Preface

If, as Rosalind declares in the epilogue to As You Like It, “a good wine needs no bush,” it is also true that a good issue does not need an elaborate preface. So let me simply draw the reader's attention to the flow of the papers. Joel Whitebook sets the stage by masterfully contextualizing Freud's famous self-characterization as a “godless Jew” against the backdrop of his father's status as a transitional figure between Jewish traditionalism and European modernity. As Whitebook traces the history of the Freud family back from Sigmund Freud's birthplace of Freiberg (in what is today the Czech Republic) to Jacob Freud's birthplace of Tysmenitz (in present-day Ukraine), so Diane O'Donoghue brilliantly excavates the amalgam of meanings invested in representations of Moses by the Catholic population of Moravia, where Freud spent his first three years, highlighting how Moses was associated with St. Methodius and paying special attention to a sculpture in one of Freiberg's five churches, where the toddler Sigmund may well have been taken by his Czech nanny. For both Whitebook and O'Donoghue the Philippson Bible in which Freud's birth and circumcision were recorded by his father, and which the latter subsequently presented to him on his thirty-fifth birthday, is a linchpin in their respective reconstructions of the prehistory of Freud's lifelong preoccupation with Moses.

Faithful readers will recall our Spring 2003 issue, “Freud's Michelangelo,” including Malcolm Macmillan and Peter J. Swales's controversial essay, “Observations from the Refuse-Heap.” Now, Moshe Halevi Spero enters the lists with “Moses Lactans,” which not only challenges Macmillan and Swales for the distinction of being the longest article published in my tenure as editor of this journal but may well also be the most comprehensive psychoanalytic account ever offered of Freud's “The Moses of Michelangelo.” Spero extends Diane O'Donoghue's inquiry into the archaic penumbra that envelops