The Unexamined Paradoxes of Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”

In Moses and Monotheism, his famous investigation of the origins of Judaism, Sigmund Freud contends that Moses was actually an Egyptian, who taught monotheism to the Jews who then murdered him and repressed the memory of this murder (although traces of the crime are preserved in the Bible and in the Jewish psyche). While much ink has been spilled in analyzing Freud’s work, few, according to Lawrence Kaplan, have noticed its striking internal contradictions; these, in Kaplan’s view, are the key to making sense of what Freud was up to: