A thought about Vayigash (פרשת ויגש, Genesis 44:18 - 47:27): The portion ends with Joseph, whom Pharaoh has made his chief administrator, using the famine in Egypt to dispossess that country’s peasants. Out of desperation they offer their land and themselves for some of the grain that Joseph had the foresight to stockpile. Joseph accepts, and in a process akin to Marx’s primitive accumulation, they become a class of landless, enslaved sharecroppers for Pharaoh. The peasants, we are told, are grateful to be kept alive. But how long before their gratitude turns to resentment, which is directed not at Pharaoh, the “good czar” who now owns their land and steals a fifth of their crop, but at Joseph, the intermediary in the antagonistic relationship between Pharaoh and the peasants?
The pattern reappears in later Jewish history. “The catastrophe of the Jews of Spain,” sociologist Werner Cahnman observed, “shows with great clarity the price Jews have to pay for their role as agents of the powers that be; it can happen that they are ground between the upper and nether millstones.”
There is no mention in the Torah of Egyptian jacqueries that become pogroms. But when, in Shemot, the new Pharaoh arises and orders his people to commit genocide—“every [Hebrew] boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile”—none of the Egyptians demur.
