Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative

Glory and Agony

Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative

Yael S. Feldman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Portions of the Introduction and of Chapter 6 were originally published in Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies. The Third Sheffield Colloquium, edited by Cheryl J. Exum and Stephen D. Moore, © 1998, Sheffield Academic Press. Reprinted by kind permission of Continuum International Publishing Group.

An earlier version of Chapter 4 was originally published in Yael S. Feldman, On the Cusp of Christianity: Virgin Sacrifice in Pseudo-Philo and Amos Oz, Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 97, no. 3 (Summer 2007), © 2007, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Portions of Chapter 5 were originally published in A People That Dwells Alone? by Yael S. Feldman, AJS Review, volume 28, issue 01 (April 2004), pp. 83-103, © 2004, the Association for Jewish Studies. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Portions of Chapter 6 were originally published in PMLA, May 1999, © 1999, the Modern Language Association of America. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association.

Published with the support of the Humanities Initiative at New York University.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Yael S.

   Glory and agony : Isaac's sacrifice and national narrative / Yael S. Feldman.

        p. cm.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8047-5902-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

   978-0-8047-5902-1

  1. Isaac (Biblical patriarch)—Sacrifice. 2. Isaac (Biblical patriarch)—In literature. 3. Zionism in literature. 4. Israeli literature—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Jewish literature—History and criticism. 6. Sacrifice—Judaism. 7. Human sacrifice in literature. I. Title.

   BS1238.S24F45 2010

   222'.1106-dc22

                                                    2009048526

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

eISBN: 9780804777360

To Isaac's descendents

      whose spirit permeates

                   the following pages

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction:

Sacrifice for Gods and Country: Practice and Theory

Part I: Osher Aqedah: The Glory of Sacrifice, 1904–1944

1.   Martyr, Victim, Sacrifice, Warrior

2.   Re-Inventing Isaac as a Military Hero

Interlude: The Land of Isaac

Part II: Isaac, Jesus, Oedipus:

The Agony and Agon of Sacrifice, 1945–1995

3.   Binder or Slaughterer? The Rise and Fall of Abraham

4.   Virgin Martyrs, Then and Now:

A Tale of Dream and Darkness, 1966

5.   Sacrificial Victims? The Isaac Generation, 1967–1973

6.   Mania, Murder, and Gender Mayhem, 1975–1995

Afterword:

A State of Exception: A View from the Present

Notes

Index

Figures

Avraham Ofek, The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Figure 1. Michelangelo Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Figure 2. Rembrandt, Abraham's Sacrifice.

Figure 3. William Blake, The Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter.

Figure 4. Shoshana Heimann, Sacrifice of Isaac.

Figure 5. Menashe Kadishman, The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Figure 6. Menashe Kadishman, The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Preface and Acknowledgments

New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff […], these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power, even over her.

—Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

The root of the heroine's frustration in this passage is familiar enough to Rushdie's readers: the persistence of the sacred within the language of the secular. Here, however, it is in a love poem by Baudelaire, of all things, that traces of the sacred are detected—some sort of altar, congealing blood, and other religious symbols. Moreover, both the iconography and the response it elicits are not incidental—they foretell a narrative of love brutally thwarted by violence, presumably sacred.

The present study grew out of a similar frustration. Growing up in Israel and specializing in Hebrew culture, past and present, I have long been aware of the uneasy coexistence between the sacred and the secular. In Baudelaire's sacral imagery I in fact recognized one of the arch Jewish symbols, if not the arch symbol of this coexistence—the trope of sacrifice, of making sacred. Yet, while the pre-modern manifestations of this mythic symbol have been amply studied, scant attention has been given to its afterlife in modern times. Jewish nationalism is an ideal test case for such an inquiry.

This book is the fruit of my long odyssey of love and heartache in the footsteps of the twentieth-century descendents of the Bible's archetypal potential and real sacrificial victims: Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Jesus. Through the exploration of their cultural production—in belles lettres, art, historical studies, and political debates—I cautiously lay bare their passionate negotiations between the millennia-long inter-cultural and ecumenical tradition they inherited and their own harsh political and psychological realities. To make better sense of these negotiations I place them in conversation with writings, from antiquity to the present, about human sacrifice, violence and victimage, martyrdom and other noble deaths. The result is an account of the attitudes toward sacrifice/victim (both qorban in Hebrew!) during the first Zionist century. My narrative draws a complex picture, revealing that just like the secular at large, Jewish nationalism was unable to invent a new, un-sacred language. Apparently, it is precisely the endurance of noble death, both martyric and military, within national narratives that has rendered them both theological and, alas, violent.

This unhappy confluence, more obvious than ever in our post–9/11 global reality, was not as transparent however at the threshold of the 20th century. My story therefore begins at that point in time when a desperate search for new meaning and new hope for a people traumatized by pogroms and wars perforce collided with the realization that defending this nascent new life means sacrificing individual lives. To my amazement, I discovered that the fierce inner turmoil and public debate caused by this requisite was ironically reconciled by importing to Hebrew, perhaps unknowingly, martyric connotations of Orthodox Christianity.

How I came to this surprising conclusion is a curious story unravelled in the following pages. Here suffice it to add a personal note. Several years ago, while at a conference in Moscow, I was privileged to listen to a brief report, in Russian, of my then research in process. I was soon startled to recognize in the stream of (nostalgically familiar but barely decipherable) language a word I remembered well from childhood: zhertva. Imagine my surprise when I learned that this Russian word means both sacrifice and victim—just like the Hebrew qorban! Long forgotten, it now resurfaced with full force, reorienting my reflections about sacrifices, victims, and intercultural connections.

Prominent in this new thinking was the recognition that human ambivalence over the need for self-/Sacrifice has deep roots. This understanding proved crucial for my new take on Israel's haunting love affair with its primal scene of sacrifice, Genesis 22. An emblem of long standing for Jewish fate in exilic persecutions, this story, appropriately named in Hebrew the Binding (aqedah) rather than the Sacrifice of Isaac, has been interpreted for millennia as advancing a divine prohibition of human sacrifice. It was the long-lasting presence of this interpretative tradition in the face of a history that has often contradicted it that spurred my curiosity. Inter alia, it inspired the following questions: How has Isaac, the passive survivor of a near-sacrifice, come to stand for the necessity for active military self-sacrifice, for a warrior's glorious death in battle? And more recently—how was he transformed into the agonizing victim of violence and homicide? How, to change a metaphor, has Abraham's sacrificial knife stopped hovering in mid air?

Glory and Agony is my attempt to provide some answers to these and other complex questions. My journey has taken me to far-off places, some out of my nominal field of specialization. It compelled me to confront painful historical periods that my Israeli education had suppressed, and to face marginal textual sources that I was trained to shun and reject. And in making me realize that the project I have undertaken is perhaps interminable, it also has taught me humility.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of this study I incurred a debt of gratitude to many friends and colleagues, near and far, who selflessly shared with me their expertise in various fields of specialization. It is a great pleasure to thank them all for helping me in thinking through specific issues and overcoming stubborn impasses. They are too many to list here but each of their invaluable contributions is acknowledged in the notes. Special thanks go to my colleagues and students at New York University and particularly to the participants in my graduate seminars on Sacrifice, Gender, Culture, whose passionate involvement sustained me through the lengthy gestation of this study. Their individual contributions are also acknowledged in the notes.

Over the years I greatly benefitted from critiques of my work-in-progress in various colloquia and seminars. My thanks to the participants and especially to the hosts of these edifying gatherings: J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen Moore (Sheffield University); Rivka Yehoshua (Israeli Society for Psychoanalysis, Jerusalem); Daniel Boyarin (CrossCurrent Colloquium in Religion, New York); Ziva Ben-Porat (Tel Aviv University, Porter Institute); Arnold Band and David Meyers (University of California, Los Angeles); Sigrid Weigel and Martin Treml (ZfL, Berlin); Ed Greenstein and James Kugel (Bar-Ilan University); and last but not least, David Ruderman and the gang at CAJS, the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies (University of Pennsylvania), for a pleasantly productive term that facilitated final touches to this book and new vistas beyond it.

Many thanks for the generous services of the following archives and libraries (personal acknowledgements appear in the notes): The Albert Einstein Archives of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem; Genazim, the literary Archive of the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel; The Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research; Yad Ya'ari in Kibbutz Giv'at Haviva; the Hebrew Union College Library, Cincinnati; the Interlibrary Loan office of Bobst library, New York University; last but not least, Evelyn Ehrlich, Head of General, Humanities, and Social Science Reference of Bobst library at New York University, who personally held my hand at the very beginning of my forays into digital research, making it an exciting adventure.

My thanks also to New York University and the Katz Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania for generously supporting a semester of research and reflection; to the New York University Research Challenge Award for supporting research travel; and to the Dean's Discretionary Fund and the Humanities Initiative at New York University for facilitating the production of this book.

Early drafts of the manuscript or parts thereof were critically read and discussed with friends and colleagues. I am profoundly grateful to Ed Greenstein, Ellen Handler Spitz, Leona Toker, Avraham Shapira, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Michal Govrin, Menachem Brinker, Hannah Naveh, Nitza Ben-Dov, and Perry Meisel, for their friendship, unfailing enthusiasm, and sound advice; to David Engel, for sharing his historical and linguistic acumen; to Baruch Levin, Avital Ronell, Anita Shapira, Rachel Elboim-Dror, Yaira Amit, Hannan Hever, Ruth Kartun-Blum, Athalya Brenner, Larry Basserman, Tova Rosen, Jan Willem van Henten, Vivian Liska, Hillel Weiss, and others whose names I may have overlooked, for their insights and helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to my dear friends, who shared my journey in many stimulating conversations: Ilana Howe, Pnina Rafailovich, Ariela Pnueli, and Carol Golden (whose ear for perfect English pitch obviated many stylistic pitfalls). Any lacunae or errors of judgement are however my own responsibility.

Most of all I wish to thank the authors featured in this study for their gift of imagination and daring. Special thanks to Haim and Aliza Gouri for their hospitality and conversations during my trips to Israel, and to Ika and Buli (A. B.) Yehoshua for a long-standing dialogue.

It is a special privilege to feature the work of three Israeli visual artists. My thanks to the heirs of Shoshana Heimann and Avraham Ofek for their kind permission; to Menashe Kadishman for his friendship and generosity; and to Gideon Ofrat for facilitating and for sharing his valuable work on Israeli art.

This book would not have come into being without the early interest and amicable support and counsel throughout of Norris Pope, Director of Scholarly Publishing at Stanford University Press. I am deeply indebted to him for his faith in this project when it was still in embryonic phase. Many thanks to the editorial staff at the Press for their personable and meticulous care: Senior Production Editor Judith Hibbard; Editorial Assistant Sarah Crane Newman; and copy editor Richard Gunde. It was a great pleasure to work with them all. Special thanks to my indexer (and former student, now Ph.D.), Jill Aizenstein, for a very useful bibliographic index.

Finally, my love and endless gratefulness to my sister Leah Shulman for her attentive ear, discerning mind, and indispensible help with archival research; and last but not least, more than love to Steve, my best friend and dear partner in love and work, for prodding and enabling, and for always being there when it really counts.

Y.F., MAY2010

Foreword

From the house, so silent now, are driven

All the gods who reign'd supreme of yore;

One Invisible now rules in heaven,

On the cross a Saviour they adore.

Victims slay they here,

Neither lamb nor steer,

But the altars reek with human gore.

—Goethe, 1797

In some case man can be sure the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law […] he must consider it an illusion.

—Kant, 1798

[…] When Isaac saw Abraham's countenance again it was changed, his eyes were wild, his appearance a fright to behold. […] Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his anguish: God in heaven have mercy on me […]; if I have no father on earth, then you be my father!

—Johannes de Silentio, 1843

The submission of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity, to the Idea, is merely a continuation of human sacrifice, of the immolation of the lamb to pacify God.

—A. Herzen, 1850

A Personal Note:

In all my years at the yeshiva I have never heard of aqedah.

Except in the weekly portion reading.

[…]

Fact or metaphor:

The pious know that the aqedah is a fact.

One more fact. Secularists believe that it is a great, mythical metaphor. If it is a metaphor, it must refer to them.

For they and metaphors are one and the same.

Thus:

The pious—a fact, Secularists—a metaphor,

Now you go figure it out.

—A. Baruch, 2002

One of the highlights of the acclaimed art exhibit Rembrandt and Caravaggio held at the van Gogh Museum in 2005–2006 was the striking divergence between the ways the two masters imagined the scene of Genesis 22, the Sacrifice of Isaac. This difference revolves, as any spectator could see, around the question of violence.¹Whereas in Caravaggio's 1603 painting (Figure 1) the image of Isaac shows only the physiology of fear and pain,²Rembrandt considerably softened and humanized the scene in his 1655 etching (Figure 2), famously adorning several recent studies of Genesis 22 and its contexts.³

Interestingly, scholars have attributed the softer tone of Rembrandt's later version to the influence of Josephus's rendition of the story in his Jewish Antiquities. Indeed, this text is one of the early (first century CE) articulations of Judeo-Christian traditions that had insisted on the benign, harmonious cooperation between father and son.⁴ This tradition was put under strain, however, in Caravaggio's painting, and as our epigraphs show, this strain grew exponentially throughout subsequent centuries in the textual tradition as well. Even Johannes de Silentio, that is, Kierkegaard—in one of his less-remembered passages—imagines the patriarch as resorting to scare tactics to ensure Isaac's trust in God….⁵

Within the last half-century, Israel has witnessed a similar bifurcation in its haunted preoccupation with its primal scene of sacrifice, Genesis 22. Here both the visual and the textual traditions were affected, experiencing a momentous reversal, though in the opposite direction: from a Rembrandt-type to a Caravaggio-type reading of Isaac's near-sacrifice. No necessary influence by these artists is intended here. Israelis have been more in tune with traditional Jewish models, which tend towards the textual. Yet the diverging visual images immortalized by Caravaggio and Rembrandt may serve as a heuristic tool, as they represent two potential appreciations of human sacrifice, whether dictated by the divine or by any of its secular substitutes: the nation, the state, or other ideological and social organizations.

Obviously, both approaches have inhabited the Jewish tradition too, but in uneven measures. This unevenness is the result of a literal reading of the end point of the scriptural episode: the halting of the knife in mid-air. From this ending the universal prohibition of human sacrifice had been deduced, although contemporary scholars are still divided over this conclusion.⁶The Hebraic tradition nevertheless insisted on a near-sacrifice, an aqedah, namely, binding rather than sacrifice.⁷

Despite this lexical/semantic difference, however, Jewish textual history has known not only bound Isaacs, but sacrificed ones as well. The latter often (though not exclusively) go willingly to be sacrificed, enacting the rabbinic (post-biblical) rendition of the story, present already in Josephus and his contemporaries, wherein both father and son are imagined as rushing, sometimes even joyously, one to slaughter, the other to be slaughtered.⁸

Still, never before had the two opposing readings of the aqedah, willing self-immolation versus imposed sacrifice, been in such contention as they are in contemporary Israel, where they have been resurrected with vengeance by (mostly secular!) authors, artists, other intellectuals, and politicians. In this contest, the aqedah signifies broadly diverse, sometimes diametrically opposing psycho-political attitudes that range from stoic heroism and ideological martyrdom to passive victimhood or its inverse: fanatic (often aggressive) resistance.⁹

Since 9/11, moreover, the global fascination with sacral metaphors has spread like wildfire, extending from self-declared religious movements to secular cultures. Awareness of the danger involved in this resurgence of the sacred within the so-called modern, secular West, has called attention to the symbolic valence of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Thus, what has until recently been a specifically Israeli emblem of inter-generational aggression is now in evidence in American popular culture, from Henry Bean's 2001 underground film The Believer to the 2006 comic book Testament: Akedah by Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp.¹⁰ Add to this the turn to polytheistic blood sacrifice in European communities, and the gory specter of human sacrifice returning as a ritual practice, not just an emblem, scarily looms on the horizon.¹¹

In view of this contemporary climate, my analytic and comparative history of attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century seems to be timely. By zeroing in on just one acute manifestation of this ethical, psychological, and political issue, and by extending my probe back over two millennia to include biblical and classical sacrificial narratives (Iphigenia et al.), I hope to contribute to the on-going conversation about the afterlife of foundational Western sacrificial models, be they voluntary or violent.

My point of departure is the pervasive revival of traditional sacrificial discourses in Tel Aviv, namely in secular Israel.¹²I use this adjective with caution, fully cognizant of its problematic nature, as recent studies of modern nationalisms have made amply clear. Within the particular context of my topic moreover, secular is meant first of all to distinguish between the long tradition of rabbinic and mystical commentaries that have interpreted the Binding of Isaac as part of a divinely ordained Jewish scripture,¹³ and its various rewritings in modern twentieth-century Hebrew discourse that consciously at least had perceived itself free of these traditional constraints. That in practice this freedom has only partially materialized will become clear throughout this study. My findings, however, confirm Talal Asad's argument that despite the religious provenance of all forms of political life (Clifford Geertz), and even though theological and political concepts share common structures (Carl Schmitt), it is not enough to point to these structural analogies, because the ostensibly same concepts operate differently in secular discourses according to the historical formations in which they occur.¹⁴

Asad's point was inadvertently anticipated by the late Israeli man of letters Adam Baruch. Using his religious upbringing as an Archimedean vantage point, Baruch flippantly deconstructed, if you will, the Israeli preoccupation with the Sacrifice of Isaac, suggesting that it is a peculiarly secularist obsession (see our epigraph).¹⁵ I beg to differ. The sheer number of traditional commentaries on the Hebrew Bible titled Aqedat Yitzhak belies his statement. It is certainly more accurate to say, as Baruch himself subsequently suggests with poignant irony, that this core narrative has a different function in a world where God is only a metaphor. More importantly, the pious-versus-secular opposition he relies on seems to be losing ground in Israel, as a growing number of observant, if not pious, Israelis have been entering the contemporary political, in a sense, secular, wrestling with this troubling Jewish legacy.¹⁶

Indeed, one of the intriguing findings of this study is that although the Israeli internal contest over the meaning of Isaac's near-sacrifice is in the end politically driven, the political division runs not along the pious-secularist divide, but rather within both camps. Unlike the emblematic contest over the meaning of the Eucharist in post-Revolution secular France, for example, where, as Ivan Strenski has shown, the national struggle unfolded mainly between Catholics and Protestants,¹⁷ the modern Hebrew-Israeli somewhat analogous process began within the secular camp. Only recently—in the wake of the 1967 War—did it start to spill over into a divided religious camp as well.

The reasons for this difference will become clear as we go along. For now let me only point out that in some sense, the Hebrew-Israeli story may be said to have taken off—symbolically—from the scene of victimization that is to my mind the undeclared trauma at the heart of Strenski's study, the Dreyfus Affair. Driven mostly by East European analogous affairs—the infamous Russian pogroms of the late 1880s and their later reincarnations—Jewish nationalism was intent on transforming future Isaacs from sacrificial victims (à la Dreyfus and myriads of East European Jews) to heroic self-immolating sacrifices on the altar of the matria (moledet, the motherland)…. The unforeseen complications engendered by this effort constitute the thrust of the story I tell in the following pages.

My exploration of the ups and down of a century-long odyssey of modern Hebrew Isaacs is refracted through the multi-faceted scholarship on human sacrifice, victimization, violence, martyrdom, and other ‘noble deaths.’¹⁸ This wide-ranging literature emanates from biblical and historical studies, cultural and linguistic approaches to anthropology and religion, and psychology and gender studies. In this global conversation, the voice of modern Hebrew culture is hardly present. Though much ink has been spilled over this topic (mainly in Hebrew), no study has so far attempted a synoptic genealogy that would outline the modern evolution of, and resistance to, the core sacrificial tropes of Hebrew culture throughout the twentieth century.¹⁹

The present study attempts to fill in this gap. It aims at identifying the particular qualities that enabled the Hebraic primal scene of sacrifice to become a suitable trope for expressing both the glory and the agony of collective and personal trauma. To paraphrase Asad, my query aspires to outline a historical grammar of the old-modern Hebrew sacrificial trope rather than treating it as a sign of an essential phenomenon.²⁰An intrinsic aspect of the grammar is the (mostly absent) analogous story of Ishmael's banishment qua sacrifice (Genesis 21), and the unavoidable contemporary moral and political implications of this absence. Another essential aspect is the analysis of gender. By studying the stories of male near-sacrifice alongside the presumed enacted sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter (Jud. 11–12) and its own classical Greek analogues, and by paying special attention to women's rewriting of both, this study helps answer some intriguing psycho-cultural questions: How should we interpret the gender difference between the Hebraic archetypal sacrificial story and its many Greek variants, where the sacrificial victim is mostly a virgin daughter? And how could Israelis have turned around a biblical scene traditionally read as a trope of obedience (à la feminine resignation of the Greek virgin sacrifices) into a trope of violence, synonymous with the oedipal conflict? Moreover, why have some of them insisted on rewriting Abraham's test, the one ostensibly signaling the repression or control of aggressive family dynamics, as the Hebraic psychological equivalent of those Greek myths that give free rein to precisely these forces? Finally, what literary and linguistic qualities enabled the Hebraic primal scene of sacrifice to serve two masters, to stand for glory and agony, elation and trauma?²¹

I should point out, however, that although my sources are not exactly entangled and confused parchments, as Foucault has famously redefined Nietzsche's genealogy, they are certainly documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times. To further paraphrase Foucault, these documents do not ‘keep their meanings,’ nor do their desires point in a single direction.²²Culled from both promising and the most unpromising places (ibid.), my wide-ranging cultural sources draw a complex picture of the vicissitudes of ancient Hebrew sacrificial narratives throughout the last century. They include a variety of genres—fiction, drama, poetry, memoir, art, historical and scholarly discourse—and they provide multiple, sometimes contradictory answers to such historico-cultural questions as: What exactly is meant by the modern Hebrew collocation motiv [motif] ha'aqedah? What is the function of this motif in the emotional and ethical economy of the national Jewish psyche and politics? How and why and when had the story of Isaac's Binding shed its religious-ritualistic connotation and turned into a secular metaphor, now used to signify national, military self-sacrifice and especially heroic death in battle? Why have some Israelis shifted from reading it as a scene of inter-generational consensus to rewriting it as the emblem of the forcefully imposed surrender of one's life? In other words, how has Isaac lost his Christological self-sacrificial image, and morphed from a self-appointed martyr into a self-perceived victim? And under what circumstances was he (or she) compelled to become an enraged Oedipus, one who rebelliously denies the urgency or need for sacrifice, one who casts his father in the role of a fanatic sacrificer, sometimes imagined as Laius, Oedipus's father, who tried to get rid of his son for fear for his own life? To put yet another spin on my query, when and why has Abraham's knife stopped hovering in midair for the Israeli mind?

Reading against the grain²³ of the prevailing consensus about both the emergence of the Zionist aqedah and the timing of its several transformations, my study offers new answers to these questions. My revised time table uncovers pockets of resistance to the concept of national sacrifice as early as the First World War, and full-blown oedipal challenges to historical martyrdom as early as 1942. In tracing this strain to its almost forgotten precursors during the formative years of the State, I unravel a dialectical intellectual history that extends and deepens previous assessments of the tensions and discontinuities animating Jewish and Israeli culture—between the sacred and the secular, the individual and the collective, modern self-determination and faith, peace and war. Moreover, my findings also show that the Israeli sacrificial discourse is not a biblical motif—as Israelis have habitually called it. Rather, it has always been part and parcel of the post-biblical martyrological legacy, which itself has had a lifelong tense relationship with Christian martyrology.

My study of twentieth-century Hebrew sacrificial discourses therefore takes us back to ancient sources, from the early Apocrypha (Jewish and Christian alike) and rabbinic midrash, to the medieval Sefer Yosippon and the post-Crusade Hebrew chronicles and liturgy.²⁴ Most surprisingly, it traces the birth of the Isaac as a military hero to a neologism, hardly remembered today, that was actually invented in Palestine/Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel) under the impact of Russian Orthodox martyric tropes.

Other sources of inspiration and resistance uncovered here include such antithetical nineteenth-century thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard and Alexander Herzen, not to mention twentieth-century luminaries from Durkheim, Freud, and Buber, to Scholem, Sartre, and Faulkner. In addition, I show that historical research of medieval Jewish martyrdom has affected the periodic conflagration of interest in sacrificial narratives throughout the twentieth century, climaxing in the recent ideological wars in Israel and the critical psycho-political battle that began in the 1970s and is still going strong.

Through this unearthing of the mechanisms and strategies operating in the contest over so-called secular national sacrifice of one particular time and place, this study ultimately problematizes recent evaluations of sacrificial violence enacted on self and others in the name of any gods, be they religious or secular (Girard, Derrida), while contributing to our overall understanding of what the consequences of secularization as such might be. It will therefore be painfully relevant to any people of the book, and even more so to the secular cultures they have spawned. It should be ultimately of interest to anyone troubled by the dangerous contemporary politicization of religious symbols and by the forbidding realization that secular rewritings of scriptural topoi might have contributed to this process.

Introduction

Sacrifice for Gods and Country: Practice and Theory

No ram was caught in the thicket

for me.

I bound

and slaughtered.

God had no respect unto me—

He laughed.

—Sh. Shire, 1962

Not from the written page will a city rise,

But from fire, and wood, and burnt sacrifice.

—N. Alderman, 1965

Cities [poleis] can only be founded on guilt. […] Sacrifice is the cosmic machine that raises our guilty lives to consciousness.

—R. Calasso, 1993

This is how we live here, in this duality. We are overfilled with religious symbols without believing in God.

—H. Gouri, 1971

The Judeo-Christian scriptures should be regarded as the first complete revelation of the structuring power of victimage in pagan religions.

—R. Girard, 1987

The relationship [between Freud and his father] seems almost to follow an archetype of the relations between immigrant Jewish fathers and their talented sons in modern times. All such sons have been, in a sense, father-slayers. But unlike the fierce Primeval Father of Freudian mythology, these Jewish fathers have been more than willing victims, eager to be slain.

—Y. H. Yerushalmi, 1991

Sacrificial Violence: Terminable and Interminable

The modern study of sacrifice, human sacrifice in particular, has had an intriguing history for the past century. Since the spate of theorizing in the late nineteenth century, scholars have agreed that sacrifice is essential to human society. Yet their evaluations of the why and how of this ritual vary greatly. There is a world of difference, for instance, between the benign view, presented over a century ago by Robertson Smith, that as a collective ritual, sacrifice was largely a festive meal that was given sacrificial character by inviting the god to partake in it, thereby strengthening both social bonds and a connection with the world beyond,¹ and Nietzsche's cynic conviction that man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifice, because he discovered that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.² Needless to say, the goal motivating this cruel exercise in bodily mnemonic inscription (shades of Kafka…) is not, according to Nietzsche, the grace of the divine, but rather an economy of tribal debt to the ancestors.³ The conviction reigns, he says, "that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments (89).⁴ Moreover, it is the fear, the dread that one can never give the ancestors enough, that from time to time leads to wholesale sacrifice, such as the notorious sacrifice of the first-born; in any case blood, human blood" (ibid.).⁵

It is precisely the issue of human blood that is most relevant to my topic, however. The question is what insights do early theories of sacrifice offer into the status and identity of the human sacrificial victim? Paradoxically, the classic study by Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1899), declared recently to be the first theory of sacrifice,⁶ has little to say about the victim, animal or human. Content to define its function as an intermediary, the one that separates them [the sacrifier and the god] while uniting them,⁷ the authors were much more concerned to define and delimit the obligation of the sacrifier: The sacrifier gives up something of himself but he does not give himself. Prudently, he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive (ibid.). As shown by Strenski, the opposition constructed here between giving up the self and giving of the self was politically motivated: it was meant to dispute precisely the idea of total human self-giving, both national and religious, promulgated in France by intransigent Catholicism ever since the onset of the Reformation.⁸

Not so the Jewish tradition. Here, a high value had been put on the substitution of animal for the human victim; it is precisely this lesson that the traditional reading of Genesis 22 is presumed to teach us, although it flies of course in the face of a basic tenet of the theory of sacrifice, namely, that ‘in the beginning were the animals.’ According to Robertson Smith (whose reconstruction of the ancient rites of the totem god guided Freud in Totem and Taboo), animals were not substitutes for humans; they were sacrificed as highly valued beings in themselves.⁹ The plain sense of Genesis may intend a similar chronology, especially if we read its textual sequence as a ‘historical sequence.’ After all, both Abel and Noah made animal gifts/offerings to God without waiting to learn any lessons from Abraham's trial. So when did this preference change? Only when humans had lost their sense of kinship with the animal world, Robertson Smith suggests. When humans began to recognize human life, or rather the life of a tribesman, as a thing of unique sanctity (362–63), animals lost their innate sacredness and were chosen as victims for their expendability, whereas human sacrifices were reserved for seasons of extreme peril (366).

Needless to say, at this stage the sacrificial victim was not deemed inherently holy anymore, but rather became sacrosanct through the rite of sacrifice. Yet while the Semites insisted, according to Robertson Smith, that the [human] victim be kin, some societies, the Carthaginians for example, began the pernicious and violent practice of sacrificing human substitutes: slave boys had been privily substituted for the children of their best families (363).

A reader weaned on the Hebrew tradition (myself for instance) must experience a cognitive dissonance upon reading this last statement for the first time. In the Hebraic mind sacrificial substitution evokes everything that is supposed to endow the Bible with the aura of progressive morality: the abolishing of child sacrifice and the instituting of animal offerings or other equivalences in its stead. The legend about the institution of proxy sacrifice and the legend on [Mount] Moriah's praises, Shalom Spiegel says in his path-breaking study, The Last Trial, came together to proclaim […] that henceforth if anyone wishes to take upon himself the strict obligation of ancient practice to sacrifice the first issue of the human womb […] it is downright sin and profaning of the Name of Heaven.¹⁰ As we shall see, it is precisely the vanishing of substitutional options from contemporary life that is one of the major motives for the Israelis’ obsessional return to their ancient sacrificial narratives.

Spiegel, however, produces his elaborate traditional ‘lesson’ as a backdrop against which he sets up counter-models from pagan, Christian, and later Jewish texts, where this substitutional process has been stopped, and human sacrifice was enacted. But nowhere do his proof-texts support the idea of the pernicious deception involved in using human sacrificial substitutes. Nor is this practice in evidence in later rewritings of the Jewish and Israeli core sacrificial narratives. If equivalent substitution is not possible or available, the Jewish way is to offer the best one can give—oneself or one's offspring.¹¹

This is a Jewish self-perception, naturally, the way Jews, as agentive, willing subjects, have experienced their own acts of sacrifice and martyrdom. How they were perceived by others is another story. In the rhetoric of early social science of sacrifice, eloquently outlined by Mizruchi, Jews no doubt fall precisely into the rubric bemoaned by her sources—those expendable social groups, the objects elected, violently of course, for the pernicious and deceptive role of the substitute sacrificial victim, better known as the scapegoat. With this we are getting close—perhaps too close for comfort—to the rhetoric and practice of anti-Semitism and Nazism, and to post-Holocaust wrestling with this very legacy, from François Mauriac to Giorgio Agamben.¹²

Although this particular topic falls beyond the boundaries of the present study (as I explain below), the ethical pressure it exerts has no doubt affected the work of late twentieth-century scientists of sacrifice, most famously, the literary and cultural interpreter René Girard. Girard sees violence as inherently interminable because of the mimetic structure of human desire that dictates envy and revenge. His early theory highlights the cruel deception and violence involved in the process of scapegoating or victimage; at the same time, however, it paradoxically posits the human scapegoat as society's only security valve against the spread of violence. Since these surrogates are elected by force from the others, from dispensable social groups, the cure is in fact no less violent than the disease, as Giorgio Agamben's recent deconstruction of the Roman marginal figure of Homo sacer makes clear.¹³

Indeed, Girard was not alone in his zeal to expose the roots of pernicious violence. A new science of violence seems to have erupted in the early 1970s, when his Violence and the Sacred was joined by Homo Necans (Killer Man) by the Swiss classicist Walter Burkert, and Jacques Derrida's discussion of Plato's pharmakos (scapegoat) in Dissemination.¹⁴ All three studies were published in 1972, perhaps in the wake of the republication of Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence in Angelus Novus (1966). A juxtaposition between the divergent approaches of these scholars (and others, with the exception of Derrida), took place a decade later, in a debate on the origins of human violence, held in California in 1983 and published as Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation.¹⁵

Not surprisingly, the debate over the origins of violence and—more importantly—over the idea that its curbing is the basis for culture and civilization, was filtered through the lens of ritual sacrifice, human sacrifice in particular. Moreover, as was already evident in Girard's (then) recent work, The Scapegoat, scripture turned out to be a major textual reference for the discussion. Except that now the Gospel and the Christian Bible¹⁶ were replaced by the more politically correct term, The Judeo-Christian scriptures (see our epigraph).¹⁷ The latter, we should note, concurrently showed up in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard's most adamant attempt to uproot the commonplace sacrificial reading of the Gospels.¹⁸ As we shall see, however, it is precisely this mistaken reading (according to Girard) that was borrowed by Jewish and Israeli historians and authors in their Bloomian agons with their own scriptural sacrificial legacy.¹⁹

Girard's apotheosis of the Bible as being the first to replace the scapegoat structure of mythology with a scapegoat theme that reveals the lie of mythology (Violent Origins, 118), laid the foundation for the discussion recorded in Violent Origins. It obviously opened the door to a lot of questions, as his primary challenger, Burkert, was quick to observe (ibid.). A classicist, Burkert argued from and in defense of mythology, offering a memorable reverse reconstruction of the original scene of scapegoating in hunter society: the group surrounded by predators that will give up only if at least one member of the group falls victim to them.²⁰ Nevertheless, in his analysis of the Elysian mysteries, Burkert too insists that though sublimated in the myth and symbolized in ritual, the theme of infanticide is present in the mysteries (Homo Necans, chap. 5: 282). This observation informs the conclusion of his study, where he warns against the love of violence and death symbolized in the maiden-sacrifice that spring[s] up all the more wildly and destructively amid seemingly rational orders (297).²¹

As a literary Hebraist, I would follow Burkert by arguing from literature and the Old Testament, or rather the Hebrew Bible. In particular I will take issue with Girard's claim that whereas the Bible invented the demythification of myth, literature has continued the process by rehabilitating the victims and overturning the scapegoating on which mythology is founded (115).²² As my study illustrates, it is not the violent foundations of mythology alone that are overturned by literature, but often also those of the very biblical tradition, the old and the new, that Girard so trustingly applauds.²³

Before turning to my Hebrew test cases let me point out, however, that although the question of sacrificial violence is even more pressing today globally than it was in the 1980s, when the conference to discuss the origin of violence was convened, it is for me, as a native Israeli, old hat. The question of violence, whether in the name of the Almighty or later secular gods, is commonplace in a country where the trauma of war and terrorism is never distant, and where the memory of the Holocaust still looms large, affecting both politics and psychology. In Israel, this traumatic condition, until recently often referred to euphemistically as hamatzav (lit. the situation, but implying something like a state of emergency),²⁴ has more often than not been symbolized by the archetypal biblical story, the aborted filicide (or near-sacrifice) narrated in Genesis 22. How and why the divinely prohibited sacrifice of Isaac became a trope for human violence and enacted homicide is an intricate tale to be unraveled in the following pages.

Canon and Nation

In his fascinating autobiography, Life of Strife, Max Brod (of Kafka fame) tells a witty anecdote of his tenure as the dramaturge of Habima, then a relatively new Hebrew theater in Palestine (to become later the Israeli National Theater). Escaping Prague in 1939, Brod was offered the job immediately upon his arrival in Palestine. His memoirs humorously evoke the overabundance of unsolicited biblical dramatic scripts he received (most of which never reached the stage):

After rejecting five plays named Moses, ten King Ahabs, and a dozen Ezras, I would have loved to hang on my door a sign that it is preferable to read the Bible in the original rather than getting excited over its staged versions.²⁵

Brod's quip illustrates not only the popularity of the Bible in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, in the 1940s, but also the tension he perceived between the original and its rewritten versions, whether on stage or on the page. As we shall see in this study, this tension has accompanied the bond between the Hebrew Bible and Jewish nationalism of the past hundred years, as it had done throughout Jewish history in different fashions. This was true in particular, however, for the role of the Bible in molding the modern, mostly secular, Jewish identity, which emerged in the Land of Israel in the early twentieth century. As a literary repository of ancient Israel, the biblical corpus in fact functioned as a nation-building text, precisely like other ethnic myths that had been recovered and disseminated under the banner of European romanticism and nationalism. As such, it affected all aspects of the Hebrew national secularist renaissance, impacting its language and letters, ideology and politics, aesthetics and ethics.²⁶

Just like other modern national identities, however, Israeli identity has been recently contested by contemporary critics, on the grounds that it is nothing more than a cultural construct, product, or invention, if not altogether an imagined community.²⁷ On the face of it, one might well apply this critique to the history of what was recently called Israel's bibliomania. This mania gained momentum, argues Anita Shapira, especially after the establishment of the State of Israel, when the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, elevated the Bible to the chief intellectual focus of the young state.²⁸

One need not forget, however, that this elevation was not a new invention. In fact, the Bible has enjoyed this elevated status in Jewish intellectual life throughout history, despite the competition from later post-biblical sources (in particular from the Talmud, the codified oral law). In the Jewish tradition, Robert Alter argued, the Hebrew Bible had been doubly canonized—as an ethical as well as a literary (and linguistic) model.²⁹ It is this double canonicity that made possible its rich after-life in the modernist, secularized world of letters, far beyond the scope of Jewish writing (as evidenced by Alter's biblical journey from Kafka to Joyce, Faulkner, and other modernists).

In light of this historical continuity, the attempt to co-opt the Bible in the service of nascent Jewish nationalism is not surprising, nor can it be considered as mere construction. On the contrary: it may remarkably illustrate the approach suggested by Anthony D. Smith and his cohorts.³⁰ Rather than ‘imaginary,’ Smith sees nationalism as a community's response to its quite down-to-earth emotional needs to connect with its ethnic myths, symbols, and memories.³¹

In their bi-millennial attempt to connect with their doubly canonized Bible, the people of Israel has utilized all three measures attributed by Smith to such national efforts—reiteration, continuity, and appropriation (86). In the modern era, however, a new measure enters this process: secularization. Although of long standing, this element has only recently been labeled as modern midrash.³² This label expresses both the continuity and the discontinuity in the retelling of ancient myths or symbols. Through the midrashic activity, Hartman and Budick suggest, the canon is transmitted and even extended by an intertextual reflection that has accepted the task of memory and preservation while adding a spacious supplement.³³ As we shall see, the tension between memory and supplement, loyalty to the original and deviation from it, is at the core of the present study. Not unlike the rabbis of old, contemporary Jewish authors, Israelis not excluded, are engaged in making sense of received scripture, in adjusting it to their own reality, hence the term midrash, which historically refers to post-biblical (rabbinic) legends and homiletic interpretations of scriptures. Unlike the rabbis, however, they (or most of them) are doing this under the aegis of secularism, hence the qualifying adjective modern.

The question is whether this continuity is still with us today. It would seem that in the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars, and in light of the unrelenting Arab-Israeli conflict, the Bible has been losing ground, despite its canonicity. As is well known, a new Israeli geo-political map has surfaced, one of extreme internal polarization. Divided along ideological, political, religious, and territorial lines, contemporary Israel is also split over its cultural and biblical heritage. While right-wing religious nationalists see themselves as the rightful contemporary heirs of divine authority embodied in the sacred canon, left-wing liberals of both religious and secular convictions contest their opponents’ claim of exclusively holding the correct interpretation of the Bible, and reject the latter's view of the Bible as an absolute moral authority.³⁴

The erosion in the Bible's status has manifested itself in the wars fought in the Israeli education system (e.g., How much Bible should be taught to grammar- and high-school students? Obviously, much less than their teachers had learned…), as well as in academic research. In what is known as the new archeology, the historical veracity of the earlier parts of biblical Israelite history has been totally debunked, since there is, ostensibly, no evidence in the ground.³⁵ Ironically, it is the books of Joshua (the conquest of Canaan) and Judges—precisely the books that Ben-Gurion had studied and fetishized half a century earlier—that are now treated as imaginative fables.³⁶

The furor that this declaration has caused among Israelis raises doubts, however, about the alleged erosion of the status of the Bible. Apparently, despite nominal