I have no idea if this is a respected theory or another "Look we found Jesus' brother's grave" kind of thing. In any case, this book kept me engaged for its pages including appendices, which I read. Based on that, as well as my avid interest in the subject, I gave it 5 stars Despite some annoying typos. Apr 04, Mack Rosenbaum rated it it was amazing. It is fascinating to think that among our ancestors were several Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, that Moses was the grandson of Joseph who was the first Hebrew Pharaoh. I know it sounds crazy but the evidence is there from non- Jewish sources as well.
The book is written by a brilliant lawyer whose lifetime fascination with the possibility resulted in this well documented soft cover book written from a committed Jewish perspective. I still can't get over it. Jan 17, University of Chicago Magazine added it Shelves: Adam rated it really liked it Nov 29, Pia rated it really liked it Jul 03, Tony Sunderland rated it it was amazing Jun 17, Elaine rated it did not like it Jun 23, Laura marked it as to-read Jun 03, Ani marked it as to-read Aug 08, Larry Lane jr marked it as to-read Sep 27, Precy Polintan marked it as to-read Oct 17, Mohamed Abdo marked it as to-read Dec 22, Nthabiseng Chabeli marked it as to-read Jun 04, Ted marked it as to-read Jul 21, Lashondra Young marked it as to-read Feb 09, Carol Rushing marked it as to-read Jul 26, Erica Shipp added it Aug 03, Donna Schmitt is currently reading it Dec 21, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Trivia About The Legacy of Mos No trivia or quizzes yet. Yahweh was not the sole god to believe in, as Moses had taught, but his opposite this is the quasi-blasphemy ventured by the historian. We might wonder about the aspects of the biblical story that could lead us to imagine the lapse, or rather the relapse, into a primitive state. But the evocation of the wonders and miracles, remnants of the ordinary, archaic and unreformed representation of the divine, are equally important. The Jews had adopted the powers of a baal a false god borrowed from the peoples they had mingled with during the course of this preparatory period.
Whatever might take its place would no longer be simply the divine. The ethnic community of the Jews had twice been dependent on a foreign influence. First, in ancient times, the master, whom they killed, adopted the revolutionary vision of a reformist pharaoh; this earlier foreign origin can be placed in the framework of a decisive emancipation, a positive development; it was rejected at the time of the murder. Yahweh was just one among many. The Hebrews accepted a brutal and vindictive deity; they allowed themselves—or were forced—to adopt crude and shocking beliefs.
We might assume that this time they lived with evil as the antidote to purification. This second initiation constituted another phase; it was the beginning of a later awakening that restored the triumphant figure of the monotheism they had previously rejected. The savior reappeared, and prevailed, when Yahweh was eliminated. Latency, the long period of forgetting that Freud considered an important factor, matured in this rebalancing. Here was a counterweight.
The Jews took possession of this uncompromising force, a reformed religion, which now bore no trace of the religion they had once abjured.
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Its denial was thus a necessary phase in the sequence of a freely rewritten epic. It was a new Sinai, and it was in this truly cathartic mood that they reached Canaan, the Promised Land. The impact of this phase was not limited to freeing a people from debased superstitions; it also transferred to them the logical and moral rigor that monotheism represented.
So it was no longer a question of imposing one religion as superior to another.
Religion had become universal, as its content had been rediscovered and re-interpreted. It no longer depended on belief, unless it confused belief with the reign of the mind. People go through all the phases of a common experience. The intellectual implantation of a truth took place in the past, if only for a short time, and was followed by a rejection that brought about a long period of alienation and repression.
The migrant people had already traced its boundaries on the ground, and later by exceeding the limits of their entitlements; these limits were intellectual, but they could be transferred to the natural world. The old Moses had imposed it on the Hebrews. Under these circumstances, its meaning changed; for the Hebrews it was linked to the high point of the monotheism propagated by Akhenaten. A reminder of this legacy, the rite confirmed the foreigners as chosen people, endowed now with a distinctive and privileged status.
The universality of which they were the guardians transcended the geographic reality of Palestine. The outcome, fixed and almost absolute, was based on a historical construction. The questions raised in reality found their answers there. In the logic of a scientist like Freud, the spiritual belongs to the realm of knowledge. A sentence in section 6, at the end of Part II, contains a profession of faith, setting the triumph of the true Moses in the text of the Bible itself: In section 7, Freud takes stock of his study, going beyond its historical aspect.
He accords the highest rank to knowledge of the power of tradition, and associates it with the influence of great men. The importance accorded to intellectual needs, illustrated by monotheism, comes next, and finally in contrast, the study of the ideas on which religions rely to exercise their power SE The first two parts appeared in Vienna in the review Imago ; the third, which returns to the same topic, adds comments, and completes the content, was written in London in ; the book was published in The surpassing of religion evolved in two stages: Freud died without knowing about concentration camps.
He may have foreseen them; some find it useful to entertain the possibility. The Jews escaped from the god Yahweh; they escaped through an intellectual act in which emancipation was inscribed. It was the manifestation of a counter-faith. We cannot stop evil, it pervades our world; but neither can we stop science, which combats and analyzes evil. This counter-faith was not revealed; rather, it was a substitute for a revelation in this rewriting of religious history.
It reformed a theology. The approach to reading texts in the service of history was modernized at the end of the nineteenth century; the new approach was based essentially on distinguishing among textual layers. The subject matter was limited to documents that could be transferred into a historical framework. In the Homeric poems, as in the Bible, it is not the letter of the text itself that mattered; the content was supposed to reflect the history of a people. The process constituted an archaeology of literary creation: What was Freud doing on the scientific scene of his day?
What was he doing in Moses and Monotheism? He shared the desire to use texts to uncover and reconstruct history; they provided supporting evidence and revealed some key indications. There was no room for a hermeneutics of the text itself in his work; there was no author. The text does not speak, does not express itself. It provides elements for a reconstitution. There is no need to focus on the literal meaning, nor indeed on the genesis of narratives and their origin, nor on the chronological redistribution of episodes, which preoccupied the critical sciences of his day philology, psychoanalysis, history , which were themselves in a historicizing phase.
The narrative that has been passed down to us conceals the underlying story, one that is plausible and closer to real life, which we must rediscover. These are two moments in history, one of which has been lost. In opposition to the text, Freud promotes the sober results of contemporary research. Historical construction replaces textual analysis. It rests on hypotheses that lend themselves to discussion. History belongs to the people; by way of the Bible it provides the material for a new rational projection, one that psychoanalysis can only accept or confirm, or at least make plausible.
This was the procedure with medieval epics, where it was agreed that they recalled events that had actually taken place, even though we are not familiar with them. We extrapolate them from the literary reorganization that transformed them with each new use. The narrative we read is supposed to reveal tendencies, but with no knowledge of the facts transcribed, we have no way of understanding them SE The truth lies elsewhere. A twofold modernity was making its way onto the scene. Philology was accompanied by a certain anthropology and by psychology. The former, external to psychoanalysis, was essentially based on the work of the Cambridge school, represented by Jane Harrison, J.
The other modernist basis is secondary in this book; it consists of proofs derived from clinical exploration. In fact, the anthropological framework allowed Freud to project psychological knowledge, acquired from individuals and their neuroses, onto a universal collective, based on the study of ritual and beliefs. Freud speaks of analogy. In general, he relies on his imagination, and it brings him no more than a probability; he then succeeds in confirming that probability by interpreting the documentation.
But imagination comes first. It is important to classify the readings according to these divergent interests. However, Freud uses the earlier work above all as a methodological reference.
The experiences of analysis in fact accompany the research into an unfamiliar domain; they support it without being confused with its practice. There is nothing new in the book that expands knowledge gained elsewhere from clinical study. A second trend focuses instead on the application of anthropological discoveries, an external dimension that Freud had included in his earlier research for Totem and Taboo. The historical construction is closely linked to that situation. A third orientation places the focus on Judaism; it considers that the Jewish question and the upsurge in anti-Semitism form the real content of the book.
Some of these studies emphasize the religious aspect. Others derive more directly, and in my opinion quite rightly, from the situation in Europe during the s. The relation to psychoanalysis in Moses and Monotheism is problematic. The rationale certainly relies on clinical experience, always by means of an analogical relation between the concepts of the masses and the individual, a relation that is hard to master, as Freud himself acknowledges. We might say that the whole construction of the book and the very course of its demonstrations proceed without psychoanalysis, or at least could do so in theory.
It is true that he refers above all to his most anthropological work, Totem and Taboo , which is in some ways the most speculative. In the new work, he is dealing with a timely topic that is separate; it offers no new knowledge, no confirmation in the area of his clinical research. Psychoanalysis is put in parentheses, so to speak. Freud speaks in his own name in a relationship that history has imposed on him, still in keeping with his work but as an addition.
Grubrich-Simitis takes no account of the political situation at the time.
Thirdly, she suggests that the book is basically a self-analysis, similar to the one in The Interpretation of Dreams. However, that driving force accounts for the lack of completion. All the arguments in the book are formulated intermittently and repeatedly, revealing even in their haste a strong concern for precision. They touch on Judaism, and particularly on anti-Semitism. Neither self-analysis nor a return to origins can be primordial here; if the reason Freud penned these reflections has to do with the global struggle, it does not reside in the self unless it renders the self a Jew and a liberator.
According to her reading, the child Freud transferred this event onto the financial difficulties his father had experienced Grubrich-Simitis sees this event as the key obtained through analysis; it explains the passage in the essay from ontogeny to phylogeny, which is related to the father. However, Nazism was a threat not just to culture and wellbeing, but to human survival, an aspect of Nazism well illuminated by the history of religions. Psychoanalysis, in the minds of more than a few readers, should have nothing to do with politics.
7. An Anthropological Fiction
Lyricism, too, was supposed to preserve its autonomy lest it be lost. However, the war had changed everything, even for Freud. Whence, late in life, such an unexpected and timely investigation. In fact, both Freud and Lacan confine themselves to the myth and to its profound truth. Lacan read it differently, but he expresses fascination with the Freudian construction. Oedipus is led to commit his actions by the god who is to annul his forbidden birth. Jakob Hessing, a professor in Jerusalem, sees Freud as forced by events to return to his Jewish origins Hessing In reality, he had never lost sight of them.
Hitler did not lead Freud to abandon an earlier dissidence; he just pushed the psychoanalyst to defend himself. Science may be Jewish, but it is not reserved to Jews. Foreignness, throughout history, must be thought of in these terms: This is the inevitable outcome of persecution. Is the aim of interpretation to prevent a real reading? It has been read by being written and re-written in inevitable projections. The Jews could not be defended in any other way.
In response to racism, we can say that the Jews are not a race; they freed themselves by transforming their religious practice—they are anti-racist because they are enlightened by science, the sole possible outcome of religion. This is the way Freud declared his Jewishness, the way he wanted to be Jewish, neither assimilated nor converted. In practice this position encompasses both science and the Freudian being, in perfect harmony. At this point we cannot avoid discussion of the moment at which Freud was writing.
The Jews rediscovered in Hitlerism the savage state in which they themselves had participated in their distant past, and from which they had managed to break away. It was thus an essential moment in history, thanks to their achievement of a position in absolute contradiction to the exercise of violence posited by Hobbes. The Hebrews must have struggled as they tried to reconcile the influence to which they were subject under the aegis of despotic deities with the memory of a vision that embodied justice through the workings of the mind. This struggle, remarkably powerful because of the adversarial positions involved, led them to move on to a new stage.
Two opposing elements combined. It no longer had the status of the initial revelation. It was no longer expressed in the discourse for internal consumption that Moses had proffered in Egypt; it was a real entry into history, a delayed entry, one might say. This fact had an impact on Freud, and then on us, and it continues to do so right up to the present day.
Hitler embodied a return to a stage that the Jews had left behind. This perspective radically shifts Athens from its central role. According to Freud, Greece skipped monotheism, despite all its philosophy. It never experienced an absolute break in the religious sphere; religion, unlike philosophy, was linked to the life of the people. The study of anti-Semitism points to a bifurcation in religious history: The Jews were persecuted because they abandoned a tradition that survived elsewhere. The split was necessary. The war Hitler declared against that spirituality defines precisely the opposite pole, in direct contradiction with his actions.
All people of learning are Jewish. For Freud, mono- or heno- theism is not merely symbolic of a principle of order or organization on a universal scale. He was the one struck down with the father. Once dead, he could be worshipped by the murderers, his descendants. Freud recalls the belief in oneness, the better to distance himself from it, and to emphasize that power was a unified whole reigning on earth before it disappeared and was mistaken for an idol, a protective authority SE Evolution leads to the return of the god-father who inherits from the murdered and devoured despot the quality of being-one and being all powerful.
The monotheism of Akhenaten is directly related to, indeed it ensues from, the primal murder; this monotheism involved the illusory transference of a reality, in this case the incarnation of a sun god, Aton. It needed to be re-translated and brought back to the constitution of humanity within the realm of the living. Unity came first, before divinization. When monotheism reappeared, it had been freed of the elements that had distorted it; it had become science.
A negative experience, the loss of knowledge, had had a positive effect. Remnants of the religion appeared as its inverse, still a religion, but stripped of anything associated with magic or the supernatural. The theory of monotheism was based on the experience of the Egyptian empire it was thus a byproduct of imperialism. God was the reflection of the unlimited power represented by the sovereign.
The Jews had not been in this situation; before Moses they had worshipped one of the gods peculiar to small nations. This did not prevent them from considering themselves, as a people, the favorite child. Freud imagined Judaization as a foreshadowing of himself; he felt it working within him in this ethnic form, inspired by the descriptions of the sacred. The conversion happened once; it can only be imagined through the entelechy of a primal murder, productive in its very negativity, which however masked an identification.
That is what Freud wrote five years after Hitler seized power, acting against religion.
The Legacy of Moses and Akhenaten: A Jewish Perspective
Freud did not neglect to mention the political situation around him. The object of persecution was science, his own perhaps first and foremost, a science considered supreme, in spite of everything, in its liberating aspects. Freud places Christ within the sphere of the Jewish tradition and as a stage in its evolution. What Freud is defending is a continuity, with the conversion of Paul, in the framework of universality, a likeness and not a difference. Saul of Tarsus introduced the guilty conscience, the awareness of culpability, which replicates original sin. The murder still cried out for atonement.
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One of the sons, one of the descendants of those who had killed the father, had allowed himself to be killed as an innocent man. At the same time, Paul was hostile to the primitive tradition. The new religion did not maintain the intellectual level of Judaism. The transformation brought about by spiritualization Geistigkeit was impaired, adapted to needs that were inferior but more pressing. The Christians were Jewish and yet they were not. The adversary was there.