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[Göttingen, mid-January 1935]
Dear Professor Freud.*
That you really answer me yourself, recounting the story in such a long letter written in your own hand—how can I thank you adequately for this! I have been carrying the letter round with me for three days, thinking about it all and longing to write to you about it. But even today this is nothing more than a brief exclamation—and partly one of horror, naturally, that all this material should remain unpublished within the corpus of your work. You are quite right of course; you are the best judge of what is going on in Austria. Only it is such a sorrow for us all. And the most essential ingredients in the story seem so inevitably part and parcel of what you have always thought, already so to speak ‘in print’ long ago, that it is hard to believe that its publication would seriously affect the situation. And the fact that you enlist in your cause a ‘non-Jewish scholar’, who has already discussed the Moses question from the historical and Christian point of view, is surely in your favour.
In this discussion one point struck me as surprising: namely, how the ‘Semitic tribe’ to which Moses resorted seems thereby to some extent diminished or subordinated compared with the kindred tribes and the Egyptian tribes. This tribe now became the inheritor of the Moses tradition; first corrupted it (as the others had done) and then experienced from time to time the precious gift of the return of the repressed, but retained nevertheless this combination of higher and lower elements?
The insights which you gained into all religions by way of the Jewish problem extend for you, as you mention yourself, right back to Totem and Taboo. But what particularly fascinated me in your present view of things is a specific characteristic of the ‘return of the repressed’, namely, the way in which noble and precious elements return despite long intermixture with every conceivable kind of material. It is of course ‘historical’ and not ‘material truths’