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My main question when I approached this book was: “Is there anything new which can be written about Freud’s papers, Moses and Monotheism, and the challenge it presents given what has been already written?” The earliest volumes were Marthe Robert’s From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity (1976); Emmanuel Rice’s Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home (1990); Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud, Moses, Judaism: Terminable and Interminable (1993)† and Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997) (Assmann has a contribution to this volume). Joel Whitebook, another contributor, has a section on Moses and Monotheism in his recently published biography of Freud. A volume not mentioned by any of the authors or in the footnotes is Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth (the book has an index but no complete bibliography for all of the papers).† Richard Bernstein, another contributor, published Moses and Monotheism: Freud and the Legacy of Moses in 1998.†
It is clear that it is difficult to offer something original about Freud’s Moses and Monotheism given the extensive literature. The promise of the volume is in its subtitle, “Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion.” Freud’s theory of the murder of Moses and the repressive attitude of monotheism towards followers and disbelievers certainly has to do with violence. However, in my view, Freud’s conviction that the Jews murdered Moses is the least supportable assertion in his paper and I believe is offered by Freud to support his idea of the primal horde, the murder of the father/leader, which is a central argument in Totem and Taboo.
The violence that was a concern to Freud was the violence of anti-Semitism. Some believe that Freud was driven to write this book (and publish this book after some delay) because of his concern about the response of the Catholic Church in Austria, which he saw as a protector of the Jews, but which was less than sorry about the impending German threa