Sunday 9 November 2008

Olive Countries

Like the Spanish “Hamilton Family”, Berlusconi’s not terribly remarkable remarks about Obama speak of the ambivalence at the heart, if not of the whole of his country, then certainly of a very great deal of it.

To affluent Northern Italians such as flock to Berlusconi and his coalition partners, “Garibaldi did not unite Italy, he partitioned Africa”, and “Naples is the only Arab city without a European quarter”.

Sicilians, by contrast, talk about “the Continent” just as we do, and do so in what for some reason has to be referred to as a particularly impenetrable dialect. In fact, that language is, like so much else on their island, a living monument to their identity as basically Latins, but Latins who are also in large part Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Jews, all sorts.

Meanwhile, have you ever seen any people from those areas only incorporated into Spain in 1492 or not much earlier? How Roman or how Gothic did they look to you? The Moors and the Jews were there for a very long time, and what goes on went on, Islam or no Islam, Judaism or no Judaism, and Catholicism or no Catholicism.

Paella is a variant on a dish found all the way to once-Mughal India and thence around the world (even to Saint Helena, where a rice-based, yellowed staple is called “plow”, to rhyme with “snow”). Numerous fiesta practices are clearly North African, analogous to the survival of berry-hanging at Christmas. All those very common “ez” names (Gomez, Fernandez, Gonzalez, Martinez, &c) are really Jewish. And so on, and on, and on.

Who is not a member of the “Hamilton Family”? Who is not “tanned”?

2 comments:

  1. "Numerous fiesta practices are clearly North African, analogous to the survival of berry-hanging at Christmas."

    Continuations of paganism?

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  2. Not at all. Mediaeval, and thus Catholic. This island was entirely Catholic when the South of Spain was Muslim and Jewish, and those situations changed at roughly the same time.

    No British or Irish Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan continuation in these islands; and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here.

    Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that.

    The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century.

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