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A Matter of Distinction: On Recent Work by Jan Assmann

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2010

Eliza Slavet
Eliza Slavet*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California
*
eslavet@ucsd.edu
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Extract

The study of memory and its collaborators (history, narrative, and trauma) has been at the center of both the German- and English-language academic worlds for at least the last fifteen years. While many of the “canonical” texts overlap, the anxieties and implications of recent scholarship have often been quite distinct, particularly in discussions of the memory and history of the Holocaust, and more generally, anti-Semitism, Jews, and Judaism. This phenomenon is played out in the debates about Jan Assmann's work, particularly since the publication of Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997).

Type
Review Essay
Information
AJS Review , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , November 2010 , pp. 385 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2010

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References

1. Many thanks to Joel Robbins and Anthony Burr for their editorial suggestions.

2. Throughout the essay, I cite pages from Moses the Egyptian and The Price of Monotheism within the text, using the abbreviations ME and PM respectively. Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Assmann, Jan, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung: oder der Preis des Monotheismus (Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003)Google Scholar; Assmann, Jan, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Savage, Robert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

3. On the question of “anti-Semitism” and alternative terminologies, see Schäfer, Peter, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 197–211Google Scholar. While Assmann more often discusses “anti-Judaism,” he generally uses the term “anti-Semitism” to encompass all hatred of Jews, whether religious, cultural, or racial.

4. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, “Memories of the Nile: Egyptian Traumas and Communication Technologies in Jan Assmann's Theory of Cultural Memory,” New German Critique 96 (2005): 103–33Google Scholar.

5. See, for example, Schäfer, Peter, “Geschichte und Gedächtnisgeschichte: Jan Assmanns Mosaische Unterscheidung,” Memoria—Wege jüdischen Erinnerns, Festschrift für Michael Brocke zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Klein, Birgit and Müller, Christiane E. (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2005)Google Scholar.

6. Assmann's argument about the un/translatability of Gods in the ancient world has been extensively critiqued in Smith, Mark S., God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008)Google Scholar.

7. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, ed. Taylor, Henry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 230–31Google Scholar.

8. See Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Boyarin, Daniel, “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,” Representations 85 (2004): 21–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Shaye J. D., The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

9. For a more detailed examination of Freud's claims about the inheritance of memory (and by extension, Jewishness), see Slavet, Eliza, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

10. It is preposterous to insist that such beliefs are outdated, primitive, or barbaric, particularly when month after month (year after year) we hear of yet another scientific study that claims to “prove” the genetic unity of Jews from around the world. Most recently, see Wade, Nicholas, “Studies Show Jews' Genetic Similarity,” New York Times, June 10, 2010: A14Google Scholar.

11. Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Strachey, James and Freud, Anna, vol. XXIII (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 117–18Google Scholar.

12. As Assmann is well aware, he can easily be criticized for seeming to blame the victim by arguing that (Judaic) monotheism initiates a process of enduring violence (as much as one of perpetrating it). “But what else is martyrdom,” he asks, “if not the responsibility of victims for their fate?” From here, he acknowledges that the Nazis were entirely uninterested in their victims' “faith,” but he fails to note that faith itself is generally not a primary category in the definition of Jews' own definitions of Jewishness.

13. See, for example, the work of Till van Rahden: “History in the House of the Hangman: How Postwar Germany Became a Key Site for the Study of Jewish History,” Lecture presented at University of California, San Diego, March 1, 2009.