UC Berkeley Berkeley Forum in the Humanities Title Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Relligion Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xk7594z ISBN 9780823280025 Authors Sharvit, Gilad Feldman, Karen S Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Freud and Monotheism Berkeley Forum in the Humanities Freud and Monotheism Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman, editors Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California, Berkeley Fordham University Press New York Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. The publishers have no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and do not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. The publishers also produce their books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1 First edition Contents Introduction Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman 1 1. “Why [the Jews] Have Attracted This Undying Hatred” Richard J. Bernstein 27 2. Geistigkeit: A Problematic Concept Joel Whitebook 46 3. Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History Willi Goetschel 65 4. Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging Gabriele Schwab 87 5. A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention Yael Segalovitz 108 6. Freud, Sellin, and the Murder of Moses Jan Assmann 138 7. Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea Ronald Hendel 157 8. Is Psychic Phylogenesis Only a Phantasy? New Biological Developments in Trauma Inheritance Catherine Malabou 177 9. Moses and the Burning Bush: Leadership and Potentiality in the Bible Gilad Sharvit 199 List of Contributors 219 Index 223 vi CONTENTS Freud and Monotheism Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman Introduction THERE ARE MANY points of entry to Sigmund Freud’s monumen- tal Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud’s last work presented a remarkable contribution to a wide array of topics. The book revis- ited neo- Lamarckian theories of heredity, offered a theory of the formation of religions, mounted radical criticism against modern historiography, and presented a new psychoanalytic theory of the collective mind and of trauma. The historical context of the book, and Freud’s personal motivations, however, fed the book’s sense of urgency. Freud began to work on his new book on “The Man Moses” in Vienna in the summer of 1934. It was only a year after his works were added to the Nazi list of blacklisted books and burnt in the great fire that portended the dark times to come. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud addressed that upheaval. His book originated out of a desire to shed light on the anti- Semitism that would come to motivate the horrors awaiting Europe. As he revealed to his close friend the Austrian author Arnold Zweig, Freud would use his psychoanalysis to explain the long history of the hatred of his people. For being somewhat at a loss what to do in a period of com- parative leisure I have written something myself and this, contrary to my original intention, took up so much of my time that everything else was neglected. The starting point of my work is familiar to you— it was the same as that of your Bilanz. Faced with the new persecutions, one asks oneself again how the Jews 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 the work this title: The Man Moses, a Historical Novel [Der Mann Moses, ein historischer Roman].1 Freud’s nod to happenstance need not mislead us. Although he supposedly undertook this investigation only because he was “at a loss of what to do,” Freud, an experienced public fig- ure, had clear understanding of the turmoil ahead. His letter detailed his apprehension over the increased danger that anti- Semites like the Austrian ethnologist Pater Wilhelm Schmidt and others in the Catholic orthodoxy had posed to himself, his family, but also, and perhaps even most worryingly, to psy- choanalysis in Vienna. It was not only Freud’s life but his life’s work that was in danger. The book’s unconventional publication process reflected the gravity of this problem. Written over several years amid increas- ing concern about anti- Semitism, Moses and Monotheism was com- pleted and published only at the heels of Freud’s escape from the Nazi occupation of Austria. All the while, Freud had to “remain silent,” as he confessed in an early letter on his new Moses proj- ect to Lou Andreas- Salomé.2 The first two of the book’s three essays appeared in 1937 in Imago. Freud delayed the publication of the third essay until after he was able to escape Vienna in the spring of 1938. Only in the safety of London did Freud feel con- fident enough to publish this work on the psychological roots of anti- Semitism.3 In the prefatory note to the third essay, Freud gave voice to his anxieties about the anti- Semitic establishment that had hitherto prevented him from publishing the book. These 2 GILAD SHARVIT AN D KAREN S. FE LDMAN were exactly the same fears he expressed in secret to Arnold Zweig half a decade earlier: “At the earlier date I was living under the protection of the Catholic Church, and was afraid that the publication of my work would result in the loss of that protection and would conjure up a prohibition upon the work of the adher- ents and students of psycho- analysis in Austria. [In London,] I can breathe a sigh of relief now that the weight has been taken off me and that I am once more able to speak and write— I had almost said ‘and think’— as I wish or as I must.”4 Nevertheless, if Freud meant to explain anti- Semitism, he had a curious way of doing so, as the opening remarks of the book acknowledged: 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, least of all by someone who is himself one of them. But we cannot allow any such reflection to induce us to put the truth aside in favor of what are supposed to be national interests; and, moreover, the clarification of a set of facts may be expected to bring us a gain in knowledge.5 Freud’s book about anti- Semitism, written and published during a most difficult time of his people, would indeed take away the “greatest of their sons.” The book did not merely hint at this dis- possession but directly argued for it. In Freud’s retelling of Jewish history, Moses was an Egyptian nobleman. Freud’s last denoue- ment was to uncover and establish that the Jewish hero and law- giver was after all a Gentile. To support this claim, the first essay of the book examined the etymology of the name Moses, which, Freud argued, had an Egyptian origin— a claim that had appeared in biblical exegesis since Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. Freud added to this argument by alluding to Otto Rank’s 1909 The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Rank’s study of ancient myth suggested that many hero legends in the archaic world had “a literal conformity”6 in their narrative Introduction 3 plot. These legends depicted a hero born to aristocratic parents but condemned to death. In this classic plot, the hero was res- cued as a child by people of humble origins, only to rediscover his aristocratic lineage as an adult. The biblical story of Moses, claimed Freud, mirrored the pattern of the ancient hero legend but at the same time also inverted it, insofar as the powerful adult Moses discovers his true origins as a child of slaves. Freud thus concluded that while the story of Moses’s humble origins served the Jewish tradition well, both Moses’s name and the structure of his myth revealed a different story than that of the Bible. They indicated that Moses did actually descend from the royal Egyp- tian dynasty. The first essay of Moses and Monotheism was modest in its length and its theoretical novelty. It mostly repeated known facts about Moses and earlier speculations of other biblical scholars in order to examine the possibility that Moses was an Egyptian. In the second essay of the book, Freud made an even more drastic move. He reread the story of Moses in light of his own work on the ori- gins of religion in Totem and Taboo (1913). In this essay, it was not only the ascription to Moses of an Egyptian identity that would unnerve the Jewish community around Freud but Freud’s recast- ing of the end of Moses’s life. THE SECOND ESSAY opened with Freud’s growing appreciation of the apparent similarities between Jewish monotheism and the brief monotheistic episode in Egyptian history during the reign of Akhenaten.