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Sigmund Freud's Jewish background and its relationship to psychoanalysis has been the subject of numerous studies, most recently by Gay (1987), Rice (1990), Yerushalmi (1991) and other students of this seemingly elusive subject. The perspectives of the authors are polarized. Gay takes the position that Freud's Jewishness, both religious and ethnic, was meager—if not nonexistent—and played no role in his discovery of psychoanalysis; nearly all the other authors posit the very opposite point of view, attributing to Freud a far more intense Jewish background than has heretofore been realized.
The Man Freud and Monotheism is a notable addition to this genre. The book's late author, Moshe Ater, arrived at the same conclusions as Rice, Yerushalmi, and others but did so through a different and rather novel pathway. It is a pathway based almost solely on Freud's writings, of which Ater appears to have been a master. The scholarship of this book is profound and impressive.
Ater was an Israeli scholar and humanist who, in 1978, published his Hebrew translation of Freud's (1939) Moses and Monotheism. Unfortunately, Ater did not live to see the publication of the book under review. On the eve of his death, which was also his 80th birthday, he gave the last draft of the manuscript to his children. It was his final literary legacy to them. The book is dedicated, in a most moving manner, by his three children to the memory of both their parents, who passed away within a short time of each other. There is also a moving and insightful introduction by Moshe Halevi Spero, a psychoanalyst and associate professor at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Ater must have completed his research shortly after 1985, that being the most recent year of all the cited references. Thus the books by Gay, Rice, and Yerushalmi were not available to him.