Semites and Semitism: From Philology to the Language of Myth

Abstract

This contribution analyses the transition from the “Semites”, which were derived, in early Semitic philology, from linguistic classification, to “Semitism,” a category combining linguistics, psychology, and cultural history. Goldziher’s critique of Renan’s understanding of Semitism not only led to a new logic of peoples in an economy of invention, transformation, and circulation but also, through the analysis of the names of the gods, to the reconstruction of a language of myth characterized by an inherent duality. With Carl Abel’s work on contradiction in primeval words, this question of duality in the language of myth is linked to Freud’s research on the language of dreams, conceived as remnant of an old primitive stratus of language. Karl Abraham’s Myths and Dreams (1909) and Otto Rank’s The Birth of the Hero (1909) also reveal the inspiration early psychoanalysis found in some reflections on Semitism: both combined insights from Semitic philology and the science of mythology with those of dream interpretation. When Freud finally offered his own interpretation of Moses in Moses and Monotheism (1939), his psychoanalytical reading revealed the potential of the philological and psychological reconstruction of the language of myth: he also read the names as traces of circulation and the canonical text as an archive of conflicts, but transformed traces into symptoms.