Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

Abstract

than Baal; that is another story. In 1882, Ernest Renan declared that, ‘if the growth of Christianity had been arrested by some mortal malady, the world would have beenMithraic’ (On peut dire que, si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été mithriaste) (Renan 1882, 579). Is it possible that, in the same way, the world could have become Baal-ist? In various monographs, Smith has explored why this did not happen (see Smith 2001; 2002, and 2004) (cited 11), yet as one of this volume’s contributors asks, ‘What would Baal do without Mark Stratton Smith to preserve and respect his memory in a monotheistic world determined to exclude and excoriate him?’ (160). For although ‘the very name evokes idolatry, and an alternative to the true God aptly called pagan’, yet ‘Baal is “The Lord,” a perfectly serviceable monotheistic title when rendered by the Hebrew ʾādôn or the Greek kurios’ and ‘biblical writers managed to let Yahweh and El “converge” into one, with Elohim (God) the common expression, but Baal could not join the convergence [...]’ (160). Even if not necessarily his ‘favorite’ deity, Smith’s ‘deep familiarity’ with Baal has kept scholarship on this god alive and thriving: in this sense, this collection of essays is both a tribute to a prolific scholar and itself a contribution to our understanding of God’s ‘early history’ – a God whose ‘death’, as Nietzsche reminds us (and as Georg Heym also recognized), still casts a shadow over us even today.