#Rumanian sage

[faguscarolinensis]

Salvia ringens / Mount Olympus Sage at the Denver Botanic Gardens in Denver, CO

[spectaculardistractions]

Shortly before he committed suicide in 1941, Stefan Zweig referred in his memoirs to the consternation the Jews felt when they were all grouped together by the Nazis into a category that was by now meaningless for them: But the Jews of the twentieth century had for long not been a community. They were conscious of their Judaism rather as a burden than as something to be proud of and were not aware of any mission. They lived apart from the commandments of their once holy books and they were done with the common language of old. To integrate themselves and become articulated with the people with whom they lived, to dissolve themselves in the common life, was the purpose for which they strove impatiently for the sake of peace from persecution, rest on the eternal flight. Thus the one group no longer understood the other, melted down into other peoples as they were, more Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Russians than they were Jews. Only now, since they were swept up like dirt in the streets and heaped together, the bankers from their Berlin palaces and sextons from the synagogues of orthodox congregations, the philosophy professors from Paris, and Rumanian cabbies, the undertaker’s helpers and Nobel prizewinners, the concert singers, and hired mourners, the authors and distillers, the haves and have-nots, the great and the small, the devout and the liberals, the usurers and the sages, the Zionists and the assimilated, the Ashkenasim and the Sephardim, the just and the unjust besides which the confused horde who thought they had long since eluded the curse, the baptized and the semi-Jews–only now, for the first time in hundreds of years, the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long since ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring–since Egypt–community of expulsion. Like the European Jews of around 1930, the Muslims of France do not exist. The religious category is imposed as a common denominator on a group of women and men belonging to different groups, with different national origins, educational levels, jobs and social classes, as well as different degrees and types of religious practice. To stick the label ‘Muslim’ onto this human diversity is quite simply a racist act, just as sticking the common label 'Jew’ onto the bourgeois intellectual of Vienna and the Jew from the shtetl in Poland was a racist act. The soldiers Imad Ibn Ziaten and Mohamed Legouad who were shot down by Mohammed Merah in Montauban were no less 'Muslim’ than he was, or than Ahmed Merabet, the policeman who was finished off on the ground by the Kouachi brothers. The problem is of a general nature: the category 'Muslim’, in the form in which it is increasingly being used, is a dangerous semantic fiction.

Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie?