Freud - Complete Works (793 page)

Moses And Monotheism

4922

   If we assume the survival of
these memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the
gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with
peoples as we do with an individual neurotic. Granted that at the
time we have no stronger evidence for the presence of memory-traces
in the archaic heritage than the residual phenomena of the work of
analysis which call for a phylogenetic derivation, yet this
evidence seems to us strong enough to postulate that such is the
fact. If it is not so, we shall not advance a step further along
the path we entered on, either in analysis or in group psychology.
The audacity cannot be avoided.

   And by this assumption we are
effecting something else. We are diminishing the gulf which earlier
periods of human arrogance had torn too wide apart between mankind
and the animals. If any explanation is to be found of what are
called the instincts of animals, which allow them to behave from
the first in a new situation in life as though it were an old and
familiar one - if any explanation at all is to be found of this
instinctive life of animals, it can only be that they bring the
experiences of their species with them into their own new existence
- that is, that they have preserved memories of what was
experienced by their ancestors. The position in the human animal
would not at bottom be different. His own archaic heritage
corresponds to the instincts of animals even though it is different
in its compass and contents.

   After this discussion I have no
hesitation in declaring that men have always known (in this special
way) that they once possessed a primal father and killed him.

   Two further questions must now be
answered. First, under what conditions does a memory of this kind
enter the archaic heritage? And, secondly, in what circumstances
can it become active - that is, can it advance to consciousness
from its unconscious state in the id, even though in an altered and
distorted shape? The answer to the first question is easy to
formulate: the memory enters the archaic heritage if the event was
important enough, or repeated often enough, or both. In the case of
parricide both conditions are fulfilled. On the second question
there is this to be said. A whole number of influences may be
concerned, not all of which are necessarily known. A spontaneous
development is also conceivable, on the analogy of what happens in
some neuroses. What is certainly of decisive importance, however,
is the awakening of the forgotten memory trace by a recent real
repetition of the event. The murder of Moses was a repetition of
this kind and, later, the supposed judicial murder of Christ: so
that these events come into the foreground as causes. It seems as
though the genesis of monotheism could not do without these
occurrences. We are reminded of the poet’s words:

                                                               
Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben,

                                                               
Muss im Leben untergehn.¹

  
¹
[Literally: ‘What is to live immortal
in song must perish in life.’] Schiller, ‘Die
Götter Griechenlands’.

Moses And Monotheism

4923

   And lastly a remark which brings
up a psychological argument. A tradition that was based only on
communication could not lead to the compulsive character that
attaches to religious phenomena. It would be listened to, judged,
and perhaps dismissed, like any other piece of information from
outside; it would never attain the privilege of being liberated
from the constraint of logical thought. It must have undergone the
fate of being repressed, the condition of lingering in the
unconscious, before it is able to display such powerful effects on
its return, to bring the masses under its spell, as we have seen
with astonishment and hitherto without comprehension in the case of
religious tradition. And this consideration weighs heavily in
favour of our believing that things really happened in the way we
have tried to picture them or at least in some similar way.

Moses And Monotheism

4924

PART
II

SUMMARY AND RECAPITULATION

   The part of this study which
follows cannot be given to the public without extensive
explanations and apologies. For it is nothing other than a faithful
(and often word-for-word) repetition of the first part, abbreviated
in some of its critical enquiries and augmented by additions
relating to the problem of how the special character of the Jewish
people arose. I am aware that a method of exposition such as this
is no less inexpedient than it is inartistic. I myself deplore it
unreservedly. Why have I not avoided it? The answer to that is not
hard for me to find, but it is not easy to confess. I found myself
unable to wipe out the traces of the history of the work’s
origin, which was in any case unusual.

   Actually it has been written
twice: for the first time a few years ago in Vienna, where I did
not think it would be possible to publish it. I determined to give
it up; but it tormented me like an unlaid ghost, and I found a way
out by making two pieces of it independent and publishing them in
our periodical
Imago
: the psycho-analytic starting-point of
the whole thing ‘Moses an Egyptian’, and the historical
construction erected on this ‘If Moses was an Egyptian . .
.’. The remainder, which included what was really open to
objection and dangerous - the application to the genesis of
monotheism and the view of religion in general - I held back, as I
thought, forever. When, in March 1938, came the unexpected German
invasion, which forced me to leave my home but also freed me from
my anxiety lest my publication might conjure up a prohibition of
psycho-analysis in a place where it was still tolerated. I had
scarcely arrived in England before I found the temptation
irresistible to make the knowledge I had held back accessible to
the world, and I began to revise the third part of my study to fit
it on to the two parts that had already been published. This
naturally involved a partial re-arrangement of the material. I did
not succeed, however, in including the whole of this material in my
second version; on the other hand I could not make up my mind to
give up the earlier versions entirely. And so it has come about
that I have adopted the expedient of attaching a whole piece of the
first presentation to the second unchanged - which has brought with
it the disadvantage of involving extensive repetition.

Moses And Monotheism

4925

   I might, however, console myself
with the reflection that the things I am treating are in any case
so new and so important, apart from how far my account of them is
correct, that it can be no misfortune if the public is obliged to
read the same thing about them twice over. There are things which
should be said more than once and which cannot be said often
enough. But the reader must decide of his own free will whether to
linger over the subject or to come back to it. He must not be
surreptitiously led into having the same thing put before him twice
in one book. It is a piece of clumsiness for which the author must
take the blame. Unluckily an author’s creative power does not
always obey his will: the work proceeds as it can, and often
presents itself to the author as something independent or even
alien.

Moses And Monotheism

4926

A

THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL

   If we are clear in our mind that
a procedure like ours of accepting what seems to us serviceable in
the material presented to us and of rejecting what does not suit us
and of putting the different pieces together in accordance with
psychological probability - if we are clear that a technique of
this kind can give no certainty that we shall arrive at the truth,
then it may justly be asked why we are undertaking this work at
all. The answer is an appeal to the work’s outcome. If we
greatly tone down the strictness of the requirements made upon a
historico-psychological investigation, it will perhaps be possible
to throw light on problems which have always seemed to deserve
attention and which recent events have forced upon our observation
anew. As we know, of all the peoples who lived round the basin of
the Mediterranean in antiquity, the Jewish people is almost the
only one which still exists in name and also in substance. It has
met misfortunes and ill-treatment with an unexampled capacity for
resistance; it has developed special character-traits and
incidentally has earned the hearty dislike of every other people.
We should be glad to understand more of the source of this
viability of the Jews and of how their characteristics are
connected with their history.

   We may start from a
character-trait of the Jews which dominates their relation to
others. There is no doubt that they have a particularly high
opinion of themselves, that they regard themselves as more
distinguished, of higher standing, as superior to other peoples -
from whom they are also distinguished by many of their
customs.¹ At the same time they are inspired by a peculiar
confidence in life, such as is derived from the secret ownership of
some precious possession, a kind of optimism: pious people would
call it trust in God.

  
¹
The aspersion, so common in antiquity, that
the Jews were ‘lepers’ (cf. Manetho) no doubt has the
sense of a projection: ‘they keep as much apart from us as
though we were lepers.’

Moses And Monotheism

4927

   We know the reason for this
behaviour and what their secret treasure is. They really regard
themselves as God’s chosen people, they believe that they
stand especially close to him; and this makes them proud and
confident. Trustworthy reports tell us that they behaved in
Hellenistic times just as they do to-day, so that the complete Jew
was already there; and the Greeks, among whom and alongside of whom
they lived, reacted to the Jewish characteristics in the same way
as their ‘hosts’ do to-day. It might be thought that
they reacted as though they too believed in the superiority which
the people of Israel claimed for themselves. If one is the declared
favourite of the dreaded father, one need not be surprised at the
jealousy of one’s brothers and sisters, and the Jewish legend
of Joseph and his brethren shows very well where this jealousy can
lead. The course of world-history seemed to justify the presumption
of the Jews, since, when later on it pleased God to send mankind a
Messiah and redeemer, he once again chose him from the Jewish
people. The other peoples might have had occasion then to say to
themselves: ‘Indeed, they were right, they
are
God’s chosen people.’ But instead of this, what
happened was that redemption by Jesus Christ only intensified their
hatred of the Jews, while the Jews themselves gained no advantage
from this second act of favouritism, since they did not recognize
the redeemer.

   On the basis of our earlier
discussions, we may now assert that it was the man Moses who
imprinted this trait - significant for all time - upon the Jewish
people. He raised their self-esteem by assuring them that they were
God’s chosen people, he enjoined them to holiness and pledged
them to be apart from others. Not that other peoples were lacking
in self-esteem. Just as to-day, so in those days each nation
thought itself better than any other. But the self-esteem of the
Jews was given a religious anchorage by Moses: it became a part of
their religious faith. Owing to their especially intimate relation
to their God they acquired a share in his grandeur. And since we
know that behind the God who had chosen the Jews and freed them
from Egypt stands the figure of Moses, who had done precisely that,
ostensibly at God’s command, we venture to declare that it
was this one man Moses who created the Jews. It is to him that this
people owes its tenacity of life but also much of the hostility it
has experienced and still experiences.

Moses And Monotheism

4928

B

THE GREAT MAN

   How is it possible for a single
man to evolve such extraordinary effectiveness that he can form a
people out of random individuals and families, can stamp them with
their definitive character and determine their fate for thousands
of years? Is not a hypothesis such as this a relapse into the mode
of thought which led to myths of a creator and to the worship of
heroes, into times in which the writing of history was nothing more
than a report of the deeds and destinies of single individuals, of
rulers or conquerors? The modern tendency is rather towards tracing
back the events of human history to more concealed, general and
impersonal factors, to the compelling influence of economic
conditions, to alterations in food habits, to advances in the use
of materials and tools, to migrations brought about by increases in
population and climatic changes. Individuals have no other part to
play in this than as exponents or representatives of group trends,
which are bound to find expression and do so in these particular
individuals largely by chance.

   These are perfectly justifiable
lines of approach, but they give us occasion for drawing attention
to an important discrepancy between the attitude taken up by our
organ of thought and the arrangement of things in the world, which
are supposed to be grasped by means of our thought. It is enough
for our need to discover causes (which, to be sure, is imperative)
if each event has
one
demonstrable cause. But in the reality
lying outside us that is scarcely the case; on the contrary, each
event seems to be overdetermined and proves to be the effect of
several convergent causes. Frightened by the immense complication
of events, our investigations take the side of one correlation as
against another and set up contradictions which do not exist but
have only arisen owing to a rupture of more comprehensive
relations.¹ Accordingly, if the investigation of a particular
case demonstrates to us the transcendent influence of a single
personality, our conscience need not reproach us with having by
this hypothesis flown in the face of the doctrine of the importance
of the general and impersonal factors. There is room in principle
for both. In the case of the genesis of monotheism, however, we can
point to no external factor other than the one we have already
mentioned - that this development was linked with the establishment
of closer relations between different nations and with the building
up of a great empire.

  
¹
I protest, however, against being
misunderstood to say that the world is so complicated that any
assertion one may make is bound to hit upon a piece of truth
somewhere. No. Our thought has upheld its liberty to discover
dependent relations and connections to which there is nothing
corresponding in reality; and it clearly sets a very high value on
this gift, since it makes such copious use of it both inside and
outside of science.

Moses And Monotheism

4929

   Thus we reserve a place for
‘great men’ in the chain, or rather the network, of
causes. But it may not, perhaps, be quite useless to enquire under
what conditions we confer this title of honour. We shall be
surprised to find that it is never quite easy to answer this
question. A first formulation - ‘we do so if a man possesses
to a specially high degree qualities that we value greatly’ -
clearly misses the mark in every respect. Beauty, for instance, and
muscular strength, however enviable they may be, constitute no
claim to ‘greatness’. It would seem, then, that the
qualities have to be mental ones - psychical and intellectual
distinctions. As regards these, we are held up by the consideration
that nevertheless we should not unhesitatingly describe someone as
a great man simply because he was extraordinarily efficient in some
particular sphere. We should certainly not do so in the case of a
chess master or of a virtuoso on a musical instrument; but not very
easily, either, in the case of a distinguished artist or scientist.
In such cases we should naturally speak of him as a great poet,
painter, mathematician or physicist, or as a pioneer in the field
of this or that activity; but we refrain from pronouncing him a
great man. If we unhesitatingly declare that, for instance, Goethe
and Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven were great men, we must be led
to it by something other than admiration for their splendid
creations. If precisely such examples as these did not stand in the
way, the idea would probably occur to us that the name of a
‘great man’ is preferably reserved for men of action -
conquerors, generals, rulers - and is in recognition of the
greatness of their achievement, the force of the effects to which
they gave rise. But this too is unsatisfactory and is entirely
contradicted by our condemnation of so many worthless figures whose
effects upon their contemporary world and upon posterity can
nevertheless not be disputed. Nor shall we be able to choose
success as a sign of greatness, when we reflect on the majority of
great men who instead of achieving success have perished in
misfortune.

Moses And Monotheism

4930

   For the moment, then, we are
inclined to decide that it is not worth while to look for a
connotation of the concept of a ‘great man’ that is
unambiguously determined. It seems to be only a loosely used and
somewhat arbitrarily conferred recognition of an over-large
development of certain human qualities, with some approximation to
the original literal sense of ‘greatness’. We must
recollect, too, that we are not so much interested in the essence
of great men as in the question of the means by which they affect
their fellow-men. We will, however, keep this enquiry as short as
possible, since it threatens to lead us far away from our goal.