Moses and Monotheism

Freud's last book, made up of three essays on the origins of Jewish monotheism, of which the first two appeared in Imago in 1937. Freud argues that Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian of high rank, an adherent of Akhenaten's monotheistic cult of the Aten, who gave that religion to a Semitic tribe, led it out of Egypt and was afterwards killed by it. The memory of the murder was repressed, and the Mosaic religion fused with the worship of a volcano god, Yahweh. After a period of latency the tradition of Moses' religion returned and came to rule the people. Freud reads this history as a return of the repressed, analogous to the latency and later outbreak of a neurosis in the individual, and links it to the killing of the primal father he had described in Totem and Taboo. Begun in Vienna, the book was completed in exile in London and published in Amsterdam in 1939.