The Longest, Most Convoluted, Revised and Thickly Imagined Title Deed Possible

Needless to say, the title refers to the Hebrew bible, about which I will now proceed to speak in highly hypothetical, but hopefully generative, terms. That central to the Bible is a covenant between God and the Jewish (let’s set aside disputes over this name for now) people is uncontroversial; that the entire Bible is nothing more than an ongoing consideration of the history, consequences, implications, terms, identity of each partner, etc., of this covenant might be a bit more so, but probably still mostly plausible. But if we get more precise and, we could say, more “realistic,” about the origins of this covenant (following the suggestion of Bernard Lamborelle) and say that the covenant is in fact a title deed to a piece of land granted to someone who came to be called “Abraham” as part of an allocation of responsibility for supervision of the parts of an empire by the emperor (or his delegate), we enter into more unknown territory. For one thing, this approach makes the entire affair far more political, because if God gave your people the land in perpetuity that would be an end to it,you’re your rights would be secure; if, however, the memory of a more mundane exchange is never completely lost, the claim to the land must constantly be re-asserted. (As an aside here—but an extremely important point to return to—this hypothesis also helps to clarify another ancient Judaic innovation: entering into a covenant with (a) God rather than the parties to a covenant swearing to a god as the judge between them.)

This very practical, material and legal notion of the founding covenant sheds light, as I mentioned in a recent discussion of the Hebrew Bible, on the intense concern with transmission of inheritance in the stories of the patriarchs, along with the willingness to leave uncensored and uncriticized some rather unscrupulous maneuvering. Jacob has a case for inheriting the birthright over Esau that might very well stand up in whatever court we could imagine presiding in that case, and perhaps Esau’s willingness to renounce it so easily should be taken to suggest that Jacob really deserves it—but, still, why emphasize such dubious proceedings, and, especially, the deception of an elderly, blind Isaac, with the aid of the sons’ mother? There is perhaps some nomadic admiration in this another stories of the patriarchs of besting the other in a negotiation, regardless of the method, but applied to one’s own brother? The stories are remarkable, but it seems to me clear that their authors could not care less whether we see the protagonists as heroic or not. What do they care about, then? Providing evidence that the title deed has, indeed, been transmitted from its original lessee through a verifiable chain of inheritances, until the authors of the story itself have received it. I’m suggesting that all of the stories fall into place if we start with the assumption that nothing else matters here, and that at every point along the way the assertions of other claimants, some of whom are no doubt forgotten (or have been assigned to different latter-day referents), are disputed, implicitly and explicitly (but in ways that would have been recoverable at the time of composition and subsequently became sources of speculation). This would account for the need to construct a line from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob even though, as Tzemah Yoreh points out, in the earliest version of the story, Abraham in fact sacrificed Isaac. In this case, the attempt to “cover up” a murder so as to preserve a viable line of inheritance resulted in one of the most generative foundation stories of Western civilization. Eric Jacobus suggested to me that the extremely unpleasant scenario of Abraham essentially pimping out his wife/sister Sarah to other Near Eastern potentates might bear traces of attempts to acquire more land or create further alliances through the exchange of sisters as wives (Hagar is an Egyptian). Here there might be some tension between the insistence on preserving all evidence pertinent to the legitimacy of the title deed and the need to claim that the lessees are indeed worthy of receiving and transmitting it. It would be interesting to read the story of Joseph and his brothers in this terms—the extreme case of a very young son (even if of the favored wife—and how does preference for one wife over the other, one child over the other—these resonant stories of envy, rivalry and resentment so important for the development of mimetic theory—come into play to legitimate one line of inheritance over others?), and moreover, one who has taken up a powerful position within an alien culture (migration to which no doubt muddies the claim to rightful inheritance) might require the powerful account of self-concealment, testing, revelation and forgiveness we see here. (The Pharoah gives Joseph land for his family to settle in Egypt—no opportunity to legitimate ownership over a piece of territory is missed.) Disputes over claims can be reconciled by narrativizing those disputes as the playing out of resentments that must be portrayed in the detail and with the plausibility necessary to rule contending claimants out of court. We see in Joseph’s story a kind of ranking of the brothers that no doubt drew upon later borders and disputes.

The primeval, antediluvian stories make new sense in these terms as well. For the Talmudic rabbis (at least in one register), the whole point of the creation story was not the grandeur of an omnipotent being who creates the entire universe out of nothing out of love for humans as the apex of creation, but that it attested to God’s ownership of the entire earth, and therefore His right to gift any part of it to whomever He wished. The polemic against Babylonian creation myths and imperial legitimacy that has long been noted in these stories also function as arguments against imperial ownership of this particular land. The argument becomes anti-imperial since we have now erased all but a few traces of the originally earthly grant of land—and this is necessary because we’re no longer talking about whether it’s the Israelites or some other Canaanite tribe that has a right to the land, but about imperial states making increasingly universal and absolutist claims to sovereignty. There’s a kind of sleight of hand here as God must be retrojected as the other partner in the exchange while the specificity of the grant makes it look suspiciously like more mundane ones. There is never a point, either in the Bible or in all of Jewish history, where some important, lasting tradition just took the seemingly obvious step of saying (the more “Protestant-like” forms of 20^th century Reform Judaism reverted to “nationalism” with the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Israel), if our covenant is with God, who is everywhere, and we are now ourselves everywhere, why do we need to insist on our right to that plot of land which we will never see, much less inhabit? There is some sense that the entire collectivity and. its history would collapse if such a step were to be taken, however immaterial or merely notional that step would actually be. The entire paradox of the God of All choosing this single people, whose persecutions testify to the truth of that God and his grant, with all its implications beyond the Jews themselves, presupposes this “irrational” tenaciousness. If my hypothesis has merit, it would also contribute to explaining the various layers of the Bible, its “supplementary” composition, from the earliest “E” layers, through the later “J”, “D” and “P” layers. Each layer, no matter how problematic, had to be retained in its entirety, because it preserved indispensable evidence of the continuity of the transmission of the deed, while the identities of the partners and the terms of the deed required constant revision. The guiding thread here would be “proving” that those of us in possession of these documents, and the broader community and ruler we serve, are, in fact, the “same” people who possessed these documents and asserted title to the land prior to us. And this requires extremely agile textual acrobatics because, as I think, from an “objective,” historically informed perspective, would be indisputable, the identity of those at different points along the line of transmission is not only unprovable but unlikely. The birthright must have been “stolen” at various points along the way, and traces of this and its denial would be found throughout the text. And God is nothing other than He with whom we have covenanted once the contact with the original has been lost and through all the twists, turns, exiles, returns, demographic shifts, changes in patron-client relations, etc. Torah study is the ongoing work on the terms of the deed or bailment, conducted through the constant retracing of all the crisscrossing lines of descent and transference and ensuring they are all at least consistent enough with each other. God is He who helps us through the trials and disruptions of inheritance precisely because H also wants to keep His side of the deal. This is the Jewish stack of scenes.

It would be easy enough to take all this to deny the legitimacy and even reality of the “Jewish people,” and denounce the Jewish tradition as a pack of lies, etc. My reading is exactly the opposite—there is a tenaciousness and willingness to undergo trials in the preservation of this legacy in the “selfishness” of its very “materialist” claims that legitimates far more than simple father to son property and monarchical transmissions (none of which have ever lasted anywhere near this long, and all of which have required a bit of “stretching” along the way). I would even say it makes the title deed legitimate as applied to the State of Israel. Politically, anyway—obviously the UN or some international court couldn’t be expected to recognize this title deed from an earthly lord over three millennia ago, but the tenaciousness mentioned above has in the meantime built up various subsidiary legitimations to hold onto. Nor is it then surprising that, once in possession of the deeded territory, Jews would take and hold possession regardless of competing claims. My argument certainly lends support to those who see something intrinsically “political,” radical, revolutionary, liberal, democratic, or maybe simply argumentative, in Judaism—Judaism as we know it today (Talmudic Judaism) took shape, on the account I’m proposing here, through an extension, elaboration and sharpening of the Jewish claim to the land through a sustained, highly mimetic, argument against Roman (and no doubt other) imperial claims. The Mishnah, the foundational text of the Talmud, is apparently an essentially utopian legal order modeled on but also meant to sharply differentiate from the highly sophisticated Roman legal system. (It is likely that the Talmudic legend that God first offered the Torah to all the nations of the world and then only to the Jews after the others had refused its terms—the younger usurping the older again—is suggested by the Roman practice of publicly posting imperial decrees.) I can see how others would find it annoying that the Jews would never give up those claims, including the claim that following Jewish law was their way of upholding their side of the covenant and was therefore critical to them having any right to assert their claim, eventually, to that land. No doubt we could trace the various formations of Judaism through similar confrontations, sometimes explicit, sometimes cautious and subtle, against claims made by other empires (Christian and Muslim most prominently) that would challenge, even in the slightest, the currently asserted status of that originating covenant. (The elevation of the Davidic dynasty and the establishment of Messianic traditions around it would also make sense in these terms.) But this means that the Jews are indeed always jockeying for power, and usually under unfavorable conditions that might require some “Abrahamic” or “Jacobic” maneuvering, as they try and form covenants with some current earthly power that will provide the political space needed to keep their claim alive. (There would be a kind of tropism toward imperial that would model the original covenant.) It also means that Jews are far less likely to take literally and “idolize” any particular authority, ruler or political system, and that they can’t help but provide for a certain degree of “ferment” within those systems. For those desirous of a scene of transcendence beyond such “wrangling,” this is all understandably infuriating. This desire for such transcendence is logocentrism, the desire to have an unmediated relation to an original, authoritative voice, and Judaism is indeed allergic to anything like that. For Judaism, we are always on another scene. The scripto-centrism of “Talmud,” as “the art of disagreement” (Sergei Dolgopolski) implies a continual retrieval of the terms of a disputed inheritance. God had to speak directly to the people (“reveal” Himself) in order to lay down the terms of the deed, but we don’t need to know any more about Him, even if the conversation is prolonged—we just need continual information regarding the transmission of the terms of the deed.

A genuinely secular Jew, then, would be one who rejects the title deed and renounces any part of it. This will lead to acrimonious splits among Jews because much intra-Jewish interaction, even under conditions of attenuated assertion of “entitlement,” presupposes that the substance of the interaction concerns sorting out the inheritance, its preservation, justification, and the distribution of responsibility for defending it. If one renounces the inheritance, one must abjure and, indeed, abhor all that, and even set one’s sites on its destruction. Such a Jew must embrace unequivocally some kind of essentially “revolutionary” authority, i.e., some authority founded on the sacrifice of the king and the “consensual” foundation of a new order by the “people.” And will likely devote all the energies to defending, elaborating upon and drawing all the “logical” conclusions from that contractual order that his (or her!) ancestors would have devoted to maintaining the title deed and their part of the “class action” created to ensure it always has a hearing. I’m no Jewish authority, so it’s not for me to either endorse or criticize such decisions, even if they seem to me less “free” than a willingness to partake in the ongoing negotiations of title deed and its “nomos,” with all its ambivalence. In a world where Jewish doings are always completely public, that willingness also entails an engagement with the ‘others,” the “Goyim,” if you like, and such engagements, on the hypothesis I’m proposing here, would have Jews frankly seeking support for their title deed in open and explicit exchange for supporting in any way within their (our) power the arrangements and nomos by which other people sort out their affairs. In other words, dealmaking with earthly powers, in accord with their power, in a way that makes the assertion and clarification of the Judaic title deed consistent with the capacity of other powers to maintain such orders as would make them willing and able to stand by the deals they make. A world in which we work on making all the longest standing claims of inheritance as consistent with each other as we possibly can. In this way the highly dysfunctional dynamic of addressing political obstacles by making accusations of antisemitism that in their very presumed effectiveness reveal an interplay of power that falsifies the absolute asymmetry implicit in the accusation should be abandoned. This kind of accusation is certainly not all that contemporary Jewish (and especially Israeli) politics consists of, but even some is too much. Jews would be performing a public service by helping break the association of powerlessness with virtue that the commemoration of the Holocaust turned into a virtual political theology—and which underwrites, ideologically (theologically), “woke” politics.

The hypothesis I’m presenting here is also perfectly consistent with the hypothesis I previously entertained, regarding the Hebrew Bible as a product of scribal culture, rooted in the pedagogy of literacy issuing in iterations and variations of the kernels of wisdom literature, expanding them into narratives, often narratives that permeate legends and chronicles of kings and battles. Training for the writing and preservation of contracts, treaties, grants, and ledgers recording debts would have been among the central concerns of scribal pedagogy and would have provided a vocabulary for describing our broader exchanges with each other and reality. Maintaining and revising a kind of ur- or meta-grant, with all of its attendant reciprocal obligations, would provide an effective ordering device for organizing and thinking about the more transient exchanges conducted on less intensely commemorated scenes. Presenting all everyday exchanges as governed by the terms of the original deed would allow for communication across scales, or the stack of scenes. Thinking about my everyday actions, even the most minute, as part of my attestation to and defense and fulfillment of the original deed would produce generative forms of logic, dialogue and narration that move seamlessly across expanses of time and space, so that one can be on the same scene as one’s ancestors even while being right here with one’s interlocutors.