Peter Jelavich reviews The Afterlife of Moses

Michael P. Steinberg. The Afterlife of Moses: Exile, Democracy, Renewal. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2022. 240 pp.

Review by Peter Jelavich

14 June 2023

Michael Steinberg’s The Afterlife of Moses: Exile, Democracy, Renewal is based on the premise that “the story of Moses and the Exodus” is “a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law” (p. 1). The tale is open-ended, lacking both origin and conclusion: “The origin and death of Moses are obscured; the constitution and future of the community forged at Sinai remain undefined” (p. 1). The story’s lack of an “origin”—which Steinberg (drawing on Edward Said) considers mythic and essentialist—means that Moses and the Exodus signify a “beginning,” which is both “human and historical” (p. 1). It is also a tale of exile—a condition that allows, and even necessitates, ever-new beginnings and reconstitutions for both individuals and communities. Steinberg argues that in the modern era these aspects of the story have encouraged secular adaptations, with political implications for liberal democracies.

Some readers may find Steinberg’s premises unpersuasive, but he posits them in order to counter the view of Moses as the mythic founder of the nation of Israel, inasmuch as the open-endedness of the story provides “a historical correction to its own mythologization” (p. 8). The universalism of the Ten Commandments allowed “the liberation of politics from myths of origin” and offered “the possibility of a viable nation-state autonomous of the cultural and mythological pull of nationalist politics” (p. 11). Steinberg traces the increasingly secular and abstract “afterlife” of these overtones of the Moses story via a whirlwind tour of (among others) Sigmund Freud, Baruch Spinoza, Michael Walzer, Jacques Derrida, Carl Schorske, Hermann Broch, and Hannah Arendt (in more or less that order). He also attributes to music a special role in the constitution and reconstitution of individuals and communities; hence Richard Wagner makes several appearances as well as Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.

Steinberg obviously believes that the ideas he addresses should bear upon the fraught politics of the present, though he rarely descends from the heights of theoretical abstraction. He opines in passing that “nonnationalist nationality has been largely accepted and successful in Germany” (p. 11)—a questionable statement, as varying degrees of nationalism (and racism and anti-Semitism) extend deep into Germany’s politically middle-of-the-road middle classes (and not just in the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, which he considers an exception). But Steinberg’s main concerns are centered on the United States and Israel. He deals with the former in his second chapter, entitled “Under Lincoln’s Eyes” (referring to his belief that Daniel Chester French’s statue of Abraham Lincoln is in dialogue with Michelangelo’s Moses). Not surprisingly, the culmination of the book concerns Israel as seen through the lens of Yaron Ezrahi—certainly one of the best analysts over the past decades of the increasing tensions between nationalism and liberal democracy. But readers of Steinberg’s book might well wonder whether its secular renditions of the Moses story could bolster support for liberalism in Israel. Steinberg himself concedes that “Mosaic law is not democratic. It is autocratic and theocratic” (p. 8). And it is that version of Moses that—theologically and theoretically justifiable or not—inspires the current Israeli regime.