The Book of All Books: An ingenious study of Judaic legacy

The Book of All Books

Author: Roberto Calasso, tr. Tim Parks

ISBN-13: 978-0241446720

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £25

In his Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, Sigmund Freud drew on recent archaeological finds to make some remarkable claims about Jewish history. The original Moses, he argued, was Egyptian, and was murdered by his followers. Far from worshiping the deity of the Old Testament, the followers of Moses had embraced a Midianite volcano god. Later, racked by remorse, they grafted the story of the Egyptian Moses on to their cult leader, who also became known as Moses, and as the myth grew the historical reality was forgotten.

Writing at a time of unparalleled risk for the Jewish people, the psychoanalyst was aware of the heretical gravity of his claim, but for Freud it was human history that produced the narrative of racial destiny, not the other way round: “It was the man Moses who created the Jews.”

Roberto Calasso, who died in July 2021, discusses Freud’s portrait of Moses in The Book of All Books, his own no less ingenious study of the Judaic legacy. Moving between retellings of biblical stories, heuristic commentary and speculative cultural theory, Calasso spins an epic that is heroic and anti-heroic at once. Portraits of Saul, David, Solomon, Abraham and Moses present a chronicle of relentless patriarchy but Calasso’s attention wanders constantly to the figures on the fringes, such as Moses’ Ethiopian wife Zipporah. When the ever-vengeful Yahweh resolves to kill Moses, Zipporah hastens to circumcise their son Gershom and flings the foreskin at Moses’ feet, calling him “a bridegroom of blood”. It works, and Moses is spared. No more is heard from Zipporah.

It is a puzzling episode but one more example for Calasso of the sacrificial exchange that defines the relationship of Yahweh and humanity. Yahweh is remarkably fond of a burnt offering, and by the time we come to the Holocaust, Calasso is forced to point out the “immense, undeserved honour” accorded the Nazis in granting the name of a religious sacrifice to their genocide. Calasso moves from the Nazis’ satanic parody of Jewish sacrifice to some thoughts on the messiah via Walter Benjamin, ending on a note of mystical incompletion (“When the Messiah comes, he will very likely pass unobserved, because he will only change some small things. And no one knows which.”)

The Book of All Books is in no sense a work of conventional theology, and prominent among its themes is the extraordinary violence required to sustain divine authority. By returning scripture to its wider roots in myth and hearsay, Calasso works to defuse the mystique of patriarchal violence. In this, Calasso has a long literary pedigree. Matthew Arnold’s decommissioning of the Bible as a work of dogma and reinvention of it as a literary classic is one of the great cultural moments of the nineteenth century. TS Eliot was not convinced, suggesting that “Those who talk of the Bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity”. The question of his own beliefs is not one Calasso feels compelled to broach.

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir explains to Estragon the different biblical versions of the story of Christ and the two thieves, lamenting the confusion among the four evangelists and how people only seem to know one version. Why should this be, he wonders, to which Estragon volunteers ,“people are bloody ignorant apes”. Calasso describes a similar aporia in a celebrated letter of Kafka’s on Abraham, in which the Bible says of the patriarch, “he put his house in order” – except the Bible says no such thing. Elsewhere Calasso describes raging disputes between the Hillelites and the Shammaites over whether the Song of Solomon should be accepted as a canonical biblical text, with the question finally going to a vote. The canonical text and its apocryphal hinterland exist in a state of fluid exchange; perhaps Kafka is now on his way to becoming an Old Testament prophet in his own right. Whatever his personal beliefs, Calasso the biblical exegete has achieved a comparable, intimate reciprocity with his text.

The Book of All Books completes a decalogue that began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, in time to catch the attention of Italo Calvino. With Calasso’s death, European writing has lost a master of comparable stature.

David Wheatley’s novel Stretto will be published in 2022 by CB Editions.