Hagar in Christian Britain

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. . . . Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. — St. Paul, Epistle to the Galatians These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind . . . — Longfellow, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” 1852 G IVEN PAUL’S TORTUOUS, divisive rhetoric, the Jew is always the proto-Christian, deprived of actual historical identity and development. For Christianity, founding itself on usurpation, cannot dispense with the Abrahamic covenant or the sacrifice of Isaac (to Jews, the akedah, binding) that prefigures the martyrdom of Jesus. Because Christianity begins by absorbing Hebraic characters as patterns, it must represent real Jews by a second displacement, as non-Jews: “These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind.” In Christian eyes, the Jew is twice dispossessed — once by metamorphosis into the potentially free Christian, and again by disguise as a creature of bondage

Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Christianity · Covenant · Early Christianity · Flesh · Identity (music · Judaism · Literature · Mount · Rhetoric · Sacrifice · Theology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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