Freud’s Moses and Monotheism is surely one of the most curious last works of a major writer. He began its composition in Vienna in 1934, a year after Hitler’s rise to power. Despite his own apprehensions about the reactions the book might elicit, in gravely failing health and with the world of Central Europe that had been his constant cultural context tumbling all around him, he pursued the idea of Moses, his ultimate literary project, for the next four years. Parts I and II, a little over a third of the whole, appeared in the psychoanalytic journal Imago in 1937. The book was published in London, where Freud had fled, simultaneously in German and in English translation, in 1939. It was the last year of his life.

For those inclined to view Freud as a nefariously influential intellectual charlatan, his freewheeling psychoanalytic speculations on the origins of monotheism offer smoking-gun evidence, or, as the inveterate anti-Freudian Vladimir Nabokov wrote to the editors of Encounter in the 1960’s after the publication of another Freudian foray into psychohistory, they could be taken to “drive the last nail into the coffin of the Viennese witch doctor.” A broad spectrum of less hostile critics have variously construed Moses and Monotheism as a document of Freud’s ambivalence about his Jewishness or even as a climactic repudiation of his Jewish origins, and the temptations held out by this text to psychoanalyze the founder of psychoanalysis have proven more irresistible than those of any other book he wrote, with the possible exception of The Interpretation of Dreams.

The double psychoanalytic plot Freud proposes in order to explain Moses does look like a provocation. (It is well to keep in mind that when he first began work on this project, he called it The Man Moses, A Historical Novel.) Weaving together certain heterodox hints from early 20th-century biblical scholarship with his own speculative scenario of the murder of a father-figure by a primal horde at the dawn of civilization, Freud read the account in Exodus against the grain to yield the following sequence of events: Moses was not in the least a Hebrew but rather an Egyptian nobleman, a fact rather clumsily disguised by the biblical authors. A follower of the monotheizing pharaoh Ikhnaton (Amonhotep IV), he brought this lofty new faith to the resident-alien Hebrews after his fellow Egyptians had resisted it, and he led them out into the wilderness where they could devote themselves to the exacting demands of his monotheistic cult. They on their part soon found the doctrine of their Egyptian leader too burdensome, rose up against him, and murdered him. This primal crime was then collectively repressed—not only in the memory of the people but also in the literary account of these founding events that they subsequently produced. About a century later, when the tribes were leading a nomadic existence in the Sinai, another Moses arose, whose name and identity became hopelessly confused with his Egyptian predecessor. A cruder and much more irascible type than the sophisticated Egyptian, he superimposed on the Aton of the first Moses a local volcano-god, probably indigenous to the “Arabic tribe of Midianites” (sic), named Yahweh. From this fusion and this erasure of memory follows the peculiar amalgam of the sublime and the primitive, of transcendent idealism and magical thinking, which, according to Freud, is the faith of the Hebrew Bible.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable,¹ a shrewd, scrupulously researched, and at times illuminating book, is wise in not expending any energy—with the partial exception of an apostrophe to Freud in the last chapter—to pull apart this web of dubious suppositions. In any case, the task has been abundantly performed ever since 1939 by biblical scholars, historians, and anthropologists. Yerushalmi also resists as a matter of principle any speculation about Freud’s unconscious motives in writing Moses and Monotheism. At the outset, he tartly characterizes the concept of ambivalence as “that tired and evasive cliché,” and he proceeds to demonstrate how much is to be gained by careful attention to Freud’s actual intentions in his last book. What this process of attention chiefly reveals is that, for all the scandal to the faithful of Freud’s thesis, he meant this book to be his ultimate Jewish affirmation. It was precisely for this reasion that he felt driven to write it as the shadows of destruction gathered over European Jewry.

Yerushalmi has a wonderful eye for the assemblage of prooftexts from Freud’s writings and obiter dicta. The pattern they show is a series of staunch declarations of Jewish identity by the private Freud and a leeriness in Freud the professional of any gesture that might make psychoanalysis appear to be what he called “a Jewish national affair.” On the one hand, he could tell Max Graf, the father of the Little Hans of Freud’s case history, “If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else.” On the other hand, he could shamelessly court C.G. Jung in order to have a Christian and a pastor’s son in his inner circle, and he could affect in his writings to know little Yiddish and no Hebrew when, as Yerushalmi persuasively argues, there is evidence to the contrary. (Freud even pretended not to know what the word menorah meant—an inconceivable piece of ignorance given his family background, as Yerushalmi says. And then there is the puzzling matter of the florid Hebrew inscription—helpfully transcribed by Yerushalmi—made by Jakob Freud in the Bible he gave his son Sigmund on the latter’s thirty-fifth birthday. Would the father have written this elaborate exhortation merely for show, with no expectation that his son could read it?) Although Freud’s Moses does not quite put the matter in these terms, one might well describe Moses and Monotheism as an effort to bridge the gap between the private and the professional Freud, to affirm proudly the author’s Jewish allegiance while remaining free of the opprobrium of Jewish parochialism. The effort could not entirely succeed, and that may explain the stubborn, pervasive oddness of the book.

The oddness is perhaps a little slighted in Yerushalmi’s account because of his overriding, and salutary, concern with intentionality. But I think Moses and Monotheism is so fascinating precisely because it is so peculiar. It bristles with points of special pleading, excesses of insistence, imbalances of emphasis, wild and woolly inferences from the proffered evidence. Many of these features make sense not in terms of Freud’s conscious project but rather as reflections of powerful impulses in the man behind the project, as manifestations of the strain of his trying to bridge incompatible aims. One need not pretend to psychoanalyze Freud to register these signs of strain.

It is not, for example, strictly necessary to Freud’s argument that Moses be an Egyptian. The same plot of the murdered leader, the guilty repression of the act, and the subterranean preservation of his doctrine could be worked out if Moses were a Hebrew who had merely picked up his new teaching from the Egyptians or even had invented it himself. But one senses in reading that Freud had a deep investment in demonstrating at all costs that Moses was an Egyptian, that circumcision was adopted by the Hebrews from the Egyptian practice, and that the monotheistic idea was entirely derived from the religious innovations of Ikhnaton. This investment is detectable both in the violence Freud does to the available historical evidence and in the inordinate amount of space he devotes to the demonstration of a point which is after all superfluous to his main argument.

_____________

There was obviously something very appealing to Freud in the notion of a leader of the Jewish people who did not really belong to it, who had nobler origins, and this notion goes hand in hand with the strokes of rhetorical vehemence in his portrayal of the Hebrews (“the savage Semites,” as he calls them). Though Moses was in the first instance a distant object of historical inquiry for Freud, many of the terms in which he is evoked betray an imaginative identification of the inventor of psychoanalysis with the iconoclastic Egyptian prince he sees in Moses: “He must have been conscious of his great abilities, ambitious, and energetic; . . . he was a convinced adherent of the new religion, whose basic principles he fully understood and had made his own.” The fate of his doctrine is compared at length to “the fate of any new scientific theory.” Above all, Freud’s entire analysis of the origins of biblical monotheism rests on an assumption about historical causation that also implicitly confirms his own lifelong enterprise—“how impossible it is to deny the personal influence of individual great men on the history of the world.” This repeated stress on the determinative power of the great man, as Bluma Goldstein points out in Wandering in a European Wilderness, a study of the Moses figure in German Jewish writing (to be published later this year by Harvard), is one of the most troubling aspects of Moses and Monotheism, exhibiting an odd correspondence with the dominant German ideology of the day that Freud of course abhorred.

Let me hasten to add that none of the features I have just cited belongs, strictly speaking, to the meanings of the text. I only want to suggest that the book Freud actually produced, which he himself described by turns as historical research and historical fiction, exhibits certain wobbles and swerves that derive not from the intrinsic nature of either of these projects but from the freight of feeling, the private agenda, that he brought to both.

All this does not diminish the force of Yerushalmi’s central thesis, which is that Moses and Monotheism, whatever ostensible traits of hostility toward Jews and Judaism it may display, affirms the unique civilizing role of the Jews—precisely because they murdered their lawgiver—as vehicles of repression and consequently of guilt, sublimation, and culture-building moral consciousness. Though Yerushalmi clearly says in his preface that he does not intend to prove that psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science” (a common anti-Semitic accusation), his persuasive analysis points to the tentative conclusion that Freud in his heart of hearts thought it to be just that, for all the vehemence of his desire that others not think it so. If I may shift terms slightly, let me propose that psychoanalysis in Freud’s last book proves to be not a Jewish science but, despite the intentness of Freud’s scientific aspirations, a Jewish ideology.

_____________

In the course of Jewish history, the two centuries that begin around 1750 with Moses Mendelssohn and the embracing of the German Enlightenment by certain advanced Jewish intellectuals might be described as the Age of Ideologies. That age came to a sharp focus just around the turn of the 20th century. Both Zionism and Bundism held their founding congresses in 1897—just two years before Freud completed The Interpretation of Dreams. Judaism, or something that was no longer Judaism but rather Jewish collective existence, found itself—in a process that went on unevenly and by stages across the map of Europe—in disorienting new circumstances. For many Jews, the rabbinic system that had held things together for 1,500 years now lost its unquestioned authority. A European realm which in bits and pieces was redefining itself as a secular and civic rather than a Christian entity implicitly required an answering redefinition on the part of Jews. New intellectual currents that were sweeping up some Jews undermined notions of revelation, the veracity of Scripture, the concordance between the natural world and divine will.

In Western Europe, substantial numbers of Jews responded to these changes by taking advantage of the new opportunities of assimilation—some through actual conversion, others simply by lapsing out of Jewish social and religious connections. Those who wanted to persist as Jews now often felt the need for an explicit program of Jewish continuation. Such programs were typically constructed by adapting to the Jewish predicament whatever seemed most appealing in current intellectual, political, or religious trends, canvassing the Jewish past for emphases that could underwrite and authenticate whatever the particular rationale for collective persistence. Roughly, this was the mechanism of ideologies like the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah), Reform Judaism, German neo-Orthodoxy, Yiddishism, Bundism, and Zionism. What was involved in one way or another was a tendentious or creative misreading (the adjective depends on your point of view) of Jewish history from the Bible onward in order to make it serve the purposes of the present.

This is more or less what ideology always does with the past. J.H. Plumb’s distinction in The Death of the Past aptly exposes a recurrent operation of the Jewish Age of Ideologies: “History, however, is not the past. The past is always a created ideology with a purpose, designed to control individuals, or motivate societies, or inspire classes.” To which Plumb adds a rather grim observation that should not be suppressed even when we are dealing, as surely we are here, with the least sinister of ideologies: “Nothing has been so corruptly used as concepts of the past. The future of history and historians is to cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful past.”

_____________

On first reflection, it might seem that Moses and Monotheism is dedicated to just such a cleansing of the story of mankind from deceiving visions. After all, it reduces morality to a reflex of guilt, makes an act of murder the crystallizing moment of collective consciousness—the election—of the Jewish people. But since this very burden of guilt is the universal human legacy, the force of Freud’s analysis is to represent the Jews, because of the particular way they confront the consequences of their guilt, as the supreme civilized people. It is precisely in this regard that Freud tries to have it both ways with the tension between universalism and particularism that had long troubled him. In his not altogether convincing reading, the Jews, because of their exemplary transformation of guilt into instinctual renunciation and sublimated activity, prove to be mankind writ large. Moses and Monotheism is thus peculiar among modern Jewish ideological manifestoes in simultaneously affirming and submerging a distinctive historical purpose for the Jewish people.

The new kind of God that the Egyptian Moses brought to the Hebrews signaled a decisive turn in the evolution of mankind, “a victory of spirituality over the senses,” because this God was a rejection of the older, supposedly matriarchal order, and imposed a new, civilizing element of abstraction, “since maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a deduction and a premise.” A little later, Freud tries to explain how the Mosaic religion endowed the Jews with a peculiar character that enabled them to survive through three millennia. It gave them, he argues, an aloof sense of self-confidence, of having been “chosen”; it made it possible for them to share in the grandeur of a new conception of God; and, most crucially for Freud, “it forced upon the people a progress in spirituality which, significant enough in itself, further opened the way to respect for intellectual work and to further instinctual renunciations.” “Spirituality” is a necessarily imperfect equivalent of the German Geistigkeit, which also implies intellectuality; the notion of a historical progress of Geist has a suspiciously Hegelian look.

Yerushalmi observes that Freud’s idea of an acquired Jewish national character that becomes a timeless set of attributes is based on the curiously Lamarckian fallacy that social characteristics are transmitted genetically. I would add that this notion is symptomatic of the simplification of history into an ideological past that is undertaken in general in Moses and Monotheism. Such simplification is evident even in the central term of Freud’s discussion, the Jewish people. Scholarship long ago recognized that Judaism and the Jews were a new phenomenon that emerged from the biblical framework sometime late in the Second Temple period. Hence scholars prefer “Israelite” or “Hebrew” as designations for the bearers of earlier biblical culture, as one can see in the titles of several of the historical studies Freud cites in his notes. But he himself repeatedly insists on characterizing the liberated slaves of the 13th century B.C.E.—he erroneously places them a century earlier—as “Jews,” for his ideology of election and survival requires an unbroken continuum of “intellectual work” and “instinctual renunciations” from the Sinai wilderness to modern Vienna.

As in all substitutions of a past, in Plumb’s sense, for history, the force of persuasion is rhetorical, and not evidential as it purports to be. In fact, Freud’s notions of a fixed Jewish national character do not stand up to scrutiny any more than the idea of Reform theology that there is a Jewish “mission” to mankind, or the concept of Ahad Ha-am, the ideologue of so-called spiritual Zionism, that the Jews have defined themselves historically by their commitment to absolute justice. The people of Israel, both on its own soil and in its dispersal, has been a bewildering variety of different things in the course of 3,000 years. Freud, who these days is notorious as an advocate of patriarchy, celebrates the Jewish turning to a patriarchal God associated with abstract thought. But Gershom Scholem, in his pathbreaking Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, a book that appeared just two years after Moses and Monotheism, would reveal in the Kabbalah a massive resurgence of feminine and mythological archetypes.

Freud’s notion of instinctual renunciation has a similar air of plausibility, but it ignores the ecstatic, hedonistic, even sensualist currents both in biblical Israel and in later Jewish history, from the ancient bands of professional enthusiasts (nevi’im) and the erotic verse of the Song of Songs to the Hebrew literary culture of medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy and—at least in regard to the ecstatic—the hasidic movement of Eastern Europe. (Freud’s own forebears were Hasidim, a fact he sought to erase in claiming he came from an “unbroken line of infidel Jews.”) Most curious is Freud’s idea of a timeless Jewish commitment to “intellectual work” and a process of abstraction that he identifies with a higher spirituality. Such a characterization works well enough for Maimonides and Spinoza and Sigmund Freud, but hardly for the prophet Ezekiel or Rabbi Akiba or even Judah Halevi, and it offers no explanation for the unabashedly anthropomorphic imagination of God in the Bible. In fact, abstract, systematic thought is a legacy of the Greeks, not the Hebrews. It is Plato and Aristotle who develop the tools of abstraction Freud uses in his own intellectual enterprise, and not, as the urging of his ideology of Jewish continuity led him to imagine, Moses.

_____________

The peculiarity of Freud’s last work, which I have stressed, reflects how it is riven by the fierce tension of a fundamental paradox. The truth, it assumes, must be sought in origins. One hardly needs to say that this is the governing assumption of psychoanalysis both as explanatory theory and as therapy. It is also an idea that has entranced the European imagination ever since Romanticism: if the layered veils of history could be parted, if what lies behind what meets the eye could at last be made out, if the Ursprung, the ultimate origins, could be uncovered, we would understand the essential character of the thing itself, perhaps touch the secret of its power.

It is just such an uncovering of the Ursprung of the Jewish people and its monotheistic idea that Freud tries to carry out in Moses and Monotheism. The problem is that origins are always more or less inaccessible because collectively and individually we cover our tracks, leaving—whether through repression in Freud’s sense or biased selection or the carelessness of neglect or scrambling through the sheer mechanics of transmission—only teasing traces, distorted fragments, of long forgotten beginnings. Freud himself is acutely aware of this difficulty in Moses and Monotheism and repeatedly confesses the need to conjecture from scanty evidence. He peers deep into the well of the past because he believes that only there will he find the truth he needs. But given his location in time, given the sustaining programmatic nature of the truth he wants to find, he is doomed to see in the well, however convinced he is of the validity of the image he rescues from the depths, no more than the shadowy reflection of his own face.

¹ Yale University Press, 159 pp., $25.00.