Scotland (and also just Northern England to a lesser extent) is an interesting counterexample to your north/south problem. Scotland is clearly the South here, but also doesn't quite match the patterns other than wild and unruly.
Very cool to see this review. I’ve long thought of actually getting into Sumption’s 100YW series but it’s a big plunge to take!
Re: North/South splits:
-The thought occurs to me that Spain might be an example where the “hill tribe” part won out, as the south and east of Spain was always the more urbanized and populous part in earlier times. Those parts, of course, were also those conquered by the Moors, but over the course of centuries it was the combative nobles of the North who won out. These winners in turn became a lot more centralized and bureaucratic, but perhaps the long-term difficulties of the Spanish state after it finished the Reconquista are related to this starting point.
Britain is an example where the South/North characteristics are flipped, but the Not Hill Tribes part still wins.
In the Byzantine world, the split is more along the lines of coast vs interior. Islands and coastal zones tend to remain “civilized” places with durable links to Constantinople, while the interior is much more unstable and prone to becoming independent or getting overrun by newly-arrived tribes.
Spain actually seems to me to be a pretty straightforward example of the dynamic -- one of the curious things about it is that the stereotypical characteristics listed don't seem to be sufficient to predict which will be the greater center of population, wealth, urbanization, and commerce: in Spain and China, the south; in the US, the north; in France, moving from south to north around the time described.
Another reversal, perhaps the OG North/South split, Upper and Lower Egypt.
"What is it about countries with a North/South division? The North is always flat, militaristic, centralized, bureaucratic, and efficient. The South is always languid, sensual, independent-minded, and seems like a nicer place to live."
Finland has a flat, centralized bureaucratic and efficient South/West - i.e. the area where most of the people live - but also has both a North/South and East/West division, with the languid sensual aspect being mostly for the Eastern tribes and independent-minded hardscrabble existence for the Northern ones. Nevertheless, the Finnish Civil War was a North/South affair, with the North winning.
Also, regarding the last paragraph, insofar as I've understood the Cathar/Calvinist areas of the South of France were also the ones where the popular support for the French Revolution outside of Paris was the strongest, giving the latter French left-wing movements a base that has to some degree survived even to this day.
> Now, why it is that this rule of thumb still holds true, despite the bulk of population and GDP moving to the West, is a very interesting question. Perhaps the legalistic Latin mind is just not as given to flights of fancy.
Au contraire! Once the balance of wealth and population shifted west, plenty of novel heresies sprouted up out of the “legalistic Latin mind”, most famously the Lutheran heresy, which inspired further heresies, mani of which Luther himself took conservative stances against. Of course, the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies were much more successful than any of the Eastern heresies, to the point that we dont’t really refer to them as heresies anymore.
Lutheranism and Calvinism have precursors/relatives in the East! Fits with the pattern of the East inventing heresies but being better at preventing them from taking off.
> Some of them also developed weird rivalries with each other, and would carefully study how to demolish each others’ favorite castles.
Ok, now I want a story about a confused war, but on closer inspection the nobles and priests are puppets, and the real struggle is between rival mercenary schools of siege engineers.
That's a fantastic idea. I might steal it, if you don't mind...
It's not exactly the same thing, but Glen Cook wrote a series of fantasy novels based upon the Albigensian crusade (among other things): "The Instrumentalities of the Night".
Cathars and Bogomils and Paulicans, oh my! Thank you for triggering a reverie recalling an intense Medieval Religion course where I first read “Montaillou.” Also makes me want to read Umberto Ecco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” again where these delightful heresies play hide-and-seek with the Hidden Masters of the world. I’ve prowled many of these erstwhile Albigensian redoubts without knowing “the rest of the story.” Your review lands several provocative questions. Dense with quotables as a bonus, women as “moral venture capitalists,” siege engineers as “tech bros” of the Middle Ages, and “Build me a church that says “Never do that again’.” Review on!
Also, iirc Eco’s Name of the Rose makes mention of these heresies and can be a bit confusing to the reader who isn’t entirely up on their medieval history (aka me in college).
You make me feel better that I’ve only read those two of his. Been decades, I should pick them up again. I can tell those are both great books: despite having read them 30+ years ago, they’ve stuck with me ever since and I’ve occasionally made reference to both in conversation.
Highly interesting. Also strange. These weren't a fight between good and evil. The problem with Gnostics were that they were "too good", in a sense. There is a terrifying kind of over-holiness that rejects the world, rejects having children, rejects the comfort of a home and so on, basically rejecting life. I don't trust people like this, because if they reject their own lives, they might reject the lives of others as well.
Modern scholarship has called the narrative as presented by Sumption into serious question, which I only raise because the alternative historiography, and controversy surrounding, the Cathars is actually much more interesting than the traditional narrative.
The TLDR is that there's good reason to doubt that the Cathars ever even existed. Rather than a secret, organized sect that came from the East, what was identified as Catharism was more likely a set of diverse folk-religious practices that developed independently in rural and isolated regions , away from the emergent centralized control and orthodoxy of the Papacy. It's not a coincidence that educational reform of the clergy was a big deal for the papacy in this era - it was the local priests who taught doctrine, and there were lots of complaints that many couldn't even read (the bible). The Catholic Church interpreted this political and religious independence as the reemergence of an ancient heresy because they were culturally and intellectually primed to, and worked themselves up into a paranoid frenzy around the subject. If this sounds crazy, I'd point to the large amount of people in the USA who complain that anything they don't like politically literally Communism or Fascism.
Argh, my commented got deleted. Let me try this again.
I'm aware of the revisionist takes on Catharism, and pretty skeptical of them. A lot of the evidence that they point to comes from the tail end of the Toulousain Inquisition, at which point the organized Cathar church had crumbled, and what remained was in fact a bunch of rural weirdos wearing masks and getting up to mischief without much theological heft.
But this doesn't tell us much about what things looked like *before* the crusade. And in fact, we have tons of records of homilies from Cathar missionaries, debates, councils, etc., all of which look quite sophisticated and a lot like Bogomilism.
Have you listened to the "The Rest is History" podcasts on the Cathars. Tom is presenting the revisionist take; do you think it is all nonsense? I have put a little effort into reading some primary sources and it is hard to parse.
Hey, you missed the most apposite north/south division of 'em all: Germany! Preußen vs. Bayern!
Seyss-Inquart: "The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it."
Always wondered about that, myself -- both the opposition in stereotype re: North Germans & South Germans, and the general "what is with countries that have a north/south division?"
-------------
For the fantasy readers among us, Glen Cook wrote a series of novels based on the Albigensian Crusade (among other things): "The Instrumentalities of the Night"
-------------
Apropos of nothing, but I put together a fairly exhaustive (...if you don't consider *how many of the blamed things there are*) list of Aeneid translations into English; if the author(s), or any literary/classicist sorts, want to provide opinions & criticism, I'd love it: https://coolest.substack.com/p/english-translations-of-the-aeneid
Oh, I love this! I particularly appreciate your bits on their translation theory. Bookmarking for the next time I have to do my “translation is not the same as reading the Latin!” spiel, which I seem to do with remarkable regularity.
Thanks a ton! I was worried I had included too much detail for it to be useful, so that's one of the best things you could've said. I appreciate it!
I'm /trying/ to learn Latin for just that reason--I've got the LLSPI books, and am supplementing them with the "Latin by the Natural Method" series. I've also had a series named "Unus, Duo, Tres" recommended, but haven't looked into it yet; if you've a favorite & have the time, please feel free to point me at it!
(I was texting my ex-wife when I saw this, and told her excitedly "one of the Psmiths saw my Aeneid thing! oh my God, she even liked it!"... but, as she has deplorable taste,* she just said "oh, from that blog you like?" instead of coming back & re-marrying me as she ought've.**)
--------------------------
--------------------------
*(I mean, she once married /me/, after all--)
-------------
**(I messed up. but, sadly, as khayyam wrote: "the moving finger writes; and, having writ, it spells out 'u r a dumbass kvel lol'")
Another one for "non-fiction that could be RPG sourcebooks".
What's interesting to me is how quickly the Occitanians flipped to gnosticism. Suggests that ordinary Christianity didn't have its hooks into the population very deeply. What economic class did it appeal to? Did it start with the merchants in the towns and then spread to the nobility? Did it come from the top down or the bottom up, or did everyone take to it at the same time?
The geology bit is good as well. France is a little strangely organised, geographically speaking. There seems to be almost nobody in the middle of the country. Provence as a string of seaports providing easy access to radically different cultures, backed by a region of high defensible hills shielded by the huge central massif, seems like a heresy machine.
The obvious story to tell is - did the Cathars survive to the present day? I will end up writing about this. I love the Skoptsy and the whole idea of a secret autocastration cult. The Perfecti is such a good name for a leader of a hidden order of devil worshippers.
I don't believe the Cathars *themselves* survived to the present day. The underlying principles of Gnosticism, and Manichaeism definitely have survived, although they're not *called* Gnosticism or Manichaeism.
I've commented elsewhere that each generation of Christians seems to independently reinvent all the major heresies, but they're generally too poorly catechized to understand what they're doing.
-the bulk of the population barely knew any theology; church was where everyone went, Christianity was just what everyone believed. The only exposure that uneducated people would have had was mystery/morality plays, plus whatever they might pick up from the priest (when he wasn't speaking Latin).
-Gnosticism puts you in a secret club, with a mission. People love secret clubs and secret missions. Who cares about boring everyday christianity, here's one where you get initiated and seek to overcome the flesh!
Theodore Roszak wrote a great thriller titled _Flicker_ that featured the Cathars. Don't know how accurate his depiction of the Cathars was, but it's a cracking good read.
A minor quibble about an otherwise excellent review: I think the Rhineland massacres of 1096 count as an "organized outbreak of religious violence in Western Europe".
Edit: Admittedly the Albigensian Inquisition was larger in scale and had more top-level societal organization.
Yes, I think they qualify. I also had to gloss over the Waldensians for this review. Their repression can also be seen as a template for the crusade. The thing that makes the crusade interesting to me is the state aspect, which makes it more of a foreshadowing of the wars of religion than these other episodes.
Thanks for this terrific article. I have been fascinated by the Cathars for many years and I learned much that I did not know. I have two comments and a question.
I disagree with you on why women might have supported movements like the Cathars. I think their support was probably due to the Cathars being less oppressive to women. I believe that women were permitted to become "Perfect." Also, you would have a hard time convincing me that women were the main driving force behind Bolshevism and Abolitionism.
On the North / South divide. Consider Italy. It is true that the north now pretty much dominates politically, but I'd much rather live in Tuscany than in Calabria. Read the terrific "Christ Stopped at Eboli."
Question: Would you agree that US evangelical Christianity has morphed into an essentially dualist faith, with God on one side and the devil on the other and the Rapture (which I don't think is ever mentioned in the bible) staring us in the face? I think it has also become essentially idolatrous,with its focus on the "elect" televangelists? (I don't know who elected them.) And now Trump.
I think it is totally true that modern evangelicalism has some dualistic tendencies (and as I tried to point out in the review, "folk" Christianity has been quasi-dualistic practically forever). You can also view the entire Protestant Reformation, especially its later phases, as another of the long serious of eruptions of gnosticism.
American Christianity is henotheistic; they think their God is the one on top, but he's constantly under attack from Satan/atheists/muslims/Democrats/two guys kissing/Satan. And they need your support now!
See 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 and 1 Corinthians 50-58
The questionable part of the Rapture doctrine is any notion of it happening before the tribulations mentioned in Revelation. 1 Corintians 15:52 says the event will happen at the *last* trump.
Thank you for enlightening me. From my perspective, the 11th-13th centuries on either side of the Pyrenees was noted by some of the greatest luminaries in Jewish history. Your review illuminates the ontology of those great rabbis, the most notable being Rabbi Shlomo Yitzkhaqi known to Jewry by his acronym, Rashi.
when it comes to North-South division in China, the south with its prosperous riverine and coastal cities (such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Xiamen etc.), is much richer than the north (pretty much only capital and surroundings).
Interestingly, dynastic founders that came from the North tended to be generals and high aristocrats (Sui, Tang, Song) or barbarian conquerors (Yuan, Qing) while those that came from the South tended to be commoners and petty officials (Han, Ming, ROC, PRC)
Scotland (and also just Northern England to a lesser extent) is an interesting counterexample to your north/south problem. Scotland is clearly the South here, but also doesn't quite match the patterns other than wild and unruly.
Very cool to see this review. I’ve long thought of actually getting into Sumption’s 100YW series but it’s a big plunge to take!
Re: North/South splits:
-The thought occurs to me that Spain might be an example where the “hill tribe” part won out, as the south and east of Spain was always the more urbanized and populous part in earlier times. Those parts, of course, were also those conquered by the Moors, but over the course of centuries it was the combative nobles of the North who won out. These winners in turn became a lot more centralized and bureaucratic, but perhaps the long-term difficulties of the Spanish state after it finished the Reconquista are related to this starting point.
Britain is an example where the South/North characteristics are flipped, but the Not Hill Tribes part still wins.
In the Byzantine world, the split is more along the lines of coast vs interior. Islands and coastal zones tend to remain “civilized” places with durable links to Constantinople, while the interior is much more unstable and prone to becoming independent or getting overrun by newly-arrived tribes.
Spain actually seems to me to be a pretty straightforward example of the dynamic -- one of the curious things about it is that the stereotypical characteristics listed don't seem to be sufficient to predict which will be the greater center of population, wealth, urbanization, and commerce: in Spain and China, the south; in the US, the north; in France, moving from south to north around the time described.
Another reversal, perhaps the OG North/South split, Upper and Lower Egypt.
"What is it about countries with a North/South division? The North is always flat, militaristic, centralized, bureaucratic, and efficient. The South is always languid, sensual, independent-minded, and seems like a nicer place to live."
Finland has a flat, centralized bureaucratic and efficient South/West - i.e. the area where most of the people live - but also has both a North/South and East/West division, with the languid sensual aspect being mostly for the Eastern tribes and independent-minded hardscrabble existence for the Northern ones. Nevertheless, the Finnish Civil War was a North/South affair, with the North winning.
Also, regarding the last paragraph, insofar as I've understood the Cathar/Calvinist areas of the South of France were also the ones where the popular support for the French Revolution outside of Paris was the strongest, giving the latter French left-wing movements a base that has to some degree survived even to this day.
> Now, why it is that this rule of thumb still holds true, despite the bulk of population and GDP moving to the West, is a very interesting question. Perhaps the legalistic Latin mind is just not as given to flights of fancy.
Au contraire! Once the balance of wealth and population shifted west, plenty of novel heresies sprouted up out of the “legalistic Latin mind”, most famously the Lutheran heresy, which inspired further heresies, mani of which Luther himself took conservative stances against. Of course, the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies were much more successful than any of the Eastern heresies, to the point that we dont’t really refer to them as heresies anymore.
Lutheranism and Calvinism have precursors/relatives in the East! Fits with the pattern of the East inventing heresies but being better at preventing them from taking off.
> Some of them also developed weird rivalries with each other, and would carefully study how to demolish each others’ favorite castles.
Ok, now I want a story about a confused war, but on closer inspection the nobles and priests are puppets, and the real struggle is between rival mercenary schools of siege engineers.
That's a fantastic idea. I might steal it, if you don't mind...
It's not exactly the same thing, but Glen Cook wrote a series of fantasy novels based upon the Albigensian crusade (among other things): "The Instrumentalities of the Night".
Cathars and Bogomils and Paulicans, oh my! Thank you for triggering a reverie recalling an intense Medieval Religion course where I first read “Montaillou.” Also makes me want to read Umberto Ecco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” again where these delightful heresies play hide-and-seek with the Hidden Masters of the world. I’ve prowled many of these erstwhile Albigensian redoubts without knowing “the rest of the story.” Your review lands several provocative questions. Dense with quotables as a bonus, women as “moral venture capitalists,” siege engineers as “tech bros” of the Middle Ages, and “Build me a church that says “Never do that again’.” Review on!
Also, iirc Eco’s Name of the Rose makes mention of these heresies and can be a bit confusing to the reader who isn’t entirely up on their medieval history (aka me in college).
Foucault's Pendulum and Name of the Rose are two of my favorite books ever. Alas, I haven't enjoyed any of Eco's newer works nearly as much.
Baudolino is good!
The Prague Cemetery, about the guy who faked the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is less well known but is probably my favourite.
You make me feel better that I’ve only read those two of his. Been decades, I should pick them up again. I can tell those are both great books: despite having read them 30+ years ago, they’ve stuck with me ever since and I’ve occasionally made reference to both in conversation.
So many heresies, and conspiracy theories, so little time. "Prague Cemetery" was the last Eco novel with which I achieved escape velocity to finish.
Highly interesting. Also strange. These weren't a fight between good and evil. The problem with Gnostics were that they were "too good", in a sense. There is a terrifying kind of over-holiness that rejects the world, rejects having children, rejects the comfort of a home and so on, basically rejecting life. I don't trust people like this, because if they reject their own lives, they might reject the lives of others as well.
Modern scholarship has called the narrative as presented by Sumption into serious question, which I only raise because the alternative historiography, and controversy surrounding, the Cathars is actually much more interesting than the traditional narrative.
The TLDR is that there's good reason to doubt that the Cathars ever even existed. Rather than a secret, organized sect that came from the East, what was identified as Catharism was more likely a set of diverse folk-religious practices that developed independently in rural and isolated regions , away from the emergent centralized control and orthodoxy of the Papacy. It's not a coincidence that educational reform of the clergy was a big deal for the papacy in this era - it was the local priests who taught doctrine, and there were lots of complaints that many couldn't even read (the bible). The Catholic Church interpreted this political and religious independence as the reemergence of an ancient heresy because they were culturally and intellectually primed to, and worked themselves up into a paranoid frenzy around the subject. If this sounds crazy, I'd point to the large amount of people in the USA who complain that anything they don't like politically literally Communism or Fascism.
Argh, my commented got deleted. Let me try this again.
I'm aware of the revisionist takes on Catharism, and pretty skeptical of them. A lot of the evidence that they point to comes from the tail end of the Toulousain Inquisition, at which point the organized Cathar church had crumbled, and what remained was in fact a bunch of rural weirdos wearing masks and getting up to mischief without much theological heft.
But this doesn't tell us much about what things looked like *before* the crusade. And in fact, we have tons of records of homilies from Cathar missionaries, debates, councils, etc., all of which look quite sophisticated and a lot like Bogomilism.
Have you listened to the "The Rest is History" podcasts on the Cathars. Tom is presenting the revisionist take; do you think it is all nonsense? I have put a little effort into reading some primary sources and it is hard to parse.
Hey, you missed the most apposite north/south division of 'em all: Germany! Preußen vs. Bayern!
Seyss-Inquart: "The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it."
Always wondered about that, myself -- both the opposition in stereotype re: North Germans & South Germans, and the general "what is with countries that have a north/south division?"
-------------
For the fantasy readers among us, Glen Cook wrote a series of novels based on the Albigensian Crusade (among other things): "The Instrumentalities of the Night"
-------------
Apropos of nothing, but I put together a fairly exhaustive (...if you don't consider *how many of the blamed things there are*) list of Aeneid translations into English; if the author(s), or any literary/classicist sorts, want to provide opinions & criticism, I'd love it: https://coolest.substack.com/p/english-translations-of-the-aeneid
Oh, I love this! I particularly appreciate your bits on their translation theory. Bookmarking for the next time I have to do my “translation is not the same as reading the Latin!” spiel, which I seem to do with remarkable regularity.
Thanks a ton! I was worried I had included too much detail for it to be useful, so that's one of the best things you could've said. I appreciate it!
I'm /trying/ to learn Latin for just that reason--I've got the LLSPI books, and am supplementing them with the "Latin by the Natural Method" series. I've also had a series named "Unus, Duo, Tres" recommended, but haven't looked into it yet; if you've a favorite & have the time, please feel free to point me at it!
(I was texting my ex-wife when I saw this, and told her excitedly "one of the Psmiths saw my Aeneid thing! oh my God, she even liked it!"... but, as she has deplorable taste,* she just said "oh, from that blog you like?" instead of coming back & re-marrying me as she ought've.**)
--------------------------
--------------------------
*(I mean, she once married /me/, after all--)
-------------
**(I messed up. but, sadly, as khayyam wrote: "the moving finger writes; and, having writ, it spells out 'u r a dumbass kvel lol'")
Another one for "non-fiction that could be RPG sourcebooks".
What's interesting to me is how quickly the Occitanians flipped to gnosticism. Suggests that ordinary Christianity didn't have its hooks into the population very deeply. What economic class did it appeal to? Did it start with the merchants in the towns and then spread to the nobility? Did it come from the top down or the bottom up, or did everyone take to it at the same time?
The geology bit is good as well. France is a little strangely organised, geographically speaking. There seems to be almost nobody in the middle of the country. Provence as a string of seaports providing easy access to radically different cultures, backed by a region of high defensible hills shielded by the huge central massif, seems like a heresy machine.
The obvious story to tell is - did the Cathars survive to the present day? I will end up writing about this. I love the Skoptsy and the whole idea of a secret autocastration cult. The Perfecti is such a good name for a leader of a hidden order of devil worshippers.
I don't believe the Cathars *themselves* survived to the present day. The underlying principles of Gnosticism, and Manichaeism definitely have survived, although they're not *called* Gnosticism or Manichaeism.
I've commented elsewhere that each generation of Christians seems to independently reinvent all the major heresies, but they're generally too poorly catechized to understand what they're doing.
My amateur perspective:
-the bulk of the population barely knew any theology; church was where everyone went, Christianity was just what everyone believed. The only exposure that uneducated people would have had was mystery/morality plays, plus whatever they might pick up from the priest (when he wasn't speaking Latin).
-Gnosticism puts you in a secret club, with a mission. People love secret clubs and secret missions. Who cares about boring everyday christianity, here's one where you get initiated and seek to overcome the flesh!
Theodore Roszak wrote a great thriller titled _Flicker_ that featured the Cathars. Don't know how accurate his depiction of the Cathars was, but it's a cracking good read.
I'll have to look into this, thanks for suggesting it!
Below you ask if the Cathars have survived into the present day - _Flicker_ makes Cathar survival a plot point.
A minor quibble about an otherwise excellent review: I think the Rhineland massacres of 1096 count as an "organized outbreak of religious violence in Western Europe".
Edit: Admittedly the Albigensian Inquisition was larger in scale and had more top-level societal organization.
Yes, I think they qualify. I also had to gloss over the Waldensians for this review. Their repression can also be seen as a template for the crusade. The thing that makes the crusade interesting to me is the state aspect, which makes it more of a foreshadowing of the wars of religion than these other episodes.
Thanks for this terrific article. I have been fascinated by the Cathars for many years and I learned much that I did not know. I have two comments and a question.
I disagree with you on why women might have supported movements like the Cathars. I think their support was probably due to the Cathars being less oppressive to women. I believe that women were permitted to become "Perfect." Also, you would have a hard time convincing me that women were the main driving force behind Bolshevism and Abolitionism.
On the North / South divide. Consider Italy. It is true that the north now pretty much dominates politically, but I'd much rather live in Tuscany than in Calabria. Read the terrific "Christ Stopped at Eboli."
Question: Would you agree that US evangelical Christianity has morphed into an essentially dualist faith, with God on one side and the devil on the other and the Rapture (which I don't think is ever mentioned in the bible) staring us in the face? I think it has also become essentially idolatrous,with its focus on the "elect" televangelists? (I don't know who elected them.) And now Trump.
I think it is totally true that modern evangelicalism has some dualistic tendencies (and as I tried to point out in the review, "folk" Christianity has been quasi-dualistic practically forever). You can also view the entire Protestant Reformation, especially its later phases, as another of the long serious of eruptions of gnosticism.
American Christianity is henotheistic; they think their God is the one on top, but he's constantly under attack from Satan/atheists/muslims/Democrats/two guys kissing/Satan. And they need your support now!
See 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 and 1 Corinthians 50-58
The questionable part of the Rapture doctrine is any notion of it happening before the tribulations mentioned in Revelation. 1 Corintians 15:52 says the event will happen at the *last* trump.
Thank you for enlightening me. From my perspective, the 11th-13th centuries on either side of the Pyrenees was noted by some of the greatest luminaries in Jewish history. Your review illuminates the ontology of those great rabbis, the most notable being Rabbi Shlomo Yitzkhaqi known to Jewry by his acronym, Rashi.
Again- thank you
when it comes to North-South division in China, the south with its prosperous riverine and coastal cities (such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Xiamen etc.), is much richer than the north (pretty much only capital and surroundings).
Interestingly, dynastic founders that came from the North tended to be generals and high aristocrats (Sui, Tang, Song) or barbarian conquerors (Yuan, Qing) while those that came from the South tended to be commoners and petty officials (Han, Ming, ROC, PRC)
Excellent review!!!