a little something for my Serbian followers....

One intriguing story from the early nineteenth century involves
the fate of a Jew from Travnik, Moses Chavijo, who converted to
Islam, took the name of Dervish Ahmed, and began to rouse the
local Muslims against the Jews. In 1817 the leaders of the Bosnian
Jews complained of his attacks, and had him tried and executed.
Some of his followers later complained to the next governor of
Bosnia, Ruzdi pasa, who seized the opportunity to squeeze some
money out of the Jews: he demanded that they pay a recompense of
500,000 groschen, and seized ten leading Sarajevo Jews, including
the rabbi, threatening to kill them if the payment were not made.
The end of the story, however, is that a crowd of 3000 Muslims
took up arms and demanded the Jews' release - which was promptly
done.

Levy, M., Die Sephardim in Bosnien: ein Beitragzur Gcschichte der Juden auf
der Balkan-Halbinsel (Sarajevo, 1911 ) pp. 62 - 63, apud Malcolm, Noel.
Bosnia, a Short History.  NYC:  NYU  Press, 1994, p. 112

The only question is, how soon will they poison him?

The only question is, how soon will they poison him?

There is a long and honored tradition — honored at least in some quarters — of discreetly removing an inconveniently-pious pope: Gregory V, Adrian III, Benedict XI, Sergius IV, Clement II — and of course there is the sorry sorry tale of poor Pietro da Morrone, St Celestine V….But, after all, the Church, in this case the Church bureaucracy, has to protect itself, its ridiculous privileges, its vast financial empire, and its deviant ways….

Okayyyyy, this is the 21st century, and there have been advances. First, forensic science makes the old-fashioned methods a little riskier. On the other hand, it’s much easier to discredit the guy by planting, say, a naked altar boy in his rooms, or a bomb-wielding Bulgarian — a different kind of poison — or forging evidence of his complicity in the Dirty War, that process has already begun. But be assured, the monsignore-apparatchik-mafia will not roll over — their deal is too sweet, waaaaaayyyyy too sweet.

Gide

more anecdota.


Gide, whose name is ALWAYS coming up -- who he?  Gide was a paederast, but he ditched his longtime boy-toy Marc Allegret, married a woman forty years his junior, and conceived upon this spouse, a daughter.  Then the couple separated, all this taking place in a matter of weeks -- actual daughter following in due course.

Marc Allegret's younger brother Yves (both brothers made movies in France in the Thirties) married Simone Signoret neé Kaminker:  father a Jewish French Army officer of Polish extraction, mother a shiksa.  That made Gide Signoret's brother-in-law.  Signoret is, in my book, all right:  one, she was sublime as La Casque d'Or; two, she married Yves Montand, nato Ivo Montano, whose father was (roughly speaking) Communist mayor of Nice before WWI, and who told off Khrushchev at a dinner in the Kremlin in the Fifties -- he Montand having become the crooner-heartthrob of les bobby-soxers after WWII, in part due to a pompadour of prodigious elevation and declivity.

Gide, the very type of the French intellectual, was the reader at Giraud who received Proust's manuscript of A La Temps Perdu.  He rejected it without even opening the package, saying, more or less, "The author is a flighty mondaine who cannot possibly have the gravitas necessary to produce true art."  The French just ADORE these guys -- the crankier the better.  No one except graduate students reads Gide anymore, although, through simple longevity and a fine eye for aesthetic politics, he was a major force in French lit for half a century.

Seeing as many French movies as I can get, the moral of which movies I take as, We are all total utter flaming assholes, and we might just as well forgive all the way around and get on with the business.

[Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be, are fun, if you're me.]