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Hatred and persecution of the Jews, which since the late 19th century has been termed anti-Semitism, has a 3500-year history. It is not the uniqueness of its style and forms that is amazing, but rather its incredible historical similarity: from Egypt to Babylonia to Rome to Isabella's Spain to present-day Russia.
Much has been written on the psychodynamics of anti-Semitism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s there were many attempts to explain, understand, or give some meaning to the Holocaust. Renewed interest surfaced in the 1970s. The attempt of so many minds to come to terms with a phenomenon of such persistence and ambivalence is rewarding in itself. This paper attempts to synthesize some of the thinking, in the hope that a better understanding might be used for social change.
Freud, in two of his later works, Moses and Monotheism1 and Totem and Taboo,2 postulated “original sin”-an act of patricide by the sons of a tribal chieftain in primeval history. This coup is seen as having had strong oedipal underpinnings and many consequences. It is most significant, however, in the light of later religious developments. Admittedly, Freud stretched analytic theory rather thinly in trying to postulate an actual historical event. This is unimportant, however, when one is attempting to review the thought that first pushed Freud to his stance, and also the thought of those who followed, who were able within this framework to come to terms with some very important issues. Freud6 sees an unbreakable link between “the act,” the development of monotheism, and the development of all religious intolerance-specifically, anti-Semitism.
Freud7 states unequivocally that the development of a Superior Being is only a replacement within the human mind for the father. He supports his hypothesis of a patricidal original sin by noting that Jesus would not have had to “die for our sins” if “our sins” under talion law had not been murder, and that, moreover, only the son could atone properly