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he is unable to resist using the skin often—and he dies one year later. Although there are no significant Christian elements in the story, apparently the theme of some kind of pact with a Devil-figure still fascinates Freud even in his last weeks, when his life was shrinking like the skin in the novel.150
During Freud’s last 10-12 years, he had a rather extensive correspondence with Arnold Zweig, as mentioned above. This writer and intellectual knew Freud and his thought rather well by the time when, in 1930, he wrote Freud that “analysis has reversed all values, it has conquered Christianity, disclosed the Antichrist, and liberated the spirit of resurgent life from the ascetic ideal.”151 At least part of Freud apparently accepted Zweig’s interpretation; he certainly is not on record as rejecting it, something he presumably would have done if he had felt Zweig’s remarks were seriously off the mark. Roazen, to whose book I owe the preceding observation, also points out that Freud specifically criticized Christianity because for him “not all men are worthy of love.”152 It was, however, in Freud’s last major (and very controversial) work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), that he produced some of his most unequivocally pro-Christian remarks. The main thesis of the book was that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian. Not only was Moses not a Jew, but, according to Freud, the Jews murdered Moses. Now Freud knew very well that this claim would be deeply disturbing to religious Jews: “[I]t is only Jewry and not Christianity which has reason to be offended by its conclusions.”153 This interpretation of Moses constituted, therefore, an attack on the Jewish religion.154 We are, of course, setting aside the whole issue of whether Freud was correct in his views. The best authorities on the subject, then as now, have generally agreed that the objective evidence for Freud’s position is rather weak and at times downright flimsy. Freud himself initially called this book a “novel.”155 At any rate, what we are interested in here is Freud’s psychology. One of the interesting pro-Christian aspects of Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s interpretation of anti-Semitism. It might be expected that this elderly Jew—supposedly a total skeptic, thrown out of his homeland during an unprecedented period of hatred expressed against the Jews, dying painfully of cancer—would express bitter criticism of the “Christian” culture that had produced the monstrous phenomenon of Naziism. On the contrary, Freud interpreted anti-Semitism as the expression of a culture that has never really been Christianized: [W]e must not forget that all those peoples who excel today in their hatred of Jews became Christians only in late historic times, often driven to it by bloody coercion. It might be said that they are all “misbaptized.” They have been left, under a thin veneer of Christianity, what their ancestors were, who worshipped a barbarous polytheism. They have not got over the grudge against the new |