Freud connected Moses and the Turk through Egyptian circumcision

Evidence

Freud reinscribes the Abrahamic configuration in Moses and Monotheism (a book that, he says, “tormented me like an unlaid ghost” Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition, 23: 103) and he opened the Psychopathology with it, as well. Implying a complex process of memory and forgetting concerning the church (Freud, Moses, 55-56), Freud also rewrites the Abrahamic, the Turk, and the Jew by exploring what Moses shared with the Turks. On the basis of Moses’s Egyptian identity, Freud compares the Turk’s attitude toward circumcision, or rather noncircumcision, with that of Moses and other Egyptians: “Even to this day a Turk will abuse a Christian as an ‘uncircumcised dog’. It may be supposed that Moses, who, being an Egyptian, was himself circumcised, shared this attitude” (30, see also the reference to borrowings from ”Arabian tribes,” 34). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1183

Categorization

• XREF: Freud’s ‘uncircumcised dog’ insult resonates with the essay ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ on how bodily markers encode religious-cultural boundary drawing.