Leviticus Thinking and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism

Abstract

Scripture, according to Daniel Boyarin, offers two discrete political options, the options developed by rabbinic Judaism and post-Pauline Christianity. From our late twentieth-century perspective, he says, both leave something to be desired: If on the one hand the insist ence on corporeal genealogy and the practice of tribal rites and cus toms produces an ethnocentric discourse, a discourse of separation and exclusiveness, on the other the allegorization, the disembodiment of those very practices, produces the discourse of conversion, coloni alism, the 'white man's burden'—universal brotherhood in 'the body' of Christ.1 In response to Boyarin's suggestive observation, I want to make two interrelated arguments. First and most important, that, as the testimony of Western colonialism bears ample witness, these two religious discourses and the political options they offer are not dis crete, but inextricably entangled. They are not discrete, because, de spite Paul's claims to the contrary, the differences between the He brew and Christian scriptures are relative, not absolute. Second, that, as the work of many recent literary critics bears witness, the repre sentation of Scripture as a profoundly ironic, postmodern text often impedes the task of historicizing race and colonialism; in particular, it frustrates the need to understand the interdependent relationship of Hebrew and Christian imperative in shaping the discourse of coloni alism.

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