With reference to the link between ancient Israel’s firstness and antisemitism as we read in the Chronicle of Saturday, December 7th, 2024, I find this priority as too abstract a notion to arouse racial hostility, though perhaps it underlies a resentment that goes by other names and symbols. As to ancient Israel’s firstness in its own cultural environment and its enduring impact among us there is no doubt whatsoever, and in many ways that I think do not receive proper attention.
Solely in my capacity as a literary humanist, the attraction of Jewish scriptures is unavoidable for their variety and richness, narrative and poetic, as, along with Greek epic, drama, and philosophy, the fountainhead of Western literary masterpieces that we rate as canonical. That very distinction owes its origin to first-century decisions on the part of Jews and Christians independently of each other to delimit the number of writings as sacred. Their canons are the model for our literary canon, composed of what have come to be regarded as culturally authoritative writings, cognitively, esthetically, and ethically. Hawthorne and Melville are unthinkable without the Jewish Scriptures, as are the English Renaissance and Reformation. This is not a matter of “influence,” as old-style comparatists would say; it was the air they breathed, thanks to the magnificent language of the King James Version of the bible.
That a literary masterpiece should be produced by a committee of scholars should not surprise us when we consider that Jewish Scriptures themselves were first composed from different traditions (Yahwist, Eloist, Priestly, etc.), then enhanced, redacted, and compiled over centuries, in a process that Walter Brueggemann has called its “traditioning,” as the achievement of a virtually millennial committee assigned by its mostly anonymous leaders. Israel is first in this practice of scrupulous editing and self-criticism (Sacks). This process is continued in the post-canonical discourses of Talmud and Midrash, in which we can identify a model for both biblical and literary hermeneutics. This is another—philological—first: Sandor Goodhart has shown that the Thomistic fourfold interpretation of Scripture (for Augustine it is threefold) is a replay of Jewish hermeneutics.
Ancient Israel is unequivocally acknowledged as first in its ardent monotheism of a personal god, and consequently its “monotheism of truth” (Haw). “Truth is one,” per Girard in an essay on Proust (1962, 12), per Faulkner in Go Down Moses (275, 314). Moreover, ancient Israel is first in the conviction that God is love, hesed being his unique profile throughout the Psalms. This is translated as “lovingkindness,” a compact, or if you will parsimonious, formulation where the emotion implies the action (Held). For ancient Israel love is truth, truth is love, an indissoluble entanglement reprised by evangelical narratives and epistles and not a few dramatists and novelists.
Ancient Israel is first in its ardent iconoclasm, such that neighboring cultures viewed it as atheist, (as indeed were early Christians for lacking monuments of their savior God). Its unimageable creator is so utterly transcendent of his creation that nothing within it could configure its presence to his worshipers, however much that presence is constantly affirmed. We owe to this aniconic worship the dazzling resourcefulness and versatility of the Jewish scriptures’ textual richness, narrative and poetic, that fills the void left by carved images—as if, for lack of monuments, they must resort to speech and to writing, even to the point, in Ecclesiastes, of contesting divine providence altogether in human affairs. Israel’s unseen God is first known to his people as their emancipator, and as Eric Gans has rightly observed (1990), is made known in a declarative sentence, YAWEH, whose being is all but nameless except as the Name, Hashem. The Thomistic refinement of this idea—I am who am—is that God alone has being; the rest is history (Carr).
The Mount Sinai revelation remains the standard bearer of everyone’s idea of freedom, defined as emancipation from slavery, of liberation from violent oppression as fundamentally and universally desirable. Freedom from domination and privation, imperial or other, was a “Jewish idea” before it became the inflection point, the wellspring and clarion call, for every decent political activism: “We hold these truths….etc.”—regardless of the flagrant mendacity of its slave holder signatories. Everyone today is nominally in favor of this, however much that rubric has been weaponized by vile conspiracy theories. Its most virulent form in the 20th century has been an antisemitism whose exterminationist horrors remain the unique manifestation of the absolutely worst violence that humans can be persuaded to do to one another, as evil incarnate (Neiman). Every philosopher’s scruples about absolute values is confounded by this unique atrocity.
It is singularly the most grotesque of ironies in Western culture, which today is global culture, that the people who invented scapegoat rituals yearly at Yom Kippur, its most important feast, as a rituals aiming at the expulsion of guilt and sin from among them—that this people were, since the middle ages, the victims of violence that we denounce by that very name for unjust persecution (Girard, 1992).
Towards the very outset in Leviticus, guilt and sin offerings are prescribed for offenses, transgressions, of the Law (“sins” in KJV, “crimes” in Robert Alter’s more exacting translation), including in early chapters (4-5) those committed “unintentionally,” “unwittingly.” Humans need not have awaited the famous last words of Christ on the cross to apprehend that “we know not what we do.” For Girard this truth, contra Freud, is a defining report on the unconscious as the ubiquitous potency of crowd mimesis: cheering now, howling next. It functions spectacularly, for example, in Peter’s threefold denials of identity among Jesus’ followers. This episode concerning its founder-disciple is prescribed in all the liturgies of the Lenten worship of Christians, as if a reminder of the fragility of their faith.
The history of Western culture is still being written, but for a sense of its meaning we have to return to Israel’s desert experience. For ancient Israel, moral consciousness and historical consciousness are one, emanating from the Mount Sinai revelation and their passage through the desert to a better life. Forty years are prescribed in order to outlive the generation of relapsarian idolaters. This is replicated in the Christian calendar as the season of Lent, prescribing abstention from material—bodily, appetitive–gratifications.
Amidst his foundational program for the social sciences, Emile Durkheim stated the “religion is a social fact.” Anthropologists define religion as a system of beliefs and practices, and chief among practices is ritual, which is also a cultural universal, however much it may be observed in putatively secular institutions. We see this in the protocols of court procedure—“All rise” at the judge’s entrance, followed by swearing in of witness, “so help me God”; we see it in fandom behavior at sport events, replete with totemic outfits. We see it in the virtual tribalism of Proust’s Combray, so awash in its rituals of belonging as to invite correlation with the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Most infamously, Nazi and KKK assemblies were charged with ritual, as anyone can see by consulting images of them on line.
Formal worship, Lit-urgy, “acts (urgy) of the people,” is enacted as ritual, which, in the case of ancient Israel, exhibits an unheralded intelligence of its purpose. It is another first as we realize when we attend to the material specificities prescribed in Leviticus for this or that sin or guilt offering, which have to be repeated yearly because of the peoples’ proclivities of relapsing into idolatry or other violations of the law. Yom Kippur is translated in French as “le Grand Pardon.” This is an all too unacknowledged manifestation of what is vaunted as the “wisdom of Israel,” namely a process of intentional acts and words, an attention–getting strategy of embodiment, of muscle- and tissue-memory to embed professed beliefs. There is an anthropological realism in this indissoluble integration of consciousness- and conscience-raising activity.
In the following observations I am going to focus on what I regard as ancient Israel’s own incarnational integrity, its adherence against all comers to rituals that are intended to embody its relation to an unseen God. Here again, ancient Israel is first in its conscious, strategic regimen of worship as embodiment, which is more than suggested in its first commandment as reprised in Deuteronomy (6.5): “And you are to “love Adonai your God with all your mind and all your heart, all your being and all your strength”—“all your resources,” “everything about you” in variant translations. “Everything about you” must needs include human embodiment. Many are the Psalms that communicate this sensorial dimension that conveys Israel’s uniquely palpable feel for their creator: “You have turned my dirge to a dance for me” (Ps 30.12); “he put in my mouth a new song” (Ps 40.4); “ Kindness (hesed) and justice I would sing/ to You O Lord, I would hymn./ I would study the way of the blameless” (Ps 101.1-2). Here and elsewhere “hymn” is an active verb, expressing a musico-cognitive dimension, as in Ps. 108 1: “My heart is firm, O God; Let me sing and hymn/ with my inward being too” (Ps 108.1); “Awake, O lyre/ Awake, O lute and lyre./ I would waken the dawn” (Ps 57.9).
Idolatry is reproved in a Psalm (115.4-7) that evokes all five senses, a full body scan: “Their idols are silver and gold,/ the handiwork of man/ A mouth they have but they do not speak./ eyes they have but they do not see./ Ears they have but they do not hear,/ a nose they have but they do not smell./ Their hands—but they do not feel;/ their feet, but they do not walk; they make no sound with their throat./ Like them may be those who make them,/ all who trust in them. Psalm 94.8-9 questions rhetorically “Who plants the ear, will He not hear?/ Who fashions the eye, will He not look?” The oft repeated prophetic appeal to “those who have ears to hear and eyes to see” references the real body experience of the senses, as probative, epistemic. There is nothing metaphysical about this. Conscious appeal to our sensory apparatus is systemic and thematic; a realism of the kind that will eventually it will show up in Western realist fiction.
Goethe writes somewhere that “beauty is a fundamental category:” it is not secondary or only an ornamental feature of human experience. It didn’t take 800 or 1800 years for that idea to become available. We find it in Plato, of course, along with the good and the true, but he notoriously fights shy of any emotional, affective involvement with it out of a well-grounded fear of mimetic contagion among the unenlightened (Lawtoo). Beauty’s emotional force is the work of the Psalms and the prophets, as especially available in Robert Alter’s translations. The Psalms of Praise (149, 150) enjoin musical accompaniment with a precise list of every instrument available; psalms of joy are psalms of enjoyment. Psalm 28 begins, “Lord, I love the beauty of your house/ the place where your glory dwells.” Exegetes tells us that it is referencing the Temple; but the Temple is destined as a resplendently small-scale model of all creation, whence its lush prescription in Torah. In ancient Israel, beauty is regularly dramatic, or scenic, to draw from a core theme of Generative Anthropology (Gans 1997).
The creation story in Genesis 1 is recognized as an anti-Babylonian polemic in the deliberately hymnal, celebratory narrative of the world’s coming into being without violence. Its deftly layered series of separations, with antiphonal divine approbation (“God saw that it was good”), is also a prototype of structural analysis (Brague), of taxonomy, of material creation as a system of differences. This resonates with the credo of every physicist, namely, that the material world exists, that it is orderly, and knowable—and “good,” according to its creator. The tale, or fable if you will (because it has a moral), ends with the human, which God said was “very good,” “supremely good” in some translations,” as made in God’s image. Whence Israel’s firstness in its prophetic claim of a universal religion, a call to “all the nations” that Paul will reprise as “the Israel of God.”
For all that Israel’s’ feasts fill out a cyclical calendar, scholars have acknowledged another first in the move from cyclical to linear time for a people motivated by the idea that they are going somewhere, which is what I mean by historical consciousness, whence the narratives of relapses and reforms. Now we know, if we know anything about history, that time accelerates like the spirals of Yeats’ gyre, such that technological innovation affording the luxuries of consumerism proceeds apace with the menace of environmental catastrophe. Speed is the nature of this historical spiral, from the invention of the wheel to jet-propelled annihilation in a matter of minutes.
This resolutely historical point of view is another “Jewish idea.” The ancient Greek and Roman historians have no notion of historical progression. Virgil is the pro-imperial exception, but no historian, and there is evidence of his recensions on the matter on imperial myth (Broch). For Herodotus, history is just one thing or another, indifferently; he mixes the factual and the fantastical. The same can be, and has been, said of the Bible (from Voltaire and Gibbon through D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Hitchens), but for the defining difference in songs and stories of a people whose averred destination is peace and justice, as we read, for example in Psalm 85.11-12: “Kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss./Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven.” Without proposing a general rule, Thucydides is decidedly “décliniste” as he records the self-destruction of Athens: because they were winning against Sparta, they declined to negotiate a peace, and, like La Fontaine’s frog who blew himself up in his efforts to be as great as the bull, went off to conquer Sicily, where they lost an army and their autonomy thereafter.
Of more recent developments in this cycle, or rather spiral, I am reminded of Gladstone’s parsimonious two-point foreign policy imperatives: preserve the empire; don’t go to Afghanistan. Because the US was victorious in WWII, we went, in a cascade of failures, to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq. Napoleon (who invented “total war”) and Hitler after him dominated all of Western Europe, so they went to Russia: sic transit vis imperiorum. The lessons of history are tragic proof against human ability to learn from its mistakes, from pathologies of obstacle-driven over-reach. That is the job of prophets and our own best writers: “Le monde va finir,” writes Baudelaire in his journal against the bourgeois myth of progress; and de Tocqueville warns against the blessings of modern equality in a way that speaks to our present crisis of difference:
Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? (Democracy in America, Introduction)
In sum, by “realism” I mean, for example, that Don Quixote is crazy because thinks—desires to believe—windmills are giants; ancient Israel is not crazy when it argues that we don’t know ourselves as its god knows us, a view recapitulated by Rabbi Paul and Augustine before it was a model for literary masterpieces as a “discovery procedure” (Gans 1997), the discovery of the non-entity of a “self,” of one’s prior reliance on others’ modeling to direct its “own” desire. “The form is the content” (Gans 1997), the novel arising since Cervantes as the narrative of conversion that is discovered in time and space, in human interaction, “a more fundamental category than being” (Gans 1997). The experience of the novel as a work of art, an art object worthy of admiration, of enjoyment, as “beautiful,” is another example of ancient Israel’s firstness in its firm and coherent interlinking of beauty, truth, and goodness, to which the philosopher aspires dispassionately and so vainly, and which Jewish scriptures dramatize.
WORKS CITED
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