This essay argues that Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939) ought to be read as a critique of two contemporary historical phenomena: first and foremost, National Socialism and its “Blut und Boden”(blood and soil) ethos; and second, Central European political Zionism and the originsnarrative it promoted to justify the creation of a Jewish state. In foregrounding the distinctive features of Judaic monotheism—its invisible divinity; its demand for instinctual renunciation; and the foreignness and exile that constitute its origins—Freud presents a vision that contrasts with both earlier iterations of monotheism and polytheistic-cum-nationalistic rituals, the latter of which elevate the Volk, the state, or the land to divine status while remaining suspicious of abstraction and universality. In simultaneously developing a proto-epigenetic theory of Jewish character, Freud offers a compatible account of communal identity-formation based on his unique understanding of “tradition” that radically undercuts both the Reich and the nation-state models. The “Moses” essay thus contains a potent critique of expressions of nationalism and national identity that rely on the claims of race or the reification of foundational texts, both of which were (and still are) invoked to legitimize violent ends and fantasies of power.

Sigmund Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion)—initially titled “Der Mann Moses, ein historischer Roman” (“The Man Moses, a Historical Novel”)—originated in trauma. Upon completing the first draft in 1934 while still living in Vienna, Freud expressed anxieties to his friend Arnold Zweig, both about how coherent his argument was and about how this book would be received in an atmosphere of “Catholic orthodoxy,” heightened antisemitism, and one already resistant to psychoanalysis. Yet despite these concerns, Freud makes clear that in writing Moses he was interested in addressing two related questions: How the Jews have come to be what they are, and why they have been the objects of such relentless hatred.