Despite the seriousness of the situation, media interest in Gaza is waning. For the moment, it seems that, fortunately, Trump's erratic plans for the region, including the possibility of a large leisure area located on an immense cemetery, have been halted. In circumstances like these, it seems that he must be aware of the most frenetic current events in order to understand anything. However, one must also look back, and I'm not referring specifically to the founding of the State of Israel or the successive wars that this event unleashed. I am fortunate enough to have in my library of more or less rare items the first edition of the seven considerable volumes of the Correspondence of the East (1834) by Michaud and Poujoulat, beautifully published in Paris by Ducollet. Incidentally, the 3,000 pages of the work are printed on whiter paper than that of booklets made a couple of years ago. If I'm not mistaken, it has never been published in Catalan or Spanish, nor in English. In any case, you can consult it online at National Library of France.
The Correspondence of the East It is an epistolary work that collects the impressions of Joseph-François Michaud (1767-1839) and Baptistin Poujoulat (1809-1864) during their long journey to the Middle East. The letters combine description, historical reflection, and rather heterogeneous notes. They undertook that uncertain adventure with the aim of documenting the Eastern world at a time when it was awakening great philosophical and political interest. Also, of course, artistic interest: Romantic painting is full of orientalizing fantasies. Michaud and Poujoulat's gaze is marked by the desire to preserve European memory in those regions, especially in relation to the imprint of the Crusades. The tour includes Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and each volume focuses on a different stage of the journey. There is a detailed description of Gaza in letter CXXXI, contained in the fifth volume between pages 390 and 414. Some statements attract attention today.
One refers to the ethnic heterogeneity of the area: "Nowhere in Palestine is there such a wide variety of clothing as in Gaza," including that of the Orthodox Christians who still live there (we are talking about the 1830s, when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire). The second underlines a supposed historical enmity, ancient and deep, between the descendants of the Philistines and the Hebrews, which the authors consider to be still present: it is the same one described in the Old Testament. Also surprising is the emphatic reference to the misery of the place: "I have never seen so many beggars as in Gaza." In short, two hundred years ago, that part of the world was, at least according to Michaud and Poujoulat, anything but idyllic, even when compared to other equally poor places in Palestine. The place is also overcrowded and unsafe. Interethnic coexistence is not good at all, neither there nor in Jerusalem.
In this regard, I was struck by a very unpleasant anecdote that appears at the end of Letter CIV, contained in the fourth volume and dated February 1834. Poujoulat explains that when he was in Jerusalem, a Jewish boy approached him and asked him in Italian if he had heard from his brothers in Smyrna. Meanwhile, an Orthodox Christian boy of about ten years old asked him (in Greek) why he would stoop to speaking to a Jew. "This boy hasn't done anything wrong to me," Poujoulat replied. Within moments, other Orthodox children gathered and began stoning the Jewish boy, who miraculously escaped (p. 339).
The extensive correspondence between Joseph-François Michaud and Baptistin Poujoulat is just a drop in the ocean of the long and dense history of a territory inhabited for thousands of years by very diverse cultures and religions. In any case, it shows with some clarity that some things that are today attributed to very recent historical events actually derive from remote inertia that we often fail to take into consideration. This connection neither legitimizes nor delegitimizes anything; it simply allows us to situate the facts somewhat beyond the presentism, the decontextualized images of the networks, and the incessant noise of comments generated through AI and derived from ambient narcissism. Correspondence of the East It also helps us understand ourselves. In the West, I mean. Two centuries ago, Gaza, or the East in general, served as a mirror, of course distorted by the prejudices of the time (in this case, Romanticism). Now we also have our prejudices (those of parodic postmodernism), although we often fail to see them.
