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8897f27
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Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
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history
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Simon Schama |
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bb8136e
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Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing sinful about a waffle.
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humor
waffle
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Simon Schama |
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ffc9978
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The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But wh..
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Simon Schama |
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5c3e0b8
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Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives..
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history
english-history
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Simon Schama |
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634b8bf
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The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been upended, courtesy of King Death.
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Simon Schama |
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6fdd589
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It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.
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Simon Schama |
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17177f9
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The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut ..
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Simon Schama |
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218895e
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Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, "It's too soon to tell."
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Simon Schama |
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972f62b
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The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education.
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Simon Schama |
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c7f415c
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The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and thus become everybody.
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Simon Schama |
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e209654
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An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A
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Simon Schama |
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2920776
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Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,' Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What
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Simon Schama |
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14735a2
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The bulk of the Bible, from generation to generation, was written when the weaknesses of state power were most apparent. The portable scroll-book became the countervailing force to the sword. Once that happened, the idea that Jewish life was Jewish words, and they could and would endure beyond the vicissitudes of power, the loss of land, the subjection of people, took off into history. Since other monotheistic book-faiths allied word and sw..
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Simon Schama |
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7d8f459
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Rozbojnicy" i ,,bandyci" to terminy od dawna stosowane przez bogatych (do ktorych z pewnoscia zaliczal sie Jozef [Flawiusz]) na okreslenie buntownikow sposrod obciazonych podatkami i zubozalych."
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rich
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Simon Schama |
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b52a853
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The Almoravids yielded to the madder fury of the Almohades and the days of worldly accommodation in Al-Andalus passed for good.
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Simon Schama |
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dff2bb5
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sentinel
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Simon Schama |
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b590884
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When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled.
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Simon Schama |
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5a17461
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obstinate
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Simon Schama |
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d11a76d
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That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover-Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.
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Simon Schama |
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5299318
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The year 388 saw an epidemic of mob attacks against synagogues all over the eastern empire including Alexandria, but especially fierce in Syria. At Callinicum on the Euphrates, the synagogue was burned to the ground by a crowd egged on by the local bishop. At first Theodosius responded with exemplary severity, ordering the synagogue to be rebuilt with the bishop's own funds, but the decision provoked a storm of protest from clerics horrifie..
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Simon Schama |
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4cf4022
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Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now, he wrote to Jerome in a series of subtly argued polemical exchanges, it was necessary to preserve Jews in the undisturbed observance of their traditions and laws, for God must have wanted them to be universally dispersed, wandering the face of the earth, as custodians of the Bible's prophecies of Christ - ..
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Simon Schama |
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631e61d
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The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a single exclusive YHWH. But there may have been a prolonged period in which YHWH was worshipped as top God rather than the only God. Even the first of the commandments says 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me', presupposing that there were others - a matter of seniority rather than exclusiveness. It is only with 'Second Isaiah' as la..
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Simon Schama |
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bbdacdc
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He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill him should he persist with it. John had work to do: the most urgent task was to separate Christians from Jews, once and for all.
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Simon Schama |
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6668106
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a young student had written to his father, justifying his decision to volunteer by declaring that "our liberty can only be assured if it will have for its bed a mattress of cadavers... I consent to become one of those cadavers."
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Simon Schama |
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b43f6da
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The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite.
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Simon Schama |
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373a65a
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Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns - Makka, or Mecca - in which those Himyarite emigrants had settled. It was precisely because Arabian monotheism (as distinct from the confusing three-in-one version preached by Christianity) had such a strongly Judaic colouring - was in effect Arab Judaism - that Muhammad, who had lived among Jews all his li..
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Simon Schama |
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4e0e006
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birth.5
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Simon Schama |
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94e519f
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In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can't help letting the boy know how he feels, right away, at the top of the letter: 'Well-being and strength I send you but from the day you went on your way, my heart, it's not so good.' And then, the inevitable clincher, the three words Shelomam must have known were coming, even without Osea having to write them, the phrase all Jewis..
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Simon Schama |
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715d477
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for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.
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Simon Schama |
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8d30e0b
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question, albeit speculative, won't go away. No scholar quarrels with the archaic antiquity of the earliest elements of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Sea and of Moses. A strong consensus exists that their form is consistent with other similar archaic 'song' literature from the late Bronze Age Near East of the twelfth century BCE. If that's correct, even though the Song of the Sea has much in common with the Phoenician epic of the storm ..
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Simon Schama |
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2cd5ef4
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The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: An Introduction
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Simon Schama |
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2a34d3c
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Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense) dwellings for impoverished Jews, without any obligation, though the evangelical side of the money naturally hoped for the admission of Gospel Light along with the natural kind. The district which filled with the Orthodox became known as Mea Shearim which, were it known to be the work of ardently Chr..
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Simon Schama |
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25cdf3e
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she had reached in her reading of Scott's novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction
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Simon Schama |
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9a24f7f
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Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return of light, lustily celebrated in Greece and Rome. Triumphal days in the Greek style - like the Day of Nicanor commemorating the defeat of that general - were added to the calendar.
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Simon Schama |
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70a37b8
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The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-fur shtreimel hat worn over the yarmulka, the long belted black coat and white stockings that merchants wore in St Petersburg. This is what they still wear in Jerusalem and elsewhere, imagined as distinctively Jewish dress, which frozen over th..
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Simon Schama |
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7432725
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No, no, no, choose , More Marimondes thought. It wasn't that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyr, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful of the injunction to save life clearly enjoined in the Torah.
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Simon Schama |
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222dfe3
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Since there was little or nothing in Jesus' own reported teachings which required the repudiation of the Torah, it was possible to be a Jewish Christian, and considerable numbers in the first generations after his death were just that, both inside Palestine and beyond.
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Simon Schama |
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d5481cc
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The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses' spoken legacy to the I..
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Simon Schama |
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387c5b4
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To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure.
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Simon Schama |
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6866027
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A central fact, possibly central fact, about the Hebrew Bible is that it is not written at a moment of apogee, but over three centuries (eight to fifth) of trouble, That is what gives the Book its cumulative sobriety, its cautionary poetic, severity from the coarseness of triumphal self-congratulation found in imperial cultures.
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Simon Schama |
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e28574a
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Jesus was constitutively, not incidentally--a Jew; the Old and the New Testament were organically connected. Jewish history was the father of Christian history.
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Simon Schama |
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97e51e9
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God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.
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Simon Schama |