Moses, Man of the Mountain.
Hurston Explores A Shared African-Judaic Heritage
Hurston, Zora Neale. Moses: Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, (1939).
8vo.; brown cloth, stamped in orange; pictorial dust-jacket (Moses receiving the Ten Commandments), jacket lightly marked. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, first binding of one of Hurston’s lesser-known texts: Whiteman, 30.
From early on, Hurston betrayed an interest in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious origins of African-Americans. In Tell My Horse, for instance, she interviews at length two West Indian cult leaders, “Mother Saul” and “Brother Levi,” both of whom, we gather, were obeah practitioners of Jamaican-Jewish origin. In “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” an angry piece written in the 30s and published some twenty years later in The Negro Digest, Hurston rails against “Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negros and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples...” (reprinted in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1979, pp. 169-173); further into the essay she makes an early and insightful connection between the forces of anti-Semitism and those of racism:
...The trouble is that there are too many who refuse to believe in the ingestion and digestion of Western culture as yet. Hence the lack of literature about the higher emotions and love life of the Negro and the minorities in general.... Publishers and publishing houses are in business to make money. They will sponsor anything that will sell. They shy away from romantic stories about Negroes and Jews because they feel the public indifference to such works...
Hurston’s literary and anthropological interests eventually fused in Moses: Man of the Mountain, her highly original but commercially disastrous re-telling of the Moses legend in the African-American vernacular. Despite Ralph Ellison’s assertion that “for Negro fiction it did nothing” (and Hurston’s own disappointment in not “achieving all that I set out to do”), the allegorical novel set an enviable standard for historical fiction, said critic Blyden Jackson, by demonstrating that “a transcript of Negro life need not be parochial, but may anchor securely its substratum in the universal mind” (Hemenway, pp. 273-4).
Moses: Man of the Mountain, blending folklore, fiction, religion, and personal philosophy, remains strikingly fresh today. It begins,
Moses was an old man with a beard. He was the great law-giver. He had some trouble with the Pharoh about some plagues and led the Children of Israel out of Egypt an on to the Promised Land. That is the common concept of Moses in the Christian world....But there are other concepts of Moses abroad in the world...Africa [too] has her mouth on Moses. All across the continent there are legends of the greatness of Moses, but not because of his beard nor because he brought down the Sinai. No, he is revered because he had the power to go up the mountain and to bring them down. Many men could climb mountains. Anyone could bring down laws that had been handed to them. But who can talk to God face to face? Who has the power to command God to go to a peak of a mountain and there demand of Him laws with which to govern a nation?... That calls for power, and that is what Africa sees in Moses to worship. For he is worshipped as a god.
Though widely overlooked—and scorned when noticed—Moses is now considered one of Hurston’s most intriguing texts. “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” wrote Alice Walker in her 1979 reappraisal, “is one of the rarest, most important books in black literature and should be required reading for all black children. It successfully blends the Biblical story of Moses’s struggle to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and the 20th-century black personality—post-slavery but pre-liberation—obsessed with the same kind of monumental endeavor” (I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, p. 176).
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