Moses and Monotheism

“To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly–especially by one belonging to that people,” writes Sigmund Freud, as he prepares to pull the carpet out from under The Great Lawgiver in Moses and Monotheism.

In this, his last book, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman and that the Jewish religion was in fact an Egyptian import to Palestine. Freud also writes that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, in a reenactment of the primal crime against the father.

Lingering guilt for this crime, Freud says, is the reason Christians understand Jesus’ death as sacrificial. “The ‘redeemer’ could be none other than the one chief culprit, the leader of the brother-band who had overpowered the father.” Hence the basic difference between Judaism and Christianity: “Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son.

” Freud’s arguments are extremely imaginative, and his distinction between reality and fantasy, as always, is very loose. If only as a study of wrong-headedness, however, it’s fascinating reading for those who want to explore the psychological impulses governing the historical relationship between Christians and Jews. –Michael Joseph Gross

Moses and Monotheism

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