"Jews and the Military"

Derek J. Penslar is the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto and the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His many books include Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective, and The Origins of Israel, 1882-1948: A Documentary History.

Penslar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Jews and the Military: A History, and reported the following:

On Page 99 of Jews and the Military I write of the effect of the Dreyfus Affair on Jewish career officers in France:

Frustrated and aggrieved Jewish officers became increasingly wont to challenge their bigoted comrades to duels, at times fatal. Many Jews resigned their commissions out of fear that their career advancement would be stifled.... Not surprisingly, at the end of the century the numbers of Jews entering the [military-technical] Ecole Polytechnique and [military academy] Saint-Cyr plummeted.

Nonetheless, even at the height of the affair Jews continued to graduate from the Ecole Superieure de Guerre and receive promotions from lieutenant to captain, battalion chief, lieutenant colonel, colonel and general. Jewish officers who died in uniform continued to receive elaborate and respectful military funerals. At the turn of the century, as the forces of republicanism reasserted themselves, Catholic and monarchist officers, not Jews, were the targets of investigation by the War Ministry…. Jews continued to flow into the Ecole Polytechnique, albeit at reduced numbers, leading to the training of a whole new generation of Jewish officers who would take command during and after World War I.

These passages speak to the heart of my book’s argument: that Jews in the modern world have often been willing, even eager, to serve in the military. In countries such as France and Italy where the officer corps was available to Jews, they sought it out. In eastern Europe Jews were frequently persecuted, and so their attitude to the state was more hostile than in the west, but even here most Jews dutifully performed their military service, and only a small minority were draft dodgers. For Jewish men in any country, military service presented an opportunity to display masculine valour. Jews worried lest their co-religionists face each other in battle, but they celebrated the virility, bravery, and above all the patriotic spirit of their men in uniform.

The excerpt is from a chapter on Jews as career military officers in Europe and North America. Other chapters in the book deal with soldering and warfare in pre-modern Jewish civilization; the relationship between conscription and emancipation; the tension between patriotism and trans-national solidarity when Jews fought in wars in the 1800s; Jewish soldiers in World Wars I and II; and the role of diaspora Jews as volunteers in the fight for Israeli statehood in 1948.

Learn more about the book and author at Derek Penslar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J .J. Carney's "Rwanda Before the Genocide"

J.J. Carney is Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. His research and teaching interests engage the theological and historical dimensions of the Catholic experience in modern Africa.

Carney applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era, and reported the following:

To be honest, I had never heard of Ford Madox Ford's page 99 test, but it was surprisingly accurate for Rwanda Before the Genocide. Namely, page 99 brings you right into the heart of the long-running controversy surrounding Catholic leaders, ethnic discourse, and Rwandan politics. You encounter Mgr. Andre Perraudin, a Swiss Catholic missionary bishop and future bete noire for the Tutsi exile community. More importantly, you encounter Perraudin's most famous writing, his pastoral letter "Super Omnia Caritas" released in February 1959. This pastoral letter explicitly and exclusively linked late colonial social injustice with Hutu and Tutsi categories, establishing Perraudin's reputation as a pro-Hutu partisan. Perraudin later called this statement the "charter of my episcopate" even as he denied that it contributed to the political climate that helped precipitate revolutionary violence in November 1959. In showing the analytical difference between Perraudin and Rwanda's other Catholic bishop at the time, Mgr. Aloys Bigirumwami, page 99 reminds us that social description lay at the heart of Rwanda's late colonial disputes. Namely, the church may stand for "justice for the poor," but the key issue is how the church understands and defines "justice" and "the poor." In Rwanda many political and religious leaders chose to define "the poor" as "Hutu," helping to establish a dangerous ideological justification for revolutionary anti-Tutsi violence. Such discourse helps to explain why many (if not all) Catholic leaders stood by Rwanda's post-colonial Hutu governments even in the midst of major anti-Tutsi massacres in 1964, 1973, and the early 1990s.

Read more about Rwanda Before the Genocide at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: J.J. Carney.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Vout's "Sex on Show"

Caroline Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. In 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for Art History. She is the author of Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome and Antinous: the Face of the Antique, which won the inaugural Art Book Award.

Vout applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, and reported the following:

Page 99 is, appropriately, not words but image -- for 'reading' images is what Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome is all about. The picture captures what remains of an ancient brothel at Pompeii, an erotic painting above the door giving a glimpse of the kinds of things that happened on the stone bed inside. It is an unusual image as far as the book is concerned in pointing so directly to bedroom gymnastics. Why? Because most of its 200 pictures reveal less about the realities of Greek and Roman sex than about fantasies, anxieties, propriety… Many of these pictures (for example those of Athenian pots decorated with scenes of athletics, or statues in the shape of beautiful gods) offer subtler invitations to think about the temptations and constraints that affected ancient bodies. They show objects used in elite drinking parties or temples, some of them rediscovered by Hellenists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By understanding their visual mechanics, Sex on Show throws new light on ancient sex and gender, cultural identity, religion, as well as modern collecting practices.

A single page, with its atypical image, inevitably struggles to encapsulate the many aspects of our strange relationship with the ancients as seen through the lens of sex. But its failure to do so captures something of the flavour of the book’s subheading and the power not of sex but the erotic. Unlike the consummation that comes from sex, the erotic is always wanting. It is only apt that page 99 should offer but the merest, even potentially distorting taste of the whole, because desire is always veiled.

Learn more about Sex on Show at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb's "Leisurely Islam"

Lara Deeb is associate professor of anthropology at Scripps College and the author of An Enchanted Modern. Mona Harb is associate professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut and the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiite South Beirut, and reported the following:

We were pleasantly surprised to find that page 99 of our book captures many of its key themes. Leisurely Islam is about many things: how and why cafes and restaurants boomed in south Beirut in the twenty-first century; the entrepreneurs who opened these businesses; the usually unsuccessful efforts of the Islamic political party Hizbullah to control this new leisure sector; the views of religious leaders on common cafe practices; the aesthetics of cafe interiors; and, as you might guess from the book title, the ways that pious youth navigate both ideas about morality and the complex sectarian geography of Beirut as they piece together ways to have fun with a clear conscience.

Page 99 conveys a sense of the tensions among the three key agents involved in producing and controlling leisure places in south Beirut and their clientele: Hizbullah, Shi‘ite jurisprudents, and cafe owners. The page highlights the late popular religious leader Sayyid Fadlallah’s view that “seeking a rapprochement between jurisprudence and the contemporary world can also be understood to suggest that jurisprudence should adapt to the social world, and thereby facilitate the needs and desires of contemporary youths.” This is an accurate summation of his opinions that are so important in this community. Page 99 also notes that cafe owners try to “act as self-proclaimed paternalistic authorities, monitoring and regulating” youths’ behavior. But perhaps the most important sentence on the page is: “But youths are not passive recipients and can be quite vocal in contesting authorities that interfere with their lifestyle choices.” This sentence encapsulates one of our key arguments in the book - that pious young Muslims are working out their own ways of living a good and moral life which includes both abiding by (their own interpretations of) religious and social values and tenets and having fun with their friends. This really isn’t an earth-shattering idea, but unfortunately in the U.S. today (and beyond), pious Muslims are often described in one-dimensional terms, so that readers and listeners are left with the impression that religion is the only important thing in their lives. One of the reasons we wanted to write this book was to counter with that assumption.

What is missing from page 99 is our argument about how new practices of leisure are affecting the geography of Beirut as a whole. The page gives the reader a glimpse of that idea when it says “Cafes and restaurants in Dahiya are providing youths with many social and spatial opportunities close to home,” but that barely begins to scratch the surface of how urban space is being negotiated and imagined by pious young people as they seek out different places to have fun.

Learn more about Leisurely Islam at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hendy's "Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening"

David Hendy is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sussex. He has been a visiting research fellow at Wolfson College and the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge; Marjorie G. Wynne Visiting Research Fellow in British Literature at the Beinecke Library, Yale University (2010); and Helm Fellow at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (2010). In 2011 he was awarded the James W. Carey Award for Outstanding Journalism by the Media Ecology Association of North America for his five-part BBC Radio 3 series, Rewiring the Mind. He worked as a journalist and producer at the BBC. His book Life on Air: A History of Radio Four (2007) won the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008.

Hendy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, and reported the following:

We’re in the world of bells – surely among the most iconic sound-making devices in the whole of human history. The earliest evidence for their use comes from China. But on page 99, we’re in the Catacombs of Priscilla, one of the less well-trodden networks of chilly underground passages and chambers hidden under the streets of Rome. Some 1900 years ago, it was lined with bodies – a quiet burial place for the ancient city’s earliest Christians. The Catacombs are silent now. But even back then, the only sounds would have come from simple funeral rites – accompanied, most likely, by the faint tinkling of small bells or ‘tintinnabula’.

A rather mute choice of location, then, for a history of sound. But even the modest, long dissipated chimes of the tintinnabula are a vital link in my unfolding story, which is about power: the remarkable power of sounds to shape our emotions and our social worlds over the past 100,000 years. Bells themselves had an extraordinary, sacred power. Their sound was seen as a ‘manifestation of universal essence’, helping to drive away those multitudinous evil spirits lurking all around. In fact, wherever they’ve been rung, bells have supposedly created a Godly aura of safety.

There’s another reason for being in the Catacombs. Some of the rooms here are stuffed full of inscriptions and frescoes: visual clues for lost soundscapes - scenes of banqueting and ceremonies, weddings and prayers - scenes that look Christian, but also perhaps Pagan, Greek, Jewish. In other words, scenes that conjure for us a turbulent melting pot of beliefs and rituals. What they show, too, is that whatever their precise religious persuasion, these earlier Christians appeared to believe that if sound really was an effective means of repelling troubling spirits, or attracting the attention of the Divine, there was no better way to guarantee access to the holy than by making a bit of racket: dancing, speaking in tongues, creating – quite literally – good vibrations.

The bishops of later centuries would soon put a stop to all this – as later pages of the book will show. But for a brief moment in time, religion has a delicious whiff of Dionysus about it. It remains (to quote the chapter’s title) an ‘ecstatic underground’: a dazzling kaleidoscope of sounds and songs somehow making their presence felt in the damp, still darkness below Rome’s noisy Via Salaria.

Learn more about Noise at the publisher's website, and follow David Hendy on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael North's "Novelty: A History of the New"

Michael North is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of several books.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Novelty: A History of the New, and reported the following:

Novelty: A History of the New is an historical study of the ways in which people have modeled a quality that is both fundamental and elusive. Common sense and basic philosophy both indicate that even the most astonishing novelty must have come from something and in that sense cannot be absolutely new. In practice, it is easy to debunk the claims of any innovation by showing that it has been preceded or anticipated, and this might lead to a strict judgment that there is never anything new. Science and philosophy are sometimes just this strict, but novelty in common parlance has never meant the eruption from a void of something utterly unprecedented. Some of our most basic models of novelty, such as revolution or renaissance, are cyclical and rely partly on nature and partly on a Christian pattern of return to a better state. Some others, particularly evolution, are based on a pattern of recombination, in which preexisting elements become new when put in a new relation to one another.

Information theory, which is the subject of discussion on page 99, is one of these models. Information theory began as a modest attempt to establish a method for determining the most efficient way of sending signals through a medium, given the inevitable corruption of some sort of interference. From these beginnings, it expanded its influence so that it became the common way of understanding genetic transmission, and it now has such widespread prestige that it is considered by some scientists and philosophers the best way of understanding the universe itself. Thus it is fair to say that the mathematical model behind information theory, which measures the extent to which a set of symbols can generate new combinations, is the dominant model of novelty at the present time.

Unfortunately, it seems that measuring the new and defining it are two different things. According to the argument on page 99, the terms used to define the quality that information theory measures, terms like uncertainty or choice, are fatefully ambiguous in that they describe a mathematical quantity in quasi-psychological terms. The subjective condition of a human receiver is ascribed to the purely objective capacity of the system to generate new combinations. Thus it remains unclear whether the novelty defined by information theory is a basic feature of things in themselves or merely an effect of our limited condition as human beings.

Learn more about Novelty: A History of the New at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hooman Majd's "The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay"

Hooman Majd was born in Tehran, Iran in 1957, and lived abroad from infancy with his family who were in the diplomatic service. He attended boarding school in England and college in the United States, and stayed in the U.S. after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Majd had a long career in the entertainment business before devoting himself to writing and journalism full-time. He worked at Island Records and Polygram Records for many years, with a diverse group of artists, and was head of film and music at Palm Pictures, where he produced The Cup and James Toback's Black and White.

His books include The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2008) and The Ayatollahs’ Democracy (2010).

Majd applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran, and reported the following:

Page 99 is probably for many readers somewhat representative of the story my book tells---it is subtitled "An American Family in Iran," after all---and deals with what almost any parent, anywhere in the world, is most concerned with: the health of their child. A regular visit to the pediatrician, a normal and necessary occurrence at home, is viewed somewhat differently when one is abroad, but that is just one small detail, revealing as it might be, of a culture both alien and sometimes familiar.

The book is nominally about exactly that: a family, thoroughly Western, uprooted and living in a country most Westerners know little, or nothing about. But unlike Westerners living in the East, I am bi-cultural, and although I never experienced living in Iran as an adult (not even as a teenager), my closeness to the culture---along with my spouse's and son's distance from it---are what made me want to experience life among the Persians and to write about Iran from a different perspective. While page 99 is representative of the book in that it is a descriptive entry, the book, at least to me, is much more about the concept of 'home', and what it means to a bi-cultural person. And, of course, it is about my people, and not just the "American family."

Learn more about the book and author at Hooman Majd's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

Writers Read: Hooman Majd (October 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Ayatollahs' Democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Klara's "The Hidden White House"

Robert Klara is the author of the critically acclaimed 2010 book FDR's Funeral Train, which historian and author Douglas Brinkley called “a major new contribution to U.S. history.” Klara has been a staff editor for several magazines including Adweek, Town & Country and Architecture. His freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, American Heritage, and The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.

Klara applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence, and reported the following:

I have to thank Ford Madox Ford for his curious maxim; when I turn to page 99 of my book, I find that I could hardly ask for a better representative page for this narrative—with an important qualifier.

I’ll explain the qualifier first. The Hidden White House is a book that details one of the most ambitious and dangerous construction projects in modern American history: The U.S. government’s complete gutting and rebuilding of the White House between 1949 and 1952. In this strict since, page 99 isn’t much of a big-picture summary. However, my conviction has always been that any story about a structure, however iconic or historic, is necessarily the story of the men and women who struggled to build it. In the sense, then, that my book about the White House is really an intimate visit with the people who worked and fought behind its storied sandstone walls, page 99 nails it.

Page 99 of The Hidden White House introduces a man named Clarence Cannon, a conservative Missouri congressman who, as head of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, was one of the most tenacious budget hawks our government has ever seen. Notorious for punching out Congressmen who disagreed with him, Cannon took the position that most all government spending was suspect or outright wasteful. So when Cannon got wind that rescuing the dangerously frail White House would cost $5.4 million, he vowed not to permit the effort a penny.

The fact that the White House had already been evacuated of the Truman family; the fact that it was in danger of imminent collapse (owing to decades of neglect and dangerous overloading of the mansion’s old wooden beams)—neither moved Cannon in the least. In fact, as page 99 details, Cannon’s only response was to demand that the White House be demolished and a new one—a cheaper one—built to replace it.

Very fortunately, Rep. Cannon would not succeed in his quest to see bulldozers knock in the mansion’s historic walls. But page 99 introduces Cannon and his cold-hearted threat—one that touched off a national debate, and one that very nearly cost the United States its most important landmark.

Learn more about the book and author at Robert Klara's website and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Hidden White House.

Writers Read: Robert Klara.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam D. Shprintzen's "The Vegetarian Crusade"

Adam D. Shprintzen received his PhD in History with distinction from Loyola University Chicago in May 2011, where his studies focused on nineteenth century America. Currently, he serves as Digital and Archival Historian (see, Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington) at Mount Vernon, where he manages digital history projects as well as the institution's archival holdings.

Shprintzen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921, and reported the following:

Cultural history serves as an important avenue of investigation in my new book, The Vegetarian Crusade. To understand the formation of the vegetarian movement in the United States in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to analyze both how vegetarians viewed themselves and how the group was visualized by society at large. Both factors shaped the development of the movement. Page 99 nicely summarizes popular views of vegetarians by the start of the Civil War, when the group was attacked as being both physically and ideologically weak. The rise of vegetarianism in the era directly before the Civil War (the American Vegetarian Society, the first national vegetarian organization, was formed in 1850) was noticed in many corners of American culture and society, celebrated by reformers and mocked by the mainstream press. The growing vegetarian movement even grabbed the attention of the American music industry.

Oh! Wasn't she fond of her greens! was a composition first published in 1860 by the New York firm H. De Marsan and subsequent versions were in circulation until at least 1869. The song relays a story of courtship from the perspective of the male courtier. The narrator seeks the affections of a young woman named Jane Bell who surpassed all other women in the courtier's eyes. Unfortunately, he also came to find out that she was a vegetarian. The song notes the peculiarity of the courtship, filled with picnics of garden sorrel and breakfasts of watercress. The last verse exposes the complex relationship between vegetarianism and gender roles:

Now, we are married, and settled in life, The old gal behaves very kind;
And, when I go home of a night, There plenty of greens I can find.
Since marriage, she's taken to meat..How wonderful strange it seems!
And sometimes, by the way of a treat, She has a little fat meat with her greens.

The song is clear in its implications. Once the woman was tamed and settled, she no longer adhered strictly to her vegetarian diet, long associated with radical politics including women's rights and suffrage. Now a respectable married woman the "old gal behaves very kind" including disassociation from her political past.

Vegetarians faced harsh attacks during this time period, though this would not always remain the case. By the late 1890s vegetarianism was embraced by mainstream society. How and why did this shift occur? The Vegetarian Crusade attempts to answer this question.

Learn more about the book and author at Adam D. Shprintzen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard S. Grossman's "Wrong"

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them, and reported the following:

Wrong tells the story of nine significant economic policy blunders from the last two centuries, including why each was adopted, how it was implemented, and its short- and long-term consequences. A main conclusion of Wrong is that policy goes horribly wrong when it is based on ideology rather than cold, hard economic analysis. For example, Wrong looks at how America's unfounded fear of a centralized monetary authority caused it to reject two central banks, condemning the nation to wave after wave of financial panics during the nineteenth century. It also describes how Britain's blind commitment to free markets, rather than to assisting the starving in Ireland, led to one of the nineteenth century's worst humanitarian tragedies--the Irish famine.

Page 99 comes at the end of the chapter that analyzes Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925. Before 1914, Britain had been on the gold standard for much of the preceding two hundred years, and had been on it consistently for almost one hundred. World War I and the accompanying risk of gold-carrying ships being sunk by the enemy made it impossible for gold to be shipped internationally—effectively ending the gold standard.

Only a few countries reestablished the gold standard after the end of World War I, but that trickle became a flood after Britain returned in 1925. To the British, the gold standard conjured up an era during which they were the world’s dominant political, military, and economic power. Yet the idea of the gold standard was more appealing than the reality that emerged in the interwar period: exchange rates were misaligned, gold holdings were inadequate and poorly distributed, and the equally unappealing alternatives of leaving the gold standard or maintaining it at the cost of domestic economic prosperity put central bankers in an impossible position.

Britain was not the first country to return to the gold standard after World War I. However, because it had played such an important role in the pre-war gold standard, its return provided the signal for many other countries to reestablish the gold standard as well. The widespread return to gold played an important role in propagating and intensifying the Great Depression, as well as preventing policy makers from undertaking steps to counteract the downturn. Had Britain not been ideologically committed to gold, the interwar period might have been quite different.

Learn more about Wrong at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800.

--Marshal Zeringue