actual stereotypes or associations with Ashkenazi Jewishiness, but that I identified with these characters so strongly that I had to make them Jewish in my mind so that sympathy was acceptable. I’m very literal. Someone has to actually be me for me to identify with them. I didn’t just love Princess Leia, I was going to grow up to BE Princess Leia. I mean, sure, I could find explanations that make this fit a little better – the destruction of Alderaan (which as a word kind of looks like Canaan) and Leia’s resulting homelessness, Luke’s feeling that he didn’t belong; those ring true for me as part of my identity as the grandchild of refugees, as well as my own ambivalent relationship with the state of Israel. But I don’t think that’s why I saw them as Jewish. Maybe part of it was just that Leia has brown hair, and I really appreciated seeing that (seriously, hair is a big thing).

There’s a part of this strange habit of mine that I think is more important than just a thing I do. I am able to do make these associations because all of these characters are still essentially white. Maybe not Jasmine, unless you’re the US government. But the same degree of whiteness that allows me and other Ashkenazi Jews to pass most days in America unmolested (despite the very real and present threat of antisemitism) is also what makes all of these characters acceptable as protagonists or supporting characters in major works of American media. If you’ve never seen someone who looks like you represented in film, it’s hard to understand why that representation is so important. But the reality is that it is difficult to really identify with and care about characters that you don’t feel that fundamental connection of identity to. The degree to which that identity is literal is pretty variable. But I think race and ethnicity have a lot to do with it. If you are white – by which I really mean of primarily northern European descent and Christian – you have a bit more freedom to see yourself in a range of characters based on their upbringing or their personality traits. But if that identity doesn’t read onto your own in a meaningful way, that difference can be a barrier to feeling a connection to what you see on screen. In my case, I would describe it as a fundamental mistrust. Similar to what I wrote previously about the baked in sense that people who aren’t Jewish won’t stick their necks out for you, I find that I am not fully convinced that a character understands the issues they are purported to be grappling with (otherness, patriarchy, discrimination based on their (relatively) darker features) unless I have reason to believe that they have really been othered in a meaningful way. And so I invent this Jewish identity for them to convince myself that what they have to say about their struggle is actually a valid comparison to my own struggles. It’s a thoroughly self-centered way to consume media. And so recognizing that I do this has also made me aware of what it must mean to people who experience much more direct and systemic discrimination not to have those connections to a character. My white privilege as an Ashkenazi Jew is in being able to invent connections to people who were not intended to be me, but are similar to me in ways I find compelling. But those connections are simply harder or not available if you can’t suspend your disbelief to interpret the Addamses or the Skywalkers as a marginalized group that is distinctly non-white.

I’m finding some optimism in the greater racial diversity of media at the moment, but this habit of mine is cluing me in to just how superficial that representation is. So, after reading all this, I want you to ask yourself “how much does this character’s racial image actually impact their experience in the narrative?” If the answer is not very much, then representation isn’t really doing enough, is it?

I wrote a few weeks back about a major blowup that happened in the historical costuming community, when a prominent member outed herself as a bigot. This is only one of many recent events that seem to be constantly shaking this subculture, likely as its membership grows and changes, and as it responds more to and reflects more the social issues that are on everyone’s lips these days. As Bo Burnham has observed, the outcome of all this pain and consternation is more content. Lots and lots of videos about racism, whitewashing, colonialism, and of course the global system of capitalism. Those videos all essentially express the same message: history, especially European and North American history, is not as white as we have been told, and we need to reflect that more, even in play.

A few months late to the party, I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside. And then I watched it again. And then I listened to the soundtrack on repeat for several weeks.

Hey, have you heard of this thing called cancel culture?

It was perhaps not surprising just after the 2016 election to discover that a portion of president-elect trump’s base espoused ideologies of white supremacy. What was surprising to those who were paying attention but perhaps less familiar, was that trump also garnered significant support from Orthodox Jews, particularly Zionists, both in the US and Israel. While there are many reasons, both historical and expedient, that these particular Jewish groups chose to throw their support behind trump, it’s the coincidence that one of the most historically maligned groups would agree on their choice for political representation as the people who have fought both in the past and present for their extermination and removal from power. What is the connection between Zionist Orthodox Jews and white supremacists?

It might sound like I’m making a value judgment here, that traditional is better than historical. Really, I’m arguing for an awareness of context. There are some traditions that don’t exist anymore. There are some things that really are gone. But it’s not as much as you think. Participating in history, appreciating history, shouldn’t come with a disregard for the present. My point is that before you label something as historical, limited to the past, you should investigate whether it actually still exists in some form in the present.

Read More “Historical vs Traditional”

We’re in a semantic age, when battles are fought over the words we use to refer to people or experiences, and lines are drawn through vocabulary. In a non-political arena, I’m having a similar fight over the specific words historians use. How important are these distinctions, really?

After I reacquainted myself with my sewing machine, learned a bit more fundamental sewing skills, and finally understood how to work from a pattern, I spent about a year filling in my wardrobe with everything I’d been missing. I’m still in process with some things, including some everyday shirts, but once the process of making my own clothes got kind of mundane, I started making clothes for other people. And after making the same dress for the third time, I learned what I already knew about myself – I don’t like repetitive activities. So, armed with pretty good sewing skills at this point, a new project started to tug at me. A medieval outfit.

maximios / Blog /