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The
biblical story is not one of autochthony
but one of always already coming from somewhere
else.

The
concept
of a Divine Promise to give this land,
which is the land of Others,
to His People Israel
is a marker and sign of a bad conscience
at having deprived the other
of their
land.

Thus,
at the same time
that one vitally important strain of expression
within biblical religion
promotes a sense of organicistic "natural" connectedness
between this People and this Land,
a settlement in the Land,
in another sense or in a counter-strain,
Israelite and Jewish religion
is perpetually an unsettlement of the very notion
of autochthony.

~!@!~

Traditional
Jewish attachment to the Land,
whether biblical or post-biblical,
thus provides a self-critique
as well as a critique of identities
based on notions of
autochthony.

One
Jewish
narrative of the Land
has the power of insisting on the powerful connection
without myths of autochthony,
while other narratives,
including the Zionist one,
have repressed memories of coming from
somewhere
else.

These
very repressions
are complicitous with a set of mystifications
within which nationalist ideologies
subsist.

We have
two alternative
modes in the Bible itself
for the construction of Jewish identity,
one based on genealogy and
one on autochthony.

PAUL
leveled his primary attack on the former,
while I am suggesting that it is the latter
that is primarily responsible
for the racist effects
in Jewish
cultures.

The
alienation
of social constructions
of divinity and cosmos
by conquest groups
resembles the alienation
of socially constructed kinship
and status terms
from domestic kin groups
to corporate descent groups -
in anthropological jargon,
from the ego-centered kinship system
of families
to the more patently fictional
ancestor-centered
systems of
lineages.

Distinguishing
between forms of "weak transcendence"
& "strong descendence,"
it can be argued
that "family membership
illustrates weak kinship;
tribal membership,
strong kinship."

Strong
transcendence
is that
which is more aggressive,
because it is more embattled
and doing more
ideological work
in the service
of land
control:

"Status
that depends on land
is generally
more precarious and alienable
than status
inscribed on the body;
mobile subsistence economies
tend to
conceptualize status
in terms of
the signifying indices
of the body
- indices of gender,
age,
and kinship -
rather than of
more conspicuously artificial constructions,
and are closer
to the weak end of the
weak-to-strong
scale."

Thus
those following
this kind of reasoning,
contrast
two covenants,
one
the Mosaic,
which rejects
"the imperial gods
of a totalitarian and hierarchic
social order,"
and one
the Davidic,
which enthrones
precisely those gods
as the one
G D.
I could
similarly contrast
the two trajectories,
the one
toward autochthony
and the one
against it
in the same way:
the former
promotes status
that depends on land
while the latter
provides for status
"in terms of
the signifying indices
of the body."

The first
would serve
to support the rule of Israelite kings
over territory,
while the second
would serve
to oppose it:

"The
dialectical struggle
between antiroyalism
and royalism
persists throughout the course and formative career
of the Old Testament
as its structuring
force.
It sets
the tent
against the house,
nomadism against agriculture,
the wilderness against
Canaan,
wandering and exile
against settlement,
diaspora against
the political integrity
of a settled
state."

My
argument,
then,
is that a vision
of Jewish history and identity
that valorizes the second half
of each of these binaries
and sees the first
as only a disease
constitutes
not a continuation of Jewish culture
but its
subversion.