The Church shouldn’t hide its sordid past
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Towards the end of his life — and while suffering from throat cancer in London, having fled from the Nazis — Sigmund Freud embarked upon his most controversial and, to some, weirdest book: Moses and Monotheism (1939). Moses, he argued, wasn’t Jewish at all. He was Egyptian. The whole story about him being hidden in the bulrushes by his Jewish mother, discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian prince, was an elaborate and unconvincing cover story to disguise the simple truth that Moses was, in fact, one of the hated Egyptian overlords. Moreover, Freud contends, the monotheism that Jews regard as their own principle discovery, was, in fact, borrowed from the Egyptians.
Quite understandably, many Jews find Freud’s highly speculative account of their origins deeply offensive. The whole exodus story is supposed to be about how the Jewish people escaped slavery in Egypt and discovered their freedom in the promised land. This story has inspired oppressed people the world over. Exodus freedom was the story that was turned into song and kept the flame of hope alive for African American slaves as they dreamed of justice. The idea that this exodus revolution was itself led by one of the hated overlords, by the Pharaoh’s son himself, is never going to be a popular idea. And Freud had precious little evidence — Biblical or otherwise — to back it up.
It was the Palestinian writer Edward Said who helped me understand Freud’s most difficult text. In a brilliant lecture, ‘Freud and the Non-European’ given at Freud’s old house — now the Freud Museum in Hampstead — in 2003, Said warned us not to expect Moses and Monotheism to be tidy. Freud maintained an “irascible transgressiveness” even towards the end of his life. And Moses and Monotheism is grumpily and defiantly incomplete, messy, confused even.
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