Freud, Sellin, and the Murder of Moses

Abstract

In his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud relied much more on Sellin’s Mose und seine Bedeutung für die israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte than is commonly acknowledged. He took from Sellin not only the theory of Moses’ violent death but also that of an ensuing guilt complex that informed the collective Jewish psyche. Sellin took the murder of Moses to be not only the last instance in the series of rebellions that accompanied the exodus from Egypt but also the first one in a series of violent acts against the prophets that ended in the death of Jesus of Nazareth. This connection, however, between the resistance against Moses and the violent fate of the prophets, which Sellin convincingly establishes, has not been taken up by Freud who did not share Sellin’s Christian presuppositions.