Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Two days ago I perpetrated a bad pun on the name Torquemada in the course of a brief comment on Schama's latest fat book of macro-history. Let my penance for the pun be a few lines by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. TORQUEMADA was the title of one of his poems, part of his TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN. The title character is eager to persuade the old Hidalgo to give evidence that his daughters are heretics. He heard in silence the Hidalgo's tale, Then answered in a voice that made him quail:  'Son of the Church! when Abraham of old To sacrifice his only son was told, He did not pause to parley nor protest, But hastened to obey the Lord's behest, In him it was accounted righteousness The Holy Church expects of thee no less!' A sacred frenzy seized the father's brain, And Mercy from that hour implored in vain...." Go to Longfellow to read the rest, if you dare. Or simply take the above as suitable Sunday fare.

Schama's new book is a single-volume thing called THE STORY OF THE JEWS: FINDING THE WORDS 1000 BC - 1492 AD. Wow. Not quite 2,500 years. And about 500 pages, so if we round off both numbers a bit we get a coverage of five years per page. I suppose someone tried to talk Schama out of ending his book with the circumstances of the Jews in the reconquered Spain of 1492. Someone must have tried, but couldn't 'torquemada' any such thing. I've always been fascinated by really sweeping books like this, especially the single volume type, because multi-volume sets seem like cheating. Digging into a small patch, writing a micro-history and finding it as complicated as, well, 2,500 years in the history of Jews, is another kind of achievement, and its value has come to me only more recently, as I've appreciated the fractal nature of historical fact. You can write history as fascinating working at the five-minutes-a-page scale.

Here's the lego version of the abbey itself and its characters. I don't care at all about the show, I've never seen an episode and have no plans to. The matter only flits across the stage of my theatre of awareness now because I have belatedly discovered that Simon Schama dislikes it.  " Cultural necrophilia " and all that. You'll notice if you follow the link that he wrote that disapproving essay two years ago. The Abbey lives on.