April 15, 2013 Biblical Blame Shift Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism?

By Richard Wolin Jan Assmann has been described as the world's leading Egyptologist a characterizat ion that few these days would dare to dispute. A 74-year-old emeritus professor at the University of Heidelberg and honorary professor at the University of Kons tanz, Assmann has held guest professorships at Yale, the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Soci ales, in Paris. In addition to his specialized work as an Egyptologist, Assmann has staked a mor e general claim to distinction as a leading theorist of cultural history as a re sult of his pathbreaking work on "mnemohistory" a concept he has developed over the past three decades with his wife, Aleida Assmann, and other researchers. In his recent volume, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembran ce, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapi tulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previou s theorists of cultural memory as an approach to historical understanding (such as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), Assmann's notion of mnemohistory s uggests that, from a cultural point of view, the way history is remembered is mo re important than to quote the German historian Leopold von Ranke "the way it really was." This insight is particularly valid in the case of ancient history. Here, whereas reliable archaeological or textual evidence is often sketchy, imaginative comme ntaries abound, in many cases composed several centuries after the fact. It is g enerally accepted that, after a period of 40 years, generational memory begins t o fade. At this point, "collective memory" cedes to "cultural memory" as a type of imaginative reinvention of tradition. As Assmann explains his methodology in Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: " Even if sometimes the debate over history, memory, and mnemotechnics may appear abstract and academic, it seems to me to nevertheless lie at the very heart of c urrent discourse. Everything points to the fact that the concept of memory const itutes the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies that will shed light on all the interconnected fields of art and literature, politics and sociology, rel igion and law." Assmann points out that questions of historical remembrance are frequently the o bject of contentious cultural negotiations and disputes. Often, such struggles g o far toward determining the cultural self-understanding of a given society or s ocial group. To take one example that resurfaces often in Assmann's work: At var ious points in European cultural history, the memory of ancient Egypt, as the "o ther" of the West, has assumed a pivotal function. Thus in both the Old Testamen t and early Christianity, Egypt was hyperbolically constructed as a "negative to tem." For the ancient Jews, it became the symbol of worldly corruption ("the fle shpots of Egypt") and soulless idolatry. Among Christians, it became one of the essential sites of paganism a past from which believers needed to free themselves in order to accede to the promised land of salvation. Assmann's approach systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclin ations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Conversely, Assmann shows in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western

Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997) that during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment two highly secularizing eras, in which emancipation from ecclesiasti cal dogma became a major rallying cry ancient Egypt's historical value was positiv ely reconfigured, both as the ultimate fount of biblical monotheism and as provi ding an evidentiary historical basis for Spinoza's heretical pantheism. (As Spin oza famously claimed, Deus sive natura: God and nature are the same.) This histo riographical reassessment represented a conscious attempt to ruin the sacred tru ths by demonstrating that Western monotheism had its origins in pagan practices and rituals. It was an image that was constructed in contrast with Christendom, where, with the Inquisition and the religious wars, religious dogma had culminat ed in intolerance, persecution, and armed conflagrations of biblical proportion. (It is estimated that during the Thirty Years' War, one-third of the population of Europe either died or was displaced.) Thus, by degrees, biblical Egyptophobi a ultimately gave way to Egyptophilia a tendency that crested with Napoleon's Egyp tian expedition (1798-1801) and the French Orientalist Jean-Franois Champollion's (1790-1832) decipherment of hieroglyphics, which became the basis for modern Eg yptology. Assmann shows that, in the work of the 17th-century English Hebraist John Spence r, the 18th-century English polemicist and freethinker John Toland, and the 18th -century English cleric and critic William Warburton, the figure of Moses played a pivotal role in the early Enlightenment's secularizing discourse on Egypt. It was during this period that the enduring cultural trope of "Moses the Egyptian" was born. To reconceive Moses as an Egyptian was a way of deflating the theolog ical pretensions of biblical monotheism. The hope was that, by demonstrating tha t Western monotheism had its origins in the nature-centered religion of ancient Egypt, one might be able to defuse Christianity's eschatological, sectarian zeal otry which, in the eyes of its critics, had had such catastrophic historical and p olitical consequences. Not only does the idea of "Moses the Egyptian" furnish the title of Assmann's 19 97 monograph. It also alludes to the title of a highly contentious essay by Freu d ("If Moses was an Egyptian ...") that was published a few months before Freud' s death, in 1939, as part of Moses and Monotheism. Freud claimed, on the basis o f some rather threadbare textual and historical evidence, that the historical Mo ses was in fact a disaffected Egyptian priest who imposed monotheism on the Jews once it had been banned in ancient Egypt following the reign of Akhenaten. Unsu rprisingly, Freud's iconoclastic study which, to the dismay of fellow Jews, appear ed as the tide of European anti-Semitism reached its zenith plays a pivotal role i n Assmann's investigations of Western mnemohistorical discourse on Egypt. In his more recent work, Assmann has taken the corrosive spirit of early modern Bible criticism a step further. In The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2010) and related studies, Assmann ignited an international controversy b y claiming that the Old Testament, by discriminating between true and false reli gion, was responsible for ushering in unprecedented levels of historical violenc e. Provocatively, he has designated this fateful cultural caesura whose origins li e in the sacred texts of ancient Judaism and which Assmann describes as a worldhistorical transition from "cult to book" as the "Mosaic distinction." It is a per spective we must transcend, he contends, if the world is to surmount the theolog ically authorized violence and hatred that have been responsible for so much blo odshed and misfortune. "We cannot change history, but we can change the myths in to which history is continuously transformed through collective memory," writes Assmann in Of God and Gods (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). "This is the r oad that should be taken. Monotheism itself pushes us to go beyond the logic of exclusivity and the language of violence." Assmann argues that biblical monotheism, as codified by the Pentateuch, disrupte d the political and cultural stability of the ancient world by introducing the c oncept of "religious exclusivity": that is, by claiming, as no belief system had

previously, that its God was the one true God, and that, correspondingly, all o ther gods were false. By introducing the idea of the "one true God," Assmann sug gests that monotheism upended one of the basic precepts of ancient polytheism: t he principle of "divine translatability." This notion meant that, in ancient Mes opotamia, the various competing deities and idols possessed a fundamental equiva lence. This equivalence provided the basis for a constructive modus vivendi amon g the major empires and polities that predominated in the ancient world. Assmann readily admits that the ancient Middle East was hardly an unending expan se of peaceable kingdoms. However, he suggests that before monotheism's emergenc e, the rivalries and conflicts at issue were predominantly political rather than religious in nature. For this reason, they could be more readily contained. Mon otheism raised the stakes of these skirmishes to fever pitch. According to Assma nn, with monotheism's advent, it became next to impossible to separate narrowly political disagreements from religious disputes about "ultimate ends" (Max Weber ) or "comprehensive doctrines" (John Rawls). According to the new logic of "reli gious exclusivity," political opponents to be conquered were turned into theolog ical "foes" to be decimated. What Assmann essentially describes in his writings is an improbable and presumpt uous theory of historico-theological "blowback." By introducing the "Mosaic distinction," Assmann argues, the Old Testament estab lished the foundations of religious intolerance, as epitomized by the theologica l watchwords: "No other gods!" "No god but God!" Thereafter, the pre-monotheisti c deities were denigrated as "idols." As Assmann explains: Ancient Judaism "shar ply distinguishes itself from the religions of its environment by demanding that its One God be worshiped to the exclusion of all others, by banning the product ion of images, and by making divine favor depend less on sacrificial offerings a nd rites than on the righteous conduct of the individual and the observance of g od-given, scripturally fixed laws." These measures and techniques infused monotheistic religious practice with a new stringency an element of fideistic absolutism that differed qualitatively from the more diffuse cult practices of its polytheistic predecessors. Moreover, by intro ducing the idea of a transcendent and omnipotent deity, monotheism was guilty of estranging its adherents from the natural world a tendency that stood in marked c ontrast with the world-affirming and life-enhancing orientation of pagan belief systems. In Of God and Gods, Assmann goes so far as to suggest that the "religio n of the book" was proto-totalitarian. "The Torah with its commandments and proh ibitions ... served as a script for leading one's life, running one's business, performing the rituals, ruling the community, in short regulating every aspect o f individual and collective existence," he argues. "This was a new phenomenon in the history of writing as well as that of religion and civilization generally. Never before had writing served such comprehensive functions." At the risk of lapsing into what, by his own admission, might be viewed as antiJewish stereotypes and polemics, Assmann invokes several chilling, if familiar, instances of mass slaughter from the Old Testament as confirmation of his thesis concerning the inherent relationship between "exclusive monotheism" and predato ry violence. To be sure, many of these episodes were directed inward: expression s of divine retribution aimed at the errant Jews themselves for their egregious lapses in faith. Assmann cites the tale of the golden calf (Exodus 32: 27-28), i n which 3,000 Israelites meet their death. At Baal Pe'or (Numbers 25), where Heb rew men are discovered fraternizing with Midianite women and worshiping their id ols, only the pre-emptive execution of 24,000 wayward Hebrews can forestall even greater divine fury. Lastly, Assmann cites the Lord's draconian recommendation in Deuteronomy that, in their impending conquest of the Canaanite lands, the Jew s must "let no breathing creature live." In all of these instances, the logic of "No god but God!" establishes what Assma

nn characterizes as a cultural semantics of religious intolerance, culminating i n the herem ban: a biblical version of jihad in which no living creature shall b e left alive. Of course, there is no archaeological evidence to support the claim that any of these alleged divinely mandated bloodlettings actually occurred. Instead, it is commonly acknowledged that they were conceived by the anonymous biblical authors as cautionary tales to illustrate the risks of straying from the basic precepts of the Old Testament's austere ethical injunctions. One of Assmann's methodolog ical failings is that he jumps too quickly from considerations of "textuality" o r "mnemohistory" to questions of actuality. Fortunately, not everything one find s in a text is automatically translated into historical practice. Assmann's disparaging construction of ancient Judaism has been harshly criticize d by Old Testament scholars. He consistently denigrates biblical monotheism as a "secondary" or "counter religion," thereby impugning its originality by claimin g that its doctrines were parasitically dependent on their opposition to ancient pagan practices. Assmann has also been accused of providing an overly sanguine and harmonious por trait of interstate relations among the proponents of ancient polytheism Babylon, Assyria, and so forth. However, in the ancient world, the Israelites were not th e only group who, in times of warfare, invoked the dreaded herem, or ban on conq uered peoples. Since the discovery almost 150 years ago of the Moabite stone, da ting from the eighth century BC, we know that other nations in the ancient Middl e East engaged in similar practices as the Moabites apparently did against Israel. Another discomfiting aspect of Assmann's veneration of ancient paganism is that , since the 1980s, a similar orientation has predominated among the advocates of the European New Right, whose hate-filled texts have often provided the script for and fed the intolerance of the Europe's far-right political parties. (For a good example, see Alain de Benoist's On Being a Pagan.) A major failing of Assmann's approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numer ous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the i mportance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviti cus (19:33-34): "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native amon g you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of E gypt." Thus, contra Assmann, lurid tales of plunder, bloodlust, and divine retri bution fail to tell the whole story. A number of astute critics have also pointed out that, from a social-evolutionar y perspective, biblical monotheism represents a significant ethical breakthrough , providing a normative basis for the idea of universal human brotherhood a charac terization diametrically opposed to the "exclusionary" mentality that Assmann co nsiders predominant. Historically, the Exodus parable, which Assmann judges the ur-text of exclusionary monotheism, has served as a foundational narrative of po litical emancipation: humanity's deliverance from the injustices of bondage and oppression. Assmann censures monotheism's ostensible "world alienation" its embrace of a trans cendent, invisible God who dwells outside of, rather than within, the world. But that divine barrier, in fact, underwrites the ethical distinction between justi ce and injustice, what is and what should be, mere life versus life led accordin g to principle. This perspective conveys the idea that the moral life is somethi ng that must be achieved by a demanding process of existential reorientation and conversion. It "alienates" men and women not from the world as such, but from t he world conceived as a locus of oppression and injustice. That was the reality that the Israelites were forced to confront during their 400 years of bondage in

ancient Egypt. Thus as the journalist Thomas Assheuer has pointed out in discussing Assmann's w ork: "The appeal to a just God was the answer to an experience of violence and s uffering that can no longer be compensated by myth." Assmann downplays the signi ficance of divine transcendence as an ethical breakthrough and neglects the coer cive power of myth as an ideological consecration of fate that is, a justification of mere life, however needlessly unjust it may be. Whereas ancient polytheism sanctified the injustices of fate humanity's entrapment in the world as it is the Mosaic religion protested against that condition and it s moral inadequacies. The covenant at Sinai represents the promise of an elevate d life: a moral life. Henceforth, secular powers that fail to measure up to the standards and precepts of the Ten Commandments stand exposed for their ethical d eficiencies. Moreover, the seemingly harsh Deuteronomic injunction that, in the lands they are about to conquer, the Israelites must "let no breathing creature live" is deceptiv e, since in subsequent passages we find the Jews living peacefully among the Can aanites and other local tribes. As Michael Walzer shows in In God's Shadow: Poli tics in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2012), on both philological and textual grounds, the Old Testament is inherently susceptible to a plurality of readings. "Given the different rulers judges, kings, and priests and the arguments o ver kingship," Walzer writes, "there can't be anything like an authoritative pol itical constitution in the Hebrew Bible. ... In the end, there are no authoritat ive readings." Assmann, conversely, serves up a peculiarly reductive and disappr oving interpretation of biblical monotheism a portrait that is distinctly at odds with his professions of solidarity with "postmodern pluralism," which he regards as a desirable, 21st-century epistemological corollary to the spirit of ancient polytheism. Assmann's argument is often scattershot and filled with qualifications so many tha t if one took all of them at face value, there would remain virtually nothing of substance. But upon closer scrutiny, what Assmann essentially describes in his writings is an improbable and presumptuous theory of historico-theological "blow back." In his view, it was the ancient Hebrews who, by virtue of the "Mosaic dis tinction" and the cultural semantics of intolerance they unleashed, conceived th e notion of holy war: a divinely ordained doctrine of total annihilation. Tragic ally, it was the same cultural semantics of intolerance that, at a later point, returned to smite the Jews themselves in the most prodigious and far-reaching in stance of mass murder ever recorded: the Holocaust. In other words: What one sows, one reaps. In Assmann's view, ultimately it was n ot the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was the Jews themselve s who were responsible, by virtue of having conceived and implemented a doctrine of "religious exclusivity" whose ultimate historical repercussions could in bib lical times only dimly be perceived. Thereby, Assmann effectively recycles the s hopworn canard that it is the Jews themselves who are responsible for anti-Semit ism. It is in that vein that, in Moses the Egyptian, Assmann praises Freud's strategy in Moses and Monotheism of asking "'how the Jew came to attract this undying ha tred.'" In this way, Assmann seeks to refute Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial thes is in Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf, 1996) that it was a specifically Ger man variant of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that was responsible for the Holoc aust. Yet Assmann goes to the opposite extreme, effectively exculpating the actu al perpetrators by suggesting that their motives were irrelevant. Instead, the h istorical key to anti-Semitism is to be found in the Old Testament, as interpret

ed by Assmann. In Moses the Egyptian, Assmann clarifies the biographical motivations subtending his investigations by informing us, "It is in a rather personal attempt to 'com e to terms with'" the German past "that I embark on the writing of this study ab out Moses the Egyptian." He continues: "The present text reflects my situation a s a German Egyptologist writing 50 years after the catastrophe which Freud saw a pproaching, knowing the full extent of the genocide which was still unthinkable in Freud's time." Here, one might plausibly inquire: What contribution might an Egyptologist be ab le to make toward understanding the Holocaust, an event that postdates Assmann's area of scholarly expertise by some 3,500 years? We find the answer to this que stion a few lines later, when Assmann grandiosely informs us that, by re-examini ng the cultural "confrontation of [ancient] Egypt and Israel," he seeks to furni sh "a historical analysis of anti-Semitism." But the term anti-Semitism is a relatively recent coinage. It first appeared in Wilhelm Marr's prejudice-laden 1879 study, The Victory of Judaism Over Germany. Among historians, the term has been conceptually serviceable for distinguishing the ideology of modern racial anti-Judaism from anti-Judaism's more traditional, religious strains. To restate these facts is merely to underline what should be obvious: The analytical and historical value of seeking to account for modern a nti-Semitism via recourse to the biblical antagonism between Israel and Egypt is manifestly limited. It is at this point, moreover, that one runs up against the analytical and conceptual limits of "mnemohistory" as a method of historical ex planation. But there is another essential component of Assmann's highly speculative theolog ical "blowback" thesis that falls beneath the threshold of sense. The Holocaust cannot be conceived as a modern instance of "religious exclusivity" this time, per petrated against the Jews rather than by them since, as is well known, the Nazis o penly disavowed monotheism (Christianity as well as Judaism) in favor of neo-pag anism. The ideology of the master race was predicated on the doctrine of Aryan r acial superiority, which provided the Nazis with their right to dominate suppose dly inferior racial groupings. Thus, in point of fact, Europe's Jews were victim ized by the recrudescence of the herem ban as practiced by ancient pagans, for w hich we now have corroborating archaeological evidence. If this insight holds, i t stands Assmann's argument on its head: It was paganism's return, rather than i ts eclipse at the hands of biblical monotheism, that helps to explain the destru ction of European Jewry at the hands of the swastika-bearing Nazis. In this case , too, Assmann seems to be scratching where it doesn't itch. Under the cover of solving the historical riddle of anti-Semitism by tracing it back to the "Mosaic distinction" and thus insinuating that European Jewry was ulti mately the victim of a brand of theological intolerance that the ancient Hebrews had themselves introduced Assmann has merely added fuel to the flames. Richard Wolin teaches history and political science at the Graduate Center of th e City University of New York. His most recent book is The Wind From the East: F rench Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Prince ton University Press, 2010).

comments shawnpg ""the rivalries and conflicts at issue were predominantly political rather than

religious - I find Political Religious

in nature" it amusing that scholars still draw this distinction. war: I want your stuff. war: God says I can have your stuff.

Chris Jones Good article. I am particularly grateful that Wolin notes epigraphic and archaeo logical evidence that herem neither originates with Israel nor is exclusive to i t. I find it inconceivable that anybody acquainted with ancient warfare practice s could attribute their escalation towards atrocity to the Bible. In fact, those who wrote the Bible only did so (for the most part) after the loss of their own polity (the Kingdom of Judah)--ironically, as a dominated minority, they were n ever in a position to enact large-scale violence before Late Antiquity, when Chr istians came to dominate the Roman Empire. If anything, the historical developm ent of monotheism compensated for the reality of imperial domination. Warfare was always deeply religious, never purely political; all ancient Near Ea stern peoples viewed battles between armies as proxy wars between national gods. Atrocity was commonplace, especially between closely-related ethnic groups. The Bible arises out of this world and makes (often ugly) rhetorical use of these t ropes; it is not uniquely responsible for introducing them. Gopher63 The combine of religion and governance goes way back to the dawn of civilization s well before the emergence of monotheism, and continues to this day..I've often doubted the literal veracity of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Where did th ey get their weapons during 40 years in the wilderness? rmshelby Weaponry can seldom have been a problem. Some came from Egypt with the migrating Hebrews. Metal sources were found in the wilderness during travels and sojourns , smithing skills were present among the tribes. Better weapons could sometimes be obtained by fierce fighting with inferior weapons. Besides which, effective w eapons could be made from simple materials near at hand: sharp poles, clubs, sto ne maces, slings, etc. Good swords were rare, spears plentiful. Bow and arrow we ll known. Chris Jones Very right--yes, some Dtr strata (both in Dtr and DtrH) may reflect Josian reali ties, though I still tend to hold that these are more ideological/propagandistic rather than reflective of political realities. And yes--the Hasmoneans did hold power for about a century, during which they engaged in some rather bloody conq uests. Thank you for the qualifications. jeffrogers142 Excellent article. Professor Wolin is correct in pointing to Michael Walzer (God 's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, Yale University Press, 2012), as a mor e credible commentator on these issues in the Hebrew Bible/OT than Jan Assmann. Assmann's reach has (too) far exceeded his grasp. ilanar I found Jan Assman's claims shocking and depressing in this day and age. His cla ims are somehow based on a warped understanding.

Wolin does a superb job of analyzing Assman's work! Well done! rmshelby It is not so much that Assman's grasp is warped as that he has an iconoclastic m otive. Fame among scholars and theoreticians requires controversy. Effort to wri te with originality entails risk of rejection. One must present "glittering stat ements," coins of which one side or the other has been too diligently polished. EllenHunt Well, content free revisionist historical criticism lives. Mr. Wolin doesn't ac tually say anything substantive except to essentially claim without basis that a nything unpleasant in the bible is as much myth as genesis is. Mr. Wolin indulges in a hopscotch over Assman's work, revealing his own uncritic al cherry-picking of biblical history and other oral tradition and drawing out the blunderbuss of anti-semitism and the holocaust to attack a valid thesis. Use of the holocaust in that way is a backdoor ad hominem attack - a propaganda tec hnique. In terms of validated oral tradition - for instance, in Fiji, their oral traditi on says that they came from a place far away and journeyed by boat for generatio ns, finding no place for their own until they came to the islands. That oral tra dition says that they originated in the northern Persian Gulf - not by that name of course, but by description and distance. And - linguistic and genetic eviden ce confirms that, putting a time of at least 10,000 years on it. So there are si gnificant confirmations of oral tradition. If you go to the country of Georgia, you will find evidence of endless war for thousands and thousands of years. For Mr. Wolin, Western Georgia is where the Argonauts lived. They panned for gold in streams and rivers of the area using fleece set in the bottom. The fleece colle cted gold. The winners of history who have come through as us, are not new age h ippies. They were, by our standards of the academic ivory tower, monstrous, bigo ted, deadly people. Is Mr. Wolin going to deny the Zealots existed, or that their battle occurred? I t would seem that Mr. Wolin is unaware of such evidence. Thus, accusing him of c herry picking his biblical incidents is totally valid. To presume that bilblical history is purely made-up stories is denialist horsema nure equal to holocaust denial. Clearly, Mr. Wolin wishes to sanitize his cultur al roots by playing "lets pretend MY ancestors were sweetie-pies". What rubbish - every culture has hands drenched in oceans of blood and stands on mountains of bones. It is facing that head on that has allowed our modern world to at least try to do better. Mr. Wolin has remained a child, and does not want to understan d that the thread of culture in the Old Testament won its way in the world with monstrous violence and horrific acts. Those biblical incidents cited are similar in kind to the monstrous acts perpetr ated by Mohammed at Khaybar, the place he ordered the slaughter of hundreds of m en who had surrendered, and the place he urged his men to enjoy raping the capti ve women. One of them killed herself after Mohammed himself raped her. This sort of thing is real history - not the sanitized garbage that pseudo-scholars prete ntiously declaim in its place because it makes them feel better about themselves . Mr. Wolin's concluding remarks are puerile nonsense. Prof. Assman is not letting the Nazi's off the hook for their acts. He is, instead, correctly providing an understanding of the sweep of history that created the Western world with its in tolerant religions. All three major western religions are murderously intolerant

. Judaism swept across the fertile crescent burning and conquering. Up until the t he Jews met the Romans, the Jews were the successful oppressors who massacred ev eryone else. Christians slaughtered Jews and drove them into the arms of Islam w hich slaughtered both and warred its way across the world out of the same desert region. It was better for a time to be a Jew under the boot of Islam's theocrat ic dictatorship, forced to wear a star and walk instead of ride, then to live wi thin the bounds of Christianity. Get a grip child. To observe that all three of the "great religions" that arose out of the Judaic thread of culture maintained this murderous intolerance that o riginated with the Jews is not holocaust justification! What puerile, asinine ru bbish! Saying so is not justification for the holocaust. Saying so is being an adult who faces reality and understands the world around him! Or will you accus e me of justifying the ravages of smallpox and TB in the world because I can tra ce its ancestry?! Dear god. nde144 "Up until the the Jews met the Romans, the Jews were the successful oppressors w ho massacred everyone else." Yeah, they really did a number on the Assyrians, t he Babylonians, the Persians, and the Greeks. (Good news: we don't actually have to rely on oral tradition for all of this.) rmshelby Yes, we recall how the "Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold!" ;-) rmshe lby 14 hours ago in reply to EllenHunt Well done and powerfully stated, EllenHunt! But, we must agree that monotheism i tself is like a coin with minimally two sides and the edge that manifests substa nce. I personally have no truck with these "great, book religions" and their spl intered generations of descent. They are matter for cultural reference, allusion and study but not for further participation, having had results in the real wor ld rather more negative than positive. At risk of seeming to pick more dried rai sens than fresh cherries, I offer transtheism as the valid position triangulated above agnosticism between theism and atheism. Spinoza's pantheistic fusion of d eity with nature is perfectly logical though unsatisfactory to any tribe of the religiosi. But, today's unitive thinking after Whitehead seems to require a cate gorical fusion of divine and humane, right? Science proffers reduction only by O ckham's Razor. sdryer I wanted to write something, but then I read this comment. There is nothing lef t for me to add (and a lot of good stuff I hadn't thought of). Any attempt I co uld make would just dilute the message. David_Alan_Coia Burn, baby,burn. I appreciate Assmann s concept of mnemohistory, and will return to it for a closer look. However, the focus on Judaism and world history is a lit tle too ethnocentric for my tastes. For the moment, I tend to see repression an d war as vices, the victims of which, in the translated words of Seneca, are neve r allowed to return to their true selves; if ever they chance to find some relea se, like the waters of the deep sea which continue to heave even after the storm is past, they are tossed about and no rest from their lusts abides. (Moral Essay s II, tr. John W. Basore, Loeb 1932, p. 291)(Chris Jones: I like your comment, b ut I disagree with any notion that warfare is primarily religious or political a

t its base. The basis for warfare is nearly always economic.) Enopoletus Harding Since the discovery almost 150 years ago of the Moabite stone, dating from the e ighth century BC Ninth century BC!!! Who edited this article? Historically, the Exodus parable, which Assmann judges the ur-text of exclusionary monotheism, ha s served as a foundational narrative of political emancipation: humanity's deliv erance from the injustices of bondage and oppression. -And the Joshua narrative has served as a foundational narrative for the slaughter of Native Americans and other ethnic groups. rmshelby Once again, I see demonstrated the principle that presentations of glittering st atement are like coins. Each obverse has a reverse and an edge. Truth resides, t hen, beyond presentation. One must "fall into the metal" of that all-seeing sile nce which, to us, is usually indistinguishable from nescient blindness. Luke Lea It is true that the Old Testament introduces the idea of religious intolerance, but I don't think European anti-Semitism was religious at bottom. In point of f act Jews were tolerated by the Church in a way that was not true of any other he retical sect. They were also in many ways a privileged minority under the reign ing secular authorities, which is to say, the kings and nobilities, who found th em "useful" for purposes of money lending, estate management, and even tax colle ction. We must remember that the world then was one in which almost everyone wa s both exploiting and being exploited by others, the only exceptions being the k ings on the top and peasant women and children on the bottom. The Jews were rig ht in the middle of this. To speak frankly, they were often used by the upper-c lass nobility (in Poland and Spain especially) as tools and instruments of explo itation of the peasantry. Add to this that they were an ethnically and genotypi cally distinct group, which spoke a different language, was endogamous and selfsegregating, and which moved about within but was not a part of the society in w hich it lived (all traits it shared with the Gypsies btw) and I think you can ex plain anti-Semitism as an ethnological and sociological phenomenon. There was a lso the religious contempt which orthodox Judaism had for Christianity, a phenom enon that was both constant and which preceded any contempt running the other wa y. Nobody was innocent here. If all parties changed places they would have fel t and acted just the same. All were trapped in the same tragic hell hole of his tory from which we are fortunate to have escaped. A terrible human price has bee n paid to build the modern world. With a little more sympathy and historical und erstanding we might realize that everybody paid it. stevesailer Everybody knows Moses was the good guy and Pharaoh the bad guy. I mean, who are you going to believe: some world's-leading Egyptologist with a comic name or Cec il B. de Mille? chervel There is currently a big debate (in German) about Assmann's concept of "mosaic d istinction" in the German online magazine Perlentaucher with articles by Jan Ass mann, Peter Sloterdijk and others: http://www.perlentaucher.de/es...

http://chronicle.com/article/Biblical-Blame-Shift/138457/