Migration As Foundation: Hagar, the 'Resident Alien', As Euro-America's

Home , Black Hole (House), Cities of Refuge, Hagar, Ishbak, Muslim Europe, Xenophilia

_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches _full_abbrevjournaltitle: BI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) _full_issue: 4-5 _full_issuetitle: Migration, Foreignness and the Hebrew Bible _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Migration as Foundation _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0

Migration as FoundationBiblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 439

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Migration as Foundation: Hagar, the ‘Resident Alien’, as Euro-America’s Surrogate Self *

Yvonne Sherwood University of Kent, UK [email protected]

Abstract

In this paper I use Hagar as a type of the shifting modern figure of the migrant, refugee or ‘resident alien’ inside the national family. In a modern update of the productively anachronistic typologies attempted by the Church Fathers, I use the presence of the Egyptian slave in biblical-European foundations to trouble the unstable concept of Europe/Christendom founded on a (distant) Christian heritage. I also use what I’m call- ing the ‘Hagaramic’ to disturb bland invocations of the ‘Abrahamic’ on the contemporary political stage. What happens when we replace the spiritualised, fraternal/paternal figure of the Abrahamic with the Hagaramic: the immigrant mimic of the Abrahamic; the resident female Egyptian alien who is there before, and supports and enables, the ‘true’ family? How does my attempt to use this figure relate to earlier attempts (by think- ers like Sigmund Freud or Edward Said) to draw on strange old biblical figures to force European identities outside themselves?

Keywords

Hagar – migration – alien – refugee – Abraham – Renan – Freud – Braidotti – Brexit – Trump …

* This is a short version of a book length project. The author experimented with different versions of this paper at the Universities of Warwick, Exeter, Manchester and the Dublin conference ‘Bible and Migration’, as well as (in an earlier form) at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin. The author is indebted to all the comments and feedback that she received.

A spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration. Antonio Hardt and Michael Negri, Empire1 … Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe 2 …

In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European3 ⸪

Figures of the Migrant (2016)

This paper has necessarily been forced through several recensions, as it has run to keep up with the spiralling hysteria on the ‘refugee crisis’ and the increas- ingly graphic and draconian closing of the borders under Brexit and Trump. I was first moved to write by the millions of refugees moving into Europe – moving as the result of very specific international interventions, treaties, and political and economic strategies, but presented in the media as if ‘beyond Greece there [was] a black hole of war of devastation’ leading to the surge of people through a ‘kind of loophole’ on the Anatolian coast.4 The refugees did not begin to intrude into our TV screens until they were pressing (the usual idiom is ‘pouring’ or ‘flooding’, as if refugees were water) into the borders and beaches of Europe – and drowning and dying at the borders and beaches of

1 A. Hardt and M. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 213 2 J. Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (trans. P.-A. Brault and M.B. Naas; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 10-11. 3 E. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), p. 44. 4 S. Zizek, The Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours (Allen Lane: London, 2016), p. 49.

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Figure 1 Adi Nes, Hagar (2006). Compare Dorothea Lange, ‘Migrant Mother’, 1936.

Europe. They remained relatively invisible when they were simply moving, en masse, into Lebanon, Iran and Turkey (but not richer countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia). Only when the refugees became a problem for Euro-Ameri- can security and prosperity did they materialise as pixels on our television and computer screens. In a graphic performance of what Peter Sloterdijk calls the self-securitising glasshouse of the ‘world interior of capital’, inhabited by the one and a half billion winners of globalisation, as soon as they intruded onto our glass screens they were presented as a threat.5 Their appearance immedi- ately appeared to us as the question of the viability of their entrance. It was as if the edges of the glass plasma screens on our computers, televisions and iPads had become an image of the border and the ‘invisible boundaries’ that ‘are … virtually insurmountable from without’.6

5 P. Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 8. 6 Zizek, The Double Blackmail, p. 5.

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On the outside of the glass/the border, the foreigner became a powerful figure for ‘us’, concentrating, reflecting and projecting back to us internally generated paradoxes. In her newly timely book Democracy and the Foreigner, written back in 2001, Bonnie Honig advanced an important argument about what the foreigner means to us and how the foreigner means to us. She argued that democracy and liberalism require and generate complex and divided figures of the virtual foreigner. In what she calls ‘liberalism’s own cleaned-up Sinai scene’,7 the people give themselves a law – but this law that ostensibly comes from the people also feels like an alien imposition on the people. Thus political theorists like Rousseau needed the figure of the foreign founder to express this sense of the alien law that is also the law made by ourselves (or our representa- tives, at considerable remove from ourselves). By dramatically giving the consent that is not required of the ones who are born citizens – by going through immigrant naturalisation ceremonies as a public oath and prayer – the foreigner who chooses to become citizen also reminds us of democracy’s sometimes forgotten foundation on consent. In Honig’s own analogy, the figure of the immigrant foreigner rejuvenates and reanimates our investment in democracy, just as ‘the biblical Ruth’s migration from Moab to Bethlehem reanimated the alienated Israelites’ affective identification with their god’.8 The immigrant citizen also models an often-forgotten element of democracy. There is an audacity to democracy. Rights often had to be taken, without permission. The British would never have granted permission for what would become the United States of America, had not that permission been auda- ciously taken – nor would Kings and nobles have invited that new spectre of ‘the People’ to take or share power, nor would former slaves or women or working-class men been invited to play an active role in that ‘People’s’ power. By taking what would not have been given, had she not come here and petitioned, the immigrant reminds us of the ‘honorific democratic practice … of demand- ing … powers, rights, privilege’.9 She reminds us of the power of audacious taking and transgression, which has the potential to build new worlds and new foundations with its ‘potentially inaugural powers’.10 Honig shows how the ‘supplement of foreignness is undecideable’ and ‘shores up and unsettles the people being founded’.11 The projected foreigner in the Brexit and the American elections of 2016 generated the same (home- grown) complex of xenophilia and xenophobia, hope and fear. But now the

7 B. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5. 8 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 3. 9 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 8. 10 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 8. 11 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 32.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 443 focus was primarily economic, with the emphasis less on democracy and more on wealth. Throughout the campaigns, I was struck by how the figure of the spectral immigrant (Hispanic/Muslim for the American electorate or Polish/ Muslim for the British) folded back on us, narcissistically, and allowed us to make equal and opposite statements about our resources, abilities and powers. The complaints – ‘They take our jobs’ and ‘They drain our resources’ – presented ‘our’ life as scarcity, frustration: wasteland. The glory has gone. The glory has been stolen. The time of plenitude (‘greatness’), is not here, in the present. We must try to conjure the mystical greatness and the control that was and will be again. But at the same time, the supplicant immigrant, the immigrant who is quite literally dying to get here, provides us with the very gratifying image of our overflowing wealth. The foreigner-immigrant became such an important figure because she pointed to the paradox – similar to Honig’s paradox, but in a different register – of our insecurity and our security and wealth. In an age of precarity, human capital, labour flexploitation and ‘expulsions’ of so many inside the ‘glasshouse’ from all the imagined securities of that glasshouse, an important double role was played by the spectre of the immigrant foreigner, looking (and flooding) in.12 The one who had so graphically lost her home served as an uncanny alien mirror for the ones who had lost their home through austerity, mortgage crises and the weight of national and personal debts. She mirrored my deficit/my debt – and served as a counterpoint to the ‘dream’ that I am (or will be) living. She reflected my country back to me as my utopia and ruin. She allowed me, or us, to say, both: ‘The gods and spirits are present. And we are strong. And they have gone; and I am lost; and it is weak’. I am deliberately using the idioms of liturgy or lament. Throughout the refugee crisis, key images have emerged like icons – focussing passionate emotions, hopes and fears – and old religious tropes have bubbled back to the surface. Cities of refuge, sanctuary cities, have rematerialised. The old biblical and qur’anic languages of exile, Exodus and return have returned. Interviewed on our television screens, refugees from Syria and Iraq spoke of the ‘sacrifice’ required to get to the ‘promised land’ of Austria and Vienna, and described the perilous journey as an ‘Exodus’ and a ‘journey of death’.13 The grim-faced policeman holding the limp body of the three-year old Aylan Kurdi, circulated like a modern pieta, or a painting of a repentant (?) Abraham mourning Isaac’s

12 On expulsions and dispossession, see, for example, J. Butler and A. Athanasiou, Disposses- sion: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); S. Sassen, Expulsions: Bru- tality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Kelknap, 2014). 13 Talk to Al Jazeera: In the Field, 25 October 2015 (Interview on Al Jazeera [English]).

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Figure 2 Michaelangelo, Pieta, St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, 1498-1499

Figure 3 A policeman holds the body of Alan Kurdi, Syrian toddler, 2nd September 2015 (Reuters)

Figure 4 Natan Nuchi, ‘The Binding of Isaac’, 1984

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 445 limp body (Figs. 2, 3 and 4). The image went viral under the hashtag #Kiyiya- VuranInsanlik, which means ‘humanity washed ashore’. The icons polarised – yes and no; black and white – as if attempt to over- come the paradoxes of the foreigner, once and for all. The exhortations to repentance and global humanity were cut off by sharp images of the razor-wire fence erected across Hungary’s borders, as an emblem of ‘Christian’, or awkwardly ‘Judeo-Christian’ Europe, facing Islam, defining itself against Islam (Fig. 5).14 Orban’s two hundred and eighty-mile long razor wire fence had a very clear pragmatic purpose: to cut off the entrance route to Europe across the Balkans. But it was also thick with all the symbolic material density of ‘Christian’ Eu- rope holding the line against Islam. The barbed wire fence became a prototype for the new walls: Trump’s wall, but also the one-kilometre-long-and-four-me- tre-high anti-migrant wall in Calais, dubbed the Great Wall of Calais. In June 2016, Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party and the Brexit campaign un- veiled the notorious poster Breaking Point, mimicking Nazi propaganda: a mass of exclusively non-white, all male, ‘Arabic’ or middle eastern immigrants, snaking into Europe, interpreted as a body mass of self-evident proof for the call or summons: ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control’. Newly self-conscious walls started to pop up all over the place, especially near where I live, on the coast. The fact that no refugees or boats actually dock in Margate in north Kent did not prevent the sea-wall rising up as an emblematic border and the site for a battle in chalk (Figs. 6 and 7). Soft border. Hard border. Fortress Europe versus universal humanity and human rights. ‘No man [sic], no self, no nation is an island (even Britain)’. Posses- sion. Dispossession. Drawbridge up, or walls coming down. As Étienne Balibar writes in We, the People of Europe?, ‘national citizens can be persuaded that their rights do in fact exist if they see that the rights of foreigners are inferior, precarious, or conditioned on repeated manifestations of allegiance’.15 By mo- mentarily assuming the ‘sovereign’ power to refuse entry or name the conditions of entry, the man or woman with a piece of chalk is able to forget his/her own precarity. Exploiting a strong metaphorical flow between immigration and water (the verb most commonly associated with immigration is ‘flooding’, and that flooding often threatens to ‘erode’ our values), the sea-wall graffiti inscribed the

14 For the construction of Europe as ‘facing Islam’, see D. Guénoun, About Europe: Philo- sophical Hypotheses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 15 E. Balibar, We, the people of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (trans. J. Sw- enson; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 37.

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Figure 5

Figures 6 and 7 Graffiti on the sea wall in Margate, north Kent, UK. Photographs my own.

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‘immigration crisis’ on the very solid structures of sea defences (walls, groynes, breakwaters and revetments) that protect our shorelines by holding back the tides. The debate over whether the border should be firmed up, like a wall, or opened, like a gate, ignored or forgot the complex processes of migration management that, even more than systems of coastal management, have devel- oped carefully calibrated, and constantly changing, techniques for managing incoming and variable ‘tides’. As Julie Mostov points out, borders have been simultaneously ‘hardening and softening’ for decades.16 In a managerial and depoliticised approach to migration politics, migration managers, like coastal managers, attempt to ‘manag[e] flows of good and bad diversity’17 and produce ‘economically needed and beneficial flows’.18 Borders are less like walls or doors and more like filtration system or membranes.19 The advanced bureaucracies of modern states have created stratified categories for types of immigrants: tick boxes and visa types, with their own entrance requirements to tick this particular box and obtain these specific papers. Are you an economic migrant? An overseas student? An asylum seeker? A ‘family member of a lawful permanent resident’? An applicant for a work permit under special DACA regu- lations? Are you in ‘tier 1’ (‘high value’ immigrants or ‘exceptional talent’), ‘tier 2’ (skilled workers), ‘tier 3’ (low-skilled workers filling temporary labour short- ages), or ‘tier 4’ (international students)? In contrast, the non-bureaucratic and less managed world of the Hebrew Bible has just two categories: the resident which is not a legal entity like the ‘permanent resident alien’ that ICE ,גר) alien and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services contrast to the ‘illegal alien’) Points-system migration schemes, placement .(נכריח or נכרי) or the foreigner agencies, brokers and consultants match mobile labour to volatile capital. Stratified and multiple systems of entry, status, residence and legitimacy/legal- ity make the border a complex phenomenon of time as well as space. Some have speedy access, with visas paid for by the firms that head-hunted them for short or long-term projects. Others undergo long periods of ‘indefinite deten-

16 J. Mostov, Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy (New York: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2008); see also S. Mezzandra and B. Neilson, Border as Method: Or the Multiplica- tion of Labour (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 17 A. Lentin and G. Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed, 2011), p. 200. 18 M. Geiger and A. Pécoud, ‘The Politics of International Migration Management’, in M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds.), The Politics of International Migration Management (Migra- tion, Minorities and Citizenship; Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3. 19 Mezzandra and Neilson, Border as Method, p. 8, summarising the arguments of Alessan- dro Petti on the spatial politics of Palestine; see A. Petti, Arcipelaghi e enclave: Architettura dell’ordinamento spaziale contemporaneo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007).

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 448 Sherwood tion’ or pre-emptive refoulement; and/or they remain a migrant – that is, a ‘figure of difference and a target of inclusion’ – for a much longer, perhaps ‘indefinite’ intergenerational, periods of time.20 Outsourced to intergovern- mental organisations which are not signatories to the same universal declara- tions and principles of international law as states, migration management policies cite, without being beholden to, human rights. The antiquated ideal- ism of ‘the good’ is replaced by the experientially validated realism of ‘best practice’, the proven outcomes of tried and tested procedures ‘validated by experience and success’.21 And yet it seems clear to me that many of these icons – these images of walls and open gates – were grasping for a more fundamental language of the future and foundation: the sacred laws of responsibility and hospitality; the language of the political, the ethical, and the religious, and human rights. The icons staged a battle of modalities, summoning and imagining different possible and necessary worlds. Colliding imperatives of must and obligation met exhortations to hospitality and repentance that felt like prayers, or a summoning of better visions of the nation, or a Europe (or America) to come. Many of the theorists that I use in this essay, from Bonnie Honig to Jacqueline Stevens to Sigmund Freud, draw on the old languages of religion in their attempt to find uncanny and unsettling stories for our presents. (They are much bolder in this enterprise than biblical scholars.) Honig couples her story of the paradox- ical foreigner produced by modern liberalism with an inventory of the ancient founding strangers, including Moses, Ruth, Oedipus and the Eleatic Stranger. I want to promote another even stranger story: the story of Hagar, which is to say the repressed story of Abraham, the first father, as an immigrant from Iraq, having sex with the Egyptian-Arabian alien in his house. What does it mean, to echo Freud’s and Honig’s most essential question, to say that the founder was foreign before he was ‘us’, or that the Judeo-Christian was Egyptian and Arabian before it was Judeo-Christian? My hope and wager is that the figure of Hagar, the resident alien, can accomplish a strange work like that of the transgressive, rights-taking foreigner, summoned by Honig, who ‘marks a gap in legitimation, a space that is held open for future refoundings, augmentation, and amendment’.22 The strangeness of the old beginning might just create an opening for us to begin again.

20 Mezzandra and Neilson, Border as Method, pp. 132-33. 21 See W. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015), p. 139. 22 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 31.

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The ‘Haphazard’ and Improvised Family/Nation of the Bible in Contrast to the Regulated Nation/Family in the Modern State

In an interview with Syrian and Iraqi refugees on Al Jazeera on 25 October 2015,23 a young Syrian refugee spoke about wanting to reach the ‘promised land’ that began in Austria – adding that everyone knew that they had a great- er chance of residence in Germany if they had family there (as he did). In lis- tening to him I was struck, for the first time, by a stark anomaly in the fundamental freedoms that allegedly constitute modern democracy and its spatial resting places, Europe and America: the organisation of peoples and nations according to birth. In The Birthright Lottery, written in 2009, Ayelet Schachar noted that, even though they are the subject of inordinate attention, only 3% of the global population becomes permanent residents outside the country in which they were born, while ‘(e)veryone else – namely ninety-seven percent of the global population, or more than six billion people – is assigned the life-long good of membership by the lottery of birth and either chooses, or is forced to keep it that way’.24 Even though ‘gaining privilege by such arbitrary criteria as one’s birthplace or bloodline is discredited in virtually all fields of public life’, it ‘still reigns supreme when it comes to the assignment of political membership – the realm we associate with democracy, participation, and ac- countability – perhaps the domain where we could least expect to see a con- tinuation of inherited entitlement’.25 In States without Nations, published in 2010, Jacqueline Stevens notes that 67 percent of newcomers to the USA were admitted because of kinship ties, while only 16 percent were given legal resi- dency because of skills and wealth.26 A clear question emerges here, as clear as it is repressed. Why have our self-constituting freedoms never included free movement across national borders? Why are we still stuck in an idea of the nation still so tightly bound to nativism and the etymology of nation, from nas- cere/nation, birth/lineage, ‘to be born’? As Jacqueline Stevens points out, in Britain, France, Afghanistan, Congo, Hunduras, Monaco, and the United States – in fact in virtually every single country in the world – ‘citizenship is deter-

23 Talk to Al Jazeera: In the Field, 25 October 2015 (Interview on Al Jazeera [English]). 24 A. Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge, MA.: Har- vard University Press, 2009), p. 11 25 Shachar, The Birthright Lottery, p. x. 26 J. Stevens, States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 29. Foreigners may apply for a legal resident card if they are ‘willing to in- vest at least $1 million in businesses located in the United States’; but in 2004 129 of 155,300 legal resident cards went to people in this category (Stevens, States without Nations, p. 29).

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 450 Sherwood mined by birth’.27 But citizenship by birthright seems to violate liberal norms. The most famous great grandfathers of our European freedoms – Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau – all presented government as founded on the individual’s participation and assent. One could not simply be born into a society or inherit a mode of government. One must actively consent. On a clear collision course with this principle, nations adhere to principles of jus sanguinis (the right of blood) or jus soli (membership by birth in the territory). Movement is carefully restricted and managed, not just in conflict with liberal norms, but in conflict with the principle of free trade. The European Union is founded on the four freedoms: the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital. But capital and persons generating capital move and circulate with very different levels of freedom and regulation. Our constitutions promote freedom of religion, in the faithful Lockeian sense of the right to have or not have and to choose one’s religion. But this flexibility is possible because religion is regarded as secondary, private and optional, unlike membership in a state. When it comes to statehood and nationality, the European Union does not declare freedom of nationality, but a right to nationality. There is no similar freedom to have, or not to have, or to change nationalities, and movement is subject to the adjudication of the state. ‘In world history, we are concerned only with those people that have formed states [because] all the value that human beings possess, all their spiritual reality, they have thought through the State alone’.28 Hegel’s statement made in lectures at the University of Berlin in the late 1820s still echoes like a sonorous prophecy. Despite narratives of globalisation, identity is grounded in the state. The immigrant is the would-be member or citizen; the emigrant is the former member or citizen. ‘A static place and membership are theorised first, and the migrant is the one who lacks both.’29 The member of the wealthy state, conversely, is not called an emigrant or an immigrant but an ‘ex-pat’, as if the membership of the dominant state holds wherever he/she is in the world. This legal emphasis on jus sanguinis sits awkwardly alongside modern dis- avowals that nationality can ever be a simple matter of language, religion, family, race. To take a famous example, Ernest Renan’s ‘What is a Nation?’, written in 1882, presents a kind of negative theology of the sacrality of the nation. Es- sential to the nation is forgetting: ‘A nation is above all else a dynasty

27 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 28 28 G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (trans. L. Rauch; New York: Hackett, 1988), pp. 41-42. Based on Hegel’s lectures given in 1822, 1828 and 1830, his Philosophy of History was published posthumously, in 1837. 29 T. Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 10.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 451 representing an ancient conquest, one first accepted then forgotten’.30 Unity is always brutally established, and in order to be unified, we must forget. A nation is not and never can be a simple matter of family or race. In the vacilla- tions of history, a person who is a Celt becomes a Slav, then a German. ‘Race is made and unmade’. A nation is a ‘daily referendum’; a soul, a spiritual principle; a combination of a rich legacy of memories and present consent. A nation is founded on forgetting, sacrifice, and memory – not as history but cultural memory. (In this sense Renan anticipates Assmann). A nation is a ‘great soli- darity constituted by the feeling of great sacrifices made’. But this mystical and numinous sense of the nation as soul and heritage can only function because it is propped up by a far more concrete system for provid- ing the backbone of the nation: the endless files, and storage systems that record family births, marriages and death. Citizenship is organised around legal structures of paternity, maternity and marriage; families that can be delineated and counted. These regulate lineages of citizenship and structures of personal inheritance. Who is who determines who gets what, and who counts as a member of the state. The state reproduces itself by managing reproduction. The backbone of the nation is the intergenerational family, as a structure of perma- nence and transcendence. In a strangeness that we have normalised as a system for alienating the stranger, citizenship is organised around birth and publicly registered acts of sex.31 In a carefully chosen and provocative phrase, Jacqueline Stevens claims that modern states organise themselves around ‘hereditary kinship groups’.32 She is deliberately suggesting that there is little difference between the modern state and the tribal societies observed by E.E. Evans-Pritchard or Claude Lévi-Strauss, or ancient societies – though in fact cultures like the Nuer, or the ancient Roman ‘family’ present far less settled versions of kinship than the legal mechanisms of the modern state. At one point, Stevens refers to the family of Abraham, which she sees as a rigid inheritance structure, exactly like the modern family and the sovereign nation state. She writes, ‘According to the Hebrew Bible, being a descendant of Abraham is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be saved by God’ and states that the family of Abraham is consolidated by the belief that ‘its members are born into the group and do not convert’.33 The reductive statements

30 E. Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, text delivered at a conference in the Sorbonne on 11 March, 1882; see Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (trans. E. Rundell; Paris: Presses-Pocket, 1992). Text accessed online at accessed 2.7.2015. All citations are from this online edition (no page numbers). 31 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 163. 32 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 101. 33 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 216.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 452 Sherwood are a salutary reminder of how little members of other disciplines know about biblical studies – and how persistently the Hebrew Bible is read through modern concepts of ‘religion’ and Christian concepts of salvation. The archive has long been superseded by its representations. Cultural memory (and to a large extent biblical scholarship) knows very little of the productive confusion of the Abrahamic ‘family’, even though this is performed so graphically on the surface of the biblical texts. Stevens hints (but frustratingly only hints) at a more interesting story when she writes, ‘Absent marriage records, the story of origins would be … haphazard, subject to fakery, invention, and obfuscation’.34 Bureaucracies and systems for regulating citizenship make all the difference between ‘primitive’ or ancient kinship groups and modern states:

Marriage laws … imply clearly designated lineages that can be accumu- lated and accounted for, a false statement of our originally and eternally uncertain, layered, hybrid origins that recurs at any given point in history. From Moses’s Egyptian origins, pointed out by Freud, to Bertholt Brecht’s Mother Courage, who says that the patchwork ancestry of her sons makes it difficult to know which army they might support, our nationalities are entirely contrived by political rules, especially marriage. The unexam- ined conventions of marital designations and family trees are so success- ful that people see only one or perhaps a hybrid of a few generations, not the actual confusions marriage law seems to eliminate. The narrative also misleads, by suggesting that earlier groups are themselves homogeneous. Even if Freud is correct about Moses’s ancestry, there are no pure Egyp- tians from which Moses and the Levites emerged, only a collection of kinship groups that became more permanent because of their written, especially legal, inscriptions over time.35

Developing this important point, we can say that ancient societies, like those represented in the Bible, are sans papiers/without papers, in the specific sense that they lack the massive modern paper edifices of citizenship and state- regulated family structures. Such cultures could be expected to narrate stories of ‘uncertain, layered, hybrid origins’, because they lack the mechanisms to regulate origin.36 And Stevens’s intuition proves true, above all, of Genesis and the

34 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 163. 35 Stevens, States without Nations, pp. 163-64. 36 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 163.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 453 conflicted family of Abraham. The biblical foundation is more overtly and productively unstable than Stevens (and most of us) assume. The book of Genesis agonises over the question of kinship because kinship is the key to property and inheritance. Once you know who is who, then you know who gets what. This logic is reciprocal: you construct the family to determine who gets what.37 So far, so like the like regulation of ethnicities and nations in the modern state. But we over-exaggerate the similarities. Modern systems for counting and re- producing nations and ethnicities are far more efficient and precise than the conflicted archive that is Genesis, and the view of the family is far more regular and regulated. In Genesis, convoluted genealogies and tortured soap-opera plots experiment with different ways of doing family and different options for maximising or minimalising the family line. According to one line of logic (and inheritance), your brother’s sons, your slave, servants born in your house or ‘bought with [your] own money’ can inherit (Gen. 15.3; 17.23) and the circum- .can become part of the family through circumcision (cf (גר cised alien (or Exod. 12.48-49). Another line of logic takes the family perilously close to incest. Genesis has not yet decided on the family and the nation, and it performs this instability in a radically defamiliarising way.

Biblical Figures as Figures for Europe’s Shadow Selves

Figure 8 Front cover to Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003)

37 See R. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 102.

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The front cover to Edward Said’s 2001 lecture, Freud and the Non-European, appears as the perfect emblem for this moment of mass migration and Brexit. Europe becomes an ink blot; a Rorschach test. It arises as an eery spectre, like a big grey bat, with a shadow self. The book is the front cover for a lecture that was a response to Freud’s deeply conflicted Moses and Monotheism – the book that Stevens refers to in passing when she alludes to Freud’s thesis of ‘Moses’s Egyptian origins’ and also ‘the patchwork ancestry’ of Mother Courage’s sons. It seems more than accidental that she chooses these two works in particular to signal the repressed hybrid origins that resurge from beneath the carefully managed identity structures of the modern nation state – and that she chooses works written by refugees, between 1939 and 1941. Brecht wrote Mother Cour- age as a German refugee in Sweden. Freud began his Moses in Vienna, and then completed it in London, where he fled during the Anschluss.38 Both works focus on the tormented allegiances and families in pre-modern stories: the He- brew Bible and the Thirty Years War. It was Freud who first gave us the terminology to talk about the ‘mental life’ as ‘an apparatus consisting of several hierarchies, districts and provinces’,39 including, of course, the ‘repressed – the isolated and unconscious material’ and the id, the outside on the inside, the inaccessible ‘state within a state’.40 In Mo- ses and Monotheism, this now traditional psychoanalytic story was mapped onto a disturbing geographical-spiritual genealogy about the relation of the Jew to the soul of Europe and the soul Europe to itself. Freud’s deliberately shocking revelation that Moses was Egyptian meant that ethical monotheism, the spiritual soul of Euro-America, was ‘historically Jewish’ but ‘genetically Egyptian’ – and that the roots of Europe’s soul come from outside, ‘from a great stranger’.41 Turbulent and repressed mental spaces were mapped onto the tortured conflicts of Europe, as Freud struggled to (naively) theorise the resurgent and profound hostility to the Jews who were (Freud said) ‘not a foreign Asiatic race’, but ‘mostly consist[ed] of the remnants of Mediterranean peoples’ while being ‘somewhat different’, ‘especially from the Nordic peoples’42 – hence somewhat hard to place. In the dramatic and twisted psycho-politics of Moses and Monotheism, Europe’s soul became Egyptian-Jewish: ‘Semitic’. Sixty years

38 Said’s lecture was also moved from Vienna to London. Originally scheduled to be given at the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna, it was cancelled due to controversy about Said as a ‘rock-throwing terrorist’. On this incident, see E. Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road- map (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 52. 39 S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (trans. K. Jones; Letghworth: Garden City, 1939), p. 123. 40 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 96 41 Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 31. 42 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 146.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 455 later, in 2001, Said read this as attempt to traumatise European identity, and to force the beginnings of Judaism and Europe outside themselves. ‘In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian)’.43 What would happen, asks Said, if we were to read Freud’s Egyptian Moses, associated with the idealised Egypt of archaeology and antiquity, as a type or political parable for modern day ‘Egyptians, but also the indigenous Arabs of Palestine … Leba- nese, Syrians and Jordanians’?44 What if we were to imagine readers of Moses reading in Arabic, or Egyptian? The question seems even more pressing fifteen years later, given the mass migration of refugees from Syria and Iraq into Eu- rope; refugees speaking very explicitly about the ‘sacrifice’ required to get to the ‘promised land’ of Austria and Vienna, even as they also refer to the perilous journey as an ‘Exodus’ and a ‘journey of death’.45 Freud’s strange book is definitely not a work of biblical studies or even the careful expansion of biblical studies into reception history or cultural ‘afterlives’. Very rarely does a biblical scholar – even a ‘cutting edge’ one – dare to use the Bible to ‘think with’ in the ways that German/Austrian intellectuals such as Erich Auerbach, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem dared to do between the 1920s and the 1950s. They boldly drafted the Bible and biblical figures into political programmes or political typologies that attempted anachronistic and powerful fusions between the Bible and modern Zionism, or the schwere heimische Kämpfe (‘struggles, fighting at home’) in Europe in the Sec- ond World War.46 Even as biblical studies moves in self-consciously progres- sive and subversive directions, it remains shy of these prophetic, sermonic, sonorous tones. Even as we break convention, we keep the convention of the idioms of the ‘professionalism’ and Wissenschaft. Yet this caution prevents us

43 Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 44. 44 Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 31. 45 Talk to Al Jazeera: In the Field, 25 October 2015 (Interview on Al Jazeera [English]). 46 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [original, 1953]), pp. 22, 81; Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklich- keit in der Abendländischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946), pp. 29, 82. In a radical ap- plication of the documentary hypothesis, Auerbach saw the Hebrew Bible as a template for contemporary Europe because the narratives were fragmented, full of non-sequiteurs, and the origins of violence were shrouded in mystery. Reading Genesis ‘as literature’ in 1942, he read Genesis as a book of schwere heimische Kämpfe (‘struggles, fighting at home’) and a book of refugees. I’m working on a longer study of Auerbach’s reading of Genesis as a reverse migrant worker (a German in Turkey) in the Second World War. For my attempt to sketch out some of the arguments, see Y. Sherwood, ‘Abraham in London, Marburg/Is- tanbul and Israel: Between Theocracy and Democracy, Ancient Text and Modern State’, BibInt 16 (2008), pp. 105-153.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 456 Sherwood from making the kinds of interventions that will allow the old biblical archives to speak to other areas of the humanities. Incautious interdisciplinary interventions seem called for, at a time when politicians are discussing Christian ‘Judeo-Christian’ and ‘Abrahamic’ foundations for European values and borders and distinctions are being mapped on racial-religious lines. My wager/ gambit is that there is untapped political potential in taking the vaguely refer- enced Christian or Judeo-Christian foundation and restoring it as conflicted archive, a seething text. To face the bland and vacuous invocations of the ‘Ju- deo-Christian’ or the ‘Abrahamic’, we need daring interventions from the old religious archives: perhaps something like the return to Paul in political philosophy (a return led by continental philosophers, rather than ‘professional’ biblical scholars). But what if we were to do this from the Old Testament, the book that Europeans inherit as more particular and parochial (Jewish) than the New Testament? Could the ‘particular’ old figure of Abraham and the Abra- hamic family ever do the same kind of political work as the already univer- salised, Christian figure of Paul?47 I want to use the strange families and strange nations at the beginning of the Bible, point zero of what is now called the ‘Judeo-Christian’ foundation, to re- orientate and disorientate contemporary discussions of kinship, ethnicity and migration – and to begin by simply stating the obvious that was missed by both Said and Freud. The Bible itself is very clear that the ‘nation’ (a term which is not yet born in its modern sense in the Bible) begins in Egypt, and Arabia, or the Ca- naan before Israel. Israel becomes itself through a series of displacements or mini-supersessions, and Israel is constantly on the move. Watching the birth struggles of Israel become itself, or Judah become the ‘new Israel’ when the old Israel has gone, is like watching Renan’s drama of Celts becoming Slavs becoming Germans; ‘ethnicity’ being made and unmade. The ‘Israelites’-to-be or the Israelites-in-waiting come from Iraq and spend a lot of time in Egypt. The dis- orientating truth that ‘identity begins with the other (Egyptian and Arabian)’48 is there on the surface of the story of Moses, and is present even more overtly in the story of Hagar: the ‘prosthesis of origin’49 in the family of Abraham.

47 Ward Blanton and I begin to explore this question in ‘Spectres of Abraham, Shadows of Paul’, in A. Bielik-Robson and A. Lipszyc (eds.), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 26-38. 48 Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 44. 49 See J. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin (trans. P. Mensah; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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Genesis as Heterogenesis

In previous papers, I’ve written critical genealogies of the recent political use of ‘Abrahamic’. To summarise: first came the ‘Judeo-Christian’ (in the 1950s, under the pressure of the Cold War and the Shoah), and then the Judeo-Chris- tian begat ‘the Abrahamic’ post-9/11.50 I pointed out how the old name is angli- cised, Europeanised. All hell that would break loose if we were to name our values as fundamentally ‘Ibrahimic’ or even ‘Avrahamic’. I reflected on the appeal of Abraham as the Ur-man, the vague origin of unity – before Christ, before the law, before all the specifics of the law and shari’a or halakah. Now, watching the Trump administration’s violent and illegal enforcement of a ‘Muslim ban’ or Viktor Orban’s erection of a barbed wire line between Europe- Christendom and Islam, I feel nostalgic for the relatively benign (if somewhat vacuous) appeal to the ‘common value and heritage’51 of the Abrahamic by politicians like Barak Obama and Tony Blair. The problem is that in extending the grace and tolerance of the hyphen to the Jew and the Muslim, Europe and America have never had to experience anything of the unheimlich. They have never had to estrange themselves from their own vague narratives of foundation in which freedom and freedom of religion come from a specifically Chris- tian foundation – and could not have come from the two other siblings in the Abrahamic trinity in quite the same way. The complacent foundation narrative cannot be left intact if we summon, instead of the bland, nice, male and rather vacuous figure of the Abrahamic, the one whose name means Ha-Ger, ‘The Resident Alien’. The story of Hagar – which is to say the messy, textual version of the Abrahamic family/nation – can in no way be read as a bland assertion of easy co-existence, on certain membership conditions, in a way that still leaves the core family as the one with a clear identity and priority from which to graciously ‘welcome’. Hagar offers a darker and more generative political allegory, for she is the immigrant mimic of Abraham – the slave on whom the true family depends. As I read her, Hagar becomes a figure for all those strange alternative ancestors and twins who appear in the book of Genesis, as the book relentlessly points to the plurality of possibility of ancestors, families and nations, as if to

50 For the recent rise of the Judeo-Christian, see, for example, D. Hartmann, X. Zhang and W. Wischstadt, ‘One (Multicultural) Nation under God? Changing Uses and Meanings of the Term “Judeo-Christian” in the American Media’, Journal of Media and Religion 4 (2005), pp. 207-234; M. Silk, ‘Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America’, American Quar- terly 36 (1984), pp. 65-85. 51 Tony Blair, Speech at the Labour Party Conference, Brighton. The Guardian, 3 October 2001, pp. 4-5.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 458 Sherwood actively raise the question: ‘Are we the right line, or not?’ The story of the genesis of Israel absolutely insists on the fact that it did not begin with itself but with others. Perversely committed to a ritualistically-repeated template of an origin divided between firstborn and second-born, it habitually presents the eponymous ancestor of Israel as haunted by a shadow side, a twin, another brother who was there before him or a surrogate family lurking just outside the tent. But why complicate one’s own story by keeping myriad ‘thems’ (and the laborious narrative of their expulsion) in? And why allow expelled brothers, like Esau, eponymous father of the Edomites, to lament their usurpation and articulate our guilt in ‘our’ text? Whence this strange kamikaze desire to present ‘our’ ancestor as the one who had to wrest the blessing from the firstborn or push the other family into the desert to make enough room for us – and why keep this act of dispossession on record? To put it crudely, if you want to write a people out, you can do it quite easily through a simple act of texticide: a form of elimination that is relatively painless. This would all be part of a normal day’s work for Hebrew narrative. Hebrew narrative is famously terse. It is always deselecting detail – not just detail that we would consider superfluous, but detail that we would have preferred to have kept in. Goddesses, daughters, mothers and details are regularly disappeared. As Renan points out, ‘essential to the nation is forgetting’. Only through forgetting is unity and coherence established. But Genesis stubbornly forgets to forget. The result is surely one of the most torturous beginnings in world literature, with too many people, too many women and too many others. Take for example the typically comic and perverse story of Judah who, in Genesis 38, marries a Canaanite (as if to say, overtly, ‘Israelite is mixed with Canaanite’); then has sex with his daughter-in-law when she is disguised as a prostitute. The result is a twin pregnancy, where the two sons fight down the birth canal (ouch) and the outcome leaves us uncertain which son has won. Are we following the right one? Who, then, are the true Judeans? The question ‘Who or what is the line of Judah?’ is answered perversely (maybe even half-smilingly – and perhaps these implausible origins are meant to make us laugh) with the genealogy: ‘The descendants of Judah, formerly married to a Canaanite, and the result of sex between Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar, with whom he had sex when she was disguised as a prostitute, leading to the birth of warring twins’. Similarly strange contortions take place around the first origin, the one right at the beginning: the Abrahamic – or the Hagaramic. The Dutch painters who focussed inordinate attention on Hagar in the seventeenth century often dwelt on that queer scene in which Abraham becomes the mighty father for the first time (Fig. 9):

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Figure 9 Adriaen van der Werff, Sarah Presents Hagar to Abraham. Oil on canvas. 1699. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

In Adriaen van der Werff’s painting there are two women: one woman too many. Sarah, like a pimp or a madam, presents a half-undressed Abraham with the draped, alabaster body of Hagar, rather like Eve giving Adam the fruit.52 The hope is that Hagar can provide what God has not provided. Abraham needs Hagar, the alien in the house, in order to become Av-Raham, Father of

52 The idea of Sarah as tempter, or madam, is even clearer in other paintings of the period, such as Willem van Mieris, ‘Sarah Bringing Hagar to Abraham’, c. 1685-90. For discussion of this obsession with the figure of Hagar, see C.P. Sellin, Fractured Families and Rebel Maidservants: The Biblical Hagar in Dutch Art and Literature (New York: Continuum, 2006).

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Multitudes. No-one can become the Big Daddy, or even just a father simplici- tas, without a son. We see the mistress requesting surrogate life from the body of the slave. But why present the origin as needing the supplement of the Egyp- tian slave? How strange to have a story in which the origin cannot take place without the intimate stranger in the house; surely it would be more than possible for the omnipotent God of monotheism to offer the gift of a single origin within a united family? Many European powers, especially European colonial powers, have longed for a purer Abrahamic family, without the acts of polyga- my that made it so hard to spread the book of Christendom and teach the vir- tues of Christian marriage. Victorian missionaries agonised over the poor examples of the patriarchs – often using Muhammad or indigenous religions as a counter-example, to shore up the (relative) morality of the Old Testament. The friars who led the evangelisation of the New World feared that ‘seeing the Holy Writ, [the indigenous peoples] would discover in it that the ancient patriarchs had many wives simultaneously, which is in accordance with what was their custom, and that they would not wish to believe what we now preach to them, that no one may have more than one wife’.53 The first foundational family in Genesis subverts conservative Christian ideals of ‘family values’. It is also, promisingly, far less predictable and self-protective than the model of the nuclear (blood) intergenerational family: the pulsating heart of the self-reproduction, and consolidation, of the modern state. Abraham mimics the resident alien even as she mimics him. The founding father lacks foundation. He begins entirely outside the comfort of the autoch- thonous and the solid ground for nation it provides, as a divinely-called immigrant, from ‘Ur’ in Babylon, modern-day Iraq. The call to possess the land of Canaan is compromised by the awkward caveat that the land is currently full of ‘Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizites, Amorites, Canaanites, Gir- gashites, Jebusites’, not to mention the ‘Rephaim’ or giants (Gen. 15.19-21): in total no less than 31 tribes. The fact that the land is not just not empty, but crowded, is mentioned in the Pentateuch no less than 27 times. The descendants of Abraham add to the over-crowding problem. The mighty father’s fa- therhood is mighty. He is the father of the Israelites (the sons of Isaac and Jacob); the Ishmaelites (the sons of Ishmael); and the Edomites (the sons of Esau/Edom) – not to mention Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah (Abraham’s sons with Keturah), and the unnamed sons by his concu- bines to whom he (guiltily?) gives gifts before they depart (Gen. 25.1-6). In

53 B. de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex (ed. and trans. A.J.O. Anderson and C.E. Dibble; Salt Lake City: School of American Research and Univer- sity of Utah, 1950-82), vol. 1, p. 93.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 461 contrast, the modern notion of the Abrahamic father of three religions or sons looks like a modern fairytale: one dad, three equal sons, as in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s ‘ring parable’ in Nathan the Wise. The Abrahamic family is far less neatly distributed – and it knows nothing of equity. Destined to be as numer- ous as sand on the seashore or stars in the sky, the Abrahamic descendants splatter far and wide. As Denis Guénoun writes in About Europe: Philosophical Hypotheses: ‘Every genealogy is an exclusion of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ancestors’.54 It is as if Genesis at least gestures to the emblematic rep- resentatives of the hundreds and thousands in the foregrounded background that it fails to forget. By the time that Abraham has sex with Hagar, the resident alien who mimics his own status as a resident alien, the book of Genesis has already raised the anxiety that Israel might already be at least half-Egyptian. In the first version of the three ‘Ancestress in Danger’ stories (as we bashfully call them), Abraham, fearful for his life, passes off his wife as his sister and she is taken into Pharoah’s house. (The next attempt at telling a better version of this story tries to get around the problem of patriarchal lying by having Abraham declare that ‘she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother’ [Gen. 20.12], but this creates a new problem: incest. Somewhere between incest and exogamy, the family, like Goldilocks must find the space that is ‘just right’.55) Had Sarah had children, we would already be wondering whether the children would have been a little bit Egyptian. Perhaps this is why she is barren for so long, to make sure that 90 years, rather than just nine months, have passed. But then the repressed fear returns as Abraham has sex with the woman that the Rabbis say Sarah brought back with her from Egypt, and Hagar gives birth to the half-Egyptian boy, Ishmael: God hears. The biblical Hagaramic functions as a surrogate Abrahamic. Her surrogacy is biological, domestic and textual. A surrogate is someone who can ‘take the place of another, especially as a successor’ and ‘replace’.56 Hagar’s biological and domestic surrogacy already undermines the house she ostensibly serves. She is meant to provide boy bricks to build up Sarah and Abraham’s house, but the boy is also hers. In her active textual surrogacy, she is even more destruc- tive. Hagar is far more than an accident or a false lead, the book of Genesis seems to want to insist. The stories about her mirror and mimic the stories of Abraham in a way that seems to deliberately detract from the uniqueness,

54 Guénoun About Europe, p. 3. 55 Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, p. 83. 56 The definition of surrogacy is taken from the Free Online Dictionary (www.thefreediction- ary.com).‎

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 462 Sherwood primacy and oneness of Abraham, which we have superimposed back on the text. The level of textual surrogacy is shocking and deliberate. Hagar’s stories duplicate and anticipate the Abrahamic to an uncanny extent. The strange co- habitation of the Hagaramic and the Abrahamic performs the mixing of the heimlich and the unheimlich: the proximate and the alien. There is something uncanny about a body and a story so close to us that it impinges on our place. Hagar and Ishmael are positioned at both extremes of the spectrum of the familiar and the foreign, just like Esau and Jacob, who are simultaneously twins and enemies, sharing the same womb and heading up different tribes. Accord- ing to the laws of kinship and tribes in the book of Genesis, she and her offspring can be absorbed into the family of Abraham. Her intimacy with the Abrahamic is as close as could possibly be conceived. Abraham ‘goes into Hagar’ (Gen. 16.4) and Sarah and Abraham’s son comes out from between her legs. Ishmael yitzhaks or ‘mimics Isaac’ – or plays at being Isaac. In Sarah’s eyes, the threat is that he would be Isaac and inherit instead of Isaac, in Isaac’s place. Like mother, like son. Hagar mimics crucial (unique?) elements of the Abraha- mic story, sometimes as echo, sometimes as prolepsis. Exceptionally for a woman, and especially an Egyptian woman, she steals the thunder of the Abra- hamic and the patriarchal prerogative in general. First comes not the man, not the father, but the Egyptian slave. Hagar is the first to receive a divine visita- tion, two full chapters before Abraham welcomes the three divine guests at Mamre (Gen. 16.7). Even more strangely, she becomes a quasi-patriarch, receiv- ing a direct repetition of the Abrahamic promise – ‘I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude’ (Gen. 16.10; cf. 15.5) – uttered just a chapter previously, for all the world as if it were going to be unique. Ishmael is to be the father of a great nation, a parallel and doubled multitude. The Hagaramic promise of myriad descendants seems to be ful- filled in the strange biblical record of the only tribe whose name is etymologi- cally related to a woman: the ‘Hagarites’ and the ‘Hagarenes’ (1 Chron. 5.10, 19, 20; Ps. 83/82.7; cf. 1 Chron. 27.31). Hagar takes over a domestic narrative that never gets to be properly domes- ticated and insular because the Egyptian slave always already does things that only the patriarchs get to do – and first. Acting out all the patriarchal preroga- tives, she names her own progeny and she names God, and then she puts a signpost in the landscape (just like the patriarchs), naming a well as a sign of her encounter with the God who hears (Gen. 16.3; 16.14; cf. 22.14). The sensa- tional Hollywood pinnacle of the story of the Abrahamic, the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), is preceded by a far less famous prototype, one chapter earlier. The sacrifice of Isaac tells of the Abrahamic’s virtual self-destruction: Isaac and the whole future of Abraham under the knife. It finally resolves the ambiguity

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 463 between Isaac and Ishmael by making Isaac the one who goes under the knife. But the Abrahamic risks itself far more effectively, if less sensationally, by having Genesis 22 pre-empted by Genesis 21. The story which becomes a type of the crucifixion, the central Christian story – the story that constructs Jewish and Christian scenes of sacrifice as scenes of fathers and sons – is pre-empted by a scene about a son and a mother, and the last-minute retrieval of Ishmael from the brink of death. Like Esau, Hagar is the secret (guilt) of the home that is hidden in plain sight. Her expulsion is straightforward, by twenty-first century standards. She is not alienated from her land by foreign governments and global corporations buying up land for the manufacture of palm oil. She does not lose her house to austerity measures or sub-prime mortgages. She is sent out of the house by the other woman and by an Abraham who follows the other wife. But the story is told in such a way that makes it clear that this is not the will of God, but the will of Sarah (and the will of women is suspect). The narrator compels the audi- ence to empathise with her, and feel the torment to our origins and interests. Just as Esau is allowed to scream out and accuse those who steal his blessing, so the Egyptian slave’s flight/expulsion from the oppressive house of Israel is told as an uncanny reverse Exodus. In the book of Exodus, the identities of ‘Is- raelite’ and ‘Egyptian’, God and Pharaoh are strangely mixed. (Freud would have loved it, as he would have loved the ‘Ancestress in Danger’ and the Hagar stories). Genesis 16 and 21 mix the role of victim and victimizer and perform the Israelite oppression of the Egyptian, and the Exodus of the Egyptian. In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion is remembered, twice, and reported at length. Why (as in the case of Esau) rehearse this narrative of guilt? Why not carry out a more emphatic expulsion and cast them out of the archive alto- gether? Why not make them ‘flee’ further, off the edge of the page?

Conclusion: Type and Antitype

How did we miss the fact that the Abrahamic, that overtly masculine, paternal- fraternal concept, has a female, foreign shadow or prototype? I suspect that the New Testament is partly to blame. We habitually associate the New Testament with the transcendence of blood, genetics, ‘race’ and literal birth. The New Tes- tament opens into the universal, so the story goes. But perhaps it also simpli- fies and closes, shutting down possibilities for the family of Abraham. In Galatians, Paul takes the voice of Sarah and turns it into the very voice of scripture in order to polemically Ishmaelise the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. ‘But what does scripture (ἡ γραφή) say? “Drive out the slave and her child; for the

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 464 Sherwood child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman”’ (Gal. 4.31). Rarely is the voice of a woman transformed into the voice of authority: ‘it is written’. Voices of women, like the voices of the devil, are there to be questioned. In Genesis, Sarah is clearly jealous, and the effects of her command are registered as ‘distressing’ to Abraham, hence contentious (Gen. 21.11). In Genesis, the command to expel Ishmael begins with the will of a woman: a woman who surprisingly gets to lead the narrative line. In Genesis, Abra- ham and God fall in with the will of Sarah; but the narrator at least partly dissents. In Galatians, the command of Sarah is promoted to the voice of God and scripture. With the command of God now behind her expulsion, it is no surprise that Hagar ends up truly cast out, forgotten – and that we forget the Old Testament’s stubborn refusal to forget. In Gal. 3.13-16, Paul reads the collective noun ‘seed’ (zera; spermatos) in Gen. 13.16 and 17.8 as a deliberate, emphatic, singular, and claims that this refers to Christ, the only. The universality is related to an organising singularity. The Abrahamic family expands infinitely; but only by going through Christ. This is a more straightforward idea of the family than a family with two wives and two mimic-sons. It is also uncannily like the concept of Europe, as a declaration of the universal and a localisation of the universal. ‘Hospitality is open; but it is centred in this place’. In the New Testament, there is and can be no doubt about the origin, the true line. The truism is that the new Christian dispensation liberated the Abra- hamic from the literal, blood family into family-as-symbol; a family forever open to creative reinvention. But the reverse is also true. The Abrahamic family in Genesis flirts with illegitimacy. It creates hybrid offshoots and relations that are potentially out of control. The messy Abrahamic family in Genesis is tidied up in the genealogy of Christ.57 A clear one emerges from amidst all those twins. Jesus’s sometime uncannily near double, John the Baptist, is not compressed together in the same womb, like Esau and Jacob. The ‘twinning’ is distant. Ascendancy is won before Jesus is born. Elizabeth cedes primacy to Mary’s child. Unlike Ishmael and Hagar who uncomfortably assert their primacy, John leaps within the other womb to acknowledge the foetal messiah (Luke 1.39-80). And then there are no more brothers (or sisters); no more rivals. Perhaps later traditions of Mary’s hysterically closed womb and perpetual vir- ginity were not primarily a reaction against the sexual body of the mother of

57 Tamar, Ruth, Rahab and Uriah’s wife all appear in the genealogy in Matthew. All four are foreign, or mixed with the foreign, and sexually compromised. But none is as foreign as Hagar, the Egyptian slave, giving birth to a potentially competing line. Hagar does not appear. She is cast out.

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God – or at least not only this. Perhaps they were also a prophylactic against Jesus-siblings and doubled messiahs. Thinking only about the New Testament, and the Virgin Mary in particular, Marcella Althaus Reid once pointed out that the Bible’s sexual metaphors are ‘chaotic, unpredictable, and immoral. That is why we like them’.58 We are drawn to these old origin stories because the origins are perverse. And the families get stranger, the further back we go. Hagar, the resident alien, can be read as a concentrated type of all this strangeness. The characters in the book of Gen- esis are emblems: ‘Father of Multitudes’; ‘Red One/Hairy One’; ‘Trickster/De- ceiver’; ‘He Laughs’ – and ‘Resident Alien’. ‘Hairy One’ and ‘Trickster’ now seem quaint, mythical, enclosed in the archives of the Old Testament, that ultimate relic of the past. ‘Resident Alien’, in contrast, reverberates between the spaces and the times. With all the strange synchronicity of typology, this antitype from the Old Testament becomes a sign of the most timely and insistent figures of migrancy. According to Braidotti, a political philosophy of nomadism calls for figurations, not simply as ‘figurative ways of thinking, but rather materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social positions’.59 Hagar is a readymade figuration – or figura – pointing to many material incarnations of the migrant, rather than the single Christ. This diffuse antitype can be read as a positive declaration of the myriad strange ways of conceiving a family or nation. In recent dramatic changes to the nuclear family (blended families, surrogate families, i.v.f, gay parents), we feel the strange contemporaneity of the old figure of Hagar. But the macro-‘family’, the nation, has remained relatively static. Structures of citizenship remain conservative, cautiously bound to the jus sanguinis and ‘hereditary kinship groups’.60 Modern bureaucratic recording systems tether, and balance, any attempts to give a more expansive visionary account of a nation’s soul. Hagar appears as an intrusive remnant of older times when families and nations were more open because they were written, as stories – not recorded as bureaucratic records. She embodies a material soul of ‘the nation’ that is amorphous, compromised, built up of ad hoc stories and improvisations rather than blood and genes. The story of Hagar proclaims that families and solidarities and origins are not given or natural. They are created. They rise unexpectedly (miraculously, perversely) like the warring twins born from sex between a father-in-law and a daughter-in-law, or the son born from

58 M. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 23. 59 R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Femi- nist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 4. 60 Stevens, States without Nations, p. 101.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 466 Sherwood sex between his Egyptian slave. These humanly improvised origins are as mi- raculous and strange in their way as the promise child bursting from the barren womb. They are an indecent, perverse, version of the miracle. The story of Ha- ger can be read as a call to itinerant identities and solidarities. Families and nations mutate. They are made – and unmade. Hagar can be read as a figure of the Egyptian/Arabic-Judeo-Christian, or the Muslim-American, or, even better those ‘split, in-process, knotted, rhizomatic, transitional, nomadic – subject[s]’ that do not even represent conjugated or hyphenated identities.61 Hagar can be read as a positive call to reconceive the family and identity as narration and improvisation. But she also stands for what has been expelled. In Genesis, the ‘Abrahamic’ is undecided as to whether Abraham is to be the Mighty Father of a particular people, or the father of kings: nations plural.62 Similarly, Europe is a declaration of the universal and a localisation of the universal. The Hagaramic stands for all the foreign bodies caught up in this self-constituting impasse. Just as the unheimlich Hagar trou- bled the old Abrahamic house, the Hagaramic disturbs the bland placidity of the ‘Abrahamic’ and all the notions of freedom and fraternity that the Abraha- mic represents. In the context of the ever more militant policing of European and American borders and identities, the Hagaramic evokes all the sans-papiers, Gastarbeiters, and ‘immigrant’ (?) religions, suing for citizenship and status. She highlights the colonial and economic dependencies, denied by our official mythologies and balance sheets. The Abrahamic, as a figure of Euro- American hospitality, represses the rude and fundamental truth of the founding father as an immigrant from Iraq, having sex with the Egyptian-Arabian alien in his house. It is hard to imagine a disruption of foundation that would seem more rude – and impossible/unthinkable – on the contemporary political stage. Thus the servant Hagar serves as the figura of an itinerant mendicant truth that attacks national interests: the resurgent memory of the great, or neg- ligible, stranger that estranges origin from itself. Against the bland principle of general hospitality represented by the Abrahamic, what we could call the ‘Hag- aramic’ stands for a darker, gritty negotiation of nation and relation, always related to the limits of land and resources, always fought out on the ground. The mystifying Abrahamic suggests that the three religions stand in roughly the same space, irrespective of who was there at the beginning. The Hagaramic replies that to be is to inherit. Kinship is the key to property and inheritance

61 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 3. Importantly, Braidotti also warns against ‘the banality of generalisations’ that would simply turn nomadism into a general ‘metaphor for the human condition’. 62 See for example Gen. 22.17-18.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 467 and citizenship. Kinship – the quest to determine who is who – is never sepa- rate from the question who gets what. These disruptive, material figurations are new for Hagar – and/but they have already been anticipated in her ‘afterlives’ for centuries. Postbiblical Hagars have always somehow found their way into ‘materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social positions’.63 Hagar has regularly occupied the space of Euro-America’s shadow-self, as if the role had always been to play the other side of the doubled grey Europe on the front cover of Said’s Freud and the Non-European. She has found her way into all the hidden spaces: the invisible and denied human infrastructures that support the official life of citizens and nations, and the lives of those without citizenship; refugees without or between states. As a sign of her disruptive potential, she became an icon for African-Americans who (despite the recent ridiculous statements of Ben Carson) did not immigrate to America, in the bottom of slave ships, with a ‘dream’ of prosperity.64 Entering through Sullivan Island, which ‘might well be Ellis island of black Americans’,65 she became a figure of those who were abducted/taken (like Hagar and Europa) and who became bodies for building a house of another.66 The sculptures of Edmonia Lewis or Pauline Hopkins’s novel Hagar’s Daughter testify to the power of Hagar as a figura for deeply conflicted white-black dramas of blood, status, religion and race. In the work of British Victorian feminist Josephine Butler (1828-1906),67 Hagar became a figure for legal reform on behalf of prostitutes and shadow (invisible) families: ‘bastard’ children, Ishmaels, those whose birth was not foretold by angels. She became an important figure for the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger (1901-1969), who was forced to move through Romania, Poland, France, England and finally lsrael in the Second World War, and whose hometown, Cz- ernowitz, was moved from Austria-Hungary to Romania and then the Ukraine. Quite naturally, Hagar found her way to becoming a figure for the refugees and sans papiers in the endless spaces that stretch between nation states. Recently

63 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 4. 64 See ‘Ben Carson Refers to Slaves as “Immigrants” in First Remarks to HUD Staff’, New York Times 6 March 2017 . 65 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 75. 66 D.S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (New York: Orbis, 2013), p. 20. 67 Josephine Butler’s use of Hagar is discussed in detail in A.W. Benckhuysen, ‘Reading Hagar’s Story from the Margins: Family Resemblances between Nineteenth- and Twenti- eth-Century Female Interpreters’, in N. Calvert-Koyzis and H.A. Weir (eds.), Strangely Fa- miliar: Protofeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Biblical Texts (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), pp. 17-32.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 468 Sherwood she has been returned, quite explicitly, as the figure of the Arabic, the Egyptian, the Iraqi and the Iranian – as if as well as indicating Euro-America’s shadow sides, she is also determined to stand for Euro-America’s spaces of perceived alterity and threat. Before ‘Islam’ emerged as such an explicit problem for Eu- ro-America, Hagar played a dominant symbolic role in the Iranian Revolution (1979): the coup against Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, installed by US inter- vention.68 She plays the title role in the Iraqi poet Amal Al-Jabouri’s collection Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation, where Hagar becomes a figure of displacement between Iraq and Germany and between pre- war and post-war Iraqs. Al-Jabouri’s poem provides an appropriately biting take on the figure of the resident alien:

Hagar After the Occupation

All the masks fall As she searches for her old face

but the streets wear blindfolds

Hagar – she abandons her life Hagar – she is a martyr for her home, what others call a dust-filled dream

There is no one but Hagar Before her, the Occupation Behind her, the Occupation

And freedom? A bastard child An orphan

Without a name.69

68 See, for example, the role of Hagar in A. Shariati, Hajj: Reflections on its Rituals (trans. L. Bakhtiar; Abjad: Alberquerque, 1992). 69 A. Al-Jubouri, ‘Hagar After the Occupation’, in Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation (trans. R.G. Howell and H. Qaisi; Farmington: Alice James, 2011).

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