130 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Palestine, and Egypt. Rather, these are polemical terms expressing the discom-
fort of the settled civilizations toward those who wander outside.
The nomads are also seen as threatening. The refusal of structured hierar-
chy, characteristic of state-based civilizations, grounds the nomadic view; Buber
quotes the historian Eduard Meyer, who describes their disdain for “the peasant
tied to his clods, and the cowardly townsfolk, who seek to protect themselves be-
hind walls and who serve a lord as slaves.”^26 The conflict between these societies
is mischaracterized if described as occurring between a more and a less advanced
“stage of development” (rhetoric that serves the “civilized”). Rather, at issue is a
perennial conflict between two principles, and therefore between two options:
The stable oasis society, however, with its State trends and closed culture,
fights against a fluctuating cultural element which, its small units linked by
a strong collective solidarity, organizes itself in closer tribal association solely
for war or cult activities, and recognizes personal authority solely in so far as
the bearer of the latter evinces it by his direct effect.... Here the dynastic prin-
ciple faces the charismatic one; a thoroughly centralist principle faces one of
primitive federalism. State law faces tribal law; and beyond this a civilization
established in rigid forms faces a fluid element which rarely condenses into a
comprehensive structural form of life and work. The tradition of the pyramid
faces that of the campfire. It is precisely when the nomads or semi-nomads
receive the alien State form in their power, and take possession of leadership,
that they fall most rapidly under its sway.^27Buber sees Israel and Egypt as exemplifying these types.
Egypt, then, represents rigidity, and Israel fluidity. Egypt committed itself
absolutely to “the tendency to persist,” which was “operative in Egypt with a
degree of exclusiveness which has been achieved by no other civilization. In its
double expression—the wisdom of knowing what should persist, and the art of
ensuring that it should persist—it produced a gruesomely consistent world in
which there was every kind of ghost; but in which each ghost carried out the
function assigned to it.”^28 Egypt is thus the settled civilization par excellence, as
its entire culture is dedicated to the principle of immobility; its greatest achieve-
ments, the pyramids, testify to this. To make the case that Israel represents the
other type, Buber draws on the well-known scholarly identification of Abraham
“the Hebrew” in Genesis with the migrant Habiru.
Buber does not identify the Israelites with the Habiru, because they com-
prised many non-Semitic elements and only part of the Semites. But his focus
on the Habiru provides an interesting counterexample to Assmann’s focus on
the Hyksos. Assmann imagines that the traumatic invasion and rule of Lower
Egypt by the Hyksos, an ancient Semitic tribe, left a scar in the cultural memory
of the Egyptians. The memory of this event later combined with the repressed
trauma of the heretical rule of the monotheist Pharaoh, Akhenaten, to form
Egyptian legends about the expulsion of foreign tribes who worshipped strange