Jersey - Don't mention the War!

One of the first things that really jumped out at me about Jersey and the Channel Islands, when I started researching for this blog, is the fact that the Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Nazis during World War Two.  For Jersey and the other islands, the Nazi Occupation was a national trauma which has shaped the history of modern Jersey and left a legacy of museums, books and movies, which document and record the Occupation for future generations. 

What really happened?

Once a war has finished, it's sometimes difficult to know exactly what went on.  History is written by the victors and I'm pretty sure that people change their perception of what happened, how they felt etc. in relation to the ultimate outcome of the war itself.  In his book, Living with the Enemy: What really happened (1995), Roy McLaughlin makes a good attempt at unravelling the realities of the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Islands and looks at the perspective of the war from both the local point of view and that of the German soldiers stationed in the Channel Islands during that period.

Different reactions

It was interesting, for me, to see the different reactions of the four main Channel Islands, to the Nazi Occupation.  The entire population of Alderney was evacuated to England (except for two farmers who returned under Nazi rule) and the island became a de facto prison camp for slave workers from Eastern Europe and Spain.  By contrast, the inhabitants of Sark stayed put, under the formidable leadership of Dame Sibyl Hathaway, who seemed to treat the German occupiers as new house staff!  Guernsey also started down the road of evacuation, sending children back to England and Scotland, whereas most inhabitants of Jersey stayed on the island and tried to 'keep calm and carry on'. 

It's quite shocking to see photos of the Nazi flag flying in 1940's Jersey and I'm sure that the propaganda value of the Occupation was exploited to the full by the Nazi government. 

Abandonment v collaboration

British government poster from 1939

Needless to say, the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Islands was a very low point in UK-Jersey relations.  One on hand, the islanders felt 'abandoned' by their fellow Britons - on the other hand, many people in the UK wondered how the islanders could continue living under Nazi rule and questioned whether or not the islanders were 'collaborating' with the enemy.  In a bid to save the islands from destruction, they were demilitarised in June 1940, although the demilitarisation wasn't announced until after the first German bombing raids, which killed a total of 38 people on Jersey and Guernsey. 

It's clear that the British approach to the Channel Islands' Occupation was disorganised and inconsistent.  The War Office didn't consider the islands to be strategic to the defense of Britain and the lack of a coherent approach by the War Office and Home Office led to confusion and disarray.  Acting against official government policy, Churchill tried to rally a response to Occupation by sending spies to Guernsey, but this undermined the islanders position and worsened an already difficult relationship between the states of Guernsey and the occupiers. 

Jersey was eased into the Occupation years by the diplomacy of Alexander Coutanche, who established a fairly workable relationship with the occupiers.  Many British people failed to understand how there could be no resistance movement in Jersey and the other Channel Islands, as there was on mainland France and this was viewed with great suspicion, however, the islanders pointed out that there was nowhere for a resistance movement to hide or retreat to, on an island that is a mere 46 miles squared.

So how bad was the Occupation?

The Nazis had a relatively benevolent approach to the Channel Islands, particularly at the beginning of the Occupation, as they tried to win the hearts and minds of their new British subjects.  The main hardships of Occupation seem to have been more general ones, such as food shortages, which also affected people in mainland Britain and for logistical reasons, the Nazis confiscated the islanders' bicycles!  McLoughlin points to the following three main factors that represented the hardships that Occupation brought to the islands:

Nazi control tower on Jersey by mrwalker

1.  Banning the radio.  At the beginning, islanders were allowed to use their radios and even listen to BBC news but, as the war went on, the Nazis banned the use of radios - a crime punishable by transportation to Germany.  Somehow many islanders managed to hide radios and continue listening to updates from the BBC - it seems most people weren't caught doing this, unless a neighbour informed on them.

2. The arrival of foreign prisoners.  Whilst the islands weren't considered to be strategically important to the British, Hitler was determined to turn them into the most fortified place in the Atlantic!  The Nazis built grand-scale defences on Jersey and the other islands and imported labour, mostly slaves from Eastern Europe and Republican prisoners from Spain, to construct their Atlantic Wall fortifications. 

Whilst the islanders were mostly left in peace, to carry on with their normal lives, the slave-labourers were treated really badly and their treatment was witnessed by the islanders, who were as distressed as any normal human would be at the suffering of others.  Many islanders risked their lives and the lives of their families, by sheltering escaped Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish prisoners who'd fled the horrors of the labour camps.

3. The deportation of non-native inhabitants.  In reprisal for the British internment of German citizens in Iran, the Nazis announced, in 1942, that all non-native (ie. from the British mainland) inhabitants of the Channel Islands would be deported to Germany.  Perhaps more than anything else, this brought home the realities of the war to the islanders who, until that point, had had a fairly peaceful relationship with the Occupiers. 

Liberation and the legacy of the war

Liberation Square, St Helier by amandabhslater

The Channel Islanders felt abandoned again when, in June 1944, during the D-Day landings, the British and other Allied forces liberated Normandy, but didn't arrive in Jersey to liberate the Channel Islands from Nazi rule.  In fact, the Nazis remained in Jersey and the other islands until May 1945, when Germany was finally defeated and the Occupiers agreed to leave.  The winter of 1944/45 was a bitterly cold one and the islanders suffered many deprivations which might have been avoided had they been liberated earlier.  Again, the liberation of the Channel Islands didn't seem to be high on the list of priorities for the British government.

The end of war saw the return of those inhabitants who'd been evacuated in 1940.  McLoughlin describes the uneasy relationship between the returnees and those who had stayed behind.  Another legacy of the war was the number of children of German parentage that had been born to island women and this 'sexual colonisation' of Jersey reminded me of a similar topic I researched for my blog post about the war in Eritrea. 

The number and influence of informers in Jersey during the war is a controversial and divisive topic that hasn't been fully researched or investigated and remains, to a certain extent, an island taboo.

The Russians in Jersey

I like the way McLoughlin devotes a chapter at the end of his book to look at the Occupation from the eyes of the Occupiers and it's interesting to read how ordinary German soldiers were happy to be posted to the Channel Islands, as it was almost like a holiday from the front line and a refuge from British bombardment, common in Germany and elsewhere.   It would be quite interesting to also know what life on Jersey was like for the many Russians, Ukrainians and Poles who spent the war there.  It must have been truly bizarre to find themselves transported to this western outpost of Nazi Europe, many miles from their Eastern European homelands. 

Image credits:

The 1939 British government poster Keep Calm and Carry on is in the public domain. 

The image of the Nazi control tower was taken by flickr member mrwalker - you can see more of his photos on his Flickr account. 

The image of the sculpture on Liberation Square in St Helier is by flickr member amandabhslater - Amanda lives in St Helier and you can see more of her images on her photostream. 

Thanks to Mr Walker and Amanda for sharing these images with us using the Creative Commons License. 

Xinjiang - Separate Tables and the History of Race

As part of my research on Xinjiang, I've read two books that were incredibly useful.  The first of these, Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang by Christian Tyler was a great overview of the history of this region, right up until 2003, when the book was published.  Of course, the period since 2003 has been incredibly important for Xinjiang, but a lot happened in the region in the 80's and 90's, which we don't often hear about it.  The second book I read was Racism: A very short Introduction by Ali Rattansi, part of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series I've mentioned in previous blog posts. 

Skeletons in the Desert

In Christian Tyler's words 'The climate of Xinjiang may be hostile to the living, but it is unusually kind to the dead'.  The early 20th-century craze for archaeology brought a number of (generally European) explorers and archaeologists to the Taklamakan desert and the Tarim basin, where they found mummified bodies dating back as far as 1900 BCE.  In modern Xinjiang, the topic of race is a controversial one.  Most people outside China might see the Uyghurs as the native inhabitants of Xinjiang, whereas the Chinese claim to have occupied this region, even before the Uyghurs came along. 

Genetic analysis of the Tarim mummies suggests that they are both wrong.  In fact, it's believed that the original inhabitants of Xinjiang were an Indo-European tribe called the Tocharians.  Red-haired skeletons wearing tartan seems somewhat out of place in Western China and I'm sure the evidence must be somewhat discomforting for modern inhabitants of the region, both the Uyghurs and the Chinese!

What is race?

Young girl at Chinese New Year by Yewenyi

When we think of race in the West, often the first thing that comes to mind is Black African versus White European.  In an effort to understand the concept of race, I wanted to read about it in a wider context, so I've chosen Xinjiang as my reference point to relate everything back to.  Of course, racial differences go beyond white/black and, in the case of Xinjiang, there is a very obvious clash of cultures that is, more often than not, given a racial context which pits the Turkic Uyghurs against the Han Chinese. 

One of the most important things I learned from Racism: A very short Introduction is that there is no such thing as race.  There are different colours of skin, different shapes of the eye or mouth, different genetic features that determine everything from what height we are, to whether our hair is frizzy or straight - but none of this constitutes complete identification with a racial category and, genetically at least, there is very little difference between someone who is perceived to be Chinese, than someone who is perceived to be Black African or White European.  When we talk about different races, often we're really talking about different cultures. 

So where did race come from?

The development of science from the 17th-century onwards, led to an obsession in the Victorian Age (19th century) with classification and 'putting things into boxes/categories'.  As Europeans started colonising the rest of the world and wiping out whole indigenous populations, (eg as the Spanish did in Central America, or the British in places like Tasmania), there was a real need to justify the expansion of European power.  Science, as much as religion, provided European conquerors with the moral argument they needed to colonise the rest of the world.

It was convenient to state that the people Europeans encountered in the New World were not really human at all, but somehow racially inferior.  Likewise, the people of sub-Saharan Africa, with whom Europeans had long-standing contact, were categorised as sub-human, a convenient justification, backed up by the new sciences, for the wholesale export of West African tribesmen and women to the cotton plantations of the Caribbean and the United States.

So what about racism?

Although I believe that there is no such thing as race, unfortunately, racism is a concept that is all too real for most societies in the early 21st century.  The term was first coined relatively recently (in the 1930's), to describe the Nazis' anti-Semitic policy of Judenrein, an early 20th-century form of ethnic cleansing.  Whilst in Ancient History, the colour of someones skin seems to have had little relevance, as to whether or not they would become a Roman Emperor (eg Septemus Severus) or an Egyptian Pharaoh (eg. the Pharaohs of Kush), xenophobia, ie. the hatred of strangers or foreigners, seems to have been around for a long time. 

Anti-Nazi League badge by Leo Reynolds

Although the Jews don't constitute a separate race, they are a minority group that has suffered incredible hatred and discrimination, particularly in Western Europe, since the time of Chaucer and the Spanish Reconquista (see my previous blogpost about the Sephardi philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza).  Likewise, being Irish, I always feel a bit strange ticking a separate box in equality monitoring forms, as I certainly don't feel racially different to other people who are white and living in Britain!  Irish people have also suffered incredible 'racism', being depicted as monkeys in 19th-century British and American propaganda and with British ethnologists, such as John Beddoe, claiming that Irish skulls were africanoid (and he didn't mean it as a compliment!)

Can only white people be racist?

Being born into a very 'white' society, I didn't have any friends growing up who identified as black or Asian, or anything other than Irish!  Luckily, being born into an culturally homogeneous community was no barrier to understanding other cultures, I think it depends on how you, as an individual, approach different cultures, and the idea that someone from a totally white background (or totally anything background) will somehow be racist, by default, is complete nonsense.  When I started travelling around the world, I was lucky enough to have the chance to become friends with people who were from different cultural backgrounds than me.

It wasn't until much later that I realised that it's not only white people who can be racist.  I think my first experiences of this were in Uzbekistan, where the local people had completely ostracised a young man who was of mixed Uzbek-African heritage, and in Thailand, where I was really shocked by the racism of my Thai students towards others in their society from Cambodian, Burmese or Lao backgrounds. 

Are the Chinese racist?

In answer to the question, Are the Chinese racist? or Are the Uzbeks racist? or Are the Thais racist? then the simplest answer is yes.  Yes, in the sense that, culturally, the Chinese (Uzbeks/Thais) have a very strong idea of what it means, and doesn't mean, to be Chinese (Uzbek/Thai).  Of course, it's a lot more complex than that and the question itself assumes that there is such a thing as a Chinese (Uzbek/Thai) race in the first place.

Whilst each one of us can approach the question of race from a very personal perspective, there are definitely collective attitudes in a lot of countries that could be considered to be inherently racist. Working with Slovak colleagues in my first teaching job in Bratislava, I was impressed by the fact that they genuinely welcomed me, an openly gay man, as well as my Jewish and Black American colleagues.  However, when the conversation turned to Roma communities in Slovakia, my erstwhile tolerant colleagues suddenly seemed a lot less so and I was surprised that a group of people who were so intelligent and reasonable, could have attitudes towards the Roma that appeared to be incredibly narrow-minded and stupid.  I guess we're all culturally brain-washed in one way or another and this is the challenge that faces many people in the modern world. 

Separate Tables

Chinese Feast by Wootang01

The evidence from Xinjiang is pretty damning and Tyler uses the concept of 'separate tables' to describe the cultural divide between the Han Chinese and the Uyghurs.  Until 1979, Chinese law forbade intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.  Although many individuals on both sides have made efforts to bridge the cultural divide, forming friendships and doing business together, intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uyghurs is still something of a taboo.  Tyler catalogues some of the terrible incidents of repression of the Uyghurs by Chinese authorities in recent years, everything from job discrimination to language restrictions to imposed birth control.  Uyghurs, on their part, use terms like 'the fourteenth nationality' as a slur against those Uyghurs who've learned Chinese and begun to assimilate with Han culture.

I can't hope to do any justice to a discussion on race in a short blog post like this, but it's an area I would like to come back to again, through another cultural or national lens.  As to whether or not the original inhabitants of Xinjiang were Uyghur, Chinese or Indo-European - it hardly seems relevant to two cultures, Chinese and Turkic, that have had centuries of contact, love, hate and (mis)understanding.

Image credits:

The photo of the young Chinese girl is by flickruser yewenyi aka Brian Yap who is an Engineer from Marrickville in New South Wales, Australia.  You can see more of Brian's work on his website.  

The image of the Anti-Nazi League badge is by flickruser Leo Reynolds who is from Norwich in England.  You can learn more about Leo at his website. 

The photo of the Chinese-style feast is by flickruser Wootang01 aka David Woo, who is a teacher, originally from New Jersey, but now living in Hong Kong - he also has a website which deals with his experiences teaching and living in Hong Kong. 

Thanks to Brian, Leo and David for sharing these images with us using the Creative Commons License.

Veneto - the Jews of Venice

Something I didn't know about Venice was that it gave the world its first ever ghetto in the early 16th century.  Seen from an early 21st century viewpoint and after everything that happened during the last century, it's easy to condemn this action as a repressive one and a dangerous precedent for future centuries.  From a 16th century perspective, it's a bit more complicated.  Jewish history in Europe goes back thousands of years and, whilst the relationship between Jewish populations and their Christian and Muslim neighbours was never completely harmonious, there were times and places when everyone seemed to get along quite well. 

I first became aware of this when I was visiting Girona in Catalunya, a few years back.  Girona had a flourishing Jewish community back in the 12th century and Jews and Christians lived peacefully together for hundreds of years.  All of this changed with the Edict of Expulsion which saw all Jews expelled from Spain and Spanish territories, including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily - Sicily also had a sizeable Jewish population at this time.  The Portuguese expelled their Jewish population in 1497 and those who left, known as the Sephardi Jews sought refuge in more tolerant places in the Ottoman Empire and countries in northern Europe, like the Netherlands.  You can find out more about Jews in the Netherlands in my blog about the famous Sephardi philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. 

The Spanish expulsions triggered (yet another) wave of persecution against Jews in western and southern Europe.  Naples, which was also under Spanish rule, didn't expel its Jewish population, but the persecution of Jews was relentless in Italy throughout the early 16th century  It was in this context that the Venetians decided to confine their Jewish population to an area of the city which was uninhabited, ie. an island in the middle of the Cannaregio district of Venice, accessible by two main bridges and a place where the city's Jewish population could easily be 'protected' from anti-Jewish pogroms of their Christian neighbours. 

The origin of the word ghetto



Venice Ghetto by Adrian Murphy


I've read a few different sources on this, but most ethnologists agree that the word ghetto is a derivative of the Venetian word geto from the verb 'to throw/cast' (cf. French  jeter) which doesn't refer to the fact that the Jews were 'cast away' on this island, but rather to the slag heaps from the foundry where metal was cast.  It's hardly surprising that the Venetians came up with the ghetto concept, considering the nature of Venice, which is made up of hundreds of islands, separated (as the Jewish ghetto was) by canals and linked only by boats or bridges.  It was easy to 'seal off' an area of the city and force the Jewish population to live there. 

Although the ghetto was ostensibly a 'safe' place for Jews to live, guarded by Christian watchmen (who were paid for by the Jewish population), in reality it was, like most of the world's subsequent ghettos, nothing more than a living prison.  Jews were only allowed to roam the rest of the city during the daytime and were forced to wear red caps and badges, so they could easily be identified.  As in other parts of the Europe, the Jews were limited in terms of the professions they could have - in Venice, they were limited to work involving textiles, taxes and medicines.  Jewish doctors were renowned and the Venetian Doge always had a Jew as his personal physician.  I wonder what happened if the Doge were taken ill at night!

Was Shakespeare anti-Semitic?



Shylock and Jessica by Gottlieb

 Probably the most famous representation of life for Jews in Venice was Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.  To my great shame, I've never read the play but, as part of my research for this blog, I watched the 2004 film version by Michael Radford.  It's a great movie, with a star-studded cast, including Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino (who played Shakespeare's most famous Jew, Shylock), Lynn Collins and Joseph Fiennes.  By all accounts, the movie uses most of the lines in the original play and, whilst I don't think it was Shakespeare's greatest play (although my unfamiliarity with the text could be clouding my judgement), it did have some classic lines, such as 'all that glisters is not gold' and I was really moved by Shylock's famous Hath not a Jew eyes? speech.

As to whether or not Shakespeare was anti-Semitic?  The story of The Merchant of Venice is incredibly anti-Semitic and Shylock is presented as a caricature, more than a character, a stereotype of the Jew that an Elizabethan audience would recognise and despise.  But in the Hath not a Jew eyes? speech, it's as though Shakespeare is trying to get through the prejudices of his audience and is appealing for greater tolerance towards Jews. 

In the modern age, everyone wants to claim Shakespeare.  We all want to know whether or not he was gay, or racist, anti-Semitic, sexist or even whether or not he was actually a she.  Whilst I think it's important to speculate and this raises some interesting questions for discussion, Shakespeare was writing for an audience that he (or she!) understood very well and I'm not sure his personal opinions really came into it.  If a writer creates a character that is anti-Semitic, or racist, or homophobic, does that mean that the writer is any of these things?  I don't think it does.  Writers portray the society they live in and Shakespeare's plays reflect the world as it was in the late 16th century. 

I think Radford recognised the need to adapt Shylock for a 21st century audience and although he doesn't contemporise the play, as Baz Luhrmann did with Romeo and Juliet, he does direct a portayal of Shylock that is more sympathetic to a modern audience.  The danger of The Merchant of Venice is the powerful nature of Shylock's caricaturisation.  The play was popular in Nazi Germany, when it was used to vindicate the hatred the Nazis had for Jewish people.

Extension of the meaning of ghetto

One way or another, the idea of the Jewish ghetto caught on and, although it wasn't always called this, there were Jewish ghettos in most European cities.  Whilst western Europeans were persecuting Jews in the 16th century, the Polish Empire was pretty tolerant so that, by the 20th century, Poland and other eastern European countries had large Jewish populations.  When the Nazis invaded Poland, they re-established the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe, the most famous one being in Warsaw.  The Warsaw Ghetto saw an estimated 400,000 Jews cramped in unbearable conditions in a tiny area of the city.  100,000 people died of disease and starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto, even before the Nazis started carting Jews off to the concentration camps, like the one at Auschwitz/Oświęcim.  The ghetto was completely destroyed after an uprising in 1943.

The modern concept of ghetto has extended to include any section of a city that has a large ethnic (and usually impoverished) population.  Some of the most famous ghettos are in the United States, especially in New York, where ghettos were established in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in East Harlem and in Brighton Beach.  Of course, modern ghettos aren't usually enforced by law, but come into existence due to immigration patterns and are usually reinforced by a vicious circle of invisible 'social boundaries' that keep the ghetto's inhabitants impoverished and out of the wealthier (and usually whiter) parts of the city.  Sociologists like Loic Wacquant described this as hyperghettoization, which leads to certain parts of a city becoming unmanageable in terms of providing infrastructure.  When hyperghettoization occurs, it becomes even harder to break the cycles of violence and poverty for the people who live there. 

The early 20th century saw a lot of black people migrate from the poorer southern states of the US, to the industrial cities of the north, such as Chicago and Detroit.  Much more than in the UK, American cities seem to be incredibly segregated, in terms of race.  Not through deliberate planning by the city authorities, but because of immigration patterns and the effects of hyperghettoization.  In the post World War 2 period, a social phenomenon, known as 'white flight', emerged, where poorer white families in the ghettos, who had more social mobility due to the colour of their skin, moved up the social ladder and migrated to the suburbs of places like Chicago and Detroit, leaving the ghettos almost completely inhabited by black communities, compounding the alienation and ghettoization of black culture.



Venice skyscraper by Jon Kleinman

 Getting back to the idea of the ghetto as a place of protection of refuge, there are constant debates in the LGBT community about the ghettoization of gay culture.  Whilst many modern cities have a specific gay area, often called a 'village', like Soho in London or Le Marais in Paris (which was previously a Jewish ghetto), many gay people argue that there is a real danger in living separately from the mainstream of society.  Ghettoization can reinforce the isolation of the gay community and led to greater stereotyping of people who are LGBT.

The Venetian ghetto today

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the original Jewish ghetto in Venice, is that Venetian Jews were still confined there until as late as 1866.  Although Napoleon's armies pulled down the gates of ghettos all over Europe, the Austrians re-established the Venetian ghetto and Jews continued to live there for most of the 19th century.  As the population of the ghetto increased, its inhabitants were forced to build upwards, so that the buildings of the ghetto began to ressemble 19th-century skycrapers!  The ghetto is still in existence today and is somewhat of a cultural centre for Jews in Venice.  Like most of Venice, it's now more of a tourist attraction. 

Image credits:

The image of the flag of Veneto was provided copyright-free on Wikimedia, the original image having been supplied by wikuser Vajotwo with this derived version being added by wikiuser Flanker - you can see a more detailed description of this image at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Veneto.svg

The image of the Venice Ghetto sign is by flickruser adrian, acediscovery, a fellow-Irish man, originally from Cork, but now living in London.  Adrian is also interested in travel and the world around us - you can see more of his work (both writing and imagery) on his blog http://acediscovery.blogspot.com/  You can also follow Adrian on Twitter @acediscovery

The image of Shylock and Jessica is by the Jewish painter Maurycy Gottlieb and is in the public domain. 

The image of the 'Venice skyscraper' is by flickuser drdad aka, Jon Kleinman who is from Dayton, Ohio.  You can see more of Jon's photos at http://www.flickr.com/people/jonkleinman/