Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s magnificent but misunderstood final masterpiece. Now available in a new literal translation, each English sentence is linked to Freud’s German original for easy comparison. Murdering Moses is a full decoding of the book. This comprehensive scholarly investigation has more than 1200 notes and references to Freud’s Moses. The ultimate reference.
“The distortion of a text is like a murder. The difficulty lies not in perpetrating the deed but in eliminating the traces.”
– Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Freud’s Moses is his last book, published in 1939, months before his death. Many consider it his worst work, the embarrassing rant of an old man, panicking as the Nazis forced him into exile.
Freud claims that Moses was an Egyptian, later murdered by savage Semites, who distorted the Biblical text to cover up this criminal truth and implies the Jews repeated their crime on Christ. Outraged critics accused him of Jewish self-hatred, betraying his people in their darkest hour.
Some 80 years later, the true meaning of Moses is here revealed. The book’s many “Freudian slips” were intended by the author as clues to its hidden meaning. He was writing in code, decipherable only by applying his psychoanalytic method to the text.
Correctly decoded, Moses proves to be a brilliant literary masterpiece of resistance. It was Freud’s defiant affirmation of Judaism, proudly taking his rightful place in its prophetic tradition, affirming its historical truth and examining the causes of Jew-hatred too dangerous to be outspoken. He wrote:
“Thus it may lie hid until the times comes when it may safely venture into the light, or until someone else who reaches the same opinions and conclusions can be told: ‘In darker days there lived a man who thought as you did.’”
That time has come.
