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Blessing and Bane
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10086 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
1,990 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
Man. |
Except the God of my Father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had been with me, surely thou hadst sent me away now empty. -Jacob (Gen. 31:42)
How odd/Of God/To Choose/The Jews," wrote Hilaire Belloc, giving expression to an ironic sentiment surely shared many highly civilized people across the ages, from Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, through Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century, to Charles Maurras, Simone Weil (herself born a Jew), and Belloc in our own. The idea of a "chosen people"--especially one with as messy and immoral a history as that detailed in the first half of the Old Testament--is itself a "scandal of particularity" to the liberal, rational mind, ancient or modern. Pity poor, weary, decent Roman administrators such as Pilate and Festus, confronted by Jewish fanatics and sectarians!
In The Philosophical Dictionary (1764) Voltaire had even more cruel fun with Jews and Judaism then he did with Christianity: "On the absurdities and improbabilities of the Old Testament," Andre Maurios notes, "he is inexhaustible." The ideas of the covenant with Moses and the Promised Land provoked Voltaire's mirth, mockery, and scorn: "Alas, my Friends! You never had these fertile shores of the Euphrates and the Nile. Someone has made a fool of you…. The masters of the Nile and the Euphrates have been your masters. You have nearly always been slaves."
It is but a short step from this view to Nietzsche's concept of Judaism and Jewishness as based on envy of the superior environing cultures." I have never been to Judea, thank God," Voltaire wrote satirically in The Philosophical Dictionary, "and I will never go there," and he went on to add: "Seeing this detestable country, Frederick II said publicly that Moses had been extremely ill-advised to bring his company of lepers to it: 'Why didn't he go to Naples?' asked Frederick." American writers such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville wondered, too, and were tempted to see the profound paradoxes of Old Testament history as based on superstition and trickery, on ignorance, weakness, fear, and envy.
Who can read the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac--and especially what parent can read it--without a feeling of terror, contempt, disgust, or hatred? If Kierkegaard and other interpreters and commentators have explained, rationalized, and moralized it with philosophical phrases such as "the teleological suspension of the ethical," is our revulsion at Abraham's god intoxicated fanaticism in any way lessened? Is the slaughter by Jacob's sons Simeon
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