New Perspectives on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism

265 Pages·2006·9.128 MB·English

by  Ruth Ginsburg, Ilana Pardes

Conditio Judaica 60
Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte
Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch
in Verbindung mit Alfred Bodenheimer, Mark H. Gelber und Jakob Hessing

New Perspectives on Freud's
»Moses and Monotheism«
Edited by
Ruth Ginsburg and liana Pardes
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2006
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek
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ISBN 13: 978-3-484-65160-9 ISBN 10: 3-484-65160-1 ISSN 0941-5866
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Contents
New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism
Introduction 1
Jan Assmann
The Advance in Intellectuality: Freud's Construction of Judaism 7
Peter Schäfer
The Triumph of Pure Spirituality. Sigmund Freud's Moses and
Monotheism 19
Robert S.Wistrich
Sigmund Freud's Last Testament 45
Rachel B. Blass
The Puzzle of Freud's Epistemology in Moses and Monotheism 65
Ruth Ginsburg
Whose Trauma Is It Anyway? Some Reflections on Freud's
Traumatic History 77
Betty Rojtman
The Double Death of Moses 93
Shuli Barzilai
Mind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses and
Monotheism 117
Gannit Ankori
Moses, Freud and Frida Kahlo 135
liana Pardes
Freud, Zipporah, and The Bridegroom of Blood:
National Ambivalence in the Bible 149
Alon Confino
Freud, Moses and Modern Nationhood 165
VI Contents
Ruth HaCohen
Psychoanalysis and the Music of Charisma in the Moseses of
Freud and Schönberg 177
Jakob Hessing
A Special Case of German-Jewish Literature: Sigmund Freud's Book
on Moses 197
Guy G. Stroumsa
Myth into Novel: The Late Freud on Early Religion 203
Philip Wexler
The Return of Alchemical and Messianic Judaism: A Social Scientific
De-Sublimation of Social Psychology in Freud and Dürkheim 217
Η. Shmuel Erlich
Der Mann Freud: A Contemporary Perspective on His and Our
Jewish and Psychoanalytic Identity 235
Selected Bibliography 245
List of Contributors 249
Acknowledgements 253
Index 255
New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism
Introduction
Moses and Monotheism was regarded for many years as a marginal, strikingly
bizarre text within the Freudian corpus. The scandalous assertions that Moses
was an Egyptian and that the Hebrews had murdered him in the wilderness
during an unrecorded revolt, the fissures in the text, the strange, obsessive
repetitions and the recurrent moments of doubt all seemed to perplex readers
upon its publication in 1939 and for many decades later. Issued on the eve of the
Second World War, it aroused much anger among Jewish readers, who accused
Freud of betraying his own people in one of their darkest hours and of exhibit-
ing, to top it all, an outrageous ignorance of Jewish history and religion. But not
only Jewish readers were puzzled by the text. Its recklessly speculative method
of argumentation was also troubling for Freud's committed advocates and disci-
ples. Many theoreticians of psychoanalysis simply ignored it, and even those
who were interested in the biographical insights provided by Moses and Mono-
theism did not fully acknowledge its theoretical innovation and importance.
During the past two decades, however, there has been a radical change in the
book's status. It is now defined as one of Freud's finest achievements, a text
whose importance to the understanding of cultural phenomena - be it collective
identities, collective memory, or national traumas - cannot be exaggerated. Nume-
rous books and articles have been published on Moses and Monotheism, among
them, Hayim Yosef Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses. Judaism Terminable and
Interminable (1991), Ilse Grubich-Simitis' Freuds Moses-Studie als Tagtraum. Ein
bibliographischer Essay (1991), Jacques Derrida's Mal d'Archive. Une impres-
sion freudienne (1995), Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narra-
tive, History (1996), Jan Assmann's Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt
and Western Monotheism (1997), Richard Bernstein's Freud and the Legacy of
Moses (1998), and Edward W. Said's Freud and the Non-European (2003).
Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses. Judaism Terminable and Interminable has
played a major role in positioning the book at the center of critical discussion.
His inspiring insights into the controversy surrounding Freud's feelings toward
his own Judaism as well as his discussion of Freud as historian generated a
fascinating series of responses and critiques. Derrida challenged Yerushalmi
for his lack of attention to the revolutionary conception of archives in psycho-
analytic theory, Assmann - with and beyond Yerushalmi - situated Moses/Freud
within a wider Western tradition of a Moses/Egypt discourse, Bernstein high-
lighted the power of Freud's treatment of the psychical phenomena underlying
2 New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism
the transmission of traditions contra Yerushalmi's critique of Moses and Mono-
theism's Lamarckism, and Said called into question Yerushalmi's tendency to
define Judaism in clear-cut terms in contradistinction to Freud's refusal to
adhere to pure notions of national identities. These are but some of the predomi-
nant responses to Yerushalmi's book that have generated, in their turn, addi-
tional readings of Freud's text.
Another line of responses stemmed from Cathy Caruth's positioning of Moses
and Monotheism as essential for the study of trauma. Her suggestive reading of
trauma - in relation to Freud's experience in the hazardous time of writing the
text and in relation to the wandering Israelites - as an open wound that defies
verbal representation, a wound that cannot be narrativized since it is not con-
sciously remembered, stimulated much discussion (Ruth Leys's genealogy of
trauma is one such response).
The current interest in Moses and Monotheism is distinguished by its inter-
disciplinary character. The study of this text (and this is true of the Freudian
corpus as a whole) is no longer confined within the realm of psychoanalysis.
Scholars from highly diverse fields - history, literature, philosophy, Jewish stud-
ies, religious studies, Egyptology, and gender studies - have come to regard
Moses and Monotheism as a vibrant research topic.
New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism presents a collection
of articles by leading scholars whose work forms part of the recent interdisci-
plinary reconsideration of Moses and Monotheism. The essays in this volume
offer new perspectives on Freud's perception of Judaism, of hermeneutics,
gender issues, collective trauma and collective repression, constructions of truth,
national fantasies, religious configurations and leadership, adding interdisci-
plinary lines of inquiry which have hitherto received little scholarly attention:
the relevance of Moses and Monotheism to the fields of musicology, art history
and sociology. The volume offers a broad range of positions, at times conflict-
ing, with respect to the different questions raised by Moses and Monotheism.
We regard such differences as a vital aspect of our project.
Jan Assmann's essay, »The Advance in Intellectuality: Freud's Construction
of Judaism« explores one of the central concepts in Freud's construction of Mo-
saic monotheism -»the advance in intellectuality« (Fortschritt in der Geistig-
keit). Discussing Freud's precursors - primarily Plato and Paul - Assmann
suggests that the turn from sensuality to intellectuality cannot be regarded as a
Jewish specialty or invention. And yet, the primary Mosaic prohibition against
images, he contends, needs to be construed as a quintessential Jewish project
which Freud sets out to continue and surpass.
Freud's definition of the monotheistic advance in intellectuality/spirituality
is tackled differently in Peter Schäfer's essay, »The Triumph of Pure Spiritual-
ity: Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism«. Schäfer sees Freud's conception
of Judaism as containing virtually nothing that is true from a religious-historical
standpoint. He goes on to suggest that Freud's work has much in common with
nineteenth-century Reform Judaism, which located the culmination of every
Introduction 3
religion in the dynamic interplay between spirituality and morality. But given
the fact that Reform Judaism was highly influenced by the Protestant Christi-
anity of the 19th century, the demarcation between Jewish and Christian con-
cepts in Freud's text remains tantalizingly blurred.
Robert S. Wistrich's »Freud's Last Testament« revolves around two inter-
twined issues: Freud's perception of Jewish identity and his concomitant per-
ception of anti-Semitism. Wistrich suggests that Moses and Monotheism needs
to be read as a response to the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism in Austria and Ger-
many in the thirties. He complicates the matter by showing how Freud's strug-
gle against anti-Semitism does not preclude a deeply conflicted relation to
Judaism. The paper offers a comprehensive consideration of the contribution
of Freud's psychoanalytic reading to the understanding of anti-Semitism.
Rachel Blass's »The Puzzle of Freud's Epistemology in Moses and Monothe-
ism« focuses on Freud's different uses of this metaphor, uncovering latent di-
mensions of Freud's search for truth in Moses and Monotheism. As Freud strug-
gles to discover the psychological and historical sources of conviction in un-
justified belief, Blass argues, he also experiences and struggles with convictions
of this kind that emerge in himself. Despite recurrent doubt regarding the posi-
tions that he puts forth and awareness that they cannot be demonstrated accord-
ing to acceptable standards, Freud continues to believe in their truth. This enact-
ment sheds light on the complex nature of Freud's concern with truth.
Ruth Ginsburg's »Whose Trauma is it Anyway? Some Reflections on Freud's
Traumatic History« calls for a reconsideration of Freud's perception of traumatic
response. Highlighting the ambiguity underlying Freud's concept of trauma,
she points to his oscillation between two divergent models of trauma: the train
accident and the Oedipal drama. Freud's oscillation is construed as a reluctance
to reach a final definition of the phenomenon. The paper considers the reasons
for Freud's choice ultimately to suppress one model of trauma in favor of the
other in the course of re-writing Moses and Monotheism.
Betty Rojtman opens up the question of Freud's definition of »the return of
the repressed« in »The Double Death of Moses«, highlighting a theoretical
problem that has hitherto gone unnoticed. Although Freud's description of the
development of Jewish monotheism as a progressive »return of the repressed«
seems strong and tempting, she argues, its implications remain vague. If the
Mosaic period itself is characterized by a repression of drives in favor of the
Law, should one then understand the »return of the repressed« as a return of
repression and the underlying drive as the »drive of repression« itself? The
paper tackles these questions by considering the interpretations of the Midrash
regarding Moses' double death.
Shuli Barzilai's »Mind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses
and Monotheism« examines two instances of a specific type of parapraxis (Ver-
sprechen), which may also be classified as »hermeneutic gaps«, in Freud's
Moses and Monotheism. In each instance, silence prevails and relevant infor-
mation is permanently missing from the text. The first involves a midrashic