Originalveröffentlichung in: Bernhard Giesen, Daniel Šuber (Hg.), Religion and politics.

Cultural
perspectives (International studies in religion and society 3), Leiden ; London 2005, S. 141-159

MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

Jan Assmann

I The ‘Mosaic Distinction’ and the Problem of Violence

Monotheism introduced a new distinction into the realm of religion,

bringing about a totally new form of religion whose hallmark was
less the exclusive worship of one god, but the distinction as such.
This distinction nnplies a whole scale of concretizations between the
poles of a more ontological and cognitive meaning with regard to
true and falsc, and of a more ethical and deontic mcaning witii
regard to ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ or just and unjust, or iieedom and
‘slavery.’ Drawing the distinction entails making a decision, and this
decision of necessity lmplies rejecting the discarded option. Tlus new
form of rehgion is based on a dccision, which m lts turn is based
on a deep conviction, implying strong notions of what is deemed
incompatible. All convictions aspiring to any depth and power require
those strong conccpts of the excludcd other. The monotheistic, oi
‘Mosaic’ distinction, which in its last consequence means the dis-
tinction between ‘God and the world, is hard to draw, and the
Bible is very exphcit about thcse many difficulties and drawbacks.
Monotheism requircd a firm dccision and correspondingly strong
concepts about ‘the other,’ for which a whole new vocabulary was
created: the ‘heathens,’ ‘pagans,’ ‘gentiles,’ ‘unbelievers,’ ‘idolaters,’
‘hcretics’ etc. Thc strength of the decision and the firmness of the
conviction imply an element of violence. This element of violence
becomes obvious as soon as the distinction betwc en true and false
or good and evil is turncd into the distinction between friend and
‘foe.’ I do not hold that this new form of religion brought violence
into the world; the world, of course, was already full of violence
before the advcnt of monotheism. One could even argue that monothe-
ism, by abolishing ethnic and national distinctions and creating over-
arching identities and solidarities, tends to make the world more
peaceful. But it is impossible to deny that at least potentially this

Assmann (1996, 1997, 2003).

142 JAN ASSMANN

kind of religion implies a new type of violence, religiously motivated

and directed against those who, in the light of that new distinction,
appear to be the enemies of god.
‘Enemies of God,’ however, sounds familiar not only in the con-
text of monotheism, but also in the context of ‘pagan’ religion. It is
a normal device in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources to
represent the political enemy as an enemy of God. In order to get
a clearer view of the problematic alliance between religion and vio-
lence, we must distinguish between ‘interpretation’ and ‘motivation.’
The religious interpretation or legitimation of violcnce is as old as
warfare in gcneral. Examples stretch from the Ancient Near East to
the most recent military activities in East and West. What is new,
is the religious motivation of violence—the idea of killing a person
or starting a war for the sake of God, to fulhll his will and ordcrs,
acting as God’s executioners.
This new type of religion is based on a truth—or a ‘law’—that
requires the resolution either to kill or to die for it, a new form of
‘religious heroism,’ which implies either active or passive intolerance.
On what could be called the ‘mythical’ plane, the plane of the found-
ing stories and grand narratives modeling the lives of peoples and
individuals, active intolerance is exercised, e.g., by Moses after the
episode of the Golden Calf, when 3000 men “brothers, friends, neigh-
bors” were killed; by Pinhas, who killed his kinsman Zimri together
with a Midianite girl in the act of love-making;2 by Joshua and the
whole complex of the “conquest”; by Elijah killing the priests of
Ba’al after winning the contest,3 etc. The list is much longer, and
though these events belong to myth and not to history, it seems to
me highly significant that the new religion attaches so much impor-
tance to violence in its narrative self-presentation. Violence belongs
to what could be called the ‘core-semantics’ of monotheism. I do
not state that monotheism is violent; merely that it dwells on scenes
of violence in narrating its path to general realization.
On the plane of history, active intolerance was shown by Josiah
destroying the “high places” (bamot) and killing the priests;4 by Ezra
divorcing the mixed marriages;5 and above all by Judas Maccabaeus,

2 Num 25:7.
3 1 Kg 18:40.
4 2 Kg 23.
5 Ezra 9: 1-4.
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 143

who applied the fictitious and archaic Deuteronomist regulations con-

cerning the Canaanite towns, which “must not be spared”6 to the
Jewish towns and communities that abandoned the way of the Law
and succumbed to Hellenism. To those towns, “the ban was exe-
cuted” and every living being was killed.7 In I Maccabees, the story
is told with pride, not with horror. The biblical term for active intol-
erance is qana, “zeal.” God is a “zealous god” (El qana), persecuting
the idolatry of the fathers down to the third and fourth generations,
and those who love him are expected to be equally zealous in fighting
for the Law. Monotheism requires a zealous attitude; it is a virtue
to be zealous, i.e. to engage totally in the cause of God. The Arabic
equivalent, of course, is djihad. The Maccabaean wars seem to be
the first religiously motivated wars in history. They were wars of resis-
tance, to be sure, led in defense against an aggressor and his pro-
ject of forced assimilation.
Judging from numerous discussions, modern theologians—Jews and
Christians, Catholics and Protestants—hate to be reminded of these
biblical stories and react violently to this line of reasoning, which
they decry as “anti-Semitic.” They point to the unhistorical, purely
fictional character of these texts, as if this would solve the problem.
It is precisely the fictional or rather mythical character of most of
these stories which makes them potentially dangerous. I am not talk-
ing about ‘history,’ but about cultural semantics conditioning and
motivating the actions and attitudes of peoples living in the horizon
of these semantics. I consider it dangerous to close one’s eyes vis-a-vis
the potentially negative or malignant implications of one’s convic-
tions. In a global world we cannot afford such an apologetic atti-
tude. Stark denial is not helpful; reflection is requircd. I do not want
just to criticize or reproach monotheism’s violent implications, but
to encourage a process of reflection and, if possible, what in Freudian
terms is called “sublimation.” I do not advocate abolishing the Mosaic
distinction, but rather call for more reflective, considerate and his-
torically informed ways of dealing with it.
Active intolcrance, however, is only onc sidc of what I have called
‘religious heroism.’ The other side is passive intolerance, i.e. mar-
tyrdom, in Hebrew qiddush ha-shem. On the plane of myth, this form

6 Dtn 7:2: lo tekhanem, cf. 13:16f. and especially 20: 16-18.

7 1 Macc 5.
144 JAN ASSMANN

of qana—“zeal for the Lord”—appears in the Book of Daniel,8 which

was written in the time of the Maccabaean Wars; on the plane of
history, it appears during these same wars in the form of heroic
resistance to Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ project to turn his kingdom
into the first ‘nation-state’ in human history, a state where there
should be only one people, one religion and (what was regarded to
be the same) one law.'1 Many Jews resisted this forced assimilation
and preferred to die rather than bow to an idol or eat sacrificial
meat, becoming by this form of zealous engagement for the Law the
first martyrs in history. Also in this context, it has to be stressed that
there are many examples of heroism and of ‘dying for’ outside the
horizon of monotheism. Roman history especially is full of examples
of heroic Romans who preferred death to ignominy, slavery or other
privations they considered incompatible with their convictions about
‘Romanhood,’ honor, patriotism, ancl bravery. Martyrdom, however,
i.e. to die for God, was something new, and it was based on this
same distinction between true and false or good and evil, which is
the hallmark of the new religion. Drawing the distinction, forming
the decision, rejecting the excluded option to the point of dying
rather than giving in and compromising: this is the line that leads
from a new form of religious conviction to its personal, social and
political consequences.
Both, active and passive intolerance, are interpreted and justified
in the Bible as a kind of ‘fulfillment’: the fulfillment of scripture.
This idea of ‘scripture’ is equally novel and innovative. Two kinds
of written texts may be identified, which I propose to term ‘infor-
mative’ and ‘performative.’ Informative texts require our attention;
performative texts, our obedience—i.e. fulfillment, execution, or trans-
lation into action and behavior. Informative texts tell us something
important or amusing about the world; performative texts order and
prohibit, and in doing so make claims of our life. Holy writ is a
performative text: it requires that it be performed or fulfilled in our
way of living. This hold true for, at least, the Jewish or, to be more
precise, the ‘halakhic’ concept of scripture, which, however, is also
present in various forms in the other monotheistic religions. All
monotheistic religions, even Buddhism (which, though not monothe-
istic, is still a religion based on a variant of the Mosaic distinction),

" Ch. 3, ch. 14.

9 1 Macc 1:41-64.
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 145

imply performative scripture in the form of canons of holy writ,

determining the forms of personal, social and political action and
behavior in the way a film script determines the actions and speeches
of the actors. Martyrdom is the form of acting out a performative
text in which this relation between scripture and fulfillment becomes
most clear. The Jewish martyrs typically die with a verse of scrip-
ture on their lips. Death is the most radical and the most decisive
way of fulfilling, acting out, or living out scripture; not in the tem-
ple, the sanctuary or some other sacred place, but in everyday life
and in the most profane and unholy situations and places.111
Again we must realize that the world was already full of scripts,
performative texts prescribing human action and claiming strict obe-
dience and fulfillment, well before the emergence of monotheism.
These texts, however, never claimed to regulate the whole of human
life, but only certain spheres of action, as may be regulated either
by law codes and royal edicts or by rituals and ceremonial pre-
scriptions. The Torah, it is true, contains many similar laws and
prescriptions, and there are many singular parallels in other ancient
civilizations, but there is no parallel for the claim the Torah holds
on the totality of human existence, nor for the divine origin and
timeless, absolute validity of such an all-encompassing regulation.
Without this form of pcrformative scripture, the underlying distinc-
tion, decision and conviction cannot be maintaincd and reproduced
through the sequence of generations and radical changes of context
and circumstances history brings about in the course of centuries.
The Mosaic distinction requires and brings about a thorough restruc-
turing of cultural memory. This form of living in the horizon of a
canon is not exclusively Jewish; in various permutations, it applies
to many minoritarian communities in antiquity. They left the main-
stream ways of life in favor of alternative, purer paths, typically based
and gathered around a core-library of normative and ‘performative’
scripture: the Pythagoraeans, the Orphics, the Platonists and other
philosophical schools, the ‘sectarian movements’ in early Judaism,
the various branches of Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the Christians,
the Buddhists, the Manichaeans, the Mandeans and others. In all
these movemcnts, we meet with the desire for the sanctification of
life, for living a life in fulfillment of a sacred or sanctioned script, a
life in truth and goodness.10

10 See Agus (1988).

146 JAN ASSMANN

Drawing the distinction and making the decision requires a firm

mind and heart. Monotheism implies not only a new idea of god
but also, and above all, a new concept of man, laying mucli stress
especially on ‘inner man’ (ho endos anthropos in the words of St. Paul,
interior homo in those of Augustine). Israel is required not only to rec-
ognize god’s unity (aechad), but love the Lord “witli all thy soul, all
thy heart, all thy power”.11 The development of new forms of inner
life, of subjectivity, reflectivity and inner conflicts, is among the most
important personal consequences of monotheism. Conversion and
repentance are perhaps the most promincnt and the most innova-
tive of these new forms of inner life. Also in this respect, I would
dare the thesis that conversion and repentance are unthinkable con-
cepts in the context of traditional ‘pagan’ religions. These religions
could not be separated from culture and society. You could assim-
ilate to Egyptian or Mesopotamian culture, but never ‘convert’ to
the respective religions. Conversion implies a decision based on the
Mosaic distinction between true (or good, or just) and false (or bad,
or unjust) religion. Conversion means making a decision about the
true forms of life and belief. Repentance—teschuvah in Hebrew, metanoia
in Greek—means a total transformation or reformation of one’s ways
of living. It is closely connected to a concept of sin which is equally
revolutionary. Making mistakes and repenting of them afterwards is,
of course, a universal phenomenon. I am thinking of an existential
turn, caused by an awareness of the general sinfulness of one’s former
life. I am not speaking of specific misdeeds, but of the funda-
mental and existential sinfulness of the ‘natural state,’ i.e. a life out-
side the Law, unheeding the will of God, as it is expressed, e.g. in
Ps 51 v. 7:
for I am born in guilt,
in sin my mother has conceived me.
and in verse 19:
Das Opfer, das Gott gefallt, ist ein zerknirschter Geist, ein zerbrochenes
und zerschlagenes Herz wirst Du, Gott, nicht verschmahen.
The god of monotheism has no divine partners, his partner is man;
both in the shape of the chosen people, Israel, and that of the indi-

" See the ‘schema prayer’, Dtn 6.5.

 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 147

vidual Israelite, who assumed, in this new kind of religion, a totally

new dignity. The individual now found himself or herself confronted
with god, even exposed and surrendered to god’s omniscience and
critical attention. Monotheism is a drama between god and man,
acted out on the arena of, both, everyday life and of the inner life
of the psyche. The T of the psalms stands firstly for a singular
suffering or jubilating, imploring or thanksgiving individual, secondly
for everybody confronting his god in similar situations, and thirdly
for the community of Israel. It is an ‘I’ ‘larger-than-lifc,’ accommodat-
ing all three meanings in its exposed position before God. Monotheism
means an extension of the traditional world in the direction of tran-
scendence and subjectivity, or outer and inner transcendence.
This new form of intensified subjectivity finds its clearest expres-
sions in the sentiment of repentance and the step of conversion, to
leave one’s former life which one has come to recognize as wrong,
sinful or evil, and to enter the life of truth, the way of the Law or
the imitation of Christ. All this is totally alien to ‘pagan’ religions.
Repentance and conversions are dramatic plays acted out on the
inner stage of the human heart, which co-evolved with the monothe-
istic turn in ancient Israel.II

II The Politigal Consequences of Monotheism

The ‘monotheistic turn’ mcans both a revolution and an evolution,

strctching over many centuries and including many drawbacks and
movements in the oppositc direction. The law of evolution reads
“Natura non facit saltus,” and it applies also to cultural history. But
culture does make leaps, not perhaps in actual history, but in his-
tory as it is perccived, remcmbcred and representcd. The monothe-
istic turn is represented in thc Bible as a revolutionary ‘leap’ of the
highest possible dcgrce. The prolonged sojourn of Israel in Egypt
for more than four centuries effaces every memory of thc patriar-
chal past in Canaan, and the cxodus from Egypt cuts the links to
thc host culture and helps to prepare a ‘tabula rasa for God on
which to write His revelation. Moses means a new beginning and
the installation of a new religion, turning an amorphous mass of
nameless emigrants into the ‘Chosen People,’ the people of God.
The revelation of thc Law at Mt. Sinai constitutes the ‘primal scene’
of monotheism.
148 JAN ASSMANN

This primal scene is politically determined in such a way as to

suggest that monotheism is originally a political religion, in the sense
of a sacralized political movement. I am envisaging, to be sure, the
event at Mt. Sinai in its broader context, including the exodus from
Egypt, the wanderings through the wilderness and the conquest of
the Promised Land, and I am interpreting this narrative complex
not in the sense of real history, but of mnemo-history. This means
that I am asking for the form in which monotheism remembers and
tells the story of its origins. I'lie primarily political character of this
story is obvious. The story is about liberation from Egyptian serf-
dom, a purely political action, in clear opposition to a kind of polit-
ical order and organization, for which Egypt stands as its symbolical
exponent. This political action leads to the constitution of the Hebrews
as the people of God and a “kingdom of priests and a holy people”
(mamlekhet kohanim we-goj qadosh),12 an alternative political organization
and the political antithesis to the oriental empires, based on the prin-
ciple of sacral kingship or ‘representative theocracy.’ The form of
this constitution is a treaty, a political alliance between the people
and God.
Monotheism is the basic principle and the first commandment of
this new political order: “I am YHVVH thy God that has liberated
thee from Egypt. Thou shalt not have other gods beside me.” This
does not mean that there are no other gods, but that Israel should
not have other gods. This makes a big difference. Israel is committed
to political loyalty, to staying loyal to the alliance and not breaking
away to other overlords. Loyalty is a meaningful concept only if
there are other gods. Exclusivism, the hallmark of monotheism, is
therefore originally a political concept, meaning the exclusivity of
allegiance to one particular god, not the exclusive existence of one
god only. It concerns the alliance between the people of god and
the god of liberation. To the loyalty of Israel corresponds the ‘jeal-
ousy’ of God: both are political properties. Both, loyalty and jeal-
ousy, are political concepts. Only with the transformation of a
sacralized political movement into a new form of full-fledged reli-
gion, the exclusivity of God turns from a question of commitment
into a question of existence.
The Schema prayer, it is true, being a central part of the Sinai
revelation, states that YHVVH is ‘ONE,’ aechad. This may be inter-

12 Ex 19:6.
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 149

preted both ways: in the sense of an exclusivity of commitment,

which befits the following injunction to love YHWH “with all thy
heart, all thy soul and all thy might,” but also in the sense of absolute
oneness or unity. In this context, the other gods that Israel is requested
not to ‘have’ are not only forbidden, but nonexistent, false, fictive
gods. Monolatry turns into Monotheism. YHWH is the only true
god. The tension between monolatry and monotheism, loyalty to the
one in full recognition of the existence of other gods on the one
hand, and the recognition of only one god denying the existence of
other gods as mere idols on the other hand, this tension marks bib-
lical religion from the beginning. The borderline between the one
god YHWH and the other gods is originally a political boundary,
separating the Chosen People from the rest of the nations, but it
tends right from the start to take on the cognitive or ‘existential’
meaning between true and false gods.
This border, the distinction between true and false or good and
evil with regard to religion is the proper innovation of monotheism.
This distinction simply did not exist previously in the realm of reli-
gion. There were foreign religions with foreign, unknown gods, but
nobody would have declared these gods false and fictitious or wrong
and evil. Not the oneness of god, but the concept of ‘idols’ is the
real monotheistic innovation. There were no idols and heathen in
the realm of tribal religion and polytheism. The construction of
paganism is the single achievement of monotheism, based on the dis-
tinction between true and false.
Monotheism, therefore, is a religion that blurs boundaries, the
boundaries that are expressed or represented by the divinities of poly-
theism: between cities and countries, tribes and nations, day and night,
land and sea, love and war, good and evil—but that also erects a
boundary: betwcen true and false, religion and idolatry. Monotheism
is, at the same time, exclusive and universalistic. Both tendencies,
the exclusive and the universalistic, have political consequences.
The political problcm of universalism consists in its lack of legit-
imizing function. The chief gods of polytheistic religions are state
gods and reprcsent political unity. Ashur stands for Assyria, Marduk
for Babylonia, Amun-Re for Egypt, Athena for Athens etc. In this
way, YHWH originally stood for Israel but the biblical god soon
outgrew this political role. Pure monotheism does not recognize
national gods. This problem is solved by the monotheistic religions
in different ways. The Jewish solution consists in ‘sub-sovereignty.’
150 JAN ASSMANN

Israel develops the pure form of monotheism only under minority

conditions, in the Babylonian exile and under Persian rule. Under
these conditions, YHWH may renounce his political function as a
state god and become truly universal. The Christian and Islamic
solution of this problem is the empire. So little monotheism suits the
needs of a national religion, so well it functions as an imperial reli-
gion. It does not support a nation-state, but an empire. Christianity
is linked to the Roman Empire, Islam forms empires of its own,
from the Abassid, Omayyad, Fatimid etc. up to the Ottoman empires.
Nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism, therefore, repre-
sented a mortal danger to the alliance between religion and politics,
in the Muslim East as well as the Christian Wcst. The typical nation-
state is a secular state. This holds for post-revolutionary France, as
well as for Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and even early Zionism.
Nationalism is also a political religion that does not tolerate other
religions beside itself. Religious nation-states such as Pakistan and
Iran are exceptional and problematic constructions. The same would
apply to a not yet existing ‘Serbia’ (at least not under this designa-
tion), with its national branch of Greek orthodox faith. The politi-
cal forms that are congenial to monotheistic universalism are either
minority conditions or imperial multinationalism.
But there is also the political problem of the ‘Mosaic distinction’
with its construction and exclusion of paganism. The political con-
sequences of this distinction turn dangerous only if it is interpreted
in terms of friend and foe. Then, the idolaters turn into enemies of
God and the political leaders turn into God’s willing executioners.
This interpretation seems typical of the political world view of the
two extreme spearheads, of radical Islamism and the Bush adminis-
tration. One side speaks of Allah’s enemies, the other of the axis of
evil. Each side perceives the other as the providential foe, the
“personihcation of its own question” (“ihre eigene Frage als Gestalt”):
Der Feind ist unsre Frage als Gestalt,
und er wird uns, wir ihn zum selben Ende hetzen.
The foe personifies our own question
and he will hunt us, we him, down to the same end.
Whereas Carl Schmitt saw in these verses by Theodor Daubler the
epitome of the political, I would understand them as expressing a
pathology of politics, a malign clinch calling for therapy. The polar-
lzation of the political world into friend and foe seems in itself patho-
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 151

logical, but it becomes mortally dangerous if the foe is demonized

far beyond his real possibilities and intentions for destruction. In
those cases the point is reached where politics merges with myth
and religion.

III Monotheism, Violence and the Modern Situation

Twenty years ago, the global situation was still determined by the
Cold War, i.e. the confrontation between two powers, one of which,
the communist block, considered itself as atheistic, and the other,
the capitalist block, as Christian. It appears that religion was only
involved on the one side of this confrontation, the capitalist side. The
opposite, in fact, is true. The communist totalitarianism of the Soviet
empirc presented the paradigmatic case of a political rcligion, i.e.
politics with a religious, even messianic perspective aiming at estab-
lishing a paradise on earth in form of class-free society and eternal
peace. Communism was not connected to a religion, but was in itself a
rcligion. Using Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s important distinction, we may
say that it is deeply rooted in, but not caased by, Christian and Jewish
millennialism. There is certainly no evolutionary trend leading from
Christian or Jewish religion, or even Gnosdcism, to Marxism; still,
thcse religions laid the foundation for a new religion, or anti-reli-
gion, to arise. Being an universal or ‘world-religion’ in itself, it did
not tolerate another religion beside itself. Soviet Communism was a
rcligion and even what I call a “secondary or counter-religion,”11
including a church and an orthodoxy, because it was based on the
distinction bctween true and false and had codified this distinction
in a canon of holy writ, including the works of Marx and Engels,
Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It demanded bclief and propagated the polar-
ization of bclievers and pagans, capitalism thcreby playing the role
of paganism.13 14
Capitalism, on the other hand, is not a religion, in the same way
as paganism is not a religion, but just a polemical and external
classification. As a religion, communism had no real counterpart in
the West. The exact counterpart was only represented by Islam. If

13 Assmann (1997).
14 Gellner (1994: 170- 181).
 154 JAN ASSMANN

towards the heathen, Christianity is a globalizing and polarizing, i.e.

politicizing, religion.
Yet even Judaism implies a globalizing tendency. It is not mis-
sionary, but lives among the peoples. What mission is to Christianity,
diaspora is to Judaism. Judaism, originally a religion of self-exclu-
sion from the orbit of other peoples, destined to live as a ‘Chosen
People’ in the ‘Promised Land,’ had to live dispersed among the
peoples in a form of passive globalization.
If Christianity is a globalizing religion intending to spread over
the whole earth, it is nonetheless about a reign which is not of ‘this
world.’ The Augustinian distinction between the City of God and
the City of Man is constitutive of Christian thought and practice,
although it had often been deliberately blurred. Mission does not
necessarily mean subjugation, though in history both quite often went
together. Islam, however, does not know of such restrictions. The
pagans are neither excluded nor violently ‘missionized,’ but subju-
gated and converted. Here, the distinction reads Dar el Islam and
Dar el Harb: “house of Islam” and “house of war”. This means exacdy:
‘where there is no Islam, there is war.’ And since war is not a desir-
able state, the rule is: ‘where there is war, shall be Islam.’ For this
reason, Islam is the most pronouncedly globalizing religion among
the three Abrahamitic monotheisms. The globalizing element of
monotheism is present only in a passive form in Judaism, in the
form of diaspora; it becomes active in Christianity, but tempered by
a that-worldly orientation; and finds its intemperate political expres-
sion only in Islam.
The globalizing dynamics of monotheism is based from in its
underlying universalism. If there is only one god, He is responsible
for all countries and peoples. Polytheism expresses the diversity and
plurality of the world, monotheism knows of only one god, one world
and one humanity. For this reason, the Bible interprets the diver-
sity of languages as a punishment and a ‘depravation of creation.’
The plurality of peoples, goyim in Hebrew, acquires the negative
meaning of ‘pagans,’ and in the Arab expression dar el-harb, this neg-
ative meaning becomes most manifest. The three monotheisms han-
dle their universalistic perspective, however, in very different manner.
Judaism postpones it to a ‘messianic age.’ History is determined by
the plurality of the nations and religions. Only at the end of time,
in the post-histoire of messianic time, will the peoples convert to the
One God and go to Zion for worship.
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 155

For Christianity, the Messiah has already come, bringing, how-

ever, not the end of history; the end will come only when the gospel
has been told to all the peoples. Until then, the kingdom of God is
in a certain mysterious way present, it is ‘true,’ but not of this world.
At least the shi’ite Islam knows of this messianic-eschatological post-
ponement, but not of the Christian dichotomy of the two kingdoms.
Islam insists on realization, that is, on transformation of religion into
politics here and now; it leaves no doubt that its kingdom is of this
world. Of the three Abrahamitic religions, it is the one that is most
resolute in the realization of the political implications of monotheis-
tic universalism.
This most unequivocally and politically globalizing religion sees
itself now confronted with a similarly globalizing movement, not in
Christianity, but in the shapc of post-Christian secularism, which
shares with Christianity its universalistic impulse but not its spiritual
perspective and which, for the same reason, globalizes the world in
such a successful and even irresistible way that it can only be per-
ceived by Islam as a mortal threat. With Western secularism on the
one side and Islam on the other, we have two religions which oper-
ate on the political plane with the claim to universal power, and
which demonize each other as mortal enemies. In this extreme sta-
tus, however, this analysis holds true only for the two extreme spear-
heads of tliese two powcrs, Islamism and fundamentalism on the one
liand and the Bush administration as the exponent ol Western val-
ues or value-fundamentalism (democracy, individualism, market econ-
omy etc.) on the other. This offers to the more moderate zones
within and between the two blocks, to liberal Islam and to plural-
istic Europc with its partly Islamic history, the chance of playing the
role of the third and of brcaking up the dangerous dualism.
Is it possible or even probable that the radical polarization of the
world is connected with the Mosaic distinction between true and
false rrligion? I would think so, but its destructive potential is only
realized in a modern, post-monotheistic world. In this situation, the
only cure seems to consist in a resolute de-demonization of the other.
The West should beware of demonizing Islam by confounding it
witli Islamism (and then depicting it as the ‘personification of its own
question’). Islam is a complcx and pluralistic phenomenon. The West
should support the libcral, refornrist trends as opposed to the fun-
damentalists and puritans (the Wahhabites) with their radical fanati-
cism. Of crucial import is also the disentanglement of politics and
 156 JAN ASSMANN

religion. Western secularism must not see and advertise itself as the
only true and universal form of political order. Islam or Islamism,
in turn, should no longer insist on the immediate political realiza-
tion of its religious norms and notions.
Monotheistic religion must remember its original critical impulse.
It was originally intended as a means of breaking up the insepara-
ble unity of ‘rule’ and ‘salvation,’ LHerrschaft, und LHeil,' typical of the
representative theocracies of the Eastern empires, Babylonia, Assyria,
Egypt, Persia and Hcllenism ruled by gods and the sons of Gods.
The idea of the ‘covenant’ burst the compact unity of rule and sal-
vation and withdrew salvation from the hand of the rulers. Monothe-
ism originally meant political criticism. Biblical monotheism opposed
the pharaonic oppression with its utopia of a decent society, where
nobody was enslaved or humiliated. Monotheism meant the dehni-
tion of an Archimedean point, from which to unhinge the political
orders of the ancient world. This issue may be defined as the sep-
aration of religion and politics. This separation is given up where
religion foregoes its critical potential and establishes a new form of
totalitarian unity, forcing politics, jurisprudence, art and other cul-
tural fields under its vision.
The political theology of the Pentateuch and the prophets has a
double direction. It is not only about founding and legitimating a
new form of political order, but it is also and primarily about criti-
cizing and delegitimizing the traditional prevailing order; and this, not the
foundational function, is the most important aspect of biblical polit-
ical theology. Biblical monotheism as it appears in the Books of
Exodus and Deuteronomy is a weapon directed against the political
structures of the Ancient Near East. However, if we continue read-
ing in the Hebrew Bible beyond the Pentateuch, from the Books of
Judges and Samuel to the Books of Kings and further through the
Books of the Prophets, it becomes crystal clear that biblical political
theology is not so much directed against Egypt and Babylonia, but
it rather addresses Israel’s own society. Egypt and Babylonia are just
symbols for what is considered to be wrong in terms of political
order. Moses standing before Pharaoh is just a model for the later
prophets to confront their respective kings in Jerusalem, Samaria and
Babylon. Biblical Monotheism constructs a new platform from which
to criticize and delegitimize polidcal order. This platform simply did
not exist in the pre-Israelite world. Religion was part of the system.
 MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES 157

Now, it became a system of its own, separated from culture includ-

ing politics, economics, arts and sciences.
Yet, the function of biblical political theology is, both, critical and
foundadonal; it delegitimizes the previous political order and legit-
imizes a new one. It separates religion from the rest of culture, but
it tends to transform the whole of culture in the light of truth. It
differendates and it de-differentiates. As a means of differentiation,
it represents an immense achievement in the history of mankind, in
terms of freedom and human rights against the claims of politics; as
a power of de-differentiation, however, of totalitarian ‘Gleichschaltung’
(ideological standardization and synchronisationi) of culture under the dic-
tate of religion, it is a danger to human freedom.
For a close, I would like to summarize my interpretation of mono-
theism as being (originally) a political movement of resistance and
liberation in dve points, which correspond to dve leitmotifs in the
Biblical narrative:
(1) The motif of liberation. The liberadon from Egypdan serfdom is
the drst and foremost foundation of the new religion; it is thus purely
political, meant to found human society on a new basis which for-
ever precludes oppression, exploitation and humiliation.
(2) The motif of God’s oneness, uniqueness or solitude. As we have
seen, this has also, at lcast originally, a political meaning. Political
alliances are exclusive: you must serve two overlords. A small state
such as Israel was constantly confronted with the decision of whethcr
to side either with Egypt or Assyria, but never with both. 1 he only
way to escape these constraints was to form an equally exclusive
alliance with God that excluded other gods and othcr lords. The
resoludon to recognize only one God is, by its origin, a purcly polit-
ical intention.
(3) The motif of God as legislator. A legislating god was unknown to
the world of.polytheism. God as judge, to be sure, was a central
concept in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but legislation was the task of
the king. The idca of justice was divine, but the formulation and
promulgation of concrete laws to be derived from the idea of jus-
tice was the task of the king, because the laws were deemcd to be
dependcnt on historically changing situations. The legislating god
replaces the king in his most important function.
(4) The motif of the wrath of God. The jealousy and the wrath of
God are political affects, distinguishing the sovereign ruler. The
158 JAN ASSMANN

biblical god develops these qualities only after the formation of the
covenant at Mt. Sinai. Unlike the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia,
YHWH does not rule over other gods, but over human people, and
assumes the necessary political emotions in relation to his people.
(5) The prohibition of images. Many things arouse the anger of God,
but he reacts most furiously to images. The primal scene of the
wrath of God is the story of the Golden Calf, which God resents
as defection to other gods. What is wrong with images? Images are
the medium through which the gods of ancient polytheisms exerted
their rulership on earth. The ancient oriental state may be classified
as a ‘representative theocracy.’ The states were ruled by state-gods,
Assur in Assyria, Marduk in Babylonia, Amun-Re in Egypt, yet they
ruled not directly but indirectly, through representatives such as the
king, the sacred animals and the innumerable images in the tem-
ples. Mundane government is just a replica and representation of
divine rulership, and draws its legitimacy from this ‘theo-mimesis.’
This sphere of representation is destroyed by the prohibition of
images. The god of Israel rules directly, not indirectly. Every image
would destroy the immediacy of His presence. The covenant is based
on direct theocracy. In this context, I would also like to refer to
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s remark on Augustine’s rejection of any rep-
resentation of the city of God on earth. According to Eisenstadt’s
understanding of Augustine’s position, people could not ‘represent’
the City of God without conceiving themselves as divine. In this
rejection of representation, Eisenstadt detected what he called an
“Axial theme,” a feature of “axiality.” Axial Age civilizations develop
a strong aversion to representing the divine, because it implies the
danger of self-deification. There is first a Jewish, then a protestant
reserve against political institutions representing the divine on earth,
such as les rois thaumaturges in France and also some elements of sacral
kingship in pre-reformation England. This is the political meaning
of idolatry; and, in my view, it belongs to the original semantic core
of monotheism.

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