Moses and Multiculturalism. Barbara Johnson

story behind every spot. There is no ambivalence to mar the absoluteness of this fight: this is Israeli politics of 1958, not 2009. Human complexity inheres in individual characters, not world politics.

      There have been two notable recent popular/scholarly books about Moses: Jonathan Kirsch’s Moses: A Life and Joel Cohen’s Moses: A Memoir.⁹ Kirsch collates the considerable body of scholarship that has grown up around the biblical Moses and makes it into an interesting character study. Cohen tries to imagine from the inside what it felt like to be Moses; again the basic source is the Bible, and the goal, the coherence of a person’s inner life. And finally, Exploring Exodus by Nahum Sarna is the only text about Moses that devotes as much attention as the original text to the Tabernacle (complete with drawings).¹⁰

      The aim of coherent unity, which may not even be possible in the biblical version, collapses with the multiple sources I shall read here. In this book, there can be no search for the “real Moses.” Anomalous elements will not fit into some larger picture, and each version will have a center of gravity different from the others while still taking off from something actually in the Bible. The texts have in common only the prestige of the story they are part of, and perhaps a desire to liberate it to make sense in a new way.

      Every rewriting of the Moses story has, among other things, to interpret the expression “chosen people.” Freud, for example, sees the “chosen people” as a trigger for sibling rivalry. But perhaps until “blood” and “choice” are conflated, until their differences are not the basis of democracy, until a truly democratic regime is not grounded in blood and soil, it is not common blood that unites the “chosen people.” At first Moses goes about his task with somewhat the same resignation as that depicted by Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”¹¹ But to form an equally unbreakable bond through arbitrary will—to have not families we’re stuck with but families we choose (as the title of a book on gay families has it)—puts the “chosen people” in a different light. That Moses is a Hebrew may be both a nationalist sop and a false lead; the biblical story is as long as it is because the Hebrews have to learn to treat Moses as not one of their own. Perhaps Moses has to have been acculturated precisely in the household of the enemy in order to lead the enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt. In any case, each of the many versions of the Moses story we will read here has something to say about the sense of the two cultures that go into his formation.

      The Bible turns out not to be alone in positing foreignness as somehow necessary for nation building. It itself says many times that one must respect the strangers in one’s midst: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:34). The political theorist Bonnie Honig sums up the recurring importance of foreigners in foundation narratives as follows:

      Sometimes, the figure of the foreigner serves as a device that allows regimes to import from the outside (and then, often, to export back to outside) some specific and much-needed but also potentially dangerous value, talent, perspective, practice, gift, or quality that they cannot provide for themselves (or that they cannot admit they have). This supplement of foreignness gives receiving regimes something different from the novelty, cultural breadth, and depth identified by theorists of immigration and multiculturalism.¹²

      One of the recurring revelations in the various versions of the Moses story from Sigmund Freud to the Egyptologist Jan Assmann is the claim that, far from being a Hebrew, Moses is in actuality an Egyptian.¹³ Exactly what, then, is foreign, and to what? Is this story about an individual (Moses) or about a historical process (Exodus)? Does the story begin in Egypt or in Goshen? And is there some Oedipal drama of respect or murder being acted out with each retelling?

      II.

      One of the most surprising threads that tie all dimensions of this project together is the importance and role of Freemasonry within it, the leadership of brothers tied together not by a covenant but by a secret rite. The fraternal order claims descendency from ancient Egypt and maintains the idea of a secret initiation for the Elect. Faced with the diminished entity that the Masonic order has become in the United States, it is hard for us to imagine its prestige and prominence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The fact that Freemasonry might have derived in part from the medieval guilds of masons, who had to move from place to place and be housed each time near their work site in a lodge, emphasizes the literal importance of architecture in the history of Freemasonry, but its figurative meanings were just as important. From the arts of memory to the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple, the Masons always looked forward to many years of their apocalyptic Craft. Yet the so-called wisdom of the Egyptians that underlay those initiation rites, and into which Moses himself had been initiated according to Acts 7:22, can be textually shown to come at least in part from an eighteenth-century French novel, Sethos, by Jean Terrasson. Wolfgang Mozart, for instance, even while being a devoted Mason, initiated in 1784 into the Austrian Lodge Beneficence, unknowingly cites Terrasson when, with his fellow Mason and libretticist, Brother Emmanuel Schikaneder, he depicts a Masonic initiation in his opera The Magic Flute.

      The U.S. founding fathers were very often Freemasons, which is why they put an unfinished pyramid—one of Freemasonry’s occult symbols—on the great seal of the United States. When the early black nationalist Martin Delany was invited to speak in 1853 by the St. Cyprian Lodge #13 of Pittsburgh on the topic of the legitimacy of black masonry, his listeners thought he could simply help straighten out the status of their lodge with the Mother Country, but instead they were told about the origins of Freemasonry itself in ancient Egypt, an African culture. Black Freemasonry, even though forced into existence by white racism, had more right to claim legitimacy than did white Freemasonry.

      Those who came to the “wilderness” of the New World to seek religious freedom often drew inspiration from the Exodus story. This was particularly true of Puritans, who established a “holy commonwealth” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and tried to combine God’s rule with human rule. John Winthrop (whom Cotton Mather called “the American Moses,” soon to be Massachusetts’s governor) addressed his congregation aboard the Arbella just before landing in 1630 by alluding to Moses (“Thus stands the case between God and us, we are entered into covenant with Him for this work”)¹⁴ and ends by quoting what Moses said to the people when he saw the promised land he was never to enter:

      And to shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deuteronomy 30 [not the King James version], “Beloved, there is now set before us life and good, death and evil, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep His commandments and His ordinance and His laws, and the articles of our covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.”¹⁵

      As the doyen of Puritan studies in early America, Perry Miller, writes, “ ‘God sifted a whole nation to bring choice grain into the wilderness,’ said the Puritan historian.”¹⁶ But the Exodus story in fact stands behind a wide variety of pronouncements in the New World: Thomas Morton, an antiPuritan, who was indeed punished by the Puritans for “bacchanalias” and corruption, could still call his book about America The New English Canaan.¹⁷ And later Mary Antin called her book about immigration The Promised Land.¹⁸

      But nothing about claiming that land was held to be easy. As a preacher put it in New Haven in 1777, “How soon does our faith fail us, and we begin to murmur against Moses and Aaron and wish ourselves back again in Egypt.”¹⁹ Yet often the wish was secretly to be delivered from history: from divine guidance to Messianism is but a short step, and Canaan begins to look a lot like Eden.

      To say one has God on one’s side can justify almost anything; it is an eminently American claim to make. As James Dana put it in a sermon of 1779, “the manifest interposition of the Almighty in humbling tyrants for their sakes” is used by all sides to justify what they are doing.²⁰ In the fight for American independence from Great Britain, it was all too easy to see Pharaoh in the English crown,