You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Most biographers of Freud concur in the proposition that he was not in any way a practicing Jew, that he did not understand Hebrew, and that he was estranged from Judaism. And yet, despite his militant stand as an atheist and his equally militant rejection of all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, something else remained for Freud that made “the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, [with] so many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words …” (Gay, 1988, p. 601). To Freud, it seemed that Jewishness, as a unique identifying quality, had its origins in some mysterious Lamarckian source, a kind of inheritance of a “racial” unconscious (Gay, 1988, p. 601). Emanuel Rice, on the other hand, tries to show in his book Freud and Moses that Freud's “irresistible” attraction to Judaism and to Jews had its origins in more down-to-earth historical facts, which for various reasons were not publicly acknowledged by Freud and his family.
Rice sets out to prove the following propositions:
that Freud's parents both came from a strictly Orthodox Jewish background and, contrary to prevailing opinions, retained many of the traditional practices to the end of their lives;
that his father can justly be characterized as having a scholarly knowledge of the Bible and its associated Talmudic commentaries;
that his parents were not “reformed” Jews nor were they totally assimilated, but were in fact closest to Orthodoxy in the conduct of their lives;
that Freud's Jewish upbringing was much more traditional than is generally realized;
that a prevailing prejudice in Vienna against unassimilated East European Jews made many Viennese middle-class Jews bend over backward in their zeal to identify with the non-Jewish middle-class power structure, and that this may have contributed in some measure to Freud's ambivalence about his Jewish identity;
finally, in an analysis of Freud's last major work Moses and Monotheism, that this essay was a v