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Out of Your Mind
Reading Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
I recently happened on an old book I’d encountered before: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. The first time around, I didn’t know what to make of it; now, after some reflection, I think Freud was a poor historian, and at times even a poor therapist (at least as psychoanalysis’ “version 1.0”), but I think he had moments of intrigue — Moses and Monotheism, I’d now say, was one of them.
The book itself was anything but boring. Published in 1939, Moses and Monotheism proposed an outrageous thesis: the historical Moses was in fact not Hebrew, but Egyptian; a contemporary of the radical-monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten, Moses gave to a small band of followers not Yahweh but the Egyptian singular god Aten; leading only his closest followers in rebellion, Moses affected an exodus of sorts from Egypt, only to later be killed by his own disciples, the ancestors of the Jews; those same disciples, overcome by guilt, then in effect deified Moses in memory, repressing the memory of his murder, and proposed a theology of his eventual messianic return.
Freud himself, at the time unsure of whether to publish his manuscript, described the book’s central thesis in a letter to his student Lou Andreas-Salomé:
“[Moses and Monotheism] started out from the question as to what has really created the particular character of the Jew, and came to the conclusion that the Jew is the creation of the man Moses. Who was this Moses and what did he bring about? The answer to this question was given in a kind of historical novel. Moses was not a Jew but a well-born Egyptian, a high official, a priest, perhaps a prince of the royal dynasty, and a zealous supporter of the monotheistic faith, which the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV had made the dominant religion round about 1350 BC. With the collapse of the new religion and the extinction of the eighteenth dynasty after the Pharaoh’s death this ambitious and aspiring man had lost all his hopes and had decided to leave his fatherland and create a new nation which he proposed to bring up in the imposing religion of his master. He resorted to the Semitic tribe which had been dwelling in the land since the Hyksos period, placed himself at their head, led them out of bondage into freedom, gave them the spiritualized religion of Aten and as an expression of…
