Moses and Monotheism

Back to the "Well, one God," of the Hypertext Poem.
Plain English Version: The Unconscious, Moses, and the One God
More detail and references.

The following excerpt was taken from Sigmund Freud, a site that offers extensive links and original works on Freud. Moses and Monotheism is a little book that Freud wrote about Anti-Semitism and the fact that we cannot know if Moses was really an Egyptian. There was an Egyptian cult of monotheism under Akhenaten. Ancient Egypt: The Cult of the Sun God and Akhenaten's Monotheism . . .

"We profess a religion of love. we ought to love even our enemies as ourselves. We know that the Son of God gave his life on earth to redeem all men from the burden of sin. He is our model and it is therefore sinning against His intention and against the command of the Christian religion if we consent to Jews being insulted, illtreated, robbed and plunged into misery. We ought to protest against this, irrespective of how much or how little Jews deserve such treatment.

"For long centuries we have treated the Jewish people unjustly and we are continuing to do so ... Jews are no worse than we are ... Nor can we call them in any sense inferior. Since we allowed them to co-operate in our cultural tasks, they have acquired merit by valuable contributions in all spheres of science, art and technology, and they have richly repaid our tolerance. So let us cease at last to hand them out favors when they have a claim to justice."

The November 25, 1938, issue of the German emigre
weekly Die Zukunft (The Future), edited by
Arthur Koestler, published Freud's "Ein Wort Zum Antisemitismus"
(A Word on Anti-Semitism), Freud's
most significant statement on the subject.
The three-page signed holograph manuscript is
in the Library's Freud Collection.

Sigmund Freud, "Ein Wort Zum Antisemitismus," 1938.
Manuscript Division, Sigmund Freud Collection.

Ernest Jones suggests that these words were written by Freud himself, and he may well be right. They were written soon after Freud completed his one major work of Jewish interest, which was published in 1939 in Amsterdam as Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion, and that same year as Moses and Monotheism in New York, a work which raised a storm of protest in the Jewish world. To maintain that monotheism was an Egyptian invention and Moses an Egyptian who was murdered by the Jews because of his message, was to rob the Jewish people of its greatest contribution and its greatest leader. To do this at a time when Judaism was being viciously maligned and Jews were being brutally treated gave all Jews pause

In the Freud Collection we find the manuscript of the work in its three parts, "Moses Ein Ägypter" (Moses an Egyptian); "Wenn Moses Ein Ägypter War. . . " (If Moses were an Egyptian ... ); and "Moses, Sein Volk, und die Monotheistische Religion" (Moses, His People, and Monotheistic Religion). The manuscript also bore an earlier title, Der Mann Moses, Ein Historischer Roman (The Man Moses, A Historical Novel). The first two parts appeared in 1937 in the Viennese journal Imago; the third part was first published as the third section of the completed book

"The complete holograph manuscript of the three parts
of Freud's Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion
(Moses and Monotheism), as well as the corrected galleys,
are in the Library's Freud Collection.
The first page shown of "Wenn Moses Ein Ägypter War . . ."
(If Moses Were an Egyptian) is dated 24/5/1937.

Sigmund Freud, Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion, 1937.
Manuscript Division, Sigmund Freud Collection."

Interpretation and critique of Moses and Monotheism are wide and varied. Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in the Lionel Trilling Lecture he delivered at Columbia University on November 14, 1986, noted that none of the scholars and critics had mentioned a manuscript of the work. He expressed delight that his inquiry to the Freud archives at the Library of Congress had brought him a Xerox copy of the original draft "different in significant ways from the published version." He found an original unpublished introduction, which Freud concluded with:

"My immediate purpose was to gain knowledge of the person Moses, my more distant goal to contribute thereby to the solution of a problem, still current today."

Yerushalmi also found that the manuscript draft and printed work differ substantially in their opening sentence. The original read: "One will not easily decide to deny a nation its greatest son because of the meaning of a name" (Moses is an Egyptian name). In its final form it reads: "To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken — especially when one himself belongs to that people" (emphasis added). Yerushalmi argues, elegantly and forcefully, that Moses and Monotheism is a work neither of negation nor degradation but of affirmation and pride in belonging to a people from whom, Freud writes:

"there rose again and again men who lent new color to the fading tradition, renewed the admonishments and demands of Moses, and did not rest until the lost cause was once more regained ... And it is proof of a special psychical fitness in the mass which became the Jewish people that it could bring forth so many persons who were ready to take upon themselves the burden of the Mosaic religion ... It is honor enough for the Jewish people that it has kept alive such a tradition and produced men who lent it their voice, even if the stimulus had first come from the outside, from a great stranger."

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Back to the "well, one God" of the Hypertext Poem. Plain English Version:The Unconscious, Moses, and the One God

The Cult of the Sun God and Akhenaten's Monotheism from above.com from Library of Congress.