prefaces which contradict, indeed even cancel,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
93
each other. For in the short interval between
writing the two prefaces the outer conditions of
the author have
radically changed. Formerly
I lived under the
protection of the Catholic
Church and feared that by
publishing the essay
I should lose that
protection and that the practi-
tioners and students of
psycho-analysis in Austria
would be forbidden their work. Then, suddenly,
the German invasion broke in on us and Catholic-
ism
proved to be, as the Bible has it, " but a
broken reed.
35
In the
certainty of persecution
now not only because of my work, but also
because of my " race " I left with
many friends
the
city which from early childhood, through
78 years, had been a home to me.
I found the kindliest welcome in
beautiful, free,
generous England. Here I live now, a welcome
guest, relieved from that oppression and happy
that I
may again speak and write I almost said
"
think " as I want or have to. I dare now to
make public the last part of my essay.
There are no more external hindrances or at
least none that need alarm one. In the few weeks
of
my stay I have received a large number of
greetings, from friends who told me how glad
they were to see me here, and from people un-
known to me, barely interested in my work, who
simply expressed their satisfaction that I had
found freedom and
security here. Besides all this
there came, with a
frequency bewildering to a
94 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
foreigner, letters of another kind, expressing
concern for the weal of my soul, and anxious to
point me the way to Christ and to enlighten me
about the future of Israel. The good
people who
wrote thus could not have known much about me.
I
expect, however, that when this new work of
mine becomes known
among my new compatriots
I shall lose with
my correspondents and a number
of the others
something of the sympathy they now
extend to me.
The inner difficulties were not to be changed
by the different political system and the new
domicile. Now as then I am
uneasy when con-
fronted with
my own work; I miss the conscious-
ness of
unity and intimacy that should exist
between the author and his work. This does not
mean that I lack conviction in the correctness of
my conclusions. That conviction I acquired a
quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my book
on Totem and Taboo
(in 1912), and it has only
become
stronger since. From then on I have
never doubted "that
religious phenomena are to
be understood
only on the model of the neurotic
symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar
to us, as a return of
long forgotten important
happenings in the primaeval history of the human
family, that they owe their obsessive character to
that
very origin and therefore derive their effect
on mankind from the historical truth
they contain.
My uncertainty begins only at the point when I
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
95
ask
myself the question whether I have succeeded
in
proving this for the example of Jewish Mono-
theism chosen here. To
my critical faculties this
treatise, proceeding from a study of the man
Moses, seems like a dancer balancing on one toe.
If I had not been able to find
support in the
analytic interpretation of the exposure myth and
pass thence to Sellings suggestion concerning
Moses
5
end, the whole treatise would have to
remain unwritten. However, let me
proceed.
I
begin by abstracting the results of my second
the
purely historical essay on Moses. I shall
not examine them
critically here, since they form
the
premisses of the psychological discussions
which are based on them and which
continually
revert to them.
SECTION I
i . The Historical Premisses
The historical
background of the events which
have aroused our interest is as follows.
Through
the
conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt
had become a world
Empire. The new Im-
perialism was reflected in the development of
certain
religious ideas, if not in those of the whole
people, yet in those of the governing and in-
tellectually active upper stratum. Under the
MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
influence of the
priests of the Sun God at On
(Heliopolis), possibly strengthened by suggestions
from Asia, there arose the idea of a universal God
Aton no longer restricted to one
people and one
country. With the young Amenhotep IV (who
later
changed his name to Ikhnaton) a Pharaoh
succeeded to the throne who knew no
higher in-
terest than in
developing the idea of such a God.
He raised the Aton religion to the official religion
and
thereby the universal God became the Only
God ; all that was said of the other gods became
deceit and
guile. With a superb implacability he
resisted all the
temptations of magical thought
and discarded the illusion, dear
particularly to
the
Egyptians, of a life after death. With an aston-
ishing premonition of later scientific knowledge
he
recognised in the energy of the sun's radiation
the source of all life on earth and
worshipped the
sun as the
symbol of his God's power. He gloried
in his
joy in the Creation and in his life in Maat
(truth and justice)
.
It is the first case in the
history of mankind,
and
perhaps the purest, of a monotheistic religion.
A deeper knowledge of the historical and psycho-
logical conditions of its origin would be of
inestimable value. Care was taken,
however,
that not much information
concerning the Aton
religion should come down to us. Already under
the
reign of Ikhnaton's weak successors everything
he had created broke down. The
priesthood
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
97
he had
suppressed vented their fury on his
memory. The Aton religion was abolished; the
capital of the heretic Pharaoh demolished and
pillaged. In 13506.0. the Eighteenth Dynasty
was extinguished; after an interval of anarchy
the
general Haremhab, who reigned until 1315,
restored order. Ikhnaton's reforms seemed to be
but an
episode, doomed to be forgotten.
This is what has been established
historically
and at this point our work of hypothesis begins.
Among the intimates of Ikhnaton was a man who
was perhaps called Thothrnes, as so many others
were at that time; l the name does not matter,
but its second
part must have been -mose. He
held high rank, and was a convinced adherent of
the Aton
religion, but in contradistinction to the
brooding King he was forceful and passionate.
For this man the death of Ikhnaton and the
abolishing of his religion meant the end of all his
hopes. Only proscribed or recanting could he
remain in Egypt. If he were governor of a border
province he might well have come into touch with
a certain Semitic tribe which had
immigrated
several
generations ago. In his disappointment
and loneliness he turned to those strangers and
sought in them for a compensation of what he
had lost. He chose them for his
people and tried
to realize his own ideals
through them. After he
1
This, for example, was also the name of the sculptor whose
workroom was discovered in Tell-el-Amarna.
G
98 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
had left Egypt with them accompanied by his
immediate followers he hallowed them by the
custom of circumcision, gave them laws and
introduced them to the Aton
religion which the
Egyptians had just discarded. Perhaps the rules
the man Moses
imposed on his Jews were even
harder than those of his master and teacher
Ikhnaton; perhaps he also relinquished the
connection with the Sun God of On, to whom the
latter had still adhered.
For the Exodus from
Egypt we must fix the
time of the interregnum after
1350. The sub-
sequent periods of time, until possession was
taken of the land of Canaan, are
especially
obscure. Out of the darkness which the Biblical
Text has here left or rather created the his-
torical research of our
days can distinguish two
facts. The first, discovered
by E. Sellin, is that
the
Jews, who even according to the Bible were
stubborn and unruly towards their
law-giver
and leader, rebelled at last, killed him and threw
off the
imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians
had done before them. The second fact,
proved
by E. Meyer, is that these Jews on their return
from Egypt united with tribes nearly related to
them, in the country bordering on Palestine, the
Sinai
peninsula and Arabia, and that there, in
a fertile
spot called Qades, they accepted under
the influence of the Arabian Midianites a new
religion, the worship of the volcano God Jahve.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
99
Soon after this
they were ready to conquer
Canaan.
The relationship in time of these two events to
each other and to the Exodus is
very uncertain.
The next historical allusion is given in a stele of
the Pharaoh
Merneptah, who reigned until 1215,
which numbers " Israel " among the
vanquished
in his
conquests in Syria and Palestine. If we
take the date of this stele as a terminus ad
quern
there remains for the whole course of events,
starting from the Exodus, about a century
after
1350 until before 1215. It is possible,
however, that the name Israel does not yet refer
to the tribes whose fate we are here
following and
that in
reality we have a longer period at our
disposal. The settling of the later Jewish people
in Canaan was
certainly not a swiftly achieved
conquest; it was rather a series of successive
struggles and must have stretched over a longish
period. If we discard the restriction imposed by
the
Merneptah stele we may more readily assume
thirty years, a generation, as the time of Moses
l
and two
generations at least, probably more,
until the union in
Qades took place;
2
the interval
between
Qades and the setting out for Canaan
need not have been
long. Jewish tradition had
1
This would accord with the
forty years' wandering in the
desert of which the Bible tells us.
2
Thus about 1350-40 to 1320-10 for Moses, 1260 or perhaps
rather later for
Qades, the Merneptah stele before 1215.
IOO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
as I have shown in
my last essay good reason to
shorten the interval between the Exodus and the
foundation of a
religion in Qades ; our argument
would incline us to favour the contrary.
Till now we have been concerned with the ex-
ternal
aspects of the story, with an attempt to fill
in the
gaps of our historical knowledge in part
a
repetition of my second essay. Our interest
follows the fate of Moses and his doctrines, to
which the revolt of the Jews only
apparently put
an end. From the Jahvist account written down
about IOOOB.C.,
though doubtless founded on
earlier material we have learned that the union
of the tribes and foundation of a
religion in
Qades represented a compromise, the two parts
of which are still
easily distinguishable. One
partner was concerned only in denying the
recency and foreignness of the God Jahve and
in
heightening his claim to the people's devotion.
The other partner would not renounce memories,
so dear to him, of the liberation from
Egypt and
the
magnificent figure of his leader Moses; and,
indeed, he succeeded in finding a place for the
fact as well as for the man in the new
representa-
tion of
Jewish early history, in retaining at least
the outer
sign of the Moses religion, namely
circumcision, and in insisting on certain restric-
tions in the use of the new divine name. I have
said that the
people who insisted on those
demands were the descendants of the Moses
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION IOI
followers, the Levites, separated by a few genera-
tions
only from the actual contemporaries and
compatriots of Moses and attached to his memory
by a tradition still green. The poetically elabor-
ated accounts attributed to the
Jahvist and to his
later
competitor the Elohist, are like gravestones,
under which the truth about those early matters
the nature of the Mosaic
religion and the violent
removal of the
great man truths withdrawn
from the knowledge of later generations, should,
so to
speak, be laid to eternal rest. And if we
have divined aright the course of events, there is
nothing mysterious about them; it might very
well, however, have been the definite end of the
Moses
episode in the history of the Jewish people.
The remarkable thing about it is that this was
not so, that the most
important effects of that
experience should appear much later and should
in the course of
many centuries gradually force
their
way to expression. It is not likely that
Jahve was very different in character from the
gods of the neighbouring peoples and tribes; he
wrestled with the other
gods, it is true, just as
the tribes
fought among themselves, yet we may
assume that a Jahve
worshipper of that time
would never have dreamt of doubting the exis-
tence of the
gods of Canaan, Moab, Amalek and
so on,
any more than he would the existence of
the
people who believed in them. The mono-
theistic idea, which had blazed
up in Ikhnaton's
IO2 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
time, was again obscured and was to remain in
darkness for a
long time to come. On the island
Elephantine, close to the first Nile cataract,
discoveries have
yielded the astonishing informa-
tion that a
Jewish military colony, settled there
centuries
ago, worshipped in their temples besides
their chief
god Jahu two female deities, one of
whom was called Anat-Jahu. Those Jews, it is
true, had been separated from the mother country
and had not gone through the same religious
development; the Persian government (in the
fifth
century B.C.) communicated to them the
new ceremonial regulations of Jerusalem.
1
Re-
turning to earlier times we may surely say that
Jahve was quite unlike the Mosaic God. Aton
had been a pacifist, like his deputy on earth
or rather his model the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who
looked on with folded arms as the
Empire his
ancestors had won fell to
pieces. For a people
that was
preparing to conquer new lands by
violence
Jahve was certainly better suited. More-
over, what was worthy of honour in the Mosaic
God was beyond the comprehension of a primitive
people.
I have
already mentioned and in this I am
supported by the opinion of other workers
that the central fact of the
development of Jewish
religion was this: in the course of time Jahve
lost his own character and became more and more
1
Auerbach: Wtiste und Gelobtes Land. Bd. II, 1936.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
103
like the old God of
Moses, Aton. Differences
remained, it is true, and at first sight they would
seem
important; yet they are easy to explain.
Aton had begun his reign in
Egypt in a happy
period of security, and even when the Empire
began to shake in its foundations his followers
had been able to turn away from worldly matters
and to continue praising and enjoying his
creations. To the
Jewish people fate dealt a
series of severe trials and
painful experiences, so
their God became hard, relentless and, as it were,
wrapped in gloom. He retained the character of
an universal God who
reigned over all lands and
peoples; ''the fact, however, that his worship had
passed from the Egyptians to the Jews found its
expression in the added doctrine that the Jews
were his chosen
people, whose special obligations
would in the end find their
special reward. It
might not have been easy for that people to
reconcile their belief in their
being preferred to
all others
by an all-powerful God with the dire
experiences of their sad fate. But they did not
let doubts assail
them, they increased their own
feelings of guilt to silence their mistrust and
perhaps in the end they referred to " God's
unfathomable will," as
religious people do to
this
day. If there was wonder that he allowed
ever new
tyrants to come who subjected and ill-
treated his
people the Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians
yet his power was recognized in that
IO4 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
all those wicked enemies
got defeated in their
turn and their
empires destroyed.
In three
important points the later Jewish God
became identical with the old Mosaic God. The
first and decisive
point is that he was really
recognized as the only God, beside whom another
god was unthinkable. Ikhnaton's monotheism
was taken seriously by an entire people; indeed,
this
people clung to it to such an extent that it
became the
principal content of their intellectual
life and
displaced all other interests. The people
and the
priesthood, now the dominating part of
it, were unanimous on that point; but the priests,
in
confining their activities to elaborating the
ceremonial for his
worship, found themselves in
opposition to strong tendencies within the people
which endeavoured to revive two other doctrines
of Moses about his God. The prophets' voices
untiringly proclaimed that God disdained cere-
monial and sacrifice and asked nothing but a
belief in Him and a life in truth and
justice.
When they praised the simplicity and holiness of
their life in the desert
they surely stood under the
influence of Mosaic ideals.
It is time now to raise the
question whether
there is
any need at all to invoke Moses' influence
on the final
shape of the Jewish idea of their
God, whether it is not enough to assume a
spontaneous development to a higher spirituality
during a cultural life extending over many
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
105
centuries. On this
possible explanation, which
would
put an end to all our guessing, I would
make two comments. First that it does not explain
anything. The same conditions did not lead to
monotheism with the Greek
people, who were
surely most gifted, but to a breaking up of poly-
theistic
religion and to the beginning of philo-
sophical thought. In Egypt monotheism had
grown as far as we understand its growth as
an