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The extraordinary attention paid of late to Freud's valedictory “novel” Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses Und Die Monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen), 1937-39, has understandably eclipsed, to a degree, interest in its more exclusively “aesthetic” younger brother, the essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” , an essay Freud was as apparently hesitant to publish as he was hell-bent (after overcoming similar hesitations) to issue the later book.1 Considering the putative effect on a world witnessing the first acts of German genocide of the argument in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was not in the first place even a Jew, it might seem more logical for Freud to have feared the response to the book rather than to the article, and to have published the former anonymously rather than the latter, as he did. The tendency to worry Moses and Monotheismin terms of Freud's own Jewishness and/or “loyalty” will probably eventually be absorbed by broader studies of the cultural historicity of psychoanalysis than we currently have, but while we are waiting for these to materialize it opens the door to re-considering his earlier treatment of Moses to notice that, albeit “aesthetic,” Freud's approach to the sculptured figure has more parallels to his later psychoanalytic study than first meet the eye. The sturdy megalomania displayed by Freud's historical scholarship in the book has its counterpart in the generally accepted assumption that by the Moses of his essay, whose essence is magisterial self-control, Freud means to allude to, or encourage, his own forbearance with respect to the backsliding of disciples.2 It contributes to the force of this resemblance that paranoia (of which megalomania is a