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Freud's Jewishness has been the subject of a large number of studies, the most influential of which was Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's (1991) Freud's Moses and, perhaps the most surprising, Jacques Derrida's (1996) response to Yerushalmi, Archive Fever. Whilst some books have been historical and others have been most interested in placing Freud as a Jewish thinker, Yerushalmi and Derrida focused seriously on Freud's engagement with Judaism and Jewishness (both encompassed in the German word Judentum, which helpfully evokes religion, identity and peoplehood) and its significance for reading practices in psychoanalysis. For Yerushalmi, the key focus was Moses and Monotheism and the central question was psychoanalysis as an extension of Judaism. For Derrida, Freud's Judentum raised issues of trace and enigmatic influence, and the whole question of what it might mean to call anything — particularly a science — ‘Jewish’.
Eliza Slavet's book, which as she tells us in the Acknowledgements was written with minimal changes from her Ph.D., takes up the issues raised or hinted at by Yerushalmi and Derrida, whose own book is echoed in Slavet's title. Whilst it offers some historical contextualization, it is primarily an examination of Moses and Monotheism that takes the text seriously as an engagement with questions of Jewish existence. In particular, it picks up on questions of trace and influence, of transmission and transference — all of which can be drawn together under the German umbrella word of Übertragung. Through a reiterative process of moving into and out of her material, weaving psychoanalytic and literary