Judaism in Recent Feminist and Afrocentric Texts
In Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior , Afrocentric scholar Marimba Ani employs the
concept "Asili "—which she translates as "cultural seed"—to explain European culture as a whole. She asserts that using this concept, European culture can be understood in its totality, because everything in a given culture is an expression of the "seed," or ideological core, lying at the heart of that culture. The ideological core of European culture, according to Ani, is Hebrew theology, which contains "the germ of 'universalism', the critical ingredient of European cultural imperialism." Hebrew theology, she asserts, is "incipient European cultural chauvinism." That is, one finds in the religion of the ancient Hebrews "an accurate statement of the European self-image."[11]
Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1994), 120.
Ani cites a variety of European and American scholars to support this interpretation of the Jewish tradition, among them the late historian of religion Mircea Eliade and Christian feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Ruether's analysis of the origins of "male monotheism" describes the ancient "nomadic peoples" who embraced this form of religion as "characterized by exclusivism and an aggressive, hostile relationship to the agricultural people of the land and their religion."[12]
Ibid., 173; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 53.
Eliade, in A History of Religious Ideas , maintains that while most ancient people believed that "the divine is incarnated, or manifests itself in cosmic objects and rhythms," this belief was "denounced by the adherents of Yahweh as the worst possible idolatry." It was the Hebrew prophets, Eliade maintains, who "finally succeeded in emptying nature of any divine presence."[13]Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1:354. Cited in Ani, Yurugu, 188.
Ani takes up this theme, asserting that European Asili "is lacking in spirituality and therefore seeks power over others as a substitute."[14]Ani, Yurugu, 67, 174.
Ani further elaborates on Ruether's and Eliade's claims by asserting that in the ancient world there existed "two divergent world-views." On the one hand, there was the worldview of the ancient Africans and other nature-worshiping cultures, which was holistic and emphasized such principles as "the harmonious interaction of the complementary Divine Feminine and Masculine" and "the eternal cycle of life that offers the possibility of transcendence, of harmonious interrelationship, of wholeness, integration, and authentic organicity."[15]
Ibid.
On the other hand was the worldview of the ancient Hebrews. "How profoundly different was the Hebrew conception of meaning from the Kemetic and other 'non-European' conceptions," Ani declares.[16]Ibid., 119.
It is from Hebrew theology, Ani asserts, that Europeans derived the ideas that "being can be mechanically, technically 'created'" and that "it is only as laws become alienated from the human spirit that conformity to them requires that they be put on paper."[17]Ibid.
The "Judaic statement," she alleges further, laid the groundwork for the "desacralization of nature," and this "attack on nature," in turn, "wenthand in hand with the Hebrew submergence of the power of women." While she admits that ancient Hebrew society was "distant in time from the [modern technological] colossus that we now experience," she insists that "the view of reality on which this colossus was constructed" was "put in place" in the Hebrew Bible.[18]
Ibid., 189.
Using the strategy of transvaluation, Ani sets a highly idealized portrait of ancient African culture against a starkly devalued Hebraism. The ancient Hebrew religion, in her system, represents the exact antithesis of all things African. Furthermore, she postulates a logical cause-and-effect relationship between the religion of the ancient Hebrews and modern European cultural values, so far removed from each other in time and space: the reason that modern Europeans became cultural imperialists is because they adopted the values of the ancient Hebrews, and this adoption, she thinks, is the key to understanding the history of European chauvinism.
Similar portrayals of the culture of the ancient Hebrews are found in recent texts by Stanford professor Nel Noddings and feminist historian Gerda Lerner. In Women and Evil Noddings argues, like Ani, and following Mary Daly, that the Hebrew Bible "undergirds destructive patterns in the fabric of our culture."[19]
Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989), 39, 52-53. Nodding's sources are Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), and Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Dial Press, 1976).
In her view the Hebrew Bible is the primal source of patriarchal values and thus of sexism. According to Noddings, the biblical accounts of conflicts between the ancient Hebrews and contemporaneous cultures, particularly Canaanite culture, depict "violent attempts to overthrow feminine deities and to subjugate women." The purpose of the conquest of Canaan, according to Noddings, was "to gain political and religious domination over an area in which the goddess was still worshipped." The Israelites "competed for land and resources with people who worshipped 'pagan idols,'" which is to say, in her opinion, that they worshiped "the Great Goddess known by such names as Ashtoreth, Inanna, Asherah, Ishtar, and Hathor," who represented these other cultures' reverence of "sexual pleasure, reproduction, prophecy, serpents, and fig trees."[20]Noddings, Women and Evil, 53.
In addition, Noddings treats the aggressive behavior of the ancient Hebrews as unique both in kind and intensity. She cites Martin Gardner's assertion, in regard to the level of violence described in the Hebrew Bible, that "it is hard to find its equal in any other sacred book."[21]
Ibid., 12; Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: Quill, 1983), 249.
She lists as evidence of this the "killings of Nadab and Abihu for a mistake in the mixing of incense, the stoning of a young man for blasphemy, the swallowing up of rebels against Moses and Aaron, the plague that murdered 14,700 people because some complained about their god's cruelty, [and] the fiery serpents sent to bite and kill when people objected to thetaste of manna." She concludes that "it is hard to deny the wickedness of Yahweh as he is portrayed in the Old Testament," where he is revealed to be "jealous, vengeful, and small-minded."[22]
Ibid.
In The Creation of Patriarchy Gerda Lerner also argues that the religion of the ancient Hebrews was primarily "an attack on the widespread cults of the various fertility goddesses."[23]
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9.
Like Noddings, Lerner conceives of the ancient world in terms of a vast cultural divide with the God of the ancient Hebrews on one side and the "Great Goddess" on the other. She provides a detailed description of the Goddess's "consistently recurring symbolic attributes" with which Lerner believes her to be associated wherever she was found in the ancient world:The Goddess is shown amidst pillars or trees, accompanied by goats, snakes, birds. Eggs and symbols of vegetation are associated with her. These symbols indicate that she was worshiped as a source of fertility for vegetation, animals, and humans. … She was venerated in Sumer as Ninhursag and Inanna; in Babylon as Kubab and Ishtar; in Phoenicia as Astarte; in Canaan as Anath; in Greece as Hekate-Artemis. Her frequent association with the moon symbolized her mystical powers over nature and the seasons. The belief system manifested in Great Goddess worship was monistic and animistic. There was unity among earth and the stars, humans and nature, birth and death, all of which were embodied in the Great Goddess.[24]
Ibid., 148.
The formation of the ancient Hebrew religion, symbolized by the Mosaic covenant, represents, according to Lerner, "the historic moment of the death of the Mother-Goddess."[25]
Ibid., 198. Emphasis mine.
Employing this dichotomizing structure is rhetorically convenient, for once it is set into place, the values represented by the opposing poles are firmly established, while the terms that may be used to represent these values are entirely arbitrary. Afrocentric scholar Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, for example, sees the story of the conquest of Canaan not as an effort to wipe out goddess worship but rather as an attempt to wipe out black people, terming the "extermination" of the Canaanites "one of the earliest acts of genocide in man's history … the very first recorded 'holocaust.'"[26]
Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, We the Black Jews (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993), xxix. Ben-Jochannan also follows the pattern among some Afrocentric scholars of taking an extremely negative view of Islam and Arabic culture. While he asserts the African origins of all three major Western religions, he views them as having been corrupted by foreign influences: thus Islam is "no better than Judaism and Christianity" as far as people of African descent are concerned, since it was Arab Muslims who introduced chattel slavery in the African context. The visions of the Holy Prophet, he says, mark "the beginning of an era which witnessed the ravaging of [Africa's] peoples and territories as she had never experienced before." On this basis he lambastes African Americans who convert to Islam as having "denied their own origin from Alkebu-lan (Africa)" (African Origins of the Major "Western Religions" [Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1970], 197, 213, 254). Similarly, Molefi Kete Asante remarks at one point that "Islam is as contradictory to ... Afrocentricity as Christianity" and that "Arabic culture" is "anathema to Afrocentrism and like Christianity makes us submit to a strange God" (Afrocentricity [Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988], 3). For a critique of anti-Islamic and anti-Arabic sentiment among American Afrocentrists, see Ameen Yasir Mohammed, Afrocentricity, Minus Al-Islam, Cheats (Los Angeles: Dawahvision, 1993).
The Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, similarly, suggests in The African Origin of Civilization that white racism is of Hebrew origin, that is, it originated with the story of Noah's curse on his son Ham in the Hebrew Bible.[27]Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974), 7, 107.
While Diop allows that this is a misinterpretation of the Hamitic myth, other Afrocentric scholars assert that Jews are responsible for this misreading itself. According to Tony Martin, professor of African American studies at Wellesley College, although Christians have often been blamed for interpreting this myth in a racist way, this interpretationitself was "invented by Jewish talmudic scholars."[28]
Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught (Dover, Mass.: The Majority Press, 1993,), 33.
Martin, following the now familiar pattern, portrays the Jewish and African worldviews as polar opposites. The Jewish perspective, according to him, is "the antithesis of Afrocentrism" and "considers Afrocentrism its natural enemy."[29]Ibid., 4, 51, 54.
John Henrik Clarke, who some view as the founder of American Afrocentrism, likewise asserts that there is "a world-wide Black-White conflict which is part of the broader conflict between European and non-European people," and in this conflict "African people are on one side of that conflict and the people we refer to as Jews are on the other side."[30]John Henrik Clarke, "'Black Demagogues and Pseudo Scholars': A Dissenting View," Black Books Bulletin: WordsWork 16 (Winter 1993-1994): 10. See also Martin's article in this same issue of Black Books Bulletin, "The (No Longer) Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews," 22-25.
Another important theme found in some recent feminist and Afrocentric texts is the idea that these interpretations of the history of the ancient Hebrew religion can be transposed into explanatory theses in regard to modernity. In effect, it is sometimes maintained that the displacement of ancient woman-centered and African-centered cultures by the religion of the ancient Hebrews was recapitulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe by the arrival of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. Tony Martin, for example, maintains that the Hamitic myth provided "a major rationalization for the enslavement of Africans" and served as "the moral pretext upon which the entire [slave] trade grew and flourished." He concludes that Jews are therefore responsible for the deaths of "many millions more than all the anti-Jewish pogroms and holocausts in Europe."[31]
Martin, Jewish Onslaught, 35.
In The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991), a controversial text published by the Nation of Islam, the authors also present an account of the institution of slavery in which the slave trade is a distinctively "Jewish" occupation, being predominantly financed by rich Sephardic Jews. This text also attempts to demonstrate that Jews were not only disproportionately represented among those who profited from the slave trade but also made up the majority of actual slave traders and those who owned slaves in North and South America and the Caribbean.[32]
The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: The Nation of Islam, 1991), 10.
The authors maintain that after the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, they migrated to Amsterdam and Dutch colonies in the Americas, where they became deeply involved in the slave trade. The Dutch West India Company welcomed the participation of Jews in their endeavors, according to this account, because Jews were thought to be experts when it came to unethical financial dealings.[33]Ibid., 24.
Notably, Gerda Lerner also traces the origin of slavery to the Jews. The practice of slavery, she says, followed logically from the ancient Hebrews' domination of women. Patriarchal dominance, in other words, demonstrated that one could establish "dominance and hierarchy over other
people," and, according to Lerner, this planted the idea in the ancient mind that such relations could extend beyond gender dominance: "As subordination of women by men provided the conceptual model for the creation of slavery as an institution, so the patriarchal family provided the structural model."[34]
Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 77, 198, 89.
Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature , also follows this approach, explaining that many of the characteristic features of modernity were of Hebrew origin, and she understands the religion of the ancient Hebrews as a uniquely oppressive institution. According to Merchant, a feminist historian of science, until the sixteenth century nature was conceived as female in European society and "organic concepts of the cosmos" dominated. This worldview was displaced in the early modern era by a view of nature as a "disorderly and chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled." This latter view, Merchant explains, originated in the Hebrew tradition, within which the natural world was viewed as something "to be overcome and subdued," and this is the understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature that came to predominate in the early modern period.[35]
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 127, 131. See also Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 207, 113 ff.
Similar motifs appear in recent texts by French and German feminists. Of special note in this respect is Bulgarian-French psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva's treatment of Judaism in Powers of Horror . Kristeva's expressed purpose in this text is to offer a feminist analysis of the concept of "abjection," an analysis to which she deems a discussion of the history of religions essential.[36]
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 31.
The evolution of the Jewish religion plays an important role in Kristeva's narrative because in her view traditional Jewish observance is rooted in the male fantasy of separation from "the phantasmatic power of the mother."[37]Ibid., 100.
Jewish law, she explains, involves the transfer of the "impurity and defilement" attached to "food that did not conform to the taxonomy of sacred Law" to "the mother and to women in general." This "inscribes the logic of dietary abominations within that of a limit, a boundary, a border between the sexes, a separation between feminine and masculine as foundation for the organization that is 'clean and proper', 'individual', and, one thing leading to another, signifiable, legislatable, subject to law and morality."[38]Ibid.
In this text Kristeva follows faithfully the standard strategy of portraying "Christianity" and "Judaism" as conceptual opposites. Jesus, she thinks, introduced a "new logic" into the world, a logic best illustrated by his relationship with the Pharisees. "After having noted that the Pharisee's faith is completely centered in appearances (too strongly tied to orality?)—'This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me'
(Mark 7:6)—Jesus affirms, 'Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man' (Matthew 15:11)." What this means, according to Kristeva, is that "the threat comes no longer from outside but from within." In Christianity morality no longer depends on observance of "the Law" but rests on "a concrete, genetic, and social authority—a natural one ," which in her view constitutes an "invitation to mend the initial filial relationship."[39]
Ibid., 114-115. Emphasis mine.
Kristeva finds this same message in the story of Jesus and the woman who "stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment" (Luke 7:38).
Contrary to the prophet who, according to the Pharisee, would have recognized impurity in this woman and withdrawn from her, Christ gives himself up to it, deluged with a kind of overflowing—of sin or love? It is, at any rate, the overflow of an interior flux and its ambiguity [that] bursts forth in that scene. Sin, turned upside down into love, attains, on account of the ambivalence, the beauty that Hegel tells us is displayed right here for the one and only time in the Gospels.[40]
Ibid., 122-123.
Kristeva's mention of Hegel is not insignificant, because the understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity that she is articulating here is explicitly Hegelian. Especially her view of the moral significance of the "Gospel" is straight from Hegel. In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel offers the following description of the "general principle" lying at the heart of all "oriental" religions, of which, in his system, Judaism was a variety: "Moral distinctions and requirements are expressed as Laws … so that the subjective will is governed by these Laws as by an external force. Nothing subjective in the shape of Disposition, Conscience, formal Freedom, is recognized. Justice is administered only on the basis of external morality, and Government exists only as the prerogative of compulsion."[41]
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 326.
Christianity, in contrast, is for Hegel, as for Kristeva, the religion of freedom, where "purity of heart" rather than conformance to the law is primary.This "New Testament" understanding of "Jewish law" appears frequently in contemporary feminist texts. It is found, interestingly enough, even in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble , where Butler, in an uncharacteristically reductionistic discussion of "paternal law," criticizes Lacan's notion of the law as "bearing the mark of a monotheistic singularity," which she elaborates on in an explanatory note, declaring that this "singular structuralist notion of 'the Law' clearly resonates with the prohibitive law of
the Old Testament."[42]
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 29, 156n.
Butler goes on to credit Nietzsche with initiating poststructuralist criticism of this "Old Testament" concept, asserting that Nietzsche "faults the Judeo-Christian 'slave-morality' for conceiving the law in both singular and prohibitive terms." Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, according to Butler, reveals "both the productive and multiple possibilities of the law, effectively exposing the notion of 'the Law' in its singularity as a fictive and repressive notion."Butler's opposition of Nietzsche's concept of the will to power to "Old Testament law" reveals a telling flaw in her interpretation. That is, she "forgets" that Nietzsche himself used the "God of the Old Testament" to illustrate the will to power in its purest form. This God, Nietzsche contends in The Anti-Christ, represents "everything … thirsting for power in the soul of a people," and it is on the basis of this view that he issued his famous defense of the Hebrew Bible in Beyond Good and Evil .[43]
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), section 17; Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1972), section 52.
Nor did Nietzsche make Butler's reductionistic mistake of erasing several millennia of Jewish history by recourse to the mythical entity popularly known as "Judeo-Christianity," on the one hand, or the anachronistic error of collapsing the entirety of the Hebrew tradition into the Christian caricature of the "law of the Old Testament," on the other. While Nietzsche's treatment of Judaism is by no means unproblematic, he at least expresses an awareness of the existence of different strands of Jewish tradition—of a difference, for instance, between ancient Judaism and rabbinic Judaism.An even stronger condemnation of "Jewish law" is articulated by Kristeva in Powers of Horror . The beauty of Christianity, Kristeva thinks, lies in its ability to have "gathered in a single move perversion and beauty as the lining and the cloth of one and the same economy ."[44]
Kristeva, Powers of Horror; 125. Emphasis mine. See Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 246 ff.
The central significance of this principle in Kristeva's thought becomes most evident in the theory of fascism that she articulates in the last few chapters of Powers of Horror . Hebrew law, she maintains, "sets in motion a persecuting machine " that becomes the mechanism behind such social movements as fascism and anti-Semitism, for such persecutory belief systems are always founded on a "fierce belief in the Absolute of Jewish Religion as religion of the Father and of the Law."[45]Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 112.
The anti-Semite, as much as the observant Jew, is bound to this concept of "the Absolute" as "its possessed servant, its demon, its 'dibbuk.'" In fact, Kristeva maintains, anti-Semitism is merely a "symptom" of "monotheistic power," an expression of "the traumatic topoi " of the Jewish religion. Says Kristeva: "The anti-Semite is not mistaken . Jewish monotheism is … the most rigorous application of Unicity of the Law and the Symbolic." And: "Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compoundby means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same … anti-Semitic fantasy?" And are not "Nazi excesses … cathartic upon the whole"?[46]
Ibid., 180, 184-186. Emphasis mine.
In her astute analysis of Powers of Horror in Saints and Postmodernism , Edith Wyschogrod observes that while Kristeva writes "with an abhorrence of Fascism," it is at the same time for her "a lure, a … seductive power."[47]
Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 251.
This ambivalence in Kristeva's text comes most clearly into focus in her study of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Kristeva spends four chapters psychoanalyzing Céline's Jew-hatred, as expressed in texts composed between 1933 and 1945. Kristeva concludes that the figure of the Jew represented for Céline "a conjunction of waste and object of desire, of corpse and life, fecality and pleasure, murderous aggressivity and the most neutralizing power."[48]Kristeva, Powers of Horror; 184-185.
In effect, Céline the anti-Semite is portrayed by Kristeva as the living embodiment of the "Christian" principle that "perversion and beauty [are] the lining and the cloth of one and the same economy." The "Jew" that Céline despises turns out to be, in her analysis, not a "real" Jew at all, but rather the figurative "Jew" inside Céline himself. Thus Kristeva produces a masterful demonstration, using the techniques of reversal and transvaluation, that the prototypical fascist is really a "Jew," the oppressed are in reality the oppressors, and the persecutor himself the persecuted.Kristeva's dissociation of Céline's anti-Semitism from the policies of extermination that were in effect in Europe during the period in question and her reduction of anti-Semitism to a psychological quirk amounts to a massive erasure of memory. This move is required to achieve the desired result, which is a dissolution of the distinction between Nazi and Jew. And as Susannah Heschel has recently shown, this approach to the problem of anti-Semitism is not unique to Kristeva but occurs with some regularity in the theories of German feminists also, where "patriarchy's responsibility for Nazism and Judaism's responsibility for patriarchy" is a not uncommon theme.[49]
Susannah Heschel, "Configurations of Patriarchy, Judaism, and Nazism in German Feminist Thought," in Gender and Judaism, ed. T. M. Rudavsky (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 149.