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American Holocaust Page 50

by David E. Stannardx


  53. Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, translated with an introduction by M.L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 41–42.

  54. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

  55. Giamatti, Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, p. 20.

  56. Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, pp. 43–44.

  57. Ibid., p. 44.

  58. Giamatti, Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, pp. 30, 32.

  59. The best study of this subject, on which much of the present discussion draws, is John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  60. Ibid., pp. 34–36.

  61. Quoted in ibid., pp. 91–92.

  62. Quoted in ibid., p. 73.

  63. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 1.

  64. Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, ed., The Wild Man Within: An Image of Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 24; Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, p. 50. For more on this theme, see Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, pp. 121–75.

  65. Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 6.

  66. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 64–65.

  67. Ibid., p. 75; emphasis added.

  68. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, p. 19.

  69. Turner, Beyond Geography, p. 205.

  70. Quoted in E.M.Y. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), pp. 26–27.

  71. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 22.

  72. Quoted in Arthur O. Love joy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 80.

  73. White, “The Forms of Wildness,” p. 14.

  74. The classic brief statement on Christianity’s negative view of nature is Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, 155 (March, 1967), 1203–1207.

  75. Ulrich Mauser, Christ in the Wilderness (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 97.

  76. David R. Williams, Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind (London: Associated Universities Presses, 1987), pp. 26–27.

  77. Ibid., p. 29.

  78. For some provocative thoughts on this, though painted with an overly broad and orthodox Freudian brush, see Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), esp. pp. 193–95.

  79. See Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, pp. 1–15.

  80. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 2–5.

  81. Hugh J. Schonfield, According to the Hebrews: A New Translation of the Jewish Life of Jesus (the Toldoth Jeshu) with an Inquiry into the Nature of its Sources and Special Relationship to the Lost Gospel According to the Hebrews (London: Duckworth, 1937).

  82. Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Invectives Against Christianity in the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade,” in Peter W. Edbury, ed., Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society of the Crusades and the Latin East (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985), pp. 66–67.

  83. See Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 89.

  84. Abulafia, “Invectives Against Christianity,” p. 70.

  85. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), pp. 3–4.

  86. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 69. On the crusaders’ ignorance of canon law and related matters, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), pp. 50–57.

  87. “The Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson,” in Shlomo Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), pp. 28, 33, 35, 43.

  88. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 69.

  89. Bainton, Early Christianity, pp. 52–55; cf., David Little, “‘Holy War’ Appeals and Western Christianity: A Reconsideration of Bainton’s Approach,” in John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson, eds., Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 124–25.

  90. James Turner Johnson, “Historical Roots and Sources of the Just War Tradition in Western Culture,” in Kelsay and Johnson, eds., Just War and Jihad, p. 7.

  91. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 19–20; see Little, “‘Holy War’ Appeals and Western Christianity,” p. 126.

  92. The classic study on this subject is Carl Erdmann’s 1935 Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, translated as The Origin of the Idea of Crusade by Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). See especially, pp. 4–32, 105–108.

  93. See Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading for discussion, pp. 84–85.

  94. Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, translated by Jon Rothschild (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984), pp. 48–49.

  95. Quoted in Turner, Beyond Geography, p. 79.

  96. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, pp. 24–25; Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Reevaluation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960), p. 112.

  97. James A. Brundage, “Prostitution, Miscegenation, and Sexual Purity in the First Crusade,” in Edbury, ed., Crusade and Settlement, p. 58. On pride as another sin responsible for defeat, see Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095–1274 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 99–101; Siberry also discusses the perceived relationship between sexual behavior and defeat, pp. 45–46, 102–103.

  98. Brundage, “Prostitution, Miscegenation, and Sexual Purity,” pp. 60–61.

  99. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 87.

  100. Moses I. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor?” in Moses I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1968), pp. 58–59.

  101. Keith R. Bradley, “On the Roman Slave Supply and Slavebreeding,” in Moses I. Finley, ed., Classical Slavery (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1987), p. 42.

  102. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 71, 75.

  103. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 38.

  104. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 55.

  105. Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 39.

  106. Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, pp. 405–406.

  107. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 171; Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, p. 94; Charles Verlinden, “Medieval ‘Slavers,’” in David Herlihy, Robert Lopez, and Vsevolod Slessarev, eds., Economy, Society, and Government in Medieval Italy: Essays in Memory of Robert L. Reynolds (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1969), p. 7; Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, p. 61.

  108. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 95. On the special dress requirements for Muslims and Jews, and the penalties for sexual liaisons with Christians, see Elena Lourie, “Anatomy of Ambivalence: Muslims Under the Crown of Aragon in the Late Thirteenth Century,” in Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christi
ans, and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Hampshire: Variorum, 1990), pp. 54–56.

  109. Cecil Roth, “Marranos and Racial Anti-Semitism—A Study in Parallels,” Jewish Social Studies, 2 (1940), 239–48.

  110. See Stephen Haliczer, “The Jew as Witch: Displaced Aggression and the Myth of the Santo Niño de La Guardia,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, eds., Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 150–53. The story of Christobalico is only one example among many of the common Christian “blood libel” at that time of charging that Jews had crucified children to mock the crucifixion of Christ. For discussion, see L. Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice,” Speculum, 43 (1973), 491–509; and, for an early variation on the theme, see Elena Lourie, “A Plot Which Failed? The Case of the Corpse Found in the Jewish Call of Barcelona (1301),” Mediterranean Historical Review, 1 (1986), 187–220.

  111. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, pp. 459, 461.

  112. Stephan L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1979), pp. 80–81, 100–101.

  113. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), passim.

  114. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, translated by David Gerard and edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London: N.L.B., 1984), p. 186.

  115. Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 259, 430–31.

  116. Ibid., p. 305.

  117. Leonard I. Sweet, “Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the New World,” The Catholic Historical Review, 72 (1986), 373. The source of Columbus’s claim that Joachim of Fiore had said that “he who will restore the ark of Zion will come from Spain,” has long puzzled students of the subject. For discussion, and the identification of Arnold of Villanova, see John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, Revised Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 22, 134–35; and Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’” American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 94–95.

  118. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), Volume Three, p. 2; quoted in Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, p. 27.

  119. Probably the best account of the trial and execution of John Huss remains that of Henry Charles Lea in The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, available in a single volume edition abridged by Margaret Nicholson (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 475–522.

  120. Ibid., p. 568.

  121. Quoted in Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 270–71.

  122. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (London: Academic Press, 1974), p. 80. On inflation, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), Volume One, pp. 516–21; and J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 62.

  123. Wallerstein, Modern World System, I, pp. 21–22.

  124. L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), pp. 86–87.

  125. Amidst a vast and growing literature on this topic, two older overviews remain especially helpful: Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), and Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

  126. Quoted in Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 239.

  127. Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 102–103.

  128. Quoted in Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 22.

  129. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 49.

  130. “Royal Decree Ordering the Suspension of Judicial Proceedings Against Criminals, Provided they Ship with Columbus, 30 April 1492,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), pp. 33–34.

  131. The most detailed study of Columbus’s crews on the first voyage—literally the scholarly labor of a lifetime—is Alice Bache Gould, Nueva lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colón en 1492, edited by José de la Peña y Camara (Madrid, 1984), and discussed in John Noble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 115–26.

  132. “The Journal of the First Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 48–49.

  Chapter Six

  1. The Libro de las Profecías of Christopher Columbus, translation and commentary by Delno C. West and August King (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), pp. 24, 109.

  2. Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise to the Indies,’” American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 82–83.

  3. Ibid., p. 87.

  4. Libro de las Profecías, p. 24; Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery,” 88; Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), pp. 22–23.

  5. Libro de las Profecías, p. 109.

  6. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, Revised Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 22.

  7. For a list of Columbus’s known readings, see Libro de las Profecías, pp. 24–25. On Mandeville’s Travels, see the discussion in Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 122–61.

  8. “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on His First Voyage, 15 February—4 March 1493,” and “Journal of the First Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 88, 185. In considering the veracity of Columbus’s claim that the natives had told him this, it is important to note not only that the Spaniards and the Indians spoke mutually unintelligible languages but that the Indians could not have described creatures as having heads like dogs, because they had never seen any dogs and would not see any until Columbus’s second voyage.

  9. See Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 130–31, note 14; W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 44–54; and R.A. Myers, “Island Carib Cannibalism,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 58 (1984), 147–84. The easy assumption (with no good evidence) of widespread cannibalism among native peoples serves the same political function among accusers as does the charge of wholesale infanticide and other allegedly savage traits. I have discussed this phenomenon in “Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth,” Journal of American Studies, 25 (1991), 381–418.

  10. “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on the Third Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 286–87.

  11. Ibid., p. 286.

  12. Germán Arciniegas, America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse, translated by Gabriela Arciniegas and R. Victoria Arana (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 44–45.

  13. Leonard I. Sweet, “Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the New World,” The Catholic Historical Review, 72 (1986), 375–76, 378.

  14. “Journal of the First Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 93.

  15. Ibid., p. 48.

  16
. France V. Scholes, “The Spanish Conqueror as a Business Man: A Chapter in the History of Fernando Cortés,” New Mexico Quarterly, 28 (1958), 26. For a convenient and insightful treatment of the rise of individualism in the fifteenth century, see Philippe Braunstein, “Toward Intimacy: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Georges Duby, ed., A History of Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 554–83.

  17. “Journal of the First Voyage,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 65–67.

  18. Ibid., pp. 69, 86; Leonardo Olschki, “What Columbus Saw on Landing in the West Indies,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 84 (1941), 656.

  19. Ibid., 655.

  20. “Columbus’s Memorial to the Sovereigns on Colonial Policy, April 1493,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, pp. 199–200.

  21. Ibid., pp. 200–201.

  22. “Michele de Cuneo’s Letter on the Second Voyage, 28 October 1495,” in ibid., pp. 214–15.

  23. Ibid., p. 215.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 95–96.

  26. “Michele de Cuneo’s Letter,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 220.

  27. “Letter of Dr. Chanca, written to the City of Seville,” in Cecil Jane, ed., Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930), Volume One, pp. 52, 70.

  28. Andrés Bernáldez, “History of the Catholic Sovereigns, Don Ferdinand and Dona Isabella,” ibid., pp. cxlvii, 118, 124.

  29. “Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns,” in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 186.

  30. “Syllacio’s Letter to the Duke of Milan, 13 December 1494,” ibid., pp. 236, 244.

  31. Ibid., p. 245.

  32. Quoted in Benjamin Keen, ed., Readings in Latin-American Civilization, 1492 to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), p. 78; and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 151.

 

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