ABSTRACT
Intergenerational haunting was a primary concern of Sigmund Freud’s late social texts, and particularly Moses and Monotheism, which was written as the “old world” was destroyed in the 1930s. In the context of his attempt to explain the continuing pull of Jewish identity, Freud’s account of the passing on of paternal violence is centred on the story of Moses. Analysts and others since Freud have emphasised the way in which trauma acts as a kind of fixation, in which the unsymbolised past invades the present, giving life its backward temporality. Freud accepts the force of such environmental accounts of transmission. While Freud’s paradigmatic Biblical figure is Moses, there is a more obvious invocation and exploration of paternal violence in the Bible, one which has been both consciously and unconsciously utilised by Jews in order to make sense of trauma.
