The Jews Killed Moses: Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Question

I

Following mainstream interpretations of his time, the starting point of Freud’s narration is that the existence of the biblical Moses can be traced back to a real historical character who lived c.14th century BC in the civilization that was built around the Nile delta. ² Back then, under the rule of the 18th pharaonic dynasty, Egypt had become a world empire; that is, a state and civilization that ruled over different peoples as an external power. These political developments contributed to the rise of a more universalistic religious cult; a divinity was needed that was not overtly related to particularly Egyptian gods but was able to appeal to different ethnic groups. This is the context within which, c.1375 BCE, pharaoh Amenhotep IV pushed for a series of religious reforms that are considered early expressions of monotheism: while formally maintaining the Egyptian tradition of worshipping the sun, the attempt was made to turn the sun into a pure symbol, an abstract force. The proto-monotheistic faith thus established centred on the cult of a new god, Aton, that although it was meant to elicit wider loyalties, never became genuinely popular. In fact, Amenhotep’s reforms were so radical that they eventually became seen as heresy by the Egyptian establishment and a civil war ensued. Not ready to give up on his newly-established creed, Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten (or Ikhnaton), left the traditional capital of the empire in Thebes and set up a new one that he named after himself – Akhenaton. This social and religious experiment was short-lived, however, and older cultic practices resumed soon after Akhenaten’s death. Its heretical character meant that the resumption of traditional religious practices erased all traces of Akhenaten’s cult and reign from Egyptian history – indeed they were only rediscovered as part of the wave of European archaeological excavations from the mid-19th century onwards.

According to Freud, then, Moses was an Egyptian follower of Akhenaten who, after the pharaoh’s death, decided to continue with the radical version of this monotheistic cult. Freud surmises that Moses was a disenchanted priest who, having lost the possibility of continuing with his worship after his side’s defeat in the civil strife, started looking for a people that might carry forward Akhenaten’s faith. Freud (1967 [1939]: 6–14) acknowledges that he was not the first to claim that Moses was most likely an Egyptian – a claim that has continued to find support since (Assmann, 1997: 5–22, 144–67). But the more consequential line of his inquiry is whence come the legend, the myth, and eventually the cult devoted to Moses as a particularly Jewish hero. It is one thing to claim that Moses was an Egyptian, another for him to have been made the founder of the Jewish people.

Freud then notices that there is something unusual in the narrative structure of the biblical story of Moses. In most myths of a similar kind – among others, Freud (1967 [1939]: 8) mentions Sargon of Agade, Cyrus, Romulus and Oedipus himself – the hero is of noble origins but external circumstances made him grow up in humble surroundings. But in the case of Moses, the story works the other way round: he was a humble Jewish boy who was raised by a noble Egyptian family and came back as the liberator of his people only later in life. To Freud, if we are to decipher the truth behind the historical Moses, it is necessary to find the explanation behind this inversion.

Here is a first clue to solve the mystery we have mentioned already: As Akhenaten had transformed Egyptian polytheism into a form of monotheism, then this Egyptian Moses was already a monotheist and the establishment of Judaism as a religion is no longer to be understood as a rejection of Egyptian beliefs. Rather the opposite, Judaism would be deeply rooted in Egyptian culture. Freud contends that the commonalities between the two cults are not merely formal but substantive: they share the belief in the existence of one single god, the denial of any form of afterlife and, above all, the continuation of the Egyptian practice of circumcision (Freud, 1967 [1939]: 44–50). If the two religions are not opposites but closely related, then Freud has cleared the first hurdle in accounting for the claim that the Jewish faith had been created by an Egyptian Moses.

A second and more serious challenge has to do with situating Moses’ presence in the Old Testament story of Exodus. Freud claims that these events may be dated to the period between 1350 and 1215 BCE and bases this assumption on historical records that speak of a period of anarchy in Egypt around that time, as that would have allowed for the escape of those slaves that followed Moses. Crucially, this is also the time when a most fateful encounter occurred between two tribes: the one that had been led by Moses out of Egypt and a group of worshippers of the volcano god Jahve, as was then prevalent among Midianite peoples in the eastern Sinai and the western side of the Arabian Peninsula. Freud contends that the initial establishment of the Jewish people took place through the meeting of these two different tribes. A momentous finding is that this Midianite tribe had its own leader, who also went by the name of Moses:

We cannot escape the impression that this Moses of Qades and Midian [. . .] is quite a different person from the august Egyptian we had deduced, who disclosed to his people a religion in which all magic and sorcery were most strictly abhorred [. . .] we are justified in separating the two persons from each other and in assuming that the Egyptian Moses never was in Qades and had never heard of the name of Jahve, whereas the Midianite Moses never set foot in Egypt and knew nothing of Aton. In order to make the two people into one, tradition or legend had to bring the Egyptian Moses to Midian. (Freud, 1967 [1939]: 41, 49)

These two ‘historical’ Moses have nothing in common and never met. But stories about their deeds and beliefs combined in what eventually became the syncretic Old Testament Moses, who was then made the founder of the Jewish people and their religion. Eventful as it is, this encounter had an even more momentous consequence: it triggered the progressive reappearance of a traumatic event that had remained repressed for the ‘Egyptian’ Jews. The Jews had done something fundamentally unforgiveable, a deed so terrible that no people could ever allow themselves to openly talk about it. Although they trusted Moses to deliver them out of Egypt, the Jews failed to live up to the high moral standards that were demanded by the new religion. They grew restless as the promise of a fertile land failed to materialize and it was then, claims Freud, that:

Moses met with the same fate as Ikhnaton, the fate that awaits all enlightened despots. The Jewish people of Moses were quite as unable to bear such a highly spiritualized religion, to find in what it offered satisfaction for their needs, as were the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty. In both cases the same thing happened: those who felt themselves dispossessed revolted and threw off the burden of a religion that had been forced on them. But while the tame Egyptians waited until fate had removed the sacred person of their Pharaoh, the savage Semites took their destiny into their own hands and did away with their tyrant. (Freud, 1967 [1939]: 57–8, emphasis added)

As they wandered aimlessly through the desert for decades, the Jews rebelled against Moses, killed him, and then, through guilt, shame, and repression, found ways to ‘forget’ and ‘erase’ all signs of this magnicide. Their crime was so despicable that they could not but repent, so the more the people who killed Moses tried to hide their deed the more they became invested in the memory of their hero and liberator; so much so that the Jews eventually naturalized Moses as one of their own. It was only the encounter between the two tribes, through the fortuitous appearance of this ‘Mediante Moses’, that led to the creation of this new syncretic religious cult. Thus emerged also a nobler version of the Jewish people’s founding myth:

From the Jahvist account – written down about 1000 BC, though doubtless founded on earlier material – we have learned that the union of the tribes and the foundation of a religion in Qades represented a compromise, the two parts of which are still easily distinguishable. One partner was concerned only in denying the recency and foreignness of the God Jahve and in heightening his claim to the people’s devotion. The other partner would not renounce memories, so dear to him, of the liberation from Egypt and the magnificent figure of his leader Moses. (Freud, 1967 [1939]: 76)

With this, Freud contends that he has solved the mystery of the original inversion of Moses. As with most myths of its kind, Moses indeed was a nobleman who found fulfilment in his life’s mission by reaching out to the weak, the oppressed and the poor. He led the Hebrew slaves out of Egyptian serfdom but was betrayed and then killed by his newly adopted people. Such a heinous crime could not but be redeemed, so the Jews erased the foreign origins of Moses and, over time, a nobler version of the story took shape: Moses was no longer part of Egyptian nobility but a humble Jewish boy. Not only that, he was made the very founder of the Jewish people.

II

The history behind the composition of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism deserves greater attention than what I can offer here, but an obvious place to start are the circumstances under which Freud wrote the text. ³ Already in his late 70s, he had been diagnosed with cancer over a decade earlier and expected to die soon. Hitler was already in power in Germany when Freud started working in earnest on the text, and the book was only completed, and published in its definitive book format, after his escape to London as the Nazis annexed Austria. It was eventually published in 1939 – the year of Freud’s death.

Freud never deserted his Jewish roots although he did not observe Jewish holidays and rites at home. He engaged with various Jewish organizations throughout his life, accepted an honorary appointment at the recently established Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, while he showed sympathy for the Zionist cause, he was reluctant to sign public statements in their support. In his private correspondence, he expressed concerns that the establishment of psychoanalysis would be seen as an exclusively Jewish affair while, at the same time, he commented that some of the non-Jewish practitioners of his therapeutic approach had difficulties in getting to grips with psychoanalysis because they were not Jewish. ⁴ As it offers the most systematic treatment of Jewish themes among his writings, his Moses was bound to trigger wider debates over Freud’s relationship with and conception of Judaism. At the same time, given the timing of its composition and the content of its substantive theses, I argue that this is Freud’s own attempt at coming to terms with the two main challenges of debates on the Jewish Question: understanding the core features of Jewish identity and explaining the obduracy of antisemitism in Western culture.

During the last decade of his life, Freud consistently sought to apply his earlier work on the rise of religious consciousness – in particular, Totem and Taboo (Freud, 2008 [1913]) – to wider questions of contemporary society and culture. In The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1989 [1927]), and then in Civilization and its Discontent (Freud, 2010 [1929]), Freud openly declared war on the main institutions of bourgeois society: religion, family and morality. Within that context, Freud was intent on demonstrating that the main structures of individual psychology were also of relevance for the study of collective phenomena: (i) an early experience of trauma that leads to (ii) the emergence of defence mechanisms, followed by a period of (iii) latency, which then leads to (iv) the eventual outbreak of the neurosis and, finally (v) the partial return of repressed materials. As this structure had already been tested with success for individuals’ ontogenetic developments, the task now was to find its application phylogenetically; that is, to establish how it could work in relation to the collective evolution of the human species as a whole. Crucially, to Freud, all religions follow the same pattern – they are a re-enactment of the original patricide, and fulfil the same function, providing adults with the ontological security that is irredeemably lost at the end of childhood. Moses and Monotheism offered Freud the opportunity to subject Judaism to its own critique of religion.

Indeed, Freud showed no mercy towards the faith of his ancestors. In his view, Judaism’s unique place among world religions has to do with it being the original incarnation, a real historical instantiation, of the parricide that is the founding act of all organized social life. At the same time, their guilt for having committed the original patricide is, in his view, the main cause behind the universality of Jewish hatred. Yet a crucial insight of Freud’s understanding of Judaism is that, however central its religious component may be, Jewish life cannot be reduced to religion alone. To Freud, the exploration of the origins of Jewish identity is significant because the Jews are arguably the first group to experience first-hand that the consequences of explicitly articulating religious beliefs and practices are not reflected exclusively, or even primarily, on religious issues. Instead, their diasporic existence turns their Judaism into a major cultural marker, which in turn may explain their always imperfect integration into the politics, law, and economy of their host societies (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993). As I will show below, misinterpretations of Moses and Monotheism may have to do with Freud’s original yet unsatisfactory articulation of this insight: however central religion may seem to the Jews themselves, there is something fundamental about Jewish identity that is not captured by its religious dimension. Indeed, not unlike the polemics that have constantly haunted Marx’s own text On the Jewish Question, commentators of Freud’s book have struggled with the text’s own equivocations. Often, so it seems to me, they have mistaken as positive claims the very arguments Freud offered as a critique of antisemitic views and conservative understandings of Jewish identity.

Freud belongs to a generation of Jews who had already severed most ties to the beliefs, practices, and rites of the Jewish religion but, nonetheless, still felt that there was something fundamentally Jewish in their personal identities. They cut, often at great personal costs, most ties with the traditions of their families and tended to have a particular lack of sympathy towards their religious rites. But at the same time as they struggled to define positively what exactly made them Jewish, they equally refused to concede that ‘the end of Judaism’ was in sight – both individually and collectively. In partial homage to Freud himself, Yosef Yerushalmi coined the idea of the ‘psychological Jew’ to underscore a constitutive tension behind the rise of this kind of modern Jewish identity. Given that much of the traditional substance of Judaism is attached to religiosity, a secular Jewish identity has

become almost pure subjectivity [. . .] Alienated from classical Jewish texts, Psychological Jews tend to insist on inalienable Jewish traits. Intellectuality and independence of mind, the highest ethical and moral standards, concerns for social justice, tenacity in the face of persecution – these are among the qualities they will claim, if called upon, as quintessentially Jewish. (Yerushalmi, 1991: 10)

Like Freud himself, these are Jews who think that there is something backward in traditional Judaism, are unable to posit positively what Judaism is beyond religion, have sympathy for but are not fully committed to Zionism, and despite all this cannot but see themselves as fundamentally Jewish. A succinct version of this insight is articulated in Isaac Deutscher’s idea of the ‘non-Jewish Jew’. While primarily concerned with Marx and such Marxist writers as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Deutscher (1981: 35–6), does include Freud within the pantheon of modern Jewish intellectuals who have fundamentally reshaped modern culture. Deutscher’s idea of the non-Jewish Jew anticipates Yerushalmi’s idea of psychological Jews:

If it is not a race, what then makes a Jew? Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and the exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy; because I feel the pulse of Jewish history, because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not the spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews. (Deutscher, 1981: 51)

This generation of intellectuals has been aptly described as ‘heterodox Jews’ (Löwy, 2015). The concept delineates the key features of a group of Central and Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who have had a major impact on modern intellectual life: Franz Kafka, Grygor Luckacs, Martin Buber, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. ⁵ Through its critical view of religion, psychoanalysis only makes sense within a militantly secular worldview; because of its subversive drive vis-à-vis Christian values, it had to be the product of a Jewish intellectual. Freud was certainly ‘a godless Jew’ (Gay, 1987: 37–50).

The difficulties in accepting this redefinition of Judaism beyond religion – without, at the same time, resorting to essential views of either nationality or ethnicity – is apparent in the highly negative reception of Moses among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century. In the 1940s, Martin Buber (1947) wrote his own book on Moses, where he curtly dismissed Freud’s theses in the first footnote of the preface to the book. Without mentioning Freud again, Buber’s book cannot but be read as a repudiation of Freud’s views: Jewish life is depicted as completely autonomous and owing nothing to Egyptian culture, while Moses is portrayed as the ‘socialist’ leader of a theocratic regime. ⁶

In the 1950s, Leo Strauss (1997 [1958]) gave a lecture on Freud’s Moses and found little in it that deserved his approval. To Strauss, Freud’s secularism fundamentally eschewed his understanding of religion in general, Judaism in particular and, above all, of what Moses may mean for Jewish history and self-identity. Strauss is hardly able to conceal his anger:

On the basis of Freud’s suggestion, the situation of the Jews in regard to Moses is identical to the situation of the Gentile (and hence in particular of the German) in regard to Jesus. At the moment of the complete collapse of the assimilation of Jews to Germans, Freud commits the ultimate act of assimilation: he assimilates the situation of the Jews in regard to Moses with the situation of the Germans in regard to Jesus. (Strauss, 1997 [1958]: 295–6)

In the 1970s, Hans Blumenberg also wrote a short piece on Freud’s Moses but decided against publishing it. In its English translation, Blumenberg’s (2018) article on Freud appears alongside his assessment of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The two texts belong together because, in both cases, Blumenberg took issue with the decision of publishing such works at critical historical junctures for Jewish history: Freud’s accusation of Jewish parricide while the Nuremberg Laws were in full swing; Arendt’s alleged belittling of Eichmann’s role during the Holocaust precisely at the time when the State of Israel was at last able to confront the crimes of the ‘final solution’ from a position of strength. To Blumenberg, Freud’s claim that he was concerned with truth alone, and Arendt’s contentious claim that she lacked love for the Jewish people, are equally disingenuous in their narcissism and sense of self-importance. ⁷

In their different versions, then, the charge against Freud is that he dramatically misunderstood the historicity and current meaning of Judaism. Freud would have indulged both in self-denial (i.e. if Moses wasn’t Jewish, then the Jews themselves are nothing but an ‘invention’) and, even worse, in self-hatred (if the Jews killed Moses, then the misery that is incessantly inflicted upon them is deserved). Matters were made only worse because this betrayal took place at the time of the most painful events in Jewish history. He would have fallen for rather than helped overcome the secular prejudices of modernist culture, and thus lent support to the very antisemitic logic he ostensibly sought to debunk.

III

Understandable as they possibly are, reactions such as those by Buber, Strauss and Blumenberg do not do justice to Freud’s insights. At the very least, their comments say as much about these critics’ own views about Judaism as about Freud’s work. They also fail to appreciate the originality of what Freud was seeking to achieve – albeit imperfectly. In this section, I should like to argue that, in delving into the historical roots of Judaism, Freud uncovers a fundamental fact of Jewish identity that is central – both historically and sociologically – to how Judaism relates to broader society: Jewish identity is fundamentally hybrid, its origins being a unique combination of different tribes and creeds. Freud’s main argument is that there is a dynamic syncretism – rather than any kind of Jewish particularism, exceptionalism, or indeed a ‘superiority complex’ based on their being the ‘chosen people’ – that remains central to any forward-looking idea of Jewish identity. At a time when the public legitimacy of racism was arguably at its peak, and the idea of keeping one’s own ‘race’ pure was deemed a worthy political goal, Freud is effectively articulating the view that there is no such thing as pure races but, on the contrary, that all forms of identity are historically hybrid.

Historicizing the figure of Moses has remained a key methodological resource in current attempts at interpreting the myth behind the biblical story: on the one hand, the idea of a Hebrew Moses that is counterposed to an Egyptian Moses; on the other, the fact that there were more than a dozen Moses stories circulating c.500 BC – that is, the period when the ‘definitive’ version of it was eventually written down (Assmann, 1997: 11; 29–44). The question that still haunted Freud – who the ‘real Moses’ actually was – matters less than the constant remaking of the Moses myth and what it has come to embody. In fact, apart from its Egyptian roots and influence over Jewish culture, Freud had already made Moses a Christian figure as well: after all, the statue by Michelangelo that was the subject of his early study was located inside a church in Rome and continues to decorate the tomb of the pope who commissioned it (Goldstein, 1992: 91–2).

Insofar as the question of Jewish identity is concerned, it seems to me that Freud’s argument is a positive one: the defining cultural marker of Jewish life lies in its continuous change and evolution – its hybrid character. The early religious identity of the Jews was constituted on the fact that the Jewish religion arose as a combination of three different faiths right from its inception: the abstract representation of the sun as the new Egyptian god ‘Aton’, of the warring god ‘Jahve’ and of the morally oriented ‘Adonai’. Freud’s countercultural narrative of Judaism is that of a way of life that was not formed through isolation and exclusivism but, on the contrary, came about through the coming together of a diversity of religious traditions, practices and influences. This is, ultimately, what Moses as its founding hero came to symbolize.

As part of that generation of heterodox Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Freud may have been reflecting on how his own Jewishness was defined by directly contradicting some of the main tenets of how Judaism has been represented in Western culture: a stubborn people who have proved unable and unwilling to change, whose only loyalty is to upholding God’s laws without change or exception and who are obsessed with erecting barriers between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Freud’s difficulties with this view of Judaism have to do with both Jewish and non-Jewish attempts to freeze it in time, while in his view the core feature of Jewish identity lies in its ability to evolve and enable different worlds to converse. Always living in the diaspora or exile, amidst different peoples, cultures and religions, the one permanent feature of Judaism is that it doesn’t sit still and is never equal to itself. Can there be anything more Jewish – and hybrid – than Yiddish and Ladino, the composite languages of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities? This is Isaac Deutscher again:

Those who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and great contradictoriness of nature and society [. . .] The definition of a Jew is so elusive precisely because the Diaspora exposed the Jew to such a tremendous variety of pressures and influences. (Deutscher, 1981: 35; 51–2)

The tension between hybrid and more exclusivist conceptions of Jewish identity has continued in modern times and can be construed as either a positive or a negative trait of Judaism, depending on the aspects that are deemed central. For instance, we find it in those transformations of Jewish life that can be traced back to Moises Mendelssohn’s Haskalah movement in the late 18th century (Meyer, 1988): the renovation of Jewish spiritual life in consonance with the humanistic, scientific and more politically progressive side of the Enlightenment. These were Jews who wanted to remain Jews but whose everyday life had already pushed them beyond an exclusively Jewish life. More or less religious, more or less patriots in their ‘host’ countries, more or less imbued in ‘German’ or ‘French’ culture, these were Jews for whom their ability to live in two worlds at the same time was perceived, or could be construed, as a unique advantage of their social position. But there are also negative attitudes against hybrid conceptions of Jewish identity. Revisionist Zionism, Orthodox Jews or proponents of full assimilation have little in common, but they nonetheless share the view that the spiritual integrity and long-term political viability of Jewish life is fundamentally challenged by its hybridity. A permanent dilemma for Jewish diasporas all over the world is that Jewish life often invites tragic choices: Jews who seek to remain Jewish in a traditional sense by tying themselves to orthodoxy ever more firmly; Jews who abandon Judaism altogether and embrace the struggle for full integration into mainstream national society; and, arguably, a great majority of Jews for whom their Jewish identity is defined by embracing hybridity through all kinds of explicit and implicit, painful and painless, accommodations. Given that there are neither pure races nor pure cultures whose strengthening requires them to exist in isolation from each other, Freud’s message to Jews and non-Jews alike is that, with regards to the formation of their cultural identity, they are not ‘essentially’ different from other human groups.

By making Moses an Egyptian who was adopted by the Jews, Freud was not betraying his brethren during those times when they needed him the most; on the contrary, his conception of Jewish cultural life may be read as an affirmative political act against past and present persecutions. Jews cannot be separated out from their ‘host’ societies without both being deprived of something fundamental of their common existence; no ethnic or racial definition of the Jews will ever work because they have never led the life of an isolated people whose only contact with the outside world is of a parasitic nature. To my mind, Freud’s message to the Jews was a positive one: we will survive these trying times, not only because our forebearers have already done so many times before but because there isn’t one thing alone that our persecutors can take away from us; there is no essential feature of Jewish identity whose disappearance may trigger the path to the extinction of Jewish life. Not even attempts at the physical extermination of the Jews would ‘work’ because whatever aspect anyone may think as essentially Jewish, it is always already something that contains both Jewish and non-Jewish elements at the same time.

IV

The intrinsic antisemitism of the Nazi ideology and society gave further urgency to Freud’s writing of Moses and Monotheism, and commentators have often argued that Freud offers a somewhat essentialist view on the causes of antisemitism. As we just saw with Leo Strauss, they picked on Freud’s rather twisted intuition that it was somehow the Jews’ own fault that they have attracted this undying hatred. Even as sophisticated a commentator as Elisabeth Roudinescu (2013: 80–81) finds it baffling that Freud uncritically accepted:

the principal grievance of anti-Judaism, namely the refusal of the Jews to accept that they had put God to death. The Jewish people, he said, insists on denying the murder of God, and Christians never stop accusing the Jews of being deicides because they freed themselves from the original fault, since Christ, as a substitute for Moses, sacrificed his life to redeem them [. . .] Freud concluded that this refusal exposed the Jews to the resentment of other peoples.

There appears to be something fundamentally negative in Freud’s views on the pervasiveness and intractability of antisemitism regardless of time, place and culture. Indeed, there is no single, let alone unified, theory of antisemitism in Freud’s work. Jay Geller (2020) has aptly distinguished four possible explanations in his writing for the obduracy of antisemitism in Western culture: (1) the practice of circumcision, which transfers to the Jews the fear of castration and the taboo of homosexuality; (2) the belief in their own ‘chosenness’, which actualises the rivalry among siblings and the envy towards primogeniture; (3) the narcissism of minor differences, which exacerbates conflicts among the three monotheisms and causes their differences to become compulsively exaggerated; and (4) parricide, which holds the Jews responsible for the foundational crime that gives rise to the social order. ⁸ More significantly, the typology makes apparent that Freud was less interested in understanding empirically the recurrence or even varieties of antisemitism in history. In all four accounts, the underlying causes of antisemitism are instead onto- and phylogenetically overdetermined: they lie outside history and remain elusive vis-à-vis current politics.

In Moses and Monotheism, the main explanation for the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish sentiments focuses on patricide as the fundamental crime on which all cultures and religions are founded. The primal patricide of the horde, that already was Freud’s central argument in Totem and Taoo, is not a symbolic but a real event; it is the moment when human history starts. If the significance of religion in human culture lies in the fact that the original killing of the father actually took place, then Freud’s story, in which the Jews killed their ‘father’, becomes the historical case on which the Oedipus complex is built as its paradigmatic psychic and collective formulation (Ricoeur, 1970: 242–6): the Jews are universally hated because they are the ones who effectuated the most odious crime of all and are held responsible for humanity’s fall from paradise. The paradigmatic significance of the Moses story, then, lies in how it delineates the transhistorical role of parricide as a main cultural framework of Western civilization: the fact that Jews continue to deny their patricide explains also why they rejected and betrayed Jesus, which in turn makes it all but inevitable that Jew-hatred has become a defining feature of Christianity. Their denial of the crime adds insult to injury: they can’t be trusted because they have such a big secret to hide. The universal persecution that has followed them is the price the Jews are constantly asked to pay for having given birth to civilization.

This also helps us account for the symbolically negative role of Jews in different milieus: in Egyptian antiquity, the Jews represented idolatry and paganism; for Christians, they incarnate the apostasy and obstinacy of rejecting their Messiah; for the nationalists, they embody the enemy within; for the capitalists, they are the personification of socialism, as much as they are quintessentially capitalistic for socialist radicals – to a large extent, the current demonization of Israel as a uniquely criminal state follows the path. The Christian Judeophobia of the Middle Ages, the racist antisemitism of modern times and much of the contemporary anti-Zionist rhetoric differ in their conceptual underpinnings – one is couched in a theological language, the other is rooted in scientific and nationalistic discourse and the third belongs in the anti-imperialist ideology of the new left. But they all mirror each other insofar as they give contemporary cultural significance to the universality of Jewish hate. The Jews were born within an ‘Egyptian orient’ that preceded them, were never able to achieve lasting political sovereignty in antiquity and then had to contend with the rise of a Christian West all around them. Eternally nomadic, cosmopolitan by nature and essentially devoted to commerce, they continue to be an anomaly in the modern world of nations. As such, they can be readily defined by their negative traits: slaves, heretics, obdurate, duplicitous, parasites and internal enemies. To Freud, what unites these various discourses is more significant than what separates them; indeed, in Freud’s account they are essentially the same. ⁹

Given his conception of cultural identities as hybrid, and thus the inexistence of pure races, it did not make sense for Freud to pursue ‘scientific’ arguments on the origins and significance of antisemitism. Furthermore, the intensity of the hatred the Jews generate cannot be accounted for on biological or natural bases. The ubiquity of antisemitism requires that we account for sources that run at a deeper level, and this explains why antisemitism appears to lie outside history to Freud. Secular, race-based, antisemitism is the current expression of ancient memory sources, it is the recent ‘sublation’ of the theological and wider cultural elements that lie underneath the very foundations of Western culture. Given that the antipathy towards Jews never fails to surface in all times and places, antisemitism may be seen as a transcultural actualization of the death principle.

Problematic as this explanation is, Freud’s book was not an act of Jewish self-hate – he was not turning his back on fellow Jews, nor was he blaming them for their own misery. Instead, this was Freud’s way to offer his own reflections on the Jewish Question. The causes of antisemitism are inextricably linked to the most fundamental fact of Jewish – indeed human – history: the killing of Moses. At the same time, if this animosity is a consequence of who they are rather than a result of what they do, Freud is in effect exculpating real-life Jews for the suffering they have experienced through the ages. Yet the cost of this universal exoneration is making antisemitism harder to explain sociologically as well as historically.

Closing Remarks

Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism is a fascinating book with an equally fascinating reception history. Contrary to mainstream Jewish readings during the 20th century, it seems to me that Freud is expressing solidarity with, rather than abandoning, fellow Jews at their most terrible historical moment. His way of doing this, I have sought to argue, was to use psychoanalysis to address the two main issues of the ‘Jewish Question’: to account for the core elements of Jewish identity and the long-term causes of antisemitism.

On the one hand, the hybridity of their cultural identities places the Jews in a difficult position vis-à-vis the various cultural milieus within which they live. They are always partly alien and partly local, envied and admired, permanently needed though never genuinely welcome. At a time when the world was being seen through the lens of pure and self-contained racial groups, Freud’s argument is both a general countercultural move against racist thinking and a particular defence of Judaism in its resilience and uniqueness, its creativity and ethical non-conformity. On the other hand, the more pessimistic side of his message for fellow Jews is that there may be little to be done to overcome, at least ‘definitively’, the hatred and persecutions they experience. The causes of antisemitism – the guilt, repression and violence that lie at the bottom of Western civilization’s ‘discontent’ – are ultimately rooted in the most fundamental Jewish event: the original parricide. As the universal scapegoat for the world’s ills, the next Jewish tragedy may just be around the corner. Freud’s key creative tension lies in the juxtaposition between this somewhat ahistorical understanding of antisemitism and the claim that Jewish identity does not have an essence and, on the contrary, is fundamentally changeable and hybrid. The ultimate paradox of Jewish life is that for all the fluidity and creativity of Jewish identity, the negative sentiments Jews universally invite may never disappear. The elusive promise of emancipation remains unfulfilled in Freud’s reflections on the ‘Jewish Question’.