Racial fever: Freud and the Jewish question

Eliza Slavet Fordham University Press, New York, 2009, paper, 290pp., $28.00, ISBN 978-0823231423

In 1934, when he was in his seventies, Sigmund Freud began a series of three bizarre essays that would later become the volume known in English as Moses and Monotheism. In the words of Eliza Slavet, author of an ambitious study of Moses, Freud's argument was that the legendary Jewish leader “was not an Israelite but rather an Egyptian follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheistic cult of the sun god, Aten” (p. 32). When, after Akhenaten's death, his tribe returned to their old ways, the Egyptian Moses encountered a “wandering tribe” upon whom he foisted his newfound faith, minus its wonted magicking and idol-worship practices. In this, he created a refined, abstract intellectual and spiritual tradition prefiguring the Judaism of today. However, its constraints led the second tribe to murder the Egyptian Moses, then to repress that oedipal sin so thoroughly that future generations would experience it only in uncanny returns, most notably a certain later crucifixion and eternal mass neurosis. “Along the way,” as Slavet recaps, the second tribe meshed with a third, Abrahamic but polytheistic, tribe “that worshipped a volcano god called Yahweh, and whose leader also happened to be named Moses” (p. 32). With the passage of time, the three tribes, the gods Aten and Yahweh, and the two men named Moses were conflated into one. By Freud's reasoning – if such a term can be applied to vast leaps of induction and psychoanalytic projection – Judaism, while Semitic, was not quite Jewish per se. Although Freud entitled his first draft The Man Moses: A Historical Novel, he came to present its arguments as truth.

Despite long fascination with the ancient world, Freud was not a trained historian. As was true of his ersatz theater criticism, recorded in letters from his student days, his historical analysis can seem discomfitingly amateurish. In the case of history, at least, he was awar