Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging

Abstract

This chapter traces the manifold rewritings, transgenerational legacies and histories of reception of the Moses story. Focusing on Freud’s main interpretive moves in Moses and Monotheism, it analyzes his scrupulous attempts to provide evidence that Moses was of Egyptian origin as well as the connections he then makes between patricide, imperialism, and monotheism. Freud’s insistence that the Jewish people not only murdered Moses, but also added a symbolic double murder with the archival erasure of his Egyptian origins, is informed by Freud’s intense personal transference at a time when he felt haunted by the political upheavals that led to his own exile. His scrupulous forensic work to reinterpret the Moses archive is thus, paradoxically, designed to counter this double murder and facilitate a work of psycho-political reparation. The essay concludes by evaluating Freud’s theory in light of the new imperialisms and fundamentalisms of his/our time.