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Europe Nations Congress May 8-11, 2011, Aveiro

Hagith Sivan: Inscribing Sinai. Ancient and Modern Palimpsests

If I were to reconstruct a consecutive history of the Sinai peninsula as a simple journey leading from its earliest records to contemporary European tourism, I would be inventing a fictional narrative and imposing it on the past. By contrast, to read the Sinai as crux of cultures, be it a metaphor of the “elect nation” or a locus of divinely conferred Law, presupposes a constructive engagement between myth and history, between utopias and realities, between truth and fable, condemning neither pair to calumny. My purpose is to trace the mutations of a unique myth of origins that celebrates utopia and orthodoxy. I analyze the emergence of the Sinai as a soil of timelessness insularity during the two best documented periods in its history, late antiquity (c. 350-750 CE) and modernity (19th century). I am addressing one question: how a foundational myth, once made to accommodate the birth of biblical monotheism, had been repeatedly recruited to serve other discourses, that of a Roman-Christian commonwealth, and that of Europe-as-Christendom? Let me begin with a modern palimpsest (power point-image). In April 2010, Sotheby’s New York listed an oil painting entitled “a Frank encampment in the desert of Mount Sinai”, estimated at 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 USD. Painted by John Frederick Lewis and signed 1862, the picture sold for 1, 874, 500 USD, possibly to a middle eastern potentate. Lewis had been commissioned in 1842 by Lord Castlereagh to “paint a picture for me of ourselves, a party”, a pictorial record of the English nobleman’s journey across the Sinai in that year. The result, done in watercolor, was lauded by John Ruskin, the famed 19th century arbiter of art, but rejected by the patron. Lewis

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subsequently produced another Sinaitic scene, nearly an identical replica of the original but executed in oil. It had been auctioned several times through Christie’s and in 2010 through Sotheby’s. Lewis’ painting depicts an animated exchange between two figures, a rather majestic Bedouin sheik splendidly clad in vibrant colors [image-figure], his feet squarely planted

and his gaze fixed on a reclining Lord Castlereagh comfortably surrounded by eastern and western amenities including a carefully laid table, a tent, hookah (pipe), tea, books, newspapers, a map, and even a lap dog seated upon a cushioned chair! [image-figure] In the background Lewis positioned the monastery of Saint Catherine, a monumental testimony to Christian asceticism, scorched by Sinai sun and sands since the fourth century. Complementing the staged encounter is the Sinai summit, where God had spoken with Moses and the Israelites. Mountain and monastery provide a faint hint of a systematic exploration and endless conversion of myths of origins. The juxtaposition of a contemporary tableau of human

engagement within the context of “nature” (mountain) and “culture” (monastery) signified the insertion of two non-native elements, the occident and Christendom, into the authochthonous Sinai. Conflating modernity with antiquarianism, and European orientalism with eastern mores, Lewis’ brush constituted a shrewd commentary on the interpolation of European identity into the biblical Orient, an allegorization of cultural history that divided Europe from the East yet united it with Sinaitic religious heritage. For Lewis, who lived in Cairo for a decade (1841-1851), the Sinai desert was a space of “solemn contemplation of the stars at night”, an inspiration for an exercise of astronomy. For the monks cloistered behind the massive walls of Saint Catherine, the “precipitous and terribly wild” Sinai was home, the only place where they could live in a “careful rehearsal of death” (to use the inimitable expression of the sixth century historian Procopius of Caesarea). For the nomads of the Sinai, in antiquity and modernity, pilgrims and travelers represented employment opportunities, although the pact between Bedouins and Europeans could end up in robbery and murder (in 1883 Professor Edward Palmer of Cambridge was murdered in the Sinai, possibly over a disagreement regarding payment to his Bedouin guides). As so often in the narratives that feature the “orient” and the “occident”, the former remains an object of translation, interpretation and representation. Verbal and illustrated juxtaposition of oppositions, like Lewis’ Sinaitic scene, formed a commentary on

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emerging modern European identity. The conspicuous position of Lewis’ sheik seems to defy yet also to confirm the dictum of Lewis’ contemporary, the famed German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), who argued that non-Europeans deserve scant attention since they live “in a kind of state of nature”, a prehistoric condition in which they have been from the beginning (“On the Character of Historical Science”, 46, cited in Perkins, Christendom and European Identity, 164). “Their antiquity”, Ranke added, “is legendary, but their condition is rather a matter for natural history” (ibid). The judgement echoes uncannily the impressions of Egeria, a Christian pilgrim from either Spain or Gaul who visited the Sinai c. 380 CE, for whom the presence of Saracens (Bedouin Arabs) provided little beyond a landmark in contemporary geography (below). Lewis’ Sinaitic and Ranke’s non-Europeans perceptions delineate the paradox of a secular and universal Eurocentrism still firmly anchored in narratives, classical and Christian, that embraced yet excluded the ‘Other’ (Perkins, Christendom and European Identity, 183). This inexorable connection between continent and creed rested on what Ernest Troeltsch (1865-1923) termed “de-orientalization”, or what I would term “Sinaitic (re)formulation”: From being a Jewish sect Christianity has become the religion of all Europe. It stands or falls with European civilization, having lost entirely its Oriental character by becoming hellenized and westernized. Our European concepts of personality…of progress ...our enormous capacity for expansion and for the interconnectedness of the spiritual and the temporal, our entire social order, sciences, art—all these rest…upon the basis of this de-Orientalized Christianity (Christian Thought, 1923, 25) Troeltsch’s insistence on divorcing Europe from its Oriental-Christian antecedents meant that the Sinai, common cradle of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, was ripe for a new and critical evaluation. The need for reassessment extended to the pages of popular literature. In 1835 a weekly entitled The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (my underline) presented its readers with a Sinai as a land abiding in myths promulgated and promoted by local monks and Muslim. The November 7th issue (no. 231) included a brief article on Mount Sinai, preceding a longer one on the sword fish. At its head appears a handsome etching entitled “Ascent to Mount Sinai” [image] taken from Voyage en Arabie Petrée (incorrectly attributed to two gentlemen, MM Leon and

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Laborde--the author was in reality a single individual named Leon de Laborde). The unnamed journalist, solicitous of topographical accuracy, warned readers of the snares that undergird the interminable discussion of the precise route of the Exodus. Instead, the journal set out to limit its exposé to spots substantiated by “local traditions and religious establishments” and referred to by “descriptions of travelers” (mostly based on Burckhardt’s 1822 Travels). The artful combination of folklore and faith of the journal article is instructive: At the very top (of the Gebel Mousa/Sinai mountain) stands a church which is the principal object of the ascent to Christian pilgrims. The church is built of granite but has suffered much from the Arabs who have exerted themselves to the most to destroy it. They believe that the Tables of the Law are concealed somewhere under this building and have made excavations on every side in the hope of finding them. The Moslems themselves have a poor unadorned mosque, about thirty paces from the church, on a somewhat lower peak. They hold it in great veneration and it is the place of their pilgrimage. The Bedouins often visit it and slaughter sheep in honor of the Jewish lawgiver to whom they make vows and entreat his intercession on their behalf. These poor people are not without peculiar relics of their own on this mountain. For along the ascent is shown in the rock a semblance of a footprint which the Moslems firmly believe to have been made by Mohammed when he visited the mountain. When he did so or that he ever did so, history does not state. But the fact of such a visit is firmly believed, not only by the Moslems but by the monks of Sinai who on their part have a print of his hand to match with this print of his foot (p. 435). Sinai-bred communities, Christian and Muslim, confronted and confounded modern European optimistic beliefs in the progress of universal history. The monks of the Sinai, guardians of its Christian traditions, had become a fixture of the landscape, not unlike the peninsula’s non-Christian nomads. Both groups colluded in grafting their foundational figures into the primordial mountain peak. Both charted the Sinai as a unique territory, prime “receptacle of divine energy”. The expression had been coined by John of Damascus (John Damascene, 676-749 CE), a Christian Arab theologian who fought vigorously against iconoclasm. The Sinai, site of biblical theophanies and home to “saints” (=monks whose lifestyle imitated Christ), topped John’s list of locations and objects worthy of universal veneration (Contra imaginum caluminiatores, cited in Caner, History and Hagiography, 20) John’s preferential assessment of the Sinai relied on generations of imaginative projections that “transformed the barren Sinai wasteland into a kind of palimpsest where monks, ascetics and visitors might directly glimpse, move or settle over traces of the old” (D. Caner, Sinai Pilgrimage and ascetic romance in late antiquity’, paper delivered at the fourth Inter Shifting Frontiers conference, San Francisco, 2001). Throughout late antiquity Sinaitic insiders and outsiders engaged in an exegesis designed to fit the peninsula’s natural geography into the biblical narrative which they both anticipated by reading and sought to recreate for the benefit of an audience at home. More than in any other locality with biblical associations, western pilgrims found the Sinai a terra incognita, a landscape ready to be reshaped to suit their needs. There one could identity, with impunity, every single stage along the memorable route of biblical liberation. At all such localities pilgrims recited appropriate prayers. Male pilgrims could also choose to cut their hair and beard on the Sinai summit pro devotione, as a pious act or for the sake of a vow (Caner, 6), a gesture that traditionally marked the coming of age for male adolescents in the Roman world. Atop Mount Sinai this act signified a symbolic rite of passage into Christian adulthood.

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Left largely unsettled, the Sinai presented the face of a large nature reserve, an island of sorts, timeless and pristine. Even the exceptional difficulties of the journey itself did not mar the moments of spiritual sublimation. On the contrary, the hardships intensified a sense of primordiality that translated into a contemporary Christian context the trials and tribulations experienced by the ancient Israelites. Even the occasional brutality of the Arab nomads was interpreted as an unpredictable arm of divine providence. A fifth century narrative of a pilgrimage undertaken by a man and his son underscores the harrowing risks of staying in the Sinai. Throughout the journey the two stayed with monks, whom the father described as “men attentive to the divine”. The harmonious coexistence of pilgrims and monks was shattered when A phalanx of barbarians [=Arab nomads] fell suddenly and unexpectedly…attacking at break of dawn, just when the reverent one [=monks] finished their sacred hymns… The barbarians ran at us howling like mad dogs, shouting incomprehensibly as they plundered. They seized the food that had been gathered for the winter…then led us out of the church. After stripping off our ragged cloaks, they ordered the oldest among us to line up, naked, for execution. (narrationes, 4.1, trans. Caner) These were men whose mode of subsistence and manner of belief belied “civilization”: [They] inhabit the desert extending from Arabia to Egypt’s Red Sea and the river Jordan, who practise no craft, trade, or agriculture at all, but use the dagger alone as their means of subsistence. They live by hunting desert animals and devouring their flesh or else get what they need by robbing people on roads. If neither is possible and their provisions run out, then they consume pack animals for food. Theirs is a bestial and bloodthirsty way of life…They especially like offer [to their divinity, the Morning Star=Aphrodite=al-Uzza] children distinguished by beauty…whom they sacrifice on piles of stone at dawn (narrationes 3.1-2) The narrator’s conventional juxtaposition of culture and nature, of Romans and barbarians, of ascetic silence and Arab din, erupted in catastrophe. The rest of the pilgrim’s tale is dominated by gruesome descriptions of monks seeking martyrdom and of the narrator’s search for his abducted son, both leading the pilgrim to question divine providence: Why didn’t the Burning Bush burst into flame, as in the days of old? Why didn’t it burn the accursed ones [=”barbarians”] with fireballs as they approached? Why didn’t the earth split open and swallow them up, as it had once consumed all of Korah’s band, together with tents and kin? Why did Mount Sinai keep its terrifying prodigies silent?…Instead the Avenging Power did nothing…Instead, the pious ones [=monks] fell helpless beside the very Bush itself and the mountain where the Law had been given, just like sacrificial animals …(narrationes 4.8) . Yet, this was the very same bush that other ancient pilgrims, like Egeria, viewed complacently while noting that the Holy Mountain [=Sinai] was too rocky to allow natural vegetation, even of thorny bushes! For her the voice of the desert did not convey a menace at dawn but a sign of God’s approval of her own presence on sacred soil (cf. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, HR 6.12). When a traveling rabbi in antiquity heard the mountain rumbling, he believed that this was no more and no less God’s own voice asking to be released from a binding oath. The rabbi interpreted the divine demand as a request

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implying that God was asking to be released of the divine oath which condemned the people of Israel to exile (below). Rather than reporting dangers, Sinai visitors registered a sense of wonderment, as though the peninsula, through monks, monuments and mountains, staged a huge installation which allowed each pilgrim to become a part of a reenact biblical episode. The moment gained intensification from reading of the relevant biblical texts and an offering (=the Eucharist), exactly on the relevant piece of ground: A remarkable thing which must have been planned by God is that even though the central mountain on which god’s glory came down is higher than all the others, you cannot see it until you arrive at the very foot of it to begin your ascent…I realized it was like this before we reached the mount of God, since the monks had already told me about it and when we arrived there I saw very well what they meant…At ten o’clock we arrived on the summit of Sinai, the Mount of God where the Law was given and where God’s glory came down on the day when the mountain was smoking. The church which is now there is not impressive but it has a grace all of its own. And when with God’s help we climbed right to the top and reached the door of this church, there was a presbyter coming to greet us…He was a healthy old man, a monk from his boyhood and an “ascetic” as they call it here--in fact, just the man for the place…[There] a whole passage was read to us from the Book of Moses, on the very spot! We made offering and received communion…(Itinerarium, 2.7; 3.4-6, Wilkinson) Egeria’s comments illustrate how sacred memory was enshrined within the monastic communities of the Sinai and spread through contacts with outsiders. The satisfaction of travelers depended entirely on the process of connecting actual sights with a biblical marker. Constant interaction between geography and the biblical text, between pilgrims and guides, between reality and expectations, accounted for the coining of Christian-Sinaitic identity. In Late Antiquity the Sinai experience contributed to a new kind of universal geography, not of Roman expansion but of Christian transformation. The recasting of biblical territory in Christian terms provided a compelling challenge and a powerful symbol of Rome’s renewal as a Christian commonwealth. Trodden under Egeria’s nimble feet, the biblical past became the present, and the present the past. Places, argued Allan Pred, always represent a human product, rather than a simple record of how they look (Making histories and constructing human geographies: the local transformation of practice, power relations, and consciousness, 1990). In mapping unfamiliar environments, a cognitive process shapes the self and the exterior world to reflect self image and destination image. In modernity, as in late antiquity, the two best documented Sinaitic eras, the Sinai emerged as a product of human imagination and ideology, a locus of transformation of maps and memorials. Like island imageries that deploy insularity to frame a series of spatial and ideological contradictions, the Sinai generated multiple utopian discourses (Islands in History and Representation). From the Exodus down to modernity it was repeatedly molded as a constructed space superimposed upon natural space, negating the latter’s differences while extending an invented uniformity to its multiple surfaces. In the 19th century the Sinai featured on the travel map of several distinct European groups: pilgrims seeking to see and to touch the places recorded in the biblical Exodus; scholars engaged in reconstructing the precise route of the Exodus or in gathering data from manuscripts to authenticate the biblical text; scientists in search of samples of all sorts in order to enrich the fast growing European collections of botany, zoology,

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geology, etc; and professional and amateur travelers who crossed the Sinai as they headed from Egypt to Ottoman Palestine/Holy Land. Travel literature generated by the more literate of these modern travelers found a lucrative niche in the European book market. But it was the hunt for biblical manuscripts in the library of the monastery of Saint Catherine that captured the imagination of Europeans to the point of becoming an object of international scandals. The discovery and publication between 1844 and 1859 of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest Greek manuscript of the Bible by the colorful scholar Constantine von Tischendorf, opened a new page in the book of Sinaitic-European palimpsests. In 1881 a new English translation of the New Testament, based on the Codex Sinaiticus (and other manuscripts), was published and immediately sold a million copies in England alone. Wagons waiting to take away copies for distribution jammed the London streets surrounding the printing houses. By then, there were about 3000 known manuscripts of the New Testament, triple the estimated number of known manuscripts in the 1840s, when von Tischendorf embarked on his Sinaitic explorations. (There are now about 10000). More significantly, the knowledge that the Sinaitic library may contain other biblical manuscripts attesting the authenticity and antiquity of the available biblical texts, generated a European community of scholars eager to trace the Bible to its genuine linguistic roots. Underlying scholarship was the serious matter of determining responsibility for schism and heresy. To appreciate why scholarly discoveries of this sort provided potential fire to raging public debates over the biblical text, it is useful to recall one “heresy” trial, in 1887, of William Robertson Smith, a Scottish professor of theology at Aberdeen, whose article contributions to the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition) became front page news. Especially inflammable proved the article, “The Bible”, in which Robertson Smith argued that neither the Pentateuch was written by Moses nor the Gospels by the Apostles. Although neither contention was original, its appearance in the hugely popular Britannica prompted a scandal, a trial, and the dismissal of the young author who refused to recant or apologize. Rather, Robertson Smith used the opportunity to air his conviction on the importance of freeing the church from a Babylonian captivity of an unscientific reading of Scripture. The presiding judge exonerated him of heresy but found Robertson Smith guilty of “a culpable lack of sympathy with the reasonable anxieties of the Church regarding the bearing of critical speculation on the integrity and authority of Scripture”. Six years later, In 1883, Robertson Smith succeeded Edward Palmer, who had been murdered in the Sinai, as professor of Arabic at Cambridge. On another occasion Robertson Smith undertook a verbal campaign on behalf of biblical textual criticism against Claude Conder and the nascent discipline of biblical archaeology. Conder, an officer and an engineer, had been entrusted by the newly formed Palestine Exploration Fund with the survey of western Palestine between 1872 and 1878. In his published work Conder claimed that biblical exegesis of well known textual critics, like the Germans Julius Wellhausen and Albert Socin, attributed tendency and motives wholly foreign to the ancient writers and to the real spirit of early human

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literature. Specifically Conder asserted that “those who know the simplicity and piety of eastern thought will always find it hard to believe that the vivid and graphic narratives of the Bible are to be regarded as cunningly political essays”. The “war” that erupted in 1887 in the pages of the popular British Contemporary Review, was described as a battle between “camel-riding Conder and text-rendering Robertson Smith” (Varisco, “The Archaeologist’s Spade and the Apologist’s Stacked Deck”, 76). Robertson Smith responded with a direct attack on Conder’s most cherished assumption, namely that only those who knew the biblical Orient at first hand were in a position to judge the accuracy of the biblical text: I have resolved to show…that when a half informed man [namely Conder] comes forward with pretension to authority, when he claims to judge and to condemn those who really know…when he has got the ear of the public, and when he discourses about biblical criticism, he is not to be listened to or argued with, but simply passed by…(Contemporary Review 1887, 561-2) Such skirmishes led to the rebirth of the Sinai in modernity as a land born in heterodoxy and separation. There was only one way to close the chasm between “camel-riders” and “text-renders”. Combining terrain and text, scholars set out to discover biblical manuscripts in a monastery where Christian ascetics had been guardians of Scripture for well over a millennium. In an atmosphere in which the fundamental compositional unity of the Bible was subjected to an analysis that refuted Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, it seems as though only the Sinai itself could warrant the authenticity of the printed Bibles used in modernity. A new myth of origins was set up about the transmutation of the biblical text in a single library whose librarians and scribes had been collecting and copying texts since the fourth century at the very foot of God’s Mountain. Unthwarted by a journey that had hardly changed since antiquity, the scholars who flocked to the Sinai in the 19th and early 20th centuries had to contend with generations of Sinaitic scribes whose priorities, understandably, did not match those of modern European erudites. Thus the oldest Syriac (Aramaic) text ever discovered (in 1894) was a palimpsest. Its discoverers, the remarkable sisters Agnes Lewis Smith and Margaret Gibson (whose story has been recounted beautifully in Soskice 2009 The Sisters of Sinai), had to peel layers of harrowing tales of sexual brutalities inflicted on female saints that the Sinai scribes had conscientiously applied to the original parchment of the biblical text. Images of scholars bent on sifting through dusty boxes of books in the library of the monastery of Saint Catherine, or of avid travelers, like Lord Castlereagh, seeking to savor the orient, document a peculiar European-Sinaitic domestication process that echoed late ancient metamorphosis, that grafted the social universe of the Bible into familiar landscapes. Like the translators and revisers of King James Bible, the Europeans who ventured into the alien landscape of the Sinai reconstructed the Old Testament with components borrowed from their own environment. The process was reassuring (Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible).

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The Sinai keeps revolving. In late antiquity a solitary rabbi who traveled, probably on the wings of his imagination, to biblical destinations in the Sinai, brought to bear his own world on his interpretation. When he saw huge rocks that looked, to him, like giants sleeping on their back, he believed these to be Hebrew dead of the desert, women and men denied entry to Promised Land. The interpretation prompted action. The rabbi tore off a piece from his prayer shawl as token of mourning but became glued to spot, from which stance he was freed only when he reinserted the textile fragment into its original place (Babylonian Talmud Baba Bathra 73b-74a). Like all other pilgrims, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, the rabbi read nature as a close world conceived to obviate the boundary of the biblical text. By systematically exploring the metaphors of origin, Sinai stories suggest that at stake was not an elusive biblical reality but a homology of differential distances. One may then ask: is the myth telling the truth about the biblical text or rather reflects the skill of the exegete? Is myth or interpretation the privileged version of the paradoxes posed by the Bible? Can one decide between the fabrication of the landscape and the scholarly-theological metaphorization of the biblical text? United through a single text, Sinaitic travelers and biblical interpreters formed an impossible couple, reflecting the power of the Sinai to constantly interfere between religion and cult, between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Perhaps no other anecdote reflects these points as well as does another rabbinic tale: Once my guide said to me: Come, I will show you where heaven and earth touch one another. I took up my bread basket and placed it in a window of heaven. When I concluded my prayers, I looked for it but did not find it. I said to my guide: Are there thieves here too? He replied: It is the heavenly wheel revolving. Wait here until tomorrow and you will find your bread basket. (BT BB 74a)