What is it about anti-Semitism? I know that evil lurks in the hearts of men, and bigotry is one of the lamentably common and often vicious forms it takes. But anti-Semitism is different. It has a persistence, a virulence and a ubiquity that are far beyond even the normal disgraceful standards of human intolerance. For instance the massacre at York Castle on March 16 1190.

If you’ve been following our projects on reclaiming Canada’s heritage, especially the Magna Carta documentary, you know that medieval England was highly unusual in its effective protection of human rights. Including the rights of women.

Racial bigotry wasn’t really an issue in part because virtually everybody was white. But the Middle Ages didn’t draw invidious distinctions on the basis of skin colour to the extent that people then encountered or noticed it. Women had more rights then than in the Renaissance, though fewer than in the Dark Ages, again especially in England where the rule of law has existed from time immemorial in remarkably robust form. Slavery was fast being abolished. It was a remarkable time and place. Unless you were Jewish.

There weren’t many Jews, if any, in Saxon England. They were brought over by the Normans, particularly to serve as moneylenders. No, I’m not stereotyping Jews. Quite the reverse. They were placed under such strict legal limits, or left so dismally outside the protection of the laws, that most occupations were closed to them in theory or in practice. And they just weren’t safe scattered among the populace. So they did the few things they could do.

It gets worse. Because Jews could not own land in England, and the crown basically owned them, if someone’s land was seized for unpaid debts to the Jews, it was seized by the state. So the kings not only wanted to borrow money from the Jews, they wanted you to as well, so they could grab it. Naturally people hated the Jews for lending them money, and would have hated them for refusing to do so, and hated them for wanting it back as agreed, and hated them for being used by the king to seize land, and so on and so on.

Thus in York in 1190 an upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiment because of Richard I’s determination to join the Crusades… No. Stop a minute. That sentence sounds unremarkable because we’re all so used to anti-Semitism. But it’s downright weird. The Crusades weren’t even against Jewish rulers or states. And what had the Jews in England to do with whether Richard did or didn’t go on one? Nevertheless, rumours began to circulate that the king wanted English Jews to be attacked because you know what the heck.

Naturally these rumours were seized upon by people who owed Jews money and felt that they shouldn’t have to pay it back because, again, um, we asked them to lend it and they did so now we should keep it or something. One Richard de Malbis in particular used a house fire to stir up a mob, leading the Jews of York to flee to the royal castle there and take refuge in the wooden keep.

Well, one thing led to another, and after the constable left the castle to negotiate with the lynch mob and the Jews were afraid to let him in, he had the sheriff besiege the castle. The king’s own castle. With innocent people seeking refuge inside it.

Ultimately the Jews decided that they were all going to die, and rather than be tortured and mutilated they set the keep on fire and for the most part killed themselves rather than wait for the flames. A few Jews surrendered instead, promising to convert to Christianity, so naturally they were slaughtered.

It’s not natural. It is, again, as strange as it is vicious, and while taking full and horrified note of the viciousness one should not let it distract one from the strangeness. What is it about the Jews that causes people to lose their minds and their decency in such a consistent manner? Even blacks, who were subjected to centuries of ghastly racial slavery, were never accused of putting children’s blood into their food, as Jews routinely have been over centuries without, I hardly need add, anything faintly resembling rational grounds for mistakenly thinking they did.

A century after the York pogrom the Jews were expelled from England entirely by Edward I, in 1290, and soon after that they were booted out of France… several times. Spain did the deed in 1492, the same year they completed the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from Muslims who, unlike Jews, actually had attacked them. And for what?

Anyway, the Jews were readmitted to England under Oliver Cromwell. Over 300 years later. And gradually they found space within the Anglosphere and ultimately acceptance. Only to have the BDS movement and other such “progressive” causes turn anti-Israel with a degree of willful blindness and hypocrisy to the far worse conduct of its Middle Eastern neighbours that I can only attribute to anti-Semitism.

The fact that anyone who reads history is used to anti-Semitism, and its tendency to break out repeatedly in vicious and hallucinatory forms over and over again in the most unlikely places, should not blind us to the fact that it is as weird as it is hideous.

Something is going on there that demands our attention.

While I’m piling up dead Caesars, it’s worth noting that March 15 is the dreaded Ides of March on which Julius Caesar was stabbed in 44 B.C. by, one sometimes gets the feeling, about half the population of Rome, in a long line waving knives. And rightly so, people long felt. Sic semper tyrannis, I would say, if that phrase had not been egregiously misappropriated by John Wilkes Booth.

What’s that? Why do I hate Caesar so? Well, it’s very simple and justified. I don’t know what he was like as a human being. But he went from being a successful general to an aspiring tyrant and when he got himself declared “dictator perpetuo” by the Senate, the Roman equivalent of the Communist “president for life” stunt, defenders of the old Republic took up arms and did him in.

It didn’t work, of course. Augustus in turn became dictator for life, without admitting it, followed by Tiberius and on down the line. And the fact that both Augustus and Tiberius did a good job, and the Republic was descending into chaos, led people to accept the subtle irreversible installation of an Emperor on the ruins of the Republic.

Fixing the Republic would have been no easy task. Had he lived, Julius Caesar too might have been a good Emperor. It’s hard to tell from the historical record what he was really like, why he wanted power or what he was likely to do with it. Many of the conspirators, despite posing as friends of liberty and the Republic, may have had unseemly aspirations of their own and they certainly came to bad ends. (One of them, Gaius Cassius Longinus, who actually seems to have been among the good guys, ended up committing suicide with the same dagger he’d used on Julius Caesar, which must have hurt even more than usually.)

I don’t know what Brutus might have been like had he too not been driven to suicide by defeat at the hands of Marc Antony, who really seems to have been a wretched character. Could they or anyone have saved the Republic? Was it worth saving given the incoherent dysfunction of its institutions and the restless ambition of its politicians?

It’s hard to say. But Caesar’s solution, seizing power by force of arms, wasn’t the right one. That’s why he was assassinated, and for centuries people recalled this courageous if failed attempt to preserve liberty as an example for the ages. That we no longer seem to do so is, I fear, a reflection of dwindling interest in the history of freedom.

We do not have Caesars, and I do not advocate assassination of anyone in a democracy. But we have accepted the growth of state power and the diminution of individual initiative in a way that would certainly have aroused the eloquent indignation of Cicero, who was not one of the conspirators but wished he had been, opposed Antony and dictatorship and was killed and his corpse publicly mutilated for it, after which Augustus claimed he was sorry for what his own allies whom he later defeated had done.

So yes, Julius Caesar got what he deserved on the Ides of March, even though it didn’t end up working. And it’s worth remembering why.

Here’s an anniversary only a nerd could love. March 14, 1592 was the biggest Pi Day since the adoption of the Julian calendar. Woo hoo point 14159265358 and on ad infinitum.

Huh? Non-mathematicians cry? Obviously pi, or π as it’s also known, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius and because the universe is irrational or God is larky or something it’s an “irrational” number which, as all celebrants of Pi Day know, is one that cannot be expressed as a “ratio of two integers” a.k.a. a fraction. And Pi Day itself is March 14 because, in places that go month-day-year (instead of logically going from small to big day-month-year) it goes 3.14. And then the 16^th century adds the 15 and the 1590s add the nine and 1592 adds the two at which point you’re rather out of digits which could be deflating.

Instead people actually celebrate Pi Day, by eating pies, throwing pies, reciting pi and otherwise whooping it up nerd-style. And I think that’s great. I think it’s part of what makes us human in a good way, that we get enthusiastic and creative about things and embrace the most ridiculous manifestations with the greatest enthusiasm precisely because they are ridiculous. And, in the case of actual pie, pretty good-tasting much of the time.

The U.S. House of Representatives even passed a non-binding resolution declaring March 14 Pi Day back in 2009, and informally March 2014 was pi month and March 14 2015 was special because in America it was 3/14/15 and, not to be outdone by March 14, 1592, they treated 3/14/15 9:25:53 as a very special moment… um… second. Of course if they’d been doing this stuff back in 1592 they’d have gone nuts at 3/14/1592 6:53:58 and if they’d been able to measure hundreds of seconds they’d have added another … oh oh… the next digit is nine.

Oh well. Never mind. Pi day is still fun. Some Indian guy actually recited pi to 70,000 digits in 2015 over nine riveting hours 27 minutes, though oddly on March 21 2015 not March 14. And a retired Japanese engineer claims to have done it to 100,000 though Guinness World Records wasn’t there to see this madcap outburst of unrestrained fun-loving boredom.

Oh, and if you can’t get enough of this stuff, July 22 is Pi Approximation Day because 22/7 is pi accurate to two digits and has been known  to be since Archimedes.

Speaking of which, you’ve heard of Roman numerals and know what a headache they were to do math with even if math doesn’t give you a headache anyway. But how did the Greeks do it?

That’s a topic for another day. For now have some pie. 3.14159 pieces, if you have a sharp enough knife, an accurate enough ruler and a nerdy enough sense of fun.

It took long enough. But on March 13 of 1862 the U.S. federal government forbade Union army officers returning fugitive slaves. There was a logic to abolition that just could not be denied, and led from Lincoln’s election through the Emancipation Proclamation to the 13^th Amendment ending slavery.

It was not a straight road. Indeed, the March 13 order had to be given because some officers were returning fugitive slaves, either because of genuine doubts about the legality of sheltering them or because they didn’t like blacks. The American Civil War is very strange in that respect; it was fought for the freedom of the most despised segment of the populace, and sadly anti-black feelings were scarcely less virulent in the North than the South. And yet… and yet…

Southerners made a big fuss in the run-up to war about the Yankees interfering with their freedom to govern themselves. But there was one issue, and one issue only, on which the North was going to intrude on the South, and that was human bondage. In some way the incompatibility of this institution with the moral and philosophical foundations of the Republic was instinctively obvious to all and, moreover, drove them to act. It is an illustration of the maxim that people have small ideas, but big ideas have people.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the legislation that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a piece of southern rather than northern aggression, trying to make Northerners complicit in slavery by forcing them to return runaway slaves. And when pressed to choose, reluctantly and often with cold hearts, Northerners chose liberty. Then they fought for it, an enormously destructive war, and when it ended they freed southern blacks.

The end of slavery was not, of course, the end of bigotry and legal as well as social mistreatment of non-whites in the United States. But that idea never died and, through an even longer and more twisted road, led ultimately to the success of the Civil Rights movement, the election of a black president, and the relegation of bigotry to the fever swamps where it shares space with those who insist that nothing has really changed.

It took far too long. But the logic was there, and could not ultimately be denied.

March 12 marks the anniversary of the 1550 Battle of Penco. It’s not an especially significant battle on its own terms, just one incident in the Arauco War which I also hadn’t heard of. But it’s significant because it was so doubly one-sided.

In the first place, it featured tens of thousands on one side against 200 invaders on the other, with a few hundred local allies. In the second, the tiny side won.

The Arauco War was fought between colonial Spain and the and their various allies. It went on for decades and ended somewhat better than most such conflicts, with the Mapuche hanging on to some of their traditional territory into the 19^th century (they are now evidently trying to regain some autonomy from Chile). But it underlines the extremely lopsided nature of the collision between Europe and the Americas in which European technology and cultural habits proved utterly lethal even when we’re talking Imperial Spain, which was bureaucratic, sclerotic and ineffective by European standards.

The indispensable book on the subject is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel which, despite the excruciating political correctness of its opening section, explains how accidents of geography, botany and animal husbandry generated an urban, open, inquisitive, dynamic and ultimately technologically progressive society around the Mediterranean and then in Western Europe that overwhelmed even the traditional societies of China and India, let alone the stone age peoples of Africa and the Americas.

It’s weird to see an unfair fight between tens of thousands on their home turf and a few hundred intruders, where the former cannot compete. When it happens, it cries out for explanation. And that explanation must be on a grand scale because the phenomenon is so extraordinary.

As for the Battle of Penco, well, it wasn’t that big a deal. Nor really was the Arauco War, unless you happened to live there. But the massive imbalance in capabilities between Spain and South America was of enormous importance.

The Queen has been thinking about it for a long time. For it was on March 11 of 1708 that Queen Anne was the last British/Canadian monarch to veto a bill. With good reason.

First, she vetoed the bill with good reason. It was to arm the Scottish militia, as the English was armed, in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union. But with a French fleet sailing for Scotland, Her Majesty’s ministers warned her that this militia might be disloyal and so she refused her assent.

Second, there’s a good reason for the lovely old formula Anne used in casting her veto, whereby when a monarch accepted a bill he or she said “Le roi/la reine le veult” and when they spiked one they used the elegant tactful circumlocution “Le roi/la reine s’avisera” (The king/queen will think about it.) We are reminded that in politics, as the stakes are high and so are the feelings, rituals that express courtesy as a matter of habit are especially valuable when they might be hard to summon as a matter of fact.

Third, it is with good reason that monarchs lost the habit of vetoing bills. It used to be routine; Anne’s immediate predecessor William III (of Orange) did it six times. But in those days the separation of the branches was far more robust in Britain than it later became and the monarch held a far more prominent place in the executive branch than would be the case by the 19^th century. These were important checks and balances incorporated, of course, in the American system whereby the President can veto legislation.

Gradually that system broke down in Britain. As late as 1834, King William IV (whose most notable achievement, unless you count 10 illegitimate children with the actress Dorothea Bland, was doggedly to live to see his niece Victoria achieve majority rather than have his sinister brother Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, become regent), dissolved Parliament rather than accept a Whig ministry he considered unsound. But when the election returned a Whig majority, he accepted it.

From then on it was the cabinet and prime minister, not the monarch, who headed the executive branch and set its agenda. And so it was they, not the queen or king, who decided what bills lived or died in the legislature. Which sounds good but isn’t. Whereas monarchs occasionally vetoed bills, Prime Ministers came to dictate them as a matter of course. In the end this fusion of the legislature and executive, despite the veneer of legitimacy in drawing ministers from the elected house, was bad for the independence of the legislature and the liberties of the citizens who elect it.

The solution is not to have the monarch veto bills. There is even some doubt whether such a thing is still constitutional given that more than three centuries have passed since the last exercise of the power. My guess is that the Queen could still reject a bill if it were sufficiently egregious, though such a bill is most unlikely to pass. But with the executive we don’t elect having half-absorbed and wholly tamed the legislature we do elect, we need some kind of restoration of checks and balances.

This isn’t the Queen’s problem any more. Rather, citizens and legislators need to think about it. Hard. With good reason. But not too long.

On March 10 a very long time ago Rome handed Carthage its fleet in the pivotal Battle of Egadi Islands that ended the first Punic War.

Now you may say duh, of course it was a long time ago, it was Rome. And you’d have a point. But what surprises me a little is that the first Punic War ended in 241 BC, very nearly two centuries before they Et tu, Brute-ed Caesar on the Ides of March. (Technically his dying words were in Greek “Kai su, teknon,” either a reproach or a threat, but never mind for now.)

By the time Caesar got the point(s), Rome was fast becoming a world power. To master it was to control the Mediterranean. But in its two-decade-long struggle with Carthage that ended at Egadi two centuries earlier, Rome was a small regional power facing possible extinction if it lost. Carthaginian territory extended from Gibraltar to Libya, Sicily and Corsica; Rome held only most of mainland Italy.

Suppose Rome had lost? The Battle of Egadi Islands was itself something of a close-run affair, though less alarming than the crushing defeat Rome suffered at Cannae in the Second Punic War at the hands of Hannibal (the general surnamed Barca with the elephants, not the creepy psychiatrist surnamed Lecter with the strange diet) in 216 B.C., after which Fabius Maximus “Cunctator” (“the Delayer”) managed to save Rome by wearing Hannibal down instead of confronting him directly.

It is hard to imagine the Rome of Augustus, or Marcus Aurelius, being reduced to harassment, attrition and denial of supplies to beat an enemy, especially on the Italian mainland, and taking over a decade to get rid of him. But that’s how it was back then. And what if it hadn’t worked?

There might seem little to choose between Rome and Carthage. Certainly at its worst, Rome was a horror, both in terms of its rulers and its foreign policy. And it was a slave state, one of very few in recorded history to base its economic production in significant measure on slavery. (To my surprise when I learned it from Keith Bradley’s Slavery and Society at Rome a few years back, there have only been five: ancient Athens, classical Roman Italy, and the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern United States in the post-medieval period. Slavery is ubiquitous but economically productive slavery is very rare.) But there are major differences.

Rome was a society based on the rule of law from its mythical origins. It did respect human dignity though it drew the circle too narrowly. It believed in government founded on the people though it never got the institutions right. And while Roman religion was frankly a bit silly, it didn’t involve human sacrifice as the Carthaginian worship of Baal apparently did.

Without Rome, there would have been no fusion of Athens with Jerusalem, no Magna Carta and no West as we understand the term. Especially if you accept G.K. Chesterton’s claim, in the profound and moving seventh chapter of The Everlasting Man, that there was a deep, fundamental, essential difference between the domestic rooted family-oriented paganism of Rome and the hard, pessimistic, baby-sacrificing paganism of Carthage, and that the triumph of Christianity depended in significant measure on there being a Roman Empire, that created an open, cosmopolitan, decent, society with ideals nobler than worship of the state and material success all around the Mediterranean from Judea to the pillars of Hercules.

Some might take its role in the triumph of Christianity as an argument for Carthage not Rome winning their long struggle, which only really ended with the lopsided Third Punic War after which Cato the Elder’s grim and persistent “Carthago delenda” was put into practice. (Again, apparently what he actually kept saying was “ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” which is too long and grammatically complex to be pithily cited.)

Chesterton took the opposite view, to the point of thinking there was something more than merely accidental about Rome’s victory. The religion and spirit of Carthage was dark, pessimistic and brutal and a world in its image would I think have been far worse than one in that of Rome for all its failings. But however you see it, surely the fact of Rome’s victory was of enormous significance to world history since.

So yes, once again, war matters, and so do apparently minor obscure battles. For instance, if things had gone differently when some 450 ships clashed on March 10, 241, nothing would have been the same afterward.

On this date in 632, March 9, Muhammad ended the first Islamic pilgrimage or hajj with his famous Farewell Sermon. Including instructions on how to beat your wives, apparently. It is of course possible that he didn’t. It’s not in the Koran. Unlike Sura 4, which also says to beat them if they are disobedient.

So maybe the witnesses or chroniclers got it wrong. But one of the “hadiths” or authoritative traditions given great weight in Islam says in this Farewell Sermon, just months before his death, he told his followers “I enjoin good treatment of women, for they are prisoners with you, and you have no right to treat them otherwise, unless they commit clear indecency. If they do that, then forsake them in their beds and hit them, but without causing injury or leaving a mark if they obey you, then do not seek means of annoyance against them.”

Alternatively, according to a respected 8^th century historian, “Now then, O people, you have a right over your wives and they have a right over you. You have [the right] that they should not cause anyone of whom you dislike to tread on your beds; and that they should not commit any open indecency (fāḥishah). If they do, then God permits you to shut them in separate rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain from [evil], they have the right to their food and clothing in accordance with custom (bi’l-ma‘rūf). Treat women well, for they are [like] domestic animals (‘awānin) with you and do not possess anything for themselves.”

Another writer, in the ninth century gives “O people: verily you owe your women their rights, and they owe you yours. They may not lay with another men in your beds, let anyone into your houses you do not want without your permission, or commit indecency. If they do, Allah has given you leave to debar them, send them from your beds, or [finally] strike them in a way that does no harm. But if they desist, and obey you, then you must provide for them and clothe them fittingly. The women who live with you are like captives, unable to manage for themselves…”

All these quotations can be found on Wikipedia. And however you translate them, the message is sufficiently clear that it’s going to take some very creative feminism to reform Islam from within in this area or, disingenuously, to say from without that oppression of women is uniquely Western or singularly virulent in the West and ignore this stuff.

Now to be fair the “Farewell Sermon” also insisted on racial and ethnic equality. And if Muslims have sometimes failed in this respect, Christians have certainly done very badly, possibly worse, on race. While many advocated the abolition of racial slavery as an affront to God and man, many others vigorously defended it as God’s will. If there is a Day of Judgement the latter will have much to answer for. And Christianity has been interpreted, in theory and practice, to justify blatantly unfair treatment of women, though also to insist on respecting them without denying their differences from men.

The fact remains that, on matters of gender, Islam contains many authoritative statements that just won’t wash out no matter how many times you try to launder these texts. Jesus never said to hit women. Unless those reporting the sermon got it badly wrong, and these accounts have been respected and revered in error, Muhammad did. And it sure doesn’t sound as though he was drawing attention to the legal status of women as “prisoners” or “domestic animals” in order to press for reforms and just forgot to say that part.

If these accounts are wrong, somebody needs to stand up and say it clearly, boldly and repeatedly. If not, his words seem to me to speak for themselves as loudly today as they did nearly 1400 years ago.