From Oil to Othering: A Peanut Butter Journey

You know how sometimes you start off with a jar of peanut butter and end up in deep thoughts about humanity, social justice, and diversity? Of course you do! We've all been there, right?

I like peanut butter. It's not like I must have it or fall into a depression, but it's a food I enjoy. So we bought some peanut butter here in Albania. But they don't have Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan. This is Nancy's Peanut Butter with only one ingredient! (Let's hope it's peanuts.) But Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan would have more than one ingredient. They'd have sugar probably, but in particular, American peanut butter would add an emulsifier.

There is a fascinating mix of languages going on here

It's like oil and water. Everyone knows that they don't mix. When you grind up peanuts, the peanut oil and the peanut mush (that is the butter) separate. They don't mix well, and even though I stirred, it did little to reintegrate the oil into the peanut butter. An emulsifier is an extra ingredient that makes oil and water mix.

So after trying to mix the oil back in, and then spreading the peanut butter on my toast, I ended with a very oily knife. And very oily hands. I do not like that sensation. I remember working at a children's museum in Wisconsin and in setting up for a scout program we had to coat pine cones in shortening. My hands were coated in shortening, it was horrific. And water does nothing to get it off, because shorterning is just solid oil, and it won't mix with water. Luckily, there's soap. That's another ingredient, like an emulsifier, that can make oil and water mix.

So I go from peanut butter to oily hands to being thankful for soap, and that, combined with something I noticed last week in Vienna, leads me to this question of humanity: separation vs. inclusion.

Europe is a very interesting experiment. The countries here are truly nation states. I don't mean nation as in a country and its boundaries. I mean the real word nation from the root nat meaning birth. (Think of nativity or natal or native.) Right now I'm in Albania, and the Albanians are distinct ethnic group who are descended from the same ancestors. This is their nation state. Much of Europe, especially post Cold War, is built on this idea, let each "nation" be its own "state."

So they are all separate, right? But on the other hand, they aren't. There are immigrants in many European nation states from other European nation states, or from other continents. How does a nation state balance the idea of "our land for our people" and "inclusivity and diversity are beneficial"? It's a struggle that Europe is still figuring out. They do a lot of it well. But you can look at Kosovo, Brexit, or the French banning hijabs to see that it isn't all working seamlessly.

America has similar, but different, problems. We don't think of ourselves as one nation in the traditional sense. We recognize that all of us are from different places, with different ancestors, different heritages, and what unites us is just our sense of being Americans. But even knowing we are all different, we still have a lot of othering based on skin color, religious beliefs, number of generations that have been in the country, or even just the way we each speak English (or worse, some other language.)

Thinking of "othering," it put me in mind of something I saw last week in Vienna. I visited Votivkirche. This is a beautiful church in the French neo-Gothic style. The front facade is incredibly reminiscent of Notre Dame aside from being bright white. There are peaked arches above the doors and in those arches are statuary of luminaries from the Bible and the post-biblical Catholic world. I noticed one of these statues in particular: Moses.

The Votive Church

You know it's Moses because he is carrying the tablet of law, he has just received the Decalogue (today called the Ten Commandments). But there is another distinguishing feature: he has horns. They look almost like extra bunny ears or something, but they are horns.

Moses, tablet and horns included

I've seen Moses with horns in other places. And I heard tales, as a kid, of people in America who honestly believed that Jews have horns. But where does this come from? I decided to find out, and what I found is a fascinating mix of translation, church politics, and good old-fashioned othering.

In the book of Exodus, the Lord visits Moses to deliver the Decalogue. But he's warned, Moses can't look on the face of the Lord. It would kill him. So he goes into a crevice in the rock and he only sees the Lord's back. And even that is enough to change Moses's appearance. When he comes down the mountain, he doesn't realize he looks different. But the Israelites at the bottom notice it right away. His face is radiant, as if rays of light are shining out from him. That's how it's described in the original Hebrew.

Jump ahead to the fourth century CE and a monk named Jerome is translating the Jewish Bible into Latin. This translation is knows as the Vulgate. (Even though this ends in "gate" like every American political scandal since Nixon, it has nothing to do with special prosecutors.) Jerome didn't have a Latin word that precisely described rays of light shining from the face. The word he chose was cornuta, which literally means horns are sprouting from Moses's face. (Cornuta meaning horned corresponds to our use of "corn" for horn. Think of unicorn or Capricorn or cornucopia. But don't think of popcorn. I dare you not to.)

The Vulgate became the most popular translation of the Bible in the Roman Christian world. Generations of Europeans read a text which told them Moses had horns coming out of his head.

But the elite, the theologians, the church elders, they knew the original meaning, they didn't understand Moses to have horns. And for centuries, artwork that depicted Moses did not include horns. In those early centuries of Christianity, an effort was made to associate Jesus with Moses, to help legitimize the idea of a miracle worker. But then we get to medieval times, the historical period and not the dinner theater with people on horses, and things changed.

Christians wanted to distance themselves from Jews. The church, though still using the Jewish Bible as the foundation for its scripture, declared in 1215 that all Jews had to dress differently, they weren't even allowed to go outside during Holy Week. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from the entire island of Britain. In many European kingdoms, Jews were not allowed to own land. And even though the church's leader knew the original meaning of the story in Exodus, it is in this time that art depicting Moses starts to show him with horns. He's still a pretty major character of the Bible, you have to depict him. But let's make sure he looks different from Christians.

Because words matter, images matter. What's the difference between an illegal immigrant and an undocumented immigrant. Nothing, but one sounds worse. What's the difference between a Moses without horns and one with horns? Maybe just a mistranslated word, but I suspect most people don't do any research into why they see Moses with horns and don't know it's about translation. They just make their own judgment about what it means. (And we don't tend to associate horned people with the good guys.)

I understand that we evolved to be very social creatures, to feel part of a trible, and have the us vs. them mentality. But we need to find ways to broaden the us category to include everyone and shrink the them to nothing, or we will always have strife, discrimination, and injustice. And we're humans, we can do better. Ghandi is often quoted as saying "Be the change you want to see in the world." He didn't say that, but he said something with a similar sentiment. Regardless, I would like paraphrase:

No more us and them, no more oil and water. We can do better. Be the emulsifier.