A peculiar people

I have noticed, wending my way through Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, the employment of this phrase—“a peculiar people”—as one of Toynbee’s eccentricities. He applies it first to Jew, and then to Turk, then to Irishman, and one begins to wonder what, precisely, he means by it.

In its application to Jews, the phrase has a fairly deep resonance for most of us. It is in the King James Version of Deuteronomy that we find Moses first applying the label:

“For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.”

Indeed, this construction has been one of the most talked about, debated, and translated phrases in the entire Pentateuch. The Oxford English Dictionary even has a special entry devoted to ‘peculiar people,’ tracing the phrase’s meaning and translations through time. Suffice it to say here that the word peculiar first attached itself to this passage via St. Jerome’s Vulgate (populus peculiaris) and is itself a translation of the ancient Hebrew segullah, which can be translated (clumsily) as “expressly possessed [treasure],” such as when the same Hebrew word is used in Ecclesiastes: “I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces…”

So, clearly, the concept behind peculiar, in the first instance, is a reflection of special ownership or possession, and that is clearly the concept invoked by the Mosaic text. It is then an accident of etymology that peculiar in English has attached itself to other meanings; in its most neutral application, it simply means “distinguished” or “special”; in its more pejorative sense, it has come to mean “strange” or “odd.” Further, the more pejorative sense of the word has been present in English for a long time, lending to many passages of literature a certain ambiguity that is pleasing to consider. For example, how are we to take T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” when he states:

“The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”

Are we to take him to mean “strange,” or merely “special”? Or perhaps both at once? Hence the joy in language.

But, to return to Toynbee, the passage in question is as follows—

“In this commonplace villa-residence the Turkish legatees of the arrested Ottoman Civilization are to-day content—like Zionist legatees of the fossilized Syriac Civilization next door and the Irish legatees of the abortive Far Western Civilization in the next street—to live henceforth in comfortable banality as a welcome escape from the no longer tolerable status of being ‘a peculiar people’.”

To what degree were (are?) the Turks “a peculiar people,” and by peculiar, how are we to mean it, precisely? For Toynbee, his story of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire begins with a small nomadic Turkic-speaking tribe, the ‘Osmanlis, and charts its rise to power through its superior administrative prowess. In this usage, peculiar becomes desacralized and simply means “special,” but in digging up the word, separating it from its covenantal origins, and applying in force to the Turks, Toynbee loses some of its aptness in applying it to the Jews, who, historically, have been peculiar in nearly every conceivable way.