Freud must have been reading Dawn of Conscience while researching Moses and Monotheism. His annotations might just be aides-memoires of useful sources for the origins of Moses' austere monotheism at Akhenaten's court. But Freud was a Jewish intellectual deeply sensitive to anti-Semitism, and Moses and Monotheism is his response to insidious and blatant anti-Semitism by vindicating the Jewish people as the developers of a high civilisation first achieved in Egypt. Another interpretation of his notes is possible. They might be reminders of the anti- Semitism implicit in Breasted's patronising image of the Jews as dwarves on giants' shoulders. In this context, a look at Freud's other sources for Moses and Monotheism is illuminating. Among them was a novel by one of Freud's favourite novelists, the Russian Dmitri Sergeyevitch Merezhkovsky (1865-1941). Freud owned five German translations of his novelised biographies of great religious and political innovators, including Julian the Apostate (the emperor who tried to reinstate paganism in the late fourth century ce), and Tsars Peter I and Alexander I of Russia. Merezhkovsky subtitles his works 'a biographical novel' or 'an historical novel' - just as Freud subtided Moses and Monotheism. Among Freud's Merezhkovsky collection was a copy of his novel about Akhenaten, first published in Russian in 1924 and translated into German as Der Messias. Roman (The Messiah. A Novel) in 1927. I discuss this novel fully in Chapter 6, so for the moment it is only necessary to note Merezhkovsky's sympathy with Theosophy, an alternative religion notoriously receptive to racist ideas, and his very negative portrayals of Jews, whom he presents as destroying Akhenaten's progressive religious experiment by crude political agitation. At the end of Der Messias, however, the main Jewish agent provocateur Issachar - named after the leader of one of the twelve tribes of Israel - is converted to Aten-worship. The Jew and the Egyptians pray together to Akhenaten as a shared Messiah.
Looking at Freud's primary sources for Moses and Monotheism and the ways he read them seems to confirm Richard Bernstein's persuasive reading of the work. Bernstein sees it as Freud's attempt to identify the distinctive character and contribution of the Jewish people to the development of human culture, and to find what it is that has kept them going through millennia of oppression. He argues that Moses' adoption of the demanding and progressive form of Akhenaten's religion represents for Freud an advance in intellectuality which goes hand in hand with the progress of spirituality, both summed up in Freud's untranslatable phrase der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit. This is what has enabled Jews to survive in spite of persecution. So, far from distancing himself from his Jewishness by making Moses into an Egyptian, Moses and Monotheism acknowledges Freud's pride in having a share of the defining legacy of Moses. Like Moses, he actively chooses to be a Jew.i3 I see Moses and Monotheism as Freud's answer and challenge to writers like Breasted and Merezhkovsky who sought to diminish the Jewish contribution by making them into passive feeders off Akhenaten's ideas - an image not far from the repeated Nazi stereotype of the Jew as a parasite. Freud responds by making the Jews into active agents who refine Akhenaten's Geistigkeit and make it something uniquely their own. Paradoxically, as Carl Schorske has observed, by making Moses into an Egyptian, Freud ended up by making Akhenaten into a Jew.34
I think that Freud was also anxious to enlist Akhenaten onto the side of culture, reason and intellectualism because he guessed how easy it would be to build a Nazi Akhenaten from the same basic materials he had used - a Nazi Akhenaten who would justify the furor Teutonicus that would soon engulf Europe. And Freud was right. At the same time as he was writing Moses and Monotheism, Fascist sympathisers were reading Breasted and Weigall and finding confirmation there of a very different set of beliefs.
Fascist Akhenatens
