Spring 2009 Advance Course Information

This information effective for spring 2009. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History

[HIS-7] [HIS-70A] [HIS-74]

7. Archives and Public History

Instructor: Mark Traugott
Office: 277 Stevenson
Hours: Thursdays 9-11am
Phone: 9-2465 (office), 9-2555 (messages)
E-mail: traugott@ucsc.edu

Information about this course can be found at http://ic.ucsc.edu/~traugott/hist007/.

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70A. Modern European History: 1500-1789

Sample Lecture—Lecture 13: Spain and the Netherlands

One of the great riddles of European history: how did the inhabitants of a small delta of waterlogged land succeed in asserting their independence from the apparently overwhelming power of Spain, and in establishing themselves during the first half of the seventeenth century as a dominant economic power on a global scale?  And what, in the perspective of the history of modernity, was the significance of this transformation of a heterogeneous group of provinces into a proud and powerful republic?

1.  A Land Without Beggars

This polyglot corner of the Habsburg Empire was relatively thickly populated.  In the middle of the sixteenth century there were roughly 3 million people in the Low Countries, the same as the estimated population of England and Wales.  There were 19 towns with a population of over 10,000 at a time when there were only 4 in England.  Prosperity was based in part on the fishing industry: salted fish were an important commodity in an era when there was no canned food.  Another strength lay in the dairy industry: the largest cows in the world were raised in Holland, supplying milk, meat, and cheese for export.  Sea links with Norway and the Baltic countries and trade with France and Spain had already brought prosperity to the country in the late medieval period; in the sixteenth century trading networks became global, extending from the Americas to China.

In the Middle Ages, the northern Netherlands had been overshadowed by the more populous, prosperous, and industrialized southern provinces (now Belgium).  But after 1580, with the rest of Europe falling into recession, the Dutch flourished.  Vermeer's town, Delft, specialized in ceramics; Haarlem in fine linen and bleaching; Amsterdam in silk weaving and dying, diamond cutting, glass blowing, leather working, sugar refining, and banking.  The flat watery district just north of Amsterdam sprouted windmills after 1600, powering a variety of mechanized processes.  The Dutch had the highest wages in Europe, thanks to both the century's most productive agriculture and a booming and diversified industrial sector that made for a tight labor supply.  The critical factor was Dutch dominance of international trade.  As Dutch merchants opened new trade routes and reduced shipping rates with improved boats, the Dutch Republic won control of a substantial share of Europe's commerce and Amsterdam replaced Antwerp as Europe's greatest staple market and financial center.  By virtue of the country's superbly informed commercial networks, Dutch producers could stay closely attuned to changes in fashion: Leiden alone made 150 kinds of fabric.  And the Republic's superior commercial, banking, and transportation systems gave it an edge in supplying the specialized trades known as "traffics," which grew up in or near ports to process imported raw materials for re-export: salt refining, tobacco processing, gin distilling, sugar refining.  Fuel costs were kept low thanks to Europe's most highly developed network of internal water routes, which efficiently delivered cheap peat and coal.  And Dutch entrepreneurs were able to mobilize pools of inexpensive capital to mechanize industrial processes, thanks to sophisticated partnerships and banks.

What these institutions offered (receiving deposits at interest, transferring monies, crediting and clearing bills of exchange, floating loans) was not different from the established practices of Genoa and Venice and Florence, but the scale was larger.  As in Venice, the chief investors were a part of the government, and insisted on the principles of sound money, secure credit, and regular repayment of debt.  Consequently there was usually money available for government loans, which gave the Dutch government a significant advantage over enemies and rivals.  Since its credit rating was firm because it promptly and consistently repaid debts, it could borrow more cheaply than any other government—a major advantage in wartime.

As the great Dutch historian Huizinga once pointed out, the hydrographic structure of the country was reflected in the decentralized character of the society: a country divided by canals and rivers must have a considerable measure of regional autonomy.  The economy was based on a multiplicity of small towns crowded together in a small space and leaving the largest portion of the land covered by rivers, heath, fields, and pastures.  But there was no room here for great feudal estates: though nobles continued to provide political leadership, the power of the nobility was eclipsed by that of the merchant class, which also supplied most of the magistrates.  And these magistrates prided themselves on maintaining order in the towns and streets.  Deserted and orphaned children as well as the aged poor were gathered together and decently cared for in orphanages or almshouses, while old and disabled soldiers were provided with pensions.  In a period when the poor were proliferating rapidly all over Europe, there were few beggars in the streets of Holland. 

2. The Dutch Revolt

With the abdication of Charles V in 1555, the Netherlands was assigned to his son Philip as part of his share in the Habsburg family inheritance.  As king of Spain Philip II saw it as his mission to repel the Turks in the Mediterranean and to reunite northern Europe under the umbrella of Spanish power and within the fold of the Catholic Church.  The Netherlands was to play an important part in this design, partly because of its strategic position at the mouth of the Rhine and opposite the English coast, and partly because of the great wealth of its prosperous towns.  Philip intended to tax this rich country to pay for his wars.  But unfortunately for Philip's project Protestantism had already made considerable progress in the urban Netherlands.  His attempts to stamp it out, combined with an intrusive economic policy, brought the country to the verge of revolt.  In 1567 Philip sent the Duke of Alva with a large force of Spanish troops to impose military rule.  Alva executed more than a thousand, including the aristocrats Egmont and Hoorn, and imposed fines, confiscations, and new taxes.  He dismantled the States-General, a representative body, and let loose the Inquisition.  The Dutch were threatened on every level: political, economic, religious.  But they found a leader of genius in another of their noblemen, William (the Silent) of Nassau, the Prince of Orange.  He succeeded in dislodging the Spaniards from the northern part of the country before his assassination in 1584.

Why did this revolt succeed?  "The war in the Netherlands did not follow the usual course of events, or the traditional ritual of pitched battles on a large plain ending with only the victors and those who beg for pity.  Rather it was a general rebellion, a levy en masse of the entire nation—peasants, bourgeois, and nobility—against Spanish violence. It burst out like fire in different spots, died down but not completely, and flared up anew.  The powerful army of occupation was constantly taken by surprise and unable to deal a decisive blow... The brutal force of the Spanish army of occupation was counteracted with intelligence, a strict merchant's calculation, organizational talents, and finally a stratagem: liberating Leiden by breaching dikes and dams" (Zbigniew Herbert). 
           
Geography and geology favored the rebels in the waterlogged lands north of the Rhine: Spanish troops were literally "bogged down" in expensive and exhausting siege warfare, frustrated by marshes, dikes, bastions, and rivers.   Dikes could be broken to flood vast areas, thereby driving back the invaders and insulating the economic and political centers of Holland and Zeeland.  From the outset sea power was important to the Dutch: they had to prevent the Spanish fleet from bringing reinforcements and supplies while protecting their own trade links.  The tightly knit organization of the Calvinist Church was another source of strength.  But the Dutch could also count on subsidies from other Protestant powers, the seizure of Church treasures, merchandise captured at sea, and, most important, taxes they voted to impose on themselves.  Spain's lines of communication stretched hundreds of miles, from Italy to the southern provinces of the Low Countires still under Habsburg control.  Faced with the consequences of his own bankruptcy and an annual trial of strength with the Turks in the Mediterranean, Philip lacked the means to subdue the recalcitrant Dutch.  In the 1590s another round of war between Spain and France gave the Dutch some relief.  Lengthy negotiations ended in 1609 in a 12-year truce, and de facto recognition of the United Provinces.  In that same year the Bank of Amsterdam was founded, and two years later the Bourse or Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile a Dutch ship had sailed to Java and back in 1595-97, and Java with its spice trade would become the center of Dutch power in the East.  The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602; its ships were the largest vessels afloat.  In 1628 and again in 1639 the Dutch intercepted the Spanish treasure fleet from the Americas, dealing Spain staggering blows from which it never fully recovered.  Dutch power was built on financial and naval strength, a recipe the British would copy later in the seventeenth century.  The Spanish king's concern with maximizing revenue extraction contrasts with the Dutch rulers' concern with limiting the apparatus of government and cutting all possible expenses.  Spain's rulers saw the state as an end in itself, divinely ordained, while the Dutch saw the state as a means to advance their main concern, commerce.  The Dutch stadholder, or chief magistrate, never gained control over independent sources of revenue.  The financial probity of the Dutch contrasted with the chronic fiscal embarrassment of the Spanish, which resorted to the sale of offices and the imposition of ruinously regressive taxes.  And whereas the Spanish crown had expelled or forcibly converted the Jews and Moors, the Dutch republic was notable for its tolerance and pluralism.  The Spanish ideal of racial and religious purity would have represented a denial of everything for which they had fought.  In the Netherlands, constitutional government, legal principles, and personal and religious liberties survived a century and a half of chronic warfare.

3.  The Golden Age

Instead of having the Church and the State as patrons for grandiose projects, Dutch artists produced paintings for sale to their fellow citizens.  The artist's life of production for the market was not an easy one: Rembrandt and Vermeer went bankrupt; Hals, Hobbema, and Ruysdael died in the poorhouse.  But there was a very lively market for pictures: the Dutch middle class wanted paintings to decorate the walls of their comfortable homes.  They often decorated the interior of these homes with paintings of the interior, fascinated by the flow of light through the large new windows.  They preferred secular to religious paintings because they were predominantly Protestant, and they valued above all lifelike representation of the landscape and their domestic life.  They also commissioned portraits, often group portraits of civic associations.  The clothes are somber; attention gravitates to the face and hands and the occasional ornament.  Dutch painters rarely took the great events of war as their subject; they were preoccupied rather with the humble events of everyday life.  They depicted them with extraordinary realism, and sometimes transfigured them with effects of light (Rembrandt and Vermeer).  The great Polish poet Herbert writes that "there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary.  They painted apples and the portraits of shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison."

Our word "landscape" comes from a Dutch word.  A flat country with few tall trees, without the great ruins so typical of Italy, the Netherlands offered the eye the peace of simple lines, of hazy distances and gradual changes.  So Dutch artists alternated between the dreamy contemplation of far-away distances and the intimate details of everyday life.  In one of the greatest of Dutch painters, Vermeer, we get both: the details of domestic space—a letter in a young woman's hand, a map on the wall—refer to persons or places in the distance.  Dutch culture is built around a series of oppositions: sea and land; adventurous mobility and bourgeois rootedness; godliness and greed; parsimony and ostentation; muffled interiors and bustling courtyards; the matchless light of Vermeer and the thick darkness of Rembrandt.

4. Conclusion: David vs. Goliath

Philip II's capital, Madrid, was an artificial city on a dry plateau with no real economic functions.  Its rapid growth tended to stifle traditional centers of economic activity in Castile rather than to generate new sources of enterprise.  Again and again the spiraling costs of war forced Philip to default upon debt repayments, to debase the coinage, to sell offices—measures which brought short-term relief but long-term disadvantage.  In spite of the influx of American silver, the government's revenues could never match the cost of fighting, variously or sometimes simultaneously, the Turks, the French, the English, and the Dutch.  Unconstrained by effective representative institutions, the Spanish crown fought wars for reasons of ideology and prestige, embroiling itself in conflicts that were of questionable relevance to the Iberian lands at the heart of the empire.  War made the Spanish state less rather than more efficient, and in the long run undermined the economic base of the country.

The Dutch, on the other hand, fought defensively for the most part, though they could be predatory in search of windfall profits from trade.  Mercantile values here permeated the government, while in Spain the government ruined the economy.  Ultimately the Dutch thrived because their credit was good.  Their recipe for success—state policy geared to the expansion of commerce, representative institutions to limit the government's expenditures, reliance on naval power rather than a more expensive army—would be borrowed by the English in their long struggle with the French. 

Spanish culture was aristocratic; Dutch culture was thoroughly bourgeois.  It's remarkable how a society that idealized simple virtues—hard work, sobriety, domesticity—achieved fantastic wealth and for several decades global power.  The tensions inherent in that situation are reflected in the brilliant visual art of the golden age of Dutch culture and anticipate the paradoxes of capitalism in our own era of globalization.   

Required Texts

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Portable Machiavelli
Thomas More, Utopia (Norton Critical Edition)
Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain
Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels
Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
Hans Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus
Duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, 1691-1709
Isaac Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Enlightenment Reader

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74. Introduction To Modern Jewish History

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
Office: Humanities 637
Hours: Monday and Wednesday,  3:30-5:00, and by appointment
Phone: 9-3467 (office), 9-2555 (messages)
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu
Teaching assistant: Kelly Feinstein (kfeinste@ucsc.edu)

Please note that this syllabus is from fall and will change slightly in 2009.

Course Description

This course examines major turning points in Jewish history from the early modern period through the twentieth century: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the development of Jewish mystical and messianic movements, the challenge of modernization, the rise of political anti-Semitism, the flowering of Yiddish literature and culture, the Jewish Enlightenment and the revival of Hebrew, the migration of European Jews to America, the nearly total destruction of European Jewry in the twentieth century, the advent of Zionism and the creation of modern Israel.  It will emphasize the diversity of Jewish cultures and their creative responses to the challenges (and catastrophes) they have encountered during the five centuries that extend from 1492 to the present.

Course Requirements

Two 6-page papers, a final examination, consistent attendance, and participation in discussion sections.

Schedule

1. The Jewish Diaspora: Exile And Dispersion (September 22- 29)
Topics: Cultures of the Jews—The Sephardic Dispersion—The Venetian Ghetto—Spinoza and the Jews of Amsterdam
Reading: Allan Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples: The Jewish Diaspora in Twelve Portraits, Introduction, chapters 1-2, 4
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza, chapters 1-4

2. The False Messiah: Catastrophe And Convulsion (October 2-6)
Topics: Ashkenaz—The Polish Catastrophe—Kabbalism and Sabbatianism
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 3
Glückel of Hameln, Memoirs, Books 1-5

3. The Enlightenment and the Jews (October 9-13)
Topics: Court Jews and Port Jews—The German Enlightenment and the Jews—The French Enlightenment and the Jews
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, ch. 5
Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography

4. Charisma and Apostasy (October 16-20)
Topics: Hasidism—Heine and Börne, Disraeli and Lassalle—Jews and the Revolutions of 1848
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 6
Lucy Dawidowicz, Introduction to The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, pp. 5-38
Menahem Mendel of Kotsk, "I Am Not a God: A Hasidic Tale," in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 100-102
Pinhas Zelig Gliksman, "Menahem Mendel's Hasidic Mode," in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 103-107
I.L. Peretz, "If Not Higher" (reader)

5. The Pale Of Settlement And The Flowering Of Yiddish Literature (October 23-27)
Topics:  The Haskalah—The Jews of Russia—Yiddish and Hebrew
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 7
Abraham Ber Gottlober, Moses Leib Lilienblum, David Frischman, Judah Leib Gordon, Gershom Bader, Samuel Leib Citron, Max Lilienthal, Lev Ossipovich Mandelstamm, and Pauline Wengeroff, essays and memoirs in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 113-144, 148-170
Mendele Mocher Sforim, "Notes for My Literary Biography," in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 273-281
Mendele Mocher Sforim, "The Calf" (reader)
I. L. Peretz, "Bryna's Mendl," "In the Stagecoach" (reader)
Hersh Nomberg and Jehiel Isaiah Trunk, "Issac Leibush Peretz As We Knew Him," in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 286-305
Sholem Aleichem, "The Search," "Hodel" (reader)
M. J. Berdichevski, "The Red Heifer" (reader)
Fischel Lachower, "Torments of Berdichevski's Last Days," in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 313-317
 

6. Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and Socialism (October 30-November 3)
Topics: Varieties of Anti-Semitism—Varieties of Zionism—Socialism and the Jews
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 8
Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation" (reader)
Theodor Herzl, "The Jewish State" (reader)
Mendele Mocher Sforim, "Shem and Japheth on the Train" (reader)
Ahad Ha'am, Chaim Bialik, Chaim Weizmann, Schneur Zalman Shazar, Puah Rakowski, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Pavel Axelrod, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Abraham Liessin, Vladimir Medem, Bronislaw Grosser, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Schwartzbard, in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, pp. 367-457

7.  The Golden Land (November 6-8)
Topics: The Lower East Side—American Dreams
Reading: Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 9
Abraham Cahan, "Yekl," "The Imported Bridegroom," "A Sweatshop Romance," and "A Ghetto Wedding," in Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Tales of Yiddish New York
Bella Spewack, Streets, parts IV,V

8.  The Jews Of Poland I (November 13-17)
Topics: The Shtetl—The Singers in Warsaw—The First World War
Reading: Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father's Court
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street," "Pigeons" (reader)

Second paper due Monday, November 20

9.  The Jews Of Poland II (November 20-22)
Topics: Poland Between the Wars—Konin and Brownsville
Reading: Theo Richmond, Konin: A Quest, pp. 3-199
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "A Wedding in Brownsville" (reader)

10.  The Holocaust And The Birth Of Modern Israel (November 27- December 1)
Topics: Hitler and the "Final Solution"—Primo Levi and Abba Kovner—The Jewish State
Reading: Allan Levine, Scattered Among the Peoples, chapter 11
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Final Examination: Thursday, December 7, 12:00-3:00

Suggestions for the First Paper (October 30)

1. The great German sociologist Max Weber famously posited a connection between "the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism."  Is there, as many observers have suspected, a similar connection between the Jews and capitalism?  How do you account for the apparently disproportionate contribution of Jews to the development of modern commerce and finance?
2. A common theme of many of the texts we have read is that of a community whose circumstances are so dire that they threaten its very existence.  Compare and contrast any two analyses of the crisis of the Jewish community, and place them in their historical contexts.
3. Several of the texts we have read feature portraits of strong Jewish women.  Compare and contrast any two of these women, and consider why they dominate the narratives in which they appear.  What do their roles tell us about the communities of which they are members?
4. Spinoza and Maimon were among the first Jews to join the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition.  Why did they break from traditional Judaism?  What did their careers have in common, and how and why did they differ?
5. Glückl of Hameln and Solomon Maimon, authors of two of the classic Jewish autobiographies, were separated not only by a century but also by enormous differences in mentality and temperament.  How and why does Maimon's sense of himself and his world differ from that of Glückl?

Suggestions for the Second Paper (November 20)

1. A number of the texts we have read feature portraits of unhappy couples.  Compare any two of these couples, consider the reasons for their conflicts, and place their troubles in historical contexts. 
2. The memoirs of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bella Spewack offer portraits of city life in early twentieth-century Warsaw and New York, each from a Jewish child's perspective.  How do you account for the very different visions of Jewish urban life that we find in their books.
3. Compare any two representations of parents and children in texts we have read, and consider what those relationships tell us about the character of Jewish life in particular historical contexts. 
4. Modern Jewish writers sometimes introduce animals (or birds) as significant figures in their texts.  Compare any two examples and consider why each author has chosen to introduce animal imagery into his or her work.
5. The turn of the century (nineteenth into twentieth) was a period of extraordinary ideological fermentation in the Jewish world.  Compare and contrast any two examples of socialist or Zionist literature from that period. 

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