UC Berkeley

249 Pages·2017·1.8 MB·English

UC Berkeley
Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
Title
Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Relligion
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xk7594z
ISBN
9780823280025
Authors
Sharvit, Gilad
Feldman, Karen S
Publication Date
2018

Peer reviewed
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Freud and Monotheism
Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
Freud and Monotheism
Moses and the Violent
Origins of Religion
Gilad Sharvit
and Karen S. Feldman, editors
Townsend Center for the Humanities
University of California, Berkeley
Fordham University Press
New York
Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data available online
at http://catalog.loc.gov.
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
Contents
Introduction
Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman
1
1. “Why [the Jews] Have Attracted This Undying Hatred”
Richard J. Bernstein
27
2. Geistigkeit: A Problematic Concept
Joel Whitebook
46
3. Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History
Willi Goetschel
65
4. Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging
Gabriele Schwab
87
5. A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly
Suspended Attention
Yael Segalovitz
108
6. Freud, Sellin, and the Murder of Moses
Jan Assmann
138
7. Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea
Ronald Hendel
157
8. Is Psychic Phylogenesis Only a Phantasy? New Biological
Developments in Trauma Inheritance
Catherine Malabou
177
9. Moses and the Burning Bush: Leadership
and Potentiality in the Bible
Gilad Sharvit
199
List of Contributors
219
Index
223
vi CONTENTS
Freud and Monotheism

Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman
Introduction
THERE ARE MANY points of entry to Sigmund Freud’s monumen-
tal Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud’s last work presented a
remarkable contribution to a wide array of topics. The book revis-
ited neo- Lamarckian theories of heredity, offered a theory of the
formation of religions, mounted radical criticism against modern
historiography, and presented a new psychoanalytic theory of the
collective mind and of trauma. The historical context of the book,
and Freud’s personal motivations, however, fed the book’s sense
of urgency. Freud began to work on his new book on “The Man
Moses” in Vienna in the summer of 1934. It was only a year after
his works were added to the Nazi list of blacklisted books and
burnt in the great fire that portended the dark times to come. In
Moses and Monotheism, Freud addressed that upheaval. His book
originated out of a desire to shed light on the anti- Semitism that
would come to motivate the horrors awaiting Europe. As he
revealed to his close friend the Austrian author Arnold Zweig,
Freud would use his psychoanalysis to explain the long history of
the hatred of his people.