Moses and Monotheism [Paperback]

Sigmund Freud (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 1955

Freud's speculations on various aspects of religion where he explains various characteristics of the Jews in their relations with the Christians.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly--especially by one belonging to that people," writes Sigmund Freud, as he prepares to pull the carpet out from under The Great Lawgiver in Moses and Monotheism. In this, his last book, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman and that the Jewish religion was in fact an Egyptian import to Palestine. Freud also writes that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, in a reenactment of the primal crime against the father. Lingering guilt for this crime, Freud says, is the reason Christians understand Jesus' death as sacrificial. "The 'redeemer' could be none other than the one chief culprit, the leader of the brother-band who had overpowered the father." Hence the basic difference between Judaism and Christianity: "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son." Freud's arguments are extremely imaginative, and his distinction between reality and fantasy, as always, is very loose. If only as a study of wrong-headedness, however, it's fascinating reading for those who want to explore the psychological impulses governing the historical relationship between Christians and Jews. --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Inside Flap

Freud's speculations on various aspects of religion where he explains various characteristics of the Jews in their relations with the Christians.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (January 12, 1955)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394700147
• ISBN-13: 978-0394700144
• Product Dimensions: 4.3 x 0.5 x 7.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Psychology
  • #10 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Bible & Other Sacred Texts > Jewish Texts > Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
  • #37 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Judaism

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars let my people go - all of them, August 17, 2006

By 

cvairag (Allan Hancock College) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Moses and Monotheism (Paperback)

Reading through the many wonderful reviews here, one gets the picture of what it is with this book: love it or hate it, believer or skeptic, even telling people the gist of the thesis and the story (the book is magnificently both), this work never fails to evoke a strong reaction. Look at the reviews. What is evident is that the book is truly provocative - rare for any book - no less a slight, speculative work of less than 200 pages, written somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Who would really care? But as you can see from this representative sample, people do.

Despite the ongoing controversy regarding, increasing skepticism towards, and perhaps dismissal of his major ideas, Freud still engages us as one of the most influential thinkers of the past century, and this work, which, surprisingly, may come to be regarded as his masterpiece (it is a masterpiece - do not doubt that), written as he was dying of cancer of the jaw and fleeing from the Nazis (Freud was Jewish - and among all the things that it is, the book is his response to that singular experience), is his signal contribution to religious studies.

The story is that:

1) Moses was an Egyptian, likely of royal birth, that he learned monotheism from the renegade Egyptian monarch, Akenaton, who, during his brief and probably aborted reign, unsuccessfully attempted to displace the long-standing polytheism and its attendant institutions with a unitary sole deity - a sun god - not represented in any form or art .

2) - That he may have been the proprietor or governor of a fringe province, the Biblical "land of Goshen" with a population of Hebraic or Semitic descent, to whom he taught the new religion. At some point during the exodus, Moses was murdered by his followers. The new God was rejected in favor of a tribal deity, a bloodthirsty, local lunar God, Jahve. However, his immediate entourage, also of the Egyptian court or priesthood, were established as the Levites, or priestly caste, and their descendents eventually revived the ancient monotheism, which we know as the religion of the ancient Hebrews.

The thesis (more complex) quite briefly is:

Akenaton possibly adopted monotheism as adjunct to Egypt's imperialist expansion in the 18th century B.C. Circumcision, which first evolved among the Egyptians (there is the pictoral evidence, as far back as it goes), is rooted in the idea of prehistoric enforced fidelity to the clan father under threat of castration thus symbolized (the primal "covenant" between father and sons). Moses was murdered because he restricted access to the women of the tribe, in repetition of the totemic archetype. The Pentateuch is a palimpsest, references the original monotheistic religion inscribed under references to the later religion of Jahve, and then again, the revival, written over those references in the Levitical Law. The revival was spurred by long, pent up guilt over the collective memory of the death of Moses. And well, Papa don't take no mess! The religion of the Levites, developed during the Babylonian exile, represents a return to the Father dominance. The Messianic trend represents yet another turn away from this father dominance toward the Son, away from circumcision, and toward social decentralization, eventually a priesthood of all believers. There's a lot more to it - but these are the bare bones.

I don't believe anyone would want to make absolute claims as to what went down thirty-eight centuries ago - but, all considered, Freud's thesis has its moment, and that moment is now. Could it be that the Jews and Arabs are one people - Semites - who have been divided over time by those with ulterior motives? Resoundingly, yes, the possibility must be considered. Freud wrote this remarkable text at a time when the Nazis were beginning to fund the Islamic Brotherhood (after they themselves had been funded by Prescott Bush and the Union Bank). Ironically, Freud's thesis suggests that the current situation in the Middle East has apparently brought this world to the edge of annihilation, may involve combatants who have no conception of their true origins or the basis of what they are fighting for, but, from the standpoint of carefully fostered illusions, merely believe, in an all too human way, that they do. Freud argues closely and pervasively enough to raise and honest doubt in our minds. Well worth the read.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freud's Last Act, March 29, 2006

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moses and Monotheism (Paperback)

Freud's Last Act

Who founded Judaism and monotheism is indeed a tricky but nevertheless intriguing question? Tom Cahill, in his wonderful and lyrical piece "The Gift of the Jews," lists monotheism as an important Jewish contribution to civilization. On the other hand, Dr. Frances Cress Welsin, in the Isis Papers, and others of her Africanist cohorts, suggest that Judaism -- as well as Christianity -- are but off-shoots of well-established Egyptian myths, rituals and religions.

While it is one thing for free-lance interlopers on either side of this issue to speculate on these matters, it is quite another when the father of modern psychology himself, Sigmund Freud, does so -- even if it is done as his last professional act.

Using his earlier work, Totem and Taboo as the psychological foundation and backdrop, Freud in his final book, spins out a not altogether unconvincing tale that Moses was an Egyptian Prince who was killed by his sons, and that monotheism was the necessary cultural invention and outcome that ultimately prevented the cycle of fratricide from continuing.

It is a fascinating read even if not up to Freud's normal high standards of analytical rigor. Despite its speculative nature, this thesis has global implications for contemporary religion, the Western worldview, and for how our current structure of morality was established and continues to work. Five stars

74 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Admit it! You hate your Dad!, January 11, 2002

By 

the wizard of uz (Studio City, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moses and Monotheism (Paperback)

This is my favorite nut book of all time, principally because it was written by THE most original thinker of the 20th century.

A conspiracy book by a mediocre paranoid is par for the course; but one written by a genius of the first order is bound to be outstanding.

To fully understand M&M one has to be somewhat conversant with Totem and Taboo, and Freud reiterates those basic premises here as well. Briefly they are as follows:

The origin of society begins with a tribe in which the dominant male gets all the women, including his sisters and Mommy.

His sons are understandably upset at being left out of the fun and complain, so Dad kills or castrates them. Or makes the mistake of being lenient and simply drives them off.

The sons, unable to find females of their own, band together go back and murder dad. Then, of course, they eat his body.

There being too many sons (and feeling repressed guilt at killing their old man) they make taboos against incest thus establishing the rule of law.

(Bet you didn't know this was the origin of Magna Carta, et al).

This keeps the gene pool safe from inbreeding but leads to all sorts of guilt feelings which get acted out politically-- not the least of which is a worshipping of Mommy, which leads to LHM -a Literal Historical Matriarchy.

(And to think feminists dislike Freud)

Next, they get fed up with being bossed about by Mom (and who wouldn't?) so they re-establish the patriarchy; only this time they stick to the rule of law, because they can't afford further fraticidal bloodshed and they invent polytheism to boot.

But deeply repressed father hatred looms within, which leads to the final step: monotheism, in which God is an avenging Father who must be appeased before he starts castrating again. . .

(Naturally there are sub-plots--Christianity belongs to the religion of The Son who becomes more important than The Father, Islam is a attempt to restore The Father, etc.)

I forget what all this has to do with Moses, and halfway through the book, so does Freud who goes off on a tangent about how the Catholic church failed to protect him in Vienna against the Nazis, so he was forced to flee to England, where things are now better, and though he thought of destroying the manuscript he figured he was old, so what the hell, might as well publish it.

Freud refuses to use the 's' word --speculate--Or rather he waffles. At one point he admits that all he's writing is conjecture and the reader should know that and not force him to repeat it in every paragraph. But a couple of paragraphs later, he appeals to his clinical material (his patients and his own fantasies) and his deductive powers in a manner that could only be described as objective--or, to be less kind, dogmatic. Will the real S.G please stand up?

In any case, the speculations/objective deductions regarding Akhnaten, the case for there being 2 Moses's -one got murdered and presumably eaten by his children. The myth 'in reverse' of the childhood of Moses (don't ask) and what it all REALLY means make for fascinating and compelling reading.