A new take on Moses
Paul Ferris
FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN by Edward W. Said Verso, in association with the Freud Museum, £13, pp. 84, ISBN 1859845002 polemicists find their weapons where they can. Edward Said, that learned and passionate advocate of
the Palestinian cause, has turned to Freud and enlisted one of his books to attack what he sees as the rewriting of Jewish history by modern Israel to suit itself.
Freud is always there, waiting to be reinterpreted. The book in question is Moses and Monotheism, the last of his works to be published in his lifetime. Completed in London in 1938, after Freud fled Vienna and the Nazis, it embodies a long preoccupation with Moses and the origin of the Jews. Freud was a nonreligious Jew, both curious and equivocal about `Jewishness'. When he was 75 he concluded that 'in a very hidden corner' of his soul he was 'a fanatical Jew'. He fantasised about himself as a Moses-figure. Moses and Monotheism was an attempt to lay that ghost.
Said takes comfort in the book's speculations about who the Jews are and, especially, about who their founding father was. Moses, according to Freud, was an Egyptian priest of noble birth, who persuaded the Semitic slaves whom he led from captivity to believe in a single-person deity, abstract and highly moral. Freud's story was, not surprisingly, a psychoanalytic one. Later on, he explained, the converts murdered Moses (thus making the Jews neurotically guilty for ever). They also abandoned monotheism.
The book has a lot more of such stuff. Other tribes and different gods, among them the 'volcano god' Yahweh, later Jehovah, are stitched into the narrative. Crucially, Freud has a second priestly figure appear on the scene, a sort of Moses II, in whom folk-memories of Moses I and his monotheism are reborn. Thus, in an agonising process lasting centuries, the Jews.
This account, knocking Moses off his traditional pedestal, was not warmly received in 1939, when the concentration camps were taking shape. Jewish scholars bombarded him. You old nitwit,' wrote an anonymous correspondent in Boston. But Freud clung to his theory in the few months he had left to live.
The bare bone of Said's argument is that Freud saw Jewish identity, beginning as he suggested with the Egyptian Moses, as having a non-Jewish, non-European dimension now forgotten. Today, the 'complex layers of the [Jewish] past' as observed by Freud have been, suggests Said, 'eliminated by official Israel'. Said continues:
So — as I read him in the setting of Israel's ideologically conscious policies — Freud, by contrast, had left considerable room to accommodate Judaism's non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries . . . Freud insisted that [Jewish identity] did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian) which his demonstration in Moses and Monotheism goes a great distance to discover, and thus restore to scrutiny.
Such scrutiny, Said implies, is crucial to our understanding. Whatever the merits of Said's case, and he makes it elegantly enough, Moses and Monotheism is an odd authority. Freud's title when he conceived the book in 1934 was The Man Moses: A Historical Novel. The book was a fantasy, a psychoanalyst's take on the early history of his own race. He made it up to suit himself. It is a curiously disorganised book, as well forgotten now as The Interpretation of Dreams is well remembered.
Yesterday's speculations can always be related to today's realities. But there are differences of context between then and now that make one uneasy. Who knows what Freud would be saying about today's Middle East? True, he was not in favour of Zionism, at least to begin with. 'History,' he wrote to Arnold Zweig in 1936, 'has never given the Jewish people cause to develop their faculty for creating a state or society.' The Nazi whirlwind might have changed his mind about a Jewish homeland. Either way, it is at least arguable whether his made-up tale of Moses contains significant clues to the views of a reappeared Freud. Said's book. which is very short, began life two years ago as a lecture. It should have been delivered in Vienna, where the Freud Institute had invited him to give the annual Freud Lecture in May 2001. The institute then had second thoughts and 'the spineless Vienna board' (as Said has called it elsewhere) withdrew the invitation. The Freud Museum in London stepped in, and Said gave the lecture there in December 2001.
The editors of the published version have failed to include any of this useful background information. The book would have benefited from it.
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