The Traitor of Arnhem

One of the great pleasures of heading to the library is picking up an unexpected book of interest, often on the new books shelf. Recently I found there a new book entitled The Traitor of Arnhem, by Robert Verkaik. I have been interested in the battle of Arnhem ever since seeing the movie “A Bridge Too Far” back in 1977, and this book threads a spy story into the narrative of the battle. Actually, it presents two spy stories, one of which was briefly discussed in the Cornelius Ryan history of the same title that the movie was based upon. This first story was that of the double or triple agent Christiaan Lindemans, who was a Dutch resistance fighter who visited a German HQ in Holland two days before the battle started and evidently leaked information about British armor positions as they prepared to move north towards Eindhoven.

The second story involved an intelligence source that was almost completely forgotten until Verkaik started researching his book. Three days before the battle started (i.e. on 14 September 1944) a German spymaster in Stockholm received information via a diplomatic pouch about an upcoming airborne operation in Holland involving the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The following day the spymaster received more detailed information about the plans in a set of microdot photos, and this information was communicated to the German field commanders by 17 September, when the battle started. The source for the intelligence was a shadowy figure somewhere in the heart of the British state who was going by the name of Agent Josephine.

A mole in British intelligence. This is starting to sound like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy territory. This isn’t entirely coincidental. John le Carré, who wrote Tinker and many other fine spy stories, worked in British intelligence from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, the period when the Cambridge Five spy scandal came to light. Before reading Verkaik’s book, I didn’t realize that the Cambridge Five spies were actively passing information onto the Soviet Union during World War II, prior to the Cold War.

Who was Agent Josephine? Verkaik presents a lot of circumstantial evidence that this was one of the Cambridge Five spies, namely Anthony Blunt. Of the Cambridge Five spies, Blunt’s reputation fared the best, and he kept his career as an art historian going well into the 1980s. But perhaps he was as dastardly as the others.

One wonders what le Carré would have thought of Verkaik’s book. At any rate, this just got me to reread Tinker and rewatch bits of the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness, always a fun thing.

Discovering A Prophet

I had a meaningful Yom Kippur this week, and through some supplemental reading (the group the Halachic Left’s collection of essays for this year’s High Holy Days) I discovered a Jewish theologian I need to dive into, namely Marc H. Ellis. He was one of first people to develop a Jewish liberation theology, especially in the context of Palestine. The notion that Jewish liberation can only come about through the liberation of the Palestinian people is a theology that traces back to Ellis, who started writing about these themes in the 1980s. (He died in June 2024).

It is not surprising I have not heard about him before; his work has been shunned by mainstream Judaism. This essay by Zev Mishell introduced me to him. I particularly like his concept of “Constantinian Judaism”, which is to say that Judaism is now a religion of empire. There was also a series of remembrances of Ellis written up in Contending Modernities, a web publication from the University of Notre Dame.

Lots to read as always.

Convivencia

Having recently gotten interested in the world of the Catalan medieval rabbi Nachmanides (aka Moses ben Nachman aka Ramban aka Bonastruc ça Porta), I just read the 2002 book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal. I was initially deterred from reading it by some disappointing reviews, but I dived in anyway and quite liked it. It is not a scholarly history nor was Menocal a historian: she was a scholar of medieval Iberian literature, and the book is at its best tracing the world of translators and connections between Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance poetry and poetic forms. There is a 2019 PBS documentary based on the book; I will watch it one of these days.

I looked at some of the reaction to this book and came across a Wikipedia entry for a book entitled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Andalusian_Paradise by Dario Fernández-Morera. But reading to the bottom of the entry led me to one of the most scathing academic reviews I have run into, entitled The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: The Extreme Right and the American Revision of the History and Historiography of Medieval Spain, by S.J. Pearce, who is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Thus I stumbled into a war between liberal and far-right historiography, between convivencia and reconquista. Here are some choice quotes from S.J. Pearce:

By cherry-picking evidence, relying on outdated and explicitly partisan scholarship, adopting a messianic and omniscient authorial voice, and misrepresenting his opponents in order to argue against straw men he can vanquish rather than flesh-and-blood ones he cannot, Fernández-Morera uses the case of medieval Spain to further an explicitly extreme right-wing political and conservative Christian political and cultural agenda as it bears upon debates about politics, the establishment of religion, and the very place of the academy in civic life.

and

In addition to criticizing liberal ideas and values, Fernández-Morera situates his historiographical approach on the political new right through his explicit aim of vindicating Spain’s Catholic past in a way that closely mirrors and brings to an Anglophone audience the historiographical jiu-jitsu of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, which is articulated clearly in the preamble to the Law of November 24, 1939 Creating the Spanish National Research Council. This law, signed into effect by Franco himself, establishes the council in order to defend Spanish history against Enlightenment thought and the diversity of opinion.

I feel vindicated in reading Menocal, and will follow up with some of her suggested readings.