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While the psychoanalytic method and theory were applied to the study of Jewish religion and scriptures in the third and fourth decades of this century, analysts did not direct their attention to anti-semitism until after World War II—with one exception. Sigmund Freud addressed it in Moses and Monotheism. Upon careful study, a historian friend of mine concluded that the major esoteric purpose of that essay was to defend the Jews against their detractors.
After the Continental analysts escaped to the United States and England, a number of them tried to master their trauma by composing essays or books on the nature and etiology of anti-semitism. This book, though published only in 1975, posthumously, belongs to the collection of psychoanalytic responses to the Holocaust.
Ernest Rappaport, who died shortly before the book was published, an alumnus of the University of Vienna Medical School and Buchenwald Concentration Camp, studied and practiced psychoanalysis in Chicago for many years. He has contributed heavily and creatively to the psychoanalytic literature.
Dr. Rappaport seems to have taken a good deal more trouble to inform himself on the history of the Jewish people than his colleagues who had published on anti-semitism previously, just as Freud gives evidence of having prepared for Moses and Monotheism by voluminous study of Jewish history and literature. The book consists of a synoptic survey of the history of anti-semitism, interrupted by fairly detailed descriptions of some of the most egregious episodes of anti-semitism, and biographies of some of the most egregious anti-semites. There are individual chapters on Paul, Augustine, Luther, Hitler, Eichmann and Stalin; on the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition; on the legend of the Wandering Jew and the many ritual blood libels. The historical