A smile for brexit, Storks like San Francisco Chinese, a fountain flowing with wine. And much more besides

A French policeman flagged us down as we crossed the border from Germany. He walked over to us, his face set, his air threatening. As we let down a window, he leaned in.

“Brexit or no Brexit?” he asked, having spotted our British number plates.

“No Brexit, no Brexit,” we chorused.

“OK, passez,” he assured us.

We’ve just spent a few packed days in the town where we used to live. That’s Kehl, in Germany, which has been a district of the great German city of Straßburg, or a market town opposite the great French city of Strasbourg, depending not so much on the geography but on the history of the region.

One place we visited was Basel, where there’s a celebration going on in honour of the sixth centennial of the publication the translation of the New Testament by Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived the latter part of his life in the Swiss city. Among the many quotes from the great scholar, I particularly liked one in which he says that he wants to be a citizen of the world, at home anywhere or, better still, nowhere.

One of the Erasmus quotations scattered around Basel

Now there’s a thought for the dividing world we live in.

We visited cousins in Basel, and were struck by the storks’ nest on the chimneys of the house opposite.

“The council sent people up to destroy the nest as soon as it was made, but the storks rebuilt it within three days. By the time the authorities sent back people, there were already eggs and it was too late.”

This reminded me of a story we were told in San Francisco’s Chinatown years ago.

When the Chinese community first arrived it was granted some fairly lousy, worthless land outside the city limits. But then San Francisco grew and had to spread all around, forcing the price and desirability of the Chinese area up.

In 1906 came the devastating earthquake and fire. Chinatown was destroyed. The whites of San Francisco saw a way of making something positive of the disaster. They summoned a meeting of the council to take back control of the Chinese district.

Alas, it took two weeks for the council to meet. And in that time the Chinese had completely rebuilt their homes and businesses and it was too late to drive them out.

Hence today’s Chinatown.

Just like the pair of storks we saw in Basel.

We also visited a village in deepest Alsace, in the wine country.

That’s Alsace, the great province of eastern France, not Elsaß, which was more than once a flourishing province of western Germany.

In between some of the vines, we found cherry trees rich in fruit, ridiculously late, because of the lousy weather this year. We weren’t complaining though, as we picked and ate handfuls of different varieties of glorious cherries at every tree we reached.

Joy on a country walk

In the local village, we visited the fountain which will, at the annual feast day in a couple of weeks’ time, be flowing with wine instead of water. The sign above the fountain informs the visitor that it celebrates the moment when, by decree of the royal court in Colmar, the people of the village were freed of the feudal requirement to pay a tax in wine, in 1897.

Royal decree? In 1897? When France was firmly republican? Well, Alsace was Elsaß then and anything but firmly French. Colmar was a provincial city of the German Empire.

The village has a massive Protestant church and an only slightly less massive Catholic one. It also boasts are well-restored synagogue, though no real Jewish community any more. Still, the building’s impressive.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews of the village were pretty poor (few of any community were particularly wealthy). So many of the boys and young men would set out for the ‘fifth voyage.’ Their parents would find them enough money to get to the French coast somewhere, where they’d take menial service in one of the great transatlantic liners. Five crossings would allow them to pay for their passage, and at the end of the fifth they would leave the ship in the States and set out to make their fortunes.

Many did, and sent back funds to support their families and also endow their home village with a good synagogue. Which stands there to this day, near the Protestant and Catholic churches, as a mute monument to a fine state of affairs when three great faiths were able to live side by side without tearing each other apart.

Erasmus I suspect would have approved. As do I. It was an arrangement that should attract a smile as fulsome as the French policeman gave us, after he’d finished ribbing us about the Brexit vote.

That was a good experience. Brexit hasn’t given me much else to smile about.

Persecuting the Irish: icon of our times

Noble, that’s the word for the Colegio de los Irlandeses, now part of the prestigious university of Alcalà de Henares near Madrid. 

Quiet, understated but self-assured, it is a fitting tribute to the offer of Spain to the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, to a refuge where they could safely study within the tenets of their faith.

Colegio de los Irlandeses, Alcalà de Henares

Makes you wonder what the ancestors of today’s Brits were up to, oppressing Irish Catholics. What good did it do them? Today Ireland is still Catholic and, what’s more, it’s independent of Britain. All that pain and suffering Britain imposed, and it gave neither nation anything benefit at all. You’d think we might learn.

The truth, of course, is that some people did very well out of the arrangement. A tiny number of people, but they were powerful. The holders of great fortunes in Ireland, particularly in the form of land, were doing just fine and saw no reason to loosen the reins. On the contrary, they felt they were absolutely entitled to see the army doing whatever it took to put down anyone uppity enough to question their right to enjoy what they, and their ancestors, had always enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Spain the founding of the College had nothing to with preserving liberty from persecution. Far from it. Spain itself was more than happy to do its full share of persecution. Protestants: burn them. Moors, Jews: drive them out. And if they don’t go: burn them. Just like the Mayflower pilgrims, Spanish Catholics weren’t out to obtain religious freedom, just the freedom of their own religion to persecute anyone who belonged to a different one.

And in just the same way, a handful of people did very well out of the arrangement: the owners of the great fortunes, in Spain, Latin America or anywhere else controlled by force of Spanish arms, were convinced that this was right and proper and the preservation of their way of life was a divinely ordained duty.

That’s what makes the College in Alcalà so eloquent a monument. So eloquent today, I mean.

When a couple of crazed, misfit Muslims, who can’t distinguish between an act of political courage and a simple piece of barbarism, hack to pieces a British soldier in Woolwich they are perpetuating the attitudes that drove Britain to impose its will by force on the Irish. Or Spanish Catholics to force the conversion of Spanish Jews. Or Pakistani Sunnis to murder Pakistani Shiites. Or orthodox Jews to deny the right of Jewish women to pray like their male counterparts at the Wailing Wall.

What they are perpetuating is the mindset of anyone who is so sure of being right that it justifies inflicting suffering or even death on those who disagree.

That goes just as much for those, in the English Defence League and outside, who’ve reacted to the Woolwich murders with violence against Muslims and their institutions. Less obviously, it also applies to organisations that don’t themselves promote violence, like the United Kingdom Independence Party. They may not actively condone persecution, but by their attacks on immigration, they sustain the belief that a nation is better for being homogeneous.

Homogeneity was what all those persecuting powers, driving out Muslims, Jews, Catholics or Protestants were trying to do, too. Looking back on their attempts in the past, as I did when I saw the Colegio de los Irlandeses, I had to ask myself ‘why did they bother?’

Though, seeing how many people seem to be rallying to the banner of intolerance again today, perhaps the question ought to be, ‘why do they still bother now?’