Question of Jewish Monotheism

Let us agree, therefore, that the great man influences his contemporaries in two ways: through his personality and through the idea for which he stands. This idea may lay stress on an old group of wishes in the masses, or point to a new aim for their wishes …

In the work cited Freud says in concluding the second part (p. 79) “There still remains much to discuss, to explain, and to assert”. The present essay attempts to follow this suggestion of Freud's and give the problem broader illumination, less with respect to the personality of Moses, than as to the idea of monotheism with which his name is forever bound and which was the occasion for Freud's concerning himself with the personality of Moses. Freud's work consists, as is well known, of 3 parts. 1) Moses—An Egyptian. 2) If Moses was an Egyptian. 3) Moses and Monotheistic Religeon. It could be imagined that Freud originally and actually put the question to himself in reverse order, thus starting from the strange seeming fact that out of the middle of an ocean of polytheistic religeons there sprang a unique monotheistic one, like an island. Neither the reference to God's inscrutable decision to choose a people and give them the revelation of his uniqueness, nor the assumption of a—not to be more clearly defined—Jewish genius who led the folk to monotheism could or can be adjudicated prior to an objective science, not falsified by feelings and hence also, not before Freud's way of thinking. Now the psychoanalytic method of research is an exquisitely genetic one in that in doing our daily work, we put continually to ourselves the question: “How many this or that symptom, this or that psychic or other behavior have arisen?” and our answer is an unresisting: