306
PA Il..TISAN IUVIEW
a single vision of history as essentially :1 story of remembering and for–
getting. . analogous to Freud's conception of the life history of an
individual. What has been overlooked is how strangely analogous it is
also to the biblical conception of history, where the continual oscilla–
tion of memory and forgetting is a major theme through all narratives
of historical events. .. The primary biblical 111lper:1tive is the
COIll–
mand
to
remember, not to forget."
The Hebrew Bible, Yerushalmi reminds us and, by extension, Freud,
/lever
represses memories of sillS and transgressions, but reminds the reader
of them repeatedly. Thus, had the Jews actually killed Moses, this deed
would have been both the worst of their transgressions and also the most
written about, so that they would
/lel'er
be allowed to forget or repress it.
Rice argues that in
Moses a/ld MO/lothcis/lI,
the last leg of his "long
journey home," Freud "set out
to
uncover a murder. Though the case is
pinned on a rebellious horde of Hebrews, there is no question that at
some level Freud understood he was himself the murdered, also the vic–
tim, also the accuser, also the judge." Yerushalmi similarly views Freud's
complex Jewish identity as fraught, if not befuddled, with contradictions,
as something that haunted him throughout his life, never resolved, to the
exasperation of both Freud and his biogr3phcrs. The questions raised
by
Rice and Yerush31mi are important ones, setting astir ripples that will un–
doubtedly provoke a continuing debate about the curious mirroring of
Freud's willed forgetting of his Jewish P3st and his projected doubling of
that amnesia onto his Jewish forefathers.
SUSAN MIRON
