Communications

A communication will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editor's discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters may not exceed seven hundred words for reviews and one thousand words for articles. They should be submitted in duplicate, typed double-spaced with wide margins, and headed "To the Editor."

ARTICLES

Benjamin J. Kaplan's article "Fictions of Privacy" [/journals/ahr/107.4/ah0402001031.html] deals sensitively with the problem that the Dutch schuilkerk had a clandestine character even though its existence was well known and condoned. His point is that tolerance is a textured matter, and that a majority population may persecute minority beliefs and behaviors when they are exhibited publicly but tolerate them when they are restricted to the private sphere.

     Kaplan's discussion focuses almost entirely on the Protestant-Catholic divide, but this arrangement was a commonplace for Europe's oldest religious minority: the Jews. To illustrate, in 589, a Catholic church council at Narbonne forbade Jews to sing psalms while conducting funerals in the city streets. Other common regulations limited the public presence of the Jews during Holy Week and Easter, although this may have been intended for the Jews' protection, as well as for other reasons.

     Architecture is Kaplan's primary focus, and, admittedly, he includes the Jews in his study of the clandestine church, directing attention to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century synagogues of Alsace and Hamburg (pp. 1054, 1056). This, however, is to overlook a singularly apt example of the subject of his argument, namely the synagogues of the Italian Renaissance. A prime example is the Scuola Grande Tedesca of Venice, which dates to 1528/29. Any visitor to Venice's ghetto nuovo might easily mistake the etching of "The Hart" (Kaplan's Figure 1) for the building that houses the Scuola Grande Tedesca, and the interior of the Hart (Figure 3) bears a passing resemblance to its Jewish counterpart. There are, of course, dozens of other examples of Italian synagogues that have no public presence; like the schuilkerk, they were typically situated on the top floor of residential buildings, out of respect for their holiness.

     The ghetto, in general, is a classic example of the historical importance of the distinction between public and private space, and of the manipulation of the presence of religious minorities as the price of toleration. Kaplan's article would have benefited from a more catholic approach to the topic under consideration.

David Malkiel

Bar-Ilan University

Benjamin J. Kaplan replies:

I am grateful to David Malkiel for supporting the basic argument of my article and for extending it to aspects of Jewish-Christian relations I did not consider. I believe that he exaggerates, though, when he claims that my discussion "focuses almost entirely on the Protestant-Catholic divide." In addition to considering Remonstrant and Mennonite places of worship in the Dutch Republic and other officially Protestant lands, my article discusses synagogues in Alsace and the city of Hamburg. Of course, there were other semi-clandestine synagogues, for example, those used by Sephardic communities in southwestern France. I did not mean to suggest that the distinction between public and private worship applied only to the specific cases discussed in my article. Even today, public symbols and rituals can become flashpoints for popular religious violence; to a non-specialist, that seems true not only for Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland but for Hindus and Muslims in India and for other groups.

     Malkiel has a point when he compares the synagogues of the Italian ghettos to the Dutch schuilkerk and its counterparts elsewhere in northern Europe. Many such synagogues were constructed inside residential buildings. It is said that concern for security, as well as halachic injunction, led to their being "typically situated on the top floor" of such buildings. Yet even the prime example Malkiel cites, the Scuola Grande Tedesca of Venice, was not as discreet as a schuilkerk: its five large, arched windows framed in Istrian stone, symbolizing the five books of the Torah, were plainly visible from the ghetto square. So likewise was the small cupola of the Scuola Canton, which illuminated the bimah within, where the Torah was read. The grandest of Venetian synagogues, the Scuola Levantina, had (from the 1680s) a monumental façade immediately visible to anyone who entered the ghetto from the Cannaregio.

     It seems a great step further for Malkiel to assert that the ghetto itself constituted a "private space." By what definition? Was it described as such by contemporaries? If the presence of ghetto synagogues was obscured architecturally at all, that suggests that the streets and squares of Italian ghettos were public, not private spaces. Certainly, during daylight hours, Christians came and went freely in them. But perhaps these are not the right categories for understanding the ghetto, and the nature of the protection it lent Jews, at all. Historians commonly compare ghettos to the quarters established in some cities for foreigners (as Jews too were considered) and for prostitutes. Alternatively, one might compare the ghetto to a suburb like Altona, or to a Catholic ecclesiastic immunity—another space that commonly was walled off. In the Holy Roman Empire, some immunities became Catholic enclaves within Protestant towns and territories.

     In many respects, though, the ghetto seems sui generis. Certainly no Christian minority in Europe was ever, to my knowledge, confined within one. The more general point I would make is that, however important, the distinction between public and private worship was not the only arrangement for peaceful coexistence between religious groups in early modern Europe.

Benjamin J. Kaplan

University College London

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Kai-wing Chow's review of A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China asserts: first, there was social mobility among "commoners"; second, Ming evidentiary standards in examination questions have no relevance for later evidential studies; and third, Chinese classical culture is rejected in my image of "cultural prisons" [AHR 107 (February 2002): 168–69].

     For the second point, readers can consult the evidence (pp. 451–59). On the third point, although it is an "imprecise metaphor" (p. 193) for the examination compounds, they resembled "prisons" in terms of their architecture and surveillance (illus. 4.3–4.8). Readers also can refer to Chow's name in the index there and in the new edition of my From Philosophy to Philology. Below, I stress social mobility.

     By some counts, officials whose immediate ancestors were "commoners" for three generations before they passed the highest examinations comprised 53 percent, 49.5 percent, and 37.6 percent respectively of the Song, Ming, and Qing examination rolls. Such numbers are noteworthy, but they decline from 1148 AD to 1904. Moreover, these figures miss the "commoners" with officials as immediate relatives from collateral lines or from affinal ties. Including such information reduces the figures significantly.

     Lack of precision in what "commoner" means is another problem. "Commoners" were ordinary families not classified as elites in early Ming cadastral surveys, 1381–1391. Subsequently, some "commoners" became local elites or merchants. Only the imperial lineage constituted an aristocracy. By the sixteenth century, many "commoner" literati and merchants were entrenched elites. For instance, Wang Yangming (1472–1528), the general and philosopher, came from a family of "commoners," but his father had been the examination optimus in 1481 and rose to become minister of personnel. The family were local elites in spite of their "commoner" status.

     I have used genealogies to document how "commoner" members of lineages fostered educational resources for training their male children in the classical canon. The Zhuangs and Lius in Changzhou were classified as "commoner" households despite their status as gentry landlords in late Ming. The Zhuangs produced six Ming palace degree holders, and twenty-seven in the Qing. Altogether, they had ninety-seven Qing degree holders. Eleven Zhuangs advised the emperor. As elite "commoners," they were simultaneously gentry (in terms of landholding), literati (in terms of scholarship), and officials (in terms of government).

     "Commoner" families relied on the material advantages of their kinship organizations, intermarriage strategies with other lineages, such as the Zhuangs with the Lius, and increased corporate investments in tax-exempt land that supported schooling. Without public schools, initial stages in preparing a son for the civil service were the responsibility of the family. Licentiates who were placed in dynastic schools to study for higher examinations could already read and write classical texts. Because they had the cultural resources, the Zhuang and Liu lineages became an affinally related "professional elite." They were exceptional "commoners" and paradigmatic of gentry and merchant social strategies.

     In one pool of 22,577 Ming palace graduates, about 14,500 usually came from "commoner" families. "Commoners" were the largest category of degree holders, but most such "commoners" were already local elites. There were an average of ninety Ming palace degree holders annually (25,000 total in 276 years). They came from local pools of about 1.4 million male candidates (1,000 per 1,385 counties), and represented about one out of the 10,000 who started out. The archives indicate that peasants, traders, and artisans, who made up 90 percent of the population, were not among those ninety annual or 25,000 total Ming graduates. Nor were they a significant part of about 1.4 million who failed at lower levels.

     Occupational fluidity among merchants, military families, and gentry translated into a substantial circulation of lower and upper elites in the examination market. "Commoners" became elites before they became degree holders. Women and Buddhist and Daoist clergy were excluded, so the pool of candidates was exclusive. When we add to this competition the educational requirement to master non-vernacular classical texts, we can grasp the educational barrier between those licensed to take examinations and those who could not because they were classically illiterate. Overall, licentiates were not peasants, traders, artisans, clergy, or women. They were gentry and merchants, who were "commoners," or military men. What Chow calls a "fluid society" or "social mobility," I describe as a "circulation of lower and upper elites."

Benjamin A. Elman

University of California, Los Angeles

Kai-wing Chow replies:

There are three issues that need clarification. First, how far back can one trace the origins of the kaozheng or kaoju scholarship associated with the Han Learning movement of the mid-eighteenth century? If by kaozheng or kaoju, Benjamin Elman means some kind of critical examination of the authenticity and authorship of texts as well as historical inquiry based on empirical evidence, one will find kaozheng in almost any period. By including topics on statecraft in Ming policy examination as evidence for their connection with the "evidential" emphasis of the Han Learning scholars in the mid-Qing, Elman erases the specificity of the phonological and textual studies of these mid-Qing Classicists. Elman, however, admits that "[k]'ao-chü in the Ming did not yet refer specifically to philology or textual studies, which would be the focus of kao-cheng in the Ch'ing" (pp. 451–58).

     The second issue concerns the impact of the civil service examination on the movement of population between social strata. According to Elman, "[s]ocial mobility in late imperial China occurred mainly within the strata of Chinese with the cultural and linguistic resources" (p. 247). The key question is whether "cultural and linguistic resources" were monopolized by the literati-merchant-military families to the extent that they became a "late imperial aristocracy." (pp. xxx, 172). Elman overstates the closeness of the upper degree-holding elites by conflating two types of obstacles: first, the inter-strata obstacle for commoner families without cultural and linguistic resources to obtain lower examination degrees and, second, the intra-stratum obstacle for examinees to pass higher level examinations (juren and jinshi). The first barrier involved wealth and access to Classical literacy, the second the quota system and cut-throat competition.

     In Ming Qing times, wealth could be obtained through success in trade, industrial operation, management of agricultural production, and office holding. The upper elites had wealth but could not monopolize or control the dissemination of Classical literacy, which was widely available in the market of cultural goods and services—private tutors and inexpensive books published in large quantity by commercial publishers. Elman has noted the continual expansion of the pool of examinees in the Ming and Qing periods. The examinations were expanded "from metropolitan and provincial capitals to all 1,200 counties" (pp. 618–19). This expansion took place in spite of the difficulty of acquiring classical literacy, a difficulty Elman defines in terms of the daunting task of memorizing "470,000" or "100,000 to 115,000 graphs." Even this misconstrued difficulty based on Miyazaki's character count approach, however, did not succeed in keeping the examination system close to "non-elite" families. Had the upper elites been able to monopolize cultural resources, they would be able to hold onto their power like an aristocracy. But since access to classical and linguistic resources depended on wealth, talented sons of the non-elites were able to obtain lower degrees through success in examination. The majority would remain holders of lower degrees, but with varying levels of classical literacy they could become tutors, physicians, writers, printers, publishers, estate managers, and copyists.

     To call late imperial Chinese society "fluid" is not to assert that peasants, artisan, and merchant families were equally free to move into the upper elite echelon. Recent studies of the ruling classes in modern Britain show the continued dominance of the landed aristocracy down to the early twentieth century! But "the persistence of aristocracy is not an argument that the industrial bourgeoisie was totally without power in nineteenth century Britain" (Alastair J. Reid, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britian, 1850–1914 [Cambridge, 1992], 6). Similarly, the advantage of the Chinese upper elites cannot be used to argue against the fact that the lower stratum of the literary elites was open to "non-elite" families. Historians studying local elites have advised against privileging government service to the neglect of other types of elites. By referring to the upper degree-holding elite as a "late imperial aristocracy," Elman trivializes those local elites seeking to obtain lower degrees to enhance their status in local communities.

     Finally, I would submit that the concept of "cultural prison" Elman uses to represent the civil examinations is much more than just an "imprecise metaphor" for the "examination compound, architecture and the surveillance." The gist of the metaphor is unequivocally not its physical confinement but its "cultural" trap (see p. 194).

Kai-wing Chow

University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

To the Editor:

I am grateful to Briton C. Busch for reviewing my book, Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land? The British, the Arabs and Zionism, 1915–1920, Vol. 1, which appeared in your issue of February 2002 [316–17]. Busch made, however, a number of errors, which call for correction.

     First, I did not "quarrel" with Arnold J. Toynbee. Our discussion, which Toynbee invited, was scholarly, dignified, and dispassionate. In it, I was able to show how Toynbee's mistake originated and that, until the late 1930s, he had been a convinced Zionist and not a friend of the Arabs, as he appeared later (see my Chapter 4). It was George Antonius, whose book is mentioned in Busch's review, who influenced Toynbee, as well as a great number of well-meaning, albeit ill-informed, Britons. I have questioned Antonius's reliability and find his book tendentious and politically biased.

     Second, contrary to Busch's assertion, I dealt extensively with the Sykes-Picot Agreement (Chapter 2), showing that it did not conflict with the undertaking given to Sharif Hussein. The authors of Sykes-Picot believed so, as did its opponents such as Sir Henry McMahon, Sir Gilbert Clayton, Sir Reginald Wingate, David G. Hogarth, and others—T. E. Lawrence, in a letter to The Times (September 11, 1919), also saw no inconsistency or incompatibility between the British promise to King Hussein (October 24, 1915) and Sykes-Picot. The British government adhered to this position consistently, as I have shown by returning to original documents and other archival evidence.

     Third, "Britain [had] no intention of including Palestine in that pledge" to Hussein, as Busch notes (p. 317), but also, regard for France and French interests made it impossible to do so. The Arab leaders themselves (al-Faruqi, al-Misri, Sharif Hussein) excluded Palestine from their territorial desiderata, limiting their claims to the Syrian hinterland (the four towns) linked to the Hedjaz through the area east of the River Jordan.

     Fourth, I am pleased Busch accepted my thesis that Palestine was excluded from the deal with Hussein, but I disagree with him that "the British policy makers had not sorted out the long-range incompatibility of Zionism and Arab nationalism" (p. 317). Arab opposition to Zionism only became prominent in the late 1920s and during the 1930s. It was not yet much in evidence during the period discussed in my book (1915–1920), and British statesmen had good reason to believe that the two Semitic nations would cohabit harmoniously.

     Unlike some Palestinian notables, King Hussein was not perturbed at all by the Balfour Declaration and, according to David Hogarth, "agreed enthusiastically to Jewish settlement in Palestine." In his article in al-Qibla (March 23, 1918), Hussein attested that Palestine was "a sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons," the Jews; "the return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually an experimental school for their [Arab] brethren." He called on the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the Jews as brethren and cooperate with them for the common welfare. His son, Emir Feisal, meeting Chaim Weizmann in Akaba (June 4, 1918), expressed sympathy with Jewish national aspirations and emphasized the absolute necessity of intimate collaboration between Jews and Arabs for their mutual benefit. This friendly encounter pleased the British. Lawrence welcomed it also, stating that the Zionist experiment would improve substantially the standard of living of the existing Arab population in Palestine, while, on a wider plane, "the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world ... rendering it independent of industrial Europe."

     Feisal agreed. Both in London and at the Peace Conference in Paris, he excluded Palestine from Arab territorial demands and recognized the moral claims of the Jews to it. Palestine, he declared, was a unique country of universal character, and therefore the principle of self-determination was inapplicable. Returning to Damascus, Feisal tried to put his ideas into practice, but, surprisingly, General Allenby vetoed a proposed Arab-Jewish meeting. The Military Administration (1918–1920) conducted a policy that was diametrically opposed to that of London, and supported instead Arab national extremists. A promising beginning of Arab-Jewish rapprochement was thus nipped in the bud.

     The details of this story are related in my book (Chapters 7, 9, 10), but, it seems, Busch overlooked them.

Isaiah Friedman Professor Emeritus

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Briton C. Busch replies:

Since Isaiah Friedman's list of "errors" in my review of his book notes only differences of interpretation, I suggest that any reader interested in these matters read the book and draw his or her own conclusions. Actually, I wish Professor Friedman well in his quest, no matter how many volumes it takes. Although the danger is great of letting "might have beens" become "would have beens," perhaps indeed there was some key turning point. I am not convinced it would have been reached by anything touched on by the author in his first volume: even had Toynbee adopted another viewpoint, or this meeting actually been held, or that treaty clause included, it is still hard to see how Arab and Jew could have been brought to live peacefully ever after in the Promised Land. The sad fact is that it did not happen in the twentieth century. Let us hope for better from the twenty-first.

Briton C. Busch

Colgate University

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