The Mosaic Legacy of Sigmund Freud: How to Read Moses and Monotheism in the Twenty-First Century: Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion, edited by Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman (New York:  Fordham University Press, 2018;  ix + 250 pp.)

Sigmund Freud, faced with the coming to power of Hitler in 1933, the burning of his books in Berlin, the 1938 Anschluss, followed by his exile to London for just one year before he died, worked throughout the 1930s on his last controversial thesis: the biblical Moses, the founder of the Jewish people, was actually an Egyptian prince, he argued. Published in 1939, Moses and Monotheism, an ‘infamously unedited text’ (, p. 116), as one contributor to this volume describes it, presents the quite unfounded hypothesis that, as a prince, Moses served under the proto-monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. When the latter's regime fell, Moses joined the marginalized Israelite people and imposed his proto-monotheistic views for creating what eventually would be known as the Jewish people. In line with his earlier work Totem and Taboo, Freud suggested that the new monotheistic religion was so prohibitive that the Israelite people decided to murder their founding father, Moses, in order to allow themselves a more permissive pleasure principle than the one that was offered to them by him. But a period of ‘latency’ - so central to Freudian developmental theory - can also play a role in the life of nations: the ‘returned of the repressed’, in the case of the people of Israel, was the emergence of a new Moses, this time to impose monotheism