Torah and / as Tradition

Andrew Barnaby

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Chapter 3 Torah and / as Tradition

In: The Freudian Exodus: Psychoanalysis and the Mosaic Legacy

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Andrew Barnaby

Andrew Barnaby
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 128–156

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004701663_007

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Abstract

Chapter 3 returns to the compositional history of the Hebrew Bible as part of a broader effort to reconceptualize Freud’s idea that the founding trauma of Jewish culture was (and continues to be even in modern times) passed on from one generation to the next. In Freud’s interpretation, this inheritance eventually evolved into a “tradition” (Judaism itself) that, at an unconscious level, became a “compulsive conviction” overriding all attempts at rational understanding. But rather than arguing, as Freud does, that this inheritance resides in repressed memories that are passed on in quasi-biological fashion (what he called a phylogenetic inheritance), I will argue instead that the process of passing on—including the transmission of the faith experience’s unconsciously compulsory force—was (and is) inseparable from the postexilic creation of Torah as an attempt at once to acknowledge and to deny the trauma of the Babylonian Exile. In this context the ritualization of the Moses-Exodus account at the heart of Torah (the culture’s foundation myth) served to fixate the Jewish people to a trauma the very replication of which made it impossible to escape. Chapter 3 ends with a meditation on how trauma-theory can be used to theorize collective trauma in any (post)colonial situation.

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The Freudian Exodus: Psychoanalysis and the Mosaic Legacy

Series: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, Volume: 32

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004701663

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 29 Oct 2024

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African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
Ancient Near East and Egypt	Human Rights and Humanitarian Law	Musicology
Art History	International Law	Philosophy
Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Biology	Languages and Linguistics	Social Sciences
Book History and Cartography	Life Sciences	Theology and World Christianity
Classical Studies	Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 3 Torah and / as Tradition

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The Freudian Exodus: Psychoanalysis and the Mosaic Legacy

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