Stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.
This passage appears with identical ellipsis and identical brackets in Peters (159), Netanyahu (39), and Dershowitz (23), with the suggestion that Twain is pining for scenes of joyous harvests and verdant fields.
Not so much. The words “such as these,” excised through shared ellipsis, refer to something different (361-2). “This campground of ours by the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of Joshua’s exterminating battles,” Twain explains. “Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the sheiks about him together, with their hosts, to make ready for Israel’s terrible General who was approaching.” Their effort was in vain, however, as “Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch. That was his usual policy in war. He never left any chance for newspaper controversies about who won the battle.”
In a second scene, the prophetess Deborah orders her general, Barak “to take ten thousand men against King Jabin.” Barak triumphs and applies “the usual method of exterminating the remnant of the defeated host,” but Sisera, Jabin’s general, finds refuge with a woman named Jael. Sisera begs for water, but she brings him milk instead. “He drank of it gratefully and lay down again, to forget in dreams his lost battle and his humbled pride. Presently, when he was asleep, she came softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down through his brain!” Twain then quotes the King James Bible (Judges 5:24-7):
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kennite be, blessed shall she be above the women of the tent.
He asked for water and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote of his head when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.
The words “Stirring scenes such as these occur no more” follow then directly.
⁂
In 2003, Norman Finkelstein pointed out that Dershowitz used pastiche-quotes of Twain identical to those found in Ruth Peters’ From Time Immemorial and numerous identical errors, but without any acknowledgement of Peters as their source. Dershowitz responded by stating that he had long been citing these passages from Twain to make his case for Israel, and by quoted two distinguished academics that defended Dershowtiz’s scholarly integrity in attributing the passages in question to Twain without mentioning Peters.
My interest here does not rest with the ethics of scholarly citation. Taking Dershowitz at his word, let us assume he had long quoted the same passages he found in Peters to make his case on behalf of Israel. I know of no comments by Netanyahu on his own unattributed use of Peters’ Twain pastiches, but whether or not he came to the ellipsis in question on his own or took from Peters, the same questions apply. Did Peters, Netanyahu, and Dershowitz not notice that Twain’s “stirring scenes” had more to do with sheik-extermination and the milk of Jael than they did with and milk-and-honey and happy valleys?
Did they not sense that by validating Twain as a reliable observer on the Palestine in his day, they validated his observations on its Digger Indians and homely women, for example? Or (378-9), the “the particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and Negroes of Tiberias” and “the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking, body-snatchers, with indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear” that resemble—“verily,” Twain tells us—resemble “the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures.”?
⁂
Page 4 of 5 | Previous page | Next page