Source of book: Borrowed from my brother
From time to time, my brother and I share books. He has a knack for coming up with unusual books that I would not have discovered, but that turn out to be excellent. A case in point is Noodling for Flatheads.
When I first came to Kern County in my teens, I was not particularly familiar with the Basques. If you haven’t lived in a place with Basque heritage, you may not know of them either.
Kern County and Reno may not seem that similar, but one thing they do have is a history of Basque immigrants settling there and herding sheep. This is why you can eat Basque food in both places. Bakersfield also has a lot of Basque surnames, including the late judge, Louis Etcheverry, who presided over the longest bench trial I ever did. (See below)
I have also eaten Basque food many times, and it is delicious and unique. That was my first taste of pickled tongue. The cuisine has elements of both French and Spanish, but also its own unique flavors. If you can’t come here and try the food yourself, you can at least make the oxtails from Woolgrowers - I cook it pretty often, and it is so good.
The history of nations is often messy, and in the case of Spain and France, this is very much the case. The boundary is drawn at the divide of the Pyrenees mountains, but this choice divided the homeland of the Basques between France and Spain. This homeland is in the mountains and foothills, on the west side. The east side also has unique cultures, with the additional culture of Catalonia - an area which includes Barcelona. Readers of Patrick O’Brian’s novels will recognize Catalonia as the homeland of Stephen Maturin.
The Basques, though, are not merely a different culture from France and Spain. They are a group which is unique in Europe. Their language, Euskara, is not related to any other known language. It is an outlier, a remnant from a time before the root language of everything from Latin to Swedish swept across Europe. Some of the features of the language indicate that it dates back to the stone age. In that sense, the Basques are the most indigenous group in Europe, the most original inhabitants.
Despite this, the Basques have never really had a country of their own. Going back to Roman times, the loosely tribal groups of Europe were mostly conquered by the empire. This included the Basques, but, as in subsequent conquests, they retained their language, culture, and a degree of self-governance.
The book’s title is a bit tongue in cheek. The book is about the history of the Basques, mostly in Spain, but also on the French side. While it mentions the emigration of Basques to the US, the book has nothing about that history.
The period covered is from the Roman era, when written records were kept, through the present. There is a brief mention of the pre-Roman era, but nothing of anthropology of the language or ethnic group before that. Most of the book recounts the era between the formation of Spain as a nation through the present.
So, consider the book a history of the Basque people in their homeland for the last 2100 years or so.
The history in this book is difficult to summarize, so I will not attempt it. The book is worth reading if you wish to learn the history.
I did want to feature a few quotes and tidbits, however. The chapters are headed with quotes either from Basque writers, or about the Basques. The first one, from The Decameron, is ludicrous.
“Nomansland, the territory of the Basques, is in a region called Cornucopia, where the vines are tied up with sausages. And in those parts there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese on whose slopes there were people who spent their whole time making macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then cast it to the four winds, and the faster you could pick it up, the more you got of it.”
Throughout the history of the Basques, one of their demands of the various conquering nations was that they keep their traditional laws. These pop up in the book periodically, and they are interesting. Some seem pretty outdated, but there are a few that might be considered progressive.
One of these that is fascinating is that, unlike the rest of Europe, real estate is inherited through the female line, not the male. The reason given for this is that women farm the land, while men went off to war.
Once the laws were put in writing after centuries of being an oral tradition, the first article affirmed that the intent of the laws was to guarantee justice to the poor as well as the rich.
Basque religion retains elements of the pre-Christian beliefs. (Actually, all religion is syncretistic, but we just pretend it isn’t…) One of these is a pre-Christian version of Santa. Or, one might say, Bad Santa. Olentzaro slides down the chimney on Christmas Eve, but is there to harm people. So, always keep the fire burning bright on Christmas Eve.
Another factoid in this book is one that has bothered me since I was a child. We were taught that Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe. This is bullshit. Magellan did not make it around the globe. He picked a stupid fight partway around, and got stabbed in the neck.
Guess who did circumnavigate the globe? That would be Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took over command after Magellan’s death. Elcano was a Basque, who, like many Basques, were the most experienced sailors in Europe.
There is some evidence that the Basques may have visited North America at the same times as the Vikings, by the way. The Basques invented whaling, years before whales were hunted for oil, not food. From Vasco de Gama (“Vasco” is the Spanish word for a Basque man) to, well, every Spanish exploration of that age, you will find Basque sailors everywhere.
Another person who was Basque, but not known for it was Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Now you know.
There are fascinating historical asides throughout the book. One of these is about the burning of witches. One forgets that history isn’t a linear progression, but more a cycle. Charlemagne outlawed the execution of witches in 787. But it came back into vogue 800 years later. This comes up because rural Basque women were targeted by Pierre de Lancre, who was Basque himself, but changed his name to hide the fact and seems to have been motivated by a hatred of everything Basque.
On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated.
This is something to keep in mind in our own times, with our current witch hunt targeting transgender people. We need to keep denouncing this for what it is, and stand against witch hunts of all kinds.
There is another fun connection drawn in this book. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, mentions Spain as a negative example. By seeing the wealth of a nation as consisting of gold, Spain was actually impoverishing itself. What Smith failed to notice, however, was that at the same time, the Basques were gaining wealth through their trade to and from Latin America. This is a lesson that Trump has yet to learn.
Later in the book, the author notes that “without the Basque and Catalan provinces, the two most productive regions, Spain would become an impoverished third-world nation.”
The Basques suffered a good deal under Franco, who tried to outlaw the Basque language and culture. The story of Basque Nationalist leader Jose Antonio Aguirre is interesting, and offers some parallels to our own time.
Aguirre didn’t live to see the end of Franco’s reign, and spent the last 20 plus years of his life in exile in France. Franco’s fascist regime sold itself as being pro-Catholic. That is, pro-Christian. This is the same argument MAGA fascism uses to sell itself to gullible religious people today.
In contrast, Aguirre was a devout Catholic who rejected the premise of fascism.
“I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”
Damn. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
During the Franco regime, the resistance included a more violent group, the ETA. The group assassinated one of Franco’s deputies, Carrero Blanco, who was intended to be Franco’s successor. While I am not in favor of violence, including political violence, I did find the response of many Spaniards to the incident to be fascinating.
The method of killing was a bomb hidden under the pavement where Blanco parked. It blew him and the car several stories high. The joke that immediately began circulating was that Blanco had become the first Spanish astronaut.
The other line, which is pretty darn good, translates to “One more pothole, one less asshole.”
Not all of the resistance was violent, however. Most was peaceful. Not that that stopped Franco from arresting dissidents over and over. In one case, Telesforo de Monzon, this reached a ridiculous pinnacle.
He managed to be arrested one last time, when his funeral procession from St. Jean de Luz was briefly stopped by Spanish police on its way to the family home in Vergara.
Another ETA member who is still around, living in Cuba, is Joseba Sarrionaindia, a novelist who writes in Euskara. One of his quotes starts a chapter, and I thought it was good.
“In people’s lives and in social history there is always a first mistake, a little mistake, which happens almost imperceptibly, a momentary slip-up, but this first mistake creates others, and these mistakes follow each other; accumulating little by little, one on top of another. Eventually, this creates a growing and fateful error.”
It is easy to think of examples in our society. One little mistake was failing to prosecute and convict Richard Nixon. In a very real way, Trump is the result of the compounding mistakes since. One could think of many others.
I wonder as well what the first little mistake was for my parents, the little slip-up that snowballed into an increasing embrace of authoritarian parenting, leading to Gothard’s cult, and eventually the destruction of our family relationships. What was that first step?
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the well-known things which are Basque, but that people do not always realize are Basque.
Picasso’s famous anti-war painting, Guernica, is a memorial to the bombing massacre inflicted on the Basque city of Guernica (Spelled Gernika in Euskara) by German and Italian fascist troops in 1937. This incident of the wanton slaughter of civilians in what was officially peacetime is not as well known as it should be.
Bilbao is the largest city in Basque country, and it is the site of one of the most iconic buildings ever created: the Guggenheim. Frank Gehry’s bold and swooping design is like nothing else. Or at least it was until Gehry used much of the same design language to create Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
I’ll end with one of the final observations by the author. Basque country transcends national borders. For the Basques, culture and language are more important than arbitrary lines. This is one way that the European Union has improved things for many border-straddling groups. With movement largely free, Basque Country can be reunited in a very real sense.
The author notes that this arbitrary border drawing is a problem around the world. (Jonathan Kwitny made the same point in a very different book.)
When Europeans decolonized Africa, they left it with unnatural borders, lines that did not take into account cultures. This is often stated as the central problem of modern Africa. But they did the same in Europe. The Pyrenees may look like a natural border, but the same people live on both sides.
The author notes that the trend in Europe today is away from seeing nations as entirely separate. Europe is bound together economically, with free movement of citizens. Instead, people are seeing nationhood more as culture and identity within larger structures.
Ironically, this is what the Basques have sought this arrangement for themselves for the past 1800 years. Maybe they were on to something.
This book is definitely an interesting one, filled with unfamiliar history (to an American at least), colorful people, and the spirit of a people who are just a bit different.
***
My trial:
This was a conservatorship case that required medical testimony. I ended up subpoenaing two doctors. One was great, and very helpful. The other one, not so much. After starting off bragging about his memory, he couldn’t remember jack shit.
After the testimony concluded, Judge Etcheverry called for a brief sidebar in his office. He told me and opposing counsel, “If I thought he had a sense of humor, I would have said, ‘I find the witness’ memory to be merely average.’”
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