The minister’s report – and this anecdote – were well-received at the court. The Ottoman authorities were impressed by the openness and tolerance of the European universities they visited and as a result took steps to introduce educational reforms into their own educational system.  

The Hungarian Jewish scholar referred to in this anecdote was Ignaz Goldziher, the savant who pioneered the scientific study of Islamic languages and texts in the West. During his long career he produced books and articles that are studied by Islamicists to this day. His work had a profound effect on Western scholarship in the areas of comparative philology, religious studies, and the emerging disciplines of Semitic languages and comparative religion. His vast oeuvre includes over eight hundred scholarly articles. The titles of his major books, six of which are studies of various aspects of Islam, are familiar to all students of the Middle East. His earliest work, Mythos bei den Hebräern (1876), was influenced by Max Müller’s work on solar mythology and addresses the relationship between theories of myth and the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. From scholarship on the Bible Goldziher moved to the study of Islam. He translated Islamic classical texts into German and Hungarian and synthesized this material into surveys of Islamic religion and philosophy. He rose to prominence in his native Hungary and then throughout the West as the preeminent non-Muslim authority on Islam. Islamic scholars in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world recognized the importance of Goldziher’s accomplishments and considered him a valued colleague. Goldziher understood the political and social implications of his scholarly work. Throughout his life he strived to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.  

Goldziher was not the only late nineteenth century Jewish scholar drawn to Islam. Many others were drawn to the study of what they deemed Judaism’s “sister religion.” As we shall see in the coming chapters, Islam held a strong appeal to European Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth century, a period of intense ferment and change in Jewish life. This central European Jewish fascination with Islam was not limited to those engaged in the study of religion and philosophy. In the late nineteenth century, the anticipated full emancipation of the Jews was blocked by a resurgence of Christian anti-Semitism. Islam, as an abstraction, if not as a political reality, appealed to many Jews. The Golden Age of twelfth century Spain, the Convivencia in which the three monotheisms were imagined to have lived in mutual tolerance, was the model for a new era of religious tolerance and mutual respect. This aspiration was reflected in the Moorish architectural styles of German synagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   

Among those fascinated by Islam were the early rabbis of Reform Judaism. First and foremost among them was Abraham Geiger. Geiger’s doctoral dissertation, presented at age twenty-four, asked the question “What had Muhammad taken from the Jews?” Geiger demonstrated that many stories narrated in the Qur’an had close parallels to narratives in the Bible and the Midrash, and he speculated that the Jewish narratives directly influenced the Qur’an. His later work focused on the development of Judaism, which he saw as an evolving faith, one that could be brought into line with modern European thought and practice. With this modernizing project in mind, Geiger shaped the emergence of Reform Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century.  

These German Rabbis and scholars viewed Islam as a ‘rational’ religion, a religion unencumbered by the magical and ‘superstitious’ aspects of Christianity, and of Orthodox Judaism. For reformers of Judaism, Islam offered a model of a ‘religion of reason.’ And in emulation of Jewish life in the Convivencia of Spain’s ‘Golden Age,’ a period idealized and romanticized by many scholars, European Jews would flourish. Goldziher was affiliated with the Neolog (Reform) movement. 

At the University of Budapest Goldziher studied Arabic and Persian with Arminius Vambery. Vambery’s birth name was Chaim Wamburger; and he had become both a Muslim and a Christian in pursuit of ‘Oriental Knowledge’ and a university lectureship. In his autobiography Vambery noted that his Orthodox Jewish education and its emphasis on the mastery of texts and languages prepared him for mastering Islamic texts and languages. In his six-year sojourn in Istanbul, Vambery mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. For Muslims, as for Jews, Vambery noted, text study is a form of devotion.

H/t Memorial Website of Ignaz Goldziher

Like his teacher, Goldziher was educated in Orthodox Jewish schools and brought to the study of the Qur’an the same attention to detail that Rabbinic scholars brought to the Torah. Thus many, but not all, of the era’s Jewish scholars of Islam had a Jewish religious education rich in text study and analysis. With these tools in hand, they took on the study of Arabic and Islam.  

Thus, from the outset of the liberalization of European Judaism, the study of Islam, or more precisely, an idealized vision of Islam as ‘rational religion,’ played a significant role. That vision was based on the recognition that the two sister religions had similar, though not identical, approaches to the study of scripture, the development of law, and the practice of rituals. 

In the first half century of this modern Jewish engagement with Islam, (1870-1920), contact with actual Muslims was limited. Some of Goldziher’s teachers, colleagues, and students spent time in the Arab world and in the wider Muslim world. And they met with European Muslims, of which there were many in Germany. Goldziher himself studied at Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the great center of Muslim learning. But these contracts did not lead any of these Jewish scholars to convert to Islam.  

In the next stage of this Jewish – Muslim encounter, roughly from Goldziher’s death in 1920 to the outbreak of war in 1939, a number of European Jews became Muslims.  

From Budapest, Goldziher went to study in Germany, then the center of both Jewish studies and Islamic studies. At the University of Leipzig he was mentored by Heinrich Fleischer, the preeminent European Arabist of the day. Fleischer, who began his academic training in a Christian seminary, was unusual in that he accepted Jewish students into his doctoral program. Eventually some forty percent of his one hundred and thirty advisees were Jews. In his eulogy for Fleischer, Goldziher said “He was one of the few learned men of our time whose academic influence was inseparable from the moral beauty that adorns a man’s character.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

Excerpted from:

From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam by Shalom Goldman. Click here to order.

Much of Goldziher’s inspiration for this life long-commitment to scholarship derived from his 1873-74 journey to the Middle East. He was then twenty-four years old and at the end of a five-year period in which he had travelled throughout Europe and studied with the most eminent European Arabists of his day. When he arrived in Damascus in 1873 and then proceeded to Cairo, he was already fluent in Arabic, and this eased his entry into Muslim religious and educational institutions. The bulk of his time in the Mideast was spent in Cairo, where his language skills, intellectual acumen, and persistence gained him an introduction to the Shaykh Al-Azhar, the administrative and spiritual head of Al-Azhar, Islam’s oldest center of religious learning.  

Goldziher was the first European non-Muslim to attend lectures at this prestigious academy. He was allowed to do so only after the Shaykh gave him a rigorous examination. Of the four months that he spent at Al-Azhar Goldziher later wrote “Both the students and the teachers treated me as if I were one of them, although I never posed as a Muslim. These were four glorious months of spirited learning.” In his travel journal Goldziher wrote movingly of his period of study at Al-Azhar: “In those weeks, I truly entered into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim, and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophic minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, as my experience taught me, is the only religion, in which superstitious and heathen ingredient are not frowned upon by rationalism, but by orthodox doctrine.”^iv 

Note that though he was fascinated by Islam, and driven to master its texts and traditions, Goldziher did not feel drawn to convert to Islam. He remained within the Jewish fold. This was in marked contract to his teacher Chaim Wamburger – Arminius Vambery, who, in the course of his life converted first to Islam and later to Christianity.  

Goldziher, as events towards the end of his life would indicate, was deeply loyal, attached to the Hungarian language and people, and to its Jewish community – and this despite his constant complaints about his job in that community’s Neolog (Reform) Synagogue.  

Goldziher’s teachers at Al-Azhar gave him an Arabic title, Shaykh Zarawi. The Arabic document which the head of Al-Azhar wrote on Goldziher’s admission to the theological school reflects a more relaxed period in interfaith relations, in which a non-Muslim scholar, fluent in Arabic, could gain permission to study at an institution usually closed to outsiders. The document read: “There appeared before us the Hungarian talib Ignaz, a man of the ahl al-kitab (peoples of the book) with the presentation of his desire to delve into the sciences of Islam under the eyes of the wise and learned shaykhs of the mosque. . . .  He declares himself far removed from all pursuit of mockery . . . Thus it is the decision of God that this youth become a neighbor of our flowering mosque, and one must not obstruct the decision of God.”^v In later years, Goldziher’s pride in this affiliation remained. He signed his books with the title Ignaz Goldziher, the Magyar (Hungarian) Azhari, student at Al-Azhar.  

In Islam in its earliest form (c. 7^th century A.D.) Goldziher found a model for religious tolerance, a model that he felt could serve modern societies and religions well. In his Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Goldziher wrote that “It is undeniable that, in this earliest phase of the development of Islamic Law, the spirit of tolerance permeated the instructions that Muslim conquerors were given for dealing with the subjugated adherents of other religions.” And speaking of the Islamic states of his own time, Goldziher noted that “What today resembles religious toleration in the constitutional practice of Islamic states goes back to the principle of the free practice of religion in the first half of the seventh century.”^vi 

But it was not only with the Egyptian religious establishment that Goldziher forged lasting ties during his sojourn in Egypt. He met with intellectuals, activists, and Sufis. Goldziher was also acutely aware of the political struggles then raging in Egypt and allied himself with progressive nationalist forces. He sympathized with the views of Egyptian nationalists opposed to both the Ottoman Turks and the European colonial powers. In Cairo Goldziher befriended the influential thinker Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani, (1838-1897) who called for Egyptian independence from all foreign powers. Al-Afghani, who lived in Egypt from 1871 to 1879, had a profound effect on Egyptian politics in particular and on Arabic political thought in general. The mid 1870s, when Goldziher was in Cairo, were a formative period in Al-Afghani’s political development. His charisma and oratorical ability had attracted many followers. Visiting European intellectuals were eager to meet with al-Afghani, and he with them. Among the Europeans, it was Goldziher with whom he formed the closest association. The friendship with Al-Afghani and the other social and intellectuals ties that Goldziher formed during this 1873-74 visit had a profound effect on his understanding of Islam as it is lived. As Lawrence Conrad noted in an important series of articles on Goldziher, the full import of this trip must be understood in the context of the times. For Goldziher arrived in the Near East in the heady early days of the nahda, the great revival of Arab political and cultural awareness that influenced the intellectual and social life in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Middle East. 

Among the aspects of Islam that Goldziher investigated and explained to a Western audience was Sufism, the mystical tendency and tradition within Islam. In Egypt, Goldziher met with Sufis and observed their rituals. He wrote extensively about Ibn Arabi, the great thirteenth century scholar who interpreted the Qur’an in a mystical manner. In his Lectures on Islam Goldziher dedicated a full lecture to Ibn Arabi and the Sufis. His essays about Sufism helped popularize its teachings in the West – and those teachings were the background for the resurgence of Western interest in Sufism in the early twentieth century. In this book’s accounts of Jewish interest in, and conversion to, Islam, an attraction in Sufism is a major factor in some individual’s decision to convert.^viii This was particularly true in the United States and Western Europe, where mystical forms of ‘Eastern’ religions held great appeal to the young and unaffiliated. 

Though the necessity for religious tolerance was a theme that emerges from Goldziher’s oeuvre, he himself was the victim of intolerance throughout his life. The breadth and depth of his scholarship on Islam was recognized by experts throughout the world, yet despite his international stature as a scholar, the state-controlled University of Budapest would not grant him a regular university appointment. A Jew, even one educated within Hungary’s own university system, was not a suitable candidate for a professorship. In predominantly Catholic Budapest, Protestant candidates too were often rejected. A contemporary of Goldziher’s, the Jewish linguist Bernard Munkacsi, in writing of his own travails at the hands of the university’s administrators, described the fate of Jewish scholars who aspired to university professorships in late-nineteenth century Hungary: “The honors degree, Ph.D. and academic achievements were all in vain! Where teacher’s posts were given, certificates of baptism were required. Teachers-to-be of Jewish origin had to settle their ‘religious status’ before being employed by the state. Many of my attempts to acquire a secular job have failed.”^ix  

Goldziher, while bitter at rejection by the system that educated him, did not vent his spleen at the Hungarian authorities. Rather, he reserved his most caustic remarks for his Jewish co-religionists. When Goldziher, in his mid-twenties, realized that admission to the regular university faculty would be denied him, he accepted an administrative job with the Neolog (Reform) Budapest Jewish community. As secretary of the Israelite Congregation, the Reform Synagogue with the largest membership in Europe, Goldziher was responsible for the religious, educational, and social activities of the congregation. As Raphael Patai noted, “A man without Goldziher’s intense scholarly drive, and more important, with a thicker skin, could have found at least some measure of satisfaction in occupying this influential position.”^x But Goldzhiher, though he served in an influential position for thirty years, did not. 

Goldziher found no satisfaction from his work as a community official. In his diary, and in his letters to friends, he complained bitterly about his fate as a synagogue administrator. Early on in his period of service he wrote “It was decided that I become a slave. The Jews wanted to have pity on me. This is the misfortune of my life.” Even though he expresses his feelings strongly, it is remarkable that Goldziher did not succumb to these bitter feelings and sink into inactivity. On the contrary, he persisted in his studies of Islam and developed a work ethic that enabled him to produce scores of books and articles over the thirty years he served the congregation. During the working year Goldziher would read Arabic texts at night, translating and taking notes, and this after working eight hours in the congregation’s office in which he supervised a staff of ten employees. On his six-week summer vacation he would take these books and notes (and later, when he married, his wife and son) to the mountains and write a complete monograph in one sustained effort. Among the magisterial works written in this manner were: Islam: Studies in the Religion of Mohammad (1881), a long German-language monograph on the Zahiris (1884), and the authoritative Introduction to Islam (1910).  

While engaged in mastering a vast corpus of Islamic texts, Goldziher did not neglect the study of Judaism. In many of his essays he compares Jewish and Islamic beliefs and practices. As Alexander Scheiber noted, “The Bible and the Talmud were Goldziher’s favorite studies in his youth. He remained a good Hebrew stylist and retained his interest in Jewish learning until the end of his life.”

It was only in 1905 that Goldziher, then aged 55, received a regular university appointment in Budapest. During his thirty-year tenure at that city’s Reform Jewish congregation, he had turned down job offers from the most important European and Middle Eastern centers of the study of religion and culture. Among the offers: In 1893 the University of Heidelberg, at the urging of the great Semitist Nöldeke, offered him a professorship. A year later Cambridge University invited him to occupy the chair left empty at the death of William Robertson Smith, the eminent philologist and historian of religion. In the first decade of the twentieth century Goldziher received offers from the Khedive of Egypt to teach in Cairo – and from Zionist leader Max Nordau (who was Goldziher’s childhood friend) to teach at the newly envisioned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Surely he was the only person who received job offers from both Muslim and Jewish institutions. 

Senior Zionist leaders, including Max Nordau and Nahum Sokolow, sought Goldziher’s involvement with the Zionist cause, and Sokolow hoped to “entrust Goldziher with the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews.”^x Though Goldziher wrote that “he wished that persecuted Jews would find a home in the Holy Land and live peaceably together with Christians and Muslims,” he was not an active political Zionist and declined the invitation to teach at the planned, but not yet established, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened its doors in 1925. 

Goldziher remained within the Jewish community, he never was a committed Zionist. We noted earlier that his teacher Armin Vambery – who professed the Protestant faith after his youthful conversion to Islam – actively supported “the Return to Zion.” A decade before Zionist leaders asked Goldziher to take on “the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews,” Vambery met with Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and agreed to arrange a meeting between Herzl and the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid.

To all of these offers of university professorships at foreign institutions, tied to Budapest and his family, friends, and regular employment, Goldziher said no. His refusal to consider teaching positions outside of Hungary – coupled with his continuing bitterness and anger at the Jewish community for “enslaving” him in his administrative position – are congruent with the general psychological picture we get from reading his correspondence. Despite his accomplishments and worldwide acclaim, he felt trapped in a work situation in which his worth as a scholar was not recognized. And from that trap he could see no way to free himself. Too, his loyalty to Hungary and its community of scholars made him reluctant to leave his native land. This was the way that Raphael Patai, the anthropologist whose father was a student of Goldziher’s, viewed Goldziher’s psychological makeup. A more recent study and analysis by Lawrence Conrad, sees Patai’s reading of the diary as flawed. For along with Goldziher’s stridency and occasional emotional outbursts, there is much in his correspondence with colleagues that is positive and affirming. To use Goldziher’s emotional outbursts as the basis for an interpretation of his life and work seems to Conrad, and to me, an unreasonable assumption.

Robert Simon, Goldziher’s biographer, noted that “he transformed correspondence into a veritable cult.” The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has preserved a good deal of correspondence, and as one observer put it, “the mere quantity of these letters is astounding: 45 boxes containing 13,700 letters from 1,650 people.” Goldziher clearly followed his own advice about staying in touch with colleagues. A letter from a valued colleague or student was joyfully received. He told A.S. Yahuda that “if I receive a letter from Nöldeke or Snouck I feel as if I were given a precious gift. A happy and solemn mood descends upon me immediately.” And these were not mere missives of politeness. Scholars who have studied his correspondence noted that these letters, and Goldziher’s detailed replies, could pass for scientific papers, in that they convey more ideas and scientific value than many other scholarly articles of the time. Joseph de Somogyi, a student of Goldziher’s who emigrated to the U.S. and taught Arabic at Brandeis University, quoted his teacher as exhorting him “to do two things if you want to prosper in life: answer every letter or card you receive, even if your answer be negative; and give lectures at the Orientalists’ congresses. This is as important as literary work.”

The outbreak of World War in 1914 was a great blow to Goldziher’s spirit, and to his hopes for world peace. His ability to travel, and to receive visiting scholars in his home, was severely curtailed by the hostilities. Hungary, one of the belligerents, was severely destabilized by the war, in which it was on the losing side. At times, Goldziher’s personal concerns about the war emerge in his correspondence, though for the most part his letters are concerned with matters philological and textual. Some of these letters served as drafts for his academic papers. Goldziher also kept a diary and in it he allowed himself greater freedom of expression. Portions of these diaries were published in the 1970s. William Montgomery Watt, in an essay on the diaries, noted that they contained a startling revelation about Goldzhiher: “His apparently effortless mastery of his subject and the even tenor of his scholarly expositions suggest a placid existence in the groves of academia. The publication of the diary shows such a suggestion to be completely erroneous. All these works of serene and profound scholarship came from one who was engaged for over thirty years in an intense spiritual struggle against forces which made his daily life almost unbearable and threatened to destroy all his confidence in himself.”This ‘spiritual struggle’ referred to here was Goldziher’s experience of his synagogue job as oppressive and his scholarly work as liberating, life-affirming.  

Goldziher’s literary legacy of books, articles, letters was vast. His other great contribution to scholarship was mentoring of students. He taught and inspired a generation of Islamicists, Comparative Semitists, and students of religion. These students, in turn, founded scholarly lineages of their own. During World War Two, many of his Jewish students were murdered by the Nazis. Others fled Europe and survived. They taught, wrote, and inspired a new generation of scholars in New York, Boston, London, Moscow and Jerusalem. As Noam Stillman wrote in an essay on “The Mindset of Jewish Scholars of Islamic Studies”: “Goldziher’s holistic approach to Islam as religion and civilization, to Hadith, law, theology to practice – both orthodox and heterodox, high and popular, historical and actual – and to belles lettres, shaped succeeding generations of scholars, Jews and Gentiles alike.”

 German-trained Jewish scholars of Arabic and Islam explored many facets of the historical relationship between Islam and Judaism. One of them, Jacob Goldenthat, explored “the influence of Islamic culture on medieval works in Jewish philosophy and Hebrew Grammar.” Another German-trained Jewish scholar of Arabic and Islam, Joseph Horovitz (1874-1931), continued and expanded on the legacy of Goldziher. Horowitz sought to forge ties between Jewish and Arab scholars of Islam. In 1928, in his argument for establishing a School of Oriental Studies at the recently established Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Horovitz wrote that, “The idea was to create a school for the study of the East, its languages and literatures, its history and its civilizations especially the Arabic and the Islamic worlds, were to be considered. It was hoped that the work to be undertaken would be such as to be appreciated by the learned world in general and more especially by savants of the Arabic speaking countries; and that in its own way, i.e. by showing that there was a ground of intellectual interest common to Jewish and Arabic scholars, the institute might also help to promote the good feelings between these two communities.”^xix But for many reasons, this institute was never established. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine, and to what the Arabs saw as British support for Zionism, broke out into violence in 1929 and to a full-scale rebellion in the Arab Revolt of 1936-9. Horovitz’s proposal that academic cooperation would lead to a lessening of tensions no longer seemed relevant to the faculty and directors of the Hebrew University. 

As some scholars have noted, Goldziher’s life and scholarship flatly contradicts the assertion of post-colonialist scholars that the study of Middle Eastern cultures is inextricably tied to imperial designs of power. For Goldziher’s work is itself a critique of Orientalism. It is an attempt to present Islam as it is understood and interpreted by its followers in its own textual tradition and not as it is presented by its antagonists. Goldziher sharply attacked Renan and other European scholars who denigrated Islam and repeatedly sought to disprove his negative view of Islam and Muslims. Goldziher’s Cairo friend al-Afghani also produced a trenchant critique of Renan’s Orientalist views. One might imagine the young Hungarian Jewish Orientalist and the older Muslim religious and political thinker critiquing Renan’s views as they walked through Cairo in the winter of 1874.^xx 

The reader will recall Goldzhiher’s youthful declaration, at age twenty-four, that “Islam was the only religion which can satisfy philosophic minds.” Goldziher and his colleagues saw early Islam as a ‘religion of reason’ and as a model of how Judaism might be integrated into European civilization, and in the decades after his death the appeal of contemporary Islam as an alternative to ‘Western’ faiths grew, especially among Jews. In the mid-1920s, a few years after Goldziher’s death, a small but significant number of German and Austrian Jews converted to Islam. Among them was Leopold Weiss of Berlin, who, as Muhammad Asad, (1900-1992), dedicated his life to presenting Islam as a religion of reason, and arguing against what he saw as extremist tendencies within the Islam of the late twentieth century. Similarly, twentieth century Western interest in Sufi teachings and rituals was informed by the scholarship of Goldziher and other late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars of Islamic mysticism.   

Excerpted from with the author’s permission from: From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam.

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), novelist, essayist, and war-correspondent, survived Hemingway by some thirty-seven years. In the period in which their tempestuous relationship developed (from 1936 to 1940), and the years in which they were married (from 1940 to 1944), Gellhorn never mentioned her Jewish identity to her husband or his many friends and acquaintances. In the light of Ernest Hemingway’s casual and often-expressed anti-Semitism remarks, she would have been reluctant to reveal her Jewish roots. And as a working journalist with a large readership in the popular press, including Collier’s Magazine, there would be little benefit in referring to her Jewish ancestry.

Martha’s parents, George Gellhorn and Edna Fischel, brought her up in St. Louis, where George Gellhorn was a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist with a successful medical practice and a professorship at Washington University School of Medicine. Born in Breslau, in what was then East Prussia, George Gellhorn studied medicine in Germany, and then had specialty training in Berlin and Vienna. Edna Gellhorn was a prominent activist for women’s suffrage.

Caroline Moorehead, the most thorough and sympathetic of Martha Gellhorn’s biographers, noted that Dr. Gellhorn hated and feared Prussian militarism, and decided to emigrate to the United Sates. In 1898 he signed on as a ship’s doctor and left Germany. A year later, in 1899, he decided to settle in St. Louis and establish a medical practice in that booming city. George married Edna Fischel, daughter of St. Louis Jewish physician, Washington . E. Fischel, and his Protestant wife. Dr. Fischel had emigrated to St. Louis from Prague. Known as Emil Fischel in Prague, he added the first name Washington when he settled in the U.S. Thus Martha, born in 1908, had two Jewish doctors in the family – her father and her maternal grandfather.

The Gellhorns did not affiliate with any of the liberal synagogues in St. Louis. Rather, they were among the founders of the local Ethical Culture Society. Among the couple’s ‘good works’ was a commitment to provide medical care to African-American patients. For decades Dr. Gellhorn conducted pre-natal clinics for the poor of St. Louis. Mrs. Gellhorn was one of the founders of the suffragist movement in the city.

In contrast with the PBS Hemingway series, and with HBO’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, , Love and Ruin , Paula McLain’s 2018 best-selling novel about Martha Gellhorn, features Gellhorn’s Jewish background. Reporting from Berlin in the late 1930s, McLain’s Gellhorn witnesses attacks on Jewish businesses. In Paula McLain’s evocation of Gellhorn’s voice, “Walking back to my pension, I startled several times as I caught my reflection in a ship window. I looked Aryan enough, with my blond waves and light blue eyes and strong straight nose. I’d inherited my features from my parents, after all, who easily passed as Protestant in anti-Semitic St. Louis. But there was Jewish blood in my family on both sides.”

Growing up in a progressive household where women’s rights and minority rights were the subject of both discussion and action, Martha’s progressive political tendencies were affirmed in her college years at her mother’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr. Martha left that school in her junior year and in 1930 went to Paris to write for Vogue, Time Magazine, and later, for United Press International. Later Martha wrote for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, then a newspaper with national influence.

During the next few years Gellhorn wrote many articles, short stories and essays. She had published a novel, What Mad Pursuit, in 1933, and two years later a journalistic account of the unemployed, The Trouble I’ve Seen. In that same year her father died, and in December 1935, she returned from Paris to St. Louis.

While Martha’s father was alive, Christmas at the Gellhorn’s had been an important family event. After his death, her mother suggested that Martha join her for Christmas in warmer climates and vacation in Florida. And it was in Key West that Martha, sitting with her mother in Sloppy Joe’s Bar, met Earnest Hemingway. He was thirty-seven years old and one of the nation’s acclaimed novelists. She was a decade younger and an aspiring journalist and fiction writer. He saw a beautiful young woman and her attractive, refined mother. Gellhorn, acerbic and affectionate, remembered their first meeting differently: “There he was,” she wrote – “a large, dirty man in untidy somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt.”

Gellhorn and Hemingway were to spend eight years together – more or less. For much of that time they were war correspondents. According to A. Scott Berg, biographer of the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, it was Gellhorn who inspired Hemingway to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Gellhorn and Hemingway became passionate supporters of the Spanish Republic of the early 1930s. When Franco’s rebellion against the Republic ignited the Spanish Civil War, they went to Spain. “We knew, we just knew” Gellhorn wrote, “that Spain was the place to stop fascism. This was it. It was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt.”

Gellhorn reported on the war for The New Yorker. Her articles from Spain are masterpieces of intimate detail. She said that she “was always afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this time and place.” Her reporting from Spain was replete with just such elements. The struggle against fascism in Spain, she explained, was “the affair of us all who do not want a world whose Bible is Mein Kampf.”

Hemingway had been married twice before. When these relationships ended, Hemingway was the one to leave. His macho public persona, and his private insecurities, would allow for no other outcome. But in Martha Gellhorn, he met his match. She would not be intimidated by his fame or talent and in the end, in 1944, Gellhorn was the one to leave him. Tired of his jealousy, insecurity, and his attempts to block her literary career, she asked for a divorce. To a friend she wrote that she no longer wanted to be Mrs Hemingway. “I want my own name back, most violently, as if getting it back would be a return to myself.”

Hemingway agreed to a divorce, but never forgave Gellhorn, and until his suicide in 1961 he was increasingly bitter and nasty when her name was mentioned. In the years between their divorce in 1946 and his suicide in 1961, Hemingway lost no opportunity to bad-mouth Gellhorn, both in remarks to friends and in thinly-disguised fictional portraits.

In 1947, when Hemingway learned that Gellhorn was writing a World War II novel, he mounted a campaign against her. Referring to Gellhorn’s German Jewish father, he told a friend that he “hated her ersatz kraut guts”. In another screed Hemingway wrote that “she had that Prussian blood mixed with the Juden.” And, in a letter to his friend Buck Lanham, Hemingway suggested that Martha Gellhorn had hidden her Jewish background from him, but despite her efforts, he had uncovered it. “I would still have married her,” Hemingway wrote, “since the Virgin Mary was also Jewish, but I would have appreciated getting at least an approximation of the truth.” These remarks and many others like them, seems to undermine Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker’s claim (c. 1981) that the novelist’s anti-Semitism “was no more than skin deep; it was mainly a verbal habit rather than a persistent theme, like that of Ezra Pound.”

Most of all, it was Gellhorn’s reputation as a writer that Hemingway sought to impugn and undermine. In Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950, Hemingway depicted a female journalist clearly based on Martha Gellhorn. “She had,” Hemingway wrote, “more ambition than Napoleon and about the talent of an average High School Valedictorian.” Gellhorn could match Hemingway’s venom, as in this remark to her mother Edna, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”

After meeting in London to discuss the details of their divorce, Gellhorn and Hemingway never met again. She had left him, and that he could neither forgive or forget. In a letter to her mother Gellhorn wrote: “I simply never want to hear his name again; the past is dead and has become ugly; I shall try to forget it all entirely, and blot it out as with amnesia.” As the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson remarked, “Hemingway was not the first or last man to love her for her independence . . . but to resent her when she behaved independently.”

In April 1945 American and British troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. Journalists, along with the soldiers entered the camps. There were tens of thousands of starving prisoners in the camp. Gellhorn was among the first group of journalists in Dachau, and one of the very few women among them. While the HBO film has Gellhorn running out of the camp and collapsing in tears, in reality she was shaken but composed, and channeled her shock and grief into writing about the horrors she had seen.

Her powerful reportage on Dachau reached millions of American readers. It was published in Colliers Magazine in May of 1945, just a few weeks after it was written: “I was in Dachau” she wrote, “when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies . . . It seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.”

In her 1948 war novel, The Wine of Astonishment, the protagonist, American GI Jacob Levy, is stunned by what he sees at Dachau. Injured soon afterwards and recuperating in an army hospital, Levy falls into a reverie: “How could you guarantee there wouldn’t be a Dachau again? The idea came by itself, unexpected and menacing, and he lay still between sweaty sheets, feeling a new fear. . . I’m a Jew, he thought and remembered the faces in the prison, I’ll always be a Jew . . . He could not move, imagining the world had grown ugly and strange after Dachau. . . . It was dangerous with a danger you could not see.”

A year and a half after she reported from Dachau, Martha Gellhorn attended the Nuremberg Trails, which she wrote about for Collier’s Magazine.

Witnessing Dachau and Nuremburg were a pivotal events in Gellhorn’s long life (she lived until the age of ninety). Her faith in human progress was shaken. Decades after the war she wrote that “It was as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion, without recognizing it.”

Despite Hemingway’s efforts, Gellhorn’s war novel, The Wine of Astonishment, was published in 1948, and widely-acclaimed. The novel was a Book of the Month Club selection and it won praise from many reviewers. The Atlantic reviewer dubbed it “one of the most authentic novels of the war.” (And this was long before Gellhorn wrote for the Atlantic). The last section of the novel is set in Dachau. In a sense The Wine of Astonishment is Gellhorn’s ‘Jewish novel.’ Unhappy with the title that her publisher chose for the book she called it her “Jacob Levy novel.” In the 1960s it was re-published as Point of No Return.

Dachau and Nuremburg led her to visit Israel. In the winter of 1949, on the first of her seven visits to Israel, Gellhorn wrote to her friend William Walton, the Time-Life correspondent. “It’s a hard uncomfortable country, with one million individuals in it; you’d never have known how many different kinds of Jews there are, until finally there is no such thing as a Jew. . . . But their stories, a gold mine of stories, the equal of which I’ve never before seen. And then they’re brave, or they wouldn’t be there and alive, and because they’re brave they are gay (I am now certain that gloominess and cowardice go together) and face the more than uncertain future with a steadiness which delights and dazzles me.”

In 1961 The Atlantic published Gellhorn’s essay The Arabs of Palestine. Along with her 1945 Collier’s essay on Dachau it was the most widely-read of her many articles. By the journalistic standards of the time the essay was very long, and very thorough in its attention to detail. It was precisely because Martha Gellhorn was not thought of, or known as, Jewish that she was able to conduct research by traveling in the Arab world and visiting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan. In those camps she conducted interviews with many refugees and with the United Nations administrators tasked with their care. Throughout the article Gellhorn compared Egyptian President’s anti-Israel rhetoric to Nazi propaganda. “The echo of Hitler’s voice is heard again in the land, now speaking Arabic,” she wrote. Gellhorn praised the UNRWA administrators for allowing her to interview whomever she wished. The article opens with her summary of the Arab position c. 1960 about Israel: “According to Arab politicians and apologists, this is what happened, this is the authentic view, these are the facts. Doubt is treasonous. There can be only one truth, according to Arab politicians and apologists, and it belongs to them:

In 1948, war took place between five Arab nations of the Middle East and the Jews in Palestine. This war was caused by the United Nations, whose General Assembly resolved to partition Palestine into two states, one for the Palestinian Arabs, the other for the Jews. The Arab nations and the Palestinian Arabs would not accept this monstrous decision. They were obliged to protect themselves against it, with force. The United Nations operated as the tool of the Western Imperialists, notably Great Britain and the United States. The United Nations wanted the Jews to proclaim the upstart state of Israel. Because of the Western Imperialists, who favored Israel, the Arabs lost the war. By massacre, threatening broadcasts, pointed bayonets, and the murderous siege of cities, the Jews drove hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of their homeland. For thirteen years, these Arab refugees have languished in misery around the borders of Israel. The United Nations (Western branch) bears the blame for these events and must repair the damage. The condition of the refugees is a sore on the conscience of honorable men. The Israeli government refuses to welcome back to their homeland the refugees, now swollen to more than a million in number. This refusal demonstrates the brutality and dishonesty of Israel, an abnormal nation of aliens who not only forced innocent people into exile but also stole their property. There is no solution to this injustice, the greatest the world has ever seen, except to repatriate all Palestinian refugees in Palestine. Palestine is an Arab country, now infamously called Israel. Israel has no right to exist, and the Arab nations will not sign peace treaties with it but will, by every means possible, maintain the state of war.

Gellhorn’s pro-Israel stance and the article’s persuasive tone galvanized American Jewish organizations to distribute the article widely. The American Zionist Council arranged for copies to be distributed to “10,000 opinion makers in all categories.” Council officials noted that “interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America.”

Among the arguments that Gellhorn presents in “the Arabs of Palestine” is that “to be a refugee is not necessarily a life sentence.” Just as millions of World War II refugees “have made a place for themselves, found work and another chance for the future,” so can the Palestinian refugees.

Gellhorn’s article was published during the Eichmann trial. Gellhorn attended the trial and wrote at length about it for The Atlantic. “The trial was essential to every human being now alive and to all who follow us. . . . No one who tries to understand our times, now or in the future, can overlook this documentation of a way of life and death which will stain our century forever.”

Martha Gellhorn read her journalistic colleague Hannah Arendt’s report on the trail for The New Yorker. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “I’ve just read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and have the greatest respect for that ice-cold absolutely rational mind.”

Perhaps Martha Gellhorn was admitting here that about the victims of the War she could never be absolutely rational and “ice-cold.” She would be more emotional and sympathetic. Her observation that “the echo of Hitler’s voice is heard again in the land now speaking Arabic” resonated with Israelis.

And that equation between Hitler and Nasser, translated into Hebrew, appeared as the headline of a Hebrew version of The Atlantic article. It was published in Herut, the newspaper of the Revisionist party led by Menahem Begin. Above the headline it says: “by the famous American author, Martha Gellhorn.”

After World War Two Gellhorn never returned to live in the United States. She spent a few years in Kenya and then in Mexico. After her initial 1949 visit to Israel, Gellhorn visited there every few years. In 1953 she travelled to Tel Aviv to renew her friendship with Leonard Bernstein and hear him conduct the Israel Philharmonic in a performance of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. Gellhorn shared Bernstein’s boundless enthusiasm for Israel and the Israelis. In a letter to a friend she described that visit to Israel. “We were all merry and elated. Something good had come out of the endless horror of the second world war, a new country full of young, brave, gay people and of hope. The courage was breathtaking.”

Through Leonard Bernstein and their mutual friend photographer Robert Capa, Gellhorn met many influential Israelis, among them government officials and academicians. She cultivated these friendships, and by the mid-1960s had a wide circle of Israeli friends, including government spokesman Moshe Pearlmann, and General Moshe Dayan. Between 1961 and 1967 many of her articles, including sections of her Atlantic article The Arabs of Palestine, were published in Israeli newspapers. Many in the Israeli reading public recognized her name, though I doubt any of them knew of her Jewish family roots.

When she arrived in Israel during the last days of the Six Day War, Gellhorn was treated as a VIP and given a military escort to visit the sites of battle. For the Guardian, The Nation, and Commonweal , Gellhorn wrote about what she saw during her month-long stay. She took the opportunity to visit some of the Palestinian refugee camps she had first seen in 1961. Unable to relate to the suffering and displacement that the war caused on the Arab side, Gellhorn remained unsympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian refugees. Her opinions, shaped by World War II and her earlier visits to the Arab states, remained unchanged.

In the early 1970s Gellhorn returned to Israel, intending to write a book about Israeli youth. But after a few weeks of extensive travel she found herself somewhat disillusioned, and even worse, bored. She was about to turn sixty and found it difficult to relate to young people who she found arrogant and boorish. Daily encounters with young Israelis had chipped away at her romantic image of the heroic Sabra. “Their manners,” she remarked, “were a combination of the worst of the French and the Germans.”

But these observations were for her diary and for letters to close friends. In her published articles Gellhorn did not allude to her disillusionment with Israelis and she was always fulsome in her praise of a people she felt a deep affinity with. As biographer Caroline Moorehead noted, “Martha, whose sympathy for exile and alienation was real, who minded profoundly about the human condition, remained obdurate about the Palestinians for the rest of her life, repeating that if ever the state of Israel were menaced, she would insist on dying with it.”

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Alexander Street/ Proquest: “Martha Gellhorn: On the Record”

As a scholar of religion and mythology I felt in dire need of archetype with whom i could identify Trump and Trumpism. I searched in vain among the multitude of characters in Scripture, folklore and myth —but nothing quite fit.

The answer to my quest did not come from my fellow academicians, but from journalists. Trump, they noted, is a Golem.

One of the first journalists to pick up on this comparison was Veteran NY Times writer George Vecsey . He came through with this compelling image when he wrote in the late summer of 2015: “Make no mistake about it, the Republicans have made this an easier world for Donald Trump to spread his foolishness. For over six years they have run a campaign of ignorance and malice and, yes, prejudice about the twice-elected President. McConnell and Boehner and Graham have questioned Obama’s motives, his actions, and, with their silence, even his birthplace in Hawaii. I think it is because they cannot handle having a moral and educated man of African and American descent, as the smartest man in their room. Their behavior has created a monster. Donald Trump is their Golem.”

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of “golem” is:

• an artificial human being in Hebrew folklore endowed with life
• something or someone resembling a golem: as a: automaton b: blockhead

in Jewish folklore the story is associated with the 16th Century Prague , and with its wonder- working Rabbi Judah Loewe. The Golem was an artificial being created to protect the Jewish community from harm. Rabbi Judah formed the Golem from a large lump of clay that lay inert in the rabbi’s attic study. When the rabbi wrote the secret name of God on the Golem’s forehead, the creature sprang to life. But as the Golem grew more powerful, his creator, the wonder-working rabbi of the city, could no longer control him. The Golem ran amok, harming the very people he was created to protect, along with anyone else who got in his way. To stop the Golem from running amok the rabbi had to catch and subdue the creature and erase the magic name from its forehead. The Golem then returned to the inert lump of clay he started from. But, the tale reminds us in its conclusion, every generation has its Golem. There once was a Golem in Prague—and there will be Golems in the future.

Over the centuries ,the lesson garnered from this tale has been that “the Golem always turns on its creators.” This adage has been used to warn about many phenomena, including the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

Today, as we witness the last act of this Golemic presidency, we can see how over the past four years this Golem has turned on his creators.

The list would have to include the producers of “the Apprentice,” CNN, the Republican Party ,social media, conservative Evangelical voters, and the Electoral College—whose job it now is to erase the ‘divine name’ of presidential authority from the Golem’s forehead.

Hopefully, Trump was the Golem of our times, and we won’t have to endure another one in our generation.

Featured image: “Statue of Golem” courtesy Pixabay

Lady Cobbold’s response to the crisis in European politics was quite unusual. She made the case for a militarily prepared Britain in this way. “While all the world is discussing the vexed question of war and disarmament, it is perhaps well to give here the attitude of Islam on the subject: While Islam bans all aggressive wars, it permits such as are undertaken in defense of the life, property, and religious liberty of all denominations.” Lady Cobbold then turned to the second Sura of the Qur’an to make her case: “Fight in the name of God against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities; verily God loveth not aggression.”

Invoking Islamic ideas to address a European political crisis was more than unusual at the time. Among British elites it was unheard of.

But Evelyn Cobbold was not citing the Qur’an as an outsider to Islam, but rather as a Muslim convert. In 1933, at age sixty-five, she performed the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and a year later she published Pilgrimage to Mecca, an account of her experiences in Saudi Arabia. The British newspapers hailed her as “the first English woman on the Mecca Pilgrimage.” As she was widely known as a traveler and game hunter, the British press depicted her pilgrimage as something of a celebrity event, as in the Daily Express headline, “Woman’s Trousered Trip to Mecca.”

Evelyn Murray was born to aristocratic Scottish family in 1867. Her parents were the Earl and Countess of Dunmore. Their family seat was on the Isle of Harris. As a young child Evelyn, the eldest of six children, spent long periods of time traveling with her father, a noted explorer, hunter, and geographer. Summers were spent in Cairo, where the Murray family kept a residence.

Converts to Islam undergo a formal process of accepting the faith; but in Evelyn Cobbold’s case no such ritual was recorded, or ever mentioned by her. Later in life she said that she had always been a Muslim, had felt that way since her childhood, so there was no reason for her to undergo a formal conversion. In her twenties Evelyn took a Muslim name, Zainab, and when in the Middle East liked to be known as Lady Zainab. But, unlike many converts to Islam, she did not give up her Christian name or her ‘Western’ ways. She remained an avid and expert hunter and angler, often winning competitions in those fields.

Lady Zainab’s story and her 1934 book might have been forgotten but for the efforts of London writer and publisher William Facey and his co-author Miranda Taylor, an editor at the Royal Geographical Society. In 2008 they re-published Cobbold’s Pilgrimage to Mecca along with a richly-detailed biographical introduction.

Lady Zainab’s pilgrimage account pays considerable attention to Muslim women in general, and to the participation of women in the Haj in particular. Seeking to counter Western stereotypes of the era, she makes the case that “it is a mistake to think that the seclusion of women is an Islamic institution . . . Muhammad enforced as one the essential teachings of his creed respect for women.”

As to the institution of purdah, the seclusion of women in Muslim India and elsewhere, Lady Cobbold asserted that “the purdah system in India is no part of the Islamic Law. It is of Zoroastrian, Persian and Byzantine origin . . . also the lack of education among the greater part of the women is in direct contravention of the Prophet’s plain command.”

After her pilgrimage to Mecca Evelyn Cobbold – Lady Zainab spent most of her long life in London and at her family estate in Scotland. She remained in contact with other British Muslims, including her fellow-convert to Islam, Muhammed Marmeduke Pickthall.

On her death at age ninety-six in 1963, she was buried, according to her explicit instructions, on her estate in Scotland. A Muslim ceremony was conducted by a British imam. And on her tombstone a calligrapher inscribed the Light Verse of the Qur’an.

Survivors of that pandemic have left us a rich cultural legacy , one that was inscribed in memoirs, novels, poems and stories.

As COVID-19 spreads, people are reading these works and asking themselves what the relevance of the past is for our immediate future. Some of the lessons gained from reading these century-old accounts are pragmatic. A comparison of the 1919 death rates in Philadelphia and those in St Louis reveal that the inhabitants of St Louis, which enforced an earlier form of ‘social distancing,’ had higher survival rates than the people of Philadelphia, whose city fathers were slower to alert the public dangers of person -to -person transmission. In September of 1918 , despite a growing number of infections in the city, Philadelphia City Hall held a Liberty Bond parade to which 200, 000 people flocked. Within a few weeks there were hundreds of cases in the city , which was the hardest -hit of America’s metropolises.

For me , and I imagine for many others, the benefits of of studying the pandemics of the past are more in the aesthetic and emotional realms. We can relate to the stories of suffering, acceptance and heroism conveyed in the accounts of the sick, the dying, and the survivors, and consider more thoughtfully the powerful challenges that lie ahead.

The musical legacy of the Great Flu is similarly instructive. And with the exception of a few classical pieces written in memory of flu victims, that musical legacy is a popular one that springs from the Blues. “The 1919 Influenza Blues,” which circulated among blues singers in the early 1930s, was in essence a protest song against officialdom, the wealthy, and the medical establishment of the day. The song opens with this verse.

It was nineteen hundred and nineteen;

Men and women were dying,
With the stuff that the doctor called the flu.
People were dying everywhere,
Death was creepin’ all through the air,
And the groans of the rich sure was sad.

Its that last line that tells us that this blues is more than a lament. Its a complaint —and a song of the poor, reminding us, with a bit of an edge, that now, in the pandemic, the rich too are suffering .

In the next verse, the songwriter, who remains anonymous, moves from complaint to judgement:The tone is biblical, the land and its people are being judged. The doctors in the singer’s town , Memphis , said that “In a few days influenza would be controlled.” The consequence of that reassurance was more suffering ( h/t protestsonglyrics.net ).

Well it was God’s almighty plan,
He was judging this old land,
North and south, east and west,
It can be seen,
It killed the rich, killed the poor,
It’s gonna kill just a little more,
If you don’t turn away from the shame.

Down in Memphis, Tennessee,
The doctor said it soon would be,
In a few days influenza would be controlled.
Doctor sure man he got had,
Sent the doctors all home to bed,
And the nurses all broke out with the same.
(H/t protestsonglyrics.net ).

Now that the doctors, and the public, have ‘been had’ –and the disease has struck deep and wide—only death will take away the dread and the pain.

Influenza is the kind of disease,
Makes you weak down to your knees,
Carries a fever everybody surely dreads,
Packs a pain in every bone,
In a few days, you are gone.
To that hole in the ground called your grave.

For many of us today, official reassurances that “in a few days influenza will be controlled “–assurances that we heard a few weeks ago from the president and his advisors–ring as hollow as they did for the composer of this song, and for the many victims he or she laments.

A cover of “The 1919 Influenza Blues” was recorded by the African-American singer Essie Ray Jenkins in 2004.

The 1919 Influenza Blues

But these musicians weren’t the only Muslim influencers in the history of American jazz. A number of producers and arrangers from Muslim countries played an important part in jazz history. Best know of these were Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records. Along with their American Jewish colleague Jerry Wexler the Ertegun brothers shaped the sound of jazz, soul , rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Between the 1950s and the 1990s these Atlantic executives signed and recorded Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin , Led Zeppelin and scores of other musical greats –and they enabled the Rolling Stones to distribute their own records through an Atlantic subsidiary.

The Ertegun brothers broke the barriers between musical genres, and in doing so they helped break racial barriers. In the late 1940s, as recent immigrants from Turkey living with their diplomat parents in Washington DC, Ahmet and Nesuhi organized the first jazz concerts in which both the band and the audience were fully integrated. As no commercial musical venue would allow them to put on an integrated concert , they held their first show at the local Jewish community center. After that concert was a success, other liberal institutions offered to host the concerts.

One of the keys to the Atlantic team’s success was that the Ertugen brothers and Jerry ‘Wexler were more than music company ‘executives’—-they were deeply knowledgable and enthusiastic about they music they recorded. They treated their musicians as artists—not solely as commercial properties. We can see this depicted in the popular film “Ray”—in which the character based on Ahmet Ertegun lets Ray Charles choose the musical style in which he prefers to record, rather than impose his own taste on the great musician.
Less well know than the top Atlantic executives, but equally important in creating and sustaining the “Atlantic sound’ in all of its great musical variety was another Muslim producer, Arif Mardin.

Like the Ertegün brothers Arif Mardin was born into the upper reaches of Istanbul society; his ancestors were public servants in a variety of professions. But whereas the Erteguns , who were a generation older , had to come to the US to meet American jazz greats, Arif Mardin, a musical prodigy and a jazz fan from childhood, was able to meet them in Turkey. In the mid-1950s the US State Department , in an era of cultural diplomacy that seems ages away from State’s current dis-functionality, sent jazz musicians on good-will tours.
In 1956 Arif Mardin heard “jazz ambassadors” Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones play at a concert in Ankara, Turkey. The twenty- four year old aspiring composer introduced himself to the musicians, who were eager to meet local jazz fans. Soon afterwards Mardin sent Quincy Jones a recording of one his compositions and on that basis Mardin was awarded a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He excelled in the Berklee program and was offered a teaching position there. But he chose to go to New York and work in recording industry.

Hired at Atlantic as assistant to Jazz producer Nesuhi Ertegun. Mardin, in his thirty year career at the company, distinguished himself as a record producer deeply knowledgable about all genres of music. He could annotate musical scores and write arrangements of his own for the artists he was working with. Mardin recorded and nurtured the talents of many great singers , including the Bee Gees, Dionne Warwick, Chaka Khan , and Phil Collins.

Because of its mandatory retirement policy Mardin retired from Atlantic Records in 2000. Still energetic and creative, he went to work for EMI, where he produced Norah Jones breakthrough 2002 recording “Come Away With Me”, an album that ‘went Diamond’ —selling 27 million copies. Mardin went on to produce other great albums and he was busy writing and producing until his death in 2006 at age 74.

For his talents Mardin was famous in the music industry as possessing “the greatest ears in town.” Bette Middler, who preferred to work with Mardin as her producer and arranger, wrote a song of that title in Arif’s honor. Its the first song on ” All My Friends Are Here,” a record of his own songs produced by Arif Mardin in the last few years of his life. The story of Mardin’s life and of the creation of that record is told in a wonderful documentary film produced by Joe Mardin, Arif’s son.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The Greatest Ears in Town: The Arif Mardin Story (EPK)

Much of Baldwin’s “Harlem Ghetto” essay was concerned with black-Jewish relations. In religious terms, Baldwin noted, African Americans identified with the Hebrews of the Old Testament: “It is the Old Testament that is clung to and most frequently preached from, which provides the emotional fire and anatomizes the pain of bondage,” Baldwin wrote. But for African Americans, this very identification with the ancient Hebrews became, in Baldwin’s analysis, a source of bitterness. As Jewish businesses in Harlem were viewed as complicit in white exploitation of blacks, they were “therefore identified with oppression and hated for it.”

Shalom Goldman’s new book is Starstruck in the Promised Land
How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel. Click here.

To escape the racial tensions of American life and focus his energies on writing his first novel, Baldwin had moved in 1948 from his native New York City to Paris, where he completed Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1952. Seeking a place outside of the United States to write his novel, he had considered several options in addition to Paris, including Israel, later writing that he had “seriously considered going to work on a kibbutz in Israel.”

Go Tell It on the Mountain was published to great acclaim in 1953; Notes of a Native Son, his first collection of essays, won a similar response two years later. In 1957 Baldwin returned to the United States and again took up residence in New York City. By the early 1960s, his essays on literature, politics, and the civil rights struggle were eagerly sought by the editors of such influential magazines as Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, the Nation, and the New Yorker.

In fact, it was the New Yorker editor William Shawn who approved of Baldwin’s suggestion that he report from Israel. In 1961 Baldwin accepted Shawn’s assignment to travel to Africa and the Middle East. A fluent French speaker who had begun to explore his African heritage while living in Paris, Baldwin planned to visit some of the emergent Francophile West African nations, including Senegal. On the way, he planned to make short trips to Israel and Turkey. “From the time of his early adolescence until his death, traveling was one of, if not the, driving force of James Baldwin’s life,” noted Baldwin biographer David Leeming. “He traveled to escape, he traveled to discover, he traveled because traveling was a way of knowing himself, of realizing his vocation.”

In October 1961, after several days in Israel, Baldwin confided to his diary, “The visit seems, so far, to have been a great success: Israel and I seem to like each other.” He had a keen appreciation of Israel’s biblical significance; as a teenager, Baldwin had preached weekly in Pentecostal churches in Harlem, following in the footsteps of his minister father. His passion for the pulpit faded, but in his life and writing the biblical influences remained. As the Baldwin scholar Clarence E. Handy III observed, Baldwin’s “religious inheritance did not simply provide a rhythm of speech or a style of rhetoric; it also helped him pursue the very essence of what he described as ‘the business of the writer’ in a culture like that of the United States, where religion’s influence predominates.”

For Baldwin, the journalistic assignment to explore the new Jewish homeland pushed him to reflect on his own struggle with cultural belonging and his strong sense of alienation. His initial reaction to Israel was more positive than one might expect: “All I’m expected to do is observe., “he wrote. “This is not going to be easy; and yet, since this trip is clearly my prologue to Africa, it has become very important to me, to assess what Israel makes me feel. The fact that Israel is a home for so many Jews (there are great faces here; in a way the whole world is here) causes me to feel my own homelessness more keenly than ever But just because my own homelessness is so inescapably brought home to me, it begins, in some odd way, not only to be bearable, but to be a positive opportunity. It must be, must be made to be. My bones know, somehow, something of what awaits me in Africa.”

Baldwin saw Israel and Turkey as cultural and geographic springboards for his projected encounter with Africa and Africans. That Baldwin would see Israel as an entrée to Africa might strike today’s reader as odd. But beginning in the late 1950s, Israel and the new African states were forging ties. The Israeli government made it a priority to strengthen economic, military, and cultural ties with African countries emerging from colonial rule. Israel provided technical, agricultural, and medical aid to Ghana and Liberia. Golda Meir, foreign minister at the time, was a strong proponent of these ties. Some of her colleagues in the government envisioned Israeli participation in the nonaligned bloc—those emerging states that affiliated neither with the Soviet Union nor with NATO. For the Israeli government and its diplomatic service, the African initiatives were of great significance. Bordered by states with which it was still at war—there was a 1949 armistice, but no treaties or diplomatic relations with the Arab states—Israel sought allies in two spheres: along the periphery, in non-Arab Muslim states such as Iran and Turkey, and among newly independent African nations.

Thus, for many African Americans of the 1950s and 1960s, Israel had a positive image, and it seemed like a natural gateway to Africa. In the early 1960s, Israel’s Foreign Ministry sent three hundred Israeli instructors abroad and invited some three thousand students from African nations to Israel for hands-on training. Baldwin was familiar with Israel’s outreach to African nations, and it is altogether possible that, during his visit to Israel, he crossed paths with Africans who were in Israel as part of these agricultural, technological, and military training programs.

Baldwin never wrote the article from Israel and Africa that the New Yorker had requested. Anticipating criticism of what he might write, Baldwin said, “I suppose the Israel piece will cause some people to say that I’m anti-Semitic.” Two years after his return to the United States, Harper’s published Baldwin’s “Letters from a Journey.” Addressed to Baldwin’s literary agent, these letters included some of his observations concerning his trips to Israel and Turkey.

After a six-month sojourn in Istanbul, Baldwin journeyed to Africa in 1962. He chronicled his experiences there in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, sections of which appeared in the New Yorker. As Baldwin biographer David Leeming noted, “This was the book that propelled James Baldwin to fame and led to his picture on the cover of Time magazine. “

In the summer of 1965, Baldwin returned to Israel to attend a production of his play The Amen Corner, which had debuted a decade earlier at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Born out of Baldwin’s experience as a preacher in Harlem’s Pentecostal churches, The Amen Corner was performed at the Israel Festival of Music and Drama by an American cast. The American Israel Cul- tural Foundation and the U.S. State Department cosponsored the production, and the latter paid for Baldwin’s trip. At the Tel Aviv premiere, Baldwin took a curtain call and introduced Claudia McNeil, the African American actress who starred in the production.

Baldwin’s two visits to Israel, in 1961 and 1965, left a lasting impressions on him, and on his understanding and analysis of the Jewish situation in the world and in the United States. His view of Israel and its place in the world would change dramatically over the decades. In his earlier essays, there is no mention of the Palestinians. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with many African American intellectuals and activists, Baldwin would move to a more critical view of the Jewish state and a more supportive view of the Palestinians. He described himself as an anti-Zionist in a 1970 interview. “When I was in Israel, I thought I liked Israel. I liked the people. But to me it was obvious why the western world created the State of Israel, which is not really a Jewish state. The West needed a handle in the Middle East. And they created the state as a European pawn. . . . I’m not anti-Semitic at all, but I am anti-Zionist. I don’t believe they have the right, after 3,000 years, to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.”

As the civil rights struggle deepened, James Baldwin emerged as one of its most forceful and perceptive chroniclers and advocates. He did not shy away from addressing the issue of worsening Black-Jewish relations in the United States. In a provocative essay in the New York Times Magazine, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” Baldwin asserted that “the root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples—all over the globe—to the Christian world. . . . The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks.”

After the 1967 War, when the situation of the Palestinian refugees became a prominent international issue, relations between Israel and Africa became strained. At the United Nations, the Arab states pressured the emerging African nations to censure Israel. Israeli cooperation with apartheid South Africa during the early 1970s caused further tension between Israel and the African states, and by extension, between Jews and blacks in the United States. The Palestinian cause, along with other revolutionary causes, resonated with American radicals, black and white. James Baldwin, who had accepted Israel as a legitimate state in the early 1960s, opposed its policies. Because of its oppression of the Palestinians, Israel was on the path to becoming a pariah state, not just in the eyes of the developing world but also in the eyes of some of its former American supporters.

In a 1973 interview in the journal the Black Scholar, Baldwin claimed that “the guilty conscience of the Christian Western nations helped to create the State of Israel. . . . It is not acceptable to me that the people who have been in the refugee camps for the last twenty-five or thirty years have no equal right to the land of Palestine where Jews and Arabs have been for so long.” For Baldwin, the inconsistency of American policy would become fully apparent during the Carter administration. Acceding to Israeli demands, President Carter had banned meetings between U.S. officials and members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). When news leaked that Andrew Young, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, had met with a PLO delegation in 1979, Carter—who had appointed Young only a year earlier— demanded his resignation. Baldwin was outraged. Writing an “Open Letter to the Born Again” in the Nation, he excoriated Carter—“the world’s most celebrated born-again Christian”—for failing to support Andrew Young.

In that powerful letter Baldwin argued that “there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East . . . without dealing with the Palestinians.”

Shalom Goldman, Professor of Religion at Middlebury College is the author of “Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel,” from which this article is adapted.

Ertegun, unlike his partner Abramson, was not a native New Yorker. The city that shaped Ahmet was Istanbul, where he was born into an upper-class family in 1923. Though he assimilated thoroughly into American Culture (and especially into American musical culture, which he would have a hand in shaping) he did not jettison his Turkish Muslim heritage – a culture for which he had reverence, and about which he had a sense of humor. “The older I get,” he wrote in his seventies, “the more I realize how Turkish I am. I display the prime characteristics of Turkish vices, indolence and excess.”

As his New York Times obituary noted: “Mr. Ertegun’s music partnerships, he sometimes pointed out, were often culturally triangular. He was Turkish and a Muslim by birth. Many of his fellow executives, like the producer Jerry Wexler, were Jewish. The artists they produced, particularly when the label began, were Black. Together, they helped move rhythm and blues to the center of American popular music.”

Ertegun and Abramson’s mixture of eclectic musical tastes, business acumen, and sheer chutzpah, paid off in ways that no one could have anticipated. Atlantic, the label they founded, survived the economic shifts of the late 1980s and 90s, when the multibillion dollar recording industry underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions that left little room for a label with its own character. But with Ertegun at the helm, Atlantic survived, and flourished. The LA Times summed up Ertegun’s story in this tribute:

“Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish ambassador’s son whose ear for the culture of Black America would make his Atlantic Records a legendary fount of 20^th century popular music, died Thursday. He was 83.” (LA Times December 15, 2006)

In 1956 Ahmet brought his older brother Nesuhi into the business. While Ahmet’s tastes ran to Soul, and rock and roll, Nesuhi’s passion was jazz. In fact, before he moved to New York City to join Atlantic, Nesuhi ran a jazz record store in Los Angeles. And, at UCLA, he taught a course on the history of jazz, the first academic course of its kind. On Nesuhi’s initiative Atlantic signed jazz greats Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and the Modern Jazz Quartet (The MJQ) to the Atlantic label.

These innovative jazz musicians praised Nesuhi’s knowledge of jazz, and the creative freedom he granted them. John Lewis of the MJQ said that unlike other record producers Nesuhi let musicians play what they wanted, not what record executives thought they should play.

Ahmet and his older brother Nesuhi came to the U.S. in 1934 when their father, Mehmet Munir Ertegun, was appointed the Turkish ambassador to the United States. Prior to that he had been ambassador in Paris and London. When the two brothers arrived in Washington D.C. Ahmet was eleven years old and Nesuhi was seventeen. In London, two years before they moved to the U.S. Ahmet saw his first jazz concert. It was a life-changing event. In Ahmet’s words:

“When I was about 8 or 9 years old, in 1932, Nesuhi took me to hear Cab Calloway and later Duke Ellington at the Palladium in London. I had never really seen black people except I had seen pictures of great artists like Josephine Baker – whom I spent a few days with before she died. And I had never heard anything as glorious as those beautiful musicians, wearing great white tails playing these incredibly gleaming horns with drums and rhythm sections unlike you ever heard on records. . . . So, I became a jazz fan quite early and never went off the path thereafter.”

Ahmet and Nesuhi’s father, Mehmet Munir, had been Kamal Ataturk’s chief legal advisor. Ataturk insisted that all government officials take Turkish names. Mehmet Munir complied by adding an invented name “Ertegun” which means “new day” in Turkish. Despite Ataturk’s assertive hostility to the practice of Islamic religious rituals, Mehmet Munir, remained an observant Muslim, praying five times a day and expressing respect for the religious traditions of his grandfather, Sufi Shaykh Ibrahim Edhem Efendi, head of the Ozbeker Tekke in Uskudar, Istanbul.

In an interview in Slate in the year before his death in 2006, Ertegun was asked what he would like his legacy to be. His reply, “I’d be happy if people said that I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.

And to the interviewer’s question, “do you have any devotional feelings towards Islam?” Ertegun said, “Well, look I’m a Muslim by birth – and the rest I’ll have to explain when I write my autobiography.” Unfortunately, Ertegun never got to write his autobiography. But perhaps we can intuit what Ahmet’s answer would be from the instructions he left for his funeral. He told his wife and friends he wanted to be buried in the family plot in Istanbul and to have his janaza (funeral rites) conducted along strictly traditional lines. When Ahmet Ertegun died at 83 in 2006 his wishes were carried out and his body was flown to Istanbul. There he was buried next to his parents and his brother Nesuhi on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

25 Years: A History of Atlantic Records

“Islam was a force which directly opposed the deterioration of the mind and body through either spiritual or physical deterrents . . . many musicians were searching for a foundation in life. Islam taught that one should keep his body clean and healthy. It elevated the mind from the morass of American oppression and myths about Blacks.”

Alfonso Rainey was born in 1923 on the Caribbean Island of Antigua to a family of musicians. He came to New York City for high school and then studied at the Julliard School. His musical skills were recognized by his older contemporaries and he was soon performing on trumpet with two of the great jazz orchestras of the day, those of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

In 1947 Rainey converted to Islam and took the name Talib Ahmed Dawud. Dawud, who brought many musicians to Islam, was converted through meetings with Sheikh Ahmed Nasr, an African-American missionary for the Ahmadiyya Islam movement.

Among the converts that Talib Dawud himself brought to Islam were reed player Yusuf Lateef and drummer and band leader Art Blakey.

In the late 1940s Dawud was invited to join Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, the proving ground for many jazz greats of the twentieth century. In Gillespie’s’ band Dawud was featured on some of Dizzy’s most popular and enduring recordings.

Over the past half-century jazz fans have delighted in his trumpet work on “Dizzy’s Diamonds” (The Best of the Verve years) and on “Good Dues Blues – The Dizzy Gillespie Story.”

As historian Robert Dannin noted, Gillespie’s band “also proved to be fertile soil for Islamic dawa.” (proselytizing), and at one point in the early 1950 the band featured many Muslim musicians.

Once he had converted to Islam and legally changed his name, Dawud decided to challenge American bigamy laws, on the grounds that his recently -adopted religion allowed him to marry up to four women. Already married twice, Dawud took a third wife in 1958. He married jazz vocalist Dakota Station, and she took the Muslim name Aliyah Rabia, but continued to record under her given name.

In the late 1950s Dawud left jazz performing and became a leader in the Ahmadiyya group, the Moslem Brotherhood of America. In 1957 Talib Dawud, together with Mahmoud Alwan an Egyptian Scholar, and the anthropologist J.A. Rogers formed the Islamic and African Institute of Philadelphia .

As a spokesperson for these two groups Dawud argued strongly against the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Chicago-based Black Muslim group led by Elijah Mohammed. Dawud wrote articles in the New Crusader, a Chicago newspaper, in which he contrasted the ‘authenticity’ of Sunni Islam with the doctrines of the NOI. Malcolm X, then a spokesman for the NOI, responded vigorously to Dawud’s claims, and attacked Dawud for letting his wife Dakota Staton continue to perform and record “sexy songs.” In a radio interview Dakota Station echoed her husband’s critique and questioned the right of Elijah Muhammad to speak for all American Muslims

The irony of these competing claim and counterclaims about religious authenticity is that Ahmadiyya Islam was in danger of being declared ‘un-Islamic’ by the Pakistani government (a step finally taken in 1974). As a consequence the Ahmadiyya movement moved its offices from Pakistan to London.

In the mid 1960s Talib Dawud, fearing the wrath of the NOI and wishing to join fellow Ahmadiyya leaders now in exile from Pakistan, moved to London to work for the London headquarters.
His wife Aliya Rabia moved with him, and in London she pursued her jazz career and continued to perform and record. But after Dawud began to interfere in her singing career , the couple was divorced and Staton returned to the US on her own.

After the 1960s Talib Dawud never returned to jazz performance or recording. Up to his death in 1999 he dedicated himself to dawa , and to the mastery of the martial arts. But for aficianados, Dawud is still one of the jazz immortals.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Dizzy Gillespie & Lee Morgan – 1958 – Birks’ Works – 01 Jordu

Personnel
Alto Saxophone – Ernie Henry, Jimmy Powell
Baritone Saxophone – Billy Root
Bass – Paul West
Drums – Charlie Persip
Piano – Wynton Kelly
Tenor Saxophone – Benny Golson, Billy Mitchell
Trombone – Al Grey, Melba Liston, Rod Levitt
Trumpet – Carl Warwick, Dizzy Gillespie, Ermet Perry, Lee Morgan, Talib Dawud