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  • Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment by Theodore Ziolkowski
  • Tod Linafelt (bio)
Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment. By Theodore Ziolkowski. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. xii + 352 pp. $60.

Published in 1972, Theodore Ziolkowski's Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus is a minor classic of "religion and literature" studies. Erudite and elegantly written that earlier book treated some two dozen modern novels (mostly [End Page e-15] twentieth century, German and English) in which, obviously or subtly, the writers had patterned character and action on the literary, if not spiritual, precursor of Jesus. The present book, then, is both prequel and sequel to the previous one: prequel because moving backward canonically to treat the character of Moses; sequel because arriving four-and-a-half decades later. The two books may be thought of as proximate bookends to a long and fruitful scholarly career—proximate, because Ziolkowski remains an active working scholar and because he had published on the German novel in the 1960s. And so while the Moses book here reviewed should and will be treated on its own merits, it is hard not to compare it, on occasion, with the Jesus book.

In the first place, the newer book is wider in scope than the earlier one, treating close to a hundred works and covering a historical period of more than two hundred years, from the late eighteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first, with the most attention given to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The books tracks, in a fairly straightforward manner, fictional representations of Moses as they occur through European and North American literary history since the enlightenment, with a heavy emphasis on English and German works and with occasion reference to French. The author engages just a bit with academic biblical scholarship, when it may be seen to have an effect on literary history (as for example with George Eliot, who not only wrote her wonderful novels but also translated from German to English two key works of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship), but otherwise focuses primarily on novels, with the occasional play or poem making an appearance as well as the libretto to Schönberg's Moses und Aron. Many of the authors are well-known (e.g., Hugo, Eliot, Twain, Hurston, Faulkner, Wiesel), but at least an equal number will be new names to most readers, especially those of us not expert in German literature (e.g., Harro Hanning, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Bacmeister, Poul Hoffmann). While the Jesus book was concerned with ways in which modern fictions transposed the Jesus figure into modern contexts, the present book treats mostly "historical novels in which modern ideologies are imposed retrospectively upon the ancient actions reported in the Pentateuch" (xi–x).

That last phrase above indicates one of the primary themes of the book, which is that the Moses story can be retold or reused in virtually any social context and attached to virtually any ideology. The point is made quite effectively in the opening paragraphs of the Introduction, where the author cites Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Elie Wiesel, all of whom made use of Moses for very different ideological purposes, to put it mildly. In fact, if the book has a thesis or argument to make, it is this, that the Moses story as retold exemplifies "the political and cultural biases" (27) [End Page e-16] of the authors that retell it. This will surprise no one of course. Ziolkowski does suggest, occasionally throughout but most strongly near the very end of the book, a slightly complicating addendum to this thesis, namely that there is something very particular about Moses that allows his story to be so ideologically adaptable. The "mysteriously ambiguous character and very sparseness of his biography," the author claims, "leaves the ground open for the most varied interpretations and the imposition of the most discrepant beliefs" (314). This seems to me to be true as far as it goes, but overlooks the fact that this ambiguity of characterization and overall sparseness is a fundamental stylistic trait of Hebrew biblical narrative more generally and not at all...

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