Judaism in the Singular
So completely is modern biblical scholarship the grateful recipient of the gifts of the German historiographic tradition that the general
tenets of that tradition are immediately assumed to be one and the same with what any right-minded student of the religion of Israel would do almost intuitively. But perhaps a caution should be penned: "Beware of Germans bearing historiographic gifts"![70]
K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 26.
One of the most questionable gifts bestowed on European scholarship by German historiography is the idea of Judaism as a monolithic, univocal tradition embodying beliefs and values that are inherently and fundamentally oppositional to the best interests of humanity, universally speaking. What contemporary scholars who take up this idea of Judaism fail to realize, however, is that this understanding of Judaism represents an ideology that is not only morally offensive but logically and empirically indefensible. During the past three decades, as Jacob Neusner points out, a "glacial shift in paradigm" has occurred in the academic study of Judaism.[71]
Jacob Neusner, The Formation of Judaism: In Retrospect and Prospect (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 5.
At the heart of this paradigm shift lies the relatively recent realization among scholars in the field that the term "Judaism," as conventionally used in both popular and academic discourse, has no external referent. "When people use the word 'Judaism,'" Neusner explains, "they use it only in the singular, and they assume that the word refers to a single religion, or religious tradition, extending (if not from Creation) from Sinai to the present."[72]Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Its Social Metaphors (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2.
People until just now have employed categories and classifications that served to foster the association of diverse sorts of evidence, so to produce aggregates and conglomerates, in all, to harmonize cacophonies and yield uniform constructs. The principal category, which had taken form early in the nineteenth century and served without challenge from that time, was, of course, "Judaism." That "Judaism" was variously defined, of course. But "Judaism" invariably observed as the "thing out there," to which all documents … attested in some way or other.[73]
Jacob Neusner, Formative Judaism: Religious, Historical, and Literary Studies (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983), 1.
But, he continues, "when we treat as uniform and harmonious—as testimony to a single 'Judaism'—the entire extant corpus of documentary evidence for Judaism in its formative centuries, we misunderstand what we have in hand."
Neusner extends this principle, for example, to the ubiquitous assumption among American and European scholars of the accuracy of popular, stereotyped conceptions of "Jewish law," contending that "no single system of law governed all Jews everywhere" and therefore one cannot describe Jewish law as "one encompassing system."[74]
Jacob Neusner, The Formation of Judaism, 62.
The Scripture's several codes of course made their impact on the diverse systems of law that governed various groups of Jews, or Jewish communities in
various places. But that impact never proved uniform. In consequence, in no way may we speak of "Jewish law," meaning a single legal code or even a common set of encompassing rules everywhere held authoritative by Jewry. The relationship between the legal system of one distinct group of Jews to that governing some other proves various.[75]
Ibid.
David Aaron has recently made a similar observation in regard to both popular and scholarly accounts of the origins of the so-called Hamitic myth, noting that it is still common to encounter the assumption that midrashic and talmudic interpretations of this myth constitute "one homogenous corpus, uniform in thought and … representative of 'Jewish' thought."[76]
David Aaron, "Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah's Son Ham and the So-Called 'Hamitic Myth,'" in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 724.
Aaron points out that this assumption fails to take into account, for example, that the rabbinic literature in question was "fundamentally incomprehensible to other than the specialist" and that "even among specialists, there is considerable controversy as to how it should be read."[77]Ibid., 751.
Aaron maintains further that despite the current popularity of the notion that racist interpretations of the Hamitic myth are Jewish in origin, the widespread acceptance—or even the existence—of a racist version of this myth within Judaism has not been verified. European Christians, he points out, were hardly "in need of midrashic parables … to find a theological justification for slavery."[78]Ibid., 752.
The diversity that characterized Judaism from the earliest period of its existence contradicts many common assumptions concerning "Jewish" ideas and values. Jonathan Z. Smith, like Neusner, asserts that it is no longer possible to "sustain the construct of a normative Judaism."[79]
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 14.
Smith maintains that from ancient times forward there have existed "a variety of early Judaisms, clustered in varying configurations." This diversity within Judaism goes beyond the standard division of Jewish history into biblical, prophetic, and rabbinic periods, beyond recognition of the independent development of the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Falasha traditions, and beyond even the contemporary differentiation of Judaism into multiple branches in the American context. Efraim Shmueli has identified seven different cultural systems that have existed in Jewish history: the biblical, talmudic, poetic-philosophic, mystical, and rabbinic as well as the Emancipation and national Israeli cultures.[80]Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish History and Thought, trans. Gila Shmueli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15.
Shmueli emphasizes the significant differences among these cultures by listing ten items "out of many more" on which these cultures sharply disagree; he notes that these points of disagreement "do not lie in valuations of minor or trifling points" but rather involve "decisive and momentous issues." What this indicates, he concludes, is that these cultures are not properly understood if they are seen as simply variations on one monolithicworldview, but rather each must be seen as "anchored in its own sense of reality."[81]
Ibid., 14-15.
Not only is the idea of Judaism contained in many contemporary texts structurally inadequate but it also betrays a lack of familiarity with the most basic conclusions of the last several decades of research in the field of Near Eastern studies. Recent research concerning ancient goddess worship, for instance, does not support the notion that the various goddesses worshiped in ancient cultures were just different representations of the same archetypal "Great Goddess" or that geographically distant civilizations shared a common belief system involving reverence for nature and for stereotypically feminine traits such as sensuality and fertility.
Nor does the evidence support the idea that religions in which goddesses were worshiped represented a system of values that was diametrically opposed to that of the ancient Hebrews.[82]
See Saul Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series, no. 34 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Steve A. Wiggins, A Reassessment of 'Asherah': A Study According to the Textual Sources of the First Two Millennia B.C.E. (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag Butzon and Bercker Kevelaer, 1993); and Jo Ann Hackett, "Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us? Ancient Near Eastern 'Fertility' Goddesses," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 1(Spring 1989).
There are numerous biblical fragments as well as an abundance of extrabiblical evidence, indicating that not only did Yahweh worship not involve an organized campaign to wipe out goddess worship but that "Asherah worship was so accepted by the people that she was worshiped right along with Yahweh in the Temple."[83]Richard J. Pettey, Asherah: Goddess of Israel? (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 206.
A primary piece of evidence for this survival is found in the Hebrew Bible itself, where the "Asherah pole" that was set up in the temple next to the altar is described (Deuteronomy 16:21). "This is the pinnacle of syncretism, the joining of religions at the very highest level, the official Temple cult. It is almost startling to realize that the Hebrews, who saw their living God present in the Temple, believed that a living Asherah was equally present at their worship."[84]Ibid.
And as Saul Olyan observes: "It is important to note that we are not speaking only of popular religion here; the asherahs of Samaria, Bethel and Jerusalem were a constituent part of state Yahwism."[85]Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, 34. Johannes C. De Moorprovides a concise summary of the evidence supporting this thesis in The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), 10-13.
Feminist theorists who set up a radical dichotomy between the religion of the ancient Hebrews and that of goddess-worshiping cultures are working with a biased image of both Israelite and non-Israelite religions, as Jo Ann Hackett has pointed out. Hackett suggests that this bias originates in an overdependence on secondary literature written by European Christian scholars holding very conventional views of gender roles.
This secondary literature sets up a dichotomy between Israelite religion and the "fertility" religion of the surrounding peoples and then often rejects these "fertility" deities and "fertility" religions in favor of Israel's official religion. … Many [feminists accept] the dichotomy between Yahwism and "fertility religion" that is set up in the secondary literature, but rather than
rejecting the "fertility religion," as the secondary literature clearly expects us to do, they often look for models in the goddess- and nature-centered worship that is what they understand to be the ancient alternative to worship of the male Yahweh, the god of Israel. They are defying the bias against nature and goddesses, and celebrating the other half of the dichotomy, celebrating the "fertility goddesses" and "fertility cults" of ancient Canaan and Mesopotamia. By embracing rather than rejecting the "fertility religion" that is presented as the rival of the official religion of Israel, they think that they are defying the male-centered religion of Israel and of the scholars who write the secondary literature.
Rather than being an act of defiance, however, the view of goddess worship expressed in these recent feminist texts is merely a reiteration, as Hackett puts it, of "the fears and fantasies of modern Western scholars." That is, Western feminists often derive their views of the Israelite religion from a transvaluation of conventional, familiar interpretations of the Hebrew Bible rather than on "independent scholarly accounts of the Israelite religion." What such independent scholarly accounts show, Hackett asserts, is that "fertility" religion is "everywhere" in the ancient world. "It is all over the Bible, it was part of Canaanite and Mesopotamian religion, and it is part of modern Western religion, too."[86]
Hackett, "Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us?" 68.
One scholar whose work was especially influential in popularizing the idea that non-Israelite religions were orgiastic "fertility cults" was James G. Frazer. As Neal Walls explains:
The central importance of Frazer to the study of Ugaritic myth … rests in the continuing influence of his thought to the present day. In particular, his views on the fertility function of primitive religion, his implicit theories of myth and ritual, and his concept of the dying-rising vegetation god haunt Ugaritic interpretation long after these ideas have been abandoned by historians of religion as essentially groundless. This fact contributes greatly to the outdated quality of much contemporary Ugaritic myth interpretation.[87]
Neal H. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 4. Emphasis mine.
Available evidence concerning the goddess figures who populate non-Hebrew ancient Near Eastern religions reveals that in some cases these goddesses make Yahweh seem rather anemic by comparison. Many of these female deities are portrayed as delighting in carnage and gore.[88]
Hackett, "Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us?" 69; cf. Walls, The Goddess Anat, 26.
Canaanite, Phoenician, and Carthaginian goddesses were believed by their worshipers to demand ritual human sacrifice. Carthaginian and Phoenician sacrificial stelae record the regular incineration of infants and children, sometimes "by the hundreds."[89]Shelby Brown, Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in Their Mediterranean Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 22, 29.
"The actual burning of the child took place, according to literary sources, while music was played to drown outany lamentation by the parents. Children, probably already drugged or dead, were incinerated one by one. … Their remains were carefully collected, placed in cinerary urns along with small trinkets or pottery provided by the parents."[90]
Hackett, "Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us?" 172.
Child sacrifice continued well into the Common Era among the Carthaginians and among other groups (for example, the Aztecs) until the early modern period.Current knowledge concerning cultures contemporaneous with that of the ancient Hebrews also discredits the idea that the ancient Hebrews were unusually violent and aggressive. Conquest narratives similar to the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan were common in the region, and most such narratives conform to a formula similar to that found in hebrew literature, such as reporting that "casualties within one's own army are rare" while claiming "the total annihilation of the enemy."[91]
Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 261.
Not only the ancient Israelites but also the Assyrians, Hittites, and Egyptians composed heroic accounts of their military exploits, and although there are significant differences between these different traditions, there are also many similarities, including the "view of the enemy, calculated terror, the high use of hyperbole, a jural aspect, and the use of stereotyped syntagms to transmit the high-redundance message of the ideology."[92]Ibid., 233-235.
In ancient Egyptian sources, for instance, one finds not only the vision of cosmic harmony posited by some Afrocentric scholars but also "a binary and imperialistic system in which the enemy was viewed as vile, wretched, and evil."[93]Ibid., 194.
The feminist and Afrocentric scholars I have surveyed seem unaware that few experts in the field of Jewish or Near Eastern studies take the biblical account of the "conquest of Canaan" as a record of actual historical events. Archeological research indicates that some of the political configurations and cities that were supposed to have been destroyed by the Israelites did not even exist at the time the conquest was supposed to have taken place and others had been abandoned long before.
The site of Jericho was occupied only briefly in the fourteenth century B.C. , or about 1325 B.C. ; the site of Ai was unoccupied. When Ai was reoccupied as a village about 1200 B.C. , there was nothing at Jericho. If we accept the most popular date for the conquest, about 1250 B.C. , which is held by both American and Israeli scholars based on destruction levels at other major sites, there was nothing at either Jericho or Ai at the time. And at no time during this period between 1400 B.C. and 1200 B.C. was there any settlement at both sites.[94]
Joseph Callaway, "The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges," in Ancient Israel: A Short History from Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, ed. Herschel Shanks (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 55.
And while some sites were destroyed during the right time period, the evidence points not to the ancient Israelites as the conquerors but rather
to a group referred to in ancient texts as the "Sea Peoples," who also plundered the Egyptian coast.[95]
For a detailed and comprehensive survey of the evidence concerning the Sea People, see Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Although Egypt controlled Canaan during the thirteenth century B.C.E. , there is no mention in Egyptian records of an Israelite conquest of the region. Considering the long history of Egyptian interest in the area and the nature and extent of Egyptian record keeping, it is hard to explain why the kind of massive devastation reported in the Hebrew Bible would have gone completely without mention.
Niels Peter Lemche, professor of biblical studies at the University of Copenhagen, proposes that there is an absence of evidence supporting the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan because this account is not a historical record of events that occurred during the Late Bronze Age, as traditionally assumed, but rather served within the early cultus of Israel as "a kind of ideological prototype." The biblical passages containing the most detailed descriptions of the conquest were written much later than the events described—between the fifth and seventh centuries B.C.E. —and this leads Lemche to conclude that the description of the Canaanites in this account "has little or nothing to do with the ancient pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine."[96]
Niels Peter Lemche, The Canaanites and Their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites, in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 110 (1991): 164-165.
In Lemche's opinion, the story of the conquest of Canaan is not the story of an actual military campaign and may even depict political conditions existing not in the thirteenth century but rather in the fifth century B.C.E. The story may in fact be a symbolic representation of "religious and political disagreements … between the Jews living in the Egyptian diaspora and the Jews of Jerusalem."[97]Ibid., 165.
In other words, both the ancient Israelite religion portrayed in the biblical literature and the Canaanite opposition might be metaphorical representations of postexilic Jewish communities.[98]Ibid., 20-21, 171.
In fact, the idea of Judaism reproduced in the feminist and Afrocentric texts I have examined has long been abandoned by all but the most literal-minded religious fundamentalists. Virtually the only statement that may be made with some degree of certainty concerning the ancient Hebrews is that their religious beliefs and practices were mainly of Canaanite origin, with an admixture of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Babylonian influences.[99]
Ibid., 22, 171.
As Mark S. Smith explains, "Despite the long regnant model that the Canaanites and Israelites were people of fundamentally different cultures, archaeological data now cast doubt on this view." In fact, he maintains, "Israelite culture cannot be separated easily from the culture of Canaan" during the dates traditionally given for the conquest of Canaan, nor can one maintain "a radical cultural separation between Canaanites and Israelites for the Iron I period" (ca. 1200–1000B.C.E. ).[100]
Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), xxii, 1.
For example, the idea of an Israelite culture and religion separate and distinct from the Canaanite during this period can be substantiated on the basis of neither epigraphical nor linguistic evidence: rather, the Canaanite and Hebrew languages "so closely overlap that the ability to distinguish them is premised more on historical information than linguistic criteria."[101]Ibid.
Nor can the material cultures of the Israelites and Canaanites be clearly differentiated from one another on the basis of such evidence as pottery design, burial practices, or architecture.[102]Ibid.
What evidence is available points rather to a definition of Israelite culture as "a subset of Canaanite culture."[103]Ibid., 3. See also Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, 266, 268; Callaway, "The Settlement in Canaan," 78.
Nor do most scholars consider viable the popular concept of "Hebrew monotheism" as a uniquely Israelite invention that appeared suddenly and involved the worship of Yahweh as the one true God. The watershed in this regard was the discovery in 1929 of the Ugaritic texts at Ras Shamra in Syria; scholars for the first time had an extrabiblical source providing information about Canaanite religion. In light of this and subsequent discoveries, many scholars began to take a new look at passages in the Hebrew Bible containing references to Canaanite deities, such as the aforementioned reference to the "asherah pole" in the Temple. Long-held assumptions about the character of Hebrew monotheism came into question, and it soon became clear that much of what European scholarship had taken for granted about Israelite religion for centuries constituted a substantial misinterpretation of the historical record. The earliest Israelite religion, it now appears, included worship not only of Yahweh but also of El, Asherah, and Baal. Yahweh, rather than being an original, singular, Hebrew deity, is most often taken to represent a conceptual "coalescence" of an assortment of ancient Canaanite deities.[104]
Smith, The Early History of God, xxiii.
The religious practices linked with Yahwism seem to be of Canaanite origin as well. Frank Cross, following Albrecht Alt, explains: "The early cultic establishment of Yahweh and its appurtenances—the Tabernacle, its structure of querasim , its curtains embroidered with cherubim and its cherubim throne, and its proportions according to the pattern (tabnit ) of the cosmic shrine—all reflect Canaanite models, and specifically the Tent of 'El and his cherubim throne."[105]
Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History and the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 72. Cf. Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, trans. R. A. Wilson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
What this evidence indicates, among other things, is that there are no aspects of contemporary Judaism that can be shown conclusively to be uniquely Hebrew in origin.Considering that both the monothetic view of Judaism derived from a literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the antagonistic view of Judaism based on New Testament theology have long been discredited
by the available evidence, it is curious that these ideas still find wide acceptance among contemporary scholars. And most curious of all is the frequency with which one encounters such outmoded constructions embedded in social and political theories that are conceived, by both their advocates and their opponents, as being of a radical or revolutionary nature. What the use of a negative idea of Judaism as a mode of social criticism reveals is that anti-Jewish assumptions originating in the European Christian tradition remain deeply entrenched in the rhetorical and discursive conventions that many scholars continue to depend on in order to maintain the structural integrity of their thought.
The specific content of these negative images of Judaism, however, is remarkably malleable. During the eighteenth century, when European scholars were infatuated with pure reason, Judaism was criticized as an irrational faith. Now that rationalist ideology has come to be viewed with suspicion, however, Judaism is more often conceived as the source of sterile rationality. When the hallmark of rational religion was its universalism, Judaism was criticized for its particularism; now that universalism has given way to an emphasis on difference, some assert that Judaism is the original source of universalistic thinking. In nineteenth-century German revolutionary thought, scientific method was viewed as a good thing and the Jewish tradition was accordingly conceived as hostile to a modern scientific worldview. In contemporary social criticism, scientific method has come under suspicion, and now we learn that the desire to dominate the natural world often equated with the scientific worldview originated in the Hebrew tradition. In modern German theories of race, Jews were often categorized as "black" because their ancestors had intermingled with Africans; in some recent Afrocentric scholarship, Jews are portrayed as the original "white" racists.[106]
Cf. Sander Gilman's On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), and Blacks and German Culture, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
This same interpretive flexibility becomes evident when theories of contemporary feminists are compared with those of Afrocentrists. Whereas American and European feminists classify monotheism as an oppressive development invented by the ancient Hebrews, many Afrocentrists continue to take the traditional view of monotheism as an important advance in the evolution of civilization and maintain that it was invented by Africans (and co-opted by the ancient Israelites during their sojourn in Egypt). Feminists often claim that the religion of the ancient Hebrews is the original source of the cultural practices leading to the "desacralization of nature" in the European tradition, whereas Afrocentric scholars, interested in portraying the ancient Africans as systematic thinkers, more often assert that it was in Africa that forms of social organization
first emerged the purpose of which was "to challenge nature."[107]
Cheikh Anta Diop, civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, trans. Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lawrence Hill, 1991), 111, 151.
And whereas many feminists assume that the ancient Hebrews invented instrumental rationality, many Afrocentric scholars insist—with good reason—that the ancient Africans were the first to engage in practical, technological, and scientific thinking.Some Afrocentric scholars also assert that it was in ancient Africa, not among the ancient Hebrews, that the first hierarchical forms of social organization were invented. In Civilization or Barbarism Cheikh Anta Diop points out that during the Eighteenth Dynasty the Egyptians colonized the entire "known" world and imposed their own system of order on the occupied territories. This system, he thinks, is the same as that later adopted by Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Napoleon.[108]
Ibid., 102.
In Diop's view, the ancient Egyptians established "the first world empire" and introduced universalistic thinking into the ancient world. And whereas feminist scholars often assert that the displacement of matriarchy by patriarchy in the Mediterranean region was initiated by the Hebrew priesthood, according to Diop it was from Africa that hierarchical and patriarchal forms of social organization were "exported almost everywhere in the world." Diop treats matriarchy as an immature stage of social organization that should disappear with the emergence of more advanced—patriarchal—political structures.[109]Ibid., 112, 167, 313.
In Diop's account, it was the evolution of patriarchal forms of government that made possible the ancient Egyptians' conquest of neighboring cultures and introduction of technological developments that served to bring these other cultures, in his words, "into the historical cycle of humanity."[110]Ibid., 151.
While some Afrocentric scholars view European cultural values as immoral and corrupt and trace the origin of these values to the Jews, others assert that European beliefs and values are themselves African in origin. Donald Matthews, for example, argues that "African/Egyptian thought played a crucial and central role in the development of the most cherished values of Western civilization" and criticizes the habit among American and European scholars of teaching their students that Western values derive from "Jewish moral law." The values that people of European Christian descent think of as "Jewish," Matthews asserts, are in fact derived from the ethical system contained in ancient African texts such as the Book of Coming Forth by Day .[111]
Donald Matthews, "Proposal for an Afro-Centric Curriculum," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 885, 888.
Likewise, Molefi Kete Asante asserts that Africans invented most of the cultural practices usually attributed to Greek and Hebrew sources, including "medicine, science, the concept of monarchies and divine kingships, and [the concept of] an Almighty God."[112]Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), 39.
Asante contends that it is also in Africa that "the originof European philosophy" is to be found.[113]
Ibid., 89.
In fact, in his view, accounts of the birth of "Western civilization" that ignore "the origin of civilization in the highlands of East Africa" are nothing but "malicious racism."[114]Ibid., 38.
When one juxtaposes the feminist historical reconstructions that I have examined with these Afrocentric accounts, it is evident that from an African-centered point of view, the exclusive focus of some feminist scholars on the Mesopotamian origins of Western civilization may be seen as blatantly racist. By the same token, many of the ideas embraced in these Afrocentric texts seem patently misogynist from a feminist standpoint.
This conflict of interpretations creates a dilemma for feminists who wish to construct antiracist narratives and for Afrocentrists who wish to avoid misogynistic assumptions. It would severely disrupt the internal logic of the feminist theories I have examined if an effort were made to introduce into these theories an acknowledgment of the extent of the influence of African thought on European cultural values, since this internal logic assumes that whatever culture first invented monotheism and hierarchical forms of social organization is responsible for the subsequent oppression of women throughout the history of civilization. In such theories, since monotheistic religion is assumed to be the original source of the oppression of women, and the oppression of women is thought to provide the conceptual model for the practice of slavery, then, if the invention of monotheism is credited to ancient Africans, people of African descent end up bearing historical responsibility for the institution of slavery.
Such logical absurdities expose not only the logic of reversal at the heart of the theoretical model borrowed by contemporary scholars from early twentieth-century German social theory but also the way in which this logic absorbs and diverts effective social criticism by its incessant transposition of the roles of oppressor and oppressed. One of the reasons this logic is so difficult to analyze effectively is that its terms never remain the same, but are constantly shifting and changing, which serves to obscure the process by means of which this structural model progressively transforms meaning and value into their opposites. In the case of Judaism, specifically which beliefs and values are identified as "Jewish" in this logic vary from decade to decade, from theorist to theorist, and from cultural location to cultural location, following popular trends in social criticism. What remains constant, however, is the systematic use of a negative concept of Judaism to legitimate criticism of whatever ideas and practices are viewed as most corrupt and oppressive.