Moses and Monotheism

Freud identified deeply with Moses. In 1909, Freud wrote to Carl Jung in connection with his succession as head of the psychoana- lytic movement. “If I am Moses then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.”
In 1901, Freud visited Rome and spent hours viewing the statue of Moses sculpted for the tomb of Pope Julius II by Michelangelo.
“No other piece of statuary has ever made a bigger impression on me than this,” wrote Freud. But it wasn’t until 1913, when he wrote the essay “The Moses of Michaelangelo,” that he revealed his true fascination and deep identification with the biblical giant. Freud reinterpreted the statue as being not of the biblical Moses who leapt to his feet to smash the holy Tablets but of a Moses “who desired to act, to spring up and take vengeance and forget the Tablets; but . . . [who] has overcome the temptation. . . . Nor will he throw away the Tablets so that they will break on the stones, for it is on their special account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them that he kept his passion in check. . . . He remem- bered his mission and for its sake renounced an indulgence of his feelings.”
The essay is intensely personal. During the writing, Freud and
Jung were at the height of conflict. In the same month, Freud wrote
“The History of the Psycho-Analytical Movement,” his attempt to dissociate the work of Jung and his followers from mainstream psy- choanalysis. Perhaps, like Moses, Freud needed to control his need for vengeance at Jung’s defection.
But Freud’s obsession with Moses stretches beyond his conflict with Jung. Moses haunted him his whole life, Freud told Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1935. In Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, Freud wrote that Moses “tormented me like an unlaid ghost.” Moses, it appears, symbolized Freud’s own internal conflict and his deep ambivalence about his Jewish roots. On a conscious level, he was proud of his Jewish heritage and of Moses the great leader. On an unconscious level, he rebelled against that heritage and identi- fied with the idolatrous mob — the unruly id.

172 Moses and Monotheism

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud advances four hypotheses. First, Moses is not, as the Hollywood movie portrays, a son of a Jewish mother but the son of an Egyptian mother, denying the Jewish peo- ple kinship with Moses. Second, the monotheism that Moses gave to the Jewish people had Egyptian roots, from the worship of Aten, founded by Akhenaten, who ascended the throne around 1375
B.C.E., denying the Jewish people as the proud originators of monotheism. To further the blow, the rite of circumcision was orig- inally an Egyptian custom. Third, the Jews killed the Egyptian Moses in the desert, and the strict monotheism he taught was sub- merged under the Semitic worship of the volcano god Yahweh
(propagated by a second, Midianite, Moses). Fourth, the murder of Moses was a reenactment of the primal parricide that Freud had described in Totem and Taboo, which the Jews repressed, thus creating enormous guilt in their people.

A growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people. . . . Till at last one of these Jewish people found . . . the occasion for detaching a new . . . religion from Judaism. Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced it back correctly to its original source. He called this the “original sin”; it was a crime against God and could only be atoned for by death.

The anti-Semitism that the Jews have experienced throughout the centuries, Freud claimed, is, in part, a result of their refusal to acknowledge and atone for this primal murder of the father.

The poor Jewish people, who with their habitual stubborn- ness continued to disavow the father’s murder, atoned heav- ily for it in the course of time. They were constantly met with the reproach “You killed God! ”

Freud, old, ill, and bitter, knew that Moses and Monotheism, begun in 1934, would create hostility in the Jewish community at a time of rising Nazi power and anti-Semitism in Germany. Jewish leaders pleaded with Freud not to write the book. Freud plunged


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