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“O Wort, du Wort das mir fehlt!”
(Oh Word, Thou Word that I lack!“)1
“Was unsterblich im Gesang soil leben,
Muss im Leben untergehn“
(“What is to live immortal in song
Must perish in life.“)2
Two great geniuses from Vienna, both Jewish, both revolutionary innovators in their respective fields.3 And both obsessively fascinated with the figure of Moses, producing two major creative works nearly simultaneously—Freud's Moses and Monotheism (published in 1939), and Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron 4 (abandoned in 1937, but published and performed as two acts ever since its first fully staged performance in 19575). Both works were preceded in their creators' oeuvre by significant earlier compositions on the subject of religion. Both men identified with Moses as a mountaintop figure, bringing a new Word to people who mostly could not understand him. And both of these Moses works occurred at critical moments of exile, escaping the Nazi regime—with such dire events prompting a return to intense personal and intellectual re-examination of religion by both men, albeit with very different conclusions.
The proximity of these geniuses in time, place, and culture, and the particular focus of each on the figure of Moses, offer a tempting subject for comparison. Exactly 80 years after the publication of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, the time seemed ripe for such a study. It is not the first of its kind, but there has been no in-depth comparison of these two treatments of the figure of Moses since Rabbi Yosef Yerushalmi (1992) published
his essay on the topic almost three decades ago. Very recently, the eminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann (2019) gave a paper on the same topic at the annual birthday lecture sponsored by the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna in 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the publication of Moses and Monotheism. He focused less on a detailed comparison in fav