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Wergeland's many sides

Henrik Wergeland started his writing career with anti-Semitic Jewish pieces. But he died as "Allah's sincere worshiper". Here are the jubilant's little-known pages.





(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

During this year's 17. May the national poet Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845) will be celebrated as never before on Constitution Day. Spring also stands in the 200 Anniversary sign:

All 565 events throughout the country, the first half of 2008 is registered with "Wergeland 2008", the official organization for the Wergeland anniversary, which is a collaboration between the National Library, the National Archives and Eidsvoll 1814. Up to his birthday 17. June, the tribute of the diverse man will be further stepped up.

But just as fully, there are a number of pages at Wergeland that are barely mentioned in Norway's official tribute by the poet, archivist and Jewish fighter. Possibly because it doesn't quite fit into the image created by him in the 163 years since his death.

Such as, for example, Wergeland's Jew-despising writings. Or his crucial meeting with two Moroccan Jews in Paris, something like the history of change. Or his theological discussions on the deathbed.

Some of this has so far gone public. As when Agder Theater set up last week's puppet theater "Moses in the Tønden", where 17-year-old Wergeland presents the Jews as money-wicked and cunning. But the larger dimensions of Wergeland's life and work disappear when the theater in the sitting school material manages to talk about the Jewish myths without addressing them, as when it is said of the Jews that "they might have taken too much interest".

- They pass on anti-Semitic myths as if they were true ones. So they should do something with this teaching material, said BjarteBruland, academic leader at the Jewish Museum in Oslo, recently to Fædrelandsvennen.

Jewish Contempt

But Wergeland's diverse background is more complex than the unofficial versions that have emerged so far. He was a child of late. Or a child of his father, the priest Nicolai Wergeland (1780-1848) – the anti-Semite and the Eidsvollsmannen as indicative of the introduction of section 2 of the Constitution of May 17, 1814, the excluded Jews from the kingdom. The same section, which was removed in 1851, caused the death of both, which was primarily due to the son taking up the fight at the end of the 1830s.

In 1824, the year before Wergeland began at the University, he wrote the poem "The Jew," with several anti-Semitic features. Henrik Wergeland honors 16 years, but in the poem he cultivates the execution of a Jew accused of espionage.

The sentence consists of six Jews shooting at him for one hour. The poem is rarely or never mentioned in the mention of Wergeland, but here are excerpts from "The Jew" (see right).

The year after Wergeland wrote "The Jew," in December 1825, he writes the comedy "Moses in the Tund," where he further harasses fellow Jews, their money-greed and their German-broken language. Knowledge of the dissent poems makes Wergeland's transformation in the spring of 1839 all the more remarkable. That is when he starts his fight for Jewish rights in Norway, by submitting his amendment to the Norwegian Constitution.

It was interesting enough that only the last sentence Wergeland would obey from paragraph 2, not the previous ones that Jesuits and monks should not be tolerated. It was not religious freedom and tolerance in general the Wergeland fight for, rather the Jews in particular. Why? An answer could possibly be found in iParis, where Wergeland went in July 1831 to experience the new democracy struggle in Europe.

Moroccan Jews

In France, Wergeland is inspired to fight for the cause of the Jews in Norway. In the author's Collected Writings we can read Wergeland's descriptions of how it went. It is when he sits outside the University of Paris that he meets what he calls "the real originators of the emancipation of the Jews".

This was a scathing experience for Wergeland, the man is often left out when the author's biography is written. This is how he portrays the self-event several years later: “I sprang up with a malicious delight, and thus I get right across from me… see the peaks of two turbans. There were two Moroccan Jews, who dropped all kinds of things, tobacco noise, dirt, small mirrors, etc. ”

For the first time, Wergeland sees Jews with their own eyes. He remains mighty impressed with "the majesty of their people." But Wergeland seems to be open to many new impulses this Christmas day: "I felt humbled forand as if I was standing in front of two of humanity's ancestors or in front of Abraham and Melchizedek, under whose tent only the one true god was worshiped."

Wergeland then buys a tobacco seed from the two Jews. This trade is what will change Norwegian history, according to his own report a few years later. Wergeland carefully takes up the "Jewish cause" in 1832, the idea is not until spring 1839 that he seriously begins the action. The direct cause of it all is the meeting with the Jews in France, we must believeWergeland himself:

One afternoon in the spring of 1839 he is on the couch in Greenland, Christiania. He's the smoker. He asks the caretaker John to pick up some of the "small things" he brought from France eight years earlier. What lasted the longest was "the little tobacco snack I had bought from the Tomaroccan Jews".

"It was eight years after my meeting with the two Jews, and I hadn't given them a thought. Then the clouds of smoke, which surrounded me, first began to show the top of two turbans and little by little, they both revered for me in the black-gray kaftans. "

Up in smoke

Eight years later, he still remembers what the two Jews looked like. Not only that, but also what they said: “I remembered every other word, I had talked to them about their position in Morocco, and that they hated that it was tolerable in several Christian countries. The idea of ​​the position of the Jews to us was the next. I found it shameful. "

On a sofa, shrouded in smoke, Wergeland's sudden liberating thought occurs. He decides that Jews should not be treated worse in Christian Norway than in Muslim Morocco. He links the Jewish-Norwegian liberation struggle to Norway's own desire for independence:

“In a more beautiful way, the Norwegians could not thank God for their freedom, but by showing the love and care of His chosen people (…) Thus the proposal for the emancipation of the Jews came into being. Glory not mine, but the two Moroccan Jews! I would have justified the suggestion on the revelation I had had, had I not dared to give one of the MPs the joke that I had reasoned on the smoke ".

This is how Wergeland ends his epistle on "The Real Authors of the Emancipation of the Jews". In June 1839, he then sent his thorough proposal to the Storting to repeal the last passage, concerning the Jews, in the Constitutional Law section 2.

Wergeland thus gives two Jews from Africa the honor for Athan sent in the historical input. The action against the Constitutional Paragraph starts on a spring day in 1839, exactly 25 years after Wergeland's father in the spring of 1814 adopted the same section.

But the story goes on. For who, in turn, has the honor of treating the two Moroccan Jews so well in their homeland? It was the Muslim majority in Morocco that Wergeland sets as a role model for Norway. Morocco and the great Ottoman Empire had welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugee Jews and Muslims from Europe since the Catholic Inquisition in Spain in 1492. The Jewish-Sephardic environment was vital in Morocco even in the 1830s, when Sultan Abd-ar-Rahman (1778- 1859) reigned.

In Wergeland's writings, the Muslims emerge as inspirational acts in progress. In his constitutional proposal, for example, we can read the following, with his own emphasis: "The Oriental and African Jews distinguished themselves from the Eastern European in several spiritual as well as physical respects, because in it they are more humanly treated by the Mahomedans."

Worshiping Allah on the deathbed

Thus, Wergeland's struggle of 1839 also did much to recognize the tolerance of Muslims, as an addition to giving the Jews the right to be Jewish in Norway.

From 1839 until the day of death, July 12, 1845, Wergeland intensified its literary theme of Muslim tolerance and Jewish peace. After the proposal to lift the Jewish ban was not approved by the Storting in 1842, his religious border crossings began in earnest. He writes Voice in the Desert, where he again points out that the Turks show "greater brotherhood than with us."

This is how we can understand what is gradually happening to Wergeland as he approaches the grave in the fall of 1844. He dislikes not only the specific Jewish contempt of Norwegians, as it is usually portrayed as, but more generally, the intolerance in Norway.

Another good indication of Wergeland's religious conviction on the deathbed in the spring of 1845 is from the bureau chief Wilhelm Lassen (1815-1907), one of the country's most eminent government employees. From April 2 onwards in May, Lassen is on several visits to Wergeland in the Cave. The head of the bureau noted in his diary that Wergeland “read out for us some brief aphorisms in which he had written down some of his beliefs. These began with the fact that he would die as a deist and as a confessor of Allah ”.

And this is in line with the wording of Wergeland's letter to his father of May 17, 1845. There, Wergeland writes: “My concepts of Godliness and my own smallness satisfy me with a strong comfort. I die as deist, as a true worshiper of Allah ”.

True, Wergeland had probably read a translated Turkish version of the Qur'an, but some detailed theological knowledge of Islam is difficult to find. Thus, one can continue to discuss the extent to which Wergeland died as a Muslim, a naturalist, a Christian, a humanist or something else.

But if nothing else, the letter of May 17, 1845, one month after Henrik Wergeland's death, shows that the ring will end: the 37-year-old began his poetry work with anti-Semitic writing 20 years earlier, while the nationalist Wergeland dies as a defender of humanism, with an emphasis on building bridges and understanding between countries, cultures and people.

This is how you can celebrate May 17 as an international day, in good Wergeland tradition.

Dag Herbjørnsrud
Dag Herbjørnsrud
Former editor of MODERN TIMES. Now head of the Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas.

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