ECHOES OF SEPHARAD AND THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
‘You fool! Look at what you’ve done!’, Eagle said, ‘It’s your fault that cold has come into the world!’”
American Indian Myths and Legends, Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (editors), 1984
Rupert Sheldrake is a botanist, rather a controversial chap…
Dr Sheldrake has an explanation for many minor mysteries of life—things like why your spouse knows you’re about to walk through the door because your dog started jumping up and down about the time your car turned the corner two blocks away or why you can solve a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in just a few minutes on some days and why you scratch your head for an hour as you try to solve the clue like “it comes after two” when you’re down to that one missing letter in “thr-e”.
He calls his explanation morphic resonance…
Most of his fellow scientists find his theory just plain unbelievable, saying it reeks more of myth than of science…
The Sheldrake Organization website defines the concept as “a process whereby self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems… morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.”
Skeptical scientists have a point when they note most of Sheldrake’s ideas cannot be examined through traditional methods used by researchers to establish the truth or falsehood of a theory. A November 2005 Scientific American column by nay-sayer Michael Shermer is one of the more charitable critiques. Shermer echoes other critics who say “confirmation bias” (seeing what you expect to see) may explain positive results achieved by participants in an online test posted on Sheldrake’s website…
But, truth be told, Dr Sheldrake makes his critics uncomfortable because his work veers into the world of the paranormal and other topics dismissed by mainstream scientific researchers. He has found supporters who embrace his ideas for the very reason academics reject them: morphic resonance offers hints of a meaningful universe, one where the past blends into the present which will in turn blend into the future, a world where man and tree and rock have an inherent dignity just by the mere fact they exist. Sheldrake himself sees morphic resonance as a framework for understanding how Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” works…
Jung in a 1936 address to the Abernethian Society in London, postulated in addition to our personal and immediate consciousness, there exists “a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily” …
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The Devil, the archetypal tester of faith, takes the form of Satan to show Jesus the kingdoms of this world that could be his if he but renounces God, a scene recreated in Duccio's "Temptation on the Mount" painted in the early years of the 14th Century |
In the realms of archetypes, we travel into the lands of myth and legend…
Laymen think of myths as stories of gods and heroes, stories that aren’t true but fun to read, stories that explain why spiders weave their webs the way they do or stories about why constellations in the night sky are shaped the way they are shaped. Others see myth as a more neutral concept: a myth is an account of why the world is the way it is without passing judgment on whether or not the explanation is fact or fantasy. One man’s myth is another man’s truth…
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| Adam and Eve in the jungle? |
But it’s the myths that we know aren’t true that interest us most. Given the choice of attending a stimulating lecture on the gravitational pull exerted by Saturn on its many moons or watching a movie in which the good guy saves the world from a deranged madman who wants to split the planet in half and then gets kissed by the prettiest girl in the movie, most of us would pick the movie with the good guy, crazed villain, and pretty girl…
Explaining the “why” of this became the life’s work of Joseph Campbell, who like Sheldrake, saw merit in Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious. The archetypes that Jung described would heavily influence Campbell’s study of mythology. Jung saw archetypal events in our life cycles such as birth and marriage and death, encounters with persons who fulfill roles of archetypal figures like the devil and the trickster and the hero and the goddess, and archetypal structures in our personalities in the form of the shadow, the animus/anima that guide our actions even when we don’t know we are being guided…
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| The Monterey Peninsula in central California where Joseph Campbell and John Steinbeck shared dinners, drinks, and conversations |
Campbell, a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence and one of the world’s fastest half-mile runners in during his student days at Dartmouth, traveled extensively in his lifetime. He studied in Europe, Japan, and India, visited Hawaii, tromped up to Alaska. And then there was a year spent in California living on the Monterey Peninsula where he became friends with John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, and Steinbeck’s buddy, marine biologist Doc Ricketts…
George Lucas and Star Wars brought Campbell worldwide attention when the filmmaker acknowledged the mythologist’s influence in the telling the story of Luke Skywalker.
Luke Skywalker was merely one incarnation of Campbell’s “Hero with the Thousand Faces”...
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| Coyote appears as a Trickster figure in various Native cultures in the American West and Southwest. In some stories, like Prometheus, he steals fire from the gods and gives it to man |
[Folklorists frequently accuse Campbell of source bias—selecting examples conforming to his monomyth and overlooking those that don’t. It is perhaps instructive to note these same folklorists level similar criticisms at other authors such as Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Women Who Run With Wolves) and Robert Bly (Iron John: A Book About Men) who achieve best-selling author status. The commercial success of these writers doesn’t invalidate the points made by their critics but it does show their approach to the subject strikes a chord with a larger audience in the marketplace of ideas, an audience who sees enough truth in their arguments and enough familiarity with their examples to ignore the quibbling of their detractors.]
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The American Monomyth: Wonder Woman, daughter of Zeus himself, casts off her anonymity in our darkest hour to fight the God of War and bring an end to a conflict engulfing the entire world |
My suspicion is the millions of people who watched Luke Skywalker battle Darth Vader and the scientists working to understand the first seconds and minutes of our new-born Universe or exploring the origins of life on our small planet in vast universe share a common desire: to understand their individuality and still be part of the larger human community…
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| The Greek hero Herakles performs twelve daunting tasks as penance for having slain his wife and children in a fit of madness. His final labor is to bring Kerberos, the three-headed hound Hades from the underworld to the land of the living. |
This struggle to define our own individuality in a world filled with other persons who look much like ourselves has occupied philosophers for centuries. Humankind looks at itself to find ways to distinguish one person from another. Some use skin color and regional origins to separate themselves from others. Unfortunately, when people do this, the ugly faces of racism and ethnocentrism begin to peer out from the primitive forests of our past to make the civilized villages our present more dangerous places. The Eighteenth and Nineteen Centuries had entire sciences devoted to demonstrating the racial superiority of white people…
Many of us are surprised to learn that dividing our species into separate races based on skin color is a relatively recent idea. A French traveler and physician, Francois Bernier, anonymously published an essay in 1684 which described the four races of man which share this world as a home. It was an attempt at a more scientific analysis of the older medieval concept of three races of mankind springing from the sons of Noah—an Asiatic Semitic race, an African Hamitic race, and the Indo-European Japhetic race…
People in ancient times certainly did realize that there were other people with different skin colors than their own and these other people had ways of life different than they did. Ancient Greeks and Romans generally attributed these differences to environmental factors. Hippocrates of Kos wrote “the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the disposition of the country.” Comfortable, temperate climates produced indolent and sluggish populations while more extreme climates resulted in peoples who were industrious and vigorous. Tongue in cheek, we might note the ancient Chinese may have been the first to see evolutionary factors at work. A Han Dynasty historian pointed out blonde haired and green-eyed barbarians resembled the monkeys from which they descended…
Religion added its own take on race—and not always for the better. Some writers have asserted the Babylonian Talmud describes black skinned Africans as the descendants of Ham, cursed for mocking his drunken father, Noah-- a belief popular in the Antebellum South of the United States. (Other scholars vigorously dispute this interpretation of the Talmudic text as inaccurate and note that nowhere in the Biblical narrative is skin color mentioned in connection with Ham's shameful behavior.) The idea of black skin as a curse and justification for enslavement found favor with some Islamic writers as the slave trade became lucrative. Not everyone in the Muslim world agreed with this idea. Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth century scholar, explained dark skin as the product of the hot African sun...
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Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel retelling of the story of of a drunken Noah who is mocked by son Ham, an incident used to explain the dark skin of Africans as God's punishment upon Ham's descendants |
Early pseudo-scientific attempts at analyzing race went horribly and terribly awry, degenerating into craniometry and phrenology. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach studied human skulls and concluded their various shapes indicated the existence of five races—Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan. To his credit, Blumenbach strongly refuted a then popular theory of black inferiority…
Phrenologists expanded the study of skull shapes and bumps to predict an individual’s personality. Despite the dubious honor of being called the “Father of Phrenology”, Franz Joseph Gall’s work would inspire others to conduct more scientifically sound analysis in the fields of psychology and anatomy. Gall was the son of a rich wool merchant. Being the second son, he was expected to become a priest but chose to study medicine. He observed that many of his more intelligent classmates seemed to have prominent eyeballs. This, he concluded, could not be mere coincidence—just as he’d noticed the oddly shaped head of a childhood acquaintance had certainly contributed to the lad’s flair for languages…
It became only a matter of time until some phrenologists saw the potential analyzing skulls had when it came to assessing the superiority or inferiority of the various races of mankind. In 1837, the American physician Charles Caldwell concluded skulls of Africans indicated qualities that required the need for a master. Samuel Morton, a physiologist, focused his analytical skills on Native American skulls. His 1839 work, Crania Americana, determined the minds of Native Americans were not like the minds of white men. Dr Morton became one of the most influential voices of scientific racism. Nineteenth Century European academics tended to distrust American scientific acumen, but Morton found supporters abroad, including Charles Darwin who saw him as an authority of race…
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| Ernst Haeckel, a 19th Century German zoologist, proposed a "scientifically based" racial theory which saw whites as the most advanced form of humans and blacks as the least advanced. His theory included the idea the Lost Continent of Lemuria now covered by the Indian Ocean was home to the first humans. |
Morton’s insights on the varieties of mankind: the African race is by nature joyous and indolent and possesses strong powers of imitation but little capacity for invention or innovative thinking; the Native American race is crafty, prone to devouring disgusting food, lacking in gratitude, and incapable of comprehending abstract concepts…
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Technological advances made it possible for phrenologists to quickly analyze skull shapes and bumps on a person's head and offer pseudoscientific insights into personality traits and character by the early years of the 20th Century |
Upon the occasion of Morton’s passing from this life, The Charleston Medical Journal eulogized him—“We of the South should consider him our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race” …
Others find distinctions in the smaller ways than skulls. Look, for instance, at the tips of your fingers with their odd patterns of whorls and ridges. Neither your spouse nor co-worker will have the same patterns as yours—nor will your child, parents, or neighbors…
A sense of the uniqueness of fingerprints has been around for a long time. In ancient China, they were used to authenticate government documents. Babylonians, in the time of Hammurabi (circa 1790 BCE), policing officials fingerprinted suspected criminals. In more modern times, notions of a forensic use for them didn’t take hold until the late 19th Century. Argentine police used fingerprints in 1892 to solve a particularly brutal murder case in which a woman killed her sons and falsely accused a neighbor of the crime, the first such use of fingerprints to catch a killer…
In more recent decades, the myth of fingerprints has transformed itself into the myth of DNA for many millions of persons (myself included) who have taken DNA tests to learn from whom and whence they came. The results of these tests can be simultaneously enlightening and baffling…
A good friend of a half-century’s standing told me about the DNA test he took. “Apparently,” he said, “my parents and grandparents and great grandparents and great-great grandparents were wrong. We always thought we were Jewish. And that my family had lived in Poland before we came to America. Turns out I’m half Jewish, 36% Hispanic, and 24% Native American. Probably Navajo”…
DNA tests that predict your ethnic origins, to be fair, use up-to-date technology that do a pretty good job of analyzing your individual genome. Those odd results that some people get have more to do with the way a computer program compares your DNA sample to a reference database of people of “known ancestry” (people whose four grandparents were all Swedish or Polish or Nigerian, etc) and then hazards a scientific guess about your ethnicity. The more highly admixed your DNA, as mine is, the more confusing and contradictory the results can be…
By way of example, I’ve taken multiple DNA tests. One hinted at ancestry in North Africa, another at forebearers on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet another saw me as the descendant of West Asians. Only problem with those prognostications is I have no known ancestors in the past several hundred years from those parts of the world…
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| The author's Ancestry DNA sample as interpreted by Ancestry |
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| The author's Ancestry DNA sample as interpreted by FTDNA |
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| The author's Ancestry DNA sample as interpreted by My Heritage |
I eventually learned of a commercial program that would compare my individual DNA test data to a database of DNA samples taken worldwide and plot the results on a map of the globe. This program wouldn’t make a prediction about my ethnic origins. It would just show where people with DNA similar to mine DNA were living today. The database would note a sample may have been taken in one place and attributed to the original homeland of the sample donor (e.g., Morocco—migrant to Israel) …
The results of that program showed my DNA matches were literally splashed all across the map in stark contrast to my wife’s whose DNA matches are basically concentrated in the British Isles and Northwestern Europe. Not surprisingly, I had strong matches to those areas as well—after all, half of me comes from folk of British and French descent. But matches to the Balkan and Iberian and Italian peninsulas? That didn’t make sense-- one set of grandparents came from Eastern Europe. I noticed many of my widely distributed matches were to samples collected in Israel but mapped as coming from various locations in Northern Africa and Western Asia…
Research into population genetics and historical migrations offered possible explanations for both the Map My Genes and commercial DNA test results…
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| Detail of the author's DNA sample when plotted on a world map with the "Map My Genes program". The letter "A" is text added by the author to note areas where the Map My Genes database entry is noted as having been collected in Israel but attributed to the sample donor's original homeland (e.g., Morocco-- collected from migrant to Israel) |
I learned Ashkenazi Jews and Italians have similar genetic signatures, most likely due to a high rate of intermarriage between exiled Judeans and Italians in the years between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the beginning of the Crusades when anti-Semitism became the norm. Another study found approximately 20% of Spanish men show traces of Sephardic Jewish ancestors—the result of forced conversions to Christianity in the late 15th Century…
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| The Exile from Sepharad |
Ashkenazi ancestry came as no surprise whatsoever, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of Sephardi forebearers. But, comparing my mapped DNA to a map of the historic routes taken by the exiles forced to leave Spain in the time of Columbus, I could see a striking similarity…
It may be the map generated from my DNA test shows echoes of Sepharad in my ancestry, reminders that the presence of the past lingers in the present. Or it may hint at the truth of a long-held assertion that the far-flung populations of the Jewish Diaspora share a common distant ancestry. Perhaps the map shows both..
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| Andromeda, princess and damsel in distress, awaits her rescue by Perseus, another incarnation of the Hero With A Thousand Faces in this painting by Edward Poynter who served as the Director of the National Gallery in London from 1894-1904 |
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