Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy

Transcription

1 Joel Whitebook 139 Joel Whitebook Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy This paper elucidates Freud s ambivalent and complex relation to Judaism, tracing it to the break with tradition that ran through the center of his father s life. Jacob Freud was a conflicted and transitional figure, with one foot planted in the parochial world of Jewish traditionalism and the other in the cosmopolitan world of European modernity. And he wanted his son to partake of these two legacies in equal degree. But Sigmund found the conflict untenable and chose in favor of science, atheism, and the Enlightenment. The point to be appreciated, however, is that he did not see his choice of the Aufklärung as a simple rejection of the Jewish tradition. Rather, by construing Moses as an Aufklärer, he was able he was able to define his project as an inner transformation of the Jewish tradition so that he could thereby to be a godless Jew, thereby confirming both his atheism and his cultural heritage. 1 What are we to make of Freud s provocative idea of a godless Jew? Is it simply a contradiction in terms that he uses to patch over an irresolvable and fundamental rift in his character and outlook? This is the position of those champions of Enlightenment universalism who want to inoculate Freud s science against any taint of ethnic particularity. They argue that the godlessness ought to be retained and the Judaism discarded. This is also the position of certain Jewish thinkers when they want to claim Freud as a prodigal son who ultimately returned to the tribal fold. 1 In this case, the idea is to drop the godlessness or at least radically attenuate it while holding onto the Judaism. I, on the other hand, will argue that the notion of a godless Jew is a coherent and meaningful concept. Explicating it will American Imago, Vol. 67, No. 2, by The Johns Hopkins University Press 139

2 140 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy not only help us understand the genesis of Freud s thinking, but will also illuminate some of the inner dynamics of his position. To make my case, I will examine the origins of Freud s godless Judaism in the ambivalent legacy his father, Jacob, left to his second first-born son (Krüll 1979, 108), Sigmund. 2 The fault line created by the break with tradition runs through the center of Jacob Freud s life. He straddles the historical chasm: one foot planted in the narrowly circumscribed world of the traditional Judaism of the shtetl, and the other in the secular world of European modernity. The dislocating effects of modernization were, as Ernst Simon (1957) observed, particularly acute for Jews such as Jacob. Because of the rapid pace of assimilation, Simon writes, a modern Jew of Jacob s generation had to pass through an evolution of 300 years during his own lifetime, leaping from the Middle Ages to the modern age (295). 2 Jacob himself had received a traditional upbringing. Fulfilling his paternal duty to transmit the Jewish tradition to his son, Jacob s father, the reb Shlomo after whom Sigmund was named saw to it that his son received a thoroughgoing Jewish education. Emmanuel Rice (1990) reports that Jacob attended a Heder, the Eastern European Jewish equivalent to primary school, and then almost certainly moved on to a Yeshiva, which was a much larger Talmudic academy (30). The fact that Jacob, as an old man, could conduct the entire Passover service from memory and study the Talmud in the original Aramaic written in Hebrew letters attests to the depth of his Jewish education (Heller 1973, 355; Rice 1990, 93). At the same time, however, there is good reason to believe that Jacob was exposed to and strongly influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which was particularly active in Tysmenitz, the Galician town where he grew up. This is not to say that Jacob was a full-blown maskil, a follower of the Haskalah, but only that the Jewish Enlightenment had a significant impact on him (Yerushalmi 1991, 62). We can assume, moreover, that, as a Wanderjude a wandering Jew, as the

3 Joel Whitebook 141 Austrian authorities categorized them a travelling salesman plying his trade in Moravia, Jacob had ample opportunity to observe the attractions of the larger modern world. And what he saw must have played an important role in his decision to move from Tysmenitz to Freiberg and exchange the encrusted world of the shtetl for the openness of modernity. Like Shlomo, Jacob wanted to pass his people s tradition on to his son. The unorthodox or post-traditional way in which he chose to do it, however, indicates that the continuity of The Great Chain of Tradition had already been broken. Jacob did not require Sigmund to spend long hours hunched over the Gamarah absorbing its teachings in the manner of an orthodox Yeshiva Bokhur. (Freud would, however, later spend long hours hunched over a microscope in Brücke s laboratory pursuing his modern scientific training.) Instead, when his son was seven, Jacob began to read to him from the family Bible something the precocious boy would soon be able to do on his own. That it was the Israelitische Bibel, published by the Philippson brothers, Ludwig and Phoebus, is of the utmost consequence for our story. The exposure to the rich content and Enlightenment orientation of this very singular edition of the Hebrew Bible had, as Freud recognized years later, an enduring effect upon the direction of [his] interest (1925, 8). The importance of these early experiences for Freud s emotional and intellectual development cannot be overestimated. We can imagine the aura of warmth, intimacy, and excitement that must have enfolded the precocious young boy and future bibliophile and his intelligent, adoring, and jocular father as they read the sacred texts together. In an admirable and sensitive piece of scholarship, Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1998, ch. 1) has demonstrated how deeply Jacob and the Bible were connected in Sigmund s emotional life. Not only does she show that Freud began collecting antiquities two months after his father s death as a way of working through the loss; she also shows that the figures he purchased often seem to have leapt off the illustrated pages of the Philippson Bible. In short, Freud was trying to re-create his father s presence in his consulting room by surrounding himself with the familiar figures whom they had studied together.

4 142 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy Furthermore, twenty-nine years later, on Freud s thirtyfifth birthday, Jacob had the same Philippson Bible rebound in leather, inscribed an emotional appeal in it, and presented the book to his brilliant, successful and, we should add, atheist son. Thus, Jacob literally passed the Book (which contained the Pentateuch) on to him. Deciphering the countless messages contained in this act will help us understand the complex legacy that Jacob bequeathed to his son, and how Sigmund took his father s inheritance and made it his own. 3 3 The story of the Freud family Bible begins much earlier than Sigmund s thirty-fifth birthday. And Jacob s birthplace, Tysmenitz a town that was 50% Jewish plays an important role in it. Tysmenitz is located in Galicia, a multiethnic region that, until 1772, had been part of Poland. At that point, it was annexed by the Austrian Empire, where it remained until the end of the First World War; today it is part of Ukraine. Because many of the conflicting currents that were surging through Jewish life converged in Tysmenitz, Jacob Freud grew up in a town where the old traditions, and hence the organization of the Jewish community, were being fundamentally challenged (Krüll 1979, 78). Indeed, orthodox rabbinism, Hassidism, and the Haskalah all clashed there. To appreciate how unsettling the challenge to traditional authority would have been in this context, we must understand that the Judaism of that day was a thoroughly communal religion that encompassed every aspect of life. The cohesiveness of the group had the highest priority, with the result that the individual was under enormous pressure to conform to the regulations that governed almost every moment of the day. Furthermore, a challenge to the cohesion of this closed community, with its long-established theological and ritualistic system of thought and activity (Rice 1990, 87), not only constituted a threat to the collective identity of the group. The extreme poverty of the shtetls and the precariousness of life in general meant that mutual support and solidarity were absolutely essential for physical survival, for, as Rizzuto notes,

5 Joel Whitebook 143 many Jews in the region died of starvation... in spite of community efforts (1998, 28). Despite strong opposition from orthodox rabbis, the Haskalah was able to establish a presence in the town and its surrounding region. Jacob may have been a Hassid as a young man, but at some point the Haskalah came to play a decisive role in his life. Because the Haskalah, which was inspired by the European Enlightenment especially the German Aufklärung was a broad and complex movement, comprising many heterogeneous tendencies, one must be careful in making generalizations about it (see Yerushalmi 1991, 62). This much, however, can be said: the Haskalah sought to advance the process of physical and spiritual de-ghettoization of Jews, begun with the Napoleonic reforms, by transforming the Jewish tradition in such a way as to achieve full participation in the wider modern world. This meant adopting not only the civic values of the host culture, but its manners and mode of dress as well. It is important to note that, while secular and progressive, the maskilim (partisans of the Haskalah) were not Yiddish-speaking philosophes, that is, were not anti-religious or anti-clerical per se. They were merely opposed to what they considered the atavistic elements in Judaism. This led them to oppose the rabbinical prohibition against secular learning and to advocate the teaching of European science, philosophy, and literature as well as European languages as part of a Jewish education. Rejecting the narrow Talmudism of orthodox studies, the Haskalah retained the Torah as a centerpiece of the educational process. The Bible, however, was often extolled as a text belonging to the humanist tradition, and its study was thought to promote Bildung the proper sort of cultured individuality which was one of the most cherished values of the Aufklärung. The Haskalah also rejected the emphasis on ceremonialism, and took Judaism s ethical teaching especially its emphasis on truth and justice as its essence. Moreover, it interpreted this ethical teaching in such a way that it coincided with the progressive values of the Enlightenment. Echoing Kant and his Jewish disciple, Moses Mendelssohn, the English translator of the Philippson Bible wrote that the intellectual cultivation of the Jewish population could not fail to bring about the rec-

6 144 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy ognition of the right of private judgment that is, the right of critical thinking and the claims of individual freedom (Yerushalmi 1991, 40). 4 While there is, as Rizzuto (1998) observes, no documented information to help us understand the process that brought about the drastic change (41) in Jacob s outlook, one piece of evidence, concerning the outcome of that process, is rich with meaning. Jacob inscribed the date he purchased the Philippson Bible 1 November 1848 on the book s Gedenkblatt, that is, the commemorative page on which an individual s or family s important milestones were customarily recorded. Spurred on by the revolutions that swept through Europe in that year and the radical reforms that followed which heralded a new epoch for the Jews (95) Jacob may have purchased the bilingual text in order to participate in a Reading and Cultural Circle, dedicated to spreading the principles of the Haskalah, which had opened in Tysmenitz that same year (Krüll 1979, 88). As a result of the upheavals, the feudal system was abolished and Austrian Jews were de jure if not de facto granted their full political and civil rights. With the events of 1848, Galician Jews were confronted with a difficult existential choice, namely, of either integrating into an emancipated and educated bourgeoisie or retreating into a secluded, homogeneously observant Jewish community. Jacob s acquisition of that particular Bible in that particular year suggests that the wave of progressive developments led him to consolidate his choice in favor of the first option. Rizzuto (1998) writes that, as a student of the Torah he moved from the orthodoxy of the shtetl, with its Hebrew Torah, to the bilingual Hebrew and German edition of the Bible produced by Ludwig and Phoebus Philippson (33). The Philippson family played a prominent role in the German Haskalah and Reform Movement. In their case, it was Ludwig and Phoebus father, Moses the son of a poor peddler who stood at the same historical juncture as Jacob Freud: he too was a member of the first generation to have taken a first decisive step away from the orthodox Judaism

7 Joel Whitebook 145 of his ancestors (Robert 1974, 21). Moses Philippson, who received a traditional orthodox upbringing, became an adherent of the Haskalah as a result of his encounter with the work of Moses Mendelssohn and German literature. He pursued his new calling as a teacher at a recently founded Jewish school, where his subjects included Hebrew, religion, and arithmetic; and as an organizer of a number of bilingual publishing projects, he intended to promote enlightened thinking in the Jewish community. In the next generation, Moses youngest son, Ludwig who would become the moving force behind the Israelitische Bibel took it upon himself to perpetuate his father s ideals (Rizzuto 1998, 105). Ludwig was equally at home in the world of Judentum and Humanität, German Enlightenment humanism and its liberal values (Gresser 1994, 1). He received a Gymnasium education in Halle, obtained a doctorate in philology from the University of Berlin, and was as adept in classical literature as he was in Hebrew. After he had completed his studies in Berlin, the Jewish community of Magdeburg invited Ludwig Philippson to deliver a sermon to their congregation. They were so impressed with his performance that they hired him as their Prediger, or preacher German law forbade them from using the term rabbi. Though he was by no means a radical, one cannot miss the distinctively reform elements in Ludwig s approach (Gresser 1994, 106). Certain traditional parts of the service continued to be conducted in Hebrew, but the sermon was delivered and the songs were sung in German. These innovations along with the introduction of an organ into the synagogue were meant to draw members of the congregation into the service and help them achieve a better understanding of its content. To someone with our contemporary sensibility, Ludwig s most impressive innovation was perhaps his introduction of confirmation for both sexes; he did this to make women feel they were valued members of the community. In addition to his work with the Magdeburg Congregation, Ludwig Philippson also founded the Allgemeine Zeitung Des Judentums ( General Journal of Judaism ) in 1837, the first modern Jewish newspaper in Central Europe, which he continued to edit until his death in Throughout Ludwig s tenure, the

8 146 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy journal which was called the mouthpiece of German Jewry (Gresser 1994, 106) continued to support the fight for Jewish emancipation, even during the periods of reaction that followed the revolutions of The publication of the Philippson Bible, which took sixteen years to complete, was a work of serious scholarship in the spirit of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement (Gresser 1994, 25) 4 that is, the nineteenth-century movement that sought to apply the most sophisticated methods of contemporary scholarship to the study of the science of Judaism. A page of the new Bible could comprise the Hebrew text of the Old Testament on the right side, its German translation on the left, and, below that, extensive footnotes containing commentaries on the relevant passage. Not only did these footnotes present important works of Jewish and Christian exegesis, they also contained scholarly entries from such fields as anthropology, the history of the ancient world, comparative mythology and religion, medicine, and even the botany of the Near East all meant to expand the reader s appreciation of the Old Testament. More striking still, the Philippson Bible contained 685 illustrations meant to evoke the historical, cultural, and physical context of the biblical story. They depicted landscapes, towns, plants, animals, coins, utilitarian objects from everyday life, and even Egyptian gods that is to say, images of foreign deities. As Jacob Freud surely knew, all these elements of the volume he chose to purchase the German translation, the scientific commentaries, and especially the illustrations, which violate God s stern prohibition on using images (Gresser 1994, 41) would have been viewed as sacrilegious from the vantage point of the Orthodox world in which he had been brought up. While the Bible was wissenschaftlich, its intent was not to debunk. As opposed to some of the practitioners of the Higher Criticism, the Philippson brothers did not seek to use the weapons of modern scholarship to undermine the authority of the Bible. 5 And, unlike Feuerbach, they did not seek to invalidate religion through a reduction ad anthropos, an anthropological critique of its content. On the contrary, their aim was to enhance religious experience and deepen the understanding of the Bible by drawing on everything the general storehouse of human knowledge had to offer. They sought to integrate their

9 Joel Whitebook 147 faith in God, Judaism, and the Torah with the advances of the Enlightenment to transillumninate the substance of the Scriptures... with the vision and the wisdom of the Aufklärung (Rizzuto 1998, 62). But whatever their intentions, by treating the biblical text as an object of Wissenschaft rather than merely of exegesis, the Philippsons contributed to the decentering of tradition (see Habermas 1981, 68ff.). It was not simply a lack of secular education that had kept Jews from reflecting on their fundamental beliefs before the nineteenth century. From within their closed worldview, such reflection simply did not make sense. For the orthodox, it was a thoroughly ingrained belief that the Torah and Talmud were of Divine origin and therefore immune to such critical scrutiny (Rice 1990, 89). A tradition is only traditionalist in the strict sense when its basic tenets cannot be reflected on, especially from an external standpoint. The structure of the traditional group s psychology is such that its fundamental idols are immunized from interrogation (see Castoriadis 1975, ; and Habermas 1981, 61). They are there, taken for granted and, to paraphrase Winnicott, the idea of calling them into question simply does not arise because it cannot. 6 Scientifically to objectify a people s tradition and belief system, as the Philippsons did with the Jews that is, to treat it as one social formation among many, formed by the contingent forces of history (see Yerushalmi 1989, ch. 4) is to deprive it of its strictly traditionalist character. 5 On the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday, Jacob, as mentioned, had the family Bible rebound in leather, wrote an impassioned inscription in Hebrew on its Gedenkblatt, and presented it to his son as a gift. In addition to the year when he purchased it, there were two other earlier entries on the Gedenkblatt, written so close to each other that they might be mistaken for one. The first records the passing of Shlomo, who had died three months before Sigmund was born, and stresses the Reb s pious nature. The second commemorates the dates of Sigmund s birth and of his circumcision, that is, the day

10 148 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy he entered the covenant. Jacob s meaning is clear: Sigmund should walk the straight course, that is, live a pious life like the grandfather after whom he had been named, and thus preserve the continuity of the generations. The inscription that Jacob entered on the Gedenkblatt on Sigmund s thirty-fifth birthday, long after his son had repudiated an observant way of life and had become an established scientist and confirmed atheist, amounts to an appeal. Reminding Sigmund how the Bible had moved him in his childhood, Jacob asks his son to renew his involvement in the Book of books enthusiastically with a song. Jacob s dramatic call to return to the Bible, to the originally shared values with the father constitutes, as Yerushalmi (1991) observes, his real mandate to his son (74). The third inscription has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. Through close readings of the text, participants have attempted to determine to what extend the Reform Movement and the Haskalah had transformed Jacob and to what he extent he remained orthodox and observant. 7 It is not clear, however, what these scholars believe would be accomplished if they could determine that Jacob was X percent secularist and Y percent traditionalist. If we take the long view on the developments under consideration, Jacob s precise location on the spectrum of heterodoxy or orthodoxy becomes a secondary concern. The more significant point is this: however pious those inscriptions may or may not be, they are recorded in a book, the Philippson Bible, which is itself situated on the far side of the break with tradition. The two-fold legacy that Jacob transmitted to Sigmund while reading to him from the Philippson Bible contained the seeds of its own subversion. The opposition between the pious appeal of Jacob s dedications, on the one hand, and the Enlightenment spirit sedimented in the book in which he inscribed them, on the other, defines the two poles of his ambivalent legacy. According to the inscription, Sigmund should in a way that was impossible for Jacob to specify be observant and committed to transmitting the tradition of his people, while at the same time enjoying the advantages of secular modernity its culture, prosperity, cosmopolitanism, political freedom, and, most importantly for our purposes, its science.

11 Joel Whitebook 149 Rizzuto (1998) observes that the Bible s illustrations themselves, which offered a broad view of many other nations, other peoples, and landscapes (118), must have served to produce cosmopolitan outlook in Freud that is, an anthropological, Herodotian, attitude, which transported him beyond the parochial confines of Leopoldstadt, the crowded Jewish district of Vienna where he lived. Jacob and the Philippsons believed that religious faith and Wissenschaft were compatible. They did not think that critical reflection would necessarily lead to the subversion of faith. However, in Freud s case, as in so many, a scientific examination of religion in fact led to its rejection. After all, it is not such a large a step from the Wissenschaft des Jüdentum to Feuerbach, whom, as Freud told his Rumanian friend Eduard Silberstein, he revere[d] and admire[d] above all other philosophers when he was at the university (Boehlich 1990, 96). What remained an inner tension for Jacob turned into an open conflict for his son. When Freud took what was his father s and made it his own, he extended the enlightened scientific outlook sedimented in the Bible that Jacob had handed down to him especially in its footnotes and turned it against religious belief in order to debunk it. Where Jacob tried to have it both ways, Sigmund recognized that this was impossible, which is to say that, where the father had been a transitional figure, the son became the full-fledged oxymoron, a godless Jew. 6 The story has often been told of how many prominent Central European Jews from recently emancipated families experienced an irreconcilable conflict between their Jewish origins and their allegiance to the ideals of German Kultur and Bildung an allegiance that Freud shared (see Gresser 1994). The conflict became so acute that it led a number of them Heine, Mahler, Kraus, and Schoenberg, for example to convert to Christianity. Now, it is true that, in addition to being a steadfast atheist, Freud could be embarrassed by and even contemptuous of the numerous Ostjuden who were moving into Vienna from the provinces. And it is also true that the dissociative episode

12 150 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy he experienced on the Acropolis shows that he was highly conflicted about surpassing his father, a humble shtetl Jew from Galicia, in his acquisition of Western culture (see Freud 1936, 239). But Freud who was as home in his Jewish psyche as he was with his brethren at the B nai Brith never experienced a fundamental opposition between the Jewish tradition and the German Aufklärung. That is, there was for Freud no conflict between what he absorbed at his father s knee, reading the Philippson Bible and at the Jewish Volkschüle that he attended until the age of eight, one the one hand, and, on the other, the values of the classical education he internalized at the Sperlgymnasium. Furthermore, he never denied that he was a Jew or seriously entertained the option of conversion. Freud s selective reading of the Jewish tradition allowed him to overcome the fundamental dichotomy between Jüdentum and the Aufklärung, Judaism and the Enlightenment, which led many of his famous compatriots to convert. He ignored a multitude of other trends in Judaism and identified the Jewish tradition exclusively with the Mosaic tradition. Furthermore, Freud construed Moses who was himself the heir to Akhenaten s Egyptian Enlightenment 8 as an Aufklärer by virtue his monotheism, opposition to myth, magic, and sorcery (Freud 1939, 24), his commitment to truth, order, and justice (21), and, most importantly, his elevation of Geistigkeit (spirituality or intellectuality) over sensuality. 9 This view removed for Freud any essential opposition between Judaism and the Enlightenment. Moreover, like the modern-day Aufklärer Kant, Marx, and Freud himself Moses was engaged in critique, and more specifically, the critique of idolatry (see Yerushalmi 1991, 22). Indeed, I would maintain that (despite the familiar attempts to paint Freud as a mechanistic positivist) science or Wissenschaft in the fundamental sense of the term, is for him critique, methodical iconoclasm. Just as Moses attacked false gods in the name of the one true God who is immaterial and transcendent, which is to say, conceptual so the Aufklärer criticized illusory beliefs in the name of science. Even the Jewish joke can be seen as a form of democratic critique. Its aim is often to puncture the narcissistic pretensions of whoever is on the receiving end, especially those in positions of status and power.

13 Joel Whitebook With these considerations in mind, let us return in conclusion to the matter of a godless Jew. By equating the Jewish with the Mosaic tradition, Freud could not only hold onto his atheism and assert his bona fides as Jew; he could also maintain that his psychoanalytic critique of religion remained within the bounds of Judaism indeed, that it in fact advanced Judaism understood as the Mosaic program of critique (see Yerushalmi 1991, 99). What is more, the Mosaic credentials that allow Freud to assert his Jewishness also explain his godlessness. For him, the inner logic of the critique of idolatry leads to the death of God. That is, the critique of false gods unfolds to the point that it is no longer a matter of the idolatrous nature of this or that particular religion; rather, a threshold is reached where critique shows that religion as such is, as it were, idolatrous false, illusory. In Freud s view, Judaism is further advanced than Catholicism by virtue of the fact that it is more disenchanted. Judaism remains rigorously monotheistic, but Catholicism s introduction of the trinity, the mother-goddess in the guise of the Madonna, and intermediate beings such as angels represents, for Freud, a regression to sensuality and polytheism (see Freud 1939, 88ff.). In another respect, however, Christianity constitutes an advance over Judaism. Through the sacrifice of Christ, Christians, Freud argues, implicitly acknowledge the murder of the primal father albeit indirectly and in a disguised form. This is something the Jews have not been able to do. And Judaism s disavowal of the murder of the father Moses and, behind him, the figure of the primal father is a serious shortcoming that leads to a proliferation of obsessional laws as a way of trying to cope with the unacknowledged and unconscious guilt. For Freud, Judaism is something like the truth in an untrue form. It is true by virtue of its disenchanted stance. It is untrue insofar as this process of disenchantment has not led Judaism to shed its religious form. It is also untrue and less advanced than Catholicism in that it disavows the murder of the primal father. The next step for the Mosaic program of disenchanting critique would be for the Jews to acknowledge the truth of the primal murder, which would mean to accept

14 152 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy Freud s theory of the father complex and his account of the psychological origins of religion in terms of it. And at this point in the process of demythologization, Judaism would cease to be a religion and pass over into something else, namely, psychoanalysis. Freud appears to be suggesting, implicitly at least, that psychoanalysis is the heir to and perhaps fulfillment of the Jewish tradition understood as the Mosaic tradition of critique. It is therefore not as far-fetched as it may seem when Yerushalmi (1991) proposes that, just as Freud viewed himself as a godless Jew, he saw psychoanalysis as godless Judaism (99). Nor is it too far-fetched to infer that Freud saw himself as Moses, the great man who had created the psychoanalytic movement a movement that, as Freud was writing Moses and Monotheism, was about to be exiled from continental Europe and form a new Diaspora. For a long time there was a self-imposed ban among analysts, begun by Freud himself, on calling attention to the Jewish origins of the field. It was feared that psychoanalysis would be seen as a Jewish national affair and that its claim to universal scientific validity would be invalidated. The ban was lifted when Marthe Robert published From Oedipus to Moses (1974), and a number of authors began writing on the topic of Freud and Judaism. Then, however, a new difficulty arose. If earlier commentators had seen psychoanalysis as not Jewish enough, now certain authors were viewing it as too Jewish. A tendency has developed, with Rice (1990), for example, to construe Freud s taking up of the Moses legend in his latter years as a fulfillment of Jacob s mandate to return to the Book of books and a homecoming to his Jewish origins. And the claim is undeniably true. But this is only one half of the story. As Richard Armstrong (2005) points out, it seems brutally clear that Freud s return to Jewish tradition in Moses and Monotheism is no facile reconciliation, nor death-bed lapse into suitably modified form of piety (248). A man s creative achievements involve identification with the father and patricide in almost in equal measure (see Whitebook 2004, 85, 101). And this is certainly true of Freud s late masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism. It is not simply the case, as Yerushalmi suggests, that Freud found a happy solution, which allowed him to obey his

15 Joel Whitebook 153 father and maintain his independence from his father through his interpretation (78) of the biblical story at the same time; nor is it the case, as Rice (1990) maintains, that Moses and Monotheism represents Freud s attempt to come home again to his Jewish roots but on his own terms and in his own way (7). The notions of maintaining one s independence and on one s own terms and in one s own way are too tepid. Not only does Moses and Monotheism represent an act of deferred obedience to and with identification his father; it also represents an act of patricide against the religion of the fathers. Freud is aware of the patricidal element in his writing on Moses. Indeed, he begins the book with a well-known apology for the destructiveness he is directing against his people by depriving them of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons. But he justifies the injury he is causing by maintaining that a gain in knowledge should take precedence over national interests (1939, 7) something that would hardly be self-evident to a person who does not share his ethic of scientific truth. But there is a more crucial point. Freud admits (1935, 72) the Feuerbachian view of religion he had advanced in Future of an Illusion was too simple and did not do justice to the subject. And there is no denying that he shows a much deeper awareness of the depth and emotional power of religious experience in Moses and Monotheism. Nevertheless, though the new formula proceeds to explain the power of religion, it does nothing to restore its validity. Freud does not budge one inch on this question. The new thesis namely, that religion represents a historical rather than a material truth is as reductionist and deflationary as the one he advanced in Totem and Taboo (1913). Indeed, it is the same thesis: that collective psychology represents the dynamics of individual and familial psychology writ large, and that the meaning of religion can be traced to the murder of the primal father hardly propositions that a believer could find congenial. Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research 1051 Riverside Drive, Unit 63 New York, NY whitebookj@aol.com

16 154 Jacob s Ambivalent Legacy Notes 1. This point was made to me by Jill Salberg. 2 For an account of how an earlier episode of that break with tradition, namely, the one that occurred with the Marranos in the seventeenth century, helped to produce another great Jewish heretical thinker, Spinoza, see Yovel (1989). 3 In Totem and Taboo, Freud cites one of his favorite quotations from Goethe: What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make thine (1913, 158). 4 Philippson s journal in fact played a role in establishing and supporting the influential Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (The Institute for the Science of Judaism). See Encyclopaedia Judaica Jerusalem (1971, 13:64). 5 Yerushalmi (1991) maintains that the attitude of the Philippson commentary toward biblical and later Jewish tradition is nothing but reverent and, indeed, conservative: The integrity of the sacred text is never questioned, the text is never emended, the central findings of the Higher Criticism are rejected, and the creation of the world in six days, as well as the traditional Mosaic authorship of the entire Pentateuch, defended (64). 6 Thus, even if individuals choose to retain the beliefs of a tradition after it has been critically objectified, the mode in which they adhere to these beliefs has been radically altered. Strictly speaking, one cannot choose to be a traditionalist. 7 See, for example, Bergmann (1976), Ostow (1982), Rice (1990), and Yerushalmi (1991, 64 67). 8 Schorske (1998) argues that one reason Freud presented Moses as the unwavering defender of Geistigkeit and ignored more sensual elements in the Egyptian tradition was political: For in Egypt, the Jews became a Kulturvolk that rescued the highest gentile civilization [which coincided with Akhenaten s reign] from the unholy alliance of priests and ignorant people, just as, in modern times, the Jews and cultured gentiles were, through exodus and exile, saving Europe s enlightened civilization from Hitler (209). 9 Bernstein (1998) focuses on the advancement of intellectuality/spirituality as the essential feature of Judaism. See also Assman (1997, chs. 1 and 5). References Armstrong, Richard H A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Assman, Jan Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bergmann, Martin S Moses and the Evolution of Freud s Jewish identity. Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines, 14:3 26. Bernstein, Richard J Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boehlich, Walter, ed The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Eduard Silberstein, Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Encyclopaedia Judaica Jerusalem New York: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund Totem and Taboo. S.E., 13: An Autobiographical Study. S.E., 20: The Future of an Illusion. S.E., 21: Postscript to An Autobiographical Study. S.E., 20: A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. S.E., 22: Moses and Monotheism. S.E., 23: Gresser, Moshe Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew. Albany: State University of New York Press.

17 Joel Whitebook 155 Habermas, Jürgen The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, Heller, Judith Bernays Freud s Mother and Father. In Freud as We Knew Him. Ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp Krüll, Marianne Freud and His Father. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. New York: Norton, Ostow, Mortimer Discussion of Martin S. Bergmann s paper. In Judaism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Mortimer Ostow. New York: Ktav Publishing House, pp. # #. Rice, Emmanuel Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. Albany: State University Press of NY. Rizzuto, Ana-María Why Did Freud Reject God? A Psychodynamic Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Robert, Marthe From Oedipus to Moses: Freud s Jewish Identity. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Schorske, Carl To the Egyptian Dig: Freud s Psycho-Archaeology of Culture. In Thinking in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp Simon, Ernst Sigmund Freud, the Jew. In Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2. London: East and West Library, pp Whitebook, Joel Hans Loewald: A Radical Conservative. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85: Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Schocken Books Freud s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yovel, Yirmiyahu Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1: The Marrano of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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