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Haifa—Har-Harcarmel
Beth Dr. Moses
End of Dec. 1935
Dear Father Freud,
Your grandson2 has just paid us a short visit and this afternoon he is going to tell us in greater detail all that he can concerning you, Vienna, himself, his plans and his hopes. I am not writing this letter by hand as I usually do, but on the typewriter, as I want to give you without delay certain
news which I must convey with every precaution and care. To proceed chronologically: a journalist I have known for a long time and who worked even before the Hitler period for German newspapers in Egypt read to me some time ago passages of a report about Arab events concerning Ibn Saud.1 He knows Arabic well, studied it in Berlin, continued his studies in Cairo and for a time lived in Luxor until the coming of Hitler deprived him of his employment and shipped him over here. Now, a few weeks ago he admitted to me that he had long been working on a play about Moses and he asked me to allow him to read it to me. This he did the day before yesterday, and this led to his giving me a number of pieces of information concerning his sources. His Moses is a pupil of the Sun Temple of Re-Aton and is a younger contemporary of Amenophis III. Extremely astonished about this dating of his, I asked him how he came to make this unhistoric chronology, secretly thinking, of course, of your great work and rather excited on your account. He maintained that a Professor Smith of the Rockefeller Museum in Luxor had told him that among the Tel el Amarna letters which were recently excavated, there was a small tablet containing a list of the pupils at the Re-Aton temple in Heliopolis and that among these were two names which could only be interpreted as being those of Moses and Aaron. He went on to say that this small tablet had been in the possession of a rich Coptic Christian, a landowner, who had then bequeathed it to the Vatican, where it is now kept. I questioned the man as carefully as I could, and I explained to him that