'Quiet, Schloymele, quiet! Freud was a filthy German. All we know about our Teacher Moses is what's written in the Torah.'
(Isaac Bashevis Singer 1999: 5)
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud examines the idea that Judaism's origins are obscured by trauma. He tells the story of Moses, the man who did the most to shape Jewish identity, but who was by origin an Egyptian aristocrat who had lived at Akhenaten's court and learned about his teachings there. Freud's Moses is extremely anodyne - a reflection, I think, of the antiseptic portrayal of Akhenaten in Breasted and Weigall. Moses joined the Jews after Akhenaten's death and imposed upon them a version of Akhenaten's solar religion so that it would survive. Moses' version of Atcn-worship was cerebral, intellectual and austere. Freud called it 'the imposing religion of his master' and 'the exacting faith of the religion of the Aten', again reflecting the views of his Egyptological sources.27 After Moses led the Jews out of bondage in Egypt, they merged with other tribes, including the Midianites, who worshipped the primitive volcano-god
Jehovah. There was a bitter conflict between the refined intellectual monotheism of Akhenaten and the crude worship of Jehovah, eventually resulting in Moses being murdered, even though his memory survived and his god fused with Jehovah. As an Egyptian and an intellectual, Moses' struggle with his adopted people became Freud's historical prototype for anti-Semitism. Once again, he was looking to ancient Egypt to find the origins of modern events. Underpinning Freud's search is his belief that the effects of historical events were unconsciously transmitted by repressed memories, so that the memory of ancient trauma could influence the ideological struggles of the present. In 1935 he wrote to his friend Lou Andreas-Salome, 'religions owe their compulsive power to the return of the repressed; they are reawakened memories of very ancient, forgotten, highly emotional episodes of human history'.28 Moses and Monotheism was a shocking work, apparently rejecting not only the Jewish origins of monotheism but also the defining figure ofjewishness itself. One should remember that Jews were bureau- cratically defined as 'Mosaisch', i.e. 'of the religion of Moses'. Freud realised that there was something in Moses and Monotheism to offend almost everyone: the Catholics whom he hoped would help protect Austrian Jews against Fascism, biblical scholars, ancient historians, and of course observant Jews (as in my epigraph to this section). Fearing that the book would endanger the future of psychoanalysis, he delayed its publication until he was in England and out of Fascist clutches.
Much scholarly ink has been spilled trying to work out Freud's real purpose in this latest and most speculative work, which fits so uncomfortably within the Freudian canon and has been often dismissed. Among other things it has been interpreted as a reaffirmation of Freud's own Jewish identity in the face of growing anti-Semitism, a written day-dream which explored Freud's anxieties about the future of psychoanalysis through his personal identification with Moses- Akhenaten, a piece of 'mnemohistory' about the survival of monotheism in the collective memory, or a sort of psychoanalytic historical novel where Freud denies his own Jewishness.2"' It is a slippery text which defies categorisation, though it certainly is a response to anti-Semitism. Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig,
Faced with the new persecution, one asks oneself again how the Jews have come to be what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred. I soon discovered the formula: Moses created the Jews. So I gave my work the title: The Man Moses, a historical novel.30
But to whose anti-Semitism is this 'historical novel' a response? The most obvious answer is, to the institutional oppression of Jews under Fascism that was well under way in Germany and was about to happen in Austria. But this may be only one part of the picture. The new political climatc may have made Freud think harder about the presentation of Jews in the books that influenced him when writing Moses and Monotheism. Again his habit of writing in his books provides a clue. The marginal notes in his copy of Breasted's Dawn of Conscience (1933), whose introduction denies any prejudice against Jews, are particularly striking.
Freud seems to be no longer interested in Akhenaten's firstness, as he had been when reading A History of Egypt.3] The only parts of Dawn of Conscience that he annotated were the chapter on Akhenaten and one entitled 'The Sources of our Moral Heritage', where Breasted repeats again and again that the Jews were not original thinkers but merely recyclers of older Egyptian ideas. Akhenaten figures prominently in his argument, the 'hymn' to the Aten being adduced as an example ofjudaism's debt to Egypt, for example. Among numerous other significant passages in Dawn of Conscience, Freud pencilled a line in the margin to draw attention to page 348 ('It is an extraordinary fact that this great moral legacy should have descended to a politically insignificant people [i.e. the Jews] living in the south-east corner of the Mediterranean'), page 364 ('When the Hebrew prophet caught the splendor of this vision ... he was standing on the Egyptian's shoulders'), page 379 ('the Hebrew book of proverbs has embedded in it a substantial section of an earlier Egyptian book of wisdom') and pages 383-4 ('The Hebrews built up their life on Egyptian foundations').32
Freud must have been reading Dawn of Conscience while researching Moses and Monotheism. His annotations might just be aides-memoires of useful sources for the origins of Moses' austere monotheism at Akhenaten's court. But Freud was a Jewish intellectual deeply sensitive to anti-Semitism, and Moses and Monotheism is his response to insidious and blatant anti-Semitism by vindicating the Jewish people as the developers of a high civilisation first achieved in Egypt. Another interpretation of his notes is possible. They might be reminders of the anti- Semitism implicit in Breasted's patronising image of the Jews as dwarves on giants' shoulders. In this context, a look at Freud's other sources for Moses and Monotheism is illuminating. Among them was a novel by one of Freud's favourite novelists, the Russian Dmitri Sergeyevitch Merezhkovsky (1865-1941). Freud owned five German translations of his novelised biographies of great religious and political innovators, including Julian the Apostate (the emperor who tried to reinstate paganism in the late fourth century ce), and Tsars Peter I and Alexander I of Russia. Merezhkovsky subtitles his works 'a biographical novel' or 'an historical novel' - just as Freud subtided Moses and Monotheism. Among Freud's Merezhkovsky collection was a copy of his novel about Akhenaten, first published in Russian in 1924 and translated into German as Der Messias. Roman (The Messiah. A Novel) in 1927. I discuss this novel fully in Chapter 6, so for the moment it is only necessary to note Merezhkovsky's sympathy with Theosophy, an alternative religion notoriously receptive to racist ideas, and his very negative portrayals of Jews, whom he presents as destroying Akhenaten's progressive religious experiment by crude political agitation. At the end of Der Messias, however, the main Jewish agent provocateur Issachar - named after the leader of one of the twelve tribes of Israel - is converted to Aten-worship. The Jew and the Egyptians pray together to Akhenaten as a shared Messiah.
Looking at Freud's primary sources for Moses and Monotheism and the ways he read them seems to confirm Richard Bernstein's persuasive reading of the work. Bernstein sees it as Freud's attempt to identify the distinctive character and contribution of the Jewish people to the development of human culture, and to find what it is that has kept them going through millennia of oppression. He argues that Moses' adoption of the demanding and progressive form of Akhenaten's religion represents for Freud an advance in intellectuality which goes hand in hand with the progress of spirituality, both summed up in Freud's untranslatable phrase der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit. This is what has enabled Jews to survive in spite of persecution. So, far from distancing himself from his Jewishness by making Moses into an Egyptian, Moses and Monotheism acknowledges Freud's pride in having a share of the defining legacy of Moses. Like Moses, he actively chooses to be a Jew.i3 I see Moses and Monotheism as Freud's answer and challenge to writers like Breasted and Merezhkovsky who sought to diminish the Jewish contribution by making them into passive feeders off Akhenaten's ideas - an image not far from the repeated Nazi stereotype of the Jew as a parasite. Freud responds by making the Jews into active agents who refine Akhenaten's Geistigkeit and make it something uniquely their own. Paradoxically, as Carl Schorske has observed, by making Moses into an Egyptian, Freud ended up by making Akhenaten into a Jew.34