religion borrowed from Egypt must have worked
on the Jewish people, how it formed their
character for
good through the disdaining of
magic and mysticism and encouraging them to
progress in spirituality and sublimations. The
people, happy in their conviction of possessing
truth, overcome by the consciousness of being
the chosen, came to value
highly all intellectual
and ethical achievements. I shall also show how
their sad fate, and the
disappointments reality had
in store for them, was able to
strengthen all these
tendencies. At
present, however, we shall follow
their historical
development in another direction.
The restoration to the primaeval father of his
historical
rights marked a great progress, but
this could not be the end. The other
parts of
the
prehistoric tragedy also clamoured for recog-
nition. How this
process was set into motion it
is not
easy to say. It seems that a growing feeling
of
guiltiness had seized the Jewish people and
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
139
perhaps the whole of civilization of that time-
as a
precursor of the return of the repressed
material. This went on until a member of the
Jewish people, in the guise of a political -religious
agitator, founded a doctrine which together with
another one, the Christian
religion separated
from the Jewish one. Paul, a Roman Jew from
Tarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and
correctly traced it back to its primaeval source.
This he called
original sin ; it was a crime against
God that could be expiated only through death.
Death had come into the world through
original
sin. In
reality this crime, deserving of death,
had been the murder of the Father who later was
deified. The murderous deed itself, however, was
not remembered ; in its
place stood the phantasy
of
expiation and that is why this phantasy could
be welcomed in the form of a
gospel of salvation
(Evangel). A Son of God, innocent himself,
had sacrificed himself and had thereby taken
over the
guilt of the world. It had to be a Son,
for the sin had been murder of the Father.
Probably traditions from Oriental and Greek
mysteries had exerted their influence on the
shaping of this phantasy of salvation. The
essence of it seems to be Paul's own contribution.
He was a man with a gift for religion, in the truest
sense of the
phrase. Dark traces of the past lay
in his soul,
ready to break through into the
regions of consciousness.
I4O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
That the Redeemer sacrificed himself as an
innocent man was an
obviously tendentious
distortion, difficult to reconcile with logical
thinking. How could a man who was innocent
assume the
guilt of the murderer by allowing
himself to be killed'? In historical
reality there
was no such contradiction. The " redeemer "
could be no one else but he who was most
guilty,
the leader of the brother horde who had over-
powered' the Father. Whether there had been
such a chief rebel and leader must in
my
opinion remain uncertain. It is quite possible,
but we must also consider that each member of
the brother horde
certainly had the wish to do
the deed
by himself and thus to create for himself
a
unique position as a substitute for the identifica-
tion with the father which he had to
give up when
he was
submerged in the community. If there
was no such leader, then Christ was the heir of
an unfulfilled wish
-phantasy; if there was such
a leader, then Christ was his successor and
his reincarnation. It is
unimportant, however,
whether we have here a
phantasy or the return
of a
forgotten reality ; in any case, here lies the
origin of the conception of the hero he who
rebels
against the father and kills him in some
guise or other.
1
Here we also find the real source
1
Ernest Jones calls
my attention to the probability that the
God Mithra, who slays the Bull, represented this leader, the one
who simply gloried in his deed. It is well known how long the
worship of Mithra disputed the final victory with Christianity.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
141
of the "
tragic guilt " of the hero in drama a
guilt hard to demonstrate otherwise. We can
scarcely doubt that in Greek tragedy the hero and
the chorus
represent this same rebel hero and the
brother horde, and it cannot be without
signifi-
cance that in the Middle Ages the theatre
began
afresh with the
story of the Passion.
I have
already mentioned that the Christian
ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the
believer
incorporates the flesh and blood of the
Redeemer, repeats the content of the old Totem
feast; it does so, it is true, only in its tender and
adoring sense, not in its aggressive sense. The
ambivalency dominating the father -son relation-
ship, however, shows clearly in the final result
of the
religious innovation. Meant to propitiate
the father
deity, it ends by his being dethroned
and set aside. The Mosaic religion had been a
Father
religion; Christianity became a Son
religion. The old God, the Father, took second
place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just
as in those dark times
every son had longed to do.
Paul, by developing the Jewish religion further,
became its destroyer. His success was certainly
mainly due to the fact that through the idea of
salvation he laid the
ghost of the feeling of guilt.
It was also due to his
giving up the idea of the
chosen
people and its visible sign circum-
cision. That is how the new
religion could
become all-embracing, universal. Although this
142 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
step might have been determined by Paul's
revengefulness on account of the opposition
which his innovation found among the Jews,
nevertheless one characteristic of the old Aton
religion (universality) was reinstated; a restric-
tion had been abolished which it had
acquired
while
passing on to a new carrier, the Jewish
people.
In certain
respects the new religion was a
cultural
regression as compared with the older
Jewish religion; this happens regularly when a
new mass of people of a lower cultural level
effects an invasion or is admitted into an older
culture. Christian
religion did not keep to the
lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish
religion had soared. The former was no longer
strictly monotheistic, took over from the sur-
rounding peoples numerous symbolical rites, re-
established the
great Mother Goddess and found
room for many deities of polytheism in an easily
recognizable disguise though in subordinate
positions. Above all it was not inaccessible as
the Aton
religion and the subsequent Mosaic
religion had been to the penetration of super-
stitions, magical and mystical elements which
proved a great hindrance to the spiritual develop-
ment of two following millenia.
The triumph of Christianity was a renewed
victory of the Amon priests over the God of
Ikhnaton after an interval of a millenium and a
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
143
half and over a
larger region. And yet Christian-
ity marked a progress in the history of religion
:
that is to
say, in regard to the return of the
repressed. From now on Jewish religion was, so
to
speak, a fossil.
It would be worth while to understand
why
the monotheistic idea should make such a
deep
impression on just the Jewish people, and why
they adhered to it so tenaciously. I believe
this
question can be answered. The great deed
and misdeed of
primaeval times, the murder of the
Father, was brought home to the Jews, for fate
decreed that
they should repeat it on the person
of Moses, an eminent father substitute. It was
a case of
acting instead of remembering, some-
thing which often happens during analytic work
with neurotics.
They responded to the doctrine
of Moses which should have been a stimulus to
their
memory by denying their act, did not
progress beyond the recognition of the great
Father and barred the
passage to the point where
later on Paul started his continuation of
primaeval
history. It can scarcely be chance that the violent
death of another
great man should become the
starting point for the creation of a new religion
by Paul. This was a man whom a small number
of adherents in
Judea believed to be the Son of
God and the
promised Messiah, and who later
on took over some of the childhood
history that
had been attached to Moses. In reality, however,
144 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
we have hardly more definite knowledge of him
than we have of Moses. We do not know if he
was really the great man whom the
Gospels
depict or whether it was not rather the fact and
the circumstances of his death that were the
decisive factor in his
achieving importance. Paul,
who became his apostle, did not himself know
him.
The murder of Moses by his people which
Sellin
recognized in the traces of tradition and
which, strangely enough, the young Goethe
1
had
assumed without any evidence has thus become
an
indispensable part of our reasoning, an impor-
tant link between the
forgotten deed of primaeval
times and its
subsequent reappearance in the
form of Monotheistic religions,
2
It is an attractive
suggestion that the guilt attached to the murder
of Moses
may have been the stimulus for the wish-
phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and
give to his people salvation and the promised
sovereignty over the world. If Moses was this
first
Messiah, Christ became his substitute and
successor. Then Paul could with a certain
right
say to the peoples: " See, the Messiah has truly
come. He was indeed murdered before your
eyes." Then also there is some historical truth
in the rebirth of
Christ, for he was the resurrected
1
Israel in der Wuste, Bd. VII of the Weimar Edition, S. 170.
2
Compare in this connection the well-known exposition in
Frazer's The Golden
Bough, Part III, " The Dying God," 1911.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
145
Moses and the returned
primaeval Father of the
primitive horde as well only transfigured and
as a Son in the
place of his Father.
The poor Jewish people, who with its usual
stiff-necked
obduracy continued to deny the
murder of their " father/
5
has
dearly expiated
this in the course of centuries. Over and over
again they heard the reproach: you killed our
God. And this reproach is true, if rightly
interpreted. It says, in reference to the history of
religion: you won't admit that you murdered
God (the archetype of God, the primaeval Father
and his reincarnations). Something should be
added, namely: " It is true, we did the same
thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have
been
purified."
Not all accusations with which antisemitism
pursues the descendants of the Jewish people are
based on such good foundations. There must, of
course, be more than one reason for a phenomenon
of such
intensity and lasting strength as the
popular hatred of Jews. A whole series of reasons
can be divined: some of them, which need no
interpretation, arise from obvious considerations;
others lie
deeper and spring from secret sources,
which one would regard as the specific motives.
In the first
group the most fallacious is the
reproach of their being foreigners, since in many
places nowadays under the sway of antisemitism
the
Jews were the oldest constituents of the
K
146 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
population or arrived even before the present in-
habitants. This is so, for
example, in the town
of
Cologne, where Jews came with the Romans,
before it was colonized
by Germanic tribes. Other
grounds for antisemitism are stronger, as for
example, the circumstance that Jews mostly live
as a
minority among other peoples, since the
feeling of solidarity of the masses in order to be
complete has need of an animosity against an
outside
minority and the numerical weakness of
the
minority invites suppression. Two other
peculiarities that the Jews possess, however, are
quite unpardonable. The first is that in many
respects they are different from their " hosts."
Not fundamentally so, since they are not a
foreign
Asiatic race as their enemies maintain but
mostly consist of the remnants of Mediterranean
peoples and inherit their culture. Yet they are
different
although sometimes it is hard to define
in what
respects especially from the Nordic
peoples, and racial intolerance finds stronger
expression strange to say in regard to small
differences than to fundamental ones. The second
peculiarity has an even more pronounced effect.
It is that
they defy oppression, that even the most
cruel
persecutions have not succeeded in exter-
minating them. On the contrary, they show a
capacity for holding their own in practical life
and, where they are admitted, they make valuable
contributions to the
surrounding civilization.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
147
The
deeper motives of antisemitism have their
roots in times
long past; they come from the
unconscious and I am
quite prepared to hear
that what I am
going to say will at first appear
incredible. I venture to assert that the
jealousy
which the Jews evoked in the other
peoples by
maintaining that they were the first-born, favour-
ite child of God the Father has not
yet been
overcome by those others, just as if the latter had
given credence to the assumption. Furthermore,
among the customs through which the Jews
marked off their aloof position, that of circum-
cision made a
disagreeable, uncanny impression
on others. The
explanation probably is that it
reminds them of the dreaded castration idea and
of
things in their primaeval past which they would
fain
forget. Then there is lastly the most recent
motive of the series. We must not forget that all
the
peoples who now excel in the practice of anti-
semitism became Christians
only in relatively
recent times, sometimes forced to it
by bloody
compulsion. One might say, they all are " badly
christened "; under the thin veneer of Christian-
ity they have remained what their ancestors were,
barbarically polytheistic. They have not yet
overcome their grudge against the new religion
which was forced on them, and they have
pro-
jected it on to the source from which Christianity
came to them. The facts that the Gospels tell a
story which is enacted among Jews, and in truth
148 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
treats
only of Jews, has facilitated such a projec-
tion. The hatred for
Judaism is at bottom hatred
for
Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the
German National-Socialist revolution this close
connection of the two monotheistic
religions finds
such clear
expression in the hostile treatment of
both.
5. Difficulties
Perhaps the preceding chapter has succeeded
in
establishing the analogy between neurotic
processes and religious events and thereby in
pointing to the unexpected origin of the latter.
In this translation from individual into mass
psychology two difficulties emerge, different in
nature and
importance, which we must now
examine. The first is that we have treated here of
only one case in the rich phenomenology of the
religions and have not thrown any light on the
others. The author
regretfully has to admit that
he cannot
give more than one sample, that he has
not the
expert knowledge necessary to complete
the
investigation. This limited knowledge will
allow him
perhaps to add that the founding of the
Mohammedan religion seems to him to be an
abbreviated
repetition of the Jewish one, in
imitation of which it made its
appearance. There
is reason to believe that the
Prophet originally
intended to
accept the Jewish religion in full for
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
149
himself and his
people. The regaining of the one
great primaeval Father produced in the Arabs an
extraordinary advance in self-confidence which
led them to
great worldly successes, but which
it is true exhausted itself in these. Allah
proved
himself to be much more
grateful to his chosen
people than Jahve had in his time. The inner
development of the new religion, however, soon
came to a standstill,
perhaps because it lacked
the
profundity which in the Jewish religion
resulted from the murder of its founder. The
apparently rationalistic religions of the East are
in essence ancestor
cults; therefore they stop
short at an
early stage of the reconstruction of
the
past. If it is correct that in the primitive
peoples of our time we find as the sole content
:>f their
religion the worship of a highest Being,
then we can
interpret this only as a withering in
the
development of religion, and from here draw
a
parallel with the innumerable cases of rudiment-
ary neuroses which we find in clinical psychology.
Why here as well as there no further development
took
place we do not understand. We must hold
the individual
gifts of these peoples responsible
or it, the direction their activities take and their
general social condition. Besides it is a good
^ule in
analytic work to be satisfied with explain -
ng what exists and not to try to explain what has
lot
happened.
The second
difficulty in this translation into
150 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
mass
psychology is much more significant, because
it
presents a new problem of a cardinal nature.
The question arises in what form is the active
tradition in the life of the
peoples still extant.
There is no such question with individuals, for
here the matter is settled
by the existence of
memory traces of the past in the unconscious.
Let us
go back to our historical example. The
compromise in Qades, we said, was based on the
continued existence of a
powerful tradition
living on in the people who had returned from
Egypt. There is no problem here. We suggested
that such a tradition was maintained
by conscious
memory of oral communications which had been
passed on from forbears of only two or three
generations ago. The latter had been participants
and eye-witnesses of the events in
question. Can
we believe the same, however, for the later
centuries, namely, that the tradition was always
based on a knowledge, communicated in a normal
way, which had been transmitted from forbear
to descendant ? Who the
persons were that
stored