Ever wonder what the people in Gomorrah were doing to rate destruction?

Given the current situation in the Middle East, the PC vocabulary watchdog is probably having a fit at the moment over the use of the word ‘Philistine’ to mean someone ‘lacking in culture and smugly materialistic’. Especially since the term was first popularised by a Jewish writer, Heinrich Heine. No doubt Mr. Schwink is trying to get the Old Testament banned for its slighting references to the Ammonites and Amalekites and some West Coast university is setting up a Department of Moabite Studies to restore their good name and counter centuries of Israelite propaganda.

Damned Jews, mucking up a perfectly good language like ours with their nasty recontextualizing. Burn 'em all, I say.

For Murti Bing:

Album liner notes are not the most scholarly source, but from my assiduous reading of them I had understood that Robert Schumann was the first to use 'Philistine' in the cultural sense. The Philistines were his musical enemies, of course, while he and his friends were 'the Band of David'. Are you mixing Schumann up with Heine? Or are you saying that Heine took over Schumann's coinage and made it even more popular?

I’ve just looked the word ‘philistine’ up and apparently its metaphorical use comes from an incident at the German university of Jena in 1693, where a student had been killed in ‘town and gown’ rioting. At his funeral, the preacher used the text “The Philistines be upon thee, Samson”. From then on, German students used to refer to the uneducated townspeople as ‘philistines’. This is certainly where Heine picked the term up (and Schumann, who was thirteen years his junior, would have taken the word from Heine. Matthew Arnold, who popularised the idea in English, definitely got it from the German poet). In his travel book, “The Harz Journey” (1826), Heine writes about his student years at the University of Goettingen:

“By and large the inhabitants of Goettingen may be divided into students, professors, philistines and cattle; which four classes are by no means sharply distinct. The cattle are the most important class…The number of philistines in Goettingen must be very great, like the sands, or rather the mud, of the sea; truly, when I used to see them in the mornings, planted outside the gates of the academic court, with their dirty faces and clean accounts, I wondered how God could have created such a pack of scoundrels.”

Later, Heine expanded the term ‘philistine’ to mean any enemy of culture or progress, including the backwards-looking elements of German nationalism. His Jewishness probably gave this an extra edge. Heine’s long poem “Deutschland: Ein Wintermaerchen” was supposedly one of Adolf Hitler’s least favourite books. As Heine predicted, those who start by burning books end up burning people.

When he was dying in Paris, Heine returned to the ‘philistine’ theme, parodying the words of Achilles in Homer’s “Odyssey”:

That fellow in Homer’s book was quite right:
He said: the meanest little Philistine living
In Stukkert-am-Neckar is luckier
Than I, the golden-haired Achilles, the dead lion,
Glorious shadow-king of the underworld.

(Rough translation by Robert Lowell)

Thanks, MB. That'll teach me to trust liner notes as sources of reliable information.

wazuuuuuuuuup!