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religion which was imposed on them; but they have displaced the grudge on the source from which Christianity reached them. The fact that the Gospels tell a story which is set among Jews, and in fact deals only with Jews, has made this displacement easy for them. Their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians, and we need not be surprised that in the German National Socialist revolution this intimate relation between the two monotheistic religions finds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of both of them.156 Freud’s writing here was uncannily like that of the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was writing on the same subject at the same time. In his 1939 book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, Maritain wrote that “hatred of the Jews and hatred of Christians spring from a common source.”151 Maritain’s book can still be read with much profit,158 for it has remained fresh and amazingly insightful. But the interesting point is that Freud said on the “Jewish question” exactly what Maritain said: It is as if he were speaking, like Maritain, from within the logic of the Christian position, and not as a Jewish “outsider.” Throughout Moses and Monotheism, for all its exasperating hypotheses and for all its fiction-like characters, Freud’s treatment of Christianity was often sympathetic.159 And these were Freud’s provocative closing words: Only a portion of the Jewish people accepted the new doctrine [Christianity]. Those who refused to are still called Jews today…. They were obliged to hear the new religious community…reproach them with having murdered God. In full, this reproach would run as follows: “They will not accept it as true that they murdered God, whereas we admit it and have been cleansed of that guilt.”… A special enquiry would be called for to discover why it has been impossible for the Jews to join in this forward step….160 That his analysis led him to the conclusion that Christianity constituted an advance over Judaism is hardly what one would have expected, given Freud’s personal situation, the historical context, and the standard version of Freud’s beliefs.161 ConclusionIt is now time to put particular examples of evidence for this book’s thesis aside, and reflect on the general structure of what has been presented in si the preceding chapters. First, I would like to officially propose the hypothesis—or, in formal, psychoanalytic terms, a “construction”—that Freud’s relation to Christianity was one of intense, often unconscious ambivalence. Now this term “construction,” initially introduced by Freud in 1937,162 refers to a hypothesis or proposition about a person’s behavior that attempts to capture both the broad structure and many of |