Moses and Monotheism was regarded for many years as a marginal, strikingly bizarre text within the Freudian corpus. The scandalous assertions that Moses was an Egyptian and that the Hebrews had murdered him in the wilderness during an unrecorded revolt, the fissures in the text, the strange, obsessive repetitions and the recurrent moments of doubt all seemed to perplex readers upon its publication in 1939 and for many decades later. Issued on the eve of the Second World War, it aroused much anger among Jewish readers, who accused Freud of betraying his own people in one of their darkest hours and of exhibit- ing, to top it all, an outrageous ignorance of Jewish history and religion.