Author Events and Original Reviews

          It is hard to reconcile the importance that nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and other spices played in history with those dusty bottles that occupy our spice racks. But Paul Freedman’s book attests to the fondness of the European privileged classes for spices in the medieval and early modern periods.

          Used to give a pronounced taste to dishes, spices were also valued as medicinal drugs and for their scent. Freedman explains the complicated medieval notion of balanced bodily humors and the use of spices to alleviate dangers imbalances caused by the food they ate. Spices are no longer kept in our medicine cabinets.

          Fragrances? Frankincense, from various Asian and African trees, is still used in Catholic services as a perfumery. But balsam, ambergris, musk, civet, castor, and aloe wood — also once popular perfumeries — are no longer on grocery shelves. In their place, ‘miracles of modern chemistry.’

          Early Christians considered perfumes to be a sign of the divine presence. The sense of smell is not as tangible as sight, hearing, and touch and hence a better sign of the divine being’s presence. Ambergris, by the way, is a secretion of the sperm whale, coughed up and found floating in the ocean.  Castor is a secretion of a gland found in the groin of several species of beaver. So much for those divine essences.

          In medieval Europe, most spices and perfumes were obtained from the east via the Islamic world. Alexandria in Egypt was the major spice entrepôt. Merchants from Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, Barcelona, and north Germany established ‘factories’ or warehouses for the storage of spices, awaiting favorable prices and a good sailing wind to re-export them to Europe.

          Portuguese and then Spanish exploration was inspired by wanting to cut out those Moslem middlemen by figuring out how to sail around Africa to reach India. India, it turns out, was another entrepôt in the spice trade, re-exporting goods that Indian and Arab merchants had for centuries gathered from the East Indies as well as the subcontinent. Direct trade with India soon replaced Egypt and the Mediterranean trade.

          Though a grade-school dogma, Christopher Columbus did not set out to prove a new theory of Earth’s shape. And, alas, what Columbus discovered  when he sailed west was that there were two continents blocking his way to the ‘spice islands.’     

          The ecclesiastical profession was an important consumer of imported spices. But Freedman points out that they were also its critics. Indulgence in spices led to gluttony. And that led to other deadly sins, particularly lust. Spices and perfumes were associated with a catholic Mediterranean culture and disapproved by protestant northern Europeans.

          Spices became less important to Europeans and European tables in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Freedman explains this as the result of the rise of French cuisine. French chefs created flavor with heavy cream and butter sauces and herbs — thyme, marjoram, rosemary, sage, oregano, parsley — found growing around the Mediterranean. New beverages replaced spiced wine: chocolate, tea, and coffee. Cream and sugar were the additives to those new drinks, not spices. France’s gastronomic leadership would hold forth for another three centuries. European and North American waists tell that tale.     

          Ah, sugar. Sugar is no longer considered a spice. Rather it is an ingredient, like flour, and we consume prodigious amounts. Sugar has lost ground, however, in main courses and was largely relegated to a final course, dessert. Where it reigns supreme.

          Haven’t we recently been retreating from rich foods? Perhaps spices will return. Some flavorings are doing well in cuisines that have come along with Asian immigrant communities: cumin, coriander, turmeric, and soy sauce for example. Pepper has gained a place alongside salt on our tables. A New World spice, chili peppers or cayenne, and the related but milder chili powder and paprika are also doing well.

          Freedman has made it difficult to set down to a good meal without thinking about its spices – out of the east.

          Thirty years ago an ancient codex was discovered by an Egyptian villager in a cave south of Cairo. The manuscript contained several early Christian texts, including the Gospel of Judas. Carbon dating of the manuscript suggested that it was produced around 280 A.D. We know that the Gospel of Judas was at least a century older than that because it was mentioned and condemned around 180 A.D. by Irenaeus, the Christian bishop of Lyon.

          Bart Ehrman’s commentary on the Gospel of Judas is part of the lively field of biblical scholarship. In recent decades, it has been transformed by another discovery in Egypt, the Nag Hammadi library of manuscripts unearthed in 1945. They were likely hidden away by their owners sometime in the fourth century. Included were dozens of gospels, including the Gospels of Thomas and Mary. Though not the four gospels that found their way into the Christian testament. Gospels were a popular genre of writing in the early centuries of Christianity.

          All four gospels in the Christian testament mention Judas. Each treats him differently according to its understanding of the life of Jesus, his betrayal, and its meaning. Each serves the literary and theological agenda of the writer. Each differs according to the audience for which it was intended.

          Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels, mentions Judas, but he drops out of sight after the betrayal. Matthew includes stories about Judas’ days after the crucifixion. Mark has him interested in the money; Matthew believes that Jesus’ death on the cross was a fulfillment of prophecies found in Jewish scripture. Hence Judas’s act of betrayal was portrayed by Matthew as an essential role of that fulfillment. Luke casts Judas as a participant in a Satanic plot.

          As with the four Christian gospels, the writer of the Gospel of Judas attributed it to a personality known to the early Christian community. The intention was to lend authority to his writing. That would seem strange in the case of Judas Iscariot! Ehrman explains.

          The Gospel of Judas shows the influence of gnostic patterns of thought. Gnosticism ultimately became a Christian heresy condemned by numerous Christian writers as they worked out an ‘orthodoxy’ and created a biblical canon to support it. Gnostic writings were excluded from the canon. Gnosticism had once been a alternative system of thought in the first centuries of Christianity and informed many of the tracts found in the Nag Hammadi library, including the Gospel of Thomas.

          Gnostic writings provide a different set of myths about the origins of humankind than those that found their way into the Hebrew testament and were embraced by early Christianity. In the gnostic tradition, the god of creation – the demiurge – is at war with the true god in heaven. Humankind has become estranged from god, entrapped in this created physical world, and hence subject to the willfulness of the demiurge. Jesus came into our world to battle the demiurge and allow our spiritual selves to escape this entrapment.

          Both the death and resurrection of Jesus were essential to that freeing of our spirit, and so Judas’ betrayal was integral to that cosmic event. Only Judas, according to the Gospel of Judas, had understood the true relevance of Jesus’ secret teaching. Only Judas had the pheuma (spirit) necessary for their decoding. The other disciples were enveloped in the physical world with limited understanding of the nature of man’s redemption as offered by Jesus.

          Beneath the surface stories in the Gospel of Judas, Ehrman finds residuals of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. Jesus has come to fulfill the prophecies concerning a messiah in Isaiah. Jesus, Ehrman believes, was confident of his overcoming death and returning as ‘king of the Jews.’ His twelve apostles would each head one of the twelve tribes of Israelite tradition. And the clairvoyant Judas of the Gospel of Judas had all along understood this role of his teacher.

          In 1688 William of Orange handed on the southern coast of England with and marched on London with 15,000 troups. He was occupying the ‘vacant’ crown of England after James II had ‘abdicated.’ William’s claim to the English crown was through both his wife Mary, James’ daughter by his first marriage, and William’s mother, a sister of Charles I of England.

         James II had scared English protestatnts with his ‘toleration’ of all religions. He was a practicing Roman Catholic, as was his second wife, and they had recently produced a male heir who would have perpetuated the catholicism of the British royals in a decidedly protestant British Isles. William of Orange was a protestant from a decidedly protestant Dutch Republic.

          William had counted on the English protestant gentry and the parliamentary leadership to rally around his ‘liberation’ of England from a catholic tyranny. He had devised a propaganda effort to convince the English of his good intentions. The gentry, however, hung back from joining his Dutch troops, waiting to see an outcome. So William’s carefully planned intervention looked like an invasion and occupation.

          As a background for William and Mary’s reign, Lisa Jardine has described the many interactions between the Dutch and British royals in the seventeenth century. She casts them as celebrities, much like the surviving European royalty of our time. The were enormously rich, relative to their fellow countrymen, patrons of art, music, and seventeenth-century science, or natural history as it was then called.

          There was a lively market for Dutch and Flemish art on both sides of the Channel. The elite of London, Antwerp, and the Hague were also interest in formal gardens of the French variety. Music and popular dances easily crossed borders as they do today.

          Much of Jardine’s story centers around the illustrious career of the Huygens family. Constantijn Huygens senior, a Dutchman, was what you might call an art facilitator. The Dutch and British royals wanted advice on art and crafted objects. They were patrons and connoisseurs but also investors. In a world of art speculation, they appreciated his guidance. Huygens’ eldest son, also Constantijn, was a political advisor to William of Orange, now William III of Britain. Another son Christiaan Huygens was a famous ‘microscopist.’ Improved lenses were allowing curious naturalists to view the microscopic world of tiny animals, like the human louse. Many gifted tinkerers, both English and Dutch, were also interested in mechanics, such as the spring-driven clock.

          Both the Dutch and British royals were emulating the vast expenditure of Louis XIV’s French court. Fortunes were spent on houses, furnishings, art, and surrounding gardens. There was an interest in city planning; the Hague with its tree-lined avenues, Jardine calls a “garden city”. They admired classical architecture, and their homes and gardens reflected its orderliness. She arranges for us an imaginery visit to Antwerp, a city of 70,000, enjoying moderate prosperity and home to a large émigré English community finding refuge from Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

          ‘Joint ventures’ you might call some of this borrowing back and forth between the Dutch and Flemish, but also there was rivalry and competition. Jardine includes stories of private back-biting and public controversy.           Nowhere is this rivalry and competition more in evidence than in the European commercial expansion that had begun in the previous century. The Dutch were making fortunes in trade with Asia and in the Atlantic slave trade long before the British. But with more financial resources and its North American settlement colonies, the future lay with the Brits. The word “plundered” in Jardine’s subtitle is, however, misleading. Atlantic commerce was not a zero-sum game.

          The Dutch lost their one settlement colony, New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, when it was occupied by the British in 1664. Why the Dutch did not have other settlement colonies may be a matter of demographics. It may also have been that the Dutch were never driven from Holland by religious intoleration as were many of the original English colonists in the New World.

          Phillip Dwyer carries the career of Napoleon Bonaparte up to the coup d’état in 1799 that brought him to power as first consul. Dwyer is critical of Napoleon, even his generalship. He is dismantling a reputation that, to a great extent, Napoleon himself constructed. Napoleon was a self-promoter, par excellence.

          He was also good at factional politics. He cut his political teeth in his native Corsica in the early years of the French revolution. Napoleon’s politically-prominent father had initially supported Corsican independence. But when France occupied the island in 1768, he chose to stay and ‘collaborate.’ He sent Napoleon and his brothers off to France for their education. Napoleon joined the French army.

          Dwyer argues that Napoleon straddled two cultures. He returned to Corsica for long periods of time between 1786 and 1791 and joined the Corsican Jacobin party. He spoke French with a heavy Italian accent. He and his brothers epitomized the contention between regional identity and French nationality, so characteristic of the long nineteenth century.

          In addition to his self-promotion, Bonaparte managed to be in the right place at the right time. He was in Paris at the right moment to get himself appointed as an artillery officer in the French army that captured the port of Toulon from the royalists in 1793. Although nothing like as consequential as he subsequently claimed, his contribution to the victory earned him the command of the Army of the Interior. That appointment fortuitously placed him in Paris with the job of defending the Directory against popular unrest in October 1795.

          Critics claimed that Napoleon’s next appointment , command of the French army in Italy, was a political appointment. But Dwyer reminds us that military appointments in revolutionary France were always political. Successful generals were self-promoters. He and they benefited from the fact that so many of the French military leadership had emigrated after 1789.

          Perhaps the most intriguing episode of Napoleon’s early career was the expedition to Egypt in the summer 1798. Charles-Murice de Talleyrand, then foreign minister of the republic, was promoting the idea that France should establish a colonial empire in north Africa. Occupying Egypt would also threaten Britain’s route to India.

          The venture was not without risks; the British fleet had a formidable presence in the eastern Mediterranean.  Moreover, there was little recognition of the difficulties of summer warfare in the Egyptian desert. The Mameluke cavalry and Bedouin infantry would prove to be more troublesome than Napoleon had assumed.

          Alexandria fell without a fight, but the disastrous march across the desert to the Nile without adequate drinking water should have been an early warning of the difficulties to follow. Cairo was taken and Napoleon set about organizing an occupation that would bring the French enlightenment to this Ottoman domain. But in August 1798 the British navy under Lord Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet moored off Alexandra. And Napoleon then suffered a humiliating defeat in Syria.

          With the Egyptian venture not going well, Napoleon looked for an opportunity to return to France. Dwyer talks about his “flight from Egypt,” abandoning his army. Upon his arrival in France, Bonaparte was, however, able to fashion a victorious Egyptian campaign out of his few but well-publicized military successes.

          Dwyer claims that by 1799, the republican experiment was concluding, the Directory almost universally considered a failure. The electoral process had been overturned by coup d’états too many times. Napoleon was, however, not the primary force behind 18th Brumaire. It was organized by a masterful intriguer, Emmanuel Sieyès. Sieyès needed a successful general, and Napoleon was available. Ultimately, however, Napoleon high-jacked the conspiracy, using a military force under his command to dismiss the Directory and disperse the Council of 500. This ‘savior on horseback,’ became a collective memory that would be cultivated during the Empire and again in the nineteenth century.

          Philip Dwyer has cut Napoleon down to size. It must be remembered, however, that Bonaparte demolished the ancien régime throughout Europe. So much so that when restored after 1815, it needed popular support and even parliamentary democracy to govern.

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          Marvelous Possessions is a meditation on the ways that sixteenth-century Europeans thought about the inhabitants of the new world. The initial response of marvel and admiration was transmuted, Stephen Greenblatt contends, to a need to possess, to appropriate. To explain that transmutation, he does a close reading of late medieval and Renaissance travel accounts, including those of Christopher Columbus and Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

          He argues that their responses to the wonder of the new world was informed by earlier European travel writers and particularly Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo. Pre-Columbian travel accounts provided a set of understandings about encounters with non-Europeans. True, both the Mayan and Aztec cultures had pictograms that involved memories of their past. But that historical memory provided no template for interpreting their first encounters with Europeans.

          Greenblatt uses Columbus’ account of an incident during the first voyage to illustrate his thesis. Columbus comes on shore and, in the presence of native American ‘witnesses,’ plants a standard declaring the land a possession of the Spanish crown. Hearing no objection from the Indians, he assumes their acceptance of Spanish sovereignty.

          There are several things wrong with this ritual of possession. For one thing it was in Spanish. There would soon be translators and go-betweens who would insure that each party knew what the other was saying; that was not the case with these early encounters. Unlike European travels to the east which involved crossing the porous frontier between Europe and Asia. There were not only translators available but also some experience with these ‘others’ that could help in that translation. For another, the Indians had no comparable notion of land ownership.

          Indians, it turns out, were skilled at acquiring new languages and soon could understand Spanish. The practice of seizing Indians, usually kidnapping young boys, and taking them back to Spain helped solve the translation problem for subsequent European explorers.

          Greenblatt has an interesting discussion of the importance of signs and gestures in the absence of a common language. Spaniard/Indian misunderstandings were created by what the Spanish believed to be the universality of signs. For example, it was assumed that the Indians gathered on the shore to greet the landing parties were there to conduct trade. But the Indians were not on the beach to trade and were confused by the gestures used to propose an exchange.

          Taking possession of Caribbean islands on behalf of the Spanish crown was never the prime motive for Columbus’s first voyage. Rather he was hoping to discover a new route to Asia as an alternative to the Mediterranean. 1492 can also be explained, in part, by the presence of a Spanish warrior class that needed opportunities for conquest and loot. Hence they responded to the gold body jewelry worn by the Indians with their historic brutality. What was admired could be grabbed.

          Columbus was part of what Greenblatt calls Christian chauvinism. Rather than seeing similarities in the Spanish devotion to sacred statuary, Columbus was enraged by the representations of their gods. He went around smashing their “idols.” As did the later Spanish discovers of Aztec and Mayan cities.

          Greenblatt, a superb Elizabethan scholar and writer, ends with an irony. The one aspect of American Indian culture that most offended Columbus — even more than their inebriation, fornication, and sodomy — was the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism. But wait a minute, how much worse is it to roast and eat a man than to roast him for the pleasure of watching him die in agony. That was a common enough event in sixteenth-century Spain, and endorsed by both religious and secular authorities.

          Marvelous Possessions was required reading for a history course this past fall semester. If you think that reading requirements for UF courses are less strenuous these days, read this book.

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          Cathy Gere’s book is not critiquing Arthur Evans’ reconstruction of this ancient prehistoric site in Crete; Evans has been ‘deconstructed’ by others. Rather she discusses how the excavation of Knossos in the first decade of the twentieth century influenced psychoanalysts, linguists, artists, classicists, and poets. Gere calls them prophets of modernism.

          Evans and his fellow travelers were confident that much could be ascertained about prehistoric peoples, such as the Minoans, based on the physical remains of their settlements. Evans was confident of his ability to divine from the stones, mortar and fragments of frescoes at Knossos. He also believed that works of art and artifacts were the products of social forces not very different from the laws of human life in his own day.

          Archeologists digging around Palestine in the same years interpreted the physical remains of the ancient Israelites as validating biblical accounts. In a like fashion Evans, excavating the Crete ruins, found evidence of the veracity of Greek myths. He proposed the notion of a ‘Minoan civilization’ because one structure that he had unearthed resembled, in his mind, the labyrinth attributed to the legendary King Minos.

          His reconstructions were conjectural at best, often, according to Gere, fanciful. Initially he decided to shelter uncovered ruins by incorporating wood and plaster columns and canopies inspired by the site’s architectural features, rather than the usual metal sheds. To shore up those parts of the palace complex which had been excavated, he used reinforced concrete, a relatively new building material in the 1900s. He employed artists to reconstruct the frescoes, again based on skimpy remains.

          Much of this reconstruction reflect an androgyny prevalent at the time. Thus the famous manly girl-athletes in the bull-leaping paintings. And the male figures, thought to be priest-kings, dressed in costumes that resembled those of the females’.

          The males were painted red, the females white. That was the convention in contemporaneous Egyptian art. Evans readily acknowledged the likely influence of Egypt and Libya on Minoan art. That acknowledgment was, Gere contends, in contrast to an earlier archeologist who had inspired Evans, Henrich Schliemann.  Schliemann excavated Troy and went on to uncover Mycenaea and create the concept of a Mycenaean civilization. But Schliemann was also a proponent of another notion, the Aryan race. He believed his Mycenaeans to have been the “first Europeans” and to have originated in German-Aryan lands.

          In fact Evans’ ideas turned out to be similar to the argument for the African origins of classical civilization articulated by a Senegalese, Chickh Anta Diop, in the 1970s. Egyptian and Libyan prehistoric cultures were, in turn, Diop argued, indebted to Sub-Saharan black Africa. Diop’s notion was popularized in North America by Martin Bernal, a scholar at Cornell University in his Black Athena. In that book Bernal accused classical archeologists of being racists. Perhaps, but Gere contends that Evans can be exonerated from that charge.

          Of the various writer-prophets that Gere identifies as having been influenced by Evans’ Minoan civilization, Friedrich Nietzsche is the most convincing. Gere also reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s views in Moses and Monotheism. In this his most speculative book, Freud made allowance for a Minoan mother-goddess in his otherwise patriarchal constructions.

          Perhaps the most remarkable thing that Evans got wrong was the supposed peacefulness of the Minoans, which he contrasted to the war-like Mycenaeans. Evans was writing in the 1920s in the shadow of a world war that had killed hundreds of thousands of young men. Recent scholarship and archeological digs in eastern Crete from the same period  have corrected that construction. But Evans with his peaceful Minoans, Gere maintains, had his heart in the right place.

          A visitor to Knossos is appreciative of Evans for creating a site of which some sense can be make. The guides to the site, however, provide a corrected version of Evans’ Minoans, and that prompts a more thoughtful looking.

          The idea of ‘civilizing’ warfare may appear to be an oxymoron. But efforts to do just that date back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Lawrence Rockwood’s interesting discussion covers both jus ad bellum – the decision to engage in military action, and jus in bellum - the conduct of the armies, both individual fighting men and the command structure. He is most interested in jus in bellum and particularly commander responsibility. We are “walking away from Nuremberg” in that we have abandoned principles upheld by the International Military Tribunal (1945-46) which tried German military and civil leaders.

          The U.S. has made an important contributor in formulating the rules of war. Rockwood argues that “General Order No. 100,” issued in 1863 by the Lincoln Administration in the midst of the Civil War, has become the basis for a body of international law on the conduct of war and command responsibility.

          “General Order No. 100,” among other issues, dealt with categories of participants and how they should be treated. Prisoners of war who had not committed criminal acts should be treated humanly, as circumstances allowed and not executed. In the case of escapees, firing on them was permitted, but not their execution. On the other hand, deserters, spies, traitors, those who failed to give quarter, or killed the injured could be executed. There was a special category for pickets, sharpshooters (Civil War) and snipers, who were often more summarily treated. The taking and shooting of civilian hostages and other forms of reprisal were permitted, but there must be some proportionality. Unclear was how one should treat civilians who in various ways were contributing to the success of an army.

          In 1944 a conversation began about how we should deal with German military commanders, Nazi party leaders, and administrators at war’s end. They had engineered the killing of millions of non-combatants and PoWs. Winston Churchill and others advocated summary execution when captured. However, the proposals for post-war trials had the support of our War Department. It was agreed to create an International Military Tribunal.

          Rockwood is not impressed with Tribunal’s deliberation. For example, Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of the German navy, was tried and convicted of waging unrestricted submarine warfare. This despite Admiral Chester Nimitz’s testifing that our submarine warfare was similar in character. Allied troops had also shot prisoners of war. American and British aerial bombardment of German cities had killed thousands of German non-combatants. Nuremberg, Rockwood claims, has the appearance of a victor’s justice.

          That seems even more so in view of the American response to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Those fighting an insurgency had not generally been mentioned in discussions of jus in bellum. To win against the Viet Cong, we would have to destroy their support in the countryside. Lieutenant William Calley’s army outfit was ordered to burn suspect villages, destroy their crops, and poison their wells. Calley ultimately claimed that he was also instructed by his immediate commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to kill “suspected insurgents.”

           Rockwood’s unsympathetic views agreed with a later military investigating committee which issued its damaging report to a stunned America in March 1970. The investigation happened because General William Westmoreland, then Chief of Staff in the Nixon Administration, insisted that the killings be looked into. Even though Congress, the Nixon White House, and veteran associations had little enthusiasm for court marshaling soldiers accused of war crimes in Vietnam. Calley was convicted but soon pardoned, and the other three dozen soldiers charged were never brought to trial.

          Most significant, according to Rockwood, the military judge and jury exonerated Captain Ernest Medina, Calley’s commanding officer. He claimed that he knew nothing about Calley’s action, even though he was circling above in a helicopter and landed several times during the operation. Thus Medina and we walked away from command responsibility for upholding principles established at Nuremberg.

          In November 2005, in the Paris banlieues (suburbs) gangs of males, many of them in their early teens, went on rampages, burning cars, breaking windows, and battling with the police. Parisians lodge their poor in several of its suburbs, without jobs and suitable housing. The rioters were mostly first and second-immigrants from North Africa. Walter Laqueur believes this to be a premonition of Europe’s future, the “old Continent’s” last days.

          Laqueur begins by explaining European demographics in the twenty-first century. The reproductive rate for women must be 2.1 to have enough children to replace themselves. Europe’s is presently 1.37 with no sign that this will change any time in the future. The Russian Federation, Spain, Italy, the Balkan are significantly lower than that. France and Britain, on the other hand, are doing better at producing children.

          Thus the population of Europe is shrinking. That may not be a bad thing, if one thinks of a sustainable future, but that is not Laqueur’s concern. Rather he is worried about “white Europe.” Will the older ethnicities die out, swamped by new immigrants of various hews who have higher reproductive rates? To the point, will the nominally Christian populations of Europe be swamped by adherents of the Moslem faith?

          Most demographers would argue that Europe’s aging population is the greater problem. Europe has a lot of graying baby-boomers. That poses a significant problem for the work place as well as the welfare system.

          There are ‘good’ immigrant populations, of course. Laqueur mentions the Indian migration to Britain from East Africa. They came with capital and have contributed to small-scale enterprise in Britain. The Vietnamese came to France, often as spouses of returning soldiers, and they have proven to be hardworking folks. Similar successes can be found throughout Europe. Immigrants continue to clean their streets and their hospitals. They also work in their factories and open countless restaurants.

          In the case of Moslem immigrants, however, Laqueur can find no comparable benefits to the host country. He deplores Moslem radicals and their violence. (No mention of the ‘white’ European violence of the twentieth century!)

          Perhaps his depiction of Germany’s guest workers in most surprising. Turks and Kurds, predominantly conservative Moslems from eastern Anatolia, were generally poor and not well-educated. Guest workers were originally temporary male immigrants. But that changed as Turks brought their families. Participants at a conference at UF last year agreed to the surprising vitality of the Turkish/German film industry. Germans are aware of the often difficult adjustments which Turks have to make, but applaud their enormous cultural vitality.

          But Laqueur believes that the Moslems have been taking advantage of the welfare system in Germany and elsewhere. True, but that is not something that most Europeans resent. They are more likely to wonder why any medical delivery system would try to exclude immigrant workers from adequate medical care.

          Laqueur frequently contrasts post-war European emigration with an earlier example of Jewish migration first to New York and other Eastern seaboard cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He attributes their remarkable enterprise to the fact that there was no welfare system to distract them from getting ahead. Thus they were up and out of the East Village in New York within a generation, often shedding their old ways for suburban life. Those former Jewish ghettos are now high-end neighborhoods, and the descendants of Jewish immigrants are returning. But the Italians have also done fine in New York. The Russians are transforming neighborhoods in Queens. Mexicans throughout the U.S. Etc.         

          Walter Laqueur has sensed the uneasiness that conservative Americans feel about our future. His “wake-up before its too late” will resonate with those readers. But at times, he borders on an Islamophobia. Which, of course, he condemns out of the other side of his mouth.