This chapter considers grounds for hearing listening in The Tempest as a Jewish, and specifically Rabbinic, virtue, namely, the virtue of a “listening ear” (middat shmiat ha’ozen) described in Pirke Avot, a core text of Jewish ethical literature, published in Latin in 1541. I suggest that this publication witnesses a tension in the Reformation’s re-inscription of supersessionary tropes of Jewish otherness as spiritual deafness. I theorize this tension as sublimation of the memory of Jewish virtue ethics and ethical listening. I trace the oneiric distribution of signifiers of Jewish alterity in the figures of the vengeful, bookish, exiled Prospero and the dispossessed indigene alike, considering the implications of this reading of the spiritual subaltern as one who can hear but not access the spiritual bounty of their birthright. I suggest that the suppressed memory of Jewish virtue ethics in the Tempest surfaces in the memory of drowned books and fathers and in the play’s echoes of the Book of Jonah, particularly its auditory compulsion to mercy and its song of the deep. I demonstrate how the play bears witness to this sublimation in its “sounding” (plumbing and amplifying) of submerged memory and in the auditory virtue demonstrated by its percipients.

Was the demythologization of Roman sarcophagus reliefs driven by a burgeoning Christian faith? To put it more succinctly, was myth a casualty of Christianity? This long-standing theory proposes that sarcophagi featuring mythless imagery – seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters – gained in popularity because such imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both traditional “pagan” and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the old mythological sarcophagi did not have. Testing this hypothesis requires that we consider Christian numbers and purchasing power in the city of Rome in the third century, as well as the question of who, exactly, was carving early Christian sarcophagi.

Freud’s intense faith in Jung, a man he had called the “Joshua” to his Moses, and whom he declared would be his successor at a time when psychoanalysis needed a “Christ,” ended in a hermeneutic battle over the Prophet Jonah. This chapter explores how the biblical story of Jonah became the site for working out the differentiation between the Viennese school and Zurich school of psychoanalysis. I argue that the forgotten Jonah trail is worth recovering because Freud’s repudiation of the Biblical hermeneutics surrounding the myth of Jonah largely determined the end of Freud and Jung’s collaboration and, at the same time, influenced Freud’s subsequent attitude to and writings on Biblical prophets. Freud’s taciturn, oppositional, and hitherto unanalyzed discursive relationship with the prophet Jonah sheds new light on psychoanalytic literature on Biblical myth, its reception, and even its consequent influence on the movement after 1913.

The book concludes by looking at what Jung and Freud published and did not publish on Jonah after their break. This retrospective perspective helps us evaluate the legacy and aftereffects of what was written during the founding years of the psychoanalytic periodicals. The book concludes with a reappraisal of Freud’s decision to end his life on the Jewish Day of Atonement during the Second World War in the context of the extraordinary ways the story on the Book of Jonah played out before the First World War.