Chronicle of Higher Education: Assheuer demonstrates Assmann's anti-Semitism

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Biblical Blame Shift 

Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism? 

By Richard Wolin 

Jan Assmann has been described as the world's leading Egyptologist—a characterization that few these days would dare to dispute. A 74-year-old emeritus professor at the University of Heidelberg and honorary professor at the University of Konstanz, Assmann has held guest professorships at Yale, the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. 

In addition to his specialized work as an Egyptologist, Assmann has staked a more general claim to distinction as a leading theorist of cultural history as a result of his pathbreaking work on "mnemo­history"—a concept he has developed over the past three decades with his wife, Aleida Assmann, and other researchers. 

In his recent volume, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to historical understanding (such as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), Assmann's notion of mnemohistory suggests that, from a cultural point of view, the way history is remembered is more important than—to quote the German historian Leopold von Ranke—"the way it really was." ...

As Assmann explains his methodology in Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: "Even if sometimes the debate over history, memory, and mnemotechnics may appear abstract and academic, it seems to me to nevertheless lie at the very heart of current discourse. Everything points to the fact that the concept of memory constitutes the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies that will shed light on all the interconnected fields of art and literature, politics and sociology, religion and law." 

Assmann points out that questions of historical remembrance are frequently the object of contentious cultural negotiations and disputes. Often, such struggles go far toward determining the cultural self-understanding of a given society or social group. To take one example that resurfaces often in Assmann's work: At various points in European cultural history, the memory of ancient Egypt, as the "other" of the West, has assumed a pivotal function. Thus in both the Old Testament and early Christianity, Egypt was hyperbolically constructed as a "negative totem." For the ancient Jews, it became the symbol of worldly corruption ("the fleshpots of Egypt") and soulless idolatry. Among Christians, it became one of the essential sites of paganism—a past from which believers needed to free themselves in order to accede to the promised land of salvation. 

Assmann's approach systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. ...

Everybody knows Moses was the good guy and Pharaoh the bad guy. I mean, who are you going to believe: the world's-leading Egyptologist (who, allow me to point out, has a funny name) or Cecil B. de Mille? I rest my case.

What Assmann essentially describes in his writings is an improbable and presumptuous theory of historico-theological "blowback." 

By introducing the "Mosaic distinction," Assmann argues, the Old Testament established the foundations of religious intolerance, as epitomized by the theological watchwords: "No other gods!" "No god but God!" ... In Of God and Gods, Assmann goes so far as to suggest that the "religion of the book" was proto-totalitarian. "The Torah with its commandments and prohibitions ... served as a script for leading one's life, running one's business, performing the rituals, ruling the community, in short regulating every aspect of individual and collective existence," he argues. "This was a new phenomenon in the history of writing as well as that of religion and civilization generally. Never before had writing served such comprehensive functions." 

At the risk of lapsing into what, by his own admission, might be viewed as anti-Jewish stereotypes and polemics, Assmann invokes several chilling, if familiar, instances of mass slaughter from the Old Testament as confirmation of his thesis concerning the inherent relationship between "exclusive monotheism" and predatory violence. ... 

Of course, there is no archaeological evidence to support the claim that any of these alleged divinely mandated bloodlettings actually occurred. Instead, it is commonly acknowledged that they were conceived by the anonymous biblical authors as cautionary tales to illustrate the risks of straying from the basic precepts of the Old Testament's austere ethical injunctions. ... 

A major failing of Assmann's approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numerous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the importance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviticus (19:33-34): "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." ...  

A number of astute critics have also pointed out that, from a social-evolutionary perspective, biblical monotheism represents a significant ethical breakthrough, providing a normative basis for the idea of universal human brotherhood—a characterization diametrically opposed to the "exclusionary" mentality that Assmann considers predominant. Historically, the Exodus parable, which Assmann judges the ur-text of exclusionary monotheism, has served as a foundational narrative of political emancipation: humanity's deliverance from the injustices of bondage and oppression. 

Assmann censures monotheism's ostensible "world alienation"—its embrace of a transcendent, invisible God who dwells outside of, rather than within, the world. But that divine barrier, in fact, underwrites the ethical distinction between justice and injustice, what is and what should be, mere life versus life led according to principle. This perspective conveys the idea that the moral life is something that must be achieved by a demanding process of existential reorientation and conversion. It "alienates" men and women not from the world as such, but from the world conceived as a locus of oppression and injustice. That was the reality that the Israelites were forced to confront during their 400 years of bondage in ancient Egypt. ... 

Thus as the journalist Thomas Assheuer has pointed out in discussing Assmann's work: "The appeal to a just God was the answer to an experience of violence and suffering that can no longer be compensated by myth."

And, no I'm not making this up. I've never heard of Assheuer before, but Assmann is a big deal in German intellectual life (as is Mrs. Assmann).

Personally, when I was eight, I thought the Book of Joshua, with all that smiting of the wicked Canaanites who had the effrontery to be living on land the Hebrews coveted, was awesome.