Moses and Multiculturalism

8. The German Moses

82 C h a P t e r e ig h t The German Moses I. Friedrich von schiller, a rival and contemporary of Goethe, is now better known as a playwright, a philosopher, and a Weimar classicist than for his little 1790 text on Moses, “The Mission of Moses.” His dilemma with Moses was, however, quite influential in its day. The problem, as he saw it, was to “avoid the double wrong of imputing to the Jews qualities which they never possessed , or of robbing them of a merit that cannot be denied.”1 The problem was that Judaism was the foundation of Christianity but surpassed and subsumed by the latter. Furthermore, the Jews were degraded and abjected by schiller; how could they have discovered something crucial? He cites what has become the roots of the anti-semitic tradition: historians other than the Bible, like Manetho, strabo, and Philo. Because the Jews increased in egypt in a small space, naturally they lived in unsanitary conditions and fostered disease. This was a way to hold ghetto life against them without discounting their exclusion from Western culture. They carried leprosy, and Pharaoh might have expelled them instead of Moses liberating them. The Hebrews needed a savior. But how could such a savior arise? Here is where Moses’ multiculturalism serves schiller’s purposes perfectly. Born a Hebrew but adopted and educated as an egyptian, Moses had all the qualities of a leader. He was a member of the priestly class and was initiated into “all the wisdom of the The German Moses / 83 egyptians.” This was the heyday of egyptomania—between the eighteenth century and the deciphering of hieroglyphics and the discrediting of Ficino. Moses’ belief in one god or supreme Being was schiller’s god of the philosophes : entirely rational and without figurative trappings. Moses’ problem was how to convey the truth of such a god to people more used to idolatrous images. His training as a priest and his initiation had acquainted him with one way: hieroglyphics were instituted to convey the secret wisdom in sensual garb. This tradition of hieroglyphics invented by priests to conceal what they knew from the people who received them was part of the “myth of egypt” that led to Terrason’s Sethos. “These ceremonies, accompanied by those mysterious figures and hieroglyphics, and the truths that lay hidden in them, and were preceded by these formalities, were designated in their integrality as the egyptian mysteries. They were located in the temples of Isis and serapis, and constituted the prototype of the subsequent mysteries of eleusis and samothrace, and of the more recent order of the free-masons” (p. 361). Mozart’s use of an initiation ceremony textually derived from an eighteenth-century French novel kept the tradition of secret initiations alive. later it was doubted whether there was ever any egyptian wisdom or any secret truth, but the myth was very powerful, and it goes on despite any discrediting. In any event, it enables schiller to explain away the people’s idolatry or magic, with which the Bible is filled. The Hebrew tribes needed this sensual dress because they were not ready for the truth comprehended by Moses (and schiller). Thus schiller is able to blame all idolatry and need for “signs” on the primitive state of the Hebrews and to promote the idea of a supreme Being as the outcome of Moses’ priestly initiation into egyptian wisdom. or to have his anti-semitism and appropriate Moses, too. II. In 1934, after struggling with his Moses text, which he first conceived as a historical novel, Freud wrote to Max eitingon, “I am no good at historical novels; let us leave them to Thomas Mann.”2 84 / The German Moses Freud was inspired by Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers to breathe new life into the Bible as a historical novel, but Freud’s finished product looked little like a novel. The fact was that Freud was too impressed by biblical scholarship to simply tell a story, and his Moses and Monotheism ended up having all the drawbacks of scholarship without being convincing. It is a patchwork of scholarship and psychoanalysis—enough to be persuasive to Freud but not to persuade other people. Indeed, many scornful things have been said about it. Freud would have been surprised to learn that Thomas Mann did in fact write a historical novel—more of a novella...