Michael Astour Explained

Michael Czernichow Astour (December 17, 1916 Kharkov – October 7, 2004 St. Louis) was professor of Yiddish and Russian literature at Brandeis University and from 1969 professor of history (classical civilization and the ancient Near East) at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Biography

Early life

Astour was born into a non-observant Jewish family, only son of a lawyer and essayist, Joseph Czernichow, and his wife, the historian Rachel Hoffmann. In 1921, the family relocated from Kharkov, then part of the Soviet Union, to Kaunas in Lithuania, which had recently achieved independence. The move was influenced by concerns for security: he had been a defense attorney at the revolutionary tribunals set up in Russia after the October Revolution, representing people accused by the Cheka of involvement in counter-revolutionary activities. In 1924 they settled in Vilna in Poland, where he received his secondary schooling at the Vilna Yiddish high school, growing up trilingual as a native speaker of Russian, Polish and the Yiddish of his Ashkenazi community. Abraham Sutzkever became a family friend. Astour later acquired fluency in French, German and English, together with a good knowledge of both Italian and Hebrew. Astour revered his father (who was also one of the founders of YIVO) and absorbed his militantly anti-religious outlook. When the father was appointed to the chair of the Vilna Kehilla in 1937, he refused to attend synagogue, an example followed by his son.

Youth

Following in the steps of his father, Astour became an activist in the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO), and, from 1935 onwards, militated in the Freeland League (Frayland-lige far Yidisher Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye) which envisaged the possibility of setting up a Jewish enclave in some sparsely populated area of the world beyond Europe and the Middle East, with the consent of the hosting society/nation. Among the countries under consideration were Madagascar, the Guianas, and Australia. He retained a deep lifelong antipathy to Zionism, and, once the latter movement achieved its goal of statehood (1948), to Israel. At 15 he was elected member of the organizing committee of the local territorialist youth groups, dubbed "Hawks" (Shparber in Yiddish). To distinguish himself from his well-known father, he adopted a pen name, Astour, which likewise bore an ornithological resonance, since, he recalled in a late interview, it was a gallicized form of a Latin word astur, denoting a species of hawk. and which he adopted as his legal name on securing a job in the United States, in 1960.

Paris

From October 1934 to 1937 he undertook advanced studies in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he became acquainted with and studied under scholars such as Charles Virolleaud, who introduced him to Ugaritic, and Charles Picard with whom he studied Greek archaeology. He also attended courses on Egyptology with Raymond Weill, Adolphe Lods in Hebrew and biblical studies, and André Pigagnol in Roman history. Julius Beloch's influential thesis (1894) that the Phoenician influences on Greece were unfounded assumptions prevailed. The only dissent from this negation of Semitic influences on Greek civilization was the work of Victor Bérard. Though entertaining some doubts, he accepted the consensus at the time. Astour graduated licencié es-lettres, equivalent to a BA, and prepared for a doctorate at the École des Hautes Études of the University of Paris. In October 1937 he visited Palestine and stayed for several months. On his return to Paris in October 1938, he changed plans and enrolled to do agricultural sciences at the École Supérieure Nationale d'Agronomie de Grignon.

World War II

On the eve of World War II in 1939, against his parents' advice, he broke off his studies and returned to Vilna. Astour and his father were arrested, together with another 1,800 people, in a Red Army roundup. The father's detention probably related to his record as a defense attorney two decades earlier. A German blitz took Vilnius on June 24, 1941, and Jews, among whom Astour's mother Rachel, were confined to two ghettos. In retreating the Soviets evacuated their prisoners in a forced march and, when Astour's father was unable to keep up on the march towards Bobruisk, he was executed. His mother Rachel was consigned to the ghetto reserved for those marked down for immediate execution and she was murdered, along with another 40,000 Vilna Jews, by SS Sonderkommandos and Lithuanian auxiliaries in Ponary Forest 8 miles southwest of the city.

The reason given for Astour's arrest was his role as a member of the Hawks. Without the preliminaries of a trial, he was given a five year sentence to labour camps. Transported to the Ukhto-Izhemskiy camp complex in the Komi Republic just south of the Arctic Circle, he was assigned to work at a Vodnyi installation where radium was extracted from radioactive water wells. Guards and zeks helped him survive three close calls with death. He was esteemed by both for his ability to recite poems and tell stories in several languages. Astour was to spend much of the subsequent decade in Soviet political prisons and gulags.

After relations were established with the Polish government-in-exile, Astour was the immediate beneficiary of an amnesty, being released in September 1941. He made two unsuccessful attempts to cross to Iran, the second time in 1943 when the battle of Stalingrad was in its closing phase, the USSR declared on 16 January all Poles who had been resident in its territory from November 1939 Soviet citizens. Caught near the frontier he was rearrested for disloyalty and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for "treason".

Release and emigration to the United States

On his release in September 1950, he settled in Karaganda also where he met and married Beta Miriam Ostrowska. Access to inter-library loans enabled him to resume his scholarly studies and he managed to have himself repatriated to Warsaw in late 1956 where he gained employment in the Jewish Historical Institute, ending 17 years of isolation. Desiring neither to remain in Poland nor emigrate to Israel, the couple availed themselves of a window of opportunity for displaced Jewish Poles to emigrate to France, arriving there in mid March 1958, and taking up a post as archivist at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, while undertaking studies on Akkadian and Assyrian. Still aspiring to return to scholarship he emigrated to the US in late 1959, becoming a US citizen five years later.

Academic career in the United States

Alerted also by a letter of recommendation from Virolleaud of Astour's research projects to explore Greek-West Asian links, Cyrus Gordon, chair of the Department of Mediterranean and Classical Studies at Brandeis University, and like Virolleaud a leading expert on Ugaritic, appointed him to the Jacob D. Berg Chair in Yiddish culture, where he was to teach Yiddish and Russian, while pursuing doctoral studies under Gordon. He obtained a doctorate with his dissertation on Hellonosemitica in June 1962. After some years at Brandeis, Astour was informed he had no future teaching there, and he took up an offer to teach as an assistant professor of ancient history at Southern Illinois University in 1965. Astour believed that the refusal of strong pro-Zionist Brandeis authorities to offer him the prospect of tenure was related to his vigorous opposition to Israel.

Astour played an important role in retrieving, and subsequently editing, the 9th volume of Israël Zinberg's monumental Yiddish History of Jewish Literature. The final volume, which Zinberg had been working on when he was seized by the Soviet authorities and sent to a Siberian gulag, where he died in 1939, turned up in a Leningrad library in 1962. Astour also wrote and published in 1967 a 900-page book in two volumes on the history of the Freeland League and the territorialist concept.

Astour was honored by a Festschrift in 1997, and, on reaching the statutory retirement age of 70, was obliged to take the pension in 1987, though he remained active in scholarly work until his death. He left uncompleted a comprehensive manuscript on ancient Syrian toponomy, running to nearly 1,000 pages, which was intended to be his magnum opus, entitled Topography and Toponymy of Northern Syria. The discovery of the Eblaite archives, which promised to yield a further huge mass of new material on the area's ancient geography compelled Astour to defer publication indefinitely.

His wife died on January 22, 2000, and received a Jewish burial. Astour died, following emergency abdominal surgery, on October 7, 2004, and was cremated.

Zionism, Israel and Jewishness

Astour bore a lifetime grudge against Zionism, arising from its influence in marginalizing the Freeland Movement. He wrote at one point of:-

the unbelievable acts of betrayal against the interests of the Jewish people committed by the rich Jewish relief organizations and by the powerful Zionist apparatus, whose official and unofficial representatives did their best, by intervening with the governments in question, to wreck the salvation efforts of the Freeland League.

In his view, Zionist exclusivism had exercised a negative impact which had profound implications for the Jewish people. He took strong exception to what he perceived to be Zionist ruthlessness in achieving their aims in Palestine on the eve of World War II when the lives of Jewish refugees were imperiled, as illustrated by a remark made by David Ben-Gurion just after Kristallnacht. He went as far as to liken Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Nazi persecution of Jews, a position that echoed the view of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. His outrage was particularly vehement in reacting to the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in 1982, American support for which led him to repudiate the Democratic Party. He went to far as to argue that the antisemitic fiction of the "Elders of Zion" had been realized in the form of the Zionist lobby.

He never reconciled himself to the post-Holocaust world, and of his personal identity as a Jew he wrote late in life:

It is difficult to identify oneself with the Israeli brand of Jewishness. My personal tragedy, however, is that neither can I feel differently with regard to American Jewishness. My kind of Jewish people has been exterminated, and there is no substitute for it.

Hellenosemitica and its reception

Long before Hellenism imposed itself over the ancient civilizations of the East, Semitism had exercised no less an impact upon the young civilization of Greece. Hellenism became the epilogue of the Oriental civilizations, but Semitism was the prologue of Greek civilization.

Astour's book did not emerge out of thin air. His sponsor Cyrus Gordon had been publishing along similar lines at the time, and three years earlier had published on The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations. The German Jewish Hittitologist H. G. Güterbock, the British archaeologist and classicist T. B. L. Webster, Joseph Fontenrose and Peter Walcot, to name a few, had been exploring similar ideas of eastern, especially Anatolian, influences on the formation of Greece. However, as is now widely acknowledged, a prejudice against the topic had set in from the 19th century. M. L. West mentions that a work written in 1658 by a fellow of Corpus Christi College Zachary Bogan, Homericus, sive comparatio Homeri com scriptoribus sacris quoad norman loquendi, drew numerous parallels between biblical texts and phrases in both Homer and Hesiod. Neglect of the work was such that West believed he was the only person to have consulted a copy at Oxford in the preceding 200 years.

Analyzing the "ideological protectionism" that set in to fracture the "Greek-Orient" axis, Walter Burkert cites three factors: the detachment of classical studies from theology; the rise of romantic nationalism which preferred to think in terms of organic growth from individual ethnic origins rather than cross-cultural influences-Jewish emancipation went hand in hand with trends against "Orientalism" giving anti-Semitism an opportunity to get a leg in; and, thirdly, the discovery of Sanskrit and emergence of Indo-European linguistics focused on a common archetype in which Semitic had no place. Thus Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, perhaps the greatest classicist of his time, could write authoritatively in 1884 that,

The peoples and states of the Semites and the Egyptian which gave been decaying for centuries and which, in spite of the antiquity of their culture were unable to contribute anything to the Hellenes other than a few manual skills, costumes, and implements of bad taste, antiquated ornaments, repulsive fetishes for even more repulsive fake divinities.
The British archaeologist John Boardman, writing for The Classical Review, found parts critical of classicists as both "crudely partisan" and outdated, stated that it was hard to decide whether or not the book furnished an important contribution to the field. The controversial historian Martin Bernal described the early scholarly reviews of Astour's book as a "battering", so severe that Astour stopped working in this specific field.

Bibliography

Books

Edited books

Articles

Notes

Citations

Sources

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