Freud, Sigmund. Moses and monotheism

Abstract

The review considers the L&PM translation of Freud's book Moses and Monotheism, previously published in Brazil in volume XXIII of the Complete Works issued by Imago in the 1970s. This translation is more elegant, poetic and vivid than that of the Complete Works, made from the English edition, more empiricist and written in a more pedantic language. The book set out to explain why the Jews were persecuted throughout history. Freud finds the reason in the way the Jewish religion is lived, still close to the psychological pattern that, in his view, explained the origin of religions: the killing of the group's alpha male by his sons and the later incorporation of his image and of moral interdictions into the psychology of the group. Freud retells the story of Moses tied to the formation of the Jewish people, departing from the biblical text in order to justify the existence of two Moses figures, merged into one, and of two religions of origin. Freud's explanations were contested by Jewish intellectuals and by philosophers such as Martin Buber. The main difficulty of the work lies in employing categories devised to understand the mental world in analysing sociological, historical, anthropological and religious questions.