Moses and Multiculturalism. Barbara Johnson

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       Moses and Multiculturalism

      FLASHPOINTS

      The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history, and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints will aim for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history, and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress

      SERIES EDITORS

       Judith Butler, Edward Dimendberg, Catherine Gallagher, Susan Gillman Richard Terdiman, Chair

      1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim

      2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson

      Moses and Multiculturalism

      Barbara Johnson

      Foreword by Barbara Rietveld

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished

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      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Johnson, Barbara, 1947–2009.

      Moses and multiculturalism / Barbara Johnson ; foreword by Barbara Rietveld.

      p. cm.—(Flashpoints, 2)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-26254-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      1. Moses (Biblical leader). 2. Multiculturalism. I. Title.

      BS580.M6J64 2010

      222’.1092 dc22 2009019422

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

      requirements of ANSI/NISO U39.48–1992 (R 1997)

      (Permanence of Paper).

       To Shoshana Felman

      CONTENTS

       Foreword by Barbara Rietveld

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. The Biblical Moses

       Chapter 2. Moses and the Law

       Chapter 3. Flavius Josephus

       Chapter 4. Frances E. W. Harper

       Chapter 5. Moses, the Egyptian

       Chapter 6. Freud’s Moses

       Chapter 7. Hurston’s Moses

       Chapter 8. The German Moses

       Chapter 9. Moses, the Movie

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Index

      FOREWORD

      If the story of Moses didn’t exist, Barbara Johnson might have invented it to illustrate concepts she began writing about in 1980. “The problem of difference,” she wrote in the Opening Remarks to her first book, The Critical Difference, “can be seen both as an uncertainty over separability and as a drifting apart within identity.” The focus in this new volume functions as a prism through which she looks at the “separability” of the cultures that have contributed to the formation of the Moses figure through stories told by different peoples and how the “drifting apart within identity” played out in each culture that claimed him as its own.

      The point of departure in Moses and Multiculturalism is the mixed identity that Moses carried within him: he was born a Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian, and married as a Midianite, then returned to Egypt to liberate the slaves from whom he had been estranged. Johnson explores those dimensions through her analyses of the biblical Moses, the Egyptian Moses, the Frances E. W. Harper Moses, Freud’s Moses, and others.

      “What literature often seems to tell us,” Johnson has observed, “is the consequences of the way in which what is not known is not seen as unknown. It is not, in the final analysis, what you don’t know that can or cannot hurt you. It is what you don’t know you don’t know that spins out and entangles ‘that perpetual error we call life’ ” (p. xii). In each version of the Moses story, it is the parts of the story that were unknown or unrecognized that give away 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