Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Schama's new book is a single-volume thing called THE STORY OF THE JEWS: FINDING THE WORDS 1000 BC - 1492 AD. Wow. Not quite 2,500 years. And about 500 pages, so if we round off both numbers a bit we get a coverage of five years per page. I suppose someone tried to talk Schama out of ending his book with the circumstances of the Jews in the reconquered Spain of 1492. Someone must have tried, but couldn't 'torquemada' any such thing. I've always been fascinated by really sweeping books like this, especially the single volume type, because multi-volume sets seem like cheating. Digging into a small patch, writing a micro-history and finding it as complicated as, well, 2,500 years in the history of Jews, is another kind of achievement, and its value has come to me only more recently, as I've appreciated the fractal nature of historical fact. You can write history as fascinating working at the five-minutes-a-page scale.

May 6th was the 158th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. In commemoration thereof, here is a lengthy and fascinating quotation from Freud's Moses , a book written by a professor of Jewish History, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and published in 1993. The bit I'm about to quote is simply Yerushalmi's summary of Freud's views on Moses, without at this point any editorial comment by Yerushalmi (or by me). It is, I think, a remarkable example of a commentator who did a better job of describing Freud's views on this point than Freud himself ever managed. Monotheism is not of Jewish origin but an Egyptian discovery.  The pharaoh Amenhotep IV established it as his state religion in the form of an exclusive worship of the sun-power, or Aton, thereafter calling himself Ikhnaton.  The Aton religion ... was characterized by the exclusive belief in one God, the rejection of anthropomorphism, magic, and sorcery, and the absolute denial of an afterlife.  Upon Ikhnato...