It has been nearly a year since I walked across the stage and received my PhD from the dean of School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. By then, it had been six months since my oral defense, which was the last time I looked at my dissertation. I gave myself a year away from it to focus on work and start a new research project. While the break from it has been productive, it is now time for me to face it and figure out what I want to do with it. That’s one of my (many) goals for this summer: to decide what sort of book I want to write.

My dissertation is a comparative study of Christian-Jewish relations in Aragon and Catalonia prior to the anti-Jewish violence of 1391. It is based on extensive archival research, during which I uncovered much new material. As with any dissertation, there are parts of it I’m extremelly proud of and others that I hope to bury forever. The difficulty is that despite my committee’s approval, I’m not sure it holds together as well as it should. The more research I did, the more it became apparent to me that the history of the Jews in medieval Iberia is very much a local history. So many local factors contribute to shaping majority-minority relations that it became painful to generalize about Catalonia or Aragon.  The two are also uneven in terms of sources since local documentation for Aragon is much thinner than from Catalonia, making comparisons very difficult.

The focus was not the only problem. There was also the fact that much of my evidence was fragmentary in nature and it was only through a combination of many fragments that a picture could be faintly discerned. Many of my chapters acquired a microhistorial structure as I luckily happened upon a few individuals who were better documented than most. After beginning my second project, I have discovered more documents about those individuals. The temptation to write a series of microhistories is there.

Ultimately, what the thesis shows is that the areas in which there was more Christian-Jewish tensions prior to 1391 where areas where the transformative violence did not occur. Violence seems to have found traction in areas where Christians (as well as Jews) were feeling the pressures of economic decline that followed the Black Death as well as growing fiscal pressures from their monarch. The Kingdom of Aragon, where there was considerable conflict between Christians and Jews in the mid fourteenth century, had recovered financially by the late fourteenth century. Catalonia, on the other hand, being historically the financial capital of the Crown of Aragon, felt the brunt of the economic decline that followed the Black Death while at the same time having to shoulder much of the economic costs of the many wars fought by Pere III during the second half of the fourteenth century. In the process of arguing that the nature of Christian-Jewish relations had not significantly changed from a century earlier – i.e. arguing against the usual teleology of Jewish history in Iberia – I was keenly aware that I sometimes sounded like I was arguing for some kind of idyllic convivencia, which was not my objective. There was plenty of problems in the late fourteenth century, that’s for sure. Exploring the ways individuals coped with those problems became my main interest.

In the process of writing the dissertation and exploring the ways Jews coped with crises within and outside their communities, I became fascinated by the role of courts of law in allowing Jews to resolve conflicts with Christians in a way that did not threaten their place. I became aware of the role of legal pluralism in allowing Jews to take a more active role in shaping their lives. The legal pluralism of medieval society allowed for all those considered disempowered (Jews, Muslims, slaves, women) to participate. While normative law can be dismissive as well as paternalistic and focused on enforcing social hierarchies, the existence of multiple legal traditions and courts with overlapping jurisdictions opened space for those lower down the pecking order of society to make the system work in their favour. Exploring this made me think more broadly about the issue of Jewish autonomy. In Jewish historiography, autonomy is usually understood as the ability of Jews to administer their own affairs and apply their own law over their correligionists. Evidence of Jews being prosecuted in Christian courts is usually seen as a sign of loss of autonomy and interpreted negatively as a sign of decline. What I found, however, is that Christian officials and Christian courts were only able to intervene in Jewish affairs to the extent that Jews wanted or allowed them. Jewish ability to manipulate Christian courts raises many questions about whether we should necessarily see loss of autonomy here as a decline in relations or a sign of normalization or better yet, of acculturation.

So the main question I need to answer to myself is whether I want to write a book about Christian-Jewish relations more generally – perhaps focusing more exclusively on Catalonia and bringing in Aragon, Valencia, Castile only when suitable – that focuses on the economic and social factors shaping relations or whether I want to make it more about legal culture and its impact on majority-minority relations. Writing this post has certainly made me feel more positive though and for the first time I am actually looking forward to re-opening the dissertation.

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Over the last few weeks, friends in Spain have been reporting with increasing frequency how much worse that economic crisis has become. Last week I heard of an elderly couple who committed suicide because they were about to lose their home and did not want to be on the streets, a young unemployed woman who passed out on the streets after spending two days without eating, a man who set himself on fire inside a bank… The list goes on. Massive protests have become common place.

Indignados protest in Madrid. Original from The Sunday Times.

Last week I lectured on the Great Depression and this week I lecture on the Second World War. As I write my lecture on the social and political consequences of the economic catastrophe that hit most of the world beginning in 1929, I cannot help but think of the parallels with the situation today in Spain. As was the case in the 1930s, citizens all over southern Europe are increasingly disappointed with their political leadership (indignados is the favoured term). Specialists estimate that the economic situation in Spain won’t begin to improve for another 18 years at least. The unemployment level among young people is nearly 50%. There’s talk of a lost generation. The question that remains is whether this particular set of circumstances will lead to the rise of authoritarian political parties and an end to democracy and a return to conflict in Spain and Europe.

Historians are not comfortable with drawing lessons from the past. I have no idea which path the Spanish people will take this time around. All I know is that writing those lectures felt more uncomfortable than I cared to admit.

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With the semester coming to a close, it is time to plan for next term. One of my jobs at New College is to develop workshops for the undergraduate students. After a very productive meeting with Deborah Knott this morning we set on some topics and picked dates for two workshops I’ll be giving next term. These are:

• Avoid death by powerpoint – How to create effective visual presentations
• Develop an online presence

Of course, we may come up with more sexy titles. The main idea is to address two current needs: the first is that students often have to make oral presentations in their classes (and later at their jobs) and few are actually trained to do so. As a result, faculty often get a string of presentations in which students spend 75% of the time giving a summary of the background of the topic, accompanied by slides that do nothing to add to their presentation. My plan at the moment is to get students to come out of the workshop with a few key points to make their presentations more effective as well as pros and cons of powerpoint and prezi.

The second need has to do with the issue of our online presence. Whether we like it or not, a good part of our lives today is spent on the internet. How can students actively build themselves an online presence that will facilitate their transition from university life to working life? I find a lot of the advice they get at this point is to not put silly videos of themselves online or avoid Facebook. While there may be some wisdom in that kind of advice, that can’t guarantee their roommate won’t post a silly video on youtube or tag them on Facebook. It may be better to ensure that positive information about them *also* appears on that first page of results if someone searches for them online. So some of the issues we’ll discuss is using Twitter and other social media to plug into relevant networks and crafting their online presence.

There’s much to think about as these workshops take shape but I’m really looking forward to them!

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There is so much I want to blog about these days. The challenges and rewards of teaching a full year seminar on my specific area of research. Finding the balance between giving enough content to my first year students that they can make meaning from it without overwhelming them. Coming up with assignments that are both meaningful and skill-building. Maintaining a research agenda during the academic year. Finding time to keep up with the reading and the latest journal issues in my field. Organizing my Devonthink Pro database.

The list goes on and on and on. I could have blogged about any of those topics long ago but I feel somehow blocked. To unblock, I’ll just post this. The longer I wait, the more pressure I feel that my post has to be special. Groundbreaking, even. So, let’s break the ice by hitting “publish”.

Now back to removing the cobwebs of this site.

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Over the last year, I’ve had the privilege of being in the organizing committee of Foodways: Diasporic Diners, Transnational Tables and Culinary Connections, an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Toronto hosted by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Tonight we had the keynote panel for the conference – a panel featuring Sidney Mintz and three other scholars reflecting on his work. Thirty years ago, Mintz wrote Sweetness and Power and forever changed the field of food history by showing anthropologists, historians, and all others taking their initial steps in the field, what could be done. Listening to him today has been one of those most inspiring moments of my career. At 94, Sidney Mintz was sharp, funny, curious, humble, excited, and inspiring. Listening to him for 10 minutes was enough to get me thinking about designing a course in which we would explore the history of the world through things. By focusing at, say, ten commodities, we would explore the history of the world, looking at globalization, cultural change, identities… I do a bit of that in my World History class, but it would be really interesting to make it the central focus of a course.  I can’t wait to propose it to the history department.

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One of my favourite aspects of my job is that I teach mostly to non-historians. The International Foundation Program is aimed at international students who performed just below the minimum IELTS/TOEFL score required for direct admission into U of T. Instead of being denied admission, these students get a chance to take a transitional year in which they improve their language skills by taking an academic course and extra classes in academic skills, writing, and speaking. I teach the academic course – a first year world history course that I run pretty much as I would if I were teaching it in the history department. The main difference is that my students did not choose to take my course. Many of them are going into the sciences or commerce and are not particularly fond of history. They confess to me that they actually hate history.

Instead of seeing that as a hurdle, I see it as an opportunity. I can relate to how they feel. I too came from an educational system in which history was boring, based on rote-learning, had absolutely no meaning. A system in which you were discouraged from asking questions because that would be the same as telling your professor that he did not explain the lesson well. You needed to show respect and the way you did it was repeating his or hers exact words in the exam. Although I loved reading historical novels, I found academic history very painful. That was until I came to Canada and took history at university and realized that it didn’t have to be that way. It changed my life. If I can share some of that feeling with my students, I would consider my job done.

My students are the elites in their countries. They come to Toronto to become doctors, scientists, businessmen and women. I don’t want them to become historians instead. There are enough historians in the world. But perhaps they can become doctors, lawyers, businesswomen who think more critically, question more, consider the historical implications of what happens around them.

In the last day of class this term, I asked my students to write in a small card what was the main thing they learned this year or what they enjoyed most. Many commented that the course changed their views of what history is and that it is much more interesting than they believed. It also changed the way they think in general. Last night a group of students organized a party for me and their academic skills and writing instructors and each student present (about 15-20 students) spoke for a couple minutes about how much they appreciated the year. I’ll miss this bunch. I love my job.

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This year I followed the ten days model to teach IFP100Y, a world history class for international students. When he taught here at U of T, Tim Brook, a Chinese history specialist, taught world history by focusing on ten separate events spanning the world from 1500 to the present. I attended a workshop he gave in 2004 about the rationale behind such course and have wanted to teach it ever since. I look at it as the microhistory approach to the survey course, which fits well with my own preferences in terms of research and writing. A number of us actually took the course to other instutitions – I have friends teaching it at Ryerson, Western, University of Mississipi, University of Texas, possibly in the future at UNBC. It’s fun to be able to focus on only ten events and go into more depth but it is also very challenging for students since the connections are not immediately apparent and they want a more predictable, narrative course. There is also no textbook, which puts the onus on me to present enough material in class for students to be able to get a sense of the topic and evaluate the readings.

While I thought of some of those issues at the beginning of the course, what I didn’t think about enough was that some topics would be difficult to face for some students. We are currently discussing women in Iran and the effects of the Iranian Revolution. Turns out one of my students is Iranian, has suffered personally in Iran, and wanted to forget about that past and now finds it back haunting her. I have tried to be supportive of her feelings and have also tried to keep other students from falling into Islamophobia and have worked hard to keep the Muslim students from being put in a position in which they have to defend their faith. I’m not sure how successful I am at all those things. I would be happy if I can teach my students how to appropriately discuss these difficult topics respectfully and without drawing from their own prejudices. I feel this would be key to be able to successfully integrate into life in this very multicultural university.

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I wish I could say I did it on purpose, but I can’t get over how fitting it is that yesterday, March 7th, was the first of two lectures in my world history course on the protests in Iran after the announcement that all women had to wear the hijab (March 8, 1979). In tutorial today we’ll be discussing Jane I. Smith, “Women in Islam: Equity, Equality and the Search for the Natural Order.” I was very taken when a Kazak, a Turkish, and a student from Azerbaijan came to talk to me after class to talk about how these debates have been discussed in their country. My Chinese students seemed puzzled and some came to talk to me after.

A good way to celebrate International Women’s Day.

I wish we could also discuss this:

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