Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (review)

120 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 academic agenda and when obfuscation seems to be the order of the day, it is a pleasure to read the clear, incisive critical prose ofJay Halio. Finally, one can say that Philip Roth Revisited is a model for what a Twayne book should accomplish. Melvin J. Friedman Department of English and Comparative literature University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, byYosefHayim Yerushalmi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 159 pp. $25.00. Sigmund Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism, was conceived and published in the 1930s with the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. Its controversial nature stemmed from two sources, one from the book's provocative content and the other from the timing of its appearance at a critical period ofJewish history. The thesis ofthe book was the claim that monotheism is not of]ewish origin but that it was an Egyptian discovery by the pharaoh Amenhotep N (Ikhnaton) who worshipped the sun-god, or Aton. Moses was reconstruct~ ed as an Egyptian noble or priest who kept alive the Aton religion and placed himself at the head of an oppressed Semitic tribe in Egypt. However, the slave mentality of the Israelites rebelled against the rigors of the faith by killing Moses. They allied themselves subsequently with other Semitic tribes in Midian who believed in a wrathful deity named Yahweh. In a curious transformation, the Egyptian Moses became the work of a Midianite priest also called Moses. With time, the early true faith adheres to Yahweh while the memory of Moses' murder remains repressed by successive generations of Hebrews, eventually reemerging in the punitive messages of the prophets and the rise of Christianity. A prior postulate of Freud in Totem and Taboo presumed the slaying of a primeval father by the sons, an event which was repressed through the millennia. The Moses patricide, for which no Biblical precedent exists, was construed as a reenactment of this mythic prehistoric act. In alluding to the Jesus cruciftxion, Freud credits Christianity with trying to free itself of guilt over the killing of God, the primeval father, by the slaying of the sacrificial son who is now deified. Yerushalmi, a historian, takes issue with those interpreters of Moses and Monotheism who looked upon the work as a literal historic account Book Reviews 121 or a malicious diatribe against Judaism. Through the review of published and unpublished correspondence and other available sources, he attempts to lay bare Freud's struggles with his identity as a Jew, particularly in relation to the Christian world's acceptance ofpsychoanalysis as something other than a "Jewish science." The father of psychoanalysis had hoped that his non-Jewish disciple, Carl Jung, would bring psychoanalysis the respectability which had eluded its founder and his early coterie ofJewish followers. When Jung proposed his own psychological principles which flew in the face of psychoanalytic theory, the estrangement between the two men became a bitter disappointment for Freud. Subsequently, Jung's flirtation with Nazi racial theories compounded this grief. What followed may well have been a defensive identification with the aggressor. Jung's version of a Jewish and Aryan group unconscious, with its Lamarckian transmission of acquired traits, was also utilized by Freud to explain the "unanalyzable" sense ofJewishness which he believed was the rockbed of ethnic belonging regardless of the degree of adherence to religious tradition. Yerushalmi's criticism of Freud's turn toward this Lamarckian explanation of Jewish identity lies at the crux of his evaluation of Moses and Monotheism. He chastises Freud for the construction that the initial repression of Moses' murder engendered the "return of the repressed" which is then credited with endowing "the Jewish religious tradition with its neurotic power over its adherents." The author points out the contradictory nature of this theory of the repressed since the Old Testament does not shy away from including a multitude of Israelite misdeeds. Most telling is ProfessorYerushalmi's discourse ofFreud's ambivalence vis-a-vis his Jewish identity when he examines private confessions versus public statements. The correspondence with relatives, friends, and colleagues reveals Freud's distrust of the gentile world which he needed to...