Sir Walter Scott, Jews and Saracens, and Other Sundry Subjects
by Ibn Warraq (May 2009)
PART ONE
Edward Said, the late Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has, in his influential Orientalism, a characteristically shallow, sneering aside on Sir Walter Scott, and, in particular, on his novel, The Talisman:
“Four of Scott’s novels involved crusades and crusaders. Count Robert of Paris [1831] was set in Constantinople at the time of the First Crusade; the other three were set during the Third Crusade. Ivanhoe [1819] and The Betrothed [1825] were concerned with events on the home front, while the plot of The Talisman [1825] was set in Palestine and centered on the friendship between a Scottish knight and Saladin, who appeared in a bewildering array of disguises, including that of a skilled physician who cured King Richard of England. The novels painted a picture of crusaders who were brave and glamorous, but also vainglorious, avaricious, childish, and boorish. Few of them were genuinely moved by religion or the crusade ideal; most had taken the cross out of pride, greed, or ambition. The worst of them were the brothers of the military orders, who may have been courageous and disciplined but were also arrogant, privileged, corrupt, voluptuous, and unprincipled. An additional theme, the cultural superiority of the Muslims, which was only hinted at in the other novels, pervaded The Talisman”.[2]
Edward Said, in fact, chose the one novel of the crusades which explicitly extolled the virtues of the Saracens and the superiority of their culture, and not the contrary, as he claimed in Orientalism. I shall come back to The Talisman, once I have gone through the other three novels involving crusades or crusaders.
IVANHOE [1819]
Ivanhoe, set in late Twelfth Century England, also displays Scott’s more general concerns, his commitment to religious and racial tolerance, and his Enlightenment abhorrence of superstition and fanaticism, whether the unreflective kind of the masses, or the more dogmatic variety of the religious bigot.
[5]
Saracens do not play a significant role in the novel, though a minor controversy was drummed up by those who objected to Scott’s introduction of two putatively black Muslim slaves at the beginning of the novel. Here is Scott’s description of the two slaves, Hamet and Abdallah, “These two squires [the crusader, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and his companion] were followed by two attendants, whose dark visages, white turbans, and the Oriental form of their garments, showed them to be natives of some distant Eastern country. The whole appearance of this warrior and his retinue was wild and outlandish; the dress of his squires was gorgeous, and his Eastern attendants wore silver collars round their throats, and bracelets of the same metal upon their swarthy legs and arms, of which the latter were naked from the elbow, and the former from mid-leg to ankle…. They were armed with crooked sabers, having the hilt and baldric inlaid with gold, and matched with Turkish daggers of yet more costly workmanship. Each of them bore at his saddle-bow a bundle of darts or javelins, about four feet in length, having sharp steel heads, a weapon much in use among the Saracens, and of which the memory is yet preserved in the martial exercise called el jerrid, still practiced in Eastern countries. [6]
A few pages later, the Crusader, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, describes the two slaves, rather confusingly, as “our Turkish captives”.
“The severe accuracy of some critics has objected to the complexion of the slaves of Brian de Bois-Guilbert, as being totally out of costume and propriety. I remember the same objection being made to a set of sable functionaries whom my friend, Mat Lewis, introduced as the guards and mischief-doing satellites of the wicked Baron in his Castle Spectre.[8] Mat treated the objection with great contempt, and averred in reply, that he made the slaves black in order to obtain a striking effect of contrast, and that, could he have derived a similar advantage from making his heroine blue, blue she should have been.
“John of Rampayne, an excellent juggler and minstrel, undertook to effect the escape of one Audulf de Bracy, by presenting himself in disguise at the court of the king, where he was confined. For this purpose, he stained ‘ his hair and his whole body entirely as black as jet, so that nothing was white but his teeth,’ and succeeded in imposing himself on the king as an Ethiopian minstrel. He effected, by stratagem, the escape of the prisoner. Negroes, therefore, must have been known in England in the dark ages.”[9]
In defence of Sir Walter Scott, there were indeed blacks in Britain before the 12 century. Ironically, there were Africans in Britain even before the arrival of the English; they were soldiers in the Roman Imperial Army stationed in the South. Among the troops defending Hadrian’s Wall was a division of “moors”, raised in North Africa, and garrisoned near Carlisle, north of England in the Third Century C.E. [12]
It would be foolish to impute these sentiments of a character in his novel to Scott, but there is good external evidence to think that they do reflect his personal views. He tells us that King Richard’s repeated victories in the Holy Land, “had been rendered fruitless, his romantic attempts to besiege Jerusalem disappointed, and the fruit of all the glory which he had acquired had dwindled into an uncertain truce with the Sultan Saladin.”[14]
Scott more generally is concerned with fanaticism, one could even take the motto, usually attributed to Scott himself, to Chapter XXXV as the motto to the entire novel,
“Arouse the tiger of Hyrcanian deserts,
[15]
The real heroine of the novel is Rebecca, the beautiful daughter of Isaac, the Jewish merchant. In describing the attitudes of various characters to Jews, Scott is able to paint a sympathetic portrait of a despised people in Twelfth Century England, and implicitly criticize religious fanaticism as a source of perpetual strife and instability.
[1] Paul Pelckmans. Walter Scott’s Orient: The Talisman. In Oriental Propects Edd. Barfoot, D’Haen. Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 1998, p.99
[2] Jonathan Riley-Smith. The Crusades, Christianity,and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p.65.
[3] A.N.Wilson. Introduction, Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, p.viii
[4] Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, p.552.
[5] The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott Bart , Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1847 Vol. VI, p.49.
[6] Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, pp.20-21.
[7] Ibid.,p.26
[8] Matthew Lewis [1775-1818] Castle Spectre [1796]
[9] Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, pp.551-552.
[10] Peter Fryer. Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain. [3rd Edn.] University of Alberta: 1987, p.1.
[11] Ibid.,p.2.
[12] Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, pp.38-39.
[13] Ibid.,p.81.
[14] Ibid.,p.97.
[15] Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1986, p.387. To comment on this article, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish important scholarship such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article by Ibn Warraq and would like to read more, please click here.