Akhenaten полностью

Jehovah. There was a bitter conflict between the refined intellectual monotheism of Akhenaten and the crude worship of Jehovah, eventually resulting in Moses being murdered, even though his memory survived and his god fused with Jehovah. As an Egyptian and an intellectual, Moses' struggle with his adopted people became Freud's historical prototype for anti-Semitism. Once again, he was looking to ancient Egypt to find the origins of modern events. Underpinning Freud's search is his belief that the effects of historical events were unconsciously transmitted by repressed memories, so that the memory of ancient trauma could influence the ideological struggles of the present. In 1935 he wrote to his friend Lou Andreas-Salome, 'religions owe their compulsive power to the return of the repressed; they are reawakened memories of very ancient, forgotten, highly emo­tional episodes of human history'.²⁸ Moses and Monotheism was a shocking work, apparently rejecting not only the Jewish origins of monotheism but also the defin­ing figure ofjewishness itself. One should remember that Jews were bureau- cratically defined as 'Mosaisch', i.e. 'of the religion of Moses'. Freud realised that there was something in Moses and Monotheism to offend almost everyone: the Cath­olics whom he hoped would help protect Austrian Jews against Fascism, biblical scholars, ancient historians, and of course observant Jews (as in my epigraph to this section). Fearing that the book would endanger the future of psychoanalysis, he delayed its publication until he was in England and out of Fascist clutches.

Much scholarly ink has been spilled trying to work out Freud's real purpose in this latest and most speculative work, which fits so uncomfortably within the Freudian canon and has been often dismissed. Among other things it has been interpreted as a reaffirmation of Freud's own Jewish identity in the face of grow­ing anti-Semitism, a written day-dream which explored Freud's anxieties about the future of psychoanalysis through his personal identification with Moses- Akhenaten, a piece of 'mnemohistory' about the survival of monotheism in the collective memory, or a sort of psychoanalytic historical novel where Freud denies his own Jewishness.²"' It is a slippery text which defies categorisation, though it certainly is a response to anti-Semitism. Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig,

Faced with the new persecution, one asks oneself again how the Jews have come to be what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred. I soon discovered the formula: Moses created the Jews. So I gave my work the title: The Man Moses, a historical novel.³⁰

But to whose anti-Semitism is this 'historical novel' a response? The most obvious answer is, to the institutional oppression of Jews under Fascism that was well under way in Germany and was about to happen in Austria. But this may be only one part of the picture. The new political climatc may have made Freud think harder about the presentation of Jews in the books that influenced him when writing Moses and Monotheism. Again his habit of writing in his books provides a clue. The marginal notes in his copy of Breasted's Dawn of Conscience (1933), whose introduction denies any prejudice against Jews, are particularly striking.

Freud seems to be no longer interested in Akhenaten's firstness, as he had been when reading A History of Egypt.^3] The only parts of Dawn of Conscience that he annotated were the chapter on Akhenaten and one entitled 'The Sources of our Moral Heritage', where Breasted repeats again and again that the Jews were not original thinkers but merely recyclers of older Egyptian ideas. Akhenaten figures prominently in his argument, the 'hymn' to the Aten being adduced as an example ofjudaism's debt to Egypt, for example. Among numerous other signifi­cant passages in Dawn of Conscience, Freud pencilled a line in the margin to draw attention to page 348 ('It is an extraordinary fact that this great moral legacy should have descended to a politically insignificant people [i.e. the Jews] living in the south-east corner of the Mediterranean'), page 364 ('When the Hebrew prophet caught the splendor of this vision ... he was standing on the Egyptian's shoulders'), page 379 ('the Hebrew book of proverbs has embedded in it a sub­stantial section of an earlier Egyptian book of wisdom') and pages 383-4 ('The Hebrews built up their life on Egyptian foundations').³²