Anti-Semitism has existed for millennia, and Jews, Jewish culture, Judaism as a religion, Jews as part of a nation, have existed even longer. I am fascinated by the question, who is Sigismund Shlomo Freud? He commonly is known as Sigmund Freud, an Austrian Jewish neurologist who created the discipline of psychoanalysis. He was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, part of the Austrian Empire, where only 3% of the population was Jewish. His family moved to Vienna four years later.
Sigmund Freud was a major cultural figure who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries CE, and contributed to a world-wide cultural phenomenon of exploring the complexities of the human mind through the art, science, and philosophy of his creation, psychoanalysis.
From his earliest years growing up in a Jewish family in the Austrian Empire, first in Moravia, then Vienna, remaining in Vienna as he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, he lived with a consciousness of having two culturally different identities, Jewish and Austrian, yet interwoven. His name itself reveals the tension between those two identities. Sigismund is a variation of the name Sigmund, the hero of the Volsunga Saga in Norse mythology, valorized in the music of Richard Wagner in the opera Die Valkyrie. The name Sigmund means Protection through Victory. Shlomo is the Hebrew name, rendered in English as Solomon, the wise King Solomon of the Torah, whose name means Peace.
The Norse hero Sigmund pulled a sword out of a rock that was planted there by the god Odin, similar to the Anglo-Saxon King Arthur pulling the sword Excalibur from a rock. Solomon also wielded a sword, in a sense, when in his wisdom, when asked to settle a dispute between two women who claimed one baby, he offered to cut the baby in half, giving each woman half a baby. Of course the real mother did not accept the offer, proving she was the baby's mother.
Thus we find two ancient heroes, Sigmund and Shlomo, each famous in his myth for using a sword, and one Jewish child growing up in Austria, named for each hero, trying to reconcile his two cultural identities. What sword would young Sigismund Shlomo need to cut the Gordian knot of his identity, and his search for meaning, truth, and the unknown? First and foremost, he had his intellect.
As he struggled with this cultural divide, immersed in the literatures of European culture, he also faced another struggle as he developed a new theory, psychoanalysis, a theory of the mind that encompassed symbolic process, unconscious process, fantasy, and conflict. As a Jew in a Christian Europe that represented the epitome of advanced intellectual cultural achievement, he found himself burdened with the dread of pervasive anti-Semitism that he assumed would denigrate his great intellectual achievement as “Jewish science”.
Arnold Richards speaks of three “three distinct strands in Freud's Jewish identity: his commitment to the ideal of Bildung; his response to the anti-Semitism of his time; and his ‘godlessness,’ his ambivalence about the religion of his family, especially his father.” He makes an important contribution to understanding the importance of “these strands of identity” becoming “manifest in psychoanalysis”.
Bildung means a pervasive cultural milieu. Freud had to distinguish himself in the intellectual cultural milieu of a Europe immersed in anti-Semitism. Freud had to untangle himself from a “too Jewish” identity, while somehow clinging to the importance of his Jewish identity, and one way he did this was to deny that a major Jewish hero, Moses, was not a Jew, but rather an Egyptian, in his 1939 book, Moses and Monotheism. Yet perhaps he identified with Moses. He may also have identified with another Jewish hero, Joseph, who was an interpreter of dreams, solving the problems of a great king, a pharaoh. The meaning of the name Joseph may be significant. The Hebrew root of the name Joseph is twofold: it means “added to” and “taken away.” Could Freud be like Moses, Jewish and not Jewish? And like Joseph, stolen from his family of origin, interpreting dreams, leading to Freud publishing The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899?
Nathan M. Szajnberg eloquently speaks of five Jews, Einstein, Durkheim,
Boas, Fleck, Kuhn, along with Freud, sharing a common perspective: “For psychoanalysis too, for Freud, is an attempt to discover what is commonly human to all of us. What lies beneath; what we share. It is a Weltanschauung, a world view, as well as a treatment and theory of mind.”
How did any of the Jewish intellectuals of Europe escape a world view that was deeply rooted in anti-Semitism? Szainberg explores this question with depth. As I read his comments about the attitudes and ideas of the anti-Semitic European intellectuals the Jewish intellectuals encountered, I thought immediately of Richard Wagner in particular.
In 1850, Richard Wagner published an essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”), under a pseudonym, K. Freidedank (Freidedank means Free Thought).
Wagner wrote the essay to “explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.”
He claimed that Jews weren't capable of speaking European languages properly. He was horrified by the sound of Jewish speech, hearing an “intolerably jumbled blabber”, a “creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle”. He thought Jews were incapable of expressing “true passion”, which makes them unable to create song or music. He also states:
“Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has remained faithful to his father's stock, and though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they show an impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him.”
Henry Zvi Lothane wisely addresses the distinction between Judaism as a religion, and the perception of Jewishness as a racial category. He poignantly addresses his own experience: “When I lived in Russia and Poland until the age of 15 I was seen as a race. Later I became a Jewish citizen of Israel. In 1963 I came to America and became a religion”. I was stunned by his use of the word became, “I became”. He “became” what he was seen to be. Now, the question of anti-Semitism can be focused on
who is defining who? Shall Jews be defined by non-Jews' perceptions of Jews, of Jewishness? Can Jews just be Jews, and, beyond being Jews, can Jews just be people, just be humans? As Lothane reviews essential anti-Semitic historical events, he concludes his remarks with a look at the dire situation that the Freud family found themselves in during the Holocaust. To an anti-Semite, Jews are never just people, just human. They are defined as the “other”, to be despised, mistreated, persecuted, destroyed. In his concluding paragraph, Lothane says, “It was the ostracized and banished Wilhelm Reich who in 1933, in Mass Psychology of Fascism, Cassandra-like warned the Jews about the Nazi danger. Many Jews in Austria and German failed to heed this warning.” How devastating!
Richards's careful delineation of a semantic issue regarding the term “anti-Semitism” resonates with Lothane's careful delineation regarding Judaism as a religion and the perception of Jewishness as a racial category. Richards identifies the first use of the term “anti-Semitism” as an intellectual construct offered by a Jewish scholar in 1860, and then its use in 1880 as a “badge of honor” in a pamphlet, “The Triumph of Germanicism over Judaism”. He notes the effect of Jews being designated as “other”, and evokes the schoolboy Freud who, when taunted by classmates, felt he belonged to an alien race.
Is there a difference between “anti-Semitism” and “Jew hatred”, two terms describing the same phenomenon? Yes. The term “anti-Semitism” seems slightly neutralized by its not using the words “Jew”, or “Judaism”, or “Jewishness”. It offers what seems to be an intellectual approach, linking the “Semitic” Middle Eastern languages to what otherwise might be perceived as pernicious disdain, hatred. “Jew hatred” means what it means, a description of full emotional intensity, pure hatred.
Szainberg outlines a two-millennia history of anti-Semitism, as he says, “before Christ, before Mohammed and well before Hitler”. As I considered this age-old history, I thought of a recent book, Deciphering the New Antisemitism, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2015. How new could anti-Semitism be, I wondered, as I began reading the book. I published a review of the book in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017, Volume 77, and I began by saying, “This impressive book, offering essays by 19 authors
on the topic of the recent upsurge in virulent anti-Jewish hostility, is daunting, not by sheer size, which is considerable, but by the very fact of its existence, the very fact of what must be its focus the worldwide rise of a pernicious, persistent anti-Semitism.”
There always are new incarnations of old tropes, such as the calumny of the blood libel. It is important to acknowledge that non-Jews have challenged these scurrilous beliefs. In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre published a powerful indictment of anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, in which he used a concept that was developed by Sigmund Freud, a concept essential to psychoanalysis, projection, to describe the mental processes of people who are possessed by anti-Semitic hatred. He explores the fantasies embedded in these projections. The anti-Semite has abandoned reason and is mired in passion, the passion of hatred. This resonates meaningfully, and oddly, with Wagner's anti-Semitic hatred, when he said that Jews were incapable of expressing “true passion”.
I found myself saddened when I read Szainberg's commentary about Freud's concern with the “stiff-necked Jews” inducing anti-Semitism, and his further elucidation that the “stiff-necked Jews” took pride in their survivals, that they thrived wherever the Diaspora has taken them. Further, what has benefitted the Jews benefits non-Jews! “And we thrive not only for ourselves but for humankind's benefit—in Wissenschaft”.
It was not easy to be a Jew in Freud's Vienna, Freud's Europe, whether a secular professional intellectual Jew or an Ostjuden orthodox unassimilated Jew. Yet, to be a secular Jew familiar with, indeed, immersed in, European “high” culture, was to be eager to participate, to both contribute and reap the rewards of engagement with European intellectual life. Freud found himself confronting the fact that indeed he was a Jew, a Jew who needed to stand proud, to claim his Jewishness, while he also felt a need to hide his Jewishness.
Freud was his father's son, Shlomo ben Yakov, the son of a Jewish man whose hat was thrown into the mud by an aggressive non-Jew. He was the son of a Jew who was supposed to submit. He yearned for the approval of, the validation from, the non-Jewish elite. He felt the need to keep psychoanalysis safe from the accusation of being a “Jewish science”,
something that would degrade pure Aryan science. He wanted Carl Gustav Jung to be his crown prince, to smooth the acceptance of his profound, creative work by the non-Jewish elite. And he remained a Jew, finding himself in exile in England, but safe, while Europe began to exterminate the Jews, while his own sisters were killed by the Nazis, safe until he died in 1939, but not killed by Nazis.
Daniel Benveniste, responding with depth to Arnold Richards's consideration of Freud in the Bildung of Europe, of Freud as Jew, explores the many aspects of Judaism that Freud repudiated or was drawn to despite his fears. He readily identifies the obsessive aspects of ritualistic religion, and the overwhelming power of mysticism, the oceanic feeling that Freud may have known and yet didn't want to know. He makes it clear that Freud repressed his own oceanic feeling, his infantile yearnings for his mother's love. This leads me to wonder, was being Jewish associated with unrequited yearnings, with obsessional demands, with a family that will be forever outsiders? Both Richards and Benveniste underscore Freud's Oedipal struggle to be more heroic than his father, to stand up to anti-Semitism. This is all the more poignant when we consider the degree of anxiety Freud felt about being Jewish. Could he ever stand up to the intellectual anti-Semitic snobbery he feared would toss his brilliant discoveries into the designated garbage heap of “Jewish science”?
Benveniste points out Freud's pride in being able to rise above the prejudices that limit intellectual exploration. Alas, was Freud's commitment to reason, to intellectual excellence, a manifestation of his fear of Judaism itself, the emotional pull of mystical Jewish experience?
When Benveniste discusses Freud's observations about sibling rivalry, and the conflictual feelings of loving and hating one's sibling rival, he evokes Jung's own rivalry with Freud. Thus there is no safe ground. It is dangerous to be Jewish in Europe, and European non-Jews are afraid of Jews.
Richards and Benveniste remind us of Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, of the dangerous power of the father. In the Europe of the Austrian Empire, in the encounter of Christian and Jew, who is the father and who is the son? Who poses a threat to another? If Judaism is father to Christianity, should the son supplant the father? Should a “new
testament” replace the ancient tradition of Torah, of Judaism? If Jews are greatly outnumbered by Christians in Europe, is the majority the powerful father, and the minority the frightened, subservient child?
As we follow Benveniste's elucidation of Freud's relationship to Judaism, and thus, to God, he offers us a fascinating idea, honed by his mentor Nathan Adler and his religion professor Frederic Spiegelberg, that God may be our narcissism. How empowered do people need to feel? Is anti-Semitism the culmination of European narcissism? Is Christianity a source of narcissism, and does the existence of Jews lead to a dread that Jews could kill Christianity, since the worst thing said about Jews is that Jews killed Christ, the source of every blood libel story?
David Lotto addresses Richards's emphasis on Freud's acute awareness, from childhood on, of the dangers of being a Jew in a German culture. He goes on to explain that many factors influenced Freud's dislike of religion in general. First, Freud valued science, rationality. Lotto identifies “the commitment to the scientific view of the world, which is logically inconsistent with religion which was that scientific Psychoanalysis could stand as a bulwark against antisemitism”. He then points out that whatever were identifying aspects of religious Jews, their garb, their behavior, fed anti-Semitic feelings among Europeans. And third, religious fervor among Christians led to anti-Semitism, to hatred of those Jews who were “Christ-killers”.
This reminds me of two episodes from my own life. Two of my three children were born in 1962 and 1964, and, in 1965 an Italian-American Roman Catholic relative took my baby son to visit another Italian-American Roman Catholic relative of his. The relative who brought my son there said, “The pope just said that the Jews are not responsible for the death of our Lord Jesus. So this little baby is not to blame for killing our Lord Jesus.” The response to that statement was, “I don't care what the pope said. All the Jews killed Jesus.” The father of these two adults once introduced my father to his own father, and said, in Italian, “Sam is a Mazza-Christo, but he's still a very nice man”. Mazza-Christo is a dialect form of the Italian phrase “Morto Christo”, which means Christ-killer. My father understood a little Italian, because when his own father, who was a plasterer, first came to the United States, he found work as a plasterer in construction, and learned Italian, thinking he was learning English.
Indeed, religion is easily a platform for prejudice, for bias, and in Europe it was a powerful platform for anti-Semitism, and all the discrimination and violence that is associated with anti-Semitism.
The epithet “Christ killer” is a driving force that has been linked for centuries with the horrific calumny of the blood libel. These blood libel stories led to violence against Jews all over Europe.
A case in point: In British Isles folk lore, there is a well-known blood libel tale, which became a folk song, Child Ballad 155. The song has various titles, “Sir Hugh”, “The Jew's Daughter”, “The Jew's Garden”. It tells the story of a young noble Christian boy, Little Sir Hugh, who is playing ball with friends. The ball bounces into the garden of a Jewish family. The “Jew's Daughter” comes out of the house and invites Little Sir Hugh to come into her garden and fetch his ball. He is reluctant, but she lures him in with offers of fruit, and then, takes him into the house, where she stabs him in the heart, “like a sheep”. Note the word “sheep”. Think of the phrase “Lamb of God”, “Agnus Dei”. Who killed the Lamb of God? The crucifixion of the Lamb of God of course is the most rabble-rousing element of the blood libel.
The folk song is a retelling of a story that was thought to be true, the story of a little boy who became known as Little Saint Hugh, a “martyr”, who was found dead in Lincoln, a city in Lincolnshire, in the 13th century CE. It was thought that he was ritually murdered by the Jews, for his blood. The passions of Jew hatred were easily aroused. Many Jews were persecuted, and quite a number were killed.
The power of the blood libel is heightened by the medieval European Christian interpretation of the Biblical story of the Exodus. As told in the Torah, Moses is trying to convince Pharaoh to free the Hebrew slaves. The Egyptians wound up enduring 10 plagues. Oh, the horrors of that 10th plague, the slaying of the first born. How did the ancient Hebrews protect themselves from that dire 10th plague? How did each family keep the Angel of Death from their door? A lamb was slain, and its blood was smeared on the lintel of the door. A lamb was sacrificed. The lamb's blood saved the Jews from death.
How might a medieval Christian hearing the story of the blood of a lamb being used to save the lives of Jews interpret that story? Who is the
Lamb? Who is the Lamb of God, Agnus Dei? Jesus. Thus the interpretation of the Biblical story was that Jews killed a lamb for its blood, the Jews killed Jesus.
Often enough, Passover and Easter coincide on the calendar. Jews are celebrating the story told in the Book of Exodus, their freedom from slavery, and Christians are celebrating the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Jews are celebrating, drinking wine and singing, while Christians are mourning the death of Jesus, a death attributed to the Jews. The tensions arising during these spring holidays are exacerbated by an elaboration of the blood libel story related to Passover, i.e. that Jews kill Christian children for their blood, to use their blood to make matzoh for their celebration. Easter was all too often an occasion for a pogrom.
Lotto's examination of Freud's intense dislike for America, for American culture, is a wonderful application of Freud's own psychoanalytic theory of projection. Lotto points out that what Freud most disliked in American culture is “Americans' alleged preoccupation with making money and using dishonest methods to acquire wealth are uncomfortably close to the traditional antisemitic accusations made about Jews”. Of course, Freud's theory of projection applies to all prejudice. The accusations against Jews over the centuries in Europe are obvious projections. And, contemporary accusations in Europe that Israel, meaning the Jews of Israel, is an apartheid country practicing genocide against the Palestinians, that Israel is a Nazi state, is also a projection. “We weren't Nazis, we didn't colonize South Africa and practice apartheid, we didn't practice genocide during the Holocaust, the Jews do that sort of thing, we don't!”
In his contribution, David Terman, like others, provides a useful overview of anti-Semitism over the millennia, and also provides a context for a psychoanalytic approach to what otherwise might be considered a topic for other disciplines, such as history or sociology. He points out that psychoanalysis is used to understand the mind of an individual, yet, all groups are composed of individuals. He uses a self-psychology framework to consider the individual needs of the self as an individual self identifies with a particular group, and he emphasizes shared ideology. Indeed, a shared ideology can provide powerful impetus for individuals
to adhere to a group. They feel strengthened by that shared ideology.
As I considered Terman's thesis, I thought immediately of the power of Hitler's “Sieg Heil” uniting people with fragile egos, and of the American ideologues' cries of “Jews will not replace us”, people with fragile egos all too readily believing that Jews want to replace a “superior race of white Christian Americans” with “inferior races”, with immigrants, particularly “non-Aryan” immigrants, and with African-Americans.
Terman prefers the concept of narcissistic rage, which precludes the possibility of empathy, to the concept of projection, as the primary factor of group malevolence.
Terman explores the narcissism of the original Hebrews in Biblical times, the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, as a source of group identity, of group bonding. He considers the vicissitudes of the emergence of a cohesive identity among the ancient Hebrews, and the formation of a powerful group ideal. I struggled with this concept, since I felt threatened in my own sense of identity, my own sense of group belonging. Yet I persevered. I read on.
As I read, I was struck by Terman's deep devotion to accurate historical description, and to his willingness to consider complexity, which I found intriguing. When he focused on territorial belonging, I found my mind relaxing. He points out that, “As a dissenting religion, Judaism was unique, in that it could not be confined to a territory of its own”. Islam and the varieties of Christianity may have been opposed to each other, but by and large they were ensconced in their own territories, their own nation-states. Thus, in Christian Europe, “the Jews remained an irritating and sometimes frightening presence”.
Terman offers a compelling idea, that anti-Semitism represents a failure, as it is an historical process in which the wish to achieve a unifying ideal has not found success.
And yet… I want to argue with this conclusion. There are many cultural groups throughout the world that have faith in their own unifying ideals, but do not try to violently eradicate those who disagree. Of course, there are those who indeed try to impose their own ideals on other groups. Even so, not all of those resort to discrimination or violence. Sometimes
they are content to proselytize, or to persuade through reason, offering facts, relying on logic. Or they may even try to lead the way by example.
What forms of prejudice have been as consistent and enduring as anti-Semitism? Perhaps others that I have never learned about, but none that I have yet seen. Why me? Why not? Why not! Because whether it is “me”, the group I belong to, it is evil by definition. Evil may not be a psychoanalytic diagnostic category, but it sure describes anti-Semitism!