Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jan Assmann (the 7th of July 1938 - the 19th of February 2024) was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion scholar. He was a professor of Egyptology at Heidelberg University from 1976 to 2003, and became internationally known for his theory of cultural memory, developed with his wife Aleida Assmann, and for his controversial argument about the origins of monotheism.
The Mosaic Distinction is the idea that monotheism introduced a sharp divide between true and false religion that earlier polytheistic traditions, which Assmann called cosmotheism, did not recognize. He argued that this rupture first appeared with Atenism in ancient Egypt and later in the Exodus of the Israelites. He laid out this argument in his 2003 book Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, translated as The Price of Monotheism, though he later said he no longer held the theory in its original form.
Cultural memory, as Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann defined it, refers to the long-term preservation of a community's shared past through ritual, text, and monument, as distinct from communicative memory, the shorter-horizon everyday memory exchanged in living conversation. He published the foundational German text Das kulturelle Gedächtnis in Munich in 1992; Cambridge University Press published the English translation in 2011.
Normative inversion is the concept Assmann developed to describe how certain Jewish practices and theological positions were formulated as deliberate reversals of Egyptian ones. He traced this principle partly to the Egyptian priest and historian Manetho and noted its reappearance in Maimonides' references to the Sabians.
Assmann received the Max Planck Award for Research in 1996, the German Historians' Prize in 1998, the Alfried Krupp Prize for Scholarship in 2006, and the Sigmund Freud Prize in 2016. Together with his wife Aleida Assmann, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Collective Memory in 2017, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018, and the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts in 2020. In 2022 he received the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Assmann argued that ancient Egyptian religion had a more significant influence on Judaism than mainstream scholarship had recognized. He contended that some Jewish practices and theological positions were formulated in direct reaction to Egyptian practices and theology, a process he called normative inversion. His book Moses the Egyptian, published by Harvard University Press in 1997, traced how the memory of Egypt shaped the formation of Western monotheism.