ABSTRACT
This chapter compares and contrasts Zora Neale Hurston's Moses: Man of the Mountain and Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, specifically examining the stories of race, nation, authority, and the magic of representation. It explores the political power of national and nonnational political identifications at a moment when the state became, increasingly, the site of political contestation and identification. It explores competing conceptions of representation and the political evaluations that they create. Hurston's Moses: Man of the Mountain explored the political power of difference, a political power that need not rely on the "truth" or "naturalness" of that political difference. Moses and Monotheism explored the two Egyptian religions, the two Hebrew religions, and the two figures of Moses. It began with a comparison of Hurston's and Freud's Moses concerning questions of political identity. Both Freud and Hurston deconstructed Jewish identity, demonstrating that something other than a Jewish genealogy articulated a Jewish identity into a meaningful social form.
