The Moses Complex in Modern Jewish Literature

Judaism, Summer, 2002 by Arnold J. Band

THE PUBLICATION OF JAN ASSMANN'S MOSES THE EGYPTIAN (1997) has provided the grounds for a revitalization of the study of images of Moses in subsequent culture and, more specifically, the images of Moses in Modern Jewish Literature. (1) The book's subtitle, The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, encapsulates Assmann's two major concerns: first, how the memory of Egypt has affected western monotheism and much of western culture; second, the theoretical relationship between history and memory, or, more precisely, the memory of history, formulated by Assmann in a coinage of his own: Mnemohistory. Energizing his investigation is another, more latent topic: the history of antisemitism which Assmann, a German reared in post-Nazi Germany, struggles to understand.

As an Egyptologist, Assmann regards the historical memory of Moses, for which we have no (extra-Biblical) evidence, as a reflex of the revolutionary Amarna period and more specifically, the seminal but later suppressed figure of Akhenaten. He posits as "the Mosaic distinction" the eradication of pagan religion by the monotheistic impulse which regards idolatry as a form of madness, the past that must be rejected. In the map of memory, a legacy of the Bible to western civilization, Israel and Egypt are irreconcilable enemies. Only with Renaissance interest in Hermeticism, and subsequent scholarly developments of the eighteenth century crowned by post-Napoleonic philological investigations by Champollion and others, was the historical Egypt reconstructed. The history of Egypt is thus counterpoised to the Biblical memory of Egypt. Assmann argues that the discovery of historical Egyptian truths, i.e., the historical reality of ancient Egypt, deconstructs "the Mosaic distinction." In applying what he calls Mnemohi story, he analyzes the mythical elements in tradition and discovers their hidden agenda. For him, Moses the Egyptian rather than Moses the Hebrew, is the mediating figure of positive importance for humankind.

Assmann's argument is, of course, far more complicated than this, but what I have presented in brief should suffice as the background to our meditations on the image of Moses presented by several distinctive and seminal figures in modem Jewish history. Out of a wide array of possible imaginings of Moses, I have picked four, clustered in two pairs of close contemporaries. All are totally different one from the other and in ensemble, present the wide arc of varieties of Jewish attitudes and ideologies in the modern period. I use the image of Moses as a touchstone to assess the perspectives and agenda of the writers who imagine Moses. The career of Moses is inextricably bound to two of the seminal memory events in Jewish history: the Exodus from Egypt and the Revelation at Sinai; one cannot conceive of Jewish history as received and taught without them. The writers who interest me sense this and, in one way or another, identify with Moses: they see themselves as the Moses of their generation. This self-imagining as Moses I call "the Moses Complex," and though this term echoes Freud, I do not regard the Moses complex as an inhibiting yet necessary stage in the development of humanity like the Oedipus complex, but rather as an incentive for certain individuals to imagine their place in the history of the Jewish people.

The first pair of writers are two close contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth century, both living on the threshold of modernity, but each almost unknown outside the Jewish world even though they exerted a powerful influence on subsequent generations, each in his own way. They are, first, the leading maskil (enlightener) Naftali Hertz Wessely (1725-1805) who lived in the northern trading cities: Hamburg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin and, second, the Hasidic mystic, Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1810), who spent most of his days, except for a journey to Palestine in 1798-99, in relative small market towns in the Ukraine. The second pair are two imposing personalities both born in the same year, 1856: the founder of cultural Zionism, Asher Ginzburg (Ahad HaAm) (1856-1921) and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1940). The analysis of the images of Moses that obsessed these four figures produces a rich spectrum of perspectives on Jewish cultural life over the past two centuries. I would argu e, finally, that one cannot truly understand the complexity of ideological positions in contemporary Israel without a consideration of the tendencies reflected in these four writers.

Naftali Hertz Wessely and Moses

Wessely, though punctiliously pious and observant in all respects, a man who devoted most of his intellectual efforts to Biblical exegesis in one form or another, became one of the most influential representatives of enlightenment in the Jewish world. Though personally close to Moses Mendelssohn during the first ten years of his long residence in Berlin (1774-1804), and though he wrote the third volume of Mendelssohn's modern commentary, the Bi'ur, Wessely was always very hesitant about full participation in the burgeoning drive to Enlightenment as it found expression in the periodical HaMeassef. (2) And yet, despite his basic conservatism, he earned a reputation as a pioneer in the creation of modern Hebrew literature and Jewish education because of several of his publications, primarily the six-volume epic poem on the life of Moses, entitled Shire Tiferet (Songs of Glory) (1789-1802). Before turning to his poem on Moses, it is important to characterize the overall tendency of several of his other publicatio ns since they fill out a comprehensive picture of his inherent literary inclinations, for, as we shall see, Wessely has a peculiarly hybrid intellect; he was both cautiously conservative, yet boldly innovative at the same time.