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Historians of religion have been critical of Freud's attempt to reconstruct early Israelite history in Moses and Monotheism (1964 [1939]). In particular, they have rejected his suggestion that the historical Moses was an Egyptian aristocrat who transmitted to the Jews an Egyptian religion (the monotheistic religion of the Pharaoh Akhnaten) and who was killed by the Jews after leading them out of Egypt.1 Psychoanalysts have been relatively tolerant of Freud's “Moses was an Egyptian” argument, but have rejected the psycho-Lamarckianism which permeates Moses and Monotheism. I know of no psychoanalytic investigator who endorses Freud's suggestion that the memory of the “Moses killing” was repressed and passed along to successive generations, and that the existence of this inherited “repressed memory” explains features of later Judaism and the Jewish character.
In his otherwise sympathetic reconsideration of Freud's “Moses was an Egyptian” argument, Ernest Jones (1957; 1958) mentions Freud's psycho-Lamarckian arguments only briefly, and then rejects them outright. Those commentators who do address Freud's psycho-Lamarckian arguments in detail usually do so only to demonstrate that these arguments are a projection of Freud's own oedipal struggles or a projection of his view of the history of the psychoanalytic movement (see Wallace, 1977; Ostow, 1977).
My position is that both the arguments in Moses and Monotheism and most of the responses to these arguments are fundamentally misdirected. If we accept the usual chronologies offered by Biblical scholars, then the Israelite Exodus from Egypt occurred sometime towards the end of the second millenium B.C. Yet, Biblical scholars also suggest that even the earliest of the traditions preserved in the Old Testament