Moses and Monotheism is a work of historical speculation. Freud himself gave the draft version the subtitle "A Historical Novel". In the early days of the psychoanalytic movement there was enormous optimism for how the findings of psychoanalysis could contribute to other fields of study. Freud and other early psychoanalysts were interested in taking the findings that had come out of their clinical work (for example about how archaic experiences are preserved in the mind) to make ambitious speculations.An example of this can be found in Freud's 1913 work Totem and Taboo, which combines his psychoanalytic findings (for example, that in the unconscious of adults on could find preserved a sense of guilt for their childhood death-wishes against parents) with works of 19th century anthropology to construct a psycho-historical tale of murder and guilt at the dawn of civilisation. Something very similar is happening in Moses and Monotheism, although the claim that Moses was killed by his own people was not an original one: it was in fact put forward over a decade earlier, in 1922, by Ernst Sellin, and Freud draws on Sellin in the book.

Moses and Monotheism was written in the context of the rise of the Nazis in Europe, indeed the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 forced Freud to flee to England as a refugee. In this sense, the text is a meditation on the question of Jewish identity and antisemitism in the 1930s. In the words of historian Elisabeth Roudinesco: "The more he explored origin myths and interpreted sacred texts to bring them into line with his own constructions, the more he was speaking of present times, that is, of the mutations of anti-Semitism and their impact on the redefinition of Jewish identity."