TOYNBEE AND SUPER-HISTORY
533
to be a species of historical event for which the proper label is, not
'the Renaissance,' but 'renaissances.''' There follows "A Survey of Ren–
aissances" in which these tum out to be a particularly repulsive form of
necromancy-a word that is used scores of times, together with the
metaphors which it invites. After Toynbee's indictment has taken up
"Renaissances of Political Ideas, Ideals, and Institutions"; "Renaissances
of Systems of Law"; "Renaissances of Philosophies" (five and a half
pages on China and two and a half on Aristotle); and "Renaissances
of Languages and Literatures" we finally do get to "Renaissances of
Visual Arts" and
our
Renaissance. At this point I wonder how Toynbee
will make good his indictment. You want to see what Toynbee will
have to say about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, and a dozen others.
But he can't quite spare five pages for "Renaissances of Visual Arts";
and though he indicts the Italian Renaissance, he simply does not men–
tion Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, or the other great painters and
sculptors of the period.
I should not dream of challenging Toynbee's right to dislike these
artists and should certainly find an intelligent critique much more to
my liking than a conventional appreciation. As it happens, Toynbee is
not at all interested in them, and in his whole ten volumes he has
absolutely nothing to say about any of them. This too is his privilege,
though it certainly diminishes his competence as a student of Western
Civilization and raises grave doubts about his critique of renaissances–
especially "of visual arts." But what is irresponsible and unjustifiable
to my mind is that he should support his indictment of the Italian Ren–
aissance by passing over in silence what does not readily fit his case.
The second example of Toynbee's lack of the historical conscience
may be found in his discussion of "Contacts between Civilizations in
S]!lace (Encounters between Contemporaries)" which constitutes Part
IX of his work. I shall confine myself to section 5: "The Modem West
and the Jews." He begins not with the modem West but with antiquity
and after that spends some time on the Jews in Spain under the Visi–
goths and later under Muslim rule. This discussion should be most in–
teresting, seeing that Toynbee had committed himself to all sorts of
implausible theses in his earlier volumes: we must make civilizations the
unit of study, he had said, because unlike nations they can be studied
in isolation from each other; Western Civilization and Islam are two
civilizations which are autonomous in this sense, and the Jews are a
fossil (the word is his) of a third, so-called Syriac, civilization. What,
then, will Toynbee make of the apparent fusion of these three civiliza–
tions? What will he say about Jehuda ben Halevy, Gabirol, and Mai-
