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Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851

Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later

Kid survives

1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family

Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair

This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies

Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence

Bologna falls the next year, 1859

Kingdom of Italy forms 1861

By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more

(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)

The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”

What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.

Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.

I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.

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I'm so mad because students in Italy have been studying on Rosa Calzecchi Onesti's translation for decades!! Her translation is so well regarded it keeps being used in academia to this day and it's from the 60s!!! There have been dozens of other translations since then but we keep using that one !!!

(and also many other women published their translations both before and after her)

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

Well, I watched Nolan's The Odyssey and I definitely enjoyed it overall. Part of it was just the sheer joy, as a classicist, of seeing Homer receive such prominence in pop culture (a 3-hr film by one of most prominent filmmakers today). Hell, even the controversies, as dumb as they are, have kept us all thinking and talking about a text that I imagined many had forgotten and stopped caring about.

As for the film itself, although I think fidelity to the text has never been relevant to Homeric reception, the film was actually more faithful at times than Tumblr had led me to believe. It followed the same basic plot as Homer's work but, more beautifully, it followed the same fundamental narrative sequence: it began with Telemachus finding out about his father through the memories of those who knew him, just as in Homer, where Odysseus doesn't appear until Book 5. As in the epic, we, the film's audience, are by Telemachus' side in discovering Odysseus through other people's memories before he actually appears in the film. I had assumed Hollywood would view this narrative device as too boring and not include it, but clearly I was wrong. Similarly, you have the same story-within-a-story device as in Homer's epic: Telemachus learns about the Trojan Horse episode from Menelaus, and much of Odysseus' journey is recounted by the man himself (although to Calypso, not the Phaeacians sadly).

Even though most scenes featured noticeable changes, some scenes had surprisingly precise details that had come straight from Homer: e.g. Telemachus weeping on hearing Menelaus talk of his father, thereby giving away his identity to Helen (Book 4); then, Odysseus physically shutting up one of the Greeks in the Horse (also Book 4); also Odysseus only going to the threshold of the underworld and the spirits of the dead drinking the blood from the trench (Book 11).

Despite talk of Nolan's monochrome style, I felt the visuals were beautiful, at times capturing the surreal feel of Homer's landscapes (esp. the opening scene with the Trojan Horse). Circe's island and the Laestrygonian islands were both stunning (the latter was a Scottish beach and the former resembled maybe Cornwall or Brittany?). The katabasis scene was wonderfully unsettling, likewise the Cyclops' cave.

The costume and character design definitely helped with these latter two scenes. Agamemnon's weird Batman/Vader/buff-squidward helmet nicely distinguished him from the other shades and ensured that his presence literally hung over the scene. The Cyclop's alien form more resembled Vergil's beastly Cacus than Homer's Polyphemus, but I felt it worked; he was more horrid than any other adaptation I've seen. And intensifying Polyphemus' alienness only produced a more gripping contradiction when he let out that startingly inhuman cry (after being blinded) only to begin sulking no differently to a human toddler.

Despite some crappy costumes (esp. Telemachus' pants and Menelaus' hunting hoody), I felt that the Trojans' armour wasn't one of these. Initially, I was baffled by their paper cutout look, but soon I realised that there was something surreal about it. The Homeric text has always had a surreal feel, which I never thought could be captured on film: the paradox of archaic vocab and grammatical forms alongside more "recent"/classical forms and colloquial constructions, and, of course, the impossible descriptions of the landscape, e.g. "bronze sky" ("οὐρανον...πολύχαλκον", Od., 3.2) or the "wine-faced sea" ("οἶνοψ", everywhere in Homer). Probably unintended by Nolan, but I thought the combination of the realistic and unrealistic in the Trojan costume evoked this same surreal contradiction.

As for the themes, it was still the same fundamental story of a man determined to return home to his wife and son. The film undermined this a bit by having Odysseus forget his past while on Calypso's island (I don't think this is in Homer. He suffers precisely because he remembers), though Nolan salvages Odysseus' loyalty to Penelope by cutting his adultery with Circe and by not showing any sex with Calypso. Odysseus' cunning and persuasion is a bit subdued but it's still visible, e.g. his lies to Sinon; his withholding of information from his companions; and naturally his beggar disguise during his return to Ithaca.

Homer's themes of hubris and remorse for such arrogance can still be found in the film: his companions slain by Zeus for eating Helios' cattle; Odysseus' insistence on hearing the Sirens' song; and his general 'defy the gods' mentality. Nolan, though, extends this remorse to include regret at harming human beings. I presume he does this to enhance the film's anti-war message and maybe also increase its appeal to us moderns, weary of living through an age of Forever War. I must say, though, this modern 'traumatised veteran' angle does reflect a post-war anguish that Homer's characters genuinely bear throughout the epic (e.g. Menelaus and Helen's complaints in Book 4 about Greek suffering at Troy and then having to drug Menelaus and Telemachus with opiates (!) to stop them from weeping at the memory. Also, in Book 8, Odysseus breaks down after hearing Demodocus sing of the Trojan Horse).

It's just so fucking stupid.

Prior to this point, when Odysseus tries to exercise Xenia (ancient Greek guest rites/hospitality code), he did what he was supposed to do. (Well, we think so anyway — notably, the most famous books of the Odyssey are told by Odysseus, who isn’t exactly a reliable narrator.)

But when Polyphemus kills and eats some of the men, the game changes. The Cyclops makes it clear he has no intention of abiding by Zeus’s laws, and will cannibalize the lot of the men. So, Odysseus responds in kind — he breaks Xenia and lies. He introduces himself under a false name as part of a trick. Polyphemus then breaks Xenia again — he tells Nobody he’ll be eaten last, and that is the Cyclops’ guest gift to him.

Odysseus’ transgression is clearly the lesser one. The Nobody trick works. It gets Odysseus and most of his crew out of the cave alive.

But, crucially, before leaving Odysseus sheds his disguise. He admits his true identity, in detail, so he can boast of his achievements and add vanquishing a Cyclops to the list. And it bites him in the ass spectacularly.

The only reason why Polyphemus can curse Odysseus, can bid his father Poseidon to curse the man who blinded him, is because he now knows who did it. If Odysseus had kept his mouth shut, he might have safely made it home from there. But while a big part of why the Nobody disguise vs. real name reveal is showing Odysseus’s hubris, it’s not just about that. It’s also about the start of a pattern that hurts him more than it helps him.

From this point in the Odyssey on, Odysseus lies about his identity constantly. And sometimes it protects him, but more often it’s a detriment or at least unnecessary. He’s lying about his identity primarily to people who are on his side — a kindly loyal swineherd, his son, his faithful wife, his ailing father.

The last one is especially damning, because happens when Odysseus has already killed the suitors and returned home and reunited with the rest of his family sans disguises. He knows from everyone else that Laertes never betrayed him or his legacy, but was mourning his son and heartbroken for almost a decade. Odysseus has publicly declared his return to everyone else — his father doesn’t know because he’s living in squalor remotely. But Odysseus doesn’t tell his father who he is. He makes up a fake identity and tells a story implying Laertes’ son is dead. And when Laertes bursts out crying, then Odysseus drops the charade and finally admits who he really was.

There was no utility to that lie. No loyalty to test. No hidden threats to worry about. But Odysseus still instinctively lies to his beloved father about who he is, only dropping the charade when he sees the damage it’s doing to his relationships.

Because at this point, lying is pathological for Odysseus. He can’t seem to stop doing it. Because with Polyphemus, a lie protected him and the truth hurt him. That is the point of the “ Nobody” disguise.