Moses the Egyptian

The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism

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by Jan Assmann

Harvard University Press

Due/Published October 1998, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0674587391

Defining and practicing the study of historical memory, Jan Assmann takes as his subject the figure of Moses, a figure, he says, not of history but of memory. Standing at the foundation of monotheism, Moses becomes the locus through which Assmann examines the ways in which factual and fictional events and characters are stored in religious beliefs and transformed in their philosophical justification, literary reinterpretation, philological restitution (or falsification), and psychoanalytic demystification. He traces the monotheism of Moses to its Egyptian source and thereby finds the beginning of a cycle in which every "counter religion," by establishing itself as truth, denounced all others as false. Assmann reconstructs this cycle as a pattern of historical abuse, and tracks its permutations from ancient sources, through Renaissance debates over the basis of religion to Freud's Moses and Monotheism. While a study of historical memory, it is also a lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.

Review

In his study of European attitudes towards the figure of Moses, Jan Assmann argues that he was not the first leader of a monotheistic religion. The Egyptian king Akhenaten (1360-1340 B.C.E.) led a brief monotheistic revolution that ultimately failed and has ceased to have much, if any, lasting imprint upon the historical memory of the West. However, it is not the facts that Assmann wants to quibble about but how the West has chosen to remember and symbolize Moses and Egypt. On the one hand, Egypt as seen through Moses the Hebrew established the conception of Egypt of as a wicked place of idolators. This notion forever created the cycle of the "counter-religion" in Western history in which one religion's belief system is "truth" and all others are false. The "Mosaic distinction" has been countered by other views of Moses, one which creates a more positive symbolic meaning for Egypt. More specifically, many Enlightenment writers, Spinoza being most notable, deconstructed the "Mosaic distinction," viewing Egypt and Moses in a more positive light, exemplifying the possibility for cultural translations rather than violent distinction. Assmann does an excellent job of exploring a wide range of writers of Egypt including: Classical writers, Renaissance scholars, Spinoza, Freud, and others. Through his study of Egypt in Western memory, Assmann provides a superb investigation of questions concerning cultural identity, the vicissitudes of historical memory, and the history of Anti-Semitism