MOSES THE EGYPTIAN Moses the Egyptian THE MEMORY OF EGYPT IN WESTERN MONOTHEISM JanAssmann HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND This book has been digitally reprinted. The content remains identical to tha t of previous printings. Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1998 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian, the memory of Egypt in western monotheism / Jan Assmann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-58738-3 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-58739-1 (pbk.) 1. Moses (Biblical leader) 2. Egypt-Religion. 3. Monotheism-History of doctrines. 1. Title. BS580. M6A79 1997 222'.1 'On-dc21 96-51600 To Moshe Barasch Contents ~------- Preface lX 1 Mnemohistory and the Construction of Egypt 1 2 Suppressed History, Repressed Memory: Moses and Akhenaten 23 3 Before the Law: John Spencer as Egyptologist 55 4 The Moses Discourse in thc Eighteenth Century 91 5 Sigmund Freud: The Return of the Repressed 144 6 Conceiving the One in Ancient Egyptian Traditions 168 7 Abolishing the Mosaic Distinction: Religious Antagonism and Its Overcoming 208 Notes 219 Index 267 Illustrations l. Beethoven's Deist manifesto. From A. F. Schindler, The Life of Beethoven, trans. and ed. 1. Moscheles (1841). 123 2. Frontispiece to Andreas von Segner, Einleitung in die Naturlehre (Gottingen, 1770). 130 3. Dedication to Goethe, with an engraving by Bertel Thorwaldsen, in Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Geographic der Pflanzen (1806). 131 4. Frontispiece to Gerhard Blasius, Anatome Animalium (1681). 132 5. Frontispiece to]. J. Kunkelius, Der Curieusen Kunst und Werck-Schul Erster und Anderer Theil (Nuremberg, 1705). 133 6. Henry Fuseli, frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem (Brunswick: L. Lucius, 1808). 135 Preface -------~ In the introduction to his book Freud's Moses (1991), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi drew a line starting with Freud and leading backrward via Friedrich Schiller and John Spencer to Strabo, Manetho, Apion, and Celsus which he suggests would be interesting to explore "had we but world enough and time." In Monotheismus und Kosmotheismus (1993), I started from the opposite end with Akhenaten and his religious revolu tion and sketched out the story of Moses' reception via Manetho, Strabo, Apion, and Tacitus up to Schiller and Sigmund Freud-only to break off with a similar feeling of resignation. But then, quite unexpect edly, I was given world enough and time in the form of an invitation to spend a year (1994-95) in California, and I used it for a preliminary exploration of this vast terrain between Akhenaten and Freud. I am grateful to the]. Paul Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities and especially to its director, Salvatore Settis, for the invitation, for the particularly fruitful atmosphere of cooperation and dialogue which he created, and for several stimulating discussions. I thank those who participated in the continuing discussions on "mem ory" (the topic for that year), especially Julia Annas, Mary Carruthers, Francois Hartog, Christian Jacob, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Krzysztof Pomian, Jacques Revel, Michael Roth, Carlo Severi, and also Aleida Assmann and Carl E. Schorske, with whom I had the chance to share some of the problems and concepts this book is about and who contrib uted many stimulating suggestions. I feel particularly indebted to my immediate office-neighbors at the center: to Carlo Ginzburg, whose seminars on "enstrangement" proved an inexhaustible source of infor mation and stimulation and whose critical interest in my work forced