each “difference.” Flavius Josephus doesn’t depict the idolatry in the Golden Calf episode, Zora Neale Hurston seems to have no inkling that Moses might not be Christian, Thomas Mann makes Moses’ mother an Egyptian princess, and so on. Who is the real Moses, and what do these different identities signify?
Multiculturalism may be one of these things we don’t know that we don’t know; this at least is one of the most fertile and disturbing suggestions of Johnson’s most recent study of the idea of difference, identity, and the unknown as it manifests itself in the multicultural icon of Moses. What do we think we know? We know, for example, that the term multicultural emerged in the 1960s in Anglophone countries in relation to the cultural needs of non-european migrants. Since that time, it has become such an integral part of our discourse that it has almost lost its meaning. If you Google multiculturalism, there are 3,750,000 entries—books, courses, articles, panels, diversity training videos, the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights—the list is endless.
Multiculturalism, which has been taken to mean a smorgasbord of cultural identities, is here confronted not only with the difference between identities but also with the difference within identities. Using multiculturalism to explain and explore difference refers to an objective Johnson set forth in A World of Difference (1987): “to transfer the analysis of difference out of the realm of linguistic universality or deconstructive allegory and into contexts in which difference is very much at issue in the ‘real world’ ” (p. 2).
In the “real world,” this is a good time to look back at a biblical figure who has been analyzed by theologians, historians, biblical scholars, psychoanalysts, and literary critics but rarely as “someone who functions well in a world to which he, unbeknownst to the casual observer, does not belong.” This description applies to the millions of immigrants and displaced people who currently find themselves in foreign environments, to people alienated in their own country or their own skin, and to everyone who doesn’t “fit.”
The idea of functioning well or otherwise in a place to which one—one person, one word, or one concept—does not belong has been a part of my conversations with Barbara Johnson for the past forty years. This study is one more piece in her work that sheds new light, one more story that we have read so often and thought we knew.
Barbara Rietveld
Introduction
I.
Ever since Sigmund Freud published his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism at the height of the Nazi Holocaust, the impression of Moses’ mono-ness and his role as founder of the Jewish faith has been reinforced. But this book begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multiculturalist of all foundation narratives. This does not simply mean that many different nations and liberation movements have adopted the story as their own, although the outlines of the story do seem to have compelling and enduring narrative shape. John Hope Franklin could thus call his classic study of Afro-American history From Slavery to Freedom (first published in 1947) and set the pitch to which most subsequent histories would be tuned.1 Jews every year reenact the story of liberation from Egypt at Passover, and Moses as original lawgiver and divine intercessor forms the heart of the Jewish tradition. And when Dante, in one of the basic texts of the European canon, wants to explain allegory in his letter to Con Grande, he uses the story of Moses as a paradigmatic example:
“When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.” Now if we look at the letter alone, what is signified to us is the departure of the sons of Israel from Egypt during the time of Moses; if at the allegory, what is signified to us is our redemption through Christ; if at the moral sense, what is signified to us is the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace; if at the anagogical, what is signified to us is the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory. And although these mystical senses are called by various names, they may all be called allegorical.2
Thus, by doing a certain figurative reading of the story of Moses, Dante produces both allegory and Christianity. Starting out from the “new” testament, the Bible becomes “old,” and the “old testament,” a reservoir of typologies and foreshadowing of the story of Christ.
But already in the Bible, the story of Moses is a multicultural story, a passing narrative, the story of someone who functions well in a world to which he, unbeknownst to the casual observer, does not belong. All the time he is in the Egyptian palace, Moses performs military exploits and has such a noble character that Pharaoh treats him as he wishes to treat his own flesh and blood, which indicates that for Pharaoh, at least, he is not. Whether Moses is cognizant of his own birth and identity is less clear: the Bible is not explicit about it, and later versions have to decide when, and with what consequences, Moses finds out. According to the biblical story, though, there is little doubt that from an outside view Moses was born a Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian, and married as a Midianite and only then goes back to Egypt to liberate the slaves. While he therefore seems to be liberating “his” people from bondage, why does the Bible make such a point of estranging him from them? Why do they so often grumble against him?
The beautiful bass voices that have sung “Go Down, Moses” have not entirely obscured the ambiguity of who is saying what to whom. It is not Moses who tells old Pharaoh to “Let my people go” but rather God. Moses is thus God’s spokesman, and the people he leads out of slavery are God’s people. But the well-known refrain that shouts out “let my people go!” cannot really represent quotation marks: one of the cruxes in the biblical story and others is thus the extent to which Moses transmits God’s message or his own, and who “my” people refers to. When Zora Neale Hurston titles a chapter of her autobiography “My People,” she alludes to the affectionate rejection of members of a group to which one belongs. This is one expression that brings up the question of Afro-American ethnicity, along with the story of freeing the slaves, which, as we have seen, fits the story of American slavery almost too well. There are always some family members who reveal precisely those traits one has learned to squelch. If “my people” manifests what I least want observers to think I am (and very likely their ready stereotypes, which I have worked so hard to combat), what are God’s people? Is there some fundamental ambivalence in the claim of possession for God, too? Are his “chosen people” a block to the possibility of idealization?
During Seder dinners, participants repeat the story of Moses and generalize God’s goodness in the freeing of all unfree peoples. Haggadot differ in how explicit they are about Auschwitz or Darfur. But all of them function as both a commemoration and a lesson, complete with questions for the uninitiated and explanations of what is being celebrated. The story is often told as if it happens to the addressee. The following are examples from two different Haggadot:
Remember the day on which you went forth from Egypt, from the house of bondage, and how God freed you with a mighty hand. (Union Haggadah, Central Council of American Rabbis, 1982)
Let us raise our cups in gratitude to God that this call can still be heard in the land. Let us give thanks that the love of freedom still burns in the heart of our fellowmen. Let us pray that the time be not distant when all the world will be liberated from cruelty, tyranny, oppression and war. (Reconstructionist Haggadah, 1942)
The service ends with the Zionists’ hope, “Next year in Jerusalem,” which can be literal or figurative. The Passover ritual, which announces itself as a repetition, is thus often a commentary on current events. Far from being the same every time, its point inheres in what it talks about, not in what it says.
But nevertheless, its forms of address are designed to call and inform the Jews about their historical position. Moses is merely the means of bringing about
