Michael Zank

A few days ago, we screened Die Slavenkönigin/Moon of Israel (Austria 1924), a film directed by Michael Courtace (aka Michael Curtiz) that was based on a novel by H. Rider Haggard that romanticized the biblical story of the exodus. You can watch the French version HERE. The screening served as a co-curricular event for a class on “Moses and Muhammad as Prophets” that my colleague and Islam-scholar, Kecia Ali, and I teach as a freshman seminar for the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.

The students in our class are outspoken about their likes and dislikes. In this case, they liked the live piano accompaniment by Gerhard Gruber (see http://www.filmmusik.at/), but they were puzzled by the story. If it was about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, why was Moses such a marginal figure?

To make a long story short, let’s just say that “Moon of Israel” and other modern cinematic representations make something evident that may otherwise remain unnoticed. Within the context of popular western entertainment, Moses has been reduced to kitsch. For students unfamiliar with this technical term, here is a definition, borrowed from the Internet:

KITSCH refers to “art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way: ‘the lava lamp is an example of sixties kitsch’.”

There is no question that the Moses of “Moon of Israel” represents something like 1920’s religious kitsch. He is the proverbial “old man with a beard.” a synthetic image of an aged (and, hence, irrelevant) Christ, or even God, the Father of Christian iconography, himself, a figure recognizable from nineteenth-century biblical engravings; in any case, he is an emasculated and ineffectual figure even in terms of plot, which is now driven by two youthful figures who take on qualities once held by Moses himself: an “Israelitish” woman named Merapi (Maria Corda) who––through “faith”––calls forth the first plague on the Egyptians, and her Egyptian lover, prince Seti (Adelqui Millar), a social-democrat who humanizes the Egyptians by lightening the burden on the Hebrews.

Oddly or not, cinematic representations of Moses remained kitschy throughout the twentieth century, whether or not the intentions of the representation were serious or unserious. (The same may be said of the Muhammad of “The Message,” the epic non-representation of the Islamic prophet, released just before the Iranian Revolution of 1979.) Call it the Midas-touch of Hollywood. In order to turn something into movie-gold, it must first be sapped of its non-kitschy potential.

The precondition of Moses-as-kitsch is the reduction of religion to the level of entertainment. The political thinker Leo Strauss pointed this out at about the same time as Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay on art in the age of infinite reproduction. Strauss worried that religion was no longer recognizable as such at the moment when it turned into a form of entertainment, even if was the highest form of entertainment. (I will look up the exact quote. Meanwhile, readers are kindly referred to my translation of Strauss’s early writings.)

Neither art, nor religion, the filmed Moses of Hollywood is a product of sentimentality, deprived of any true knowledge of “ultimates” (a nod to my colleague, Professor Neville) and divine authority. Take Cecile B. Demille’s two versions of the Moses/Exodus story, the original “Ten Commandments,” released in 1923, and the monumental remake of 1956, the most costly and meticulously researched spectacle of the time. The white-American 1920’s Moses is an apostle of temperance, the 1950’s Moses a vehicle of Cold War propaganda, proclaiming the gospel of freedom, made in America, over against the tyranny of the East,  represented in the figure of Rameses, played by the inimitable Yul Brynner. In both cases, the audience’s confused beliefs and their sentimental attachment to the prophetic leader of the exodus is exploited in the interest of clearly articulated social-political messaging. The biblical story is given contemporary “relevance,” while a contemporary agenda (more or less uncontested by the intended audience) is reinforced by what remains of the authority of the biblical figure.

I haven’t seen the new Museum of the Bible in D.C. but it will be interesting to see whether it manages to avoid the trappings of kitschification. [Update: Later I did visit the MOB. Here is my report.]

For further thought: Does the biblical narration of the life of Moses escape the verdict of kitsch, and if so, how? What about Philo and Josephus? To what extent are their respective apologies for Moses “serious” and to what extent do we owe the modern image of swash-buckling Mosaic feats of strength to their early attempts at romanticization? What about the Midrashic burlesque of Moses stuck in a pit by Jethro, in a kind of contest of the magicians? In other words, when and under what presuppositions was Moses ever not kitsch? This raises the question: when and under what conditions is religion “serious” rather than sentimental? Do we need to go back to the Aztecs to find religious seriousness? Or is the theatricality of religious ritual inevitably a form of entertainment?