Book review: The Handshake

Ella Al-Shamahi's history of the handshake comes at a time when humanity is reconsidering this ancient gesture, along with its risks and rewards.

A history of the handshake

The Handshake: A Gripping History (Profile) by Ella Al-Shamahi

It has become one of the games we play, to anchor ourselves to a pre-pandemic age: asking ourselves, and each other, who was the last person we shook hands with. Mine was a guest for a radio interview in March 2020, shortly before London’s first lockdown: eager to make a good impression on someone whose work I admire, and briefly taking my eye off the grand scheme of things, I extended my right hand. He answered with his. We then both froze just short of contact, the same thought having clearly occurred to us at once. I asked, “Are we doing this?”, he said, “I guess so,” and the formality was sheepishly completed.

Which is to say that Ella Al-Shamahi’s The Handshake is nothing if not timely, arriving as it does at a moment at which some of us, at least, are tentatively allowing ourselves to contemplate who might be the next person with whom we undertake this workaday ritual. At the risk of giving away the ending, Al-Shamahi’s thesis is that the handshake will make a comeback – it has survived previous pandemics, up to and including the Black Death. But the real joy of this terse and often funny tract is Al-Shamahi’s exploration of the origins, the history and the uses of the gesture itself.

As Al-Shamahi explains in the preface, she has had reason to give this more thought than most. As a palaeoanthropologist, she has an interest and expertise in the behaviour of early humans. As a former adherent to the strict letter of Islamic law, which takes a dim view of physical contact between men and women, she became practised in declining or deflecting the handshake, and was thereby continually reminded of its importance, and of the primal value it holds for many, if not most, of us as a means of establishing a connection. “Some of us waited a long time to shake hands,” she writes. “I’m not ready to give it up.”

She dispenses early on with the popular myth that the handshake is a mediaeval tradition – that the open palm of the sword hand indicates peaceable intent, and that the shaking of the arm reassures that you don’t have a halberd up your sleeve. Like most picturesque explanations for stuff, this is untrue.

The earliest known depiction of a handshake is a limestone carving showing King Shalmaneser III of Assyria and King Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I of Babylon agreeing on something circa the ninth century BC – hopefully that they both had really cool names, and that little was to be gained, therefore, from continued hostilities. But Al-Shamahi believes that it goes back a stretch further than that – 7 million years, to be precise – to our Neanderthal ancestors. Handshake-adjacent behaviour has also been observed in chimpanzees and bonobos.

The handshake endures despite the fact that, even amid the most optimal of public health environments, it is an incredibly effective way of transmitting germs. According to one estimate cited by Al-Shamahi, there are roughly 150 bacterial species lurking in each of the hands with which you are gripping this issue – and the stronger and longer the shake, the greater the chances of passing them along. It may seem that those peoples whose traditional rituals of greeting do not involve touch, including some Asian and Islamic cultures, may be onto something. In practice, however, the handshake has become the global default.

It is certainly difficult to imagine any of the alternatives Al-Shaahi considers – the bow, the fist-bump, the finger-snap or nose-rub – conveying quite the same gravitas as the encounters that fill the chapters on significant historical handshakes. These vignettes remind us that there’s nothing quite like the handshake as a signifier, whether it is the compassion (and scientific reason) incarnate in Princess Diana’s ungloved handshake with an Aids patient, the hope symbolised by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shaking hands at Camp David, or the reconciliation demonstrated by Queen Elizabeth II and Martin McGuinness in Belfast.

However, a handshake can also be a hostage to fortune, as Neville Chamberlain infamously demonstrated after greeting Hitler in 1938. Boris Johnson is another prime minister put in a more than awkward position after enthusing about shaking hands with Covid-19 patients shortly before the virus nearly killed him.

This brings us back to where we came in: just as many of us can recall our last handshake, many of us will also be wondering with whom the drought will be broken. Until then, The Handshake is a hugely entertaining reminder of what we’ve been missing.

This article is from the New Humanist summer 2021 edition. Subscribe today.

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