238 Ideals in the Modern World
We were once a courageous people, Freud said: once, but alas,
no longer. The time was the late 1930s when the Nazis were perse-
cuting the Jews in Vienna and Germany and Freud was about to
publish his book, Moses and Mono the ism. The book would be con-
troversial, and Freud knew it. In it, he speculates that Moses was
not a Jew but an Egyptian. To this he adds the possibility that Moses
was killed by the Jews. His crime? Much like the crime of the cre-
ator of psychoanalysis: asking people to believe in a supersensory
realm of being. For Moses it is the invisible Yahweh that the Jews
must believe in rather than Moloch and the Golden Calf. For Freud
the invisible world is the one composed by the psyche and the trinity
of I, Over- I, and It.
Freud says that by and large the Jews have lost their courage— but
that he has not. He will publish the book. The Jewish bravery he is
thinking of is not bravery of an intellectual sort, however. It is the
courage the Jews showed when, shortly after the death of Jesus,
they rebelled not once but twice against their Roman overlords.
The account provided by Josephus, which is not entirely reliable,
chronicles infi ghting and competition among the vari ous competing
Jewish factions, but some ferocious bravery as well. Finally Vespa-
sian and his son Titus were compelled to leave Rome with some
of its best legions to put down the rebellion. The Romans ruined
the city, killed and enslaved the re sis tance, and destroyed the
Temple. On the Arch of Titus in Rome one sees Roman troops
carry ing the sacred Menorah, their booty and sign of victory over
the brave and often reckless Jewish rebels.
Freud may have been moved by Jewish courage two thousand
years before his own life, but he is not moved by martial courage in
the pre sent. Consider again Freud’s topography of the inner life. It
is a commonplace to say that Freud relies on the map of the spirit
that Plato drew, and in this commonplace there is some truth. Both
maps are tripartite: both men believe that the human spirit is divided