Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  My first example is Babylon in ancient Mesopotamia, whose territory was roughly congruent with modern-day Iraq. Although it was a center of immense learning, especially in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, Babylon as a symbol of sin and decadence has become imprinted on Western culture via the Bible, which records the highly intolerant eye-witness accounts of Hebrews deported to that city after the conquest of the kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C. The handicraft skills of thousands of Hebrews were needed and exploited by King Nebuchadnezzar in his systematic reconstruction of Babylon. The Babylonian Captivity of the Hebrews would last fifty-nine years (not seventy years as prophesied by the Book of Jeremiah), until they were freed after the invasion of Babylon by Persia. What the Book of Genesis attacks as the Tower of Babel was the sacred ziggurat of the god Marduk-Bel, a triumph of ancient engineering that soared over 270 feet high and was sheathed in shiny copper. Babylon is excoriated even in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, where imperial Rome is portrayed as the bejeweled Whore of Babylon, the “Mother of Harlots” arrayed in purple and scarlet as she rides a seven-headed beast and holds a golden cup brimming with “the filthiness of her fornication.”

  It is hard to believe that the nondescript piles of melted mud brick spread across a desert fifty miles south of contemporary Baghdad were once a spectacular, palm-ringed metropolis whose hanging gardens were a wonder of the ancient world. Elite Babylonians were highly sophisticated in dress and manner: both sexes evidently wore cosmetics such as kohl eyeliner and anointed themselves with heavily perfumed oils. While it is probably not true, as the Greek historian Herodotus reported, that every Babylonian woman had to prostitute herself once in her lifetime in the Temple of Ishtar, it does seem as if prostitutes operated openly in the Temple grounds. Furthermore, the festivals of the war goddess Ishtar may have involved ritual public sex acts of some kind, perhaps even involving transsexuals. There can be no doubt that Judeo-Christian values, with their strict regulation of sexuality and hatred of idolatry, were partly formed in opposition to Babylonian paganism, which was organized around elaborate rituals for the dressing, feeding, and daily transfer of massive golden idols, in which the gods were thought literally to reside.

  The culture shock of the Hebrews in big-city Babylon was partly due to their own pastoralist roots: they had been shepherds, herdsmen like the Arab Bedouin, who dressed modestly and followed a conservative code of stoicism, frugality, and sexual discipline. What the exiled Hebrews recorded as a babel of voices inflicted as a punishment by God was actually the immense ethnic diversity of Babylon, which was a fabulously wealthy trading center perfectly situated between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. A huge variety of people and languages were always represented in the mixed population of Babylon, with its masses of immigrants, fugitives, deported laborers, and itinerant merchants.

  Babylon’s diversity began with its physical location in the 500-mile-long alluvial plain of the flood-prone Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which stream down from the snowy mountain ranges of Armenia. Babylonia was mythically fertile, a true Garden of Eden, but its sedimentary landscape lacked stone, timber, and metals. (Indeed it was precisely its lack of stone that would reduce Babylon to ruins by the time of imperial Rome. Babylon’s clay bricks did not have the sturdiness of Egypt’s abundant stone.) Babylon’s tolerant outward orientation toward other peoples began in its economic need to exchange its surplus of crops for other basic resources. In other words, commerce was the basis of that industrious but open and pleasure-loving civilization. Furthermore, merchants, with their adventurous mobility, shrewd alertness, and pragmatic flexibility, provided a liberating counterpoint to the ponderous fixities of the bureaucrats and pedagogues whose obsessive list-making constitutes the bulk of the cuneiform tablets yet discovered in Mesopotamia. A massive system of canals, created and maintained by a sometimes dictatorial hierarchical government, provided reliable irrigation and efficient transport of goods. Babylon collapsed when its government weakened and could no longer effectively maintain the canals as they silted up. Furthermore, the soil became irretrievably salinized due to poor drainage on the flat plain, leading to abandonment of the land.

  The Hebrews’ experience in Babylon helped to consolidate their sense of cultural identity as well as their theology. In the Babylonian destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Hebrews lost their hallowed place of worship but as a consequence developed in their exile a more refined concept of divinity that would eventually be absorbed by Christianity. Yahweh, a symbol of Hebrew nationalism, ceased to be the resident or patron of a building but became a spirit suffusing the universe, a living flame carried in all hearts.

  As a coda to the story of Babylon, I would cite the 1916 silent film Intolerance, a three-and-a-half-hour epic conceived and directed by the controversial D. W. Griffith. With its giant set of the walls of Babylon, it was the most ambitious and expensive film yet made, featuring thousands of costumed extras. However, the film was a commercial failure, partly due to Griffith’s stipulation that showings be accompanied by a symphony orchestra. Intolerance was Griffith’s attempt at self-justification after the bitter national backlash over his prior film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which remains infamous for its racist caricatures of African-Americans as well as its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Intolerance daringly or dizzyingly crosscuts among four story lines, each dealing with some aspect of historical bigotry, including the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when thousands of Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered by Roman Catholics in France. Griffith’s ancient story focuses on the fall of Babylon to the Persians. Prince Belshazzar (whose ominous vision of a hand writing on the wall was interpreted by Daniel in the Bible) is presented as a devotee of Ishtar and a defender of religious tolerance, but he is fatally conspired against by the intolerant high priest of Bel, whose betrayal of Babylon leads to its destruction in flames.

  My second example is Renaissance Venice, which because of its position at the north end of the Adriatic Sea had been a major trading center since the Middle Ages. Built for defensive purposes on a chain of marshy islands, Venice was physically separated from the mainland and was psychologically oriented less toward Italy than toward Constantinople, the great gateway between East and West. Venice consequently became one of the most culturally diverse cities in world history. Its central church, St. Mark’s Basilica, is Byzantine in style, as was Venetian taste in general, with its luxurious ornateness. The Venetian instinct for pleasure, as embodied in its sensual art, would become increasingly sybaritic over time, especially as compared to the austere sensibility of the more intellectual Florentine Renaissance.

  The constant presence of foreign (and often Levantine) merchants in Venice gave it a cosmopolitan character. At times, the Venetians tried to safeguard their ethnic identity by limiting itinerant merchants’ stay to a fixed period of months or years and by banning them from bringing their families to the city, but such rules were often flouted. Ethnic tensions became blatant in Venice’s official establishment of the Ghetto, in which Jews were compelled to reside after 1516. Jews had created and controlled the money-lending industry in the region of Venetia since the twelfth century. It was the religious tolerance of Venice that drew them and that eventually produced the largest population of Jews in Europe. Jews were usually permitted to practice their religion in Venice without state interference. In contrast, England had expelled the Jews in 1290; France had expelled them in 1306; Spain did the same in 1492, followed by Portugal in 1497. Lingering anti-Semitism in England was illustrated by Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, where the fictitious Shylock makes cruel and arbitrary loan demands that would never have actually been permitted under Venetian law.

  The word ghetto, which was revived in the twentieth century for the Nazi sequestration of Jews in Warsaw and for the urban blight of African-American neighborhoods, was derived from geto,
the Italian word for “foundry”: an abandoned fourteenth-century cannon factory had once occupied the Venetian island to which Jewish merchants and bankers were restricted. The high walls of the Ghetto were designed as much for the protection of the Jews as for their confinement. Resident Jews were responsible for paying four Christian sentries to keep watch at night, when the two gates were shut. No Jews except for doctors were allowed on the streets of Venice until the morning bell rang at St. Mark’s. While Jews were originally required to wear a yellow badge in Venice, that was modified to yellow and then red head gear for most of the Renaissance. Jews were not permitted to own property, and they could not become Venetian citizens until the early nineteenth century. Overcrowding in the two districts of the Ghetto caused higher and higher buildings to be built (resembling modern apartment buildings), leading to occasional collapses on the spongy soil.

  The Ghetto population itself was highly diverse, with a multiplicity of ethnicities and languages—Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Polish, Greek, Turkish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as many Italian dialects. There were eight splendidly designed and furnished synagogues in that limited space, each devoted to a single ethnicity; five have survived, restored but intact. The wealth of the Venetian Jews, as signaled by the lavish jewelry worn by strikingly beautiful women attending synagogue, was reported by a British traveler, Thomas Coryat, in a 1611 memoir published in London. That their own diversity presented a challenge to Venetian Jews was demonstrated by the energy and attention they continually devoted to adjusting the ethnic representation of the internal governing committees of the Ghetto.

  Venetian power and glory would fade after the Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which allowed merchant ships from Northern Europe to travel directly to Asia without passing through the Mediterranean and transferring cargo to slow overland caravans. Now supplanted by Lisbon as a rich commercial capital, Venice began its decline, which would turn into the eighteenth-century decadent hedonism of Casanova and then the city’s humiliating dependence on tourism, captured in Thomas Mann’s portrayal of the rotting, plague-filled resort during the Belle Époque in Death in Venice.

  My third example is nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The “city of brotherly love” began as a Quaker refuge founded in 1682 by William Penn, who was escaping persecution of the Quakers in Britain. The city was laid out in mathematical squares between two great rivers, with north-south streets assigned numbers and east-west streets given tree names, reflecting the Quaker interest in botany as a symbol of harmonious nature. The Quaker ideal of tolerance drew immigrants to Philadelphia throughout the eighteenth century, but Quakers lost power within the city when their code of anti-militarism led them to abstain from any involvement with the American Revolution, so much of which occurred around Philadelphia. It was the Quaker commitment to social justice that led to Philadelphia becoming a center for abolitionism, which had begun among English Quakers. America’s first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia in 1833. The Quakers themselves were not immune to dissension: a major schism between Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers in the Northeastern United States led to the “Great Separation” of 1827 that was not healed until 1955.

  Women had always been active and prominent in the Religious Society of Friends. Indeed, it was in Quaker meeting houses, with their absence of a hierarchical clergy, that women were first permitted and encouraged to gain experience in public speaking, which was considered improper and unfeminine for respectable ladies well into World War One. A New England–born Quaker resident of Philadelphia, Lucretia Coffin Mott, founded an anti-slavery society for women but was denied delegate status because of her gender at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. Mott’s indignation led her to collaborate with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to organize a convention on women’s rights, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, that produced the woman suffrage movement and marked the birth of modern feminism.

  But there were contrary forces at work in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In 1838, three days after the opening of Pennsylvania Hall, erected by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as a headquarters for abolitionism, a mob attacked the building and burned it to the ground. A black church (Bethel AME) and the Quaker Shelter for Colored Orphans were burned the same night. There had already been race riots in the city several years earlier between Irish immigrants and African-Americans competing for the same jobs in manual labor. Hostility to working-class immigrants was building in the U.S. The Native American Party was founded in 1837 in Germantown, a historic seventeenth-century village outside Philadelphia that is now part of the city. The Nativist campaign against immigration would take rabidly anti-Catholic form. Samuel F. B. Morse, the Massachusetts-born inventor of the telegraph, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York on the Nativist ticket and published an incendiary 1835 tract (Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration) denouncing the Jesuits as “a secret society” bent on subduing American democracy to the monarchical tyranny of “Popery,” with newly formed Catholic schools as their diabolical wedge. Condemning Roman Catholicism as “intolerant and illiberal,” Morse called for stringent naturalization reform to stop the incursion of “the priest-ridden slaves of Ireland and Germany.”

  Back in Philadelphia, there was a tremendous surge of hostility to Irish Catholics, who began arriving in the city even before the Great Potato Famine of 1845–49. Some of the animus came from Scots-Irish Protestants (mainly Presbyterians) from Northern Ireland. For much of the nineteenth century in Boston and New York as well as Philadelphia, the Irish were stereotyped and vilified as violent, dirty, coarse, clannish drunks. In 1842, the militant American Protestant Association was formed in Philadelphia. Two years later, there were anti-Catholic riots in the city that resulted in twenty deaths, one hundred injuries, and the burning to the ground of St. Michael’s Church, St. Augustine’s Church, and the Seminary of the Sisters of Charity. Mobs invaded Irish neighborhoods and burned a dozen homes. The militia was called out to restore order, and martial law was declared for a week. These civil disturbances would lead to the creation of a professionalized police force and to the 1854 consolidation of the city, which officially incorporated all districts, boroughs, and outlying towns in Philadelphia County.

  Anti-Irish sentiment would linger into the early twentieth century, when the wealthy John B. Kelly, the self-made son of an immigrant from County Mayo, was snubbed by the Philadelphia social elite because he had begun his meteoric business career as an apprentice bricklayer. Although he had won six U.S. National Championships in rowing, the super-athletic Kelly was rejected from competing in the Diamond Sculls on the Thames at the Henley Royal Regatta in England because it was a written rule that no one could compete in the regatta “who is or has been by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan, or labourer.” In other words, Kelly was not a gentleman. But he became a hero to the Irish everywhere when, later that same year, he won a gold medal by beating the British sculling champion in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. A bronze statue of Kelly at his oars stands today in Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River where he trained. His daughter, Grace Kelly, who was excluded from the city’s debutante balls because she was Irish Catholic, would have her revenge not only by marrying a prince of Monaco but by acidly playing the supercilious socialite role of Tracy Lord in High Society, a 1956 musical version of the 1940 classic MGM comedy, The Philadelphia Story.

  Industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century led to the rapid transformation of Philadelphia, which physically expanded with the erection of factories for consumer goods and the construction of vast new neighborhoods of inexpensive two-story brick row houses for workers. Starting in the 1880s, a flood of job-seeking immigrants poured into the U.S. from Italy and Eastern Europe. Most of them were unskilled workers from a lower social level than the craftsmen and small merchants who had emigr
ated earlier from Northern Europe. Tensions rose even within the Jewish community because of ethnic differences. Earlier Jewish immigrants, like the Swiss-born Meyer Guggenheim, whose first job after his arrival in Philadelphia in 1847 was selling metal polish in the streets, were Sephardic or German Jews, while the new immigrants came from the rough farmlands of Poland and Russia. Guggenheim would go on to accumulate one of the greatest fortunes of the century by buying mining and smelting operations here and abroad and bequeathing them to his numerous, productive, and philanthropic children and grandchildren.

  In the early nineteenth century, the genteel Protestant establishment of Philadelphia had been concentrated in banking and finance, but huge fortunes were now being made in railroads, coal, and manufacturing. This local aristocracy adopted a defensive posture toward the non-English-speaking immigrant hordes who were changing the character of the city, increasingly afflicted with noise and soot. Gilded Age families in Philadelphia began to migrate themselves, moving from their mansions in fashionable Rittenhouse Square in Center City to estates in the rolling countryside along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad heading west toward Pittsburgh and Chicago. There they built lavish country houses in the British manner, ironically often employing virtuoso Italian stonecutters, woodworkers, and gardeners. Many of those houses, which represented some of the most beautifully designed and situated domestic architecture in U.S. history, were demolished to make way for suburban developments following World War Two.