Moses and Multiculturalism

Introduction

1 Introduction I. ever since sigmund Freud published his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism at the height of the nazi Holocaust, the impression of Moses’ mono-ness and his role as founder of the Jewish faith has been reinforced. But this book begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multiculturalist of all foundation narratives. This does not simply mean that many different nations and liberation movements have adopted the story as their own, although the outlines of the story do seem to have compelling and enduring narrative shape. John Hope Franklin could thus call his classic study of Afro-American history From Slavery to Freedom (first published in 1947) and set the pitch to which most subsequent histories would be tuned.1 Jews every year reenact the story of liberation from egypt at Passover, and Moses as original lawgiver and divine intercessor forms the heart of the Jewish tradition. And when Dante, in one of the basic texts of the european canon, wants to explain allegory in his letter to Con Grande, he uses the story of Moses as a paradigmatic example: “When Israel went out of egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.” now if we look at the letter alone, what is signified to us is the departure of the 2 / Introduction sons of Israel from egypt during the time of Moses; if at the allegory, what is signified to us is our redemption through Christ; if at the moral sense, what is signified to us is the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace; if at the anagogical, what is signified to us is the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory. And although these mystical senses are called by various names, they may all be called allegorical.2 Thus, by doing a certain figurative reading of the story of Moses, Dante produces both allegory and Christianity. starting out from the “new” testament, the Bible becomes “old,” and the “old testament,” a reservoir of typologies and foreshadowing of the story of Christ. But already in the Bible, the story of Moses is a multicultural story, a passing narrative, the story of someone who functions well in a world to which he, unbeknownst to the casual observer, does not belong. All the time he is in the egyptian palace, Moses performs military exploits and has such a noble character that Pharaoh treats him as he wishes to treat his own flesh and blood, which indicates that for Pharaoh, at least, he is not. Whether Moses is cognizant of his own birth and identity is less clear: the Bible is not explicit about it, and later versions have to decide when, and with what consequences, Moses finds out. According to the biblical story, though, there is little doubt that from an outside view Moses was born a Hebrew, raised as an egyptian, and married as a Midianite and only then goes back to egypt to liberate the slaves. While he therefore seems to be liberating “his” people from bondage, why does the Bible make such a point of estranging him from them? Why do they so often grumble against him? The beautiful bass voices that have sung “Go Down, Moses” have not entirely obscured the ambiguity of who is saying what to whom. It is not Moses who tells old Pharaoh to “let my people go” but rather God. Moses is thus God’s spokesman, and the people he leads out of slavery are God’s people. But the well-known refrain that shouts out “let my people go!” cannot really represent quotation marks: one of the cruxes in the biblical story and others is thus the extent to which Moses transmits God’s message or Introduction / 3 his own, and who “my” people refers to. When Zora neale Hurston titles a chapter of her autobiography “My People,” she alludes to the affectionate rejection of members of a group to which one belongs. This is one expression that brings up the question of Afro-American ethnicity, along with the story of freeing the slaves, which, as we have seen, fits the story of American slavery almost too well. There are always some family members who...