Nicolaus of Damascus

 

Wikipedia:

Nicolaus of Damascus (64 BC – after 4 AD) was a Greek historian, diplomat and philosopher who lived during the Augustan age of the Roman Empire. His name is derived from that of his birthplace, Damascus. His output was vast, but it is nearly all lost. His chief work was a universal history in 144 books. Considerable remains of two works written late in his life exist: a life of Augustus and an autobiography. He also wrote a life of Herod, philosophical works, and tragedies and comedies.

He was born around 64 BC. Nicolaus is known to have had a brother named Ptolemy, who served in the court of Herod as a type of book-keeper or accountant.

He was an intimate friend of Herod the Great, who died a number of years before him. He was also the tutor of the children of Mark Antony and Cleopatra (born in c. 68 BC), according to Sophronius. He went to Rome with Herod Archelaus, to defend the young man's claim to the throne upon the death of his father Herod the Great.

The question whether Nicolaus was a Jew or a Greek has been much debated in scholarship. If he had non-Greek roots, he must have been at least thoroughly hellenised. Later ancient sources refer to him as "the Peripatetic". Since Nicolaus wrote a work On the Psyche, he may well have been, like Philo, in the school of the Pythagoreans or Platonists and been part of the syncretisation of Judaic monotheism with the monotheism (the Monad/The Good) of those two schools.

"Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context" by Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt, Oxford University Press, 2021.

Description:

Most of our information about Herod the Great derives from the accounts found in Josephus' Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Together they constitute a unique resource on one of the most famous personalities of ancient history. But from where did Josephus get his information? It is commonly agreed that his primary source was Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod's court historian, though the extent to which Josephus adapted his material remains disputed. Herod in History takes a modern, source-critical approach to Josephus' extensive account of Herod's reign to suggest that Josephus did indeed rely heavily on Nicolaus's work, but that previous scholarship was mistaken in seeing Nicolaus as a mere propagandist. Nicolaus may have begun his Universal History while Herod was alive, but he finished it after his death and so had no reason to write propaganda. This makes his work all the more interesting, for what we have instead is something rather different: a Syrian intellectual claiming a place in Augustan Rome, by telling a story about what the Augustan World looks like on the Eastern periphery. Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt delineate Nicolaus' approach to various critical topics in Herod's reign in order to reveal his perception of client kingship, the impact of empire, and the difficulties involved in ruling Judaea. This study uncovers an Eastern intellectual's view on how to succeed and how to fail in the new Augustan world order.

"The Assassination of Julius Caesar: Told By Nicolaus of Damascus [44BC]" (The Chronicles of History):

Nicolaus of Damascus wrote of the murder of Caesar a few years after the event. He was not actually present when the assassination occurred but had the opportunity to speak with those who were. He was a friend of Herod the Great and gathered his information during a visit to Rome. His account is thought to be reliable.

The Plan:

“The conspirators never met openly, but they assembled a few at a time in each others’ homes. There were many discussions and proposals, as might be expected, while they investigated how and where to execute their design. Some suggested that they should make the attempt as he was going along the Sacred Way, which was one of his favorite walks. Another idea was for it to be done at the elections during which he bad to cross a bridge to appoint the magistrates in the Campus Martius; they should draw lots for some to push him from the bridge and for others to run up and kill him. A third plan was to wait for a coming gladiatorial show. The advantage of that would be that, because of the show, no suspicion would be aroused if arms were seen prepared for the attempt. But the majority opinion favored killing him while he sat in the Senate, where he would be by himself since non-Senators would not be admitted, and where the many conspirators could hide their daggers beneath their togas. This plan won the day.”

Literary And Religious Influences On Don Quixote

Wikipedia:

Sources for Don Quixote include the Castilian novel Amadis de Gaula, which had enjoyed great popularity throughout the 16th century. Another prominent source, which Cervantes evidently admires more, is Tirant lo Blanch, which the priest describes in Chapter VI of Quixote as "the best book in the world." (However, the sense in which it was "best" is much debated among scholars. Since the 19th century, the passage has been called "the most difficult passage of Don Quixote".) The scene of the book burning provides a list of Cervantes's likes and dislikes about literature.

Cervantes makes a number of references to the Italian poem Orlando furioso. In chapter 10 of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote says he must take the magical helmet of Mambrino, an episode from Canto I of Orlando, and itself a reference to Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando innamorato. The interpolated story in chapter 33 of Part four of the First Part is a retelling of a tale from Canto 43 of Orlando, regarding a man who tests the fidelity of his wife.

Another important source appears to have been Apuleius's The Golden Ass, one of the earliest known novels, a picaresque from late classical antiquity. The wineskins episode near the end of the interpolated tale "The Curious Impertinent" in chapter 35 of the first part of Don Quixote is a clear reference to Apuleius, and recent scholarship suggests that the moral philosophy and the basic trajectory of Apuleius's novel are fundamental to Cervantes' program. Similarly, many of both Sancho's adventures in Part II and proverbs throughout are taken from popular Spanish and Italian folklore.

Cervantes' experiences as a galley slave in Algiers also influenced Quixote.

Medical theories may have also influenced Cervantes' literary process. Cervantes had familial ties to the distinguished medical community. His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, and his great-grandfather, Juan Díaz de Torreblanca, were surgeons. Additionally, his sister, Andrea de Cervantes, was a nurse. He also befriended many individuals involved in the medical field, in that he knew medical author Francisco Díaz, an expert in urology, and royal doctor Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz who served as a personal doctor to both Philip III and Philip IV of Spain.

Academia.edu:

Michael McGaha is the Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor of Modern Languages (Emeritus) at Pomona College, where he taught from 1970 to 2007. He has published fifteen books and over fifty scholarly articles on Spanish and Turkish literature and on the literature and history of the Sephardic Jews. A founding member of the Cervantes Society of America, he edited the society’s journal, Cervantes, from 1986 to 1999.

An excerpt from, "Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?" (PDF) By Michael McGaha, pg. 174-178:

Once the idea that Cervantes was of converso ancestry had won wide acceptance, some readers, not surprisingly, began to look for hidden Jewish messages in Don Quixote. Since the 1960s a number of books and articles on this subject have been published. Although some of these have attracted considerable attention among the general reading public, I do not believe that any of them has had a significant impact on Cervantes scholarship. This is probably partly due to the fact that none was written by an academic with specialized training in Cervantes studies. 

The first of these works, and I believe the most interesting as well, was Dominique Aubier’s book Don Quichotte, prophète d’Israël, first published in 1966. A Spanish translation entitled Don Quijote, profeta y cabalista was published in Barcelona in 1981. Mme. Aubier is fairly well known in her native France, especially since a film about her life and work, entitled Après la tempête: portrait d’une femme extraordinaire, was released in 2000. Author of over thirty books, she has been twice nominated for a Nobel Prize. 

According to Aubier, it is obvious that the character Don Quixote is based on Jewish models. The Jews, after all, are preeminently the “people of the book.” What could be more Jewish than Don Quixote’s attempt to live a life based on his reading—to become, as it were, a living book? (67) Don Quixote’s decision to adopt a new name to reflect his new understanding of his destiny recalls, for example, how God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, and Jacob’s name to Israel. Both of those names, however, are rich in symbolism, Abraham meaning “father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5), and Israel—according to the dubious but traditionally accepted etymology in Genesis 32:28—“he who strives with God.” It therefore seems very odd that, after spending eight days pondering the choice of a new and significant name for himself, the best the protagonist of Cervantes’ book could come up with was “Don Quixote.” Although commentators have pointed out that, as a common noun, quixote designates a piece of armor for the thigh, that it recalls the name of Lanzarote, and that the suffix -ote in Spanish is usually comical or pejorative, this still seems unsatisfying. Aubier was the first person to point out that the word qeshot means “truth” or “certainty” in Aramaic and occurs frequently in the thirteenth-century masterpiece of Castilian mysticism known as the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor. She also observes that the stressed syllable in the name, ’ot, means “sign” in Hebrew (99). According to Aubier, Quixano, Don Quixote’s original name, is an anagram for ’Anokhi, the Hebrew first-person pronoun, and hence indicates Cervantes’ identification with his character (Quixano=’Anokhi=I).

Aubier argues that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah—the Glory of God or Divine Presence, a feminine, maternal aspect of the divinity that was said to accompany the Jews in exile (102). The name of her hometown, El Toboso, represents the Hebrew words tov sod, literally, “good secret,” or “secret of the good” (258).

Aubier also believes that the word caballería in Don Quixote is a veiled reference to Qabbalah. In her view Don Quixote is essentially an allegorical commentary on the Zohar, which in turn was a commentary on the Talmud, which was itself a commentary on the Bible (174). For Aubier the central message of Don Quixote is the need to reconcile the three great monotheistic religions through a more profound, universal understanding of the divine Word. That is why Cervantes made the hero of his novel a cristiano nuevo whose Jewish initiation is described in a book written by a Muslim and based principally on the Zohar (174–75). Just as the prophet Ezekiel preached a new, more universal form of Judaism after the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile, so Cervantes—after the equally catastrophic expulsion of the Jews from Spain and in the midst of the horrors of the Inquisition—urges Jews, Christians, and Muslims to achieve a new synthesis.

María Rosa Menocal, in her excellent recent book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, makes much the same point, although in her view Don Quixote is more a lament for the loss of Spain’s former pluralism than a plea for its restoration. “After 1492,” she writes, “the religions of a significant portion of Spain’s population were ferociously repressed, and eventually extinguished. Forged in the bonfires of ideas, of books, and of people was the illusory conceit that there could be a pure national and religious identity, and yet this became the ultimate religion everyone had to live with. Even though the famous scene of the burning of Don Quixote’s library is often discussed as if it were no more than a self-referential literary conceit, can we really forget it was written at a moment when not only books, the most flammable of the memory palaces, but also people were being burned? Don Quixote is thus in part a postscript to the history of a first-rate place, the most poignant lament over the loss of that universe, its last chapter, allusive, ironic, bittersweet, quixotic” (263). Echoing the tragedy that had befallen Spain’s Jews and Muslims, Don Quixote is insulted, scorned, misunderstood, tormented, ridiculed, often beaten within an inch of his life, and his books are burned.

According to Aubier, only a person who is steeped in the Jewish religion, history, and culture possesses the intellectual conditioning necessary to understand the real meaning of Don Quixote. A thorough knowledge of the Zohar is especially indispensable (282–85). As an example, she quotes the following passage from Book I, Chapter Two: “[Don Quijote] vio, no lejos del camino por donde iba, una venta, que fue como si viera una estrella que no a los portales, sino a los alcázares de su redención le encaminaba….

. . . .Thus Don Quixote approaches the inn where he will shortly be knighted, a necessary first step before undertaking his redemptive messianic mission. The porquero who announces his arrival by blowing a cuerno symbolizes a rabbi who alerts his flock to the dawn of redemption by blowing the shofar. In Cervantes’ Spain converted Jews were of course commonly referred to as marranos or puercos. And the Zohar informs us that “every deliverance is announced by the shofar” (275). Aubier’s conclusion is that “if one accepts that Cervantes’ thought proceeds from a dynamic engagement with the concepts of the Zohar, themselves resulting from a dialectic dependence on Talmudic concepts, which in turn sprang from an active engagement with the text of Moses’s book, it is then on the totality of Hebrew thought—in all its uniqueness, its unity of spirit, its inner faithfulness to principles clarified by a slow and prodigious exegesis—that the attentive reader of Don Quixote must rely in order at last to be free to release Cervantes’ meaning from the profound signs in which it is encoded” (283).

The most important issue that Aubier fails to address in her book is how, where, and when Cervantes could have come to know the Jewish texts on which she claims he based Don Quixote. There is no evidence that he knew Hebrew or Aramaic or even that he had a sufficient command of Latin to have read the Zoharic texts that by his time were available in that language. In any case access to such texts would have been very difficult and dangerous for a layman in sixteenth-century Spain. If in fact he had any knowledge of the Jewish mystical tradition, the most likely possibility is that he acquired it through contact with Spanish-speaking Jews during the five years he spent in captivity in Algiers. As a cautivo de rescate, Cervantes was free to wander through the city at will during much of the time that he was there, and it is plausible that he would have been attracted to the Sephardic Jews who shared his language and cultural background. As a person of enormous intellectual curiosity, he surely would not have passed up this opportunity to acquire firsthand knowledge of a religion that may well have been that of his ancestors. Did he have Jewish friends or acquaintances? Did he engage in discussions with them about the relative merits of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Might his refusal to take up his lot with them have caused them to taunt him as a shoteh (“fool” in Hebrew), or one who refused to acknowledge the qeshot of their faith? These are tantalizing questions which, in the present state of our knowledge, we simply cannot answer.

Yang Jiang

 

Wikipedia:

Yang Jiang (Chinese: 杨绛; Wade–Giles: Yang Chiang; 17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016) was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.

. . .Yang also translated into Chinese three major European works of picaresque fiction: Lazarillo de Tormes (1951), Gil Blas (1956) and Don Quixote (1978). Her Chinese translation of Don Quixote is, as of 2016, still considered the definitive version. After deeming several English and French translations unsuitable, she taught herself Spanish. “If I wanted to be faithful to the original, I had to translate directly from the original,” she wrote in 2002. Ms. Yang had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing. “I worked with every ounce of energy I could muster, gouging at the earth with a spade, but the only result was a solitary scratch on the surface,” Ms. Yang wrote. “The youngsters around me had quite a laugh over that.” As the Cultural Revolution subsided, Ms. Yang returned to Beijing to work on “Don Quixote.” The nearly completed draft that had been confiscated by Red Guards is said to have been discovered in a pile of scrap paper and returned to Ms. Yang. Published in 1978, it remains widely regarded as the definitive translation of “Don Quixote” in China.

Video Title: Profile of Yangjiang. Source: CGTN. Date Published: May 25, 2016. Description:

Chinese writer, playwright and translator Yang Jiang, the widow of literary master and scholar Qian Zhongshu, passed away at the age of 105 early Wednesday morning in Beijing. Her renowned works include the memoir “We Three”, the novel “Baptism” and a philosophic work “Reaching the Brink of Life.” Yang lost her daughter in 1997, only one year before her husband Qian Zhongshu’s death. “We Three” is a book recalling her most dearly beloved.

Burkert On The Survivability of Small Sects And Monotheistic Cults

 

Wikipedia: 

Walter Burkert (2 February 1931 – 11 March 2015) was a German scholar of Greek mythology and cult.

A professor of classics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, he taught in the UK and the US. He has influenced generations of students of religion since the 1960s, combining in the modern way the findings of archaeology and epigraphy with the work of poets, historians, and philosophers. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He published books on the balance between lore and science among the followers of Pythagoras, and more extensively on ritual and archaic cult survival, on the ritual killing at the heart of religion, on mystery religions, and on the reception in the Hellenic world of Near Eastern and Persian culture, which sets Greek religion in its wider Aegean and Near Eastern context.

An excerpt from, "Ancient Mystery Cults" by Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1987, Pg. 51-53:

In summary, ancient mystery cults did not form religious communities in the sense of Judaism or Christianity. Even Richard Reitzenstein had to acknowledge that the concept of church, ekklesia, has no equivalent in pagan religion; it goes back to the Septuagint. It is remarkable that a term borrowed from the Greek polis system came to designate an organization that was to overthrow and eliminate this very system. Ekklesia indicates quite a different level of involvement, and a claim about the organization of life different from that inherent in a private club or a limited and local clergy. A new and contrasting form of politeia was emerging; we find Philo applying this very term of "political activity," politeia, to the Jewish way of life, and Christians following suit in their own terminology. The Jews had refused total integration into ancient society, and with Christianity there appeared an alternative society in the full sense of potentially independent, self-sufficient, and self-reproducing communities. Here we find from the beginning a concern for the poor, economic cooperation at a level quite uncommon in pagan religion, and the inclusion of the family as the basic unit of piety in the religious system. To educate the children in the fear of God suddenly became the supreme duty of parents, as the Apostolic Fathers already taught. And since the believers were at the same time encouraged to multiply, with a new morality ousting all the well-established forms of population control such as the exposure of children, homosexuality, and prostitution, the ekklesia became a self-reproducing type of community that could not be stopped.

No religious organization outside Judaism had developed such a system, least of all the mysteries with their exclusiveness, their individualism, and their dependence on private wealth. It is true that there were initiations of children: they frequently appear in Bacchic mysteries, and even at Eleusis there was a "child from the hearth" initiated at each festival. But this was a special honor or provision of concerned parents, not a religious or moral duty. It was unthinkable that the entire life of the family should be subject to a special religious orientation, and that every child should find himself inescapably merged in a religious system where apostasy was considered to be worse than death. The very idea of Bacchic, Metroac, or even Isiac "education of children" would approach the ridiculous. Mithras, for one, did not even admit women; he stood for men's clubs in opposition to family life.

There is only one slight indication of a possible movement of mysteries in a similar direction: in the case of the Bacchanalia in 186 B.c., the accusation was that there had been a huge conspiracy (coniuratio) that was to overthrow the existing res publica; "another people is about to arise," alterum iam populum esse. This vision of "another people" that is to oust the populus Romanus Quiritium is a frightening one which in a strange way foretells the proclamation of a new politeia, a new civitas by later Christians. This may also explain why repression was so cruel and radical, with some 6,000 executions at a time. There is nothing comparable in religious history before the persecutions of Christians. One might also mention the movement started in Sicily by Eunous, the inspired prophet and miracle worker of the Syrian Goddess, who became the charismatic leader of the slave revolt that lasted from 136 to 132 B.C. Again, the repression was absolutely relentless. But here the social issues were much more prominent than the religious overtones. Much later, it was for Augustine to proclaim triumphantly that Christianity had swept like a blazing fire through the Oikumene (incendia concitarunt). Earlier pagan charismatics were well advised to beware of arson, and most of them circumspectly avoided launching a "movement."

The basic difference between ancient mysteries, on the one hand, and religious communities, sects, and churches of the Judeo-Christian type, on the other, is borne out by the verdict of history. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sects have demonstrated astounding capacities for survival, even as minorities in a hostile environment. The Samaritans, split from Jewish orthodoxy, have survived in the world for about 2,400 years; the Mandaeans are about as old as Christianity: the Albingensian movement survived even the European Inquisition; countless sects have been active ever since the Reformation. Christian outposts in Ethiopia, Armenia, and Georgia are no less remarkable for this tenacious vitality. It was quite different with the ancient mysteries, whether those of Eleusis, Bacchus, Meter, Isis, or even Mithras, the "invincible god." With the imperial decrees of 391/92 A.D. prohibiting all pagan cults and with the forceful destruction of the sanctuaries, the mysteries simply and suddenly disappeared. There is not much to be said for either the Masons' or modern witches' claim that they are perpetuating ancient mysteries through continuous tradition. Mysteries could not go underground because they lacked any lasting organization. They were not self-sufficient sects; they were intimately bound to the social system of antiquity that was to pass away. Nothing remained but curiosity, which has tried in vain to resuscitate them.

The Gay Goy King

"Proud Nimrod first the bloody chase began

A mighty hunter, and his prey was man."

- Alexander Pope.

A full understanding of the religious history of the Near East and the West, and the role played by Judaism in both, would do more to explain the current standoff between America and Iran than any bullshit about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

In the hands of the radical Jews and Shia, neither America nor Iran are normal and ordinary states. 

Washington and Tehran have been turned into messianic vehicles to usher in an end times scenario and the implementation of a unified world state. They are not fighting for their national interests but for a grand project that's religious in nature and more than a century in the making.

With their combined ability to choke off the world economy financially and control the flow of oil they can dictate the course of events and guide the world to a global economic apocalypse. 

For the longest time the great fear of an American-Iranian conflagration was its impact on the world economy. Alexander Pope famously wrote, "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." This perfectly encapsulates Trump's Iran adventure. 

I am certain that Trump couldn't find Iran on a map when Netanyahu told him to attack it. He's a useful idiot par excellence, a man fully owned by the Jews. They couldn't have found a better Goy to serve their needs and fulfill their messianic wishes. It's like he was made in a Goy lab. Just the perfect Goy specimen. Arrogant, stupid, self-conceited, promiscuous, gluttonous, mean-spirited, a ravenous, two-faced, and treacherous beast who respects nothing but power.

Trump bows down before the Jews because he recognizes their power, not because he likes them or believes in their cause. 

Every successful American politician since Kennedy’s murder has been blackmailed and threatened to go along with the program but no one has done so with as much glee as Trump. It's a form of psychological compensation on his part. 

Some still believe he can be saved. They may be correct in that assessment. Trump admits he fears hell. He fears death. He knows all the evil he's done comes with a heavy price. So there is still a soul in there somewhere. 

But, should America and mankind gamble on his transformation into a Christian and a decent man at this late the hour? I say no. It is a risk. He should be put out to pasture. Right now the world needs a sane, straight, and cool operator in the White House, not a gay goy gone mad with rage and impotence.