MDMD Washington & Gershom

[Doug Millison]

I support John Bailey's rather sinister reading in this instance. If
Washington didn't intend to to get them stoned,  would he tempt visitors
with the smell? That would hardly be hospitable.   I doubt Dixon would have
raised the question if W hadn't made it so obvious -- it's as if he was
just looking for an excuse to offer a toke. Hospitable he is, but also more
than a little calculating, it seems to me.

However the author may be playing with the historical Washington here, I
suspect he's playing as well with popular conceptions of more recent
Presidents who have been rumored to use what Pynchon has called, elsewhere,
a useful substance.

That " *Yarmulke* on the Peruke on the slave" may be " a curious display of
black on white *on black*, but, in the context of the Vegas-style jokes, it
made me think of the rather famous black convert to Judaism, Sammy Davis,
Jr.

It's also worth mentioning -- if nobody has done so already --  that the
slave's name is that of a French Jewish mathematician, philosopher,
astronomer, and Talmudic scholar .  The connection to the kabbalist
mysticism of GR seems obvious to me.

>From Tim Ware's index to M&D:
Gershom

Submitted by Brad Carroll, Dept. Physics, Weber State University

Could the name of George Washington's slave Gershom refer to Levi ben
Gershom? Here's what the Encyclopedia Britannica has to say:

Levi ben Gershom, also called GERSONIDES, LEO DE BAGNOLS, LEO HEBRAEUS, or
(by acronym) RALBAG (b. 1288, Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Fr.--d. 1344), French
Jewish mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and Talmudic scholar.

In 1321 Levi wrote his first work, Sefer ha-mispar (Book of the Number),
dealing with arithmetical operations, including extraction of roots. In De
sinibus, chordis et arcubus (1342; On Sines, Chords, and Arcs) he presented
an original derivation of the sine theorem for plane triangles and tables
of sines calculated to five decimal places. On the request of Philip of
Vitry, bishop of Meaux, he composed a book on geometry, preserved only in
Latin translation, De numeris harmonicis (1343; The Harmony of Numbers),
containing commentaries on the first five books of Euclid and original
axioms.

Influenced by the works of Aristotle and the 12th-century Islamic
philosopher Averroès, Levi wrote Sefer ha-hekkesh ha-yashar (1319; Latin
Liber syllogismi recti; Book of Proper Analogy), criticizing several
arguments of Aristotle; he also wrote commentaries on the works of both
philosophers.

Although Levi's biblical commentaries are complex, he presupposed an
audience familiar with these commentaries, medieval astronomical
literature, and the works of Averroès when he wrote (1317-29) his major
work, Sefer milhamot Adonai (The Book of the Wars of the Lord; partial
trans. Die Kaempfe Gottes, 2 vol.). Divided into six parts, the work treats
exhaustively of the immortality of the soul; dreams, divination, and
prophecy; divine knowledge; providence; celestial spheres and separate
intellects and their relationship with God; and the creation of the world,
miracles, and the criteria by which one recognizes the true prophet. In the
fifth part, he describes Jacob's staff, an instrument that he used to
measure the angular distance between celestial bodies.

Levi's work has often been criticized because of his bold expression and
the unconventionality of his thought, which continued to exercise wide
influence into the 19th century.

It is the line that Levi ben Gershom describes 'Jacob's staff,' an
instrument that he used to measure the angular distance between celestial
bodies that leads me to believe that Pynchon may have had this Gershom in
mind, since this is exactly what Mason and Dixon are doing when making
their astronomical observations.
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/extra/gershom.html