The Afterlife of Moses: Exile, Democracy, Renewal

THE AFTERLIFE OF MOSES

Exile, Democracy, Renewal

Michael P. Steinberg

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2022 by Michael P. Steinberg. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steinberg, Michael P., author.

Title: The afterlife of Moses : exile, democracy, renewal / Michael P. Steinberg.

Other titles: Cultural memory in the present.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Cultural memory in the present | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049990 (print) | LCCN 2021049991 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503631144 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503632295 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503632301 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Moses (Biblical leader) | Political science—Philosophy. | Democracy—Philosophy. | Exodus, The.

Classification: LCC JA71 .S7876 2022 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01—dc23/eng/20211122

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049990

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049991

Cover art: Philip Hughes, Ménerbes 8/5/10

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cultural Memory in the Present

Hent de Vries, Editor

For Katy

I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origin was a terminus.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Und alles, was einst von Moses geleistet wurde, wäre in unserm Weltzeitalter nachzuholen.

[And everything once achieved by Moses would have to be revised in our own age.]

—Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, August 1934

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Moses and Modernism

2. Under Lincoln’s Eyes

3. Hannah Arendt Crosses the Atlantic

4. Yaron Ezrahi: Democracy and the Post-Epic Nation

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

For some forty years, my father opened our annual Passover Seder evenings with remarks in two parts. I know everyone around the table—he would begin, over time to four generations—is tired of hearing me repeat the same thing year after year. In fact, we were not. Our ages and states of rebellion notwithstanding, my father’s annual remarks affirmed our own orientations inside the family and out into the world. He would then continue with a brief summary of his own exodus story following the National Socialist accession to power in 1933. Sent alone in 1934 at the age of ten from Pforzheim, Germany, to the Collège de Saint-Dié in eastern France, he moved to Paris three years later and boarded at the well-known Lycée Janson de Sailly until his parents’ arrival in June 1938. When German forces occupied the city and the northern half of France in June 1940, he fled with his mother to the southern, unoccupied zone, while his father dodged repeated arrests and detentions. They were able all three to cross the Spanish and Portuguese borders and sail in late summer 1941 from Lisbon to Havana, Cuba, where they spent five years prior to their arrival in the United States in 1946. The point of this retelling was the unmediated importance to him of the Exodus story itself. The traversal of the Haggadah that followed was swift, as our collective linguistic and exegetical capacities remained limited. So did our varied performances of ritual observance. My mother and her side of the family, whose exile out of Germany—via Belgium, France, and Cuba as well—paralleled my father’s, continued, for example, to observe the ritual fast on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. My father and his parents had disavowed the ritual fast after Yom Kippur 1940, on which October morning my grandfather had been arrested in Bergerac, (unoccupied) France, following the passage of a swath of Vichy regime legislation subjecting both foreign national and Jewish men of working age to internment and forced labor. Late that day, my grandmother carried a bowl of soup to the police precinct, unsuccessfully entreating the authorities to have it brought to my grandfather following his twenty-four-hour fast. His internment as a prestataire, or service provider, lasted until August 1941. Disavowal of a tradition can become itself a tradition, an act of homage. At some point it occurred to most of us that the English in which my father was speaking to us was the fourth language he had learned out of necessity, itself a metaphor for the life he, my mother, and their parents had rebuilt in the United States. At the end of his remarks, my father urged us to do what the Haggadah text also instructs: to take the Exodus story personally.

My family history belongs within—and will occasionally punctuate—the larger argument of this book. As the child and grandchild of immigrants to the United States from Nazi Germany, I have been drawn regularly to the experiences and thinking of figures who faced upheaval and exile, immigration and renewal. These include the lives and work—often heroic even if on a modest or private scale—of ordinary people who were forced, or blessed, into exile and immigration. These publicly unremembered people shared both displacement and renewal with recognized and remembered heroic thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and—however late in his life—Sigmund Freud. All generated new beginnings from strong legacies despite (exceptions notwithstanding) scant material resources. All are predecessors of some sixty-five million displaced people in the world today.¹

These concerns claimed renewed priority for me in 2016, when I began a term as president of the American Academy in Berlin. Founded in 1994 with the intention of replacing the recently departed US military presence in Berlin with an academic and creative one, the American Academy brings US-based fellows in the humanities, public policy, and arts to Berlin for a semester or a year of research and networking with German counterparts. It occupies a villa in the southwestern corner of (West) Berlin that belonged, until its Nazi expropriation, to the family of Hans Arnhold, the Weimar-era scion of the prominent German Jewish Arnhold-Bleichröder banking house of Berlin and Dresden. During the Cold War and the allied occupation of Berlin, the villa had served as a US Army recreation center. In the 1990s, the Arnholds’ New York descendants became key funders of the villa’s renovation and the Academy’s programs. Working in this environment so redolent of twentieth-century achievement, exile, and return was deeply moving to me. More specifically, I started my term in the aftermath of the German absorption (welcoming, in the official language) of nearly one million refugees from Syria and other locations—a kind of culmination of Germany’s assiduous reversal from its twentieth-century responsibility and reputation for expulsion and genocide into an agent of moral politics and social democracy.

This German transformation accompanied a sea change in the facts and perceptions of the United States and its place in the world. The Cold War narrative of the American rescue of Europe and European democracy has retained substantial currency in Germany, if long offset by critiques of American internal economic and racial inequalities and the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age.² The US election of 2016 and its eruption of xenophobia, anti-immigration fervor, and racism along with the delegitimation of science and the integrity of facts brought this other America into broad relief. As bears recalling, this malevolent face of the United States found its meme in the events since referred to as Charlottesville 2017. The violence, the uninhibited avalanche of racism and antisemitism, and most of all their combined presidential ratification shocked deeply in Germany, where antisemitism is illegal, where Holocaust memory is ingrained in mainstream discourse, and where the United States still signifies to many as the most likely agent of political reason and responsibility.

Those days in August 2017 found me in Cape Town, attending the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, on whose board I had served for a dozen years. Cape Town itself intensified our political anguish. The city’s urban and creative vitality fades against the long-term memory of colonial slavery and the shorter-term memory and reality of South African apartheid and its difficult posthistory. My principal task there was a meeting with officers of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a grant proposal for the American Academy on themes of migration/immigration and race in comparative perspective. The two themes had reemerged after 2016 as salient, interrelated, and at the same time fundamentally different between the United States and Germany—and indeed Europe more generally. The flip side of German post-Holocaust and European postcolonial discourse has fixed a taboo on virtually any consideration of race, including as an analytical category, enabling the predicament that Etienne Balibar has called racism without race.³

After 2016, the political and intellectual ground beneath our feet and subject positions seemed to be caving. And for good reason in a political context where racism dared not say its name but found itself encouraged to raise its head at every opportunity. The election of Donald Trump and the regime of the alternative fact assaulted simultaneously the very possibilities of democratic politics as well as the foundations and future of human knowledge itself. The alternative fact is by definition antidemocratic, and as such the meeting point of the assault on knowledge and of racism itself. In such a climate, the demand for recognition coincides with the basic right to exist—the right to breathe in the literal and metaphorical language of Black Lives Matter. In this kind of predicament, the chestnut of liberal consensus exposes a hegemonic conceit that, by including, preserves the right to exclude and hence to inhibit the production of new, decentralized, yet at the same time coherent democratic subjectivities.

In this context, American intellectual and university life found itself in a state of similar destabilization. The malaise affected the university at its two essential levels: as an organ of free and open thinking and speech, and as a producer of new knowledge. On the first level, the university, its mission, and its demography form a microcosm of the larger spheres of public citizenship—such as nations, states, and their attending identity positions—those spheres that this book primarily addresses. The slow and salutary emergence after World War II of underrepresented voices in the US university as in the public sphere at large has required reconstitutions and rededications in both contexts. Since 2016, the self-identifying liberal university has largely taken up the challenge to continue and accelerate policies of access and representation, indeed with an increased sense of purpose when the dominant national discourse points in another direction. At the same time, however, the good intentions of the widespread current language of diversity and inclusion may harbor, I fear, the potential preservation of those traditional subject positions and discretionary capacities among those who select and include and, by implication, exclude as well. Inclusion thus hides potential echoes of toleration as well as the discredited discourse of the contribution of outsiders to spheres under the sustained control of a hegemonic majority. (More than once I have been reassured personally of the Jewish contribution to German culture.) To anticipate a problem that will occupy the middle section of this book, the language of diversity and inclusion deploys social categories to address problems that are in fact political ones and would be better addressed with the political language of plurality and representation. The existing language itself falls short of its declared politics because it is itself not political language. At the scale of grander public spheres such as the nation-state or any number of international bodies, the same principles of plurality and representation apply, requiring ever-urgent political bolstering if democratic citizenship has any hope of perseverance.

At the level of its academic purpose and distinct from its own public sphere as well as other ones, the university consists of communities of domain, disciplinary, advanced, and indeed specialized knowledge. The advancement of such knowledge—the university’s research agenda—is contingent on academic freedom, which is in turn related to the general principle of freedom of speech but sustained by intellectual capital—in other words, by hard-earned scholarly knowledge and its credentials. In the context of social change and progress, the pursuit of knowledge has prompted a rigorous, ongoing debate over the definition of objectivity and objective analysis in their relation to the subject position of the researcher—whether humanist or scientist. Answers to questions—the advancement of knowledge—relate back to the nature of the questions and to who is asking them. Here is where epistemology and politics meet. The vocabularies of critique and the critical mark this mutuality of subject and object, as they mark the recognition that plurality and subjectivity—the life of the public sphere and the inner lives of individuals—are multiply related and infinitely complex. When knowledge is itself under attack, objectivity becomes more and more distinct from neutrality.

The experience of exile can inspire political as well as personal renewal. Moments of political constitution and reconstitution do not necessarily follow experiences of exile. They often do, however, just as they often but not always follow wars and revolutions, whether violent or not. If personal exile involves what Carlos Pereda has called the art of self-interruption, the same trope can be applied to the collective exile of polities. Not without danger, however, as periods of political disgrace—Nazism, fascism, and so forth—can become vulnerable to conceptual containment as mere interruptions of underlying and more authentic realities.⁴ No doubt, political renewals can also follow more routinized processes such as elections—assuming, of course, that elections are themselves allowed to proceed. Declarations of newness, of new beginnings, inevitably converge—consciously or unconsciously—with references to the past, its models, legacies, and archives. But they do not, or rather must not, rely on the past. Even less can they afford to fetishize the past. Fetishizing the past results from the confusion of myth with history, divine origins with human beginnings, cultural memory (as distinct from the memory of lived experience) with history. The failure of contemporary conservatism has resided precisely in such fetishization of the past, and perhaps most sharply in mythologies of origins at the expense of critical (and self-critical) histories.

Thinking with and through these issues during the last five years led me to reconsider the Moses and Exodus stories together with the refractions that form the four chapters of this book. The stories themselves have produced an archive of potent political possibility. Collected and redacted during a period of exile—the so-called Babylonian captivity of the sixth century BCE,—their account of the flight from Egypt is overtaken by that of the new political constitution established at Sinai. The full story carries an extraordinary quality of self-interrogation and an accompanying resistance to self-mythologization. Carlos Pereda again:

In 597 b.c.e. Jerusalem surrendered, and many Jews were forced to set out for Babylonia. Almost immediately, the outward displays of protest found in many of the Bible’s books are replaced by a desire for self-examination, that is, a withdrawal inward.⁵

Renderings of Moses from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud and beyond have seized on this self-interrogating capacity of the Moses and Exodus stories. The inward gaze that Pereda recognizes has also looked outward and forward. The modern afterlife of Moses becomes a fount of new beginnings.

The opening lines of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) announce,

A captive greets thee, coming from a house

Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free,

A prison where he hath been long immured.

Now I am free, enfranchis’d and at large,

May fix my habitation where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me?⁶

The leap into freedom begins with a reminder of exile, the uncertainty of where one can live. Wordsworth’s exhilaration exudes the optimism that a dwelling will be found: The earth is all before me, the verse continues. The political constitution of dwelling in freedom becomes the open and difficult question, the treacherous road into the future.

Introduction

1

This book pursues an argument on two parallel tracks. At its base it addresses the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. The story denies itself both an origin and an ending. The origin and death of Moses are obscured; the constitution and future of the community forged at Sinai remain undefined. Modern renderings of Moses from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida have seized on the story’s ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first articulation of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of my argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals, their own reconstitutions.

No doubt, the Exodus story’s literal etching of universal law into the tablets of the Ten Commandments is offset, historically, by the particularisms of national and cultic identity claims. The Decalogue is given to the Israelites. But the Israelites are not, or not yet, distinguished from other polities at this point in their history as it unfolds in the story—in other words, through the available textual evidence.¹ For this reason, their basic laws proved both textually and historically readable by later thinkers as universal in both intention and application. Universalism, in turn, must be distinguished from monotheism in the ancient world and from various articulations of self-privilege and othering in the modern world. In these latter guises, the implicit claim We are universal, but you are not becomes the governing irony. This is the claim of many modern cosmopolitanisms, the privilege of metropolitan power. As recent scholarship has emphasized, the god of the first two commandments is a competitive god, not an only one.² If other gods imply other peoples as well, the recognition of national identity, its boundaries and its others, arrives late in the course of biblical redaction.³

The language of universal human rights (as in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, partner to the formation of the United Nations) is the twentieth-century variant of the older universalisms, possibly the correction of their earlier incarnations as universal law, faith, and reason. What is argued philosophically, however, remains distinct from what happens historically. Most schematically, we can say that the universal law of the Pentateuch was overtaken historically by the universal (catholic) church announced by Christianity. In the latter’s name, the divine right of kings generated the legitimacy of European earthly power and authority that lasted into the modern age. Absolutism was its religious and political moniker. The Reformation and religious wars of the sixteenth century ravished Europe not only physically but psychically as well, splitting the absolute and throwing into crisis both the divine right of kings and the path to salvation of every imagined human being. Cultural, religious, and psychic panic converged. As Lucien Febvre famously argued, unbelief was cognitively impossible in the age of religious warfare.⁴ As the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the following two centuries, which together we might call the long Enlightenment, found in Reason a new face of God, arguments of universal reason and then of the rights of man edged out divine right and absolutism. The new politics and science together propelled the claim of We the people in the new United States in 1776 and then le peuple in Revolutionary France of 1789 and after. Simultaneous with the revolution in France and the US Constitution came Immanuel Kant’s philosophical revolution in Germany, in which the universal capacity for reason, the production of a universal ethical norm (the categorical imperative) from inside the individual mind, articulated an inverse momentum to that of the earlier model of universal reason from without. Both productions of universal reason are included in the historical narrative referred to as secularization. Whether universalism reversed absolutism or repeated it in different terms remains a fundamental and unanswered historical question. Truth claims and power grabs can be difficult to distinguish.

In recent decades, arguments about secularization have shifted from paradigms of the replacement of the sacred to ones of its displacement. The secular makes sense only with reference to the sacred and as a principle of distancing from the sacred. The sacred as a dimension of collective life (rather than its totalization) is what we moderns call religion. The sacred persists, whether as a necessary moral compass or as the return of the repressed. However—and this point is regularly overlooked—there remained in the European context a persistent and paradoxical divergence between Catholic and Protestant patterns of secularization. French universalism retained a Catholic aura, substituting the reason of the state (raison d’ état) for the glory of God. Protestant secularization, with a focus on individual moral behavior and its collectivization in the liberal state, became the core principle of national and global modes of capitalism. The dignity of the individual thus split—as John Stuart Mill lamented in On Liberty—into the engine of individualism and the cultivation of individuality, the latter attending to that quality of personhood that cannot be reduced to its social determinants. The persistent failure of liberal politics to address social inequality as well as the recent insurgencies of nationalism and racism—in the United States and globally—speak together to this ongoing problem of universalism and its discontents.⁵

The afterlife of Moses with which I am concerned here is a secular one: worldly, immanent, and therefore unimaginable, presumably, to the biblical source material and its cultures; unintended by its writers, yet fundamentally enabled by its contents. The story of Moses has bequeathed a founding myth of exile and renewal that has in turn inspired modern thinking about culture and politics, and specifically about the constitution and reconstitution of political communities. The life story of Moses himself has no beginning and no ending. Moses’s origin is a mystery, and his disappearance is shrouded in incompletion and even failure. These elements prove key to the development of modern biblical scholarship and interpretation. Critical readers from Spinoza to Freud have demythologized the origin of the Hebrew nation in favor of an account of the establishment of a law-based political community. This tradition activates what I take to be the story’s inherent capacity for self-critique and secularization, from the mystery of Moses’s origin to the prohibition of his entrance into a promised land. If the Exodus story becomes one of ambivalence between universalism and particularism, the place of Moses in the story is also one of fundamental ambivalence: between hero and antihero, founder and failure. The story itself, as Jan Assmann has recently observed, is simultaneously one of revelation and revolution. Assmann retells the story from the vantage point of revelation. Modern retellers have struggled inside the force field of revolution and revelation. His own focus notwithstanding, Assmann comments on the component narrative strands of the Exodus story as follows: Whereas the Priestly Source pursues the ideal of a ‘sacred people,’ the Deuteronomist follows that of a just society. . . . The people—not Moses, not the seventy elders, not Aaron, not the Levites—assume the role of a sovereign partner in the covenant. This directness of access to God is what lends the biblical concept its democratic force.⁶

The secular tradition that conceivably begins, mutely, with Michelangelo and decidedly with Spinoza focuses on the formation of a living, historically contingent political community. This tradition is both anti-originalist and antiteleological. It shows how the constitution of a living nation—human, historical, flawed—inherently stages the need for its continual reconstitution. The formation of a renewable political community emerges as an important critique of nationalisms and their ideologies of origin and essence, and therefore as a key component of restorative politics. In formal terms, this is a modernist impulse; in political terms, it is a democratic one. The secular afterlife of Moses depersonifies into the critique of myths of origins and, accordingly, into the histories of exile, democracy, and renewal.

Exile is not a function of choice. The cosmopolitanisms engendered by exile are coerced before they are inhabited. Belonging to a native place infuses the exile and refugee with the universal pull of memory and the past. To an extent, everyone is driven by an angel of history, blown into the future with its eye focused on the past. Coerced displacement is the form that the angel of history virtually monopolized in the twentieth century, with unimaginable quantification. Exile implies, indeed requires, renewal: on a personal level to be sure and on the level of social and intellectual transformation as well. This is exile’s temporality. Exile also has a spatial dimension, as Jessica Dubow has emphasized: the geography of in-betweenness and the spaces of