Why can’t you marry your sister?

Hugo Grotius changes his mind on the sources of the prohibition of consanguineous marriage

Hugo Grotius says in the introductory chapter of De jure belli ac pacis (first published in 1625) that the Natural Law which binds all human beings is knowable to them through their innate reason, with no need for special revelation from God. In fact this Law follows directly from rational human nature, and therefore God, who made human beings what they are, can no more alter the law post factum than he can make two plus two equal five.¹ But the law can nevertheless be said to be divine, because it is only by God’s providence that human beings were created with reason at all:

Natural law is a dictate of right reason that shows that there is either a moral wrongness or moral necessity in a given act, according as it disagrees or agrees with natural reason itself: and therefore that such an act is either forbidden or commanded by God, the author of nature.²

God has also from time to time given special commandments to human beings by direct revelation. These ‘voluntary’ laws (so called because they are given at will by God) cannot be said to form part of the natural law, because they are not discoverable by reason.³ Furthermore they are binding only on those persons to whom God gave them. In particular the laws of Moses must be understood to have applied to the Jews only, not to the whole of mankind:⁴

A law is not binding on those to whom it was not given. Now this law itself tells us to whom it was given: Hear, O Israel. And throughout it says that the covenant was made with them; that they were called to be God’s own people.

However (Grotius goes on), it is evident from the Bible that some voluntary laws were given by God to Adam, or else to Noah and his sons; and by extension to their descendants, who were all of mankind.⁵ The Jews even have a tradition of spelling these laws out: according to them, the universal voluntary laws prohibit things like murder, anarchy, blasphemy, sexual sins, and theft.

But there are two reasons why the universal voluntary law never played a significant role in Grotius’ system. First, he saw no easy way to determine historically what exactly it covered, and what it did not. Of course the Jews had their list of Noahide laws, but that was nothing more than a tradition, extra-biblical and surely corrupt in some respects. Second, the subjects of the Noahide Law (as enumerated by the Jews and as intimated in certain passages of Genesis itself) are mostly crimes so abhorrent that human reason should have been able to derive the prohibitions thereof independently. It seemed to Grotius that God only gave extra laws to Noah as a reinforcement of Natural Law, necessary perhaps after the wickedness which had provoked the Flood.

Therefore, when he set out the Natural Law in De jure belli Grotius mentioned the Law of Noah only rarely, and referred to the Law of Moses only for the same reason as he did the Roman Law; i.e. as a confirmation or an example of what reason itself could work out.

… With one interesting exception. With admirable frankness, Grotius confessed embarrassment on the topic of incestuous marriage.

The question of marriages between those who are related by blood or close relation is a difficult one, and often disputed with great energy. For if anyone tries to come up with certain reasons why such marriages (forbidden by law and custom) should be prohibited by nature, he will discover in the attempt how hard it is: in fact, he will find that there are no such reasons to be found.⁶

That is, it is difficult to say exactly why certain marriages of close kin should be forbidden by the natural law. Marriages along a vertical line of kinship—between a mother and a son, or a father and daughter—are one thing; it is easy to come up with a reason why they are repugnant to human reason. Unions of parents and children are an obvious perversion of the natural family structure that is common to mankind. The natural role of a parent is to be a protector and nurturer of his or her offspring, and a connubial relationship stands in clear conflict with this:

For neither can the husband, who by law is superior in marriage, give that reverence to his mother which is demanded by nature, nor even a daughter to her father; for albeit she is inferior in marriage, marriage itself demands a relationship that is inconsistent with the reverence required from a daughter.

But what about marriages of brothers and sisters, or of first cousins? Here is where Grotius came up short. It was not obvious to him from reason alone why there should be an obstacle to marriage between two people who are equals. There are plenty of reasons why it might be a bad idea to marry your sister, for instance that it’s wise to widen your alliances by marrying into another family: but should that point of prudence make it illegal? Let’s say you contrived a situation in which it were financially or politically advantageous to marry your sister; say, to keep the family’s money from falling into a fortune-hunting suitor’s hands—should it be legal then?

Faced with this problem, Grotius fell back on something which he was otherwise reluctant to invoke:

As for horizontal degrees of affinity (especially the ones mentioned in Leviticus 18), though we may grant that these prohibitions do not come from the mere law of nature, it can be seen that they were established by an act of God’s will.

That is: the rational law of nature does not prohibit sibling-marriage, but the universal voluntary law does.

Here below (in the JPS translation) is the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus which Grotius cites on this point. It contains laws given to the Children of Israel in the desert, before they go to the Promised Land, which is occupied by Canaanites and other foreign peoples.

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them: I am the Lord your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their statutes. Mine ordinances shall ye do, and My statutes shall ye keep, to walk therein: I am the Lord your God. Ye shall therefore keep My statutes, and Mine ordinances, which if a man do, he shall live by them: I am the Lord. None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness. I am the Lord. The nakedness of thy father, and the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. The nakedness of thy father’s wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness. The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or the daughter of thy mother, whether born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover. …

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things; for in all these the nations are defiled, which I cast out from before you. And the land was defiled, therefore I did visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomited out her inhabitants. Ye therefore shall keep My statutes and Mine ordinances, and shall not do any of these abominations; neither the home-born, nor the stranger that sojourneth among you—for all these abominations have the men of the land done, that were before you, and the land is defiled— that the land vomit not you out also, when ye defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whosoever shall do any of these abominations, even the souls that do them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep My charge, that ye do not any of these abominable customs, which were done before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the Lord your God.

Grotius reasons as follows about these laws:

That these laws did not bind the Jews only, but rather all mankind, may be gathered from the words of God as written by Moses: Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled. And: For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled. For if the Canaanites and their neighbours sinned by doing such things, it follows that they were bound by as some pre-existing law. And because this law was not a merely natural law, the only remaining possibility is that it was given by God; whether to the Canaanites in particular (quite unlikely, and unsupported by the text) or else to the human race at their first creation, or else in their restoration after the Flood.

That is, we may infer a special divine prohibition of these sins from the very fact that the Canaanites who committed them were punished with exile from their land to make way for the conquering Children of Israel. That the prohibition was universal may be inferred from the fact that God, by all accounts, did not reveal it specially to the Canaanites at any time since the Flood. They were just supposed to know about it, even though there is no way they could have discovered it by reason. It may be deduced from all this that, although the Natural Law says nothing about horizontal consanguinity, the prohibition thereof is no less binding on all of humanity.

I’m reluctant to get into the gratuitous and easily solvable question of whether Grotius was somehow a “secular” thinker (by which is apparently meant that he sought to divorce the Bible from his legal thought).⁷ But let this unusual twist in the argument of De jure belli serve as a reminder, as if any were needed, that the world for Grotius was still ‘full of God’. And the Bible was nothing other than a true record of God’s dealings with mankind, from the Creation down to Jesus Christ. Just because he did not accept the Old Testament or the Gospel as straightforward sources of Natural or International Law (for reasons which he took care to explain as clearly as possible), Grotius did not deem these texts to be in any respect less divine, or less expressive of God’s demands on human beings. Finally, the Natural Law and Law of Nations that are outlined systematically in De jure belli ac pacis do not exhaust the laws that Grotius considered to be binding on humankind, whether on nations or individuals. They exist alongside other laws of equal divinity and importance.

A more interesting point is that Grotius’s resort to the voluntary law of God was the result of a recent innovation in his thought on the matter. In an earlier minor treatise of ca. 1613, Grotius had solved the problem of horizontal consanguinity in a different and more rudimentary way, by simply declaring no reasons for the prohibition to be necessary. In what seems to be an earlier draft of one of the paragraphs quoted above, he wrote:⁸

Nothing prevents the principle that a reason cannot be given for everything which is settled on from being extended to certain precepts of the Natural Law, especially if a reason is sought such that the precepts can be deduced from it by necessary consequence. Take for example the sexual union of persons who are related by blood or affinity: even though we do not have a written law of God declaring such a relation to be illicit, still we must know that it is so; for the Roman jurists say that there is such a thing as incest by natural law, and the Apostle Paul says that such a crime is unheard of among the nations. [1 Cor. 5.1] But if anyone wishes to supply a reason for this precept, he will not easily find one to which nothing can be opposed, or one which is equally certain and evident as the precept itself. But indeed what need is there to look closely into these causes, inasmuch as they are to be referred to the judgement of God? [Rom. 2.15.]⁹

Evidently by 1625, when De jure belli was published, Grotius was no longer satisfied by this hand-waving approach to the problem. Instead of declaring the prohibition of consanguinity to be a part of the Natural Law, for reasons ineffable; he removed the precept altogether from the province of reason, and gave it a new home among the primordial laws that were given directly by God to the children of Noah.

1. §1.1.10. Here and below I give my own translations from the Latin original.

2. §1.1.10.

3. §1.1.10, 15.

4. §1.1.16.

5. §1.2.5.

6. §2.5.12.

7. Cf. chapter V of that amazing work of Mark Somos, Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 383–437. He proves his case by suggesting that Grotius’s numerous invocations of the Bible in his works are so perverse and badly argued that they are not to be taken at face value, and are instead evidence for Grotius’ disdain for Biblical Law as applied to the Law of Nations. We read on p. 436: ‘In conclusion, let me restate once more that I do not argue that Grotius did not believe in God, or that he set out in IPC to undermine the Bible. Instead, he presented an unbroken string of forced interpretations with shocking implications for just war theory. He did this in order to show that the Bible should not be used in international law at all.’

8. Hugonis Grotii Defensio Capitis quinti Maris liberi oppugnati a Guillelmo Welwodo Iuris Civilis professore XXVII ejus libri scripti Anglico sermone cui titulum fecit Compendium legum Maritimarum. Printed as Appendix C of Samuel Muller, Mare clausum. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der rivaliteit van Engeland en Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1872).

9. P. 347: ‘Nam quod dicitur non omnium quae constituta sunt rationem reddi posse, id ad quaedam etiam iuris gentium praecepta quominus extendatur, quid obstet non video, praesertim si ratio quaeratur talis ex qua per necessarium consecutionem praecepta emanent. Exemplum sit in concubitu personarum quae sanguine vel affinitate proxime jungantur; esse talem conjunctionem illicitam etiamsi legem Dei scriptam non haberemus, ignorare tamen minime liceret; cum Romani iurisconsulti aliquod esse dicant incestum iure gentium [L. ult. ff. de Ritu nupt. (l. 69. D. XXIII. 2.)] et Paulus Apostolus tale facinus dicat „οὐδὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν ὀνομάζεσθαι“. [1 Cor. V. vs. 1] Rationem autem praecepti huius si quis velit reddere, haud facile talem inveniet cui nihil posset opponi, aut aeque certam et evidentem atque est ipsum praeceptum. Et certe quid causas scrutari opus est, cum referenda haec sint „πρὸς τὰ δικαιώματα τοῦ θεοῦ“. [Rom. 1. (vs. 32.)]’

Bonaventure Des Periers (†1544) did not write the ‘Nouvelles Récréations et joyeux devis’ (1558)

This one is pretty obvious when you think about it

An article of mine was published a little while ago in the Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance.¹ You can go find it there, or else you can read this summary of it in English.

The Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis is a collection of ninety tales, some of them funny and most in fairly bad taste. For example, there’s one where a pregnant bride’s husband goes off on a trip three weeks after their wedding night, and their neighbour André convinces her that a little more work is necessary to finish off the baby’s ears. In another one a councillor gives his old mule to his groom and asks him to find him a new and younger one; a little while later the groom sells it back to him in disguise for thirty écus, explaining he found one similar enough to the old one that it won’t take any getting used to. In one a young man dresses up as a girl and joins a convent, but runs into trouble when the abbess, wondering why some of the nuns are getting pregnant, lines them all up naked for inspection. (Hilarity ensues.)

The collection was first published in 1558 by Robert Granjon in Lyon. Here is the title page:²

As you can see the name of the author was given as “feu Bonavanture des Periers valet de chambre de la Reine de Navarre”. Des Periers was a real person who actually served as valet de chambre to Queen Marguerite of Navarre until his death in 1544. He is famous for writing the Cymbalum mundi (1537), a set of four unfunny dialogues that were falsely reputed to carry a secret subversive message. After his death, a collection of his writings was also published by his friend and fellow valet Antoine Du Moulin.³ But the Nouvelles récréations are the work on which his modern reputation primarily rests. They have been reedited in dozens of editions and translated into as many languages.⁴ Hundreds of articles and dozens of books have been written about their literary qualities and their relationship to the other works of Des Periers.

Therefore it is somewhat problematic for his reputation (and for that of modern literary scholarship) that Des Periers certainly did not write the Nouvelles récréations. This was already asserted in the sixteenth century by Estienne Tabourot and other authors, who nevertheless did not provide evidence for their denial.⁵ Then, in the early eighteenth century, it was independently noticed by two scholars, Prosper Marchand and Bernard de La Monnoye, that a great many historical details in the tales are obviously datable to after the death of Des Periers in 1544. For example, in nouvelles 5 and 66 there are references to the Tiers livre of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, which was first published in 1546. In nouvelle 17 the famous jurist Pierre Lizet is referred to as “recently deceased”; he died in 1554. In nouvelle 27 the bishop René du Bellay is likewise referred to as “recently deceased”; he died in 1556. In nouvelle 47 there is a mention of the “late king François”, who died in 1547. In nouvelle 66 there is a citation from a book called De archa Noé by Jean Borrel; this book was published in 1554.

And so on. The natural conclusion is that the Nouvelles recreations were not written during the lifetime of Des Periers, but sometime between his death and the publication of the book in 1558; probably pretty close to 1558 as a matter of fact. Perhaps, as La Monnoye seems in places to suggest, it is possible that although the tales containing anachronisms are not by Des Periers, the rest are still attributable to him: but that assumption seems gratuitous to me, and motivated less by evidence than a reluctance to depart from Granjon’s statement of the book’s author. I want to underline at this point that false attributions are nothing unusual; there is nothing remarkable about a sixteenth-century publisher putting the wrong name on the title page of his book, by ignorance or deceit.

Charles Nodier, famous romantic author of the 19th century, is responsible for overcoming the inconvenient evidence of the anachronisms and ratifying the attribution of the book to Des Periers for modern generations. In 1839 he wrote an article for the Revue des Deux Mondes in which he supplied an easy explanation for how the Nouvelles recreations could still be considered genuine:⁶

I freely allow that Desperiers, who died before 1544, could not have spoken of the death of president Lizet, deceased in 1554; or that of René du Bellay, bishop of Le Mans, who did not cease living until 1556. The same goes for two or three parallel cases which La Monnoye has collected before me, and probably for some others which escaped us both. But what does this prove? These phrases: recently deceased, deceased bishop of Le Mans, etc., are only insertions which a careful publisher lets fall into his text to certify its authenticity [sic!] or to bring it up to date.

This is a nice-sounding line of reasoning. But it must be very firmly rejected, just like La Monnoye’s suggestion of tales gathered from different authors. If there is independent reason to believe that a text is authentic, then it is perfectly acceptable to put brackets around certain passages within it that seem to be spurious. But, as is the case here, when there is no such independent proof, and the question of authenticity still remains to be decided, it is totally illegitimate—and a fine performance of question-begging—to dismiss the passages mustered against authenticity as mere interpolations.

Just imagine what you could do with Nodier’s method: there is pretty much no text that could ever be proved a forgery on textual grounds. You could prove that the Donation of Constantine was genuine, because all the anachronistic words flagged by Valla were inserted by unscrupulous in the middle ages. Or else that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had their basis in a real document written by the Jews, albeit they were modified and expanded by their Russian editors to make them more lurid. Yet for nearly two centuries after Nodier’s article, the consensus of scholarly opinion has embraced his defence of the Nouvelles récréations’ authenticity. In my article I cite a train of scholars repeating his argument down to our own day; sometimes even to the point of plagiarism. Publishers of the sixteenth century were loosey-goosey people, the famous experts tell us: it’s no surprise if they added some up-to-date references to their manuscript of the Nouvelles récréations.

Well, loosey-goosey as these publishers were, I’m not sure why that’s an argument for their being flexible about anachronisms, but not for their readiness to put a false author on the cover of their books. In any case, an argument like this over general habits of printers is pointless: it is necessary to look at the evidence in this specific case. The fact of the matter is that there is no evidence whatsoever for Des Periers’s authorship of the book. There is only the bare statement of the publisher that he wrote it, made fourteen years after his death. Nor did Granjon supply any reasons for this statement, or anything but the vaguest explanation of how he himself came by the manuscript:

He thanks “some virtuous person” for saving the Nouvelles récréations from oblivion. It doesn’t even seem like Granjon himself knew who this person was! So I think it’s fair to cease treating his statement as evidence for Des Periers’ authorship. It is nothing more than an assertion; and assertions do not ripen into proof by the passage of centuries.

I think I even know where Granjon got the name “Bonavanture des Periers” from in the first place: the Recueil des œuvres de feu Bonaventure Des Periers, which was published by his fellow Lyonnese printer Jean de Tournes in 1544, right after the death of the author.

I think he borrowed Des Periers’s name and title from the title page of this book, down to the prefix feu, which describes someone who has recently died—apt enough in 1544, but no longer in 1558.

So in conclusion: there was a book published in 1558 that was attributed to Bonaventure Des Periers. There is no evidence, apart from the publisher’s assertion, that he wrote it. And on the other side of the ledger there are a great many details in the book that prove that he cannot have written the book as we have it. This leaves us with two options. Either (like the vast majority of historians and “literary critics”) we can search diligently for reasons why after all Des Periers is the real author of (at least most of) the book. Or else, far more simply, and as I think we must, we can conclude once and for all that the common attribution of the Nouvelles récréations is baseless and false.

1. Jonathan Nathan, ‘Les Nouvelles récréations (1558) ne sont pas de Bonaventure Des Périers (†1544)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85, no. 3 (2023): pp. 601–33.

2. One of the most immediately noticeable things about this book is the typeface that Granjon set it in: it was his trademark lettre française, more commonly known today as Civilité (the title of another book printed by Granjon.) Designed to imitate the handwriting of the time, it is very beautiful but almost illegible before you get a little practice with it.

3. Antoine Du Moulin, ed., Recueil des œuvres de feu Bonaventure Des Periers, Vallet de Chambre de Treschrestienne Princesse Marguerite de France, Royne de Navarre (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1544).

4. See e. g. John A. Rea, trans., ‘Cock of the Walk—Ribald Classic’, Playboy 6, no. 1 (January 1959), p. 63.

5. Estienne Tabourot, Les bigarrures du Seigneur Des Accordz (Paris: Jehan Richer,

1583), fol. 20r.

6. Charles Nodier, ‘Bonaventure Desperiers’, Revue des Deux Mondes 20, Quatrième Série (1 November 1839): pp. 329–51 [350].

Otiose Interpositions

A very annoying poetic mannerism

A sentence from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903):

Und diese Beschäftigung bereitete ihm eine ganz ähnliche Genugtuung, wie wenn er mit seiner Geige (denn er spielte die Geige) in seinem Zimmer umherging und die Töne, so weich, wie er sie nur hervorzubringen vermochte, in das Plätschern des Springstrahles hinein erklingen ließ, der drunten im Garten unter den Zweigen des alten Walnußbaumes tänzelnd emporstieg…

And this activity gave him a satisfaction quite similar to when he paced around his room with his violin (for he played the violin) and the notes, as soft as he could bring them forth, mingled with the plashing of the fountain’s up-leaping jet in the garden below, under the branches of the old walnut tree…

This is elegant to a fault, and the fault is the little parenthesis: “for he played the violin”. We get an explanation of a statement that consists in a repetition of the same statement. You might as well say: “He looked around with his brown eyes (for he had brown eyes)” or “She came in from the rain (it was raining)”. To me this has the strange impression of being metrical filler: as if Thomas Mann, at a loss how to finish a line, came up with something inane but pretty so that he could move on to the next one.

So it’s no surprise that this kind of mannerism has its home in Latin poetry. Here are some examples:

1. Virgil Aeneid 6.405–7:

“Si te nulla movet tantae pietatis imago
at ramum hunc” (aperit ramum, qui veste latebat)
agnoscas.”

“If you are unmoved by the sight of such piety, at least this branch”—she drew out the branch hidden in her clothing—“you will recognize.”

2. Aeneid 12.206–7:

ut sceptrum hoc—dextra sceptrum nam forte gerebat—
numquam fronde levi fundet virgulta neque umbram…

“Just as this staff”—for he chanced to have a staff in his hand—“will never put forth foliage of delicate leaves or shade…”

3. Ovid Ars amatoria 2.131–2:

Ille levi virga (virgam nam forte tenebat)
Quod rogat, in spisso litore pingit opus.

[Odysseus] drew the scene desired by [Calypso] in the dense sand with a thin rod (for he chanced to be holding a rod).

4. Ovid Metamorphoses 6.358–9:

hi quoque vos moveant, qui nostro bracchia tendunt
parva sinu—et casu tendebant bracchia nati.

Be moved too by those who stretch forth their little hands in my lap (and by chance her children stretched forth their hands.)

5. Ovid Heroides 16, Paris to Helen 253–4:

dum stupeo visis—nam pocula forte tenebam—
tortilis a digitis excidit ansa meis.¹

While I gaped at the sight (for I chanced to be holding a cup)
The twisted handle slipped from my fingers.

In the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the grammarian Servius includes this literary device in his catalogue of techniques which were “either invented by [Virgil] himself, and not adopted from older writers.’ Of the examples 1 and 2 above, he says (6.6.13) Nec interpositiones eius otiosae sunt: ‘nor are his insertions pointless.’ But I have to object. It is not only pointless but perverse to write like lines like this! And worst of all: what Virgil seems to have done from necessity, Ovid seems to have done for pleasure, fully aware how annoying it was. There is no choice but to admire such masterful trolling. Seneca the Elder was right to say of him (Controversiae 2.12) that ‘this genius of a man did not lack the judgement to rein his poems in, but only the will.’²

1. I think something might be up here with the text. Why is pocula in the plural? Why is an explanation with “nam” given before any mention of a cup?

2. ‘Ex quo adparet summi ingenii viro non iudicium defuisse ad compescendam licentiam carminum suorum sed animum.’

Pairs of plaques

In Vienna, Paris, and Norwich

I.

Two plaques on a building in Vienna (Landstraßer Hauptstraße 26):

The upper one says: “LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN lived in this house in 1817.”

The lower one says: “The house to which the above memorial plaque was originally affixed was located on this spot.”

II.

Two plaques on the north wall of the nave of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, my favourite church in Paris:

The first one tells of the church’s consecration.

On Sexagesima Sunday, 15 February 1626, in the pontificate of our Holy Father Pope Urban VIII and in the reign of King Louis XIII the Just, this church and its Altar were consecrated and dedicated to the honour of God and the Virgin Mary under the invocation of the Protomartyr St Stephen, by the Most Reverend Jean François de Condy, archbishop of Paris etc.

The one beneath is somewhat more exciting:

And, during the ceremonies of dedication, two girls from the parish fell from up in the gallery of the choir along with the railing and two of the balusters. They were saved miraculously (the attendants at the service too—for nobody was found under the rubble) considering the great number of people who attended the said ceremonies.

One of my correspondents pointed out to me the following meditation on this incident by the elder Holmes.¹ You’ll see he doesn’t get the details quite right.

III.

I and my friends Stephen and Emma came upon this horrible tree in central Norwich on Christmas Eve 2018.

Accompanying plaque 1:

THE TREE OPPOSITE IS A MONGOLIAN | LIME PLANTED BY THE LORD MAYOR | ON 14 OCTOBER 1993 TO MARK | THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF | THE NORWICH SOCIETY

Plaque 2:

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table [final instalment]’, The Atlantic Monthly 2, no. 12 (October 1858): pp. 619–33 [620].

Hans Herzl’s Copy of Augustine

which he read before converting to Christianity

One night last summer I was sitting in my college library and writing a boring cover letter. I got stuck in the middle of a sentence and got up to pace in the stacks. At random my eye fell on a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions, a book I hadn’t read in a decade. I pulled it down. It was the 1907 Teubner edition, edited by Pius Knöll.

Trinity Hall, Jerwood Library 189.2 AUG

The signature at the top right of the page caught my eye:

There is no mistaking it: this book belonged to Hans Herzl (1891–1930), the only son of Theodor, the founder of Zionism. Hans Herzl had studied at St John’s College in Cambridge before the First World War, and the reader’s ticket is from a Cambridge bookshop. Nevertheless he signed the book in 1920 when, according to Ilse Sternberger,¹ he was already in Vienna, so perhaps this book was put up for sale in Cambridge after his death, after which it found its way to Trinity Hall.

Theodor Herzl with his children Hans, Trude, and Paulina in 1900.

Hans had a sad life.² He was born in Vienna and grew up in the shadow of his father, a man of gigantic worldwide fame. But Hans never married and never had any settled career, and spent his time shuffling from one European capital to another, translating the odd book from German into English.³ In 1923 he converted to Christianity, causing a minor scandal in the worldwide Jewish community. (He started as a Baptist and eventually became a Catholic.) Finally, in 1930 he felt he was going nowhere in life and killed himself, leaving behind a rather confused note urging Jews to Christianize their religion and Christians to be tolerant of Jews.

A couple of years later, Marcel Sternberger, who had written an article about Hans and was now preparing a book-length biography, wrote to Albert Einstein for commentary on Hans’s tragic conversion and death. This is the reply he got:

Dear Sir,

Your article about Hans Herzl made a great impression on me. His misspent life is a warning to all Jews against falling away from the community. For this reason, I regard the book you are writing as a worthy act for the Jewish cause.
Considering the strains on me I don’t think a personal meeting is in order. But I authorize you to make whatever use of the above remark that may be fit for winning attention for your book.

Here is the letter in its original German:

Now, Hans bought his copy of Augustine when he was first wrestling with the possibility of converting to Christianity. Ilse Sternberger (Marcel’s wife, who resumed the project he had left unfinished at his death) wrote the following footnoteless paragraph about this period in his life.

One Sunday, strolling through London’s Hyde Park he chanced upon a speaker from the Catholic Evidence Guild, a missionary society for the conversion of Jews, and found himself moved. He listened to its proponents from time to time, but did not seek them out. The idea instilled in him by his father and reinforced by Wolffsohn that only a cowardly Jew deserts his people was still powerful; besides, his infinite humility made him feel “unworthy to be a Christian.” But he started reading and rereading the New Testament as well as the Old with new awareness, and became more and more attracted to the image of the gentle Jesus in whose father’s house there were many mansions, and whose demands for blind faith touched a responsive chord in his soul.⁴

It turns out he read the Confessions as well as the Bible, or at least planned to. I can imagine it would have appealed to him, as the work of a fellow tormented lost soul. But on the other hand, Hans’s problem was quite unlike Augustine’s; it was not that he was a terrible sinner, but that he never had anything to do in his life. And neither the Confessions nor the Bible have very much to say to someone whose suffering comes from being at loose ends.

1. Ilse Sternberger, Princes without a Home: Modern Zionism and the Strange Fate of Theodore Herzl’s Children, 1900-1945 (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1994).

2. See the following very well-researched online essay: https://simonmayers.com/2014/10/28/a-tale-of-religious-angst-and-self-deprecation-the-short-life-of-hans-herzl-1890-1930/

3. E. g. Oscar A. H. Schmitz, The Land Without Music, trans. H. Herzl (London: Jarrolds, 1925); Rochus, Baron von Rheinbaben, Stresemann: The Man and the Statesman, trans. Cyrus Brooks and Hans Herzl (New York: D. Appleton, 1929).

4. Princes without a Home, pp. 339–40.