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In Freudian historiography, exhaustive research about the lives of the British Freuds, Emanuel and Philipp, was long overdue. Emanuel and Philipp were Sigmund's two elder half-brothers, who were born and raised in Galicia in the first half of the 1830s, then lived in Moravia (Czech Republic) with their father Jacob and emigrated to Manchester in 1859. Both brothers soon became middle-class shopkeepers, which raised the young Freud's envy for their status (cf. his footnote to the
Auf Geseres dream in the Traumdeutung). In the long run, though, their origin from a patriarchal shtetel and their not so lucrative trades in Manchester curbed the full assimilation of their children, all but one unmarried and childless. In comparison, the longer path of assimilation through higher education, the German Bildung, chosen by the unpractical but cultivated Jacob for his son Sigmund, would get the upper hand.
The best example of the British Freuds' ambivalent, light and dark story of assimilation was the “good guy” of this story: the eldest Emanuel . On the light side, he was a secular Jew who got British citizenship in 1877 and played the role of the patriarch at least until 1900, maintaining strong bonds with his Viennese siblings: Sigmund and his five younger sisters, including Anna and her husband Eli, who had moved to New York in 1892, made their fortunes there, and raised the other VIP of the family, the public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays . As for Emanuel's dark side, it will show through his second son and heir Samuel , born in Manchester, who was to spend his whole life as a caretaker for his two elder, unmarried sisters, Pauline and Bertha. Sam took over his father's business, though at a lesser size, and maintained regular epistolary ties with Vienna, though from a position junior to his almost peer of age uncle-professor. The reserved Sam (“I know so little about you,” observed Sigmund) made himself very helpful in 1919-1920, sending food parcels to Sigmund a