Review of Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash

Rivka Ulmer breaks much new, impressive ground in her recent monograph Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash.¹ Ulmer brings to the work her unique, if not rare, scholarly training in both Egyptology and rabbinic literature and thought—a combination of skill sets which affords her not merely familiarity with the normative folds and contours of the academic approaches and concerns of both fields of study, but also the ability to focus the critical lens of each field on the other. This is to say, by applying the standard scholarly and research norms of rabbinic literature to the field of Egyptology, and, similarly, the standard academic approaches of Egyptology to the study of early rabbinism, she realizes insights and results that are anything but standard and normal for both. This is no small accomplishment. Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash realizes outcomes that advance well beyond those typically achieved in interdisciplinary research endeavors, in that it not only reveals the mutually transformative potential each of these fields holds for the other, but also actualizes and explores this potential in great detail. The result is a work that succeeds in exhausting its specific focus while simultaneously uncovering broad avenues of interest yet to be explored.

Ulmer's methodological approach in the work can be categorized as a hybrid blend of cultural history, reception history, and collective memory. Her interest is neither to explore nor to question the veracity or reliability of the historical representation and recollection of Egypt in the midrashic corpus—an endeavor that would be frustrating and doomed to fail from the outset. Rather, she aims to identify and discern the way Egypt is culturally represented and envisioned in early midrashic literature, in order to uncover and interpret the significance of Egypt in the active formation and unfolding of the collective early rabbinic cultural memory and historical imagination. The remembrance and memory of Egypt and all things Egyptian long fascinated the earliest generations of rabbis many centuries beyond the period of time in which these memories originated. Ulmer is interested in questioning why Egypt continued to engage the cultural memory of the earliest generations of early rabbis, how their recollections over the centuries were as much fancifully imagined as possibly real, and what one might learn about the development of the nascent rabbinic movement and early rabbinic identity as a result.

Ulmer identifies ten cultural tropes of Egypt that recur throughout the midrashic corpus and serve as windows into the transformative memory and imagination of the early rabbis: pharaohs; the Nile; Egyptian festivals; the Osiris myth and Egyptian magic; history: the Roman emperor and Egyptian funeral practices; Alexandria; Cleopatra, Isis and Serapis; the Egyptian gods, language and customs; the Divine Eye; and the "finding of Moses" in art and text. Her exploration of the various representations and occurrences of each throughout the midrashic corpus enables Ulmer to outline the transmigration of Egyptian ideas and culture into the emerging culture of early rabbinism. This, in turn, allows Ulmer to interpret the significance of the manner in which the early generations of rabbis did not remember or recall Egypt historically, but, rather, creatively remembered and reconfigured Egypt—both purposefully and subconsciously—in order to appropriate it for their own purposes and to suit their existential, religious needs:

Midrash . . . served as a repository of rabbinic cultural knowledge. The midrashic utilization of Egyptian images reveals that the rabbinic interpreters moved beyond their own cultural sphere and in so doing generated rhetorical patterns in regard to a culture both ideologically and topographically different. The complexities of this engagement with Egypt will be noted; for example, rabbinic texts sometimes manipulated Egyptian concepts and customs in ways that were significantly different from Egyptian practices, while at other times the rabbinic texts are amazingly consistent with Egyptian traditions. The purpose of manipulating these Egyptian ideas and customs was to establish rabbinic concepts in contrast to Egypt or to reinforce existing Jewish religious ideas.²

For the early rabbis, therefore, Egypt was both the ultimate Other that, by means of midrashic reimagination, they managed to reconstruct as something manageable and claim as something familiar...