Moses & Monotheism: The Appeal of Foreign Religions

Christianity has become so embedded in the West that we tend to forget that it too came from abroad. In fact, religions thriving outside the country of their origin is not an anomaly, its the norm. Christianity emerged in the Levant and established a capital in Rome. Islam originated in Arabia and had capitals in Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. Even Judaism, which is so inextricably tied to Israel and Judea, originated elsewhere. Not only was Abraham originally from Mesopotamia, but, according to Freud’s controversial thesis in Moses and Monotheism, the founder of the Jewish religion was not a Jew born in Egypt, but an Egyptian noble and follower of Akhenaten who abandoned Egypt’s polytheistic tradition in favour of the monotheistic Atenism (which was the state religion for twenty years until it was overthrown by Pharaohs after Akhenaten’s death).

According to Freud, the myth of the baby in the basket (which is not unique to Judaism) is used to reclaim Moses as a Jew:

It is that the first family, the one from which the babe is exposed to danger, is in all comparable cases the fictitious one; the second family, however, by which the hero is adopted and in which he…