Volume 38, Number 20 · December 5, 1991
How Jewish Was Freud?
By William J. McGrath
Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home
by Emanuel Rice
State University of New York Press, 266 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable
by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
Yale University Press, 159 pp., $25.00
Freud's conception of scientific creativity as the 'succession of daringly playful fantasy and relentlessly realistic criticism' may have served him reasonably well during his long and fruitful scientific career, but even his most committed admirers have looked on his last important work, Moses and Monotheism, as one in which fantasy prevailed at the expense of reality. Indeed, the most prominent of his arguments—that Moses was an Egyptian, that monotheism originated in Egypt, and that Moses was murdered by the Jews—has struck many readers as so recklessly fanciful and so deeply at odds with Jewish tradition that interest in the book has turned largely on Freud's motives in writing it. The book raised once more the question of the importance of Freud's Jewish background for his work generally; but the puzzling inconsistencies in Freud's statements about this subject as well as the failure of most Freud scholars to appreciate its complexity have frustrated any hope for clarity.
Review, 4205 words
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