Last words: Said, Freud, and traveling theory.

Armstrong, Richard H.

Said's Freud and the Non-European is an attempt to read Freud's Moses and Monotheism in the light of contemporary israeliPalestinian politics. Freud's excavation of Judaism shows its roots in Egyptian monotheism (the Aten cult of Akhenaten), and, therefore, Said argues, the impossibility of any foundationalist or essentialist view of Jewish (and therefore Israeli) identity. This article shows at length that Said projects unto Freud's book what he, himself, deems pertinent for the historical moment, embodying his very notion of "Traveling Theory." The reason for Said's projections is his profound identification with Freud, in particular, and secular Jewish thought, in general, which is at the heart of the "non-humanist humanism" he argued for in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism.

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Among Edward Said's last works is the text of a lecture he delivered at the invitation of the Freud Museum in London on the topic of "Freud and the Non-European." (1) In many ways, the lecture, conforms to the basic contours of the Saidian oeuvre. A text by a major European thinker, Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939) is brought to bear on a real-world problem that remains unresolved--namely, the essentializing notions of national identity at work in Israel that exclude historical others, most especially the Palestinians. Said reads Freud's Moses as a work in the "late style"--in conformity with his wider critical interests that bridge the discussion between literature and music--and as a powerful, unsettling meditation on psychological identity. The most biting criticism of Israeli policies that Said draws from Freud's text is conveniently summarized in the following statement:

 Quite differently from the spirit of Freud's deliberately
 provocative reminders that Judaism's founder was a non-Jew,
 and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian,
 non-Jewish monotheism, Israeli legislation countervenes,
 represses, and even cancels Freud's carefully maintained
 opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish
 background. The complex layers of the past, so to speak,
 have been eliminated by official Israel. So--as I read him
 in the setting of Israel's ideologically conscious policies--Freud,
 by contrast, had left considerable room to
 accommodate Judaism's non-Jewish antecedents and
 contemporaries. That is to say: in excavating the archaeology
 of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not
 begin with itself but, rather, with other identities
 (Egyptian and Arabian) which his demonstration in
 Moses and Monotheism goes a great distance to discover
 and thus restore to scrutiny. (44)

Said's lecture ends by characterizing Freud as representative of a line of modern thought traced by Isaac Deutscher through the "non-Jewish Jews" Spinoza, Marx, Heine, and Freud that stresses a dialectical relationship with reality, not a static one, and a relativistic view of human values that still upholds the basic solidarity of humanity as a whole. (2)

In the final paragraphs, Freud emerges as a kind of cosmopolitan hero, one who was able to contemplate the scary notion that

 identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone;
 it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical
 originary break or flaw which will not be repressed,
 because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside
 the identity inside which so many have stood, and
 suffered--and later, perhaps, even triumphed. (54)

This view, Said argues, speaks to us still through its insistence that identity be thought of as "a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound" (54) instead of as a fictional foundation that excludes historical others. In his closing words, Said articulates the hope that acknowledging this secular wound would be a different kind of foundation for a bi-national state "in which Israel and Palestine are parts, rather than antagonists of each other's history and underlying reality" (55).

I propose here to examine Said's invocation of Freud as a kind of limit-case for his rapprochement of scholarship with real-world concerns. The notion that Israel should attend seriously to so dubious a text as Moses and Monotheism is on the surface quite absurd, as reviewers of Said's book have been quick to point out. But beyond this prima facie absurdity, there is much in the Freudian work that deserves a more severe Saidian critique than the one Said himself provides. I shall present here the kind of critique of Moses that Said, were he applying his own well-tried tools of analysis, could have come up with had he taken seriously works by other scholars. All superficial ironies aside, my critique serves a particular purpose here: to show why Freud necessarily emerges as an authorial hero, which tells us a great deal about Said's views of humanism and the humanities at the very end of his life. The second part of this essay in particular will map out Said's heroic characterization of Freud in the light of his own humanistic agenda, and will make the point that Said's reading of Freud is symptomatic of his need for heroic predecessors on whom to found his non-foundational humanism.

Critiquing Said's Moses

Moses and Monotheism is by far one of Freud's most criticized texts, not least because it appears to deconstruct Judaism right on the eve of the Shoah. Shortly after its appearance, the Jewish historian Salo Baron dismissed it as a "magnificent castle in the air" (qtd. in Yerushalmi 82), and it has been said that "if Moses were merely an essay in biblical history written by some adventurous academic, it would long have gathered dust on the more tenebrous shelves of theological libraries" (Yerushalmi 82). It did gather dust for some time until a certain vogue for discussing Freud's Jewish identity brought it to the fore in the 1990s, when it suddenly became the focus of work by distinguished Jewish scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Yosef Yerushalmi; the latter's Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991) is in fact discussed by Said. (3) Yerushalmi's book is the most poignant example of how Moses remains a point of serious interrogation of Freud's relationship to Jewish culture. It concludes with an open address to Freud by the scholar that shows just how difficult it is for Jews to follow Freud all the way into the construction of a purely "psychological Jewishness" severed from traditional Judaism. (4) While Jewish scholars have wrestled with the ambivalent legacy Freud leaves in a post-holocaust world, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann has looked at Freud's book in relation to a whole history of discourse on "Moses the Egyptian," and has even praised the book for its foray into a field he has come to theorize and champion--mnemohistory or the history of memory. (5) But foraging in the space of memory is ,or the same as investigating history, a distinction rigorously policed by Assmann, and Freud's historical claims remain untenable in Assmann's expert eyes, despite their enormous interest for the student of "Moses discourse." In sum, while virtually all scholars roundly reject the historical thesis of Moses and the historical identification of the man Moses with an Egyptian proponent of Akhenaten's monotheistic Aten cult, the book has indeed been vindicated as a major work full of provocative questions about modern as well as ancient Jewish identity. (6)

Right at the outset, then, Said's deployment of Freud's rather patchy historical argument seems a violation of his own championing of good historical research as a method of humanistic understanding. The moral tone he takes in confronting Israelis with the "carefully maintained opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish back ground" rings rather hollow, since Freud's "careful maintenance" could easily be dismissed as an elaborate fantasy, or even an obsessive projection. Hence, a hostile Jewish reviewer, like The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, can make short work of refuting Said's central gesture of marshalling Moses as a kind of counter-history with which to shame the Israelis (or, as Wieseltier takes it rather personally, all Jews).

 Said remarks that "so much of the material [Freud] is
 dealing with as he chronicles the aftermath of Moses's
 legacy is uneven," but it is really quite even. It is evenly
 spurious. Freud's discussion in Moses and Monotheism is
 nothing like a "demonstration," as Said calls it. Freud
 himself concedes in his book--Said does not cite these
 passages--that "[o]bjective evidence ... has not been
 obtainable," and that he is "accepting what seems to us
 serviceable in the material presented to us and rejecting
 what does not suit us," and that "I use Biblical tradition
 here in such an autocratic and arbitrary way." Freud is not
 restoring anything. He is inventing everything. And Said
 has a political use for his inventions. (38)

Much has been written about the unfortunate step Freud took in characterizing his work as "history" instead of historical fiction (as he initially did), but Said seems not to have appreciated fully enough the problematic situation this step creates for his own argument. One cannot attack the fictions of foundationalist and essentializing historical narratives with largely fictitious or fanciful counter-examples and still appeal to history as an arbitrator of modern conflicts. Here it is apparent that Said hangs more of his argument on the auctoritas of the man Freud than the strength of Freud's argument, and this, as we shall see, is a symptomatic gesture on Said's part.

Said characterizes Moses and Monotheism as a work in the "late style," meaning it displays the traces of a difficult and unresolved question that tormented the final years of the author: "Everything about the treatise suggests not resolution and reconciliation ... but, rather, more complexity and a willingness to let irreconcilable elements of the work remain as they are: episodic, fragmentary, unfinished (i.e., unpolished)" (Freud and the Non-European 28). Said is of course aware that the spotty nature of the book has a lot to do with Freud's declining health as well as its episodic composition, first, in the deeply embittering circumstances of Austria's final days before the Anschluss with Germany; and second, in the exilic circumstances of Freud's sojourn in England, whither he fled with his family in 1938 and where he died shortly thereafter. For Said, the concept of the late style is key to revealing the work's "irascible transgressiveness, as if the author was expected to settle down into a harmonious composure, as befits a person at the end of his life, but preferred instead to be difficult, and to bristle with all sorts of new ideas and provocations" (29). We know for a fact that Freud did see himself as showing considerable transgressiveness in this work, which in the first sentence points out the very damage he is doing to Jewish tradition through this investigation into the origins of Judaic monotheism: "To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by someone who is himself one of them" (23:7). He had no doubt at the time that Jews would be quite appalled at what he was doing, and that it was historically a very bad time to be undermining the imperiled Jewry of Europe.

On the other hand, one can also argue that the work is not nearly as transgressive as Said makes it out to be, for it is staunchly resting on psychoanalytic notions with which Freud had been toying since the early 1900s. Though it was his first and last foray into history, Freud had been alluding to the analogy between personal and cultural trauma for decades, and, in a sense, Moses is a rather mechanical extension of the analogy. (7) Based on his clinical findings. Freud now deploys the dynamic of trauma-repression-return of the repressed to a historical event that, just as he would for an individual patient, he must reconstruct from the distorted fragments of cultural memory (namely, the Biblical narratives of Moses and the archaeological record). Freud had seen early on that such an application of psychoanalysis was essential to its mission, and his erstwhile devoted student Otto Rank spent a great deal of time applying psychoanalysis in this way to literature, mythology, and art. (8) Freud himself had produced a biographical-historical study of Leonardo da Vinci along these lines in 1910, in which the analogy between history and personal memory is quite explicit (11:83-84). Moses is also full of little gravestones marking ruptures and rivalries with long-lost colleagues. It was in fact Karl Abraham, who died in 1925, who first applied psychoanalytic tools to the study of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten way back in 1912. Freud quite shockingly does not even cite Abraham's work, even though earlier he had done much to encourage it. It is also important to note the lingering influence of Rank, who broke quite openly with Freud in the 1920s. Freud's whole analysis of the Moses story takes Rank's work on the birth of the hero as its point of departure, though he quickly explains that Rank's work was done at a time when he was still under Freud's influence (23:10). Freud later mentions a particular theory of the origins of epic poetry that is clearly indebted to Rank, yet does not mention him in any way at this point. (9) So there is much recycled business going on in the Moses study, but only a Freud scholar would notice the ghostly presence of these revenants, since Freud--for whatever reason--is careful not to bring this old business too close to the surface.

In other ways, Freud comes off as stubbornly doctrinaire in the book. For one thing, his relentless deployment of Lamarckian genetics-already problematic in his work in the 1910s--suggests a very closed, nineteenth-century frame of mind. (10) He freely admits biologists do not accept the idea of the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he confesses quite flatly, "I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution" (23:100). His central thesis--that Moses was murdered by the Hebrews--was a tenuous hypothesis espoused by a single scholar, Ernst Sellin, who himself later recanted it (upon learning this, Freud is reported to have remarked, "He was right the first time!" [qtd. in Yerushalmi 83]). The larger contour of Freud's plot in the Moses saga, however, is the most predictable element in the work. First of all, the murder of Moses by the Hebrews is clearly seen as a patricide, an acting-out against the paternalistic Moses's harsh monotheism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a repetition of the murder of the primal father that Freud first reconstructed in Totem and Taboo in 1912-1913 (13:125-61). Freud himself admitted privately that Moses "is essentially a sequel to and an expansion of another work which I published twenty-five years ago under the title Totem and Taboo. New ideas do not come easily to an old man; there is nothing left for him to do but repeat himself' (Ernst Freud 453). Secondly, the real dynamic behind the Jewish religion turns out to be a complex reaction to the return of the repressed event, making, once again, a neurotic symptom out of passionate religious behavior. This was Freud's view of religion as early as the 1890s, and the real source of novelty in Moses is the elaborate emplotment required in order to rig up his historical hypothesis to the surface of Hebrew scripture.

While I obviously think Said's use of "late style" as a mode of interrogation for Moses is subject to challenge, there is a much deeper point to be made about Freud's trotting out of the oedipal machinery here. By fixing on the "non-European" hypothesis of Moses's Egyptian origins, Said is missing the larger point about identity in Freud's text: Moses, Egyptian innovator though he was, made the drastic error of awakening the universal (according to Freud) primal experience of the Urwater and paid the price. Moses is thus no trigger for a wounded sense of identity based on "Otherness" and "non-Europeanness," but rather he triggers something uncannily familiar to the Hebrews (and, supposedly, all of us): the inherited memory of our primal ancestors and the universal quandary of oedipal rivalry. What makes Freud's Moses foundational in a scandalous way is neither his Egyptianness nor his monotheism, but the fact that he was a murdered father and is the dynamic source of latent and inherited guilt. Without the repression of his murder, Moses could never have become so grand a figure of memory in Jewish tradition, nor could his monotheism have developed such a powerful hold on the Jewish people, as Freud states quite explicitly (23:101). There is a direct connection between the self-glorifications of a culture and the enormity of its hidden crimes in Freud' s thinking, and Said---of all people--should be attuned to that idea. So when Freud talks of the ethical heights that the Jews achieved over and above the other peoples of antiquity, he is quick to remind us:

 These ethical ideas cannot, however, disavow their origin
 from the sense of guilt felt on account of a suppressed
 hostility to God [i.e., the Urvater, and his revenant,
 Moses]. They possess the characteristic--uncompleted
 and incapable of completion--of obsessional neurotic
 reaction-formations; we can guess, too, that they serve
 the secret purposes of punishment. (23:134-35)

Since Said also hangs a lot on the "non-Europeanness" of Moses, we might also ask if there is much force behind the cultural "Otherness" he represents. Here Said seems to have skipped over a lot of what is most salient in Freud's reading of Akhenaten's religion. Whereas Karl Abraham (1912) took pains to characterize Akhenaten's monotheistic revolution as an oedipal revolt against his more successful father, Amenophis (or Amenhotep) III, Freud takes a far more positive view of the Aten cult's content and mentions nothing about it being an oedipal revolt--no doubt because he wants to cast Moses as the father, not the son in this drama. By focusing solely on the image of the solar disk and worshipping it as a symbol of a divine being "whose energy was manifested in its rays," Akhenaten had instituted a cult that was an "astonishing discovery of the effect of solar radiation" (23:22). The religion grew into a harsh clarity that gradually led to the outright rejection of "everything to do with myths, magic, and sorcery," which put his monotheism completely at odds with traditional Egyptian religion and popular culture (23:24). The Jews, by adopting this religion with even greater fervor through abolishing all idols and images, thus participate in a great "progress in intellectuality" that clearly puts them on the side of enlightenment as against popular superstition and irrationality (23:111-15). In fact, the gradual acceptance of monotheism among the later Hebrews is likened openly to the Darwinian revolution, the most successful and truthful paradigm change in modern times, in Freud's view (23:66-67).

Akhenaten thus emerges as a daring and demanding innovator who stood apart from the compact majority of his own people; Freud even cites James Breasted's characterization of him as "the first individual in human history" (23:21, note 1). This exceptional nature, however, also explains his sudden demise and the total disappearance of his novel religion until archaeologists uncovered it in the nineteenth century (unless one agrees with Freud that it survives in Judaic monotheism, of course). Thus this "non-European" Other that stands at the head of Judaism is just as much a non-Egyptian for the utter nonconformity of his views. (11) Akhenaten is an untimely and lonely Aufklarer, like Freud himself, and like the Moses who takes his cult to the ungrateful Hebrews, only to be killed for it. Here it seems Said has not judged rightly the alterity function that Moses performs. He is not a representative of a different-but-equally-noble culture and civilization, but rather a radical, a heretic (by Egyptian standards), even an "intellectual" one might say, who goes into exile when political circumstances make it inevitable.

There was, to be sure, a keen sense of identification between Freud and his Egyptian Moses. Like Moses, Freud brought his new truth, which is quite uncompromising and idol-smashing, to an audience that quickly revolted in many different directions. In a way, there is a quality of self-pity in the Moses plot that updates the self-pity evident in the primal horde scenario, where the Father is killed and eaten by the sons. Totem and Taboo, which launched this horde myth, was after all written in the midst of Freud's bitter disputes with Jung and other dissenting followers, during which time Freud also wrote his first work on Moses, "The Moses of Michelangelo" (13:211-38). His interpretation of Moses in that earlier work is as a stoic intellectual hero who does not allow his anger at the rebellious Israelites to get the better of him. The parallel with Freud's situation at the time seems clear and rightfully makes us wonder about his continuing fascination with the figure of Moses. But Said seems to have identified even further with the exilic Other, being himself an intellectual who grew up in Egypt yet was neither Egyptian nor Muslim, and who later lived most of his life in New York intellectual circles--which are, needless to say, very Jewish. Did the Zionist hostility that plagued him--especially right at the time of this lecture, as we shall discuss further below--make Said all the more prone to identify with the murdered Egyptian Moses? At the same time, did his warm acceptance by certain liberal Jews make him feel adopted into the American intellectual clan? Would Said have readily identified with Freud's ambivalent view of Jewishness and Judaism from his unique perspective in "Alexandria-on-the-Hudson"? We shall return to these questions later.

Perhaps the greatest problem with using Freud's Egyptian Moses, as an invitation for Israelis to embrace the Other, is that Said misses the highly negative aspects that monotheism brings with it, some of which Freud himself mentions critically while he takes others to be positive in ways that Said might well question. When he first mentions Akhenaten's introduction of monotheism, Freud's ambivalence toward it is clear: "It was a strict monotheism, the first attempt of the kind, so far as we know, in the history of the world, and along with the belief in a single god religious intolerance was inevitably born, which had previously been alien to the ancient world and remained so long afterwards" (23:20; my emphasis). Indeed, as Jan Assmann has argued at length, monotheism in its strictest form (what he terms the "Mosaic distinction" between true and false religion) is not a religion but a counter-religion, one that relies heavily on the notion that, besides there being just one god, all other gods are false and must be rejected (Moses the Egyptian, Die mosaische Unterscheidung). There is built into strict monotheism, in other words, the necessary assumption that the Other's religion is false, that all other gods are empty idols.

Freud was very quick to recognize the negative nature of monotheism and to see intolerant exclusivity as an inherent feature of it. And yet, the Hebrews' abstraction of their concept of the deity was, for him, a highly positive move toward a more intellectual form of culture that would be nothing less than progress in intellectuality/spirituality (Fortschritt der Geistigkeit). This follows on two key Freudian assumptions: (1) that intellectualization is a form of instinctual sublimation, and this is inherently good for civilization and brings with it heightened self-esteem; and (2) that intellectualization is in fact more manly than the polytheistic cult of images, which rely on the evidence of the senses in a manner that associates them with femininity in a highly negative way (23:114). Freud goes to some length to explain the demise of the mother goddesses in this text in a manner that looks rather vindictive, as if maternal deities need to be conjured away in favor of their (superior) male counterparts and eventually banished by the singular Father God (23:45-46, note 2). One thing is clear: He considers the imposition of patriarchy to be a "momentous step," a "victory of intellectuality over sensuality" to which the Jewish abolition of images is very much aligned (23:113-14). It is odd that Said made note of this in Beginnings (171-72) many years before, but here makes no mention of it. So Moses delivers the dubious gifts of intolerance and patriarchy to the Jewish people, and Freud makes no excuse for the first gift and openly applauds the latter.

A reading of Moses put forward by Richard Bernstein in Freud and the Legacy of Moses (with which Assmann now agrees, Die mosaische Unterscheidung 120-24) spells out further the necessary connections: The Jews were in the avant-garde of civilization by adopting monotheism, the exclusive nature of which gave them a heightened sense of election and self-worth, and Freud is deliberately emphasizing this feature as a way of defending the Jews and, by implication, psychoanalysis, the latest "Jewish truth." Monotheism's aberration from pagan norms inevitably made others deeply suspicious of the Jews, and herein lie the seeds of anti-Semitism (or what is more accurately termed Judeophobia), which was originally Freud's point of departure in writing the study (i.e., to find out in psycho-historical terms why the Jews are so hated). Freud's most brilliant rhetorical flourish in Moses is the suggestion that Christians, many of whom were forcibly converted from their "barbarous polytheism," in fact hate the Jews because Judaism is the source of Christianity, the moral strictures of which they unconsciously resent (23:91-92). This turns anti-Semitism, curiously enough, into a kind of Christian self-hatred, which Freud finds evident in the Nazi hostility toward both religions.

Bernstein's reading helps us to see the positive and defensive side of Freud's strange study. The Jew who is able to excavate all these truths, Sigmund Freud, is showing himself to be, like his forefathers, on the cutting edge of civilization by putting forward his psychoanalytic truth in the face of the great traditional authorities (the Bible, Rabbinical Judaism, and the Catholic Church), as well as the reigning nationalistic manias (Nazism, but arguably also Zionism, since he undoes a Jewish "national hero") that confront him. Thus the Jew is reconstructed as intellectually valiant, not as the effete and denatured creature the Nazis make him out to be; and culturally the Jew is superior to the later Christian monotheists who, through the worship of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, fall back into the errors of polytheistic idolatry and the mother goddess cult (23:88). Freud personally saw Moses as an act of authorial heroism on his part that restored the original nature of Jewish character. Writing to Charles Singer, who had warned Freud that these writings would cause misunderstanding, Freud refused to back down from his position saying: "Well, we Jews have been reproached for growing cowardly in the course of the centuries. (Once upon a time we were a valiant nation.) In this transformation I had no share, so I must risk it" (Ernst Freud 454).

In this reading, then, we see how much Freud relies on the exclusivity, of Judaic monotheism as the feature that tenders the most important advantages (the heightened self-esteem and increased capacity for intellectual sublimation) as well as disadvantages (the hatred and mistrust of others). By turning Freud's psycho-historical account into a kind of multicultural parable of inclusivity, Said loses the tragic edge of Freud's argument. What makes the inclusion of a "non-European" at the heart of Judaism possible is the Great Truth of monotheism, not some primeval tolerance toward other tribes and other gods, nor even any real sense of shared history between Egypt and Israel. Indeed, there is no possible reconciliation of the real dominant culture of Egypt with Israel after Moses's momentous adoption of the Jews as his people, since the majority of Egyptians remain staunchly polytheistic and the Jews have become intolerantly monotheistic, like the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten. If Freud is a hero of heterogeneous identity in Said's account, he buys this distinction at a very cheap cost, having dusted off a hypothetical "good Egyptian" (i.e., a maverick proto-monotheist, not a nasty traditional pagan) with whom to found the ambivalent legacy of the Law. But as Leon Wieseltier noted in his review, this alterity at the source hardly constitutes a scandal to the Jews: "In the Jewish tradition, it was Abraham, and not Moses, who discovered monotheism, and Abraham was famously a Chaldean, a man who came from across the river and was therefore an ivri, a crosser, a Hebrew" (38). A legend held in common by Jews and Muslims alike reports that Abraham's father was not only an idolater, but also a maker and seller of idols, against which Abraham waged a clever sabotage in a precociously intolerant way (see the Midrash Genesis Rabbah 38:13 and the Qur'an 6:74-82; and 21:51-71). (12) Here, again, it is the categorical gesture of intolerance toward a common culture that distinguishes the Urvater.

To misunderstand the centrality of exclusive monotheistic truth to Jewish identity is arguably to have misunderstood the whole thrust of Moses (and maybe the whole nature of monotheism), and yet this is what we must conclude in the case of Said's reading. Freud's point of departure was not the question "How can I understand the Other?," but, rather, "What are Jews that people should hate them so much?"--which might be rephrased more personally as: "Why does the Other hate me so much?" The answer is, in part, "Because I smashed his idols and think mine is the only true God."

Last but not least, we come to another feature in Freud's view of monotheism that Said, had he not been in such a hurry to let Freud off easy, would normally have put center-stage in his reading: the genesis of monotheism in imperialism. (13) This is introduced early on in Freud's account and is echoed as a truism throughout, so there really is no excuse for Said to overlook this as somehow inessential to Freud's understanding of the cult. Initially, Freud echoes James Breasted's view that there was a tendency toward henotheism (a nonexclusive form of monotheism) already before the time of Akhenaten. In this view, the external cause of monotheism was clearly the political condition of Egyptian hegemony:

 As a result of the military exploits of the great conqueror,
 Tuthmosis III, Egypt had become a world
 power: the empire now included Nubia in the south,
 Palestine, Syria and a part of Mesopotamia in the
 north. This imperialism was reflected in religion as
 universalism and monotheism. Since the Pharoah's
 responsibilities now embraced not only Egypt but
 Nubia and Syria as well, deity too was obliged to
 abandon its national limitation and, just as the Pharaoh
 was the sole and unrestricted ruler of the world known
 to the Egyptians, this must also apply to the Egyptians'
 new deity. (23:21; my emphasis)

So Akhenaten's innovation was not the introduction of the Aten cult per se, which was already under way, but rather "something new, which for the first time converted the doctrine of a universal god into monotheism--the factor of exclusiveness" (23:22). Here we see a fascinating irony: By taking this imperialist line of thought, Freud rejected the notion that monotheism, the cult of the one great Father God, was simply the result of an oedipal struggle, which was Karl Abraham's dutiful interpretation back in 1912. Instead, he firmly espouses the political view, repeating later in the work: "In the case of the genesis of monotheism, however, we can point to no external factor other than the one we have already mentioned--that this development was linked with the establishment of closer relations between different nations and with the building up of a great empire" (23:108).

This is, however, not merely an issue of monotheism's original genesis; it is inherent in monotheism, as would be borne out by Jewish and Christian history:

 If we provisionally accept the world-empire of the
 Pharaohs as the determining cause of the emergence of
 the monotheist idea, we see that that idea, released from
 its native soil and transferred to another people, was, after
 a long period of latency, taken hold of by them, preserved
 by them as a precious possession and, in turn, itself kept
 them alive by giving them pride in being a chosen people:
 it was the religion of their primal father to which were
 attached their hopes of reward, of distinction, and finally
 of world-dominion (23:85: my emphasis).

This explains the Judeo-Christian penchant for an apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of God, but also, in a clever Freudian twist, it explains that the Christian hysteria over the "Elders of Zion" conspiracy is a defensive projection of monotheistic imperialism back onto the Jews, who in fact have long abandoned such fantasies of world dominion under the pressures of their historical subjugation. Once again, Judeophobia reveals more about the Judeophobe than the Jew in Freud's reading.

So, in the final analysis, it seems downright un-Saidian for Said to have missed these points about the "Egyptian" Moses's cultural legacy to the Jews: It brought intolerance, exclusivity, patriarchy, and imperialist fantasies to an obscure nation who would be forever changed by this dubious patrimony. Exposing this legacy as such would get little traction against Israeli policies of exclusion and expansion; if anything, it might lead simply to a "blame the Egyptians" view of Israeli aggression as the "return of the repressed" Atenic culture. If it is ironic that Freud should have foregone in this instance the Freudian conclusion that monotheism came about as an oedipal revolt, it is doubly ironic that Said missed this irony and, for once in his life, failed to catch hold of the insidious thread of imperialism and the diffuse cultural manifestations of hegemony. Said wants to lionize Freud in the name of resistance to imperialism, yet the real parable of Moses is one of a minority's subtle ingestion of an imperialist ideology. In this history of the "traveling theory" of monotheism, Said risked becoming, as he said of Foucault, merely the scribe of power.

But let us try, one last time, to take Said on his own terms: He is trying to read Freud at a certain remove, to see how his provocative ideas can be reinterpreted in the light of later history and experience. This is a signature gesture of Saidian reading, and it is quite explicit in his opening remarks, where he claims to read figures like Freud "contrapuntally, that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art" (Freud and the Non-European 24; his emphasis). So let us, for the sake of argument, agree that Freud's Moses demonstrates how a non-essentializing, heterogeneous account of national identity will be inherently better in ethical terms and will lead to practical results in the processes of peace and mutual understanding. As an academic liberal myself, I want this to be true, but I tear that there is one egregious counter-example that comes immediately to mind that refutes the pat assumption Said is making. For we have the historical precedent of a culture that was completely open about its multicultural origins and much more undogmatic in matters of faith than the monotheistic Hebrews, and yet belonged to the greatest and fiercest imperialists known to the ancient world: the Romans.

To get a taste of the Romans' surprisingly non-essentializing view of their own historical identity, one need only read the first book of Livy's monumental historical work, Ab urbe condita. There you will see the accreted myths and traditions that work together to "found" Rome over and over again in order to capitalize on as many cultural and religious associations as possible. There is the eastern saga of the hero Aeneas, a Trojan (the primal Other of the Greek world), who escapes the destruction of Troy and founds a new civilization in Italy that is an amalgam of Trojan, indigenous Latin, and Arcadian Greek elements. There is the Etruscan current that is openly cited as the source of important forms of religious observance and political culture like the "curule" chair, the twelve lictors, and the purple-bordered toga. There is the clear admission that Romulus opened Rome as an asylum to all fugitives from the neighboring peoples, which led to a huge influx of runaway slaves, criminals, and other riff-raff: yet Livy maintains "That mob was the first real addition of strength toward [Rome's] future greatness" (1.8.6). There are the complex inter-Italian rivalries that lead to conflict and resolution between Rome and its mother-city of Alba Longa, the Sabines, the Etruscans of Fidenae and Veii, and others--all of which lead to new cultural elements being introduced into the growing city-state. There is the tale of the religious "refoundation" of Rome by the Sabine Numa Pompilius, who tames the warlike rabble of Romulus with austere old Sabine institutions that will later define Roman pietas. All of this is laid out in marvelous, heterogeneous detail for the reader of Livy's book--and yet, at the same time, there is no doubt that there is a single Rome with an exceptional history, a history justified in the eyes of all not by any purity of origins, but rather by the self-evident proof of its military success. In other words, origins mean little to identity-formation in comparison with the successful wielding of power. Roman identity was often to undergo an "opening out" toward an Other (the profound Hellenization of its culture, while it was politically hegemonic over Greece, is the greatest instance of this, but not the only one), but this did not blunt the edge of its imperial resolve. (14)

Said's gospel of hybridity also fails to stand up to other historical tests, like the nineteenth-century empires he has written so much about. As with the Romans, the British consciousness of a multicultural past (Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Danish, and Norman) did nothing to mitigate their enthusiasm for imperial adventures. Such differences can be realigned or sublated by "higher" attempts at unity, like the "white man's burden" to spread Christian civilization and technological advancement around the world, as Said knew very well. Freud's social-psychological writings are very much aimed at understanding how antagonisms and animosities are rewired by the cunning of unreason, which give us a common "ego ideal" that forges the strangely compulsive basis of group solidarity. All group identifications, being based on the primary oedipal identification, inherently contain an element of aggression and ambivalence (see especially Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 18:67-143). Said, as Orientalism shows very well, is attuned to how aggression is projected outwards onto an Other, but he is less able to fathom the internal violence identity-formation can effect. But a true Freudian archaeology of a group's past inevitably exposes not the glorious co-existence of diversity, but rather the skullduggery of the group's real conflicts that have been purposefully forgotten under the pressure of historical circumstance. Said forgets, in other words, that Moses is really a murder mystery.

Said has often been chided for "essentializing the West" in order to blame it for essentializing the East. That is, he is blamed for lumping together all things Western in order to create a monolith that meets his needs for the sake of argument. I think that is not entirely fair, but here we run into an important issue: Said often fails to acknowledge the way Western imperialisms co-opt their own micro-national conflicts into larger contexts that in some way assuage the loss of autonomy by providing at least the illusion of power. After all, Napoleon, the great imperial progenitor of Orientalism in Said's analysis, was originally a Corsican nationalist. Many of the British empire's great engineers, explorers, doctors, and agents were in fact Scottish. And the example of the current world empire--the United States of America, as multicultural as any world power has ever been--ought to teach us that a consciousness of heterogeneity in origins adds up to very little in the exercise of power when vital interests, the will-to-power, and self-preservation are perceived to be at stake. Currently millions of Americans will rally around the vague notion of "freedom" that is not borne aloft by any single tribal history or old-time sense of community. The cosmopolitanism that Said seems to feel is the panacea for modern conflict can, after all, swerve into an imperialist-consumerist cosmopolitanism without much effort, as the example of the US clearly shows.

In sum, Said's attempt to refurbish a Freudian archaeology of identity into a new gospel of hybridity reads Freud considerably against the grain; even if his interpretation of Freud's Moses is taken as correct, it ultimately overvalues the impact such revelations have on the actual wielding of power. It is at best wishful thinking--profoundly wishful thinking, judging from both the historical record and current events--but therein lies the key to understanding Said's "contrapuntal" reading of Freud. Said's uncritical reading builds on a profound inner harmony with twentieth-century Jewish thought.

Freud's Moses and Said's Jewish Identity

To talk of Said's Jewish identity seems an obvious provocation, so 1 shall begin with a statement of his own that shows this was Dis provocation, not mine. In an interview with Ari Shavit for Ha'aretz Magazine in 2000, Said had responded to the question "Are you addicted to homelessness?" by citing Theodor Adorno's dictum that in the twentieth century the idea of home has been superseded. That dictum expressed essentially Said's problem with Zionism--"it attaches too much importance to home" (Power, Politics, and Culture 457). He had to explain that he did not personally feel as though he could return to Palestine, but needed rather to remain in New York, "[w]here there is no solidity of home" (457). Thus his vision of a bi-national state as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was founded on an inclusive view of territory that excluded the sense of home:

 ... I want a rich fabric of some sort, which no one can
 fully comprehend, and no one can fully own. I never
 understood the idea of this is my place, and you are
 out. I do not appreciate going back to the origin, to the
 pure. I believe the major political and intellectual disasters
 were caused by reductive movements that tried
 to simplify and purify. (457)

When Shavit remarked, "You sound very Jewish," Said then concluded the interview by saying:

 Of course. I'm the last Jewish intellectual. You don't
 know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals
 are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these
 people here in America. So I'm the last one. The only
 true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I'm a
 Jewish-Palestinian. (458)

This is, to be sure, a remarkable statement, and if one looks carefully at the intellectual genealogy Said forged for his critical humanism in his last years, there is a certain truth to it. Adorno, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Deutscher--these are figures that loom large in Said's later years, though their presence had been known in his works earlier on. Their point of view was largely diasporic, exilic, and post-nationalist (and in Deutscher's case, openly anti-Zionist). In sum, Said identifies very strongly with the marooned mandarinate of the Jewish intelligentsia.

It is not hard to see why: These figures exhibit the characteristics of the intellectual who stands within and without nations and traditions, a riven condition with which Said was so strongly sympathetic. Hence his recurrent fascination with Auerbach's Mimesis, a work written outside of Europe with the coherent vision that comes from displacement and exile, and yet an unabashedly Eurocentric work that is firmly ensconced in a fairly conservative professional discipline: Romance philology. Said was quite open about his desire to return to philology as a grounding discipline for the American humanist (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, chapter 3), but it is interesting to note that he steered his vision in his later years more toward the philology practiced by the exiled Jews Spitzer and Auerbach than that of Ernst Robert Curtius, who stayed and worked in Nazi Germany and tried in a sense to unite Europe from within by emphasizing the Latin Middle Ages. As much as Said extols the old-school erudition and learning that characterized the Jewish mandarinate, it is really the quality of their excludedness and not their exclusivity that Said puts most to the fore.

In the case of many such Jewish mandarins, their excludedness was a matter of a traumatic amputation of their nationalism. Freud was a German nationalist as a young man, but--like most Jewish members of the German nationalist movement in Austria--found himself cut out by the turn toward anti-Semitism that the movement took in the 1880s. Erich Auerbach was a Prussian of the old school and a decorated World War I veteran, but the Nazis clearly did not consider him a real German. Isaac Deutscher was a Polish nationalist as a young man, and broke with his Hassidic background in order to pursue a secular Polish education. The virtue of critical distance that Said ascribes to these men is in part the product of the accidents of history, which have anti-Semitism as their one unifying trend. But it is clear that the historical accident of excludedness is a necessity-turned-virtue in Said's eyes:

 It is especially appropriate for the contemporary humanist
 to cultivate that sense of multiple worlds and complex
 interacting traditions, that inevitable combination I've
 mentioned of belonging and detachment, reception and
 resistance. The task of the humanist is not just to occupy
 a position or place, nor simply to belong somewhere, but
 rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating
 ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone
 else's society or the society of the other. In this connection,
 it is invigorating to recall (as I have in other
 places) Isaac Deutscher's insufficiently known book of
 essays, The Non-Jewish Jew, for an account of how great
 Jewish thinkers--Spinoza, chief among them, as well as
 Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself--were in, and at the
 same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original
 tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that
 took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them
 from community in the process. Not many of us can or
 would want to aspire to such a dialectically fraught, so
 sensitively located a class of individuals, but it is illuminating
 to see in such a destiny the crystallized role of the
 American humanist, the non-humanist humanist as it
 were. (Humanism and Democratic Criticism 76-77)

What is disingenuous in his description is that these "non-Jewish Jews" renounced one part of their tradition--the Jewish part. The other part of the story, in the case of at least Freud, Auerbach, and Deutscher, is that their original nationalism was denied them, which taught them to refrain from Jewish nationalism at a later date. It is clear that this forms the basis of Said's admiration for Deutscher, who says in the book of essays that Said so admires: "To my mind it is just another Jewish tragedy that the world has driven the Jew to seek safety in a nation-state in the middle of this century when the nation-state is falling into decay" (Deutscher 113).

Said also shares with Deutscher the notion that the intellectual's role is to unsettle the settled orthodoxies and idees recues of the time, but here again Said extracts this role away from the context of the unique instance of the Jewish tragedy as Deutscher states it. For Deutscher, the nation-state is to blame for the inevitable recurrence of chauvinism, racism, and, especially, anti-Semitism:

 That is why I think that the role of the intellectuals--Jews
 and non-Jews alike--of those who are aware of the
 depth of the Jewish tragedy and of the menace of its
 recurrence, is to remain eternal protesters: to maintain
 the opposition to the powers that be, to militate against
 the taboos and conventions, to struggle for a society in
 which nationalism and racialism will at last lose their
 hold on the human mind. I know that this is no easy way
 out; it may be distressing and hurtful; and for those who
 take it there can be no precise formulation of a set of precepts
 for action. But if we do not remain protesters, we
 shall be moving within a vicious and pernicious circle, a
 suicidal circle. (Deutscher 59)

Said clearly wants to lift this critical stance to a new level, to make all intellectuals aspire to the condition of being Socratic gadflies to the common consensus. It requires the voluntary renunciation of one's national and religious affiliations, and he is aware this is a very tall order. It is an attempt to imagine humanism without the human concern for god and country, which may be why Said resorts to calling his ideal practitioner, rather awkwardly, the "non-humanist humanist." It is also very telling that elsewhere, namely in Culture and Imperialism, this process of voluntary renunciation is actually stated in psychoanalytic terms, again underscoring his affinity with Freud. Using a quotation by Hugo of St. Victor (much loved by Erich Auerbach, so again we have the usual suspects), Said makes the point that one achieves this independence and detachment by "working through attachments, not rejecting them" (Culture and Imperialism 336; his emphasis). Thus Said's critical stance is not only post-nationalist, it is also post-therapeutic, predicated on the necessary working through of traumatic loss.

Said had obvious existential reasons for such a position. It is clear from his extraordinary memoir Out of Place that he interpreted his personal life as a condition of never belonging. As a Palestinian Christian growing up in Egypt, he was caught between the alienating colonialist mentality of his English school masters, the loss of his chthonic Palestinian connections, and the rise of Arab nationalism that eventually led to the further loss of his father's prosperous business in Egypt. At the same time, however, his university studies clearly directed him toward a kind of universalism envisioned along very European lines, a humanistic universalism greatly influenced and expanded by his highly privileged position as a tenured professor at Columbia University in New York, the city pat excellence of immigrants and exiles. Such a personal trajectory certainly explains his tendency to raise the general "transcendental homelessness" of modernity to a kind of necessary qualification for the intellectual. It is this personal connection--this worldly connection, he would say--that makes him so prone to adopt the thinking of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals, whose ragged geographical trajectories are so famously a part of their life-stories and projects.

So in the case of Adomo's sense of homelessness, Deutscher's paradoxical, non-identical identity, Spitzer and Auerbach's worldly philology, and Freud's self-undermining excavations and therapeutic "working through," we see recurrent instances in Said's work of what he termed "traveling theory," more profoundly reinforced by the fact that these were all traveling theorists. Traveling theory refers to a theory divorced from its original real-life moment of articulation and applied to a later time and place, for better or for worse (see The World, the Text, and the Critic, chapter 10 and Reflections oil Exile, chapter 37). Said seems to have taken the notion far more positively upon reconsideration in "Traveling Theory Reconsidered," which culminates in a paragraph that could quite adequately describe his own affiliation with these wandering Jewish intellectuals:

 To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not
 adequate. There is in particular an intellectual, and
 perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation
 in the deepest and most interesting sense of the
 word. As a way of getting seriously past the weightlessness
 of one theory after another, the remorseless
 indignations of orthodoxy, and the expressions of tired
 advocacy to which we are often submitted, the exercise
 involved in figuring out where the theory went and
 how in getting there its fiery core was reignited is
 invigorating--it is also another voyage, one that is
 central to intellectual life in the late twentieth century.
 (Reflections on Exile 452; his emphasis)

It would be normal in psychoanalytic terms to talk of Said's "identification" with the Jewish intellectuals of the German diaspora, but it seems clear that he moves this further along from an unconscious mimetic impulse to being a conscious, intellectual alignment--an affiliation, as he puts it. Affiliation, we might say, would be the intellectual's way of working through identification towards a more lucid, self-aware, and voluntary relationship with the past. Affiliation in a sense ratifies identification.

But in the case of Freud, Said's identification was much more pronounced by the circumstances surrounding the text of Freud and the Non-European itself, since the venue for the lecture had effectively been "exiled" from Vienna to London, a historical irony certainly not lost on Said himself ("Freud, Zionism, and Vienna" n. pag.). This controversy came in the wake of Said's thorough self-excavation in writing Out of Place, a work which shows considerable psychoanalytic attention to the oedipal currents of his childhood and that doubtless moved him closer in sympathy to Freud. The fact that both his memoir and Freud and the Non-European were composed while Said was undergoing cancer treatment also suggests a strong identification with Freud, who suffered dreadfully from a cancer of the mouth in the last decade of his life.

So let us return to the specific relevance of Freud in this scheme. We have seen how Said turns Freud's account of monotheistic exclusivity into a parable of inclusivity, and it should be clear why such a notion is projected unto the work of an exiled Jewish thinker: excludedness leads to inclusive impulses, in Said's way of thinking, the ability to see things Otherwise. What appealed to Said in the work of Freud, particularly in reference to ancient cultures, was "the universalism of his vision and the humane scope of his work," as well as its "anti-provincialism" ("Freud, Zionism, and Vienna" n. pag.). In a sense, Said has a point. Unlike his contemporary Robert Eisler, Freud was not interested in reclaiming the Jewishness of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Eisler, a fellow Austrian and later fellow exile in England, went to enormous lengths in his work on Jesus to restore the Christian savior to the status of Jewish prophet, i.e., to understand him exclusively in Jewish terms in defiance of Christian tradition (Jesous Basileus ou basileusas, 1929-1930). (15) Though he admired Eisler's work, Freud took the more difficult step of undermining Jewish tradition by reconstructing Moses as non-Jewish, as Said rightly emphasizes. By appearing to refuse any safe ground in this respect, Freud obviously appeals to Said's sense of transcendental homelessness, of the need to "work through" any primary allegiance to an essentialist tradition.

More importantly to Said, Freud fulfils very well in Moses the function of the intellectual as a provider of counter-narratives, since the only thing beyond questioning is his critical process--psychoanalysis--itself. As Said says in a book written around the same time as Freud and the Non-European, "The intellectual's role is to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity and mission" (Humanism and Democratic" Criticism 141). Or again in the same work, "The intellectual is perhaps a kind of countermemory, with its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep" (142). Though Said knows well that Freud's Moses was not written to refute the Zionists, at the same time, Said can capitalize on the fact that Freud was perfectly aware he was going to upset Jews most of all by writing it. In this sense, Said's temptation to deploy Moses against the Israelis is a quite understandable instance of traveling theory, a desire to reignite the fiery core of that work. However, while Said correctly identifies Freud's anti-foundationalist argument, he rather tellingly misses the consequences of Freud's stress on monotheistic exclusivity.

Indeed, Said does not appreciate fully enough the odd conclusion that Freud draws from his excavations: There is an irrational vet compelling nature to group identity that has deep and inalienable historical roots. If initially Moses was untimely for its insensitivity to the imperiled Jews, it is untimely for Said's purposes as well because of the peculiar solidarity it expresses--against all reason, it often seems--with the Jews. Moshe Gresser sees this as the real nature of Freud's turn to Moses, which "embodies Freud's chosen embrace of his Jewishness, namely, the status of being chosen. It is a Jewishness of chthonic commitment, choosing to accept a fanatical belonging to one's people independently of and even in opposition to rational assent. That is, Freud chooses to be chosen" (246). Gresser characterizes Freud's position, then, not as being a "non-Jewish Jew," but rather as having a "dual allegiance" to Jewry and humanity at large. We might wonder if this also better describes Said, whose passionate commitment to the Palestinian cause would make us doubt that he would be truly comfortable being termed a non-Palestinian Palestinian.

The significance of Freud's irrational allegiance to the Jews is further brought out in Jacqueline Rose's response to Said, which is published in the same volume. She reminds Said that in his 1930-preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud had openly defined himself as an atheist ignorant of Hebrew, and as unable to share in Jewish nationalist ideals. Yet he also describes himself as one "who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature" (qtd. in Rose 70). Freud stresses that, although he has abandoned all the common characteristics of Jews, he retains of Jewishness "[a] great deal, and probably its very essence" (qtd. in Freud and the Non-European 70-71). So Freud himself was quite essentialist about his own identity, though just what is left for him to espouse as Jewish is obviously an enigma. This suggests, as Rose rightly points out, that "the fixity of identity--for Freud, for any of us--is something from which it is very hard to escape, harder than Said, for wholly admirable motives, wants it to be" (Rose 74). The fixity is a result of historical circumstance, historical trauma more specifically, and trauma engenders unfreedom, that is, it triggers the compulsion to repeat, "and causes identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith. Are we at risk of idealizing the flaws and fissures of identity?" (Rose 76). Said, in Rose's view, makes Freud preach the gospel of hybridity prematurely, not just for Freud himself, who clearly did not resolve his essentialist allegiance to Jewish identity, but for most of us as well.

in the final analysis, Said's attraction to the anti-foundationalist Jewish intellectual tradition shows how much he himself is not beyond identities or traditions. He is firmly ensconced in the historical specificity of secular Jewish thought and experience, which he tries to universalize in a manner that risks becoming its own trap, as his invocation of hybridity as a kind of gospel suggests. (16) His worldly position in New York City--the one place outside of Israel where secular Jewish thought might be considered most completely at home--underscores this specificity. Said saw New York as a place where he was "[on] a constantly shifting ground, where relationships are not inherited, but created. Where there is no solidity of home" (Power, Politics, and Culture 457). Homeless he may have felt, but he was very centrally decentered in the Big Apple, able to pronounce on the precariousness of exile urbi et orbi with far greater celebrity than would have been possible from a much more obscure professorship at Bit Zeit. Ivy League tenure may not be the equivalent of the solidity of home, but it certainly represents a considerable safety net. Said very openly denied himself the status of refugee, but did affiliate himself with the status of exile. But the Jews whose work forms the foundation of his later humanism were refugees, and for that reason Said's humanism will have to be defended in the future from accusations of being merely a salaried alienation.

in the end, there is greater truth in his earlier admission of being specifically a Jewish Palestinian than in the generic notion of being an American humanist (for as an American, I can attest that there is such a thing as the depressing solidity of home over here). It was after all the secular Jewish tradition that showed him how to "work through" the loss of a physical connection to his Palestinian homeland (even though the Israeli state brought this situation about), and to forego the facile consolations of chthonic nationalism without weakening in his demands for justice or wavering in his commitment to history. His adoption of Moses even suggests a very Jewish hermeneutics. Freud functions for Said like an old Hebrew nabi, a prophet whose vision excoriates the current state of things in Israel and points toward the things to come; his is a voice in the wilderness whose truth only now becomes apparent as the blank pages of history are filled. I doubt Said would have found problematic the exposure of his Jewish affiliations, since it merely illustrates from a different perspective a point he eloquently argued on many occasions: "... the truth is that Jewish and Palestinian suffering exist in and belong to the same history: the task of interpretation is to acknowledge that link, not to separate them into separate and unconnected spheres" (Reflections on Exile 435).

Works Cited

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Armstrong, Richard. A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005.

Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1997.

--. Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Agypten, Israel, und Europa. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000.

--. Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, oder der Preis des Monotheismus. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003.

Bernstein, Richard. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. NY: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Oxford UP, 1968.

Eisler, Robert. Jesous Basileus ou basileusas: Die messianische Unabhangigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Taufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechten nach der neuerschlossenen eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen. 2 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1929-1930.

Freud, Ernst, ed. Letters of Sigmund Freud. 1960. Trans. Tania and James Stern. NY: Dover Publications, 1992.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth P, 1953-1974.

Gresser, Moshe. Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew. Albany, NY: State U of NY P, 1994.

Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. Freuds Moses-Studie als Tagtraum. 1990. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1994.

Osman, Ahmed. Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus. 1990. Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2002.

Paul, Robert. Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud's Myth. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

Rank, Otto. Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage. Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1912.

--. "Homer: Psychologische Beitrage zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Volksepos." Imago 5 (1917): 133-69, 372-93.

--. Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung. Leipzig: Internationale psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1919.

--. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.

Rice, Emanuel. Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. Albany, NY: State U of NY P, 1990.

Rose, Jazqueline. "Response to Edward Said." Edward Said. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003. 63-79.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. NY: Vintage Books, 1979.

--. Beginnings: Intention and Method. 1975. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

--. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983.

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Smith, Dinitia. "A Stone's Throw is a Freudian Slip." New York Times (March 10, 2001): B9, B11.

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Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Notes

(1) The circumstances behind the lecture are important to note. Said had been invited by the Freud Society of Vienna to give the annual Freud lecture for May 2001, but controversy surrounding a photograph of him tossing a stone in celebration of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon led the Freud Society to cancel the invitation (liar the New York Times' coverage, see Dinitia Smith; and for Said's own commentary, see "Freud. Zionism, and Vienna"). Said clearly saw the parallel between Freud's exile and the "exile" of his lecture: "Freud was hounded out of Vienna because he was a Jew.... Now I am hounded out because I'm a Palestinian" (qtd. in Smith B9). The Freud Museum in London then invited Said to give his lecture there, where it took place without incident.

(2) Said draws specifically from Isaac Deutscher's essays in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, which I discuss below.

(3) We can see an almost annual arrival of important Moses studies in the 1990s: Rice in 1990, Yerushalmi in 1991, Grubrich-Simitis in 1994, Derrida in 1995, Paul in 1996, Assmann in 1997, and Bernstein in 1998.

(4) This point is brought up again by Moshe Gresser at some length (chapter 5).

(5) See Moses the Egyptian (1997); this book stimulated considerable controversy, as it seemed to be a condemnation of monotheism for being intolerant and, in the eyes of some reviewers, seemed to point toward a need to return to polytheistic points of view. Gravest of all was the accusation that the book is implicitly anti-Semitic. To his great credit, Jan Assmann published several critical reviews as an appendix to a work in which he spells out at greater length his views in response to these criticisms; see Die Mosaische Unterscheidung (2003).

(6) A notable exception is Ahmed Osman, who continues to argue for the validity of Freud's identification of Moses as an Egyptian, and goes so far as to identify him with Akhenaten himself (2002). Jan Assmann does see a connection between Moses and Akhenaten, but it is entirely different: The cultural memory of Akhenaten's monotheistic revolution becomes later confused with the memory of the Hyksos invasion and the Jews. Moses is thus identified with a "dislocated memory of Akhenaten" in Manetho's account of a certain Osarsiph (Moses the Egyptian, chapter 2).

(7) The first public mention of the analogy between personal and cultural memory occurs in 1907 in material added to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (6:148).

(8) See Rank's Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage, "Homer: Psychologische Beitrage zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Volksepos," Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung, and the anthology in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings.

(9) Freud 23:70-72. The Rankian text in question is his study of Homeric epic (1917).

(10) There has been a great deal of cleverness exerted to free Freud of the charge that he is a staunch believer in inherited memory and acquired characteristics. The evidence, however, shows clearly that Freud did indeed hold these views. In 1934, Joseph Wortis challenged Freud about the validity of Lamarckism in the eyes of most biologists of the day, to which Freud replied: "But we can't bother with the biologists.... We have our own science." When Wortis objected that sciences ought not to be inconsistent with each other, Freud again retorted: "We must go our own way" (Wortis 84).

(11) Freud stresses throughout the essential alterity of Akhenaten's monotheism to Egyptian culture, particularly when he describes the syncretism of Christianity, which renounced many elements of monotheism and "adapted itself in many details to the rituals of other Mediterranean peoples. It was as though Egypt was taking vengeance once more on the heirs of Akhenaten" (23:136).

(12) I am grateful to Mr. Lance Hirsch for pointing this out to me.

(13) Though he avoids this simplistic derivation of monotheism from imperialism, Jan Assmann devotes considerable attention to the "political theology" behind the figure of Moses in Herrschaft und Heil (part 4); it is again regrettable that Said was unable to incorporate Assmann's erudition and approach into his reading.

(14) Indeed, future studies of Said's work might well probe the issues of militarism and military psychology in relation to imperialism, which he seems less able to address in his discursive approach beyond the matter of the instrumental knowledge generated by military invasions. Here, again, a focus on Rome would be a good point of departure.

(15) For a more detailed comparison of Freud and Eisler. see Armstrong, chapter 9.

(16) In this regard, we have to see Homi Bhabha's more complex views of hybridity as an essential extension of Said's work.