On the Rhetoric of Aleksander Krawczuk

Rhetoric is what the ancients called it, and went to Greece to study. The word meant as much “structure” as “style.” And the structure and style of this book, as of every book of Aleksander Krawczuk, are all of his own.

If they surprise you, it is because, like me, you have grown up reading English-language books on history and, therefore, like me, are expecting one of two kinds of books: either a narrative (what one critic called “a one-damn-thing-after-another historical writing”) or an argument (like, say, The Myth of Andalusian Paradise—you get the picture). The former sort is deemed “popular,” meaning that we simpletons desire to know what-then, what-then; while the academicians prefer a controversy (a way to make waves).

But Krawczuk's books fall into neither category.

1. First, Krawczuk’s books are more like a broad overview of a topic, a period, or an idea. We see the topic, as it were, from the eagle’s perspective, from very high up. We now examine this aspect of our subject, now that, and as we do, all the different elements gradually coalesce into a broad, nuanced, and richly textured picture. This style of writing does have its English-language equivalents. Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower and The Distant Mirror are each a portrait of an age; the former a kind of snapshot of the West about the year 1900, the latter of Western Europe about the time of the Black Death; Michael Haag’s Alexandria, City of Memory, does the same for British Colonial Alexandria.

Rome and Jerusalem is similar to these books in that it gives us a picture of the Roman Levant at the time of the First Jewish War. It puts the war in the perspective of the great political events on the Mediterranean stage and the major intellectual and religious currents of the period. The device of weaving several narratives together, switching back and forth from one place of action to another, from a political narrative to a personal biography to a religious debate, allows us to sense how complex and interconnected everything was then—and always is.

The literary trope is that of a flaneur on an informal trip guided by the author: the reader is a curious stroller through the Middle East about AD 67-69 observing people, places, and events from various perspectives.

2. Krawczuk’s reluctance to tell us how these different elements fit together sets his work apart from other similar books. There is no closing chapter summarizing the findings. Krawczuk leaves the interpretation to us.

Each of his books has a theme. In Seven Against Thebes, it was the historical tradition; in The Last Olympiad, the process of cultural transformation. In the Jewish Trilogy, the theme is national survival in a changing world. Krawczuk sets out to show many aspects of the problem, occasionally highlighting them through comparison and contrast with modern people and places, often with his native Poland. Yet, he offers no conclusions. The reader is presented with the facts and left to make sense of them himself.

One result is that Krawczuk’s books remain with us. Months after putting the book down, the reader finds himself thinking about its themes and trying on different interpretations of how they fit together. I have thought about the enigmatic conclusion of Rome and Jerusalem for decades, and it has launched me on years of reading on different tangents.

3. A prominent feature of Krawczuk’s approach—rare among professional historians—is to note similarities between the past and the present, highlighting in the process certain monumental, timeless aspects of the human condition.

This phenomenon has, as it were, two sides.

First, since so much of ancient history survives only in fragments, requiring us to infer or conjecture what really happened, an analogy from a different time may well help our understanding. This is what men said and did two thousand years later in a similar situation: could something like this have happened in the earlier case as well?

A belief underlies this method: that the past is not a foreign country; that it is populated by people like us, and that we can understand them no better and no worse than we can understand our contemporaries. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this technique in the present book is the attention Krawczuk devotes to understanding the motivations of the actors—patriots, politicians, soldiers, priests—who emerge as more familiar as a result.

And then there is the second aspect of the comparison/contrast between the past and the present: a story from the past can help us see our present in a different light. This has been an important part of Krawczuk’s success in Eastern Europe. It proved easy for modern East Europeans—conquered by a great power—to see themselves in first-century Jews.

4. Finally, Krawczuk’s books feature what most modern historians, striving to sound scientific, eschew: an occasional flash of literary brilliance. Few historians will dare to include in their books a fictitious apocalyptic prophecy in the style of Daniel (p. 109), an imagined soldiers’ dialogue (pp. 126-8), or this pixish flight of fancy:

A person inclined to fantasize about syzygies might look for one in the evolution of the legend about three different women with the same name. Two alleged Berenices, both miraculously cured, merge in later tradition into one; and she, in turn, is transferred to the city of historical Berenice, where she becomes a Jewish princess, alive and famous in the years of early Christianity. And, despite everything her contemporaries said about the historical Berenice, she is the kernel of her future rise to the status of sainthood.

And thus posterity showed Queen Berenice a special grace, while it denied it to Nero. The emperor, whose grave was adorned with flowers for many years after his death, the ruler loved and awaited, and who was resurrected three times, in time, in the eyes of later generations, became the Beast of the Apocalypse. Say what you may: this is a manifestation of the law of syzygy if there ever was one. And an example of Divine Justice.

Tom Pinch
Ardennes National Park
Luxemboug