Joseph, or the Misfortunes of Virtue

Jacques Hassoun, who is a writer and psychoanalyst, recently published Les contrebandiers de la mémoire (The Smugglers of Memory).

Joseph the man who knows how to interpret dreams, Joseph the beloved son, Joseph the Marrano, Joseph sold by his brothers, Joseph the court Jew, Joseph the multiform and strange character, represents a whole that prefigures the exceptional destiny of the diasporic man.

It is nonetheless difficult for me to choose, among the different facets of this character — all of which could arrest the attention of the secular-Jewish-psychoanalyst… and Egyptian to boot — the one that might appear exemplary.

And so these pages will attempt to gather together a few flashes, a few images that might allow us to tell the relevance of the beloved son of the beautiful Rachel, the matriarch whose heartrending weeping is heard at Ramah without her finding any comforter capable of repairing the immense suffering that tears her apart.

And first this mystery: in the territorial partition of Canaan (into Cis- and Trans-Jordan), two of the children of Jacob have no geographical space that bears their name: Levi, whose descendants will devote themselves to the priesthood, is present/absent from this Promised Land conquered through hard struggle, but Joseph too: it is his two children, Ephraim and Manasseh (Menashe), who take over.

This dispossession of the name of Joseph in favor of that of his children represents an aporia. Whereas constantly throughout the Twenty-Four Books (which compose the so-called Bible), it is always the father who marks a lineage, a space… here it is the sons who will take the place of their father by “inheriting” the territory that had been allotted to him.

We know it: the effacement of the proper name is the mark of a grave fault, if not of a major crime, which exposes the subject of a structuring genealogical antecedence: at a point in a trans-generational continuity, the weave is torn, a name is foreclosed. This pertains to the constitution of a cryptic space that remains unknown to the descendants. As such, it can be the cause of a suffering without a name.

But what would Joseph’s fault be? To have kept silent about his belonging before Pharaoh? Before him, Abraham had used this ruse, had even feigned to be the brother of Sarah his wife (which, by the same stroke, could inscribe him in a simulacrum of incest liable to make him resemble the Egyptian monarch himself). To have shown himself cruel toward his brothers? They were so themselves toward him beyond all measure, in wishing first to murder him, then in selling him to the Ishmaelites, that is to say to a cousin and antagonistic tribe, to a tribe descending from Hagar, detested by Sarah the legitimate wife… This fault of the brothers was most grave: after the fact, in Mosaic legislation, to sell one’s brother will be considered a murder and punished as such. But we are not yet at that point… All in all, the brothers, irritated by the arrogance of this little youngest son who presented himself as a chief by way of those dreams, did nothing but respond, in a specular mode, to the pretensions of their junior. In compelling his brothers to kneel before him, Joseph had realized in the real the desire inscribed in his irritating dream. Is it on this account that he was to be punished?

There remains, however, a mystery: Joseph, whom tradition calls the just one, the tzadik (Yossef ha-tzadik, or Yossef tzadika — in Aramaic), does not reign nominally over a geopolitical space. We may then suppose — an optimistic hypothesis — that, equal to Levi, he occupied a particular function that transcended all idolatry of the land, that his spirituality went beyond a few acres, and that he had reigned sufficiently over a great country for his name to be necessarily attached to some barony.

But that could not satisfy us completely, and so we must explore yet further the history of this character: what is the grave fault imputed to him… To have been a Hofjude, a court Jew, with all the compromises that supposes? To be sure… And yet he is the one who knew how to resist the advances of the lustful wife of Potiphar, who knew not to yield “to the usages of the nations,” not to violate the Tenth Commandment even before it was decreed.

Yet another accusation can be brought against him: that of having made the old Jacob and his brothers “go down” into Egypt — in the time of its splendor — without prejudging the sequel of events: the enslavement of his descendants. He, the inspired dreamer, who had known how to read in Pharaoh’s nocturnal fancies the geopolitical future of Egypt, was incapable of foreseeing a history that would reveal itself to be painful. But was he not, on this occasion, the executor of destiny, was he not the one through whom the Promise comes? Let the reader recall: in the Brit ben habetarim [the Covenant between the Pieces] that bound the divinity to Abraham, a treaty had been pronounced: “Your descendants will become, after a time of slavery, a strong and numerous nation.”

In this respect, Joseph was not only a just man but an instrument of destiny. But more than this, we might suppose that this de-nomination in favor of his descendants was the mark of an extreme distinction: Egyptianized, Marrano-ized, he had known how to keep intact his faith in the God of his fathers and had transmitted it to his sons. This de-nomination would then be purely formal, for it would reveal itself to be founding of a transmission. As a name he could efface himself, since he was founding himself in his children (whereas he was isolated, declared dead to his father, responsible — equal to Isaac — for the death of his mother): a bifurcating genealogy. He had known how to perpetuate, in the most total isolation — as later certain minuscule diasporas were able to do — his faith, his emblems, a few of his traits that inscribed his children in the Abrahamic genealogy.

This effacement of the name, then, would pertain not to foreclosure (or to malediction), but rather to that symbolic one that founds the subject in his relation to the Law.

We could at this point content ourselves with this reading and affirm that this history reveals itself to be most instructive for the secular and diasporic Jews that we are, who never cease making ourselves… the smugglers of our memory¹.

We could close this inquiry here, did not another element, a very late one this time, come somewhat to modulate this optimistic finale. In the Spanish and Portuguese rite² of the 9th of Av, there is an elegy that for us represents the extreme point of horror: it is the one entitled “The Ten who were murdered for having confessed the divine majesty”³.

Here, the elegist describes an event apparently banal and yet tragic. Ten sages among the sages are murdered in an atrocious manner (burned alive, flayed with iron combs heated red in the fire, throats slit, broken, hanged…). But the circumstances of this murder are remarkable for their relevance. Indeed, the legislator responsible for this drama and representative of Caesar needed an indictment, needed a pretext. For,

we know it: the worst of murderers is the perverse bureaucrat who seeks and finds justifications for his act in the very discourse of his victims. Here, the legislator, one of the occupiers of Judea, summons ten sages from among the “Lights of the Age” and poses them the following question: “What punishment is incurred by the man of the house of Israel who sells his brother so that he may be reduced to slavery?”

The sages answer “death.”

“But then,” the legislator resumes, “you are the descendants of those who sold their brother Joseph, and this fault has remained unpunished down to our own days”…

This remark sets off a profound disquiet among the sages, who confer and acquiesce.

“You who are the representatives of those ten murderous brothers, you therefore have an unpaid debt, and the time has come to settle it.”

This irrefutable logic, this perversion of the Law, was to reveal itself mortal.

But there is one passage of this elegy (which is generally cantillated in a particularly funereal mode) that seems to me remarkable. As Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel sees the skin of his face flayed and begins to howl his faith in a voice resembling the sound of the shofar, the angels, overwhelmed by his suffering, cry out to the divinity “so this then is the Torah and this is its reward,” to which, most heedlessly, the divine retorts “if such a crime rises up to me, I will betray my oath and bring back the Flood upon the earth.”

And the adolescent of fifteen, raised in the strictest tradition and who adhered fully to its teaching and its practices, listened to this sentence with horror. A few years earlier he had seen arrive in Alexandria the Yugoslav women, survivors of the camps, who had been victims of medical experiments. He had heard what was said about the death camps, he had read Antelme and David Rousset, he had consulted works on the Inquisition and on the pogroms that, in the seventeenth century, had ravaged Poland and annihilated the glorious Council of the Four Lands… And this adolescent had believed in the truth of this elegy, he had believed that Joseph was responsible for the murder of these sages, but also that through his intermediary the divinity had revealed itself for what it was: a liar, non-existent, radically non-existent.

And ever since, the adolescent has never wavered from this position. The divine is at best non-existent, and if it exists it is a liar.

And so, Joseph would be understood as the one who transmitted to an Alexandrian Jew, some millennia after his death, this truth: whatever the Law and the spirit of justice that sustains it, there always exists a perverse man who is liable to divert it in the name of a Just one. We must consider this perversion as proper to qualify a divinity incapable of guaranteeing the validity of its word.

In this respect, Joseph could not give his name to a territorial settlement: he is the one charged with transmitting the truth about the ferocity of the divine… and of institutions.