Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient by Vincent Barletta (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 226 them feel persecuted; such images have subsequently been labeled “anti-Semitic ,” thus showing the inadequacy and totalizing force of a critical debate focused around ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘Jew-hatred’” (170). For example, two anecdotes reveal Jewish fears of pollution over having their holy books bound by Christian monks. In another, more deadly, episode, Bale notes that Christian and Jewish accounts of the massacre of Jews in York in 1190, in which besieged Jews opted to commit mass suicide, tend to agree that “the Jews’ leader encouraged the martyrdom and the Jews carried it out. For both Jews and Christians, this was a shared way of making a ‘religious’ sense—via martyrdom —of the event at York” (171). Thus, Christians use imagined persecution by Jews for aesthetic effect, and to some extent Jews did the same thing. If, as Bale writes, “the primary mode in the Christian representation of Jews was one of moral allegory and contrast, suffused with images of disgust, violence, bloodiness and torture” (23), Jews also deployed some of those same tropes in anti-Christian invective. Bale’s point, that the artifacts under consideration have an aesthetic function that can be studied separately from any real violence, is valid. Viewing these artifacts solely through the lens of anti-Semitism does indeed only tell part of the story. However, this rejection of historicist readings in order to focus on aesthetic reception has its limitations. After all, medieval Christian fantasies of Jewish persecution were just that—fantasies, while Jews across Europe did suffer very real persecution at the hands of Christians. As Bale admits, “it is hard to identify how far the aesthetic of Jewish persecution that Christians had developed in their religious and emotional lives ‘crossed over’ into actual persecution, because fantasy can, but does not usually, become reality” (27). This book provides a useful angle from which to read—and teach—literary and other artifacts of the often tense co-existence of Christians and Jews throughout the Middle Ages. Bale does an excellent job of illuminating a lost aesthetic of persecution that valorized “edifying fear.” However, it should never be forgotten that, regardless of their aesthetic function, images of violence very often do reflect a reality in which in which the potential for real, actual violence was always present. MICHAEL HAMMER, Spanish, San Francisco State University Vincent Barletta, Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010) 272 pp. In Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient, Vincent Barletta explores the way that early modern Iberian writers— that is, those writing in the three principal kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula during this period: Portugal, Castile, and Aragon—used stories about Alexander the Great to theorize their expanding empires. Barletta claims that Alexander was seen simultaneously as both a representation of the West and as an Eastern Other. This oppositional identity represented a model for Iberian writers to understand their own contact with the Eastern Other as they expanded their empires into places that spanned from Morocco in the West to India in the East. Using the work of Emmanual Levinas as a guiding principal, Barletta also REVIEWS 227 discusses how these writers tried to explain the encounter with another unknowable Other, death. As with the example of the Eastern Other, stories about Alexander serve to provide a framework for understanding encounters with death during the process of imperial expansion. As Barletta states, central to the literature of Iberian Empire was the “interplay between Alexander, the radical agency of the Eastern Other, and the horrific alterity of death itself” (35). Stories about Alexander’s encounters with the Eastern Other and his own mortality shape the stories told about the encounters between Iberian empire builders and these same figures. In the opening of his first chapter, Barletta describes a scene from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in which the protagonist, Gustav van Aschenbach, comes face-to-face with a red-haired representation of the Other who boldly returns his gaze. Barletta takes this as a point of departure for his discussion of the interaction between the different Iberian empires—Portuguese, Castilian...