Moses's Beginning

Abstract

All beginnings are complicated, and few more so than the story of Moses. No one felt this more acutely than Sigmund Freud, who wrote and reluctantly published his three late essays on Moses and Monotheism between 1936 and 1938, just before and after he had to flee his native Austria and go into English exile. In his essays he proposed the provocative, though not quite unprecedented, theory that Moses, the leader of the Jews in Egypt, was in fact himself not Jewish but Egyptian. Freud argued that not only was Moses's name more likely to be derived from an Egyptian word than from a Hebrew root, but he also pointed to improbabilities in the legend of Moses's childhood as an adoptee of the Egyptian royal family. Freud knew that his hypothesis was likely to be explosive; the first essay, “Moses an Egyptian,” therefore begins with an apologetic captatio benevolentiae: “To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly—especially by one belonging to that people.”1

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