Paul Reitter

Rereading Freud's Moses (Again)

The author briefly reconstructs the scholarly debate about Sigmund Freuds Moses and Monotheism, and both reveals the debate to be rather narrow in its basic concerns and offers an explanation for its narrowness. The author then seeks to uncover—or recover—layers of meaning in the book that have been lost in the argument over what sort of Freuds Jewish identity it ultimately reflects. More precisely, the author shows that while Freud presented Moses and Monotheism as a theory of anti-Semitism, this last work develops more concertedly a theory of Jewish self-hatred.