Satire and the Hebrew Prophets (review)

122 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 Gay admired Freud for his loyalty to science as the ultimate source of truth without becoming sidetracked by his ethnic-cultural affinities. Moses and Monotheism is the culmination of a commitment to an egocentric faith that all mysteries can be probed and solved with human imagination. This conclusion overlooks the psychological and cultural influences that shape all scientific inquiries and, in particular, the creation of Freud's output. Freud's Moses highlights the process in which the author of Moses and Monotheism attempted to bridge the gulf between psychological and theological "truths" in order to achieve a universal rather than a particular· belief system. Although heroic in conception, Freud's effort is perceived retrospectively as misguided. Freud's Moses derives from a series of Franz Rosenzweig Lectures which the author delivered at Yale in 1989. It concludes with a chapter entitled "Monologue with Freud," in which Yerushalmi offers a deferential critique of the patricide theory, favoring a fratricidal one based on the Cain and Abel story. He wonders why the Oedipus complex and not a Cain complex played such a central role in psychoanalytic thinking, especially since Freud admitted to murderous fantasies toward an infant brother whose subsequent death burdened him with guilt. Surely, the crucifIXion story, Christian supersessionist fervor, and genocidal antisemitism appear to arise more from sibling rivalry rather than from a mythology of patricide. This book is an erudite, well-referenced and annotated explication of a paradox exemplified in Freud's last work which has pursued Jews since the Enlightenment, namely the integration of peoplehood, religion, and rationalism into a coherent self-definition. Although Freud failed in a synthesis of these disparate parts, his struggle reflects the tripartite thrust of modern Jewry's efforts to adapt to historical change. Werner I. Halpern, M.D. Rochester, New York Satire and the Hebrew Prophets, by Thomas ]emielity. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation Series. louisville, KY: Westminster!.John Knox Press, 1992. 225 pp. $17.99 (P). The author of this well written and interesting book is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His book takes place in the modern reclamation of the Bible as literature illustrated by names such as Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Northrup Frye, Frank Kermode, David Book Reviews 123 Damrosh, and others. In the English language, these critics have remarkably contributed to Biblical intelligence, and it is reassuring to see at last sacred literature escaping the autocracy of a scholarly caste and being returned to the audience for which that literature was written in the first place. On that score also we are grateful to Thomas Jemielity. From the outset, the author acknowledges his debt to Northrup Frye, who pioneered in the field. Now, a distinction must be made, after that master, between satire and comedy, between the bitter irony of the prophets and genial laughter, effectively absent from the Hebrew Bible. This principle is, however, seldom respected by Jemielity, who, I think, goes too far in his zeal to stress the similarities-undeniable-between the prophet and the satirist (he mentions in particular Horace and Juvenal, Alexander Pope and William Blake ...). Both the Biblical and the Classic expostulators are judgmental, and they use a forensic language in their denunciations ofa society, especially its institutions and cadres, which they deem corrupt. Both, in a striking way, play on a sense of shame, which in Israelite as well as in Western societies is a central societal motivation for behavior. The book is divided in two major parts, "The Message," and "The Messenger" (followed by a bibliography and indexes). On both scores, the problem of the prophet or the satirist is one of credibility. They appear easily as cheap critics of their own people, subversive for the sake of subversion, traitors to sacred national or societal causes, hypocrites or paranoids. These elements as well as numerous other ones show that, as personae, the prophet and the satirist are indeed very much alike, and one will not be surprised, I imagine, after I myself suggested elsewhere a dependence of the book ofJonah upon "Menippean satire" (d. Jonah, a PsychO-Religious Approach to the Prophet, 1990), if I conclude...