Moses and Multiculturalism

Epilogue

95 epilogue My study of the various versions of the story of Moses does not start from the premise, frequent in scholarship about Moses, that he is a sign of Jewishness, or that all these stories are about the same Moses. even in the biblical version, it is sometimes hard to see Moses’ character as consistent. In fact, those enigmatic moments in the biblical story give an opening to entirely different imaginings of Moses. This book, which profits greatly from biblical commentaries, departs from them, too, in not trying to reconcile all inconsistencies and not drawing a lesson from them. The exegetical tradition, in other words, never forgets the question: what does this say about Jewishness? The central question about Moses is: is he Jewish, or is he universal? In many versions of the Moses story, there is no question but that Moses is the founder of Jewishness. But the origins of Christianity, too, are in the “old” Testament, transformed into universal “good news.” In Christianity, then, Moses’ Jewish identity is erased in favor of his identity as lawgiver and emancipator. This universalization of Moses as lawgiver and emancipator is, however, started by Jews, in the celebration of Passover. But the proponents of a judge’s right to display the Ten Commandments in his office don’t see them as Jewish. Anything universal is assimilated to mainstream—that is, Christian—Western culture. It is therefore not possible for a “minority” culture to universalize. 96 / Epilogue Two criteria governed my selection of Moses stories: they should attempt a full story, and they should represent many cultures. For although the Bible insists on Moses’ two cultures, it still treats Moses as a Jewish leader. How does Moses become mainstream? How does he become what Hurston calls “the Moses of the Christian concept”? If you are trying to depict Moses as a touchstone for complicated attitudes toward Jewishness from the inside, then Jewishness is a fixed point to which everything else is tied. Fragmentary versions often yield as much information as whole ones (as in the cases of Heine and Kafka in Bluma Goldstein’s Reinscribing Moses). There are several ancient texts that fill in details about Moses or establish the beginnings of an anti-semitic tradition. These often still imply that Moses is a known figure being added to or modified. But here the versions of Moses often take him as a cultural hero without reference to Judaism. And when they contain anti-semitism, it is to come to grips with a shared origin. By the time we get to the movies, Moses is a hero of mainstream culture, not Jewish culture. How is Moses’ Jewishness erased? How do different cultures imagine him? Does an individual author represent a culture? It is to answer those questions that I have written this book. ...