Jacob Freud's Birthday Greeting to his Son Alexander

A new record of Jacob Freud's writing, discovered in the Freud Collections of the Library of Congress, confirms that at a late age (77) he was still involved in Hebrew learning and Judaic practice. More significantly, a letter to his youngest son, Alexander, would seem to point strongly to the latter's knowledge and practice of Judaism. This finding, in turn, would appear to complete the picture that all four of his sons, including Sigmund, had substantial Judaic training, both in school and home.

It is concluded that Freud's strong, insistent denial of his Jewish education and practice is due to ulterior motives: to distance himself publicly and totally from any possible accusations—in the midst of the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Vienna and elsewhere—that psychoanalysis is Judaic. Only thus could he claim and attempt to convince others that his psychological discoveries and principles were universal and applicable to all humanity.

Jacob Freud is said to have corresponded a great deal (example for his son, Sigmund?) and had a fine, flowing literary style. Yet little remains to us of his actual writing.

The one significant, well-known piece by Jacob Freud—and repeatedly discussed and analyzed—is his poetic Hebrew dedication to Sigmund Freud on the occasion of the latter's thirty-fifth birthday. This finding we owe to Ernst L. Freud, Sigmund's son, after his father had been established in his London home. In his curiosity, he was rummaging through his father's shelves and discovered it on a page within in his father's Bible, at which time “my father presented me with the book” . Nor was this the only Hebrew written item he found there. An attached sheet, entitled Gedenkblatt, “reports the death of his (Jacob's) father, Rabbi Sholomo, son of Rabbi Ephraim, and the birth and circumcision of Sigmund, in the same year 1856” (Freud, 1956).

As Ernst Freud mentions, this sheet “apparently comes from an earlier