Fact-Checking: Olrik and Film part 2: Bookending

One of the things oral traditions never do is say "this is important". Instead, they tell multiple tales about an issue important to the culture.

Torah does this at least twice. One set has to do with stealing wives. There are three (!) narratives, each with a different emphasis and outcome. The textual location and sequence of the narratives have to do with genetic relationships between the characters.

The other set has to do with slander. The three (!) narratives happened at different times, and two of them happened at Sinai while the other happened on the borders of the Holy Land. These narratives show the associative principle at work; slander is such a killer transgression that the tradition put all three stories in the same place to really pound the lesson into people's heads. It also teaches that nobody is above the law, and it illustrates Olrik's Law of Ascents as each opponent to Mosheh is more important or numerous.

While studying Burt Lancaster's movies, I felt that his life of reading taught him how narratives work, and that he copied oral narratives features in his work, consciously or not. A number of his film pair up as studies of the same issue from different angles; I call these films bookends. There was also room for two movies he never made, that would have been bookends to films he did release.

• ·         Eternity and Run Silent both deal with genuine issues in the military, but Eternity is more about the destruction of people while Run Silent has more to do with the tension between human concerns and the norms of behavior in the service.
• ·         Scalphunters and Nuremberg which show that just because you don’t hate doesn’t mean you won’t engage in hateful behavior.
• ·         Lawman and OK Corral show how a sheriff may want young criminals to turn from their way and live.
• ·         Mister 880 and Young Savages about compassion for criminals.
• ·         The Train and Cassandra Gorge about how resistance is not futile.
• ·         Rainmaker and Elmer Gantry, about miracles.
• ·         Cattle Annie and Tough Guys about a younger generation venerating criminals of the past.

I think that All My Sons should have been followed in the 1970s with a film about the Apollo 1 disaster of 1967, with John Glenn's quote about "two million parts" shown above the credits. Lancaster had an excellent opportunity to hire Noriyuki "Pat" Morita as technical advisor, since Morita was an aerospace manager in the 1960s. Didn't happen. If a studio ever considered it, probably NASA refused to cooperate and the studio wasn't willing to film it with a disclaimer.

I also think that if Lancaster had played General Gordon in Khartoum, it would have been on condition of making it anti-imperialist in sentiment. The studio wouldn't do that, the schedule slipped, and Lancaster headed to Italy to film The Leopard. It would have been a bookend with Zulu Dawn, which hit on a number of themes that probably made Lancaster hot to do it as soon as he read the script:

• ·         Racism sits at the top of the bill, and Lancaster gets a great line about whether relegation to a place at the rear has something to do with the Basuto troops that his character, Dumford, raised, trained, and commanded.
• ·         You see classic British prejudice against the Irish, which Lancaster’s character is, and he even managed an Irish brogue. (He was tone-deaf about accents: this is the only time in 45 years when he tried one but it was a natural due to his being of Belfast stock.) This anti-Irish sentiment becomes explicit when Chelmsford sneers at Colonel Brown for being Irish, as much as for his concern over his troops’ lack of provision.
• ·         Assimilation. Simon Ward’s character enthusiastically shakes the hand of a black man who attends a garden party, but Ward’s character only has one function: killing blacks. The black guest has assimilated to the imperialists, but those who will not assimilate must be destroyed. Bishop Colenso’s “there should be room for all of us” is disingenuous; the empire may have geographic room for all, but not cultural room for all.
• ·         At minute 29 we get a chilling “let us hope that this will be the final solution to the Zulu problem.” I would not doubt that Lancaster took this role in part to get that statement in front of audiences who had learned in school about the Holocaust, especially after his role in Nuremberg.
• ·         Chelmsford comes across as a British Custer: “my only fear is that the Zulu will avoid engagement.” When the empire lost the battle, he blamed Dumford, who was dead, and whose advice the film pointedly shows the general dismissing. This was Lancaster’s chance to do a version of 1970’s Little Big Man.

Colenso was an avid missionary and that means he was an assimilationist, though he tried to get blacks treated equally under the law. He also rejected a common origin for all human races. He knew there was not cultural room for all when the Anglican church attacked his Hexateuchal commentary and filed suit to deprive him of his salary. If Lancaster came across this information while studying the script, it would have made him even hotter to do the film because it illustrates how religious institutions hang on to power by suppressing inconvenient unconventionalities. And in a sense that makes Zulu Dawn a bookend to Elmer Gantry for the hat trick.

If you have seen Lancaster's films, look again with this in mind and let me know if you find other sets. Also let me know if your favorite thespian does things like this. Lancaster was one of the few in Hollywood who gained control of his career early on, so he may be one of the few if not the only one to do this kind of thing. 

But it's not the same as doing one sequel after another, or doing films that follow on from a TV series, or making films about comic book characters. Those are just the studios trying to ensure an audience instead of daring to reach beyond the tried and true, the familiar and possibly tired. Reaching beyond is what Lancaster always tried to do, one reason his reputation has grown over the years.

Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 3

So apparently everything old is new again, and the blood libel is being trotted out for a new phase of the current anti-Semitism now that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been exposed as a/ anti-Semitic and b/ paid for by various US companies, which may in fact be cutouts for the real instigators if they are not being used to launder money for those instigators. (b happened yesterday.)

And somebody tweeted that the blood libel was a thing of the 1200s CE.

Well, it wasn't. It was started by Christians in the 400s CE.

And the last manifestation that I know of was the 1913 trial in Kyiv, which at the time was part of the Russian empire, of Mendel Beilis. I have an entire blog thread about the trial. It has ten sections on the trial that will tell you what happened if you don't have time for the larger part of the work.

That larger part consists of 34 PDFs with the first and only English translation of the entire trial transcript, with footnotes, attached to a description of each days' material with other metadata. The transcript was 1430 double-column pages long in the pre-Soviet orthography. With the notes, the PDFs add up to over 3000 pages.

Since I finished posting the translation (2014), various new information or epiphanies have come up, and I added links for them to the original page.

The transcript and other information are here. I just checked and the website is still there. I downloaded things to my laptop since you never can tell when a link will rot. Let me know if anything has disappeared that I link to.

The trial was a fraud from beginning to end. The government knew that Vera Cheberyak and her gang of violent robbers committed the murder. When she was arrested in July 1911 by honest cops, a tsarist lackey had her released and began forging evidence against Beilis. He had depositions forged over the signatures of people who lived near the site of the murder; he had Vera's husband perjure himself -- Vera and their sole surviving child also committed perjury -- testifying to a story the government invented. He had items planted that supposedly related to the murder but had nothing to do with it. He had an incriminating letter forged over Beilis' signature. 

The government's medical examiners signed an autopsy report that the government wrote in St. Petersburg. The information in it did not prove the blood libel because there was no way to do that. The three government witnesses who spoke or signed depositions about the blood libel, each had a different description of how you knew if a murder was the ritual murder involved in the blood libel.

The government's witnesses were mostly illiterate and none of them knew anything incriminating. The defense consisted of five lawyers who worked themselves into exhaustion in sessions that lasted up to 14 hours a day, 34 days straight including closing arguments, without a day off.

In the end, despite what anti-Semites will tell you, the jury voted on two charges. One charge was about the fact that a murder had been committed, without assigning guilt to any party. The jury voted yes on this. 

The other charge was about whether Mendel Beilis was guilty of the murder out of "motives of religious fanaticism", the blood libel. Six of the twelve men on the jury voted no, which was enough to acquit.

The single most important thing about this trial was that it violated a century-old principle in law. There should be no crime charged if there is no existing law about it in the penal code. Russia repealed a law about murder due to "motives of religious fanaticism" in 1906, during the reforms forced on Nikolay II by the 1905 revolution. It was illegal to try Beilis or anybody else on this charge.

Fact-Checking -- Olrik and film

I have an experiment I'd like you to try. Feedback is at your discretion. I want you to take the Epic Laws and put them in front of you while you watch some of your most and least favorite films. See how many hits you get.

Film is substantially oral literature. Any written literature that transitions to film has to be rewritten, except for records of oral traditions like fairy tales. Find a filmed version of War and Peace online somewhere, watch it, and then read the book. You will see how Tolstoy's text had to be simplified so as not to overwhelm moviegoers. Even Sergei Bondarchuk's classic four-film version is much simpler than Tolstoy's book. Simplifications often reduce the work to the dimensions of oral literature.

I was watching Judgment at Nuremberg, which Youtube maintains free with ads to encourage viewership. It is based on an actual trial involving 16 defendants; this is cut down to four, which most of us in the west can handle because we are used to four suits in cards, etc. But while there are four principal characters, there are three contrasting viewpoints: Janning's, Rolfe's, and Haywood's. This is the epic Law of Three, the one that turns up the most in both oral literature and film.

Burt Lancaster's work as Janning blew me away and I went on a search for his other roles. He played 87 characters in his 87 films in 45 years. He started in noir films and made 14 westerns, but he also buckled his swash several times and made three films where he was dubbed in Italian. He never made a sequel, but his movies started trends like violent westerns, disaster movies, and apocalyptic body count films. 

And the epic laws turn up in almost every one of his films. 

In particular, Devil's Disciple with Kirk Douglas illustrates the laws. First, the George Bernard Shaw play was rewritten, adding about ten minutes of action to give Burt a bigger role. This happens in oral literature, and sometimes the addition spins off a new cycle of literature dedicated to the character in that role.

Second, in those ten minutes, Rev. Anthony Anderson reinvents his own personality. From a holy fool, he becomes a militant rebel. This is an internal cascading contrast, and it always contrasts with Kirk Douglas' character, a black sheep who backs into rebellion.

Third, there are Law of Three events. It takes three incidents to make Anderson rebel: the death of an innocent man; the arrest of Richard Dudgeon in a case of mistaken identity; and the fact that the British wanted to arrest Anderson for giving the innocent man a Christian burial.

As a rebel, Anderson makes three attempts to blow up British munitions. One British officer has to be put out of the way in the first attempt; two soldiers in the second attempt; and a squad in the third. This is also Olrik's Law of Ascents. 

In Run Silent Run Deep, Lieutenant Bledsoe the XO shuts down P.O. Kohler three times for questioning Captain Richardson's orders. Actually, the second time Kohler doesn't get a chance to say anything, he just shows himself in the doorway and Bledsoe says "shut up".

Oral literature also illustrates behavioral norms. In Run Silent, the norms of military behavior shape the action, especially Bledsoe refusing to criticize the captain to the men or explain orders -- or tolerate their objections to Richardson's orders.

In Scalphunters, which I discussed before, Lancaster acts out an anti-racism message instead of stating it in the script. This whole film is an example that oral literature uses action, not description or discussion, to get to its denouement. 

Actually, many of Lancaster's films have a message; it is stated in the script only once, in Control: "There is no shelter from The Bomb, even in a shelter;" His war films are all anti-war films, except possibly Run Silent, and even then Lancaster gets to point out that "captain's discretion" gets people killed. 

It was a thrill watching those films and I watched a lot of them twice. The first run was to get through the plot and find the pivotal points; the second was to watch the man work. He was GOOD. He was good from the very first film he put in the can, Desert Fury, which you can see on Internet Archive. It was the second role he ever played in his life and he held his own in scenes with Mary Astor, of Maltese Falcon fame. I wrote 20 pages (single-spaced) on how good an actor Burt Lancaster was. Let me know if you're interested.

Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 2

So the Canaanites have reared their heads in current urban legends about the population of the Holy Land over time, and I posted some history.

You can see from that history that the Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites. On the Fact-Checking thread, I specifically wrote about the old genocide urban legends. I've tweeted about it too.

What's more, we know there were Canaanites in the 1220s BCE, three centuries after the Israelites came to the Holy Land.

Now there are new urban legends that pull in the Canaanites. The fact is, they are still with us. The people of Lebanon have a Canaanite inheritance.

And lol and behold, it is the same J2 Y chromosome haplogroup found in many Jews. It originated in NE Anatolia during the Neolithic and domestication of wheat, wine grapes, and animals, close to the Caucasus. You know. Near Ararat. Genesis 10 in the Bible gets another confirmation. 

So a) the Israelites did NOT kill off all the Canaanites b) the Canaanites were known to the Egyptian New Kingdom as living in the Holy Land and c) the Canaanites had descendants who are still with us.

I'm just saying -- hand-wringing not accepted

I finally saw that stupid tweet that said "what are we supposed to do as American Jews in this situation".

I don't think that person understands Jewishness because the answer is obvious.

IT'S CHANUKKAH. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT CHANUKKAH IS IMPORTANT FOR. RISING UP AND SHOWING PEOPLE WE ARE HERE.

You don't need a fancy setup. Go to your grocery and buy enough packs of birthday candles to get you through, and some matches.

Wrap a box in aluminum foil.

Find a window that looks out onto the street, and into which people on the street can look.

Melt the bottom of a candle enough for it to stand upright on the foil.

LIGHT ONE CANDLE AND USE IT TO LIGHT THAT DAMNED STANDING CANDLE AND PUT IT IN THE WINDOW WHERE PEOPLE CAN SEE IT AS IT BURNS

The proper place for Chanukkah candle lighting is in the home. We all of us need to stand up and be counted. That is what Chanukkah is about. Not hand-wringing. Not hiding. 

And then play this, standing up while you listen to the anthem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-y12LJlFkU

Here you'll find instructions on what to do after tonight.

https://www.chabad.org/holidays/chanukah/article_cdo/aid/102911/jewish/What-Is-Hanukkah.htm

Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance

In light of the false information going around on the web, mostly with anti-Semitic screeds, I thought it was time to give some information I didn't give on my Fact-Checking blog. The supporting data is in the bibliography. 

There are two reasons for most of the ignorance. One is simply that schools don't teach Jewish history, even in AP courses, and that history is never a required subject. The other is that courses dealing with Jewish history do not use post-1995 data like I did, ignore DNA evidence, and know nothing about the intersection between the Bible and Olrik's work. That's aside from the fact that academic writers are so ignorant about Biblical Hebrew and Jewish classics.

So here's the real deal.

By 4000 BCE the Semitic language parent had developed in eastern Anatolia south of the Caucasus mountains, distinct from the nearby ergative isolate Hurrian or its ancestor, and also the Indic languages. A Jewish ancestor is set in this location at this time, when wine grapes were being domesticated and meteoric iron was being used. The J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome subclades begin to develop at this time in NE Anatolia, and they are the main subclades in men descended from Jewish males.

The Jewish culture begins about 2500 BCE with a small nucleus of people who move west, after environmental changes dessicate the edin which used to be watered by four rivers, of which only two survive today. At the time smelted iron was coming into use. 

About 2350 BCE, the Hebrews of Ur have migrated west to the crossroads trading city of Haran, then southwest along the trade routes to the region of Numeira which is now in Jordan. Akkadian was used in diplomacy and trade all over southwest Asia. 

By 2000 BCE, after the destruction of Ebla and the Gutian takeover of Mesopotamia, ties between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coast weakened. Communities in southeast Anatolia dissolved along with the trade routes that had supported them. Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and Hebrew began to develop and, coincidentally, the Indic Sea Peoples began to differentiate from each other, carrying the R1a Y-chromosome subclade of the Indo-Europeans (which also originated in NE Anatolia). Carbon steel and war chariots hitched to horses appeared by this time.

The patriarchs acquire land at Chevron and Shkhem, but have to migrate away from the latter after destroying the city’s men. The narrative behind the migration has similar elements to Greek saga, and the Achaean Greeks were partners with if not identical to the Pelishtim who settled in the Holy Land.

In the reign of Amenemhet III, the patriarchs migrate to Egypt, but are (illegally) forced into servitude when Canaanitic immigrants take over north Egypt, forming the 17th dynasty,which the Egyptians called Hyksos. 

In 1628 BCE (a radiocarbon date) Thera erupts, part of a swarm of troubles during which the Israelites escape while their Hyksos oppressors try to pick up the pieces. 

The Israelites roam the Sinai Peninsula for 38 years; they consolidate a legal system that subsequently survives 35 centuries of oppression and murder and proves the advantages of common law, which reconciles local tradition with culture-wide law, over civil codes like the Roman one. Not until the reign of Henry II, in England in the 1100s CE, will another common law code arise. Radiocarbon dating places the start of the reign of Ahmose I over a reunited Egypt at about the time of the Ingress. 

Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Israelites begin to adapt one version of Ugaritic cuneiform to Hebrew, an easy job because Ugaritic is also a Semitic language and has already adapted cuneiform into a representation of its sound system, dropping logograms and determinants. 

Between 1400 and 1100 BCE, the Aramaeans settle in the territory that takes their name, the Ionians (Achaeans) settle in a part of the Peloponnese known as Achaia, and they also colonize the western coast of the Holy Land where they are known under their Egyptian name of Pelishtim, leaving writings in Linear B. 

About 1300 BCE is the middle date for the Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor of the Jewish kohanim according to 21st century genetics. This is the period of the central shrine at Shiloh, with a tabernacle and an ark of the covenant. Before this, people sacrificed in their settlements which were under frequent attack; that was the time of the bamot, which were prohibited in the Shiloh period.

About 1230 BCE (radiocarbon date) in a period of dessication, Merneptah of the Egyptian 19th dynasty sends soldiers to raid the Holy Land for grain, impacting both the Canaanites and Israelites. He puts up a stele about 1227 BCE which identifies them as distinct peoples living side by side.

Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the Sea Peoples destroy Ugarit, Wilusa, Hattusas, and other cities. In the previous centuries, the Indo-European Greek/Pelishtim contingent have replaced the Linear B writing system adopted from the Palace Culture, with an adapted version of Ugaritic cuneiform they picked up during their residence in the Holy Land. 

By 1100 BCE the Pelishtim bring the Shiloh central shrine cult to an end and Israelite settlements spring up on bare ground on the hilltops. They refuse to trade with the lowlands, making their own pottery and excluding wild pig, which was part of diets of the Holy Land from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE. Wild pigs survive in the highlands of Israel into the 21st century CE. Bamot are again established. Pottery styles in the north and south differ, hard evidence of cultural differences that will lead to the split monarchy.

By 900 BCE, the Israelite hilltop settlements dissolve. After the First Temple is built, the bamot are again prohibited forever. A previously united kingdom splits into Judea and all the rest of them. 

By 800 BCE, the Jews have developed a distinctive system of writing seen on the Gezer calendar. Aramaic has replaced Akkadian as the language of trade and diplomacy. The Ionians colonize the western coast of Anatolia, unknowingly returning to their homeland, and begin shaping the Sea Peoples epic of the war they took part in that destroyed Wilusa. 

By 690 BCE, the Assyrians take over the northern (Israelite) kingdom. They deport about 22,000 of the northern nobility, then import Assyrian-speaking people to whom the Israelite priests have to adapt their oral tradition. 

By 600 BCE, the Aramaeans conquer Babylon and develop Neo-Babylonian, a hybrid of Aramaic and Akkadian. They conquer Assyria and Judea and deport about 22,000 of the Judean nobility. 

By 500 BCE, the Jews return to the Holy Land and, with authorization from Persian rulers Daryavesh and Koresh, rebuild the temple. They now have a written version of the oral tradition in the wording that developed over the preceding 35 centuries. Its language is Biblical Hebrew, their pre-Captivity vernacular. Their current vernacular is Neo-Babylonian and they will adopt its non-cuneiform script for scrolls that can legally be read from in synagogue. They use Mishnaic Hebrew when running their courts and recording its enactments. 

Jews continued to live in the Holy Land for the next 25 centuries, although they spread out worldwide. Two particular infusions were the medieval creation of the kabbalistic community in Tsfat, and the purchases of land from the Ottoman Empire after 1850. The latter is known as The Old Yishuv.

The New Yishuv happened, of course, in 1948. Immediately thereafter, the Jews of Yemen were brought to Israel, and later the Jews of Ethiopia. The Jews of India also immigrated to Israel.

The sad part is that all this information is out there on the web and nobody accesses it. A lot of it is on Jewish Virtual Library. The people who want to smear Jews refuse to learn the truth. But as I said the other week, people who don't hate Jews are equally ignorant because they, too, refuse to use the resources on the Web. We all of us need a better education and as the old saying goes, it's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. Keep your tongue between your teeth if you refuse to study up.

Ben Hur, the novel, part 22

So what do we say about Wallace and Ben Hur.

Wallace did not respect his readers. He did not teach them anything by doing good research. Instead, he pandered to all the worst tendencies of Victorian melodrama.

He stole material from every cheap novel and play of the previous couple of centuries, except that he got the name Iras for Balthazar’s daughter from Shakespeare.

He pandered to every bigoted Victorian concept.

Only about 10% of what’s in this novel got into either of the two films made from it. The big thing in both of them was to get to the chariot race somehow because both filmmakers realized that it had everything – sports, excitement, death, and revenge.

It’s pretty sad to say that a novel this long is only 10% worth passing along to posterity, but that’s the case, unless you want to pass along myths and bigotry. They have their place in novels, but it’s not a good place unless you’re writing for an audience of liars or bigots.

Put it another way. I’ve been bingeing Burt Lancaster movies and came across one where he plays a trapper who is forced at arrow point to accept a black man as trade goods in exchange for an entire winter’s furs. While the movie has lots of humor in it, you can’t admire Lancaster’s character because without hating the black man, he is still cruel to him and minimizes the past sufferings of blacks. You probably wouldn’t watch that movie just from my description, even though I can throw in that they become allies in the end.

But it shows how non-haters have nothing to congratulate themselves on if they buy into the lies. Which is partly what my Fact-Checkingblog is about, and why this string of posts belongs there.