Berenson and Islamic Culture:
“Thought and Temperament”*

Mario Casari

Preliminary note

Bernard Berenson’s long and complex encounter with Islamic culture had already begun in his student days, and from the earliest period at I Tatti until his death he actively acquired the major books in Islamic history and arts. In 1910, he bought the first Persian miniatures that would constitute the heart of his small collection of Islamic art. By 1913 the Islamic phase of his collecting was over, and thereafter it did not compete with the central fields of his connoisseurship and scholarship. Nevertheless, Berenson’s engagement with the Islamic world constitutes a strand, sometimes thin and at other times robust, that entwines with other interests throughout his long career.

This essay uses a broad definition of “Islamic culture” that includes the religious aspect implied by the adjective, but refers also to a system of civic life, a complex of socio-cultural relations across a wide geographical area involving three continents and spanning fifteen centuries. Despite its extremely complex and diverse nature, Islam can be associated with certain cultural forms that have given rise to a flourishing of art, literature, philosophy, and science in numerous languages, styles, and techniques. The “Islamic world” should be understood as the web of societies in which Islam is recognized as socially dominant, but where non-Muslims have played an integral part, manifesting their own cultural, social, and political mores, though often expressed in the same languages and techniques as the dominant Muslim populations.[1] Berenson often viewed the Islamic world and its culture as intrinsically linked to the other cultures of Asia, especially the Indian subcontinent, China and Japan, under the all-embracing labels of “Orient” and “Oriental.” Such terms will be maintained in this essay when they correspond to Berenson’s view.

To trace Berenson’s relationship with this broader concept of Islamic culture requires exploration across a wide range of sources, from his travel diaries and correspondence to his autobiographical works and his essays on aesthetics. The formation of his Islamic art collection and of his Oriental Library, today the Asian and Islamic Collection of the Biblioteca Berenson, are also included in this research, as is the accumulation of material relevant to Islamic art in the Biblioteca Berenson and Fototeca at I Tatti. I have attempted to compose a mosaic in which Berenson’s curiosity and his passionate pursuit of objects play a role, but so do his eventual diffidence and aloofness towards this exotic world, which exerted a strong fascination but also evoked a deep-seated and reciprocal hostility with the West—a sentiment that was particularly clear in the colonial era of which Berenson was a part.

The thread that I will weave out of occasional material from this wide and heterogeneous range of sources may offer us insights not only into this sector of Berenson’s activities but also into his entire life’s work. The phrase in my title, “thought and temperament,” derives from a poem by the young Berenson. I have adopted it here to encapsulate the duality of his approach towards the world that is the object of this study, an approach constantly torn between reflection and impulse, curiosity and diffidence, fascination and repulsion. I have organized the material into three parts, which reflect chronology but also embody coherent themes that recur over his entire lifetime, ebbing and flowing as his attitudes to Islamic culture developed.[2]

Learning überhaupt

In one of his most intimate writings, composed late in life, Berenson speaks of feeling at times like “a typical ‘Talmud Jew.’ ‘Talmud’ means ‘learning’ überhaupt and that has been my chief pursuit.” [3] An encyclopedic curiosity similar to Talmudic learning was indeed the basis of Berenson’s formation as a young orientalist. After entering Harvard in the autumn of 1884, Berenson dedicated particular care to the study of languages: Latin and Greek, but also Hebrew, a subject in which he excelled thanks to his childhood education and to the tutelage of Professor David Gordon Lyon. He went on to study Sanskrit with Professor Charles Rockwell Lanman and Arabic with Professor Crawford Howell Toy.[4] It was Arabic that he preferred: “he felt that only Arabic was really profitable, because it led him into belles lettres and art, whereas Sanskrit and Hebrew were like ‘biting on the trunks of trees’ whose fruit he ‘had already enjoyed.’”[5] The vast and variegated list of Berenson’s youthful reading matter, recorded by Mary Berenson in a diary entry of 1890, includes the following: “Sacred Books of the East (some in the original), Arabian Nights (in the original, and Burton and Payne), Persian (followed orientalism and philosophy),” and shortly after, “craving for oriental languages, histories, literature, for philology as a method.”[6] Much later, in his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, when he surveyed his own youthful trajectory, Berenson affirmed the value of acquiring a language in order to comprehend the thought categories of a people and to enjoy direct contact with its art and literature:

The person of general culture has no idea how much he is misguided by fanatical propagandists and sheer fakers who claim or pretend to inform him about things of the Moslim or Hindu world. An acquaintance with the grammar of their languages opens an insight into their categories of thought, an even slight familiarity with their literatures in the originals, with their modes of feeling, and of course a direct contact with their arts, of the world as they desire it and want to see it.”[7]

Berenson’s linguistic education was never completed, however. In 1910, at the height of his interest in Oriental art, Berenson complained in a letter to Isabella Gardner that he could remember none of his Sanskrit and Arabic.[8]

In his student days, Berenson was first a collaborator and then editor-in-chief of the Harvard Monthly. He produced nineteen essays, reviews, poems, and short stories, including one piece on an Islamic subject.[9] Published in the spring of 1887, it bore the title, “Was Mohammed at all an Impostor?”, which though it sounds provocative does not intend to be denigrating.[10] Rather, the piece is an attempt at a psychological interpretation of a figure from the distant past following the theories of William James, which Berenson would later apply, in quite different fashion, to his Italian painters.[11] His at times severe assessment of what he saw as the lustful and ecstatic personality of Muhammad derives from classic authors such as Gibbon, Weil, Nöldeke, Muir, and Sprenger,[12] interspersed with an initial meditation on some passages from the Koran, which he was reading in the original under the guidance of Professor Toy. His conclusion has both an emotional and an aesthetic component:

We gain little by adjudging Mohammed this, or by adjudging him that. We gain a great deal, however, if through the study of Mohammed we come to the conviction, that he, in common with such men as Savonarola and Luther possesses a certain virtue, each of his own,—a virtue which we lack; which they can supply to us: a certain grandeur, a certain transcendency, a certain sincerity withal, that has a potent tonic effect upon us.[13]

Here we have an echo of Thomas Carlyle[14] and a fascination with romantic orientalism more than the embryo of specialized research on Islam and the Arab world.

Indeed, Berenson’s study of Arabic and Islamic culture grew fainter as he progressed. Among his papers one finds a pair of short manuscript translations of two poems by Imru’l Qays and Labidh from the Mu?allaqat (a collection of seven celebrated Arab poems from the pre-Islamic period), together with their respective commentaries.[15] These translations, which cite the original Arabic in good calligraphy, were done by John Orne Jr. in Cambridge in June 1885 and August 1886. Orne, who later became curator of the Arabic manuscripts of the Harvard Semitic Museum (1899–1911), must have given them to Berenson as a personal gift in those years, although it has not been possible to discover how Berenson used them himself. Later notes refer to his reading of the ghazals (love poems) by the Persian poet Hafez, and his amazement at the fact that they celebrate men.[16] He also used a disquisition on Arabic verse to beguile Vernon Lee during their first Florentine meeting when he was still young.[17] Together, these fading traces of engagement with the literatures of the Muslim world represent a small corpus of references that seem to be an extract of a book he appreciated, Goethe’s West-?stlicher Diwan, rather than the product of independent reading.[18]

Berenson’s education in Oriental studies would therefore remain a potential that was never realized. It is perhaps a sign of fate that Berenson’s application for a traveling fellowship was rejected. On 30 March 1887 he applied for one of the four Parker Traveling Fellowships for study in Europe, including courses in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, buttressed by strong recommendations from his language professors. On the application, he wrote:

The Arabic which I am reading with Prof. Toy is interesting me more, and more, and it is my intention to devote a good portion of my time in the future to the literary study of Arabic literature. I feel what few have realized: that Arabic literature has a tangibility, a virility, and a sanity of passion not only to inspire the student, but also to be a revelation to the Occident, where Arabic literature has been very little appreciated.

It is not my intention, however, to hunt for new treasures, or to edit new editions. I mean to learn to appreciate the Arabic classics so well, that my appreciation may tempt others, - a temptation I hope to foster by my writings. All this, and much more I owe to Prof. C. H. Toy, who understands me, and to him I appeal.

The application was rejected, however, and it soon became clear that Berenson’s destiny lay elsewhere. He still managed to depart for Europe, thanks to the support of admiring friends like Isabella Stewart Gardner, but his new directions did not include the study of Oriental languages.[20]

On another level, however, the legacy of those early studies was considerable, and not only because the Thousand and One Nights became one of his most beloved books, cited on numerous occasions in his memoirs and reflections. (He began reading the work in the original Arabic, then the English versions by Burton and Payne, and especially the French translation by Mardrus.[21]) More importantly, the competence he had acquired in the field helped him give shape to the Asian and Islamic section of his great library, which also covers India and the Far East. The Islamic section contains a more or less exhaustive collection of the principal publications up to his death, covering history, anthropology, philosophy, religion, literature, and art, as well as a number of geographical and ethnographical reportages and travel diaries. These cover a great variety of regions, from the west of North Africa to Northern India and Central Asia. Some texts of particular value were the fruit of suggestions and generous exchanges with experts in the field of Islamic art and archaeology whom Berenson met later, such as Friedrich Sarre, Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, Mehmet Aga-Oglu, and Archibald Creswell: these contacts were made through mutual friends, or by chance, or through specific interests. Some of the volumes acquired by Berenson during this period remain a unicum among Italian libraries.

There has been some growth in the Oriental Library in the five decades since Berenson’s death. It currently contains approximately 3,400 books; 1,000 periodical volumes, including thirty titles in complete runs and nineteen currently received; and 1,000 auction catalogues of Islamic and Oriental art objects, miniatures, and carpets.[22] The material on the Islamic world constitutes more than a third of the total. In a more comprehensive overview, one would add the considerable number of books in the house that deal with North Africa and the Middle East, which reflect Berenson’s dream of embracing in his mind all human endeavor. Berenson’s personal vision of the Mediterranean world thus led the research center that followed in his wake to be the prototype of a universalist approach to the study of the Renaissance. [23]

Berenson’s reading and his association with figures such as Sarre, Meyer-Riefstahl, Aga-Oglu, and Creswell stimulated his curiosity about Islamic architecture, which he discovered during his first visit to Egypt in 1921–22. It made a strong though not unalloyed impression: “Such a treat as Arab architecture,” wrote Mary to her mother from Cairo, “for two hardened sight-seers was never invented, for not only is it as grand and beautiful & varied & important as our own Northern Gothic, but it is almost unknown!… Bernard says ‘It has ruined me as a European,’ but he is so intoxicated with it that he doesn’t care.”[24] The I Tatti Fototeca still holds a copy of Creswell’s photographic archive that is almost the equivalent of the originals in the Ashmolean Museum.[25] In addition, Berenson and Nicky Mariano continued to add cuttings and leaflets on this subject from various sources over the years.[26] Some scholars continued to see in Berenson a reliable source of advice on aspects of Islamic decorative arts as reflected in European art and on scholarly publications.[27] Berenson always responded with interest, providing moral support (such as for the appointment of Aga-Oglu as curator at the Institute of Arts in Detroit[28]) but occasionally also material support, as in the case of Creswell, whom he met in Cairo in 1922[29] and whose photographic campaigns he partly financed.[30] Creswell reciprocated by sending Berenson all of his publications as they came out. More valuable still, in 1954, Berenson asked Creswell to send him the draft of Creswell’s vast bibliography on Islamic art, published only in 1961,[31] a sign of Berenson’s indefatigable efforts to establish a complete library, even in a collateral field.[32]

Berenson remained focused on the idea of the Mediterranean as the cradle of the great civilization of which he felt himself son and bard. He drove himself to explore the Greco-Roman Mediterranean with all of its neighboring and superimposed cultures, wherein he found material for his long-term project on the decline and recovery of the arts.[33] This Mediterranean was the object of many journeys with Mary, or Nicky, or both, which included countries that we would consider part of the Islamic world but which were, for Berenson, witnesses especially to Hellenic and Byzantine culture.[34]

From Berenson’s scattered annotations, from Nicky Mariano’s descriptions (in Forty Years with Berenson), and above all, from Mary’s three accounts, cast in the style of the aristocratic travel diary in vogue at the time,[35] we can form an impression of these intense journeys. The terrain could be wild and inhospitable, but the exotic context—with its sketches of veils, turbans, caravansaries, bazaars, and evocative sounds, as in classic orientalist literature—provided only the framework for Berenson’s conception of the Mediterranean, which was centered elsewhere.[36] Although Arabic architecture had made a strong impression on Berenson during his visit of 1922, the Egypt of the pharaohs, with its sequence of dynasties and styles, attracted his attention more.[37] At Constantinople (he preferred the older appellation to the “corrupt” form of Istanbul) he fell in love with Hagia Sophia, which he judged to be the model for the succession of Ottoman mosques.[38] The pilgrimage to the Holy Land offered him the opportunity to visit the holy places of Judaism and early Christianity, while in Syria he visited the majestic ruins of Palmyra.[39] In Tunisia and Algeria, accompanied by readings of Flaubert’s Salammbô, he principally explored the classical world at the site of such places as Djemila, Tozeur, and Sbeitla.[40] His two visits to Libya, spaced twenty years apart, centered on the archeological sites of Cyrene, Gadames, and Leptis Magna.[41] With the evaporation of his youthful linguistic interests and competence in the field, it might be thought that Berenson came to consider Islamic civilization as merely a folkloristic veneer on the ancient essence of Mediterranean culture. This would be an error, however. His encyclopedic curiosity flowered in a brief but intense season of love for Islamic art.

A matter of passion

After his youthful linguistic and literary studies and then his shift towards the fine arts, Berenson’s passion for the art of Asia was sparked by a visit in 1894 to the collection of Chinese and Japanese painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.[42] Italian Renaissance art would soon become his central interest, but his horizons were opened by a visit to the great Islamic art exhibition in Munich in 1910, organized by Friedrich Sarre and Fredrik Robert Martin. This extravaganza aimed to replace the older ethnic and national categories of Arab, Persian, and Turkish art with a more comprehensive view grounded in the total region and culture.[43]

Berenson’s interests were shifting at the time of the exhibition. He wrote to Edith Wharton: “the tide of my interests is flowing fast and strong to eastward. Strange what transmutations are taking place unbeknownst to oneself under one’s jacket. Softly and silently it has happened, and I suddenly find that the Renaissance is no longer my north star.”[44] The notes that he sent from Munich to Mary Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner reveal even greater enthusiasm than he had expected: “We spent the entire p.m. at the Muslim show, and thus far have seen only half of it. Overwhelming is the word. The quantity is immense, the quality very high or very interesting, and the arrangement a revelation of order, taste, and distinction”;[45] and again: “I have been here some days studying the marvellous Muslim, chiefly Persian things here. There never was such a thing, and there scarcely will be again in my lifetime.”[46]

Berenson’s new and seemingly spontaneous passion was in fact part of a wider vogue among intellectuals, collectors, and dealers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the discipline of Islamic art history began to emerge from under the shadow of history in European academic circles. It was a concomitant development with colonial expansion and the consequent rise of travel by artists and scholars. The period witnessed the first specialist publications and journals as well as the first important collections of Islamic art in the West, first of coins and manuscripts and later of artifacts like glass, pottery, metalwork, woodwork, lacquer, textiles, and carpets. At the end of the nineteenth century, many collectors and curators traveled back and forth between the Middle East and North Africa, Egypt in particular, in search of acquisitions. The great exhibitions of Islamic art in Europe, of which the Munich exhibition was only one, represent the opening of the field to a larger public. The haphazard arrival in commercial galleries of dispersed materials, from fragments of monumental size to smaller ceramics, metalwork, miniatures, and carpets, was the final step in this rapid process.[47] One of the main consequences of this process was the widespread vandalism and dismembering of a rich cultural patrimony. When Berenson decided that Islamic pieces would have a place in his own collection, like his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner he knew a range of specialist dealers in Europe and America, such as Claude Anet, Georges Demotte, Charles Vignier, Léonce Alexandre Rosenberg, Meyer-Riefstahl himself, and Dikran Kelekian. All of them were responding to the fashion with varied offerings and steadily rising prices that were only capped at the outset of the First World War.[48]

These figures offered Berenson, perhaps at discounted prices, all the objects in his Islamic collection in the brief period between 1910 and 1913. After a considerable amount of reselling, which can be partly traced in the Biblioteca Berenson, the collection now consists of three Persian manuscripts, a fragmentary manuscript of the Koran in Arabic, two Arabic and four Persian detached miniatures, two Kashan ceramics, a Persian silver lobed cup, a Mamluk brass bowl, and a number of carpets.[49] The heart of the collection is certainly the manuscripts and miniatures. They center on the art of the book, sacred and secular, which Islamic civilization raised to the highest degree.[50] Despite its small scale, in Richard Ettinghausen’s words, “the Berenson collection is of high quality and comprises examples of nearly all the schools known and available at that time.”[51] However, the more interesting issue is the way in which an interpretive model then current among scholars and collectors guided the acquisition of these books, precariously imposing the value scale of Renaissance art on the Islamic world. There was a preference for works produced during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The focus was on connoisseurship and the role of the individual artist was exalted, so that the few miniature painters named in the documents were disproportionately celebrated—this was especially true of Behzad (died ca. 1535), the Timurid painter working at the court of Herat, to whom only a handful of paintings can be assigned with any certainty. Finally, noble families were glorified for their patronage and a recurrent parallel tended to equate the Timurid dynasty (1370–1507)—which governed eastern Iran for more than a century—with the Medici.[52]

Berenson’s Islamic manuscript collection was shaped by this Renaissance-oriented approach. It includes, in chronological order: a problematic fragment of the Koran, apparently from the eleventh century; a folio from the Great Mongol Šahname (Book of the Kings), the Persian epic by Ferdowsi (Tabriz, Iran, Ilkhanid period, ca. 1335), which Berenson bought from the Belgian dealer Georges Demotte, who was responsible for the destruction of the manuscript and the scattering of its beautiful miniatures; and two Arabic miniatures from a manuscript of the Arabic treatise on engineering Kitab fi ma?rifat al ?iyal al-handasiyya (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) by al-Jazari (Egypt, Bahri Mamluk period, 1354), which now ornament the Berenson Reading Room at I Tatti. The dealer who sold them to Berenson misrepresented them as works from the reign of Saladin, while they actually date to the later Mamluk period.[53] Continuing the list, we have the Persian Al-Rasa’il (“Treatises,” known as Anthology) of Prince Baysunghur (Herat, Afghanistan, Timurid period, 1427); a folio from the Persian ?afarname (Book of Victory) by Sharaf al-din Yazdi (probably made in Shiraz, Iran, Timurid period, 1436); two Persian miniatures from uncertain books, attributable to the periods and areas of the Turkman and the Uzbek dynasties respectively (end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries); a complete manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Šahname from the Safavid period, enriched by thirty-three fine miniatures (Shiraz, Iran, Safavid period, 1524–76); and finally, a Safavid manuscript of the Persian narrative poem Farhad va Širin (Farhad and Shirin) by Mulla Vahshi (Isfahan, Iran, Safavid period, beginning of the seventeenth century).

Each of these pieces has its place in the history of the Islamic art of the book.[54] When acquiring them, Berenson furnished reproductions to interested people and institutions, often receiving equivalent material in exchange.[55] Thus, these works, partially buried in a predominantly Renaissance collection, gradually attracted the attention of scholars from Meyer Riefstahl to Aga-Oglu, from Blochet to Kühnel, and finally Richard Ettinghausen, who contacted Berenson after he found reproductions of Berenson’s miniatures at the Fogg Museum.[56] In Berenson’s last years, Ettinghausen visited I Tatti to work on these pieces, although his selective survey of the Persian miniatures would not be published until 1962.[57] Ettinghausen realized that the miniatures which Berenson had acquired as being by Behzad were not in fact by the hand of that master, but had a value in their own right apart from the outdated attribution. The reattributions show in some measure how the trade routes in Islamic art, along which Berenson moved in the early years of the twentieth century, were peopled with sirens and swindlers.

Berenson’s masterstroke was one of his early acquisitions, Baysunghur’s Anthology, purchased in October 1910 from the French dealer Claude Anet.[58] This is a group of seven Persian treatises on courtly themes by various authors, which include seven fine miniatures. It was commissioned by the Timurid Prince Baysunghur (d. 1433), one of the greatest art patrons of the Islamic world. Sumptuously symbolizing Berenson’s journey towards Islamic art, the main figure in them may be an ideal representation of Prince Baysunghur himself, the true hero of the manuscript, but also the incarnation of the orientalist-Renaissance ideal.

Despite Berenson’s successful creation of this small but solid collection, the sudden, intense passion that marked its beginning endured only briefly. Even before the outbreak of the First World War, Berenson had already stopped acquiring. After 1917, he acquired little or nothing in any field of art, since his house was full and his resources strained. His passion for Islamic art was beginning to wane, and he increasingly distanced himself from it. [59]

Berenson’s penchant for the latest bibliography and the best photography led him to continue collecting cuttings pertaining to Islamic art and reproductions, especially of monumental architecture and miniatures, though these were shifting to the margins of his interests.[60] The Fototeca Berenson at I Tatti holds a small but complete section devoted to the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. The discovery of the glorious eighth-century mosaics within the mosque had profoundly touched the scientific community, and Berenson had had the chance to admire them during his “pilgrimage” of 1929.[61] His interest in this remarkable monument, however, stems from another source. In an exchange with Creswell in 1958, Berenson, by this time quite aged but still lucid and curious, wanted to know if it was true, as some scholars had maintained, that the Great Mosque of Damascus was in fact the reconsecrated former Christian basilica of St. John the Baptist. This view was upheld for some time, on the basis of the contradictory information provided by the sources, and of the mosque’s unusual plan, similar to that of a basilica. From the tone of Creswell’s response, we can understand that Berenson was disappointed. Creswell, along with other scholars, had determined that the Umayyad caliph al-Walid had torn down the earlier building in its entirety in order to construct a completely new edifice. In this view, the result, one of the most beautiful monuments of the Mediterranean, was therefore to be considered wholly Islamic.[62]

Sunset and Twilight

This minor exchange was in some ways representative of Berenson’s guiding ideas about Mediterranean civilization and art. In correspondence and in personal reflection he often posed a crucial “what if” question—namely, what might have happened if the Hellenic culture and the Roman Empire had been able to consolidate their hold on the eastern Mediterranean and stopped the incursions of the “Mohammedan.”[63] The question was based on an assumed superiority of the Greek legacy and its ramifications: “Hellenism is not a fixed state of things but a path, a way, a reaching out towards a humanity that is as remote from chaos as it can succeed in soaring above and beyond ‘nature.’”[64] After having studied Islamic art as part of his reconstruction of the artistic journey of mankind, Berenson found himself perceiving the extraneousness of that tradition.

Berenson found a paradoxical comfort in correspondence with leading scholars concerned with the cultures of Islam, some of them resistant to the nascent discipline that appeared to them as already succumbing to conformity. Revealing in this sense is his correspondence with René Grousset and later Louis Massignon,[65] and above all with Edgar Blochet, a prolific scholar and curator of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and author of many relevant publications in the field of Islamic painting. In a postcard of thanks for an article sent in 1931, Blochet complains to Berenson: “Le sujet que vous traitez a infiniment plus d’attrait pour moi que la peinture orientale; l’art orientale, dans tous les domaines, est une manifestation secondaire de l’ésprit humain, comme d’ailleurs les litteratures orientales, sauf la Bible, pour l’Asie Anterieure, qui est un livre unique, et quelques ouvrages chinois.” Blochet reaffirmed these sentiments in a postcard of 1932: “Je vous remercie vivement de l’amabilité avec laquelle vous m’avez envoyé votre excellent article sur la peinture florentine; ces oeuvres sont toute autre chose que les enluminures des livres musulmans, persans et arabes, devant les quels des gens sans aucune culture artistique tombent en admiration pour snobisme.”[66] Comforted by such authority when he undertook his general work on aesthetics, Berenson was to have no more doubts: “Little more can be said of Islamitic Persian and all ‘Arab’ arts, despite the exaggerated importance given recently to both. They must eventually find their place. But it will not be at the centre of the stage.”[67]

Behind this aesthetic disillusionment, Berenson was brooding over a vague but increasingly rigid conception of the “Orient.” Even during the period of his infatuation, Berenson always perceived it as a unified culture, joining the Islamic world with India and the Far East. Berenson’s reading of Renan and de Gobineau may have conveyed to him a specific current of European Orientalism, although their more or less open anti-Semitism could not but hurt his feelings—especially after the Second World War—since he remained tied to his Jewish roots, even if in a conflicted and contradictory way.[68] Berenson’s notes on this theme were occasional and unstructured, though a clear guiding idea of Asia emerges as a mass civilization in contrast with the Europe of the individual: “When I say ‘East’ I have in mind civilizations where the horde, the tribe (as in Japan), the mass (as in China) prevails, and individuality exists only negatively, not positively; by what the single person fails to do, not by what he could do if he were encouraged.”[69]

Theoretical elements in the history of civilization mixed in Berenson’s mind with the accumulated experiences and impressions, some not edifying, of his Mediterranean explorations. Already evident in his travels in 1922, an increasingly tenacious diffidence emerges in which aesthetic reactions cross with cultural and social ones, reaching peaks of contempt for the feudal impression made on him by the fellah and the Egyptian bureaucrat.[70] In 1928, in the course of his preparations for his trip to Constantinople, the (missing) letters he wrote to Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, his principal contact there, must have shown serious concern, since his archeologist friend responded warmly and ironically, but also quite severely: “Your otherwise pure mind must have been corrupted by some vile Greek or Armenian propaganda. What you describe may have happened in the blackest days of Hamidian ignorance and suspicion, but not in the modern and democratic republic of Turkey.”[71] In another letter written shortly after, Meyer-Riefstahl permits himself once more to tease Berenson affectionately about his slightly archaic orientalism, sending him a humorous vignette on what awaited him in Istanbul.[72]

Yet in general, Berenson’s political attitude was multifaceted and animated by a critical spirit. He condemned in no uncertain terms the Italian campaign in Libya,[73] even if he later partly changed his mind, offering a positive assessment of certain aspects of the occupation and maintaining cordial epistolary relations with the governor, Italo Balbo, whom he met in 1935.[74] He also welcomed Massignon’s mournful defense of the Algerian revolt against the French.[75] In the 1940s and 1950s, he continued to interrogate actively his correspondent friends, such as Charles Henry Coster, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Stewart Perowne, and George Huntington.[76] His diaries show notes on the major issues in the politics of North Africa and the Near and Middle East: the ascent of Nasser in Egypt and the Suez crisis; the reforms in Morocco; the discussion on the role of Turkey during the Second World War; the fall of Mosaddeq in Iran; and the Palestinian question and the birth of Israel. In these notes and in the responses from friends, we have the impression of a man with a profoundly skeptical perspective: Eurocentric, but also critical of the imperialistic attitudes of the English and French; afraid of communism, but uncertain about how to evaluate the growing power of America; sympathetic in the abstract for some nationalist causes, but doubtful about the capacity of formerly colonized peoples to make progress.[77]

The question of Israel is a theme around which Berenson’s hardening anti-Arab sentiment developed. On the one hand, Berenson, the great opponent of theology, lamented the absurdity of the growing enmity between the two peoples: “No difference in blood, yet the bitterest of enemies—frères ennemis. What but material interests wrapped in dogma separates them?”[78] On the other hand, as a Jew, even if nominally converted to Christianity and previously unsympathetic to Zionism, Berenson had been sorely tried by fascism and the war and had begun to understand the reasons why Jewish men and women desperately sought a homeland in Palestine. He shared their hopes and appreciated their zeal.[79] The ordeal of Nazism was incommensurable, and to the blindness of that totalitarian project, Berenson attached his view of mass societies. The Second World War appeared to him as the definitive failure of the German attempt, lasting a full seven centuries, to push the Greco-Roman-German civilization eastwards. “Nazism is an attempt on the part of Germany to Asiatize itself completely, destroying and eradicating everything in itself that spells Europe, which Europe is equivalent to Mediterranean. It began with the easiest to accomplish, the wholesale massacre of the Jews, always the spearhead of Mediterranean civilization.”[80]

Perhaps the image of the Islamic world that Berenson formed during his travels as one of social backwardness, [81] deprived of any sense of individuality, was overlaid by a painful association with Nazism and with what he saw as Germany’s orientalization. The question of Israel, immediately following the Holocaust, then hardened some of his assertions:

I question whether for the last thirty centuries any people have contributed more than the Jews. They have inspired and started the great religion of the White Race.… Compared with the Arab-speaking world, their output of work promoting civilization, culture, high living is overwhelming. In comparison, the Arab world has nothing for centuries, not since ibn-Khaldun has a Muslim written anything, or done anything else of a creative and constructive contribution to the City of Man.… In comparison with what Jews for three thousand years have contributed that is still operative, still fermenting, still creative, ‘the Arab’ is nowhere.[82]

In fact, in the annotations Berenson wrote on his readings throughout the year of 1942, in hiding during the war, we find a quite dry note: “Began also the Nazi Koran [italics in original], Mein Kampf, for Hitler, besides much else in common with Mohammed, has given his adherents a book.”[83]

It is very difficult to recognize here the young student from Harvard who ventured into reading the Koran in Arabic. Time had passed, however, and other things had taken place than simply the loss of an aesthetic passion. Berenson never ceased to be curious or to exult at the pearls he found in the darkness, and he savored subtlety to the end. It allowed him, after his harsh rejection of Islamic art, to draw nuanced distinctions between the roles of the Persians and Arabs,[84] and to declare an ardent love of Seljuk architecture as the offspring of the free nomadic culture of the Turk.[85] The same might be said for his positive evaluation of Mohammad as an eloquent and poetic communicator.[86] There remained for Berenson a nostalgic vein of orientalist fascination with a world suffused with the images of the Thousand and One Nights, though overlaid with skepticism.[87] He was growing tired, [88] however, and in this fluctuating course backwards and forwards the framework of his thought had profoundly and definitively changed.

“Thought and Temperament”: A provisory conclusion

It is difficult to try to draw conclusions from the fragmentary and often random nature of the material cited in this essay, which is marginal compared with Berenson’s primary field of study. There would be some value in integrating these reflections into a larger study of Berenson’s complex political trajectory. Nevertheless, the thread I have followed here runs through the entire fabric of his life, and perhaps it is possible to highlight some points.  

Berenson was a child of his time. He was an intellectual of Euro-American formation who viewed the Islamic cultural world through the lens of the developments taking place in Oriental studies during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[89] He also witnessed the contradictory effects of European colonization, and, through the tragic experience of two world wars, he observed the beginning of decolonization and the geopolitical realignment of the Middle East brought about in part by the question of Palestine and the birth of Israel. Coming from the periphery of Europe and from a minority, which he never forgot, he nevertheless became an ardent advocate of the leading role played by Greco-Roman civilization, and subsequently Europe, in the human journey. As a secular intellectual, throughout his life he remained instinctively and profoundly diffident towards a civilization that appeared to him as predominantly imbued by religion and by faith.

At the same time, Berenson appears to us as an independent thinker, free from political and academic conformity, infinitely curious and decisively selective, who did not hesitate to give voice, in amiable conversation or in letter, to his most intimate thoughts and instincts. His reflections were subtle, but he also allowed himself to express quite openly feelings of profound attraction or crude repulsion.[90] He formed a section of Arabic and Islamic scholarship in his library almost at a specialist level, but then he denied that culture any recent contribution to civilization. During a few years of passionate collecting, he was capable of assembling a precious legacy of Islamic art, only to reject the essence of this art a few years later. The phrase “Thought and Temperament” seemed to me to encapsulate this process. It did not come to me by chance—rather, it is the title of a short poem that Berenson published as a student in the Harvard Monthly. The complete title is “Ghazel: Thought and Temperament.” Ghazel, or better ghazal, is the name of a traditional Arabic and Persian poetic form, roughly equivalent to a love sonnet, which was practiced by the celebrated Hafez, whom Berenson liked to mention in conversation. In light of the small number of Berenson’s references to the themes related to our inquiry, I quote it here.[91]

“Ghazel: Thought and Temperament”

Ringing silence is hissing around me.

Numbing thought to the rock fast hath bound me

From which I gaze at a bare and bleak world.

Here, resistless, all sorrows have found me

From which I ever had made myself free.

Blank and bleak are the sights that surround me.

Chill and gray, overhead, are flat uncurled

Frozen mists from wan seas that had drowned me

With gloom, were my heart not blithe within me,

Glad to war with the griefs that would ground me

On slimy shallows of shoreless sorrow.

Living sunshine is teeming around me,

Madly carolling songs of mad gladness,

To the ripe wheat ears waving around me.

It is a mannered and gloomy poem, and it would not be appropriate to read his future thoughts in it. Yet, the intimate, almost solipsistic form of this reflection in verse seems analogous to the kind of material I have been dealing with in my research. Berenson loved travel, but from the small paradise of I Tatti he would also travel in the mind, and he was capable of both love and repulsion for objects that he knew only through his insatiable reading. I Tatti increasingly became a protected refuge from which to observe and assess the infinite contradictions of the outside world. In his ninetieth year, after a climb to the hilltop town of Settignano near I Tatti, he wrote: “What are the views from the heights above Damascus compared with those I was enjoying of Florence and its beyonds in every direction!”[92]

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