Jewish Jokes: Sigmund Freud and the Hidden Language of the Jews

I begin with a parapraxis, a slip of the pen. In his autobiography, From Berlin to Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem (1980), a man whose life was defined by books, makes surprisingly few references to those books that helped form his attitude toward literature as well as his Jewish identity. Scholem's life, played out in the scholarly world of texts, re-created the idealized world of the Jew as scholar in a Germany that had only rediscovered these values of traditional Judaism shortly before his birth in 1897 (see also Biale, 1979). Scholem writes of his first encounter with “some Hebrew books somewhere on the back shelves as well as other Hebrew books from the estate of my great-grand-parents.… Otherwise I remember only two Jewish works of fiction that were very popular at the time, Israel Zangwill's The King of Schnorrers and the collection Jüdische Witze [Jewish Jokes] by Herrmann Noël” (Scholem, 1980, p. 40). These two titles remained with Scholem for over sixty years as the first Jewish