Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

by Isabella Hammad

Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism posits that Moses, the Hebrew prophet, was actually Egyptian, and that “his ideas about a single God are derived entirely from the Egyptian Pharaoh,” Said explains. For Said, this signals Freud’s prevailing Eurocentrism giving way to a model of otherness at the root of Jewishness. He suggests that the work expresses, perhaps even unconsciously, Freud’s reaction to Zionism and his refusal to submit to the ethnonationalism of Zionist ideology. This secret Egyptianness at the root of the Jewish religion, he argues, has been collectively repressed in the establishment of the Israeli state as an essentially European project in the Middle East. Freud’s is a search for origins that destabilizes, he argues, an alternative archaeology to the Zionist archaeology that is used to legitimize the state-building project. Through looking at this late work of Freud’s, Said dismantles the binaries he was occasionally accused of reifying, pointing to the position of a non-European non-Jew—“the great stranger”—at the heart of the Jewish story.