ABSTRACT
Moses and Monotheism represents Freud’s last, intellectual will and testament. A strange and deeply problematic work, Moses remains an important text because of the questions that it raises. How and why did a weak and conquered Hebrew people develop and preserve a monotheistic religion, which ultimately conquered their own conquerors? Why has the cultural triumph of this monotheism called down upon the Jewish people 2000 years of persecution and hatred? What accounts for the enduring power of a religious tradition? What is the nature of its power, the source of its dynamism, and the mode of its transmission? In addition, Moses brings to completion the story of religious evolution and cultural development that Freud had begun with Totem and Taboo. Faced with the destruction of all that he held dear, by the resurgent barbarism he had long feared, Freud, the slayer of all illusions, succumbed to a wishful fantasy of his own: that the Jewish “Geistigkeit” vital to the cultural development of the West would endure because it had become an innate part of the Jewish character and was now transferrable to others in its secularized form—psychoanalysis.
