Political Freud: A History

Freud himself reinforced the view that the book essentially concerns Jewish identity. He wrote that the subject of the book was “what has really created the particular character of the Jew?” and how has the Jew “in view of the renewed persecutions…drawn upon himself this undying hatred?”¹ But at a deeper and perhaps largely unconscious level the driving force behind the book was Freud’s worry concerning the survival of psychoanalysis. Writing the book while dying, and in the course of being driven into exile, Freud was well aware that psychoanalysis could be stamped out just as quickly and surprisingly as monotheism had been stamped out in ancient Egypt. For Freud the survival of the values he associated with the discovery of the unconscious was far more important than the survival of the Jewish religion, which he considered of little value, and even of Jewish ethnicity, to which he was deeply attached, although differently from the way he was attached to psychoanalysis. Of course, it must be said that Freud, like everyone else, had no idea that he was facing the attempted destruction of the Jewish people, a fact we know now that has profoundly shaped our perceptions.

Furthermore, Freud didn’t consider the question of the survival of psychoanalysis alone but posed the question of the survival of spiritual or intellectual advances in general. For that reason, the book should be read as a meditation on the overall crisis of the Western world in the light of the rise of Nazism, comparable to contemporaneous works, also largely written in exile, such as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Erwin Panofsky’s work on perspective, and Hans Baron’s Crisis of the Italian Renaissance. Nazism demonstrated, as perhaps no other current of the twentieth century did, why something like Freud’s hypothesis of the unconscious was necessary. That so horrific and primitive an example of sustained hate and destructiveness could arise in the country of Bach and Goethe showed how deluded our sense of ourselves as progressive and enlightened could be. Freud’s idea of the unconscious, implicitly defended in Moses and Monotheism, is analogous to Auerbach’s idea of realism, Panofsky’s idea of perspective, or Baron’s idea of civic humanism: a tentative and fragile advance in our understanding of subjectivity. In posing the question of the survival of psychoanalysis, Freud joined a group of scholars and thinkers concerned with the question of the survival of core human values overall.

What monotheism and psychoanalysis had in common Freud called Geistigkeit. Often translated as intellectuality or spirituality, the best English equivalent for Geistigkeit may be inwardness or subjectivity. Freud believed that the invention of monotheism had been a world-historical event, not because it created the Hebrew people, but rather because of the prohibition on graven images, which forced the Hebrews into envisioning a God they could not see or feel or touch. For Freud, Geistigkeit was a difficult human achievement, which went against the instinctive drive for sensory satisfaction as well as against the mind’s unconscious propensity to relive libidinal satisfactions from infancy. Geistigkeit was related to the ancient Hebrew idea of holiness (kedushah), but it was also related to the German idealist philosophical tradition that had taken shape as a critical response to Anglo-American empiricism and that informed Freud’s education and scientific milieu. In both meanings—spiritual and philosophical—Geistigkeit was integral to the idea of the unconscious. Just as the Hebrews could not represent God, and just as Kant could not empirically demonstrate the transcendental subject he hypothesized, so Freud could only infer, not demonstrate, the existence of unconscious mental processes.²

The sense in which Moses and Monotheism is centered on the survival of the idea of the unconscious will be apparent when we summarize the book’s argument. One man, Freud tells us, created Judaism: Moses. He did so by choosing a circle of followers and initiating them into a difficult practice based on instinctual renunciation rather than sensory gratification. His followers, after some enthusiasm, rejected his practice as too demanding, effectively returning to the idol worship from which Moses had rescued them. Eventually his followers killed Moses, and a debased Judaism triumphed. Nonetheless, the repressed memory of Moses’ ascetic doctrine survived and was rediscovered centuries later by the prophets.

Now let us make the obvious substitutions. One man created psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. He did so by choosing a circle of followers and initiating them into a difficult practice based on instinctual renunciation rather than sensory gratification. His followers, after some enthusiasm, rejected his practice as too demanding, returning to the idol worship from which Freud had rescued them. Eventually his followers killed Freud and a debased psychoanalysis triumphed. Nonetheless, the repressed memory of Freud’s ascetic doctrine survived, and its secrets too would be rediscovered centuries later.

Moses and Monotheism, then, should be read in two different but complementary ways. If, at one level, Freud was using psychoanalysis to illuminate the history of Judaism, at another he was using the history of Judaism to illuminate the history of psychoanalysis. Let us start with the latter. Freud’s conception of Jewish history has an underlying narrative structure that consists in five parts. In the first the Jews are presented with the monotheistic idea of God, which affords freedom from subordination to the senses and in that way deepens the inner world of the Hebrews; in the second they experience a sense of chosenness, of possessing a special treasure that raises them above those who are still immured in sensory and empirical knowledge; in the third they struggle with guilt at not being able to live up to the new ethical ideals associated with having a conscience and being a chosen people; in the fourth they are tempted to abandon their difficult standards and revert to the sensuous polytheism of the Egyptians as well as to the mother gods of the ancient Near East; and in the fifth they rediscover the original monotheistic message. In what follows I will identify five analogous stages in the history of psychoanalysis, stages that also reflect the extent to which psychoanalysis was the product of Jewish history. In a conclusion I return to situate Moses and Monotheism in the context of the Second World War and ask what light it sheds on the place that Judaism and anti-Semitism occupied in that war.

The monotheistic message was also a repetition in a second sense, this time of the cultural advance that occurred in the murder’s wake. Egypt’s earlier religions were polytheistic and oriented toward nature gods. They abounded in pictorial and symbolic representations of spiritual entities and promised life after death. In the monotheism developed at the court of Ikhnaton, by contrast, “all myth, magic and sorcery” were excluded. Instead of the pyramid and the falcon of the earlier Egyptian religion, the sun god was symbolized by “a round disc from which emanate rays terminating in human hands,” a symbol Freud called “almost rational.” Strikingly, the new religion had no mention of life after death. Of special importance, for Freud, was the Bilderverbot, the prohibition on graven images of the deity. The injunction against visualizing or otherwise representing God, he believed, forced a leap from the material and sensual world to the conceptual or intelligible. In Freud’s words, “ideas, memories, and inferences became decisive in contrast to the lower psychical activity which had direct perceptions by the sense-organs as its content.” This shift from sensory knowledge to conceptual thought, in Freud’s view, was an instinctual renunciation, by which Freud meant sublimation, not repression. As such it brought about a rise in self-esteem.

Freud’s account of the birth of monotheism parallels the birth of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s father Jacob Freud came from a Hasidic community in Galicia, and at an early age Freud was made familiar with the family Bible. As Freud later wrote, “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.” A patriarchal God and a foundational crime against that God were central to the book of Genesis. In the 1890s, when Freud was developing psychoanalysis, he grappled continually with the question of paternal authority. Although Freud interpreted a dream of his own for the first time in July 1895 and wrote out a draft of The Interpretation of Dreams, he could not complete the book for three more years.³ He explained the delay as the result of his “self-analysis,” the introspection and mourning precipitated by his father’s death. The death uprooted him, awakening his past and prompting him to surmise that the death of the father was invariably the most significant event in men’s lives. The process of completing The Interpretation of Dreams and of coming to grips with his father’s death went on together. The parts of the book Freud had difficulty finishing were his debts to his predecessors and the formulation of his most original idea, the primary process or unconscious.

For Freud, the formulation of the idea of the unconscious was not the result of an empirical discovery but of a conceptual breakthrough. Blocked from access to consciousness by what Freud was at that point calling the censor, neither the form nor the content of the unconscious could be directly represented. Rather, Freud would free associate to each of his dream fragments, then interpret his associations, and only after interpretation would he infer the contents of his unconscious. The proper starting point for analytic introspection, therefore, was the recognition that one could not know directly but rather had to infer the contents of one’s mind. In this regard Freud echoed Kant, “Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perception…must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psychoanalysis bids us not to set conscious perception [that is, our conscious thoughts] in the place of the unconscious mental process which is [their] object.”⁴

To be sure, the Hebrew sense of the sacred and unapproachable—all that is connoted by the Hebrew term kedushah—and the Greek discovery of philosophy, mathematics, and of a conceptually grounded science, are very different.⁵ But they have in common a turn toward the inner life, whether seen as spiritual, intellectual, or both, and the Greek and Hebrew strands were mingled in the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian eras, becoming part of a common thread of Western civilization. Freud’s education had been “neo-Kantian,” meaning that the innate or a priori categories of the mind posited by Kant were being redefined as evolutionary products. In a deep sense, however, Freud inflected the Kantian and neo-Kantian thought in which he had been trained with the ancient Hebrew connotations of kedushah. The unconscious, as Freud envisioned it, is not merely unknowable as the metaphysical world is, meaning not directly accessible to the senses; it is unknowable because that is where the dead parents, the memories of childhood, including the unconscious memory of the primal murder, lie not wholly buried.⁶ Thus, although Freud described the theory of the unconscious as “an extension of the corrections begun by Kant,” Freud’s core conception around 1900 was that of repression, a concept unknown to Kant and the ultimate source of the dream images that kept the memories of childhood buried. When Freud insisted in The Interpretation of Dreams that the Ur-image—the dream—be turned into words, he promulgated a new Bilderverbot. Freud’s insistence—the so-called single rule in psychoanalysis, namely to free associate—bespeaks his identification with Moses. Moses emancipated the Jews from the graven images of Egypt; Freud may have seen himself as emancipating humanity from dream images, opening up not the unconscious but the repressed unconscious, the incestuous and murderous wishes of infancy.

Like Moses, Freud needed to share his discovery, a need that initiates stage 2 in our history. As he formulated the idea of the unconscious, he drew closer to the Jewish community, effectively “choosing” his followers from among them. After returning from Paris in 1885, he had begun working as a private doctor for nervous diseases, primarily with Jewish and immigrant patients. Defiantly opening his first office on Easter Sunday, he presented himself as a convert to the “French” school, often a code word in Vienna for Jewish. He delivered a paper, “On Male Hysteria,” supposedly a Jewish disease, before the Viennese Society of Physicians. As anticapitalist and anti-Semitic feeling mounted in late nineteenth-century Vienna, only the emperor prevented the seating of the populist and anti-Semitic Karl Lueger as mayor, and that only until 1897.⁷ Freud responded to Lueger’s ascent, as well as to the Dreyfus affair, by joining B’nai B’rith. In so doing he stepped down the social ladder from the medical and academic intelligentsia to a stratum of ordinary Jewish doctors and businessmen who, “if they could not assist or further his scientific pursuits, did not threaten or discourage him.”⁸ It was from this relatively meager stratum of self-employed Jewish doctors that Freud “chose” his earliest followers.

Among these followers, Freud became a father figure himself, someone—as he wrote of Moses—“in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided, expression,” although the impulsion for which he stood was subjectivity and rational thought rather than monotheism. Like Moses, Freud eventually became a great cultural superego, a whole “climate of opinion,” as Auden wrote in a wonderful poem.⁹ Like the Moses of Freud’s imagination, many of Freud’s followers sought to slay him, at least figuratively. But, unlike Moses, Freud sought to thwart his detractors by telling his own story—in Moses and Monotheism. Thus the first stage in the history of psychoanalysis, the founding, was embedded with Judaic meanings, and so later Freud was able to tell the history of the Jews in way that illuminated the first stage in the history of analysis.

When the British Zionist analyst David Eder died in 1936, Freud recalled their meeting decades earlier: “We were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried in us that miraculous thing in common which, inaccessible to any analysis so far, makes the Jew.” Through writing Moses and Monotheism, Freud believed he had discovered the origins of the “miraculous thing” that Jews have in common. It was their “secret treasure,” their intellectuality, which gave them their self-confidence and sense of superiority in regard to pagan cultures that had remained “under the spell of sensuality.”¹⁰ Characteristically, Freud traced this “miraculous” feeling to the Hebrew people’s childlike relation to Moses. He wrote,

Being chosen was not without difficulties. When Moses presented the idea of one god to the Hebrew people, they seized upon it because it was a revival of the earlier submission to the primal father. But they also seized upon monotheism because it reproduced the gain made when, after the murder of the father, the brothers renounced their aggression and founded law, ethics, and religion. Like those who accomplished the first advances of civilization, the early Hebrews achieved the “triumph of spirituality (Geistigkeit) over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation.”¹¹ The same triumph, however, brought the Hebrews closer to the memory of the “prehistoric tragedy,” the murder of the primal father or fathers. Thus, while the Jews after Moses felt “superior to those who have remained in the bondage of the senses,” they also felt burdened by a guilt that “clamored for recognition.” Ambivalence, then, was inseparable from chosenness.

Once again, an episode in the history of psychoanalysis provided an uncanny repetition of an episode in Jewish history. The original Hebrews had chafed when they discovered that chosenness did not simply bestow a sense of superiority, but rather brought with it a gnawing sense of not living up to one’s responsibilities. So, too, beginning around 1906, Freud was caught in the crossfire between two figures who sought a more affirmative psychology than Freud had provided. On the one hand, Carl Jung supported the idea of a psychoanalysis rooted in man’s “higher”—i.e., religious—self. On the other hand, Alfred Adler challenged Freud on behalf of the secular ideals of equal status and self-esteem. In retrospect one can see that Jung and Adler represented the two great movements that challenged psychoanalysis throughout its history: Christianity and socialism. These were also movements of enormous consequence for the Jews of Freud’s time.

After the birth of Christianity, then, anti-Semitism changed its character. From a prejudice against a people perceived as alien, clannish, and stubborn, it became a prejudice against a people who reminded others of the fatal inevitability of guilt. When Freud met Jung, the eminently respectable son of a pastor, he hoped he saw a way beyond the anti-Semitism psychoanalysts faced. He “chose” Jung to become the “savior” of analysis, even urging his Jewish associates who did not like Jung to “cultivate a little masochism.” Jung helped teach Freud the importance of the anthropology of early myth and ritual, and it was under the spell of his relationship with Jung that Freud wrote Totem and Taboo. The two men differed, however, in their interpretations of the unconscious. Jung, in the tradition of German idealism, believed that just as Kant had discovered the laws that governed conscious thought Freud had discovered the laws of the unconscious. Freud, by contrast, went back to kedushah—the law of the Father—in his discovery of the unconscious. His ultimate concern was with the individual soul and not with such anonymous, impersonal regulative principles as condensation, displacement, and considerations of representability, which Jung believed organized the collective unconscious of symbol and myth.

Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s closest associates, captured the difference between the two men. Jung’s concern was the salvation of the community, not the analysis of the individual, Ferenczi wrote. Of course, it was Christ’s sacrifice that laid the basis for the community’s salvation. Thus Jung “identifies confession with psychoanalysis and evidently doesn’t know that the confession of sins is the lesser task of therapy: the greater one is the demolition of the father imago”—the unconscious image of the father—“which is completely absent in confession.” Jung sought to bring the patient to forgiveness and reconciliation, not self-knowledge; this in turn reflected on Jung. Jung doesn’t want to be analyzed, Ferenczi wrote, but rather wants to remain to his patients “the savior who suns himself in his Godlike nature!” Being analyzed would entail exposing “his hidden homosexuality,” that is, his identification with the band of brothers and refusal to recognize his ambivalence toward the father, Ferenczi continued. The band of brothers appears in Jung’s writings as the “Christian community” or “brotherhood.” Rather than make his own “homosexuality”—his “brotherly love”—clear to himself, Jung prefers to ‘“despise’ sexuality” and praise “the ‘progressive function of the [unconscious].’”¹² A few months later, Ferenczi reiterated: “The father plays almost no role…the Christian community of brothers takes up all the more room.”¹³

The conflict between Freud and Jung forced into the open the Jewish composition of psychoanalysis. The reason psychoanalysis had emerged among Jews, in Freud’s view, was that the Jews were a people “especially sensitive to the repressed historical material that is their tradition,” meaning, above all, guilt for the murder of the primal father.¹⁴ Christians, by contrast, evaded the feeling of guilt, since Jesus’s crucifixion redeemed the murder. Because, in Freud’s thinking, self-knowledge necessitated an inner—personal—awareness of guilt and responsibility, it was harder for the Christian to engage in introspection than it was for the Jew. Thus Freud explained to Abraham, “Racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual constitution, whereas [Jung], being a Christian and the son of a pastor, can only find his way…against great inner resistances. His adherence is therefore all the more valuable”¹⁵

In these and similar remarks Freud revealed himself to be a member of a parochial, still persecuted minority. For example, he seems to have known nothing of such great Christian thinkers as Augustine, Pascal, and Jonathan Edwards, whose critique of self-love or sense of the power of guilt are in every way the match of Freud’s or the superior. Nonetheless, Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious as linked to the capacity to work with an analyst whom one could not see, touch, or feel also offered a riposte of sorts to Protestant philosophers like Hegel who called Judaism the religion of sublimity, meaning that Jews viewed God as all-powerful and man as nothing. For Christians, the passion, suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ plunged the absolute into history and thus supplied the mediation through which humanity could touch and hear and feel God. Freud, by contrast, conceived of the analytic space as one in which patients could encounter what sometimes seemed to them a remote authority figure, someone whom they could not see and who offered no solace, no advice, no consolation, no relief from guilt. In working through a personal relationship to such a figure, Freud hoped that patients would reproduce infantile fantasies about the father and turn them into insight—what Ferenczi called “demolition of the paternal imago.” Ironically, then, it was not the Jew but the Christian who, by substituting confession for analysis, left unanalyzed the transcendent, remote, sublime Godhead that Freud first called the primal father and later called the superego.

Adler’s social-democratic and egalitarian critique of psychoanalysis complemented Jung’s religiosity. Like the Hebrews who revolted against Moses, Adler sought an affirmative approach to narcissism. Thus, if Christians avoided the difficulties of self-knowledge by insisting that Christ had already saved humanity, socialists held that the abolition of capitalism would produce universal benignity. Assuming that individuals had an innate sense of dignity and self-respect, Adler explained “neuroses” as arising from an insult or affront, such as the affront of poverty or discrimination or what is known today as status-injury. Sensitivity to slights, he reasoned, was the real basis for class consciousness.¹⁶ Any physician, he continued, can observe this sensitivity in the transference. When the neurotic loves or needs, he or she feels “I am a slave.” What Adler called the “masculine protest” was the revolt against this feeling of enslavement in both sexes. In 1911 Adler summarized his view: “There is no principle more generally valid for all human relationships than ‘on top of’ and ‘underneath.’”¹⁷

Freud called his 1914 “On Narcissism” “the scientific settling of accounts with Adler,” meaning that he had situated narcissism within what would soon be called the structural theory of the mind. In letters written at the same time, Freud charged that Adler “tries to force the wonderful diversity of psychology into the narrow bed of a single aggressive ‘masculine’ ego-current,” as if a child “had no other thought than to be ‘on top’ and play the man.”¹⁸ The view of life reflected in the Adlerian system, he added, “was founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love.”¹⁹ Adler and Jung complemented one another. For Adler status was everything. Jung, by contrast, despised the ego’s petty hurts, its “oversensitivity,” prickliness, its obsession with its standing in the world, traits that he eventually associated with the Jewish character of psychoanalysis.²⁰ Both men, however, sought to affirm narcissism without recognizing ambivalence. Neither man accepted the difficult path toward self-knowledge that Freud espoused in psychoanalysis, just as Moses had espoused an equally difficult path in the form of monotheism.

There was a further analogue between Judaism and psychoanalysis, especially significant for understanding America. Visiting New York, Jung developed a theory of the “Negro complex,” which paralleled Freud’s theory of anti-Semitism. The Negro’s example, Jung believed, posed a threat to the “laboriously subjugated instincts of the white races,” just as the Hebrew rejection of Christ’s sacrifice reminded Christians of their guilt.²¹ The Negro, in other words, flaunted his or her sensuality, just as the Jews seemed to Christians to flaunt the primal murder. Ferenczi elaborated on this idea: “the persecution of blacks in America” occurs because blacks “represent the ‘unconscious’ of the Americans. Thus the hate, the reaction formation against one’s own vices…. The free, ‘fresh’ behavior of the Jew, his ‘shameless’ flaunting of his interest in money, evokes hatred as a reaction formation in Christians, who are ethical not for logical reasons but out of repression. It is only since my analysis that I have understood the widespread Hungarian saying: ‘I hate him like my sins.’”²²

The early conflicts in the history of psychoanalysis, then, parallel the early conflicts in the history of the Jews. Both pivot on the discovery that the “miraculous feeling,” the “secret treasure,” associated with chosenness was inseparable from an internal struggle over guilt and ambivalence. Jung sought to bypass that struggle by defining therapy in terms of the interpretation of a symbolic world that accompanied Kant’s conception of reason. Adler, by contrast, anticipated the demand for recognition, which is the common sense of democratic societies today. Meanwhile, for Freud, the passage beyond the feeling of being chosen had to take place through recognition of the tragic weight of guilt, the subject of the next stage in Freud’s schema.²³

In Moses and Monotheism Freud explained the inseparability of guilt from the Jewish love of God. “Ambivalence is a part of the essence of the relation to the father: in the course of time the hostility could not fail to stir [again], which had once driven the sons into killing their admired and dreaded father. There was no place in the framework of the religion of Moses for a direct expression of the murderous hatred of the father. All that could come to light was a mighty reaction against it—a sense of guilt on account of that hostility, a bad conscience for having sinned against God and for not ceasing to sin.”²⁴

Christianity, by sacrificing a son, had offered a one-sided—affirmative—solution to the problem of the Jewish bad conscience. The weakness of this solution revealed itself in the Christian inability to leave the Jews in peace. Instead, the church fathers adopted the Hebrew Bible as their own “Old Testament,” rewrote the Hebrew stories so that they foretold the coming of Jesus, insisted that the Jews be preserved as an example of error, and predicted that the second coming would be known by the conversion of the Jews. The radical character of modern anti-Semitism, culminating in Nazism, lay in its attempt to destroy the long-standing Christian dependence on Judaism, an aim symbolized by the Nazis’ public burnings of the “Old Testament,” a sacred text for Christians after all. For many Germans in particular the attempt to build a modern nation-state hinged on the effort to build a world without finance capitalism and without Bolshevism, in other words a “world without Jews.”²⁵

The weight that guilt plays in Jewish culture was also a problem for young Jews. Before the rise of the Nazis obscured everything else, emancipation implied freedom not just from Christian strictures but from Jewish strictures as well. World War I seemed a turning point. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In the same year, the Russian Revolution ended the hated Romanov dynasty, originator of the modern pogrom and inventor of the greatest anti-Semitic lie of the modern world, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A great revolution swept the German-speaking Jewish world provoking complex rethinkings of Judaism such as those of Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, was increasingly read as a Jewish thinker as well as a Jewish writer. In the twenties, too, the correspondence between Freud and Einstein, encouraged by the League of Nations, symbolized the way the modern Jewish intellectual was becoming exemplary of Enlightenment values in general.

Freud’s writings concerning the uniqueness of the Mosaic moment, the particular contribution of the Jews to world history, and the way in which modern scientific thought, including psychoanalysis, had transcended not just Judaism but all religion, were produced in this context, within which he saw Mosaic Judaism as providing a touchstone through which to interpret psychoanalysis. As the biblical text records, when Moses returned from Mount Sinai he discovered that Aaron had led the Hebrews in building a golden calf. “Make us gods, which shall go before us,” meaning gods we can see, touch, and feel, the Hebrew people had cried out. That cry so betrayed Moses’ messages that he ordered the sacrifice of three thousand Hebrew men and women who refused to follow him, all the while begging God to allow him, Moses, one look (Exodus 33–34). The insistence that one believe in a God that one cannot see and that thereby offered no sensual relief and consolation eventually led, according to Freud, to the murder of Moses. Just as the early Hebrews rejected monotheism, so in the 1920s two great alternatives to psychoanalysis beckoned: Communism and America. Both appeared as salvation religions, offering powerful and appealing escapes from psychic conflict.

The charismatic and influential Wilhelm Reich represented the Communist alternative. Terming matriarchy the familial system of “natural society,” Reich praised “the natural self-regulation of sexuality that it entails.”²⁶ By contrast, the creation of patriarchy, private property and the state constituted the Ur-repression from which all neuroses flowed. Working in “Red Vienna” with its working-class schools, libraries, community centers, and apartment blocks (one of them subsequently named for Freud), all aimed at creating neue Menschen, Reich urged the politicization of analysis. Attacking Red Vienna’s “sexual abstinence” literature, he called for the sexual liberation of youth and women. The feminist psychoanalyst Karen Horney was among Reich’s most devoted followers.²⁷

The United States offered an alternative vision: individual rather than collective redemption. There the idea of mental healing, “mind cure,” or “positive thinking” was close to a national religion, central to Christian Science, self-help ideologies, salesmanship and career manuals, and movements for racial uplift, such as that of Father Divine. Mind cure preached “mind over matter,” not in the sense of Geistigkeit, but in the sense of wishful thinking. In analysis the search for quick, affirmative shortcuts came from Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, who suggested an “active therapy” in which the analyst prohibited activities such as masturbation or enjoined patients to fantasize, even suggesting the content of their fantasies.²⁸ Freud’s goal of insight, Ferenczi and Rank explained, was “entirely different from the healing factor…. We see the process of sublimation, which in ordinary life requires years of education, take place before our eyes.”²⁹

Freud was not immune to the appeal of either communism or emigration to the United States. On the one hand, he described himself as sympathetic to the “great experiment” unfolding in Russia while rejecting Reich’s view that human beings are benign except insofar as they have been corrupted by property.³⁰ On the other hand, he called the works of Rank and Ferenczi, “children of their time…conceived under the stress of the contrast between the postwar misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life.”³¹ In his late seventies and suffering from cancer since 1923, Freud responded to these challenges by deepening his stress on the role of guilt.

Freud didn’t believe that patients came to analysts to get well; they came, rather, to satisfy powerful instinctual wishes that had been formed in infancy. For this reason, Freud insisted on “abstinence,” meaning no consolation in the form of advice, sympathy, or recognition. In refusing to palliate the patient’s situation, Freud’s hope was that the instinctual need would be frustrated, intensified, and brought into sharper focus. Eventually, the need itself would become the object of observation and the result would be insight or self-awareness, in other words, Geistigkeit. However, the path to Geistigkeit was through the resistance: “no stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.”³² The key, then, was not to rest content with the positive transference, the desire for insight, but to also force the negative transference into consciousness. Only analysis did that.³³

In the 1930s, two powerful forces converged to further focus Freud’s imagination on the destructive drives: the difficulties analysts faced in gaining cures and the rise of new, radical forms of anti-Semitism, expressed in the German elections of 1930 in which the Nazis won the second largest number of votes. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor on January 31, 1933, Germany began a series of careful, legalistic efforts to purge the Jews from cultural and economic life. In April 1933 the government ordered that no Jews could serve in an executive function in a medical organization. By 1934 over half the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute’s former members had fled. Increasingly, the Nazi cataclysm threatened to swallow up the whole of Judaism, reducing psychoanalysis to a footnote in a larger tragic history. That was the context in which Moses and Monotheism was written.

One great idea pervades the book: the power of the command emanating from the law of the father and passed on unconsciously through evolution and history. In the course of development, Freud wrote, “a standard is created in the Ego which opposes the other faculties by observation, criticism and prohibition. We call this new standard the superego…. The superego is the successor and representative of the parents (and educators), who superintended the actions of the individual in his first years of life…. The Ego is concerned, just as it was in childhood, to retain the love of its master, and it feels his appreciation as a relief and satisfaction, his reproaches as pricks of conscience.” Judaism, then, was a superego religion, an expression of the omnipotent, ubiquitous father. “What seems to us so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in a mystical fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its connection with religion, its origins from the will of the father…which sets out to work compulsively and which refuses any conscious motivation.”³⁴ For still obscure historical reasons, psychoanalysis had inherited both the burden and the opportunity of the Jewish relation to the father, as was shown in its focus on “abstinence” or sublimation. “While instinctual renunciation for external reasons is only painful, renunciation for internal reasons, in obedience to the demands of the superego [brings] a substitutive satisfaction. The Ego feels uplifted; it is proud of the renunciation as of a valuable achievement.” Yet “the feeling of guilt is [also] created by the renunciation of aggression.” I consider this [idea] the most important progress in analysis,” Freud added.³⁵

In February 1938 Adolf Hitler summoned the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to Berchtesgaden, the resort town where The Interpretation of Dreams had largely been written. On March 11 the Germans marched without opposition across Austria’s northern border and into Vienna, shattering Freud’s fantasy that Hitler would be stopped at the city gates. Two days later, the board of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society decided that all members should flee the country and establish the future headquarters of the society wherever Freud went. After disbanding the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud invoked the memory of Rabbi Jochanan Ben Zakkai who, after Titus’s destruction of the second Jewish temple, fled to begin a school of Torah studies.³⁶ He did not publish Moses and Monotheism until he migrated to England. With the destruction of analysis on the continent of Europe, and its rebirth in England and America, the fourth stage in Freud’s schema unfolded: assimilation.

In Moses and Monotheism Freud used the transformation of Judaism into Christianity to illustrate the dilution and vulgarization that occurs when a difficult elite doctrine assumes a popular form. The new Christian religion, he wrote, “meant a cultural regression as compared with the old, Jewish one, as regularly happens when a new mass of people break their way in or are given admission. The Christian religion did not maintain the high level in things of the mind to which Judaism had soared. It was no longer strictly monotheist, [and] it took over numerous symbolic rituals from surrounding peoples.” Unlike Judaism, too, Christianity “re-established the great mother-goddess and found room to introduce many of the divine figures of polytheism only lightly veiled.”³⁷

Here, too, Freud’s account of the fate of the Mosaic religion reflects his experience of psychoanalysis. The question of matriarchy or mother goddesses had arisen among analysts, along with the question of the role of the mother in psychic development, as a result of the rise of feminism, reflected in women’s large and growing role within the analytic movement. Psychoanalysis was arguably the most woman-friendly profession in the world in the twenties and thirties, and Freud played a role in making this happen. For him, however, what psychoanalysis had in common with the Mosaic religion was not patriarchy, a word that came into use in the 1970s to signify female subordination, nor misogyny, a concept used in psychoanalysis in Freud’s time but not at stake here, but rather the stress on paternity. Recognition of the father’s role in procreation, Freud thought, had been a cultural advance, an aspect of the Geistige revolution that accompanied monotheism, insofar as the recognition of paternity had no clear instinctual or biological basis, as the mother-child relationship seemed to him to have. The idea of the Oedipus complex, the significance of sexual difference, and the exploration of the unconscious all presumed that prior moment of cultural advance. The stress on paternity did not deny the existence of a matriarchal or mother-centered phase in human history, but it did presume that the movement from matriarchy to what Freud called “the father-headed family” had meant the expansion of the role of culture and law. Analogously, for Freud, the movement in childhood to the recognition of the father’s role represented an intellectual advance, one centered on the knowledge of sexual difference. The question, then, was not whether to integrate the matriarchal hypothesis into Moses and Monotheism but how.

Historically, furthermore, there were two different currents to the matriarchal impulse, which is to say two different ways of understanding the role of the mother. One derived from the romantic response to the Enlightenment and had a strong tie to the Völkish nationalisms that eventually sanctioned the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Johan Jakob Bachofen’s 1861 Das Mütterrecht, which linked Mother-right to agriculture and the land, represents the best example. For Bachofen, the Mother “feeds” her favored Völk. Within psychoanalysis, Jung had represented this Völk-centered current, citing against Freud the “early, cultureless period” in human history when incest prevailed and the father’s role was “purely fortuitous.”³⁸ Drawing upon Aryan solar myths, Jung described the earliest societies as mother centered and polytheistic. The purpose of analysis, he urged, should be to “revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the [premonotheistic] soothsaying god of the vine, which he was.”³⁹

A second current in matriarchal thought was social democratic as opposed to Völkish. Here the source was the archaeological excavations in Sumer, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Southern Europe, which occurred during Freud’s lifetime. Freud was particularly struck by the excavations of Minoan-Mycenean civilization in Crete, which led to the remaking of our understanding of classical Greece, in part through James Frazer’s twelve-volume compilation of fertility myths, The Golden Bough, and in part through Jane Harrison’s reinterpretations of Greek tragedy as portraying a conflict between chthonic mother goddesses and patriarchal militarized invaders.⁴⁰ This current was bolstered after World War I when Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish emigré to England, returned from the Trobriand Islands claiming he could not locate a single myth of origin in which the father was assigned a role in procreation. Others argued that social organization arose from the need for prolonged maternal care or portrayed the maternal village as the forerunner of the paternal town.⁴¹ These currents of matriarchal thought influenced Melanie Klein’s work and were also linked to social democracy and the welfare state, as discussed in the following chapter.

Both the German Völkish and the Anglo-American social-democratic currents of matriarchal thought depended on the sense of belonging to a common nation or people. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism was central to the Völk-based nationalisms and irrelevant to, and sometimes even opposed by, the Anglo-American variants, even granted the ubiquity of eugenics. The reason was the strength and character of feminism in the Anglo-American context. After World War I, the women’s movement had been transformed by the impact of Freudianism and modernism. With its new democratic ideals of youth and the sexual couple, it rejected the Puritanism of the prewar women’s movement and supported social democracy. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, those who exalted the pastoral community advocated the Bismarckian welfare state but were critical of the young sexual couple, praising “masculine society,” and attacking the Jewish man for his “hypertrophied” attachment to the family. The Jew, wrote Jung, because of his “extraordinary fixation to the family” was trapped at the level of “uncontrolled incestuous feeling” and thus lacked the “communal” sentiment embodied in the life of the sons or brothers. The Jew, Hans Blüher, editor of the homosexual newspaper Der Eigene, elaborated, was “weak in male-bonding.”

In envisioning a transition from the “great mother” religions of tribes, in which men were only loosely attached to family life, to “father-headed” or pair-bonded families, Moses and Monotheism was closer to the Anglo-American version of matriarchy than to the German-speaking Völkish version. Like Jung, Freud believed there had been a transition from matriarchies to father-headed societies, but in Freud’s view this was no loss. Rather, the transition accomplished an intellectual and spiritual gain. In his reasoning, while the father was not known in “primal hordes,” one knew one’s mother through direct sensory perception. Only after the murder of the primal father led to the creation of kinship relations, law, and the state—in short to the institutionalization of the oedipal order—did the cognitive, extrasensual recognition of one’s father become institutionalized. The creation of two-sex families in place of mother-centered tribes signified the “victory of intellectuality [Geistigkeit] over sensuality [Sinnlichkeit],” in other words, the advance of reflective thought over sensory perception. In making this argument Freud was in line with much subsequent anthropology, such as the work of Meyer Fortes, who wrote, “Institutionalized fatherhood, unlike motherhood, comes into being not by virtue of a biological…event, but by ultimately juridical, societal provision, that is by rule. Fatherhood is a creation of society.”⁴²

Characteristically, Freud emphasized the cognitive gain involved in the recognition of the father’s role in procreation, but in connecting this gain to a historical event—the emergence of monotheism in ancient Egypt—Freud was also grappling toward a social, cultural, and, indeed, historical grounding for psychoanalysis. This point is important for understanding political Freudianism. While the nineteenth century self-characterization of historians was narrowly empirical (archive based), and while many contemporary historians describe Freud as “ahistorical” or even antihistorical, Freud’s way of thinking is very close to that of the working historian. This can be seen in his focus on concrete, particular events, especially turning points, in the geologically derived idea of strata that underlie both the historical and analytic professions, in the understanding that in any historical era currents from many different moments are in play, and in the skeptical approach to sources, so prominent in Moses and Monotheism. Combining evolution with the study of written sources to which historical writing has traditionally been confined is also familiar today.

Given these changes in our approach to history, Freud’s idea of a transition to “father-headed families” can be better understood. The “pair-bond” created by recognition of the father’s procreative contribution is a distinguishing mark of our species for two reasons. First, recognition of paternity made posible the sexual division of labor and thereby the prolongation of infancy, which led to the growth of the brain. Second, recognition of paternity is linked to social cooperation because it makes genealogy and kinship transparent and thereby useful for social organization, not half-hidden as they were when only the mother’s role was apparent.⁴³

For Freud, the Hebrew Bible reflected an important historical moment in this evolutionary past. The shift from the mother-centered fertility goddesses of polytheistic Sumeria, Babylon, Canaan, and Egypt to Mosaic monotheism involved what might be called paternalization, involving multiple changes at the levels of family life, genealogy, communal order, and political authority.⁴⁴ When Freud used such phrases as “the rule of the father,” he generally had in mind not only the evolutionary past but also the Hebrew sense of a pervasive law or order having the family at its center. This was not the patriarchal family invented in ancient Rome and molded by the Christian focus on original sin, the condemnation of “concupiscence” (sexual desire) as an expression of love of self, and the exaltation of female virginity, but rather the patriarchal family of the Hebrew nomads.

Viewed historically, Freud’s conception of monotheism as an intellectual or spiritual advance was also linked to the “dual-sphere” family, which became so important in the nineteenth century and was the family system in which Freud grew up. In Jewish history the dual spheres were the religious center (ultimately the synagogue) and the home; in Freud’s day these had become work and the home. The underlying idea was of respect for the autonomy of each sex in his or her sphere. As the complement to the home, the synagogue is not equivalent to all-male institutions, such as men’s lodges, premised on the derogation of family life. In contrast to such systems, Freud’s emphasis on dual-sphere families reflected his view that the sexes had the same early aims and objects and yet diverged essentially through the recognition of sexual difference in the course of the oedipal transition. He equated this recognition of sexual complementarity and difference with Geistigkeit and placed it at the center of human development.

Moses and Monotheism also provided an evolutionary and historical counterpart to the discovery of the mother’s role in psychoanalytic clinical practice. Just as Freud had turned the primal father into the superego, so he integrated the matriarchal archaeological discoveries into psychoanalysis. In 1931 he likened the psychic discovery of a pre-oedipal or matricentric stage of psychic development to the archaeological discovery of Minoan (i.e., pre-Mycenean) Greece. Everything, he wrote, “in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed so difficult to grasp in analysis—so grey with age and shadowy…that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.”⁴⁵ During the preoedipal stage, Freud argued, psychic development was the same in both sexes. Later, however, during the oedipal stage, sexual difference became important, indeed, inescapable. At the same time, the early common path was critical to his reconceptualization of the oedipal stage. In the course of development, he wrote, “something which both sexes have in common [was] forced…into different forms of expression.” This common current Freud called the “repudiation of femininity,” meaning the defensive repudiation of vulnerability in relation to the father.

At around the same time as Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism, he posited that the mother was the “child’s first erotic object,” “the first and strongest love-object,” “the prototype of all later love-relations—for both sexes.”⁴⁶ Freud did not, however, take this as evidence of a primal matriarchy whose overthrow constituted the “world historical defeat of the female sex,” as did, for example, Wilhelm Reich or, in a somewhat different sense, Friedrich Engels.⁴⁷ Rather, the recognition of the role of the mother informed the democratic welfare state, which, in the context of World War II, included an enormous psychoanalytic component aimed at specifying and securing the psychological prerequisites of a democratic citizenry. To be sure, the idea that the recognition of paternity represented a cultural advance could and did lead to sexist conclusions, such as the hypostatization of the mother’s role in early childhood, which occurred in postwar U.S. and Britain. But these were not inevitable given Freud’s emphasis on the psychic as opposed to biologically given character of sexual difference. This emphasis on the psychical also found an echo in Freud’s approach to Jewish identity.

According to the anthropologists and psychiatrists of Freud’s time, the Jews were a tribe (Stamm) or a race (Rasse), which implied they were marked by a positive—in the sense of external or manifest—identity. It was thought, therefore, that the empirical sciences could identify the nature of the Jew through observation, measurement, or genetic tracking, a project on which the Nazis were already embarked when Moses and Monotheism was being written. Freud, by contrast, rejected the idea of direct, sensuous, concrete recognition of descent or racial identity, just as he linked the family and kinship to a cognitive advance, In effect, he was insisting that one could no longer know directly what it meant to be Jewish, just as one could not know directly who one’s parents were. Of course, this is true of all identity; there is always a cognitive or Geistige element that makes it impossible to know identity directly. This Geistige element can be linked to cosmopolitanism or civilization, the unifying spirit and recognition of diversity the world has known at least since Alexander. In the late nineteenth century, however, the way in which our common humanity exceeds our empirical identity was posed as an accusation against the Jews. Richard Wagner, for example, reputedly called the Jews “the plastic demon of the decline of mankind.”⁴⁸ To many misogynistic and anti-Semitic minds, this accusation linked the Jews, who supposedly could take on so many different national attributes, to the new woman, who supposedly had no fixed sexual identity. Thus Otto Weininger called the Jews “pervasively feminine,” meaning that they lacked the autonomous Kantian ego that Weininger equated with masculinity.⁴⁹ As these examples show, there was a connection between Jewish identity and gender identity, not because Jewish men were pervasively feminized, as some have recently argued, but rather because both Jews and women were questioning the derogation of their ascribed biologically given identities.⁵⁰

In any event, there were grounds for Freud’s intuitions concerning the resonance between some forms of maternalism and the dilution or vulgarization of psychoanalysis. In England, where a brilliant Freudian offshoot had developed around Melanie Klein, Ian Suttie’s 1935 The Origins of Love and Hate described Christianity as a “system of psychotherapy” in which matriarchal elements were central. Emphasizing the social over the individual, the external over the internal, and the altruistic over the selfish, Suttie called the Freudian emphasis on the father “a disease.” In the United States, where a market society encouraged a narrow empiricism, and where the Calvinist heritage enfeebled explorations of the problem of guilt, the emphasis on the mother became linked to a deemphasis of the unconscious. Gertrude Stein looked forward to an un-Freudian twenty-first century, “when everybody forgets to be a father or to have one.” She broke with her brother Leo as a result of his decision to be analyzed, insisting that “if you write about yourself for anybody it sounds as if you are unhappy but generally speaking everybody…has a fairly cheerful time in living.”⁵¹ In the 1970s, psychoanalysis took the so-called relational turn, which was based on the idea that the mother-child relationship was itself always already intersubjective, thereby cultural and not in need of the recognition of paternity in the form of the Oedipus complex, which had been so important to classical analysis. These developments were already underway when Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism as a contribution to what he hoped would be an eventual return of the repressed—the recovery of the original discoveries of psychoanalysis.

Soon after finishing the book, Freud died. With his death the question arises: will there be an analogue to the fifth stage in Freud’s schema, in which the repressed tradition is rediscovered and reclaimed? Or would psychoanalysis become of merely historical interest? Moses and Monotheism itself addressed this question. There Freud wrote, “it would be wrong to break off the chain of causation with Moses and to neglect what his successors, the Jewish prophets, achieved. Monotheism had not taken root in Egypt. The same failure might have happened in Israel…. From the mass of the Jewish people, however, there arose again and again men who lent new color to the fading tradition, renewed the admonishments and demands of Moses and did not rest until the lost cause was once more regained.”⁵² Is there an analogy to the prophetic tradition within psychoanalysis, for example in figures like Herbert Marcuse or Juliet Mitchell, who discovered radical trends in what others had taken as conservative, or in Jacques Lacan, who called for a “return to Freud?” Or has psychoanalysis already been decisively absorbed in a new popular, eclectic mix of cybernetics, neuroscience, behaviorism, relational analysis, feminist therapy and culture criticism, just as Judaism was absorbed into Christianity? Whatever we say about that, another question arises: How can we understand Moses and Monotheism so that it sheds light not only on the history of psychoanalysis but also on World War II?

At the same time, Moses and Monotheism is a Jewish work: it belongs to the tradition of Jewish thought and is a product of the persecution of the Jews on the eve of World War II. Perhaps the best way to grasp this is by reference to Franz Kafka. Kafka was born, like Freud, in Moravia, one generation after Freud, and died another generation before Freud did. In both authors we have the vision of an all-powerful God or primal father, impossible to locate empirically, and an all-pervasive but fraying law (Gesetz), a patriarchal order, or even tradition, which cannot be directly accessed, whose claims are beyond rationality, and that leaves no place for the individual to hide. Kafka’s writings represent the real-world external literary complement to the Freudian inner world, the unconscious turned inside out. Gregor Samsa actually wakes up as an insect, right in his own bed, an ego’s defensive maneuvers dig out an underground burrow, the “instincts” take the form of speaking animals, bisexuality becomes a brother and a sister, and Joseph K. is not only irrationally guilty, he is also “shot like a dog.” For both writers, the essential relationship is between “man” and God, or “man” and the Father, and is not the I-thou relationship so favored in the Christian imaginary. Gershom Scholem captured the Jewish vision that the two authors share in a 1931 letter to Walter Benjamin that likened The Trial to the Book of Job: “Here for once a world is expressed in which redemption cannot be anticipated—go and explain this to the goyim!”⁵³

Freud’s retelling of the biblical Moses story so that it centers on survival and transmission also belongs to such Jewish traditions as Talmud (commentary), Zohar (exegesis), and Haggadah (telling), especially because there is a strong paternal voice running through it. Auerbach’s famous opening chapter in Mimesis describes the Hebrew mode of exposition as shaped by God’s entry from some vast heights or depths, some “undetermined dark place,” from which He or She calls: “Abraham!” So, too, did Moses enter Jewish life from some dark, undetermined place, leaving behind trails—archives for Jacques Derrida—of tradition, ritual, and law. Thus Freud argued that if a religious tradition were based only on conscious or explicit communication “it would be listened to, judged, and perhaps dismissed, like any other piece of information from outside; it would never attain the privilege of being liberated from the constraint of logical thought. It must have undergone the fate of being repressed, the condition of lingering in the unconscious, before it is able to display such powerful effects on its return, to bring the masses under its spell.” Religious texts such as the Bible showed evidence of this long process of unconscious transmission and reworking. Thus Freud argued that Exodus—like all codifications of memory—had been “subjected to revisions which have falsified it…mutilated and amplified it and have even changed it into its reverse” while simultaneously expressing a “solicitous piety [that] sought to preserve everything as it was.”⁵⁴

Moses and Monotheism is also a work of Jewish testimony, written by a political refugee. While the Jews occupied a territorial kingdom for several centuries, they were displaced—in exile—when Moses found them and for most of the time afterward. That helps give the story of Moses its untoward power. The Hebrew people were both the “founders” of Western culture—the originators of the idea of a single God, from which the whole of Christianity and Islam descend—but also “the Other” to the very culture they unwittingly founded. Their role as founders is crucial to understanding why anti-Semitism had the scope, power, even—for its progenitors, as well as for its enemies—the majesty that it did, as we shall see. But the Jewish role as “Other” also anticipates the way the vortex of World War II’s hurricane moved from Western Europe to the regions that Timothy Snyder has called “Bloodlands,” such as Poland, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Western Russia, and then again to the struggles against colonization in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the postwar search for a new, extra-Western world order.⁵⁵

Exile, longing, and memory had been the locus of Jewish identity since the destruction of the Temple. The Hebrew liturgy states, “A fire kindles within me as I recall—when I left Egypt, but I mourn as I remember—when I left Jerusalem.” The Haggadah enjoins, “In each and every generation let each person regard himself as though he had emerged from Egypt.” Freud was himself an exile at both the beginning and end of his life. He made his childhood situation as an exile clear in an early dream discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In the dream he saw himself almost in tears: “a female figure—an attendant or nun—brought two boys out and handed them over to their father, who was not myself.” The dream, Freud wrote, concerned “the Jewish problem, concern about the future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers.”⁵⁶ In associations to the dream, Freud recalled a Jewish asylum director who had been dismissed for confessional reasons, cousins able to flee Moravia for England during Freud’s infancy, and a performance of Theodor Herzl’s (1894) The New Ghetto. He saw himself sitting at the side of a fountain in Rome weeping and recalled Psalm 137, the Israelite lament from the Babylonian captivity, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.”

Because they were in exile, Ashkenazi Jews like Freud faced eastward. Just as in the anti-Semitic discourse of Freud’s times, the Jews were “Asiatics,” so many Jewish intellectuals believed that the spiritual center of Judaism lay in Poland, the Ukraine, and in the Russian Pale, as well as among the Sephardim and Mizrahim, rather than among the assimilated Jews of Germany and Austro-Hungary. Assimilated German Jewish homes were often filled with tallises, yarmulkes, tefillin, siddurim, and kashruth dishes from the East; Kafka’s breakthrough writing came after he saw an East European Yiddish theater troupe perform in Prague. At the same time, the Jews poured into the modern universities, modern business, science, and literature. This posed a conflict in regard to Jewish identity. We can understand the conflict by contrasting Martin Buber’s writings on the Hasidim, and his “I-Thou” philosophy, which originated during World War I, with Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism (1941). Both Buber and Scholem believed that the renewal of Jewish life would come from the Ostjuden—from the East—but they had opposing views as to how this would happen. Buber used the Hasidic tales to stress the universality of the Jewish experience, especially its resonance with enlightened Christian themes such as the existentialist encounter. By contrast, Scholem drew on the Hasidim, and especially on their mystical currents, to emphasize Jewish difference, chosenness, and unassimilability. Freud was certainly closer to Scholem than to Buber on this divide, but he was even more radical in that he moved the topos of Jewish spirituality back in time and further East in space—to Egypt, the one Arab country of Freud’s time that had a continuous history with the biblical era.

Egypt was a special passion for Freud. Although he had grown up in the shadow of the statue of Athena that stood in the Ringstrasse in Vienna, Freud was convinced that Athena was the descendant of the Egyptian phallic mother goddess Neith of Sais, the goddess of war. Isis, Osiris, and Horus were among his favorite antiquities, and when he visited London in 1908 he refused most invitations to tour, spending his evenings reading up for the next day’s visit to the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum. When Freud first met Karl Abraham, he slipped two Egyptian figurines into Abraham’s briefcase as a going away present. When Abraham wrote on Ikhnaton five years later, Freud called the essay a new “orientation” for psychoanalysis, intending the pun. Like his contemporaries, Freud was especially struck by the discoveries of mother goddess figurines at the palace at Knossos (Crete), which many archaeologists believed was an Egyptian colony. In Freud’s view, ancient Egypt was the most bisexual of all civilizations, and bisexuality for Freud laid the strongest basis for intellectual and artistic advance.⁵⁷

The mystery of origins lies behind kedushah, which is as important as reason to Geistigkeit. Freud described Moses as a “Great Stranger.” In fact, the Jews were “strangers” in Canaan before being enslaved in Egypt. When the Torah was written, the “other” was Babylonia. The God of the Midrash was fashioned against the backdrop of the Byzantine Empire, and that of the Kabbalah against the backdrop of Muslim Spain. In Freud and the Non-European (2003) Edward Said wrote, “Freud was deeply gripped by what stands outside the limits of reason, convention and, of course, consciousness: his whole work in that sense is about the Other.” According to Said, by locating Egypt in Israel rather than outside it, Freud was suggesting that there was something unknown, uncanny and unconscious, at the center of Jewish identity.⁵⁸ There is truth in this—the truth of of postcolonialism—but it is not the whole truth. Freud was not so much trying to put Egypt at the center of Jewish history as putting universality (Geistigkeit) at the center of all history, including that of the Jews. In that sense, Moses and Monotheism was exemplary of the Popular Front, the Marxist-inspired struggle against fascism. The Popular Front defined World War II as a conflict between those nations that descended from the Enlightenment, including the Soviet Union, and those that rejected the Enlightenment, led by Nazi Germany. For Freud, psychoanalysis was a child of the Enlightenment from which the concept of Geistigkeit derived.

Seen in that context, the attack on the Jews was not only an attack on the Jews as a people; it was also an attack on the civic republicanism of the Renaissance (Hans Baron, Erwin Panofsky), on the age of democratic revolutions (Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt), and on what Erich Auerbach called the tribal-democratic mode of representing everyday reality, which had begun with the ancient Hebrews. Freud, like almost all European analysts of the time, was a social democrat, not a classic free-market liberal, as he has so often been (mis)described, for example, by Peter Gay.⁵⁹ Still, it would be more precise to describe him as an important figure for the Popular Front than an advocate of it. In Moses and Monotheism he criticized the idea that consciousness can be traced back to so-called material factors and stressed instead the force of tradition, charisma, and “the personal influence upon world-history of individual great men.” Whatever the relation of Freudianism to the Popular Front, leftism had implications for Jewish identity. The Polish Jewish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher grasped this in 1954 when he described Freud as a “non-Jewish Jew.” Praising “the Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry,” Deutscher connected Freud to Heine, Marx, and Rosa Luxemburg, all figures who “were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs…where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other…. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”

In Moses and Monotheism Freud was trying to understand Jewish history, as well as Jewish identity, but he was also trying to understand anti-Semitism, not only in its ancient national and religious forms, but in its modern forms as well. The Judeocide, to be sure, took place after Freud died, but the psychology that created and tolerated it was in place throughout the 1930s, certainly in the German-speaking world. According to Mark Mazower, “National Socialism…fits into the mainstream not only of German but also of European history far more comfortably than most people like to admit.”⁶⁰ Mazower had in mind especially Nazism’s racial-nationalist welfare system and its attempt to create a common European market, but Nazism was also close to the European mainstream in its attempt to free European Christianity from its dependence on the Jews. Richard Evans provides a clue to the centrality of anti-Semitism to World War II in his review of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. As Snyder argues, the Jews were killed along with Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Roma, and many other peoples. Yet, according to Evans, “There was something peculiarly sadistic in the Nazi’s desire not just to torture, maim and kill the Jews, but also to humiliate them…. The Slavs, in the end, were a regional obstacle to be removed; the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ to be ground into the dust.”⁶¹