Why Freud said Moses was not Jewish

By Patricia Kolesnicov

In "Moses and the Monotheistic Religion", the father of psychoanalysis develops a hypothesis in which the hero of the Exodus is Egyptian. How to read it for free on any computer, tablet or phone.

"Moses and the monotheistic religion” can be downloaded for free from Bajalibros by clicking here

In addition to being the father-of-psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is an author who tells stories and tells them very well. Cases, ideas or, as in this case, some hypothesis about history. He maintains the tension and surprises with the resolutions he proposes: a great writer

But what I want to tell is something else: I started reading Moses and the monotheistic religion, an idea that Freud develops in three essays and that starts from a statement that is difficult to accept: that Moses the main Jewish hero was not Jewish!

He wrote the first two essays in Vienna in 1934 and 1936. The last one—where he somehow takes what he has been thinking in the previous ones and develops it—was written in London. In between, the Nazis had invaded Austria and the Jewish Freud I no longer had a homeland. He doesn't act distracted and allude to this.

Anyway, you see: Freud chose a great moment to try to understand monotheism. In the third essay he says: “Convinced that now I would no longer be persecuted only for my ideas, but also for my 'race', I left with many friends the city that had been my home for seventy-eight years, since my early childhood.".

So the story of this book is also that of that journey: that of the Jewish intellectual who, due to a blow of history, has to leave everything behind. As part of an exodus, of course.

As is known, Moses is the central character of the story that tells of the escape from slavery in Egypt, at his hand, and the passage to freedom. In that step, on the road through the desert, after the great episode of the opening of the waters of the Red Sea, Moses gives the Jewish people the tables of the law, religion.

How is the story

This is what the “official” story says: Pharaoh had ordered the killing of Jewish baby boys to get rid of future threats. In this context, a child is born that the mother refuses to kill; She then hides it in a basket and rests it in the river. The waters carry him or he remains among reeds and a little further away the Pharaoh's daughter is bathing (or arrives), who sees him, picks him up, raises him as one more in the palace. Moses grows up royalty, like a egyptian prince, but one day he sees how a foreman punishes a slave; Injustice rebels against him and he flees to Midian—in the Sinai Desert—where he works as a shepherd and marries the daughter of a priest. He will return forty years later, when God reveals himself to him in the form of a burning bush and orders him to go and free his people. He talks to Pharaoh…nothing. God through sends lice, frogs, darkness, blood... death of the firstborn. Pharaoh makes way but makes them chase and when the Jewish people have the soldiers behind them, Moses—with the divine arm—opens the waters and they are already on the other side.

What Freud says

The point is that Freud It starts with a revulsive idea: that Moses indeed it WAS Egyptian. One proof is the name: Mose, he says, is “boy” in the Egyptian language. And it was the end of many names, such as “Ptahmose,” which means “child of Ptah.”

Would the liberator be a son of the oppressor? And why would he want to release the slaves? But going further: if he released them and gave them a religion, wouldn't it be theirs? Also, the Egyptian religion, remember, is anything but monotheistic… so?

Freud shows that there was at the time—1375 BC—a young pharaoh, named Amenhotep, who wanted to impose a monotheistic religion, the first known monotheistic religion. That, he will say, had to do with the expansion of Egypt: a people that conquers others needs a god that works for everyone. That god was called Aton, says the creator of psychoanalysis and notes the similarity of the name with “Adonai”, one of the ways of naming the Jewish god until today.

Enthusiastic about his new imperial faith, the pharaoh changed his name to Ikhnaton, which means something like “of great use to Aton.” But the monarch died in 1358 BC and with him his religion, which did not catch on in his people.

Moses He would have been one of Pharaoh's henchmen, one of his own. Perhaps—since we are hypothesizing—the governor of a border province where some Semites had settled some time ago. “He decided,” he says. Freud— start over, give a new people to their god Aton. He chose those Semites—the “chosen people”—and there he went with monotheism and something else: circumcision. He took away that god and that custom that was then practiced in Egypt.

There is much more, much more. Freud shows the ups and downs of History and how the Moses we know is, in reality, the sum of two characters. Moses of Egypt, he says, was killed by his own.

The other “Moses” has to do with another people and another god, less immaterial. In reality, that other god, who was not different from his neighbors, prevailed. But at the bottom of the memory remained that of Moses and his uniqueness. The prophets rescued him.

Humanity says Freud, value the spiritual over the material, the containment of instincts to their deployment. Or, in short - oh, Freud - the paternal, which is a assumption - for much of history who was someone's father was unverifiable - to the maternal, which is solid and concrete.

The analysis reaches Christianity and how it modifies that absolutely immaterial monotheistic idea for a more attenuated one and why the religion of the Father becomes that of the Son.

He relies on historical and archaeological studies and deploys his theoretical imagination, which is delicious.

My highlights

1. «Abandonment in the box is an unmistakable symbolic representation of birth: the box is the mother's womb; water, amniotic fluid. In countless dreams, the parent-child relationship is represented by drawing or saving from the waters.

2. «In all the cases within our reach, the first family, the one that abandons the child, is the fictitious one; The second, however, the one that collects and raises it, is the true one. If we dare to grant general validity to this rule, also subjecting it to the legend of Moses, we will suddenly realize very clearly: Moses is an Egyptian, probably noble, who, thanks to the legend, must be converted into a Jew.

3. "(...) it is not easy to conjecture what could have induced a high-ranking Egyptian—perhaps a prince, priest, or high official—to lead a horde of foreign, culturally inferior immigrants, to abandon his country with them."

4. "With the belief in a single god, religious intolerance was almost inevitably born, foreign to previous times and also to long later times."

5. «When we ask ourselves where the custom of circumcision came to the Jews, we will have to continue answering: from Egypt. Herodotus, the 'father of history', informs us that the custom of circumcision existed in Egypt for a long time, and his words have been confirmed by examinations of mummies and even by the mural figures of the tombs.

6. «Studying the prophet Hosea (second half of the XNUMXth century), he found unmistakable traces of a tradition according to which Moses, the instituter of religion, would have met a violent end in the course of a rebellion of his stubborn and rebellious people, who at the same time renounced the religion instituted by him.

7. «Both Moses and lkhnaton suffered the fate of all enlightened despots. The Jewish people of Moses were as incapable as the Egyptians of the XNUMXth dynasty to support such a spiritualized religion (…)».

8. «Among the precepts of the Mosaic religion there is one whose importance is greater than one would suspect at first sight. I am referring to the prohibition of representing God by an image; that is, the obligation to venerate a God that cannot be seen.

9. «In any case, this prohibition had to have, when accepted, a profound effect, since it meant subordinating sensory perception to a decidedly abstract idea, a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality and, strictly considered, a renunciation of the instincts (…)».

10. «In effect, both our children, neurotic adults and primitive peoples present the psychic phenomenon that we call belief in the 'omnipotence of thought.' In our opinion, this is an overestimation of the influence that our psychic acts - in this case intellectual acts - can exert on the outside world, modifying it.

11. "Later it still happens that spirituality itself is dominated by the very curious emotional phenomenon of faith, thus arriving at the famous creed quia absurdum."

12. «The religion that began with the prohibition of forming an image of God evolves more and more over the centuries, until it becomes a religion of instinctual renunciation. It is not that it requires sexual abstinence; "it is satisfied with a sensible limitation of sexual freedom."

13. «(...) had taken hold of all the peoples of the Mediterranean like a dull malaise, like a cataclysmic premonition whose reason no one was able to guess and that it has only managed to grasp the occasional and accessory causes of that collective dysthymia. It was also Judaism that cleared up that oppressive situation. In fact, despite the multiple outbreaks and hints of that idea in different peoples, it was in the mind of a Jew, Saul of Tarsus - called Paul as a Roman citizen - in which recognition arose for the first time: ' We are so unfortunate because we have killed God the Father.' It is completely understandable that he did not manage to grasp this part of the truth, except under the delirious disguise of the exultant message: 'We are redeemed from all guilt since one of our own laid down his life to atone for our sins.'

14. » The strength that this new faith derived from its roots in historical truth allowed it to sweep away all obstacles; Instead of the joyful feeling of being the chosen people, now appeared the liberating redemption.

Source: INFOBAE