Freud - Complete Works (791 page)

   We have already said that the
Christian ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the believer
incorporates the Saviour’s blood and flesh, repeats the
content of the old totem meal - no doubt only in its affectionate
meaning, expressive of veneration, and not in its aggressive
meaning. The ambivalence that dominates the relation to the father
was clearly shown, however, in the final outcome of the religious
novelty. Ostensibly aimed at propitiating the father god, it ended
in his being dethroned and got rid of. Judaism had been a religion
of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old
God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his
place, just as every son had hoped to do in primaeval times. Paul,
who carried Judaism on, also destroyed it. No doubt he owed his
success in the first instance to the fact that, through the idea of
the redeemer, he exorcized humanity’s sense of guilt; but he
owed it as well to the circumstance that he abandoned the
‘chosen’ character of his people and its visible mark -
circumcision - so that the new religion could be a universal one,
embracing all men. Though a part may have been played in
Paul’s taking this step by his personal desire for revenge
for the rejection of his innovation in Jewish circles, yet it also
restored a feature of the old Aten religion - it removed a
restriction which that religion had acquired when it was handed
over to a new vehicle, the Jewish people.

  
¹
Ernest Jones has pointed out that the god
Mithras, who kills the bull, might represent this ringleader
boasting of his deed. It is well known for how long the worship of
Mithras struggled with the young Christianity for the final
victory.

Moses And Monotheism

4912

   In some respects the new religion
meant a cultural regression as compared with the older, Jewish one,
as regularly happens when a new mass of people, of a lower level,
break their way in or are given admission. The Christian religion
did not maintain the high level in things of the mind to which
Judaism had soared. It was no longer strictly monotheist, it took
over numerous symbolic rituals from surrounding peoples, it
re-established the great mother-goddess and found room to introduce
many of the divine figures of polytheism only lightly veiled,
though in subordinate positions. Above all, it did not, like the
Aten religion and the Mosaic one which followed it, exclude the
entry of superstitious, magical and mystical elements, which were
to prove a severe inhibition upon the intellectual development of
the next two thousand years.

   The triumph of Christianity was a
fresh victory for the priests of Amun over Akhenaten’s god
after an interval of fifteen hundred years and on a wider stage.
And yet in the history of religion - that is, as regards the return
of he repressed - Christianity was an advance and from that time on
the Jewish religion was to some extent a fossil.

   It would be worth while to
understand how it was that the monotheist idea made such a deep
impression precisely on the Jewish people and that they were able
to maintain it so tenaciously. It is possible, I think, to find an
answer. Fate had brought the great deed and misdeed of primaeval
days, the killing of the father, closer to the Jewish people by
causing them to repeat it on the person of Moses, an outstanding
father-figure. It was a case of ‘acting out’ instead of
remembering, as happens so often with neurotics during the work of
analysis. To the suggestion that they should remember, which was
made to them by the doctrine of Moses, they reacted, however, by
disavowing their action; they remained halted at the recognition of
the great father and thus blocked their access to the point from
which Paul was later to start his continuation of the primal
history. It is scarcely a matter of indifference or of chance that
the violent killing of another great man became the starting-point
of Paul’s new religious creation as well. This was a man whom
a small number of adherents in Judaea regarded as the Son of God
and as the Messiah who had been announced, and to whom, too, a part
of the childhood story invented for Moses was later carried over,
but of whom in fact we know scarcely more with certainty than of
Moses - whether he was really the great teacher portrayed by the
Gospels or whether, rather, it was not the fact and circumstances
of his death which were decisive for the importance which his
figure acquired. Paul, who became his apostle, had not known him
himself.

Moses And Monotheism

4913

   The killing of Moses by his
Jewish people, recognized by Sellin from traces of it in tradition
(and also, strange to say, accepted by the young Goethe without any
evidence¹) thus becomes an indispensable part of our
construction, an important link between the forgotten event of
primaeval times and its later emergence in the form of the
monotheist religions.² It is plausible to conjecture that
remorse for the murder of Moses provided the stimulus for the
wishful phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and lead his
people to redemption and the promised world-dominion. If Moses was
this first Messiah, Christ became his substitute and successor, and
Paul could exclaim to the peoples with some historical
justification: ‘Look! the Messiah has really come: he has
been murdered before your eyes!’ Then, too, there is a piece
of historical truth in Christ’s resurrection, for he was the
resurrected Moses and behind him the returned primal father of the
primitive horde, transfigured and, as the son, put in the place of
the father.

   The poor Jewish people, who with
their habitual stubbornness continued to disavow the father’s
murder, atoned heavily for it in the course of time. They were
constantly met with the reproach ‘You killed our God!’
And this reproach is true, if it is correctly translated. If it is
brought into relation with the history of religions, it runs:
‘You will not
admit
that you murdered God (the primal
picture of God, the primal father, and his later
reincarnations).’ There should be an addition declaring:
‘We did the same thing, to be sure, but we have
admitted
it and since then we have been absolved.’ Not
all the reproaches with which anti-semitism persecutes the
descendants of the Jewish people can appeal to a similar
justification. A phenomenon of such intensity and permanence as the
people’s hatred of the Jews must of course have more than one
ground. It is possible to find a whole number of grounds, some of
them clearly derived from reality, which call for no
interpretation, and others, lying deeper and derived from hidden
sources, which might be regarded as the specific reasons. Of the
former, the reproach of being aliens is perhaps the weakest, since
in many places dominated by anti-semitism to-day the Jews were
among the oldest portions of the population or had even been there
before the present inhabitants. This applies, for instance, to the
city of Cologne, to which the Jews came with the Romans, before it
was occupied by the Germans. Other grounds for hating the Jews are
stronger - thus, the circumstances that they live for the most part
as minorities among other peoples, for the communal feeling of
groups requires, in order to complete it, hostility towards some
extraneous minority, and the numerical weakness of this excluded
minority encourages its suppression. There are, however, two other
characteristics of the Jews which are quite unforgivable. First is
the fact that in some respects they are different from their
‘host’ nations. They are not fundamentally different,
for they are not Asiatics of a foreign race, as their enemies
maintain, but composed for the most part of remnants of the
Mediterranean peoples and heirs of the Mediterranean civilization.
But they are none the less different, often in an indefinable way
different, especially from the Nordic peoples, and the intolerance
of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly
against small differences than against fundamental ones. The other
point has a still greater effect: namely, that they defy all
oppression, that the most cruel persecutions have not succeeded in
exterminating them, and, indeed, that on the contrary they show a
capacity for holding their own in commercial life and, where they
are admitted, for making valuable contributions to every form of
cultural activity.

  
¹
‘Israel in der Wüste’. In
the Weimar Edition,
7
, 170.

  
²
On this subject see Frazer’s
well-known discussions in Part III of
The Golden Bough
(
The Dying God
).

Moses And Monotheism

4914

   The deeper motives for hatred of
the Jews are rooted in the remotest past ages; they operate from
the unconscious of the peoples, and I am prepared to find that at
first they will not seem credible. I venture to assert that
jealousy of the people which declared itself the first-born,
favourite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted
among other peoples even to-day: it is as though they had thought
there was truth in the claim. Further, among the customs by which
the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a
disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained, no
doubt, by its recalling the dreaded castration and along with it a
portion of the primaeval past which is gladly forgotten. And
finally, as the latest motive in this series, we must not forget
that all those peoples who excel to-day in their hatred of Jews
became Christians only in late historic times, often driven to it
by bloody coercion. It might be said that they are all
‘mis-baptized’. They have been left, under a thin
veneer of Christianity, what their ancestors were, who worshipped a
barbarous polytheism. They have not got over a grudge against the
new religion which was imposed on them; but they have displaced the
grudge on to the source from which Christianity reached them. The
fact that the Gospels tell a story which is set among Jews, and in
fact deals only with Jews, has made this displacement easy for
them. Their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians, and
we need not be surprised that in the German National-Socialist
revolution this intimate relation between the two monotheist
religions finds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of
both of them.

Moses And Monotheism

4915

E

DIFFICULTIES

   Perhaps by what I have said I
have succeeded in establishing the analogy between neurotic
processes and religious events and in thus indicating the
unsuspected origin of the latter. In this transference from
individual to group psychology two difficulties arise, differing in
their nature and importance, to which we must now turn.

   The first of these is that we
have here dealt with only a single instance from the copious
phenomenology of religions and have thrown no light on any others.
I must regretfully admit that I am unable to give more than this
one example and that my expert knowledge is insufficient to
complete the enquiry. From my limited information I may perhaps add
that the case of the founding of the Mahommedan religion seems to
me like an abbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, of which it
emerged as an imitation. It appears, indeed, that the Prophet
intended originally to accept Judaism completely for himself and
his people. The recapture of the single great primal father brought
the Arabs an extraordinary exaltation of their self-confidence,
which led to great worldly successes but exhausted itself in them.
Allah showed himself far more grateful to his chosen people than
Yahweh did to his. But the internal development of the new religion
soon came to a stop, perhaps because it lacked the depth which had
been caused in the Jewish case by the murder of the founder of
their religion. The apparently rationalistic religions of the East
are in their core ancestor-worship and so come to a halt, too, at
an early stage of the reconstruction of the past. If it is true
that in primitive peoples of to-day the recognition of a supreme
being is the only content of their religion, we can only regard
this as an atrophy of religious development and bring it into
relation with the countless cases of rudimentary neuroses which are
to be observed in the other field. Why it is that in the one case
just as in the other things have gone no further, our knowledge is
in both cases insufficient to tell us. We can only attribute the
responsibility to the individual endowment of these peoples, the
direction taken by their activity and their general social
condition. Moreover, it is a good rule in the work of analysis to
be content to explain what is actually before one and not to seek
to explain what has
not
happened.

Moses And Monotheism

4916

   The second difficulty about this
transference to group psychology is far more important, because it
poses a fresh problem of a fundamental nature. It raises the
question in what form the operative tradition in the life of
peoples is present - a question which does not occur with
individuals, since there it is solved by the existence in the
unconscious of memory-traces of the past. Let us return to our
historical example. We have attributed the compromise at Kadesh to
the survival of a powerful tradition among those who had returned
from Egypt. This case involves no problem. According to our theory,
a tradition of this kind was based on conscious memories of oral
communications which people then living had received from their
ancestors only two or three generations back who had themselves
been participants and eye-witnesses of the events in question. But
can we believe the same thing of the later centuries - that the
tradition still had its basis in a knowledge normally handed on
from grandfather to grandchild? It is no longer possible to say, as
it was in the earlier case, who the people were who preserved this
knowledge and handed it on by word of mouth. According to Sellin
the tradition of the murder of Moses was always in the possession
of priestly circles till eventually it found expression in writing
which alone enabled Sellin to discover it. But it can only have
been known to a few people; it was not public property. And is that
enough to explain its effect? Is it possible to attribute to
knowledge held like this by a few people the power to produce such
a lasting emotion in the masses when it came to their notice? It
seems, rather, as though there must have been something present in
the ignorant masses, too, which was in some way akin to the
knowledge of the few and went half way to meet it when it was
uttered.