Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew

The Late Period

4 --~---€i<51e-The Late Period The Encounter with Death The years 1920-23 were painful ones for Freud, full of the deaths of loved ones and friends, culminating with the threat to his own life. Following the devastations ofWorld War I, it is little wonder that Freud is pessimistic and bitter. On 20 January 1920 Freud's friend and great benefactor to psychoanalysis, Anton von Freund, died of cancer at the age offorty. Freud visited him daily in his illness, watching him die. "He bore his hopelessness with heroic clarity, did not disgrace analysis," Freud wrote Eitingon the day after Freund's death.1 Though Freud felt the loss "keenly," his admiration is also clear, for Freund had died "as Freud's father had died and as he himself hoped to die," that is, stoically.Z Five days later Freud's daughter Sophie died, pregnant with Freud's third grandchild. Hilda Doolittle remembers Freud saying in 1933 that he had lost his favorite daughter in an epidemic in the last year of the Great War. "'She is here,' he said, and he showed me a tiny locket that he wore, fastened to his watch-chain."3 Less than two years later, Freud's niece, Caecilie Graf, pregnant and unmarried, committed suicide. She was Freud's "best niece," "a dear girl of23."4 Six months later, in February 1923, Freud writes Jones that he had detected "a leucoplastic growth on my jaw and palate, right side," that he suspected was cancer ("My own diagnosis had been epithelioma, but this was not accepted").5 When Freud finally showed this growth to two medical friends in April, both advised excision of the lesion but did not tell Freud he had cancer. A minor operation was performed badly on 20 April 1923 to remove the growth, and X-ray and radium treatments followed, belying the supposed harmlessness of the 175 176 DUAL ALLEGIANCE condition.6 Freud was not told of the malignant diagnosis of the excised growth, but he probably understood enough. It is just after this operation that he announced plans by circular letter for a two-week trip to Rome in September with his daughter Anna.7 The gesture may have indicated Freud's awareness that his time was running out and expressed a desire to set foot on the soil of Rome once more to renew his strength. Then on 19 June 1923 Freud's grandson, Sophie's second son Heinz Rudolph, died of tubercular meningitis, and Freud wept-according to Robert Hollitscher, for the only time in his life.8 This loss obviously affected Freud de:eply, and he described himself in mid-August to Eitingon as now a stranger to life and a candidate for death.9 The boy, he told lifelong friend Oscar Rie, "meant the future to me and thus has taken the future away with him."l0 At this point, in September the true diagnosis of his cancer now being withheld from him by "The Committee" as well, Freud takes his planned trip to show Rome to his daughter Anna, thinking it might be his last opportunity. To Anna too it had been "plain enough" from a conversation she had had with his doctor, Felix Deutsch, that her father had cancer,II and even if Freud had not acknowledged his condition, his mood after Heinerle's death was enough to make the significance of the trip clear. And when at breakfast on the train from Verona to Rome "suddenly a stream of blood spurted from Freud's mouth," "there was no doubt of its significance in either of their minds."12 Yet they continued on and did not return to Vienna until a few days before the scheduled oral surgery with Hans Pichler. Facing death, Freud returns to the scene of his first triumph, both to say good-bye and to begin again with renewed strength, like Antaeus touching the earth. He certainly would have shown Michelangelo's Moses (and perhaps too the Arch of Titus) to Anna, who more than any other now must have appeared to be his real successor. As Freud says, "Anna was splendid. She understood and enjoyed everything, and I was very proud of her." \3 Freud is passing the mantle of psychoanalysis to Anna, who would serve until his death as his nurse and public representative. The final period of the development of Freud's Jewish-humanist identity begins here in Rome, appropriately enough. For it is in Rome that Freud can find confirmed together both his "indestructible national feeling" and his identification with the classical civilization that grounds his humanism. When Freud returned to Vienna, he was examined by his oral surgeons on 26 September and told definitely that his ulcer was malignant. He wrote on the same day to Abraham, Eitingon, and Jones, facing the future with composure and adding, "You know what it all means."14 The Late Period 177 Major operations were performed 4 and 12 October, a large section of the right side of Freud's upper jaw was removed, and he was fitted with a prosthesis.IS On 30 October 1923, following his return home from this radical surgery, Freud drafted a will in the form of a letter to Martin, so clearly Freud realized that he might die soon. A few days later, on 5 November, he began a systematic list of the translations of his works. He also keptlists of letters received and answered, visitors, patients, and a "Shortest Chronicle"-a kind of "list of lists." Michael Molnar suggests that Freud's keeping these lists was a way of his holding onto his life as he felt it begin to slip away.16 The Correspondence With this biographical context as an introduction, let us turn to Freud's correspondence. While he was vacationing in July of 1923 at the summer resort at Badgastein, he received a letter from a young German Jew named Erich Leyens, who said he was alarmed at the growth of antisemitism in Germany. The young man had been a member of the German Youth Movement and had fought on the German side in World War I. One of the leaders of the now antisemitic Movement, psychiatrist Hans Bltiher, had quoted Freud in support of his opinions, having called in the preceding year (in his Secessio ludaica) for the separation of all Jews from the German people.17 Freud replies to Leyens on 4 July: I believe I understand you and your situation. That I have full sympathy for you requires no corroboration. But I would dissuade you from consuming yourself in the hopeless struggle against the present "spiritual " currents in Germany. Folk psychoses are immune to arguments. Precisely the Germans had the occasion to learn it in the recent World War. But they appear not to be capable of it. Let us leave them to themselves ... Repudiating Bliiher, Freud continues, Turn yourself toward the things that can lift the Jews over all these insanities and-don't take amiss the advice that is the upshot of a long life!-don't impose yourself upon the Germans.18 One gets the sense from the last phrase that Freud regards Jews in German lands almost like "guests in someone else's house," so a kind of Jewish succession seems to have already taken place in his mind (unless 178 DUAL ALLEGIANCE of course he had always felt that way). Freud feels a volle Sympathie for this young Jew, whose shifting German-Jewish allegiances and encounters with antisemitism mirrored Freud's own as a youth.19 Understanding Leyens, Freud identifies with him. Freud's words remind us of those he wrote to Abraham at the beginning of their correspondence. He advises Leyens to cum away from the Germans-they are crazy-lest he be "consumed" (vl?rzehren). Instead, Freud says, turn to the Jews and lift them up, elevate them above this madness. Leave the Germans alone; help the Jews. Freud's advice, the experience of a long life, is a kind of "projective identification," whereby he uses the young Jew to do for him what he wants to do for himself. For as the final period unfolds, Freud does the same thing in his own life that he advises Leyens to do in his, namely, he turns from the Germans and toward the Jews and his own Jewishness in an effort to help his people, and in so doing discovers the nature of his own Jewishness. Moses andMonotheism may itself be an attempt to 'lift the Jews out of the insanities' that were engulfing Germany , in spite of irs "ambivalent" form. This letter to Leyens stands at the beginning of our late period as suggestive evidence of a shift in Freud's attitude as he faced his own death in the summer before his last trip to Rome. The following year, the City Council of Vienna bestowed upon Freud the Burgerrecht of Vienna for his sixty-eighth birthday. It was the first civic honor with which the city saw fit to acknowledge him. Freud explained his view of the city's motives by telling Abraham that "the idea that my coming sixty-eighth birthday may be the last must have occurred to other people tOO."20 To Ferenczi he dismissed the honor this way: There is little co be said about the Vienna Biirgerrecht you mention. (Man ka1l11 SchaMes davoll mache1l ["One can make Shabbes with it"]).21 As mentioned in chapter 2, Freud made oblique reference to this Yiddish proverb as part of a joke in The Interpretation ofDreams.22 The import of the proverb is to say "big deal," for the honor is useless for doing any "work" during the week. That is, as far as Freud is concerned, it means nothing for psychoanalysis. It does not indicate an acceptance of psychoanalysis , but is rather a kind of ritual blessing, of no use in earning a livelihood or in promoting psychoanalysis. The conjunction of these two responses to Viennese recognition is significant in relation to Freud's Jewishness. Freud thinks on one hand of his own imminent death, and on the other of a Jewish joke with a Yiddish punch line (which, significantly, he renders in German). In the The Late Period 179 face of the threat of personal extinction, Freud affirms his ethnic roots and a kind of solidarity with a popular Jewish tradition. As Kurt Schlesinger says, Jewish humor as an oral tradition handed down over generations of joke telling is a form of secular communal ritual which both binds and characterizes the community, and acts adaptively for its survivaJ.23 In letters to Abraham from 1924 dated 22 August and 8 December, Freud's interest in another Jewish tradition appears, namely, the symbolism of the number seven, so prominent in the Jewish Bible. Freud wants to take a "historical view" of the matter, and he proposes "a period when men counted in sixes," though he admits that "here ignorance sets in." In other words, Freud is letting his imagination play. As a result of being the first of a second series of six, the number seven is "like first things, subject to taboo." That the initial number of the third series, thirteen, is "the unluckiest ofall numbers would fit in with this," Freud adds. Freud's idea has its origin in a book he is reading on the history of Assyria, in which" 19 was also one of the suspect numbers"as Freud remarks, it is "the beginning of a fourth series of sixes." He notes also that many prime numbers occur in this series, concluding with "49 which is again 7 x 7." He adds in December, "The problem of 7 still interests me greatly." Why? Freud is using this play with numbers in an attempt to get at ancient historical facts, to probe "Assyria" or perhaps "the Babylonians" (where Abraham 100ks),24in an effort to get a glimpse into an age that is "pre-astronomical."25This numerical interest is to be understood as part of Freud's long look backwards in time into the origins of human civilization, and this is tied up with his growing interest in the roots of the Jewish people. But as mentioned, the rabbis too used the play with numbers in a serious attempt to uncover the secrets of reality (in their case, the divine reality of Creation; Freud wants history). Freud may be closer to Jewish tradition than he knows. The Return ofthe Suppressed: Lettersfrom 1925 In the following year, 1925, Freud makes a number of significant and forthright statements about himself as a Jew, and all but one of theseimportantly for my thesis of periodicity-are made to the public. Freud "comes out" as a Jew from behind the "Gentile facade." In this year Freud publishes his Selbstdarstellung ("An Autobiographical Study") in Grotes's Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, though Jones tells us it was written in August and September, 1924.26 Freud notes in 180 DUAL ALLEGIANCE the "Postscript" he wrote for the work in 1935, "Shortly before I wrote this study it seemed as though my life would soon be brought to an end by the recurrence of a malignant disease,"27 so he is clearly aware at this time that his own death is on the horizon. At the beginning of the essay, Freud mentions that he has already published "the essence of all that I can say on the present occasion" ten years before, in On the History o/the Psycho-Analytical Movement (1914).28 But a difference in phrasing that is important for us is evident. In 1925 Freud writes, "My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself."29 In his essay written in 1914, the word "Jew" does not appear, in spite of a clear allusion to Freud's Jewish origin in the context of his suspicion that antisemitism has played a role in an opponent's criticism of psychoanalysis as "typically Viennese." This charge, Freud suspects, is "a euphemistic substitute for another reproach which no one would care to put forward openly,"30 namely, that psychoanalysis is the work of a Jew. In 1925, in the late period, Freud states openly the Jewish origins he only alludes to in 1914, in the middle period. This contrast appears stronger when Freud describes here his experience of antisemitism in the years following his entrance into the University of Vienna in 1873: I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. No circumlocutions here. Freud's reaction is characteristically defiant: I refused absolutely to do the first of these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my "race." Gay notes that around Christmas 1923 Freud had read an advance copy of Fritz Winels's biography of him and had marked with strong disapproval a statl:!ment by Wittels that Freud's "fate as a Jew in the German cultural area made him sicken early with the feeling of inferiority , which no German Jew can escape.".ll Gay suggests that Freud's emphatic claim that he did notfall prey to this sickness was "an indirect response to Wittels's characterization."32 Freud rejects the subordination because he expects to have a place to work within the "framework of humanity." He "relinquished, without much regret," the acceptance of the community, apparently accepting that he did not belong to the German Volk, as was evident in his letter to Erich Leyens in 1923. Belonging to the Jewish people functioned as compensatory support in this loss. The Late Period 181 Rather than crushing Freud's Jewish identity, this antisemitic rejection helped form his character: ... for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban ofthe "compact majority." The foundations were thus laid for a certain degree of independence of judgement.33 A character trait formed in the early period is given explicit public articulation in the late period. We will see that Freud identifies his "Unabhlingigkeitdes Urteils" as a specifically Jewish element of his character for which he is grateful. Freud's reference to Henrik Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People, recurs in the following year, when Freud addresses the Vienna B'nai B'rith. At that point we will discuss its context in detail. Here it is sufficient to note that being excluded from the community of the "solid majority," offinding himselfsocially marginalized, worked to his advantage in his eyes, strengthening his "intellectual constitution." He was willing to forego the "pleasure" of the community of the antisemitic majority. There is one other sentence in this text that will reward our attention . Discussing his youth, Freud says, My early familiarity with the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learned the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.34 Freud added this sentence too to his text in 1935.35 Just as he is himself engrossed in his revision of the "biblical" or "historical" Moses that will appear in Moses andMonotheism, Freud acknowledges the early influence of his Bible reading on the direction of his later interests, and he includes this sentence in these paragraphs that relate to the givenness and formation of his Jewish identity. Freud realizes anew in the late period that he is a Jew whose identity is rooted in the Bible.36 Butas Freud, facing death, re-encounters his own Jewishness, he repeatedly also reaffirms his atheism, lest there be any mistake about his allegiances, both of them deep. He writes at this time to the editor of the Jewish Press Centre, a Jewish-Swiss weekly in Zurich (from what cause we don't know, perhaps a query from that editor): I can say that I stand as far apart from the Jewish religion as from all other religions; that is to say, they are of great significance to me as a 182 DUAL ALLEGIANCE subject of scientific interest, but emotionally I take no part in them. On the other hand, I have always had a strong feeling of belonging together with [ZusammengehOrigkeitl my people and have also nourished it in my children. We have all remained in the Jewish denomination .37 Echoing his words in his Selbstdarstellung, Freud says with a certain pride that he and his family have remained Jews. He knows how common conversion to Christianity was at the time, especially among liberals and freethinkers. As noted above, Freud considered this a great loss to one's potential; as we shall see below, he also considered it "unworthy" and "senseless." He is explicit in affirming the nature of his Jewish allegiance to "peoplehood" and not religion, a dichotomy we have seen Freud use before. Religions are a subject of wissenschaftlichen Interessen (not "national interests," as he will say in Moses andMonotheism). That is, they engage Freud intellectually; emotionally he claims to keep his distance . Yet since Freud defines himself to such a great extent in terms of the information that comes from intellectual "crafts of knowing," such interest is not insignificant for Freud's Jewish identity, even ifhe denies an emotional participation (which we have reason to question, in any event). In fact, Freud will use precisely this "scientific" method when he comes to define for himself (and his public) what a Jew is in Moses and Monotheism. And a little over a year later, Freud will admit that "Jewishness is still very important to me emotionally.".l8 Presumably he refers here again to his feeling of "belonging together" with Jewish people. Freud's letter continues with perhaps the first of many statements attesting both to his lack of Hebrew language ability and to his regret at this lack of knowledge: In the time of my youth our free-thinking [or "Iiberal"-freisinnigenl instructors of religion placed no value on the acquisition of a knowledge ofthe Hebrew language and literature by their pupils. Myeducation in this field is therefore quite left behind, which I have since often regretted.39 As mentioned, Rainey points out that it is an exaggeration on Freud's part to say that his liberal Jewish teachers placed no value on a knowledge of Hebrew. "In principle," he says, "they valued Hebrew instruction highly, but they were forced to curtail it drastically because of the small amount of class time [two hours per week] allotted to them in the public schools."40 This curricular decision itself, however, reflects a value--or rather, not valuing Hebrew and its religious traditions as com- The Late Period 183 pared to "secular" or even humanistic studies. The fact that there was no study of the Talmud and its commentaries also points to this choice. Although Freud's words are an exaggeration in their evaluation of his teachers' ideals, nonetheless he is right about the Gymnasium's overall values. His education in this area was indeed minimal and inadequate, and his sorrow is understandable, especially later in life. Feeling a solidarity with his people and yet having no part in their language highlights the loss. As Freud's teacher Hammerschlag wrote, Precisely because he [the Jew] knows that he is one in language, customs , and way of life with the people among whom he lives, and directs his efforts toward the realization of the same political, national, and cultural goals, precisely for this reason he must preserve and protect with that much greater fervor and devotion the only means through which he remains conscious of his connection with his brothers in the faith [Glaubensbriider] and his own religious particularity [Besonderheit],41 namely, the study of the Hebrew language, which binds Jews of all nations together. So Freud's regret can be traced to his teacher's unrealized ideals. A practical expression of this emotional connection is found in the fact that Freud refused to accept any royalties whatsoever whenever any of his works were translated into Hebrew or Yiddish and published or printed.42 Freud's respect for intellectual life and its Wissenschaften may also be related to his Jewishness. On 1 April 1925, inauguration ceremonies were led by Lord Balfour for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Freud himself was elected to the board of trustees for the university in 1925 and 1926, but because of ill health he was unable to attend these opening ceremonies. Instead he wrote a letter, dated 27 March 1925, to the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Dr. Zvi Hirsch Chajes, for the occasion: Historians have told us that our small nation withstood the destruction of its independence as a State only because it began to transfer in its estimation ofvalues the highest rank to its spiritual possessions [geistigen Guter], to its religion and its literature. We are now living in a time when this people has a prospect of again winning the land of its fathers with the help of a power that dominates the world [i.e., Britain], and it celebrates the occasion by the foundation of a University in its ancient capital city. A University is a place in which knowledge [Wissenschaft] is taught above all differences of religions and nations, where investigation is carried on, which is to show mankind how far they understand the world around them and how far they can control it. 184 DUAL ALLEGIANCE Such an undertaking is a noble witness to the development to which our people has forced its way in two thousand years of grievous fortune [schwerer Schicksalel. I find it painful that my ill-health prevents me from experiencing in person the opening festivities of the Jewish University in Jerusalem .43 This extraordinary document deserves several comments. First, it is clear how moved Freud is by this event, and one can imagine that the pain of which he speaks at not being able to be present himself was indeed heartfelt. "Religions" may not claim Freud's emotional allegiance , but the "spiritual" (geistig) strivings of his people do. The man to whom this letter was addressed, Chief Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes, was a liberal biblical scholar born in Brody, Galicia (Freud's mother's birthplace ), and educated in part at the University of Vienna. He was an ardent Zionist and outspoken supporter of Herzl from his youth, and during nine years of office of Vienna (1918-27), he was "the undisputed spiritual leader of Austrian Jewry,"44 recognized for his "love of truth" and his "pride at being a Jew."45 Like Freud an honorary member of the Hebrew University's board of trustees, Chajes was a natural choice to receive Freud's letter. Freud's opening words here in 1925 recall of course the Nathan letter of 1882 written to his fiancee. What was private in the early period becomes public in the late period. In 1882, Freud scoffed at the ritual fast of Tisha B'Av, not only because the date of its observance was based on a "historical miscalculation," but also because the historians say that if Jerusalem had not been destroyed, we Jews would have perished like so many peoples before and after us. Only after the collapse of the visible Temple, did the invisible edifice of Judaism become possible. The "invisible edifice" from the Nathan letter in 1882 appears in 1925 as the Jewish people's "spiritual possessions, its religion and its literature ." At the end of his life Freud will clarify these "spiritual goods" even further, identifying them specifically as "ideas:·46 Jewish survival is made possible only by its devotion to ideas, and the university, as a place dedicated to the teaching of Wissenschaft independently of religious or national differences (in sharp contrast to Freud's experience at the University of Vienna), is an institution that therefore supports Jewish survival and expresses its lifeblood. Two years later, in 1927, Freud will characterize religious ideas as an illusion, opposed to science; here reli- The Late Period 185 gion is partofwhat made Jewish survival and development possible throughout two thousand years of "grievous destiny," and Freud is proud of that. The fact that this founding is taking place in his people's "ancient capital city," Jerusalem, is no small part of Freud's pride, stirred on by the fighting prospect ofagain winning its "viiterlichen Boden" with Britain's help. Lord Balfour, speaking on this occasion, referred to Freud as one of three Jews who, along with Einstein and Bergson, had had the greatest beneficial influence on modern thought. Eight months later, in December , Freud wrote to his nephew in England, Samuel, with bemused pride: "I am considered a celebrity.... The Jews all over the world boast of my name, pairing me with Einstein."47 Freud acknowledged his thanks for the "honorable reference" by having Jones send Lord Balfour an offprint of his Selbstdarstellung, not insignificantly, considering the proud affirmation of his Jewishness that it contains. He also donated a signed copy to the Hebrew University Library.48 Karl Abraham, Freud's Jewish friend and psychoanalytic collaborator , died on 25 December 1925, apparently of an undiagnosed lung cancer.49 The next issue of the 1926 Internationale Zeitschriftfur Psychoanalyse was to have been a special issue commemorating Freud's seventieth birthday. But Freud, Jones tells us, instructed its editor to postpone the issue and to devote it "to the memorial notices of Abraham which Rado had wished to publish at the end of the year." As Freud said at the time, "One cannot celebrate any festival until one has performed the duty of mourning."so Freud's sentiment here is conditioned by Jewish law and custom, which rules that when one enters a state of mourning for a deceased blood relative (e.g., a brother), one cannot participate in any joyous festivity, particularly for the first seven days. Freud's response indicates how close he felt to Abraham: he was like a member of his family. Statements andLettersfrom 1926 In 1926 Freud made a number of revealing statements about the nature ofhis Jewish identity and its allegiances, an act perhaps particularly appropriate for this Jew in his seventieth (7 x 10) year. Freud had achieved a kind ofJewish wholeness and could look back and observe some definitions . One aspect of that definition was his "sympathy" for Zionism, even if, he told Friedrich Thieberger, he could make "no judgement on it, on its chances of success and of the possible dangers facing it."51 Yet he wrote in February 1926 to Enrico Morselli that he was able to read 186 DUAL ALLEGIANCE Morselli's pamphlet on "the Zionist question" "wholly without mixed feelings, with unqualified approval." Freud is pleased at Morselli's sympathetic , humane [Menschenfreundlichkeit], and understanding discussion of an issue so often "distorted by human passions." In fact, he feels obligated to send him his "personal thanks for it." Though Freud does not become actively involved in the Zionist movement, nevertheless his positive emotional response must be noted, for it is a deep part of his Jewishness. Freud's public statements on the Zionist question will be less enthusiastic, as we shall see, but that may be accounted for by his political strategy for the advancement of psychoanalysis. Freud's letter to Morselli, an Italian psychiatrist and anthropologist who wrote the first Italian textbook on psychoanalysis (which he had just sent to Freud), continues with Freud's customary complex ofethnic pledges of allegiance and religious denials: I do not know whether your judgement, which recognizes in psychoanalysis a direct product of the Jewish spirit [Geist] is correct, but if it were so I would not feel ashamed. Although I have been estranged from the religion of my forebears for a long time, I have never given up the feeling of solidarity with my people and realize with satisfaction that you call yourself a pupil of one of my clansmen-the great Lombroso,sz In contrast to those who would derive psychoanalysis from the Jewish "mind" in order to disparage and dismiss it, Freud is proud of the rootifit be there in fact. Yet since any statement ofJewish allegiance unavoidably raises the question of Jewish religion, Freud repeats his atheism, while returning immediately to his never-renounced feeling of belonging together with his people, whose "tribal" nature he acknowledges. Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was an Italian physician and criminologist who had an interest in Zionism and was a friend of Max Nordau. Freud feels a sense of "satisfaction" at finding psychoanalysis being promoted in Italy by a pupil of a "tribesman," and he would have liked to visit Morselli-had he been able to travel. Freud feels this sense of satisfaction because of his Jewish and humanistic experience in the Vienna B'nai B'rith. Insofar as Freud regards psychoanalysis as a humanistic science, he regards its dissemination as a victory for Humonitiit. Klein notes that the Vienna B'nai B'rith interpreted their Jewish mission in terms of Humonitiit: We in Austria have not called ourselves Humanitatsvereine for nothing: we are the champions of the ideal of humanity:13 The Late Period 187 Thus when Freud finds that psychoanalysis is succeeding on the strength of the Jewish "tribal" connection, he can feel a sense of satisfaction at the fulfillment of Jewish ideals. Freud's effort to insulate the scientific status ofpsychoanalysis from the irrationality of tribal affiliation, while at the same time taking pride in its Jewish origins, also comes to the fore in connection with his interest in telepathy and the occult. On 7 March 1926, Freud writes to Jones about the latter's distress over Freud's paper, "Dreams and Telepathy," saying, If someone should reproach you with my Fall into Sin, you are free to reply that my adherence to telepathy is my private affair, like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and other things, and the theme oftelepathy-inessential [wesensfremdl for psychoanalysis.54 The elements of this group-Jewishness, smoking, and telepathy-are not unrelated in Freud's mind, since all three relate to the irrational side of Freud's personality. All three also seem connected with his father. Freud reveals in a letter to Fliess written in 1929 5 .1 that his model for cigar smoking was his father, who remained a heavy smoker until the age of eighty-one.56 On 7 May 1930 Freud complains to Ferenczi that the "autotomy" ("self-amputation") of tobacco and cigar abstinence leaves him "feeling noticeably depersonalized,"57 indicating how deeply smoking carries the identification with his father. It generates Freud's sense of personhood. So we can understand too why smoking and working are inextricably linked in his life.58 With regard to telepathy, we recall that in a letter to Jung in 1909,59 Freud described his numerology superstitions as "Jewish mysticism." And as we have seen, Freud equated "mysticism" with "occultism."60 Freud's obsession with numbers was connected with Jewish folk superstitions that link him to his father and his Eastern European background,61 and so suggests a paternal link between Freud's Jewishness and his interest in parapsychological phenomena. Jewishness itselfwill become "para"-psychological for Freud in becoming phylogenetic in Moses and Monotheism. This link between his Jewishness and irrationality might explain Freud's tendency to emphasize his atheism (i.e., his commitment to rationality) whenever he expressed his irrational feeling of solidarity with the Jewish people. Once in a late-night conversation with Jones before the first World War, Freud allowed for the possibility that the existence of mental processes independent of any organic bodily functions-whose reality he was not prepared to deny on this occasion at least-could lead to a 188 DUAL ALLEGIANCE belief even in der liebe Gatt. 62 Though Freud may have gone this far to shock or tease Jones, still it seems to be evidence of an underlying tendency towards a be:lief in manifestations of the irrational "beyond" the merely psychological.63 This leads Rainey to wonder whether Freud's agnosticism is not in fact in part a reaction-formation against an undesired propensity for belief.64 If so, then Freud's interest in religion leads him quite naturally to a consideration of his own "non-religious" Jewishness as a manifestation of a "para-rational" solidarity. We recall his remark to Putnam that his motivation in writing Totem and Taboo was to explore his own lack of religious belief. Twenty years later this beginning will lead him to explore the irrational nature of his own Jewishness. As Freud's seventieth birthday approached, his B'nai B'rith lodge published acommemorative issue oftheir periodicaJ,f'5whose articles friendly to psychoanalysis Freud pronounced harmless.66 We would expect this strengthening of the Jewish bond to produce a negative statement about religion from Freud, and indeed he continues his letter to Marie Bonaparte by saying, "I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion, but they don't seem to have any suspicion of that."67 But Freud does not see the B'nai B'rith as a "religious" society, for he tells Friedrich Thieberger in January of this year, "Our lodge is based on national foundations and pursues mainly ethical aims."68 Note that a Jewish foundation is a national one in Freud's mind. In his address to B'nai B'rith in May 1926, Freud makes this national dimension as clear publicly in the late period as he did privately in the early period, forty years earlier, in his letter to Martha in 1886. As he tells George Viereck in an interview in June 1926, My language is German. My culture, my attachments are German. I considered myselfGerman intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I consider myself no longer German. I prefer to call myself a Jew.69 As mentioned, the pride Freud expresses in being Jewish may be related to the humanitarian ideals of the B'nai B'rith, which sought to be "a single nation of brothers" committed to "the active support of the ideals of humanity which our prophets laid down but which have been ignored by European mankind."70 Note again that Freud's self-conscious Jewish identity emerges in response to antisemitism. Antisemitism was in fact a crucial factor in the formation of the B'nai B'rith in Vienna. "Without antisemitism," William Knoepfmacher The Late Period 189 claimed, "we would never have formed this union in the first place."7l Freud himself will reportedly tell Joseph Wortis that he believes that as long as there is an antisemitic movement, Jews must "band together" to fight it.72 When in 1935 Freud writes of his joining the lodge, he says, I soon became one of you, enjoyed your sympathy, and almost never neglected to go to the place, surrounded by extreme hostility, where I was certain to find friends.73 So one reason for Freud's seeking out Jewish friends was that "he sought refuge from anti-Semitic ostracism."74In fact, as noted, Freud's joining the lodge on 29 September 1897 was at "the first possible moment after he recognized the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Viennese politics and academic life."75 The 1926 Address to B'nai B'rith. But Freud's association with the B'nai B'rith went beyond consolation; it also helped him define his own Jewishness. And when in May 1926, in addition to the commemorative issue of their periodical, the B'nai B'rith lodge organized a celebration in honor of Freud's seventieth birthday, Freud wrote an address, which his brother Alexander (also a member of the lodge) delivered for him, entitled "On Being of the Sons of the Covenant" (i.e., B'nai B'rith),76 As Klein shows, Freud's address must be read in the context of the one that preceded it, namely, that given by his friend and former physician , Ludwig Braun, for Freud had read Braun's address two days before the celebration,77 and it clearly influenced his own remarks. Braun attempted to define Freud's Jewish identity. He asked, "Can anyone even imagine Freud as not Jewish?" Braun went on to define Freud's Jewishness as typical and paradigmatic in three respects. First, Freud's spirit of moral and religious independence kept him apart from the world, as was characteristic of the Jew. The idea of the moral role of the Jew as the conscience of society, awake at the periphery, is also expressed. It is clearly a proud position, and seems rooted in the Biblical idea ofbeing a "light unto the nations." Secondly, Freud had a courageous determination to oppose the rest of society, "his enemy." This determination involved a steadfast persistence (remember Freud's "tenacity"), dignity, and composure, as well as a spiritual optimism rooted in the Jewish will to survive. The third Jewish characteristic was "wholeness" (das Ganze), which constituted in Braun's mind the essence of the Jew "precisely." "The Ganzejudewas able to discern, behind the fragmented and discordant surface, the unity and indivisibility of nature." This 190 DUAL ALLEGIANCE enabled the Jew in Freud to see all men equally, to recognize that "the mind and soul of every person has the same organization." Again the particular gave Freud a universal insight. Furthermore, Freud's refusal to "devote himself to Zionism, to religious piety, or to any other partial expression of Judaism," and instead to commit himself to the whole of humanity, was an ,expression of this essential Jewish characteristic, and it explained why "Freud feels at home here," namely, because of the humanitarian ideals ofB'nai B'rith. Though he w:ill express certain reservations to friends later, in his address Freud does not dismiss or even qualify Braun's words. In fact, he admits to Marie Bonaparte that the speech "cast a spell over" (bezaubern) even his own family, implying a tacit Jewish self-recognition that accounts for his family's response. Freud in his address seeks only "to add something to what: has been said by one who is both my friend and the physician who cares for me." Freud describes his loneliness and isolation after his initial psychoanalytic discoveries and publications: "I felt as though I were despised and shunned." He sought "a circle of chosen men of high character" who would befriend him. "That you were Jews," Freud tells them, "could only be desirable to me; for I was myself a Jew, and it always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless [unsinnig] to deny it." The denial of his Jewishness is unreasonable or absurd, the severance of meaning. Yet once admitting his bond to Jewry, Freud must define it more precisely over against other passions: What bound me to Jewry was-I am duty-bound [schuld~gl to admit it-not the faith, nor the national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever, and was brought up without religion, though not without respect for what are called the "ethical" demands of human civilization . Whenever I felt an inclination towards national exaltation, I tried hard to suppress it as being harmful and unjust, frightened by the warning example of the peoples among whom we Jews live. Freud says he feds "obligated"78 to be honest about his true attachments , lest his brothers credit him with a piety or a kind of loyalty he cannot in good conscience profess. Yet based on the facts of Freud's life, his words are exaggerated in places. For example, he was not brought up "without religion." As we have seen, Freud's instruction in Judaism was "clearly 'religious' in the sense that it sought to strengthen his faith in God and to interpret the ethics and the ritual practices ofJudaism; it was not a dispassionate analysis in the spirit of Religionswissenschaft."79 So Rainey suggests that Freud is describing here his response to parts of The Late Period 191 this kind of instruction. For even though he rejected its "religious" aspects, nevertheless, his curriculum's heavy emphasis on the ethical teachings of the prophets and on "the moral laws" of the Bible made a lasting impression on him.8°We recall Freud's eulogy for Hammerschlag, in which he wrote that "religious instruction seemed to him a way of educating towards Humanitiit." In Freud's childhood home, "religion" was present in the observance ofJewish festivals, but it is clear that such observance did not include a belief in God, at least for the young Freud, who was openly critical in his letters to friends. And his astonished belief in his mother's "proof' that we are made of clay gave way to a stoic belief in Nature's Ananke, and to atheism.81 So he seems to describe this upbringing through the lenses of his own unbelief, perhaps a kind of wish-fulfillment. Freud's denial that national pride bound him to Jewry must also be qualified-as he perhaps does in his own way-by the evidence from his letters that show a great deal of national pride, and even (as we shall see again) a sense of Jewish superiority. Freud's rational mind tells him that this feeling is harmful and unfair, but he admits that he feels it: Ein nationales Hochgefiihlhabe ich. His "sympathy" for Zionism also suggests that national feeling is part of what binds him to Jewry, but here in a public forum Freud the Jewish humanist tries to strike a balance. We recall the feeling of personal gratitude Freud expressed in response to Morselli's presentation ofZionism with such Menschenfreundlichkeit. Freud will say in his next paragraph that he took his share in B'nai B'rith's "humanitarian and national interests." Freud's national interests, like those of the lodge whose ideals he shares, are mingled with his humanitarian interests. Actually, as Klein shows, the former are an expression of the latter. This interdependence is also expressed in the last phrase quoted. Though proud to be a Jew, Freud wants to learn from "the peoples among whom we Jews live," and so be a better Jew. As the tradition in Midrash Rabbah says, "Ifyou hear that there is wisdom among the Gentiles, believe it."82 But Freud goes on in his address to define psychologically what binds him to his people, what makes "the attraction of Jewry and of Jews irresistible." He speaks of "many dark emotional forces, all the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words." Freud feels powerfully drawn to his fellow Jews by deep emotions (Gemachtfiihlen). But in addition, he has a clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimate familiarity [Heimlichkeitl of the same psychological structure [der gleichen seelischen KonstructionI. 192 DUAL ALLEGIANCE In Freud's mind, J~:ws have the same inner psychic structure, or "soulconstruction ." They are psychologically "built" in the same way. As a result, they share a feeling of a common "home." Exactly what this structure of the Jewish psyche or soul consists of, Freud does not say, but the concept clearly underlies his project in Moses andMonotheism to say "how the Jew has come to acquire the character he has," the definition of the Psychological Jew. As mentioned in chapter 2, Simon has suggested that Freud's theory of Jewish wit in his Wit andIts Relation to the Unconscious (1905) presents a "theory ofthe Jewish soul" in miniature. The rather conventional portrait there included sharp self-criticism, a democratic mode of thought, an emphasis on social justice rooted in Jewish religious tradition, revolt against the oppressiveness of religion itself, a consciousness of the experience of poverty, and an all-pervading skepticism.8.1 As discussed above in connection with the early period, these conventional Jewish characteristics certainly reflect Freud's own personality, and this is why he uses Jewish wit so often in situations related to his Jewish identity. Jewish jokes are a means by which Freud feels and thus confirms his Jewishness. In the early period this implicit understanding was enough to convey a sense of coherence, or at least attachment. But in the late period, in 1934-38, Freud's nl~ed for a deeper understanding of his Jewish psychic constitution (and for a deeper attachment to the tradition of his father) will drive him to write Moses andMonotheism, a work that will help him understand why he feels so "mingled" or bound up together with other Jews. In 1926, he can only say that something is there. Freud continue:s his address, saying that it was to his "Jewish nature alone" that he owed two character traits that had helped him in his struggles with life: Because I was a Jew I found myself free of many prejudices which restricted others [i.e., Gentiles] in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and renounce [or "relinquish"verzichten ] agreement with the "compact majority."H4 Freud attributes to his Jewish "nature" his independence of thought and his courageous capacity to oppose social convention and relinquish solidarity with the majority. In the context of an address to the B'nai B'rith, Freud seems to be talking about prejudices and agreement within Gentile society, though the same qualities will enable him to analyze Jewish history and reach conclusions that will require him to relinquish agreement with the majority of his fellow Jews. Thus Moses andMonothe- The Late Period 193 ism, in its very independence of and challenge to accepted conventions, may be a quintessential expression of Freud's Jewish identity. Freud's closing reference to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, mentioned above in connection with Freud's use of it in his Selbstdarstellung, is also significant. The play's central character, Dr. Stockman, struggles throughout the story to enlighten the people of his town about a danger that threatens their livelihood, but whose solution threatens those in power with loss and so arouses their oppressive opposition. By telling them the truth Stockman struggles to free the townspeople from their self-serving masters, who want to keep them in ignorance of the facts. The parallel with Freud's view of himself teaching the disagreeable "facts" of psychoanalysis is patent. The play closes with Dr. Stockman's discovery that the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. ("Father!" his daughter responds in breathless admiration at this discovery , her "eyes full offaith," as the play ends.) As Freud will say, no one is more familiar with that solitary position than the Jew, and it has made him strong indeed. Freud is proud to be a Jew, and his reference reveals it. He will stand alone again at the end of his life in asserting the Egyptian origins of a Moses who was himself the disciple of "the first individual in history,"85 Akhnaton, who stood alone in his struggle to proclaim the truth. So Freud attaches himself to a long tradition of ideological opposition in the name of the truth. That Freud finds non-Jews at both the beginning and the end of this chain (Akhnaton and Ibsen), with Jews as the links in between, is not surprising given his hopes for humanistic culture and the instrumental role of Jews in "preparing the ground." Moses and Monotheism is Freud's last attempt to contribute to that cultural whole, and he will do so in what may be for him a characteristically Jewish way, namely, as a solitary individual. A word might be said too about Freud's word Heimlichkeit as it applies to his Jewishness. Literally, it means "home-ness," and through the private nature of the home, it has come to mean secret or hidden, a reality shared only by those who live in the same home together. The word points to the family-like intimacy that Jews experience among themselves, a closeness that "the same psychic constitution" would produce . Heimlichkeit, as something both familiar and congenial (like the home) and yet concealed and secret (as Freud describes it himself in his essay, "Das Unheimlich, " "The Uncanny"),86 is a fitting word for Freud to use to characterize his Jewishness, for not only is he aware of its private nature, but he also has felt a need to keep it private. As we have shown, in the middle period Freud sought to keep the Jewishness of the psychoanalytic movement hidden behind Jung's "Gentile facade," and 194 DUAl, AI ,LEG lANCE he bid his Jewish followers to suppress themselves to the advantage of Gentiles. We remember too Freud's comment about George Eliot's Daniel Deronda that it contained things that "we speak of only among ourselves ."87 Freud's sense of Jewishness is familial in nature, heimlich. David Bakan has an epilogue to his speculative book on Freud and the Jewish mystical tradition,88 in which he notes that Freud associates Heimlichkeit with the experience of the uncanny, Unheimlichkeit, to such an extent that Freud says unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies ofheimlich.89 Bakan then goes on to show that Freud associated Unheimlichkeit with the sense of impending death. Now ifHeimlichkeit is associated with being Jewish, and Unheimlichkeit with death, and the two ideas are related, then, Bakan reasons, "Freud's Jewish feeling is related to his sense of impending death."90 Bakan's conclusion supports my thesis that Freud's concern with and public statements about his Jewishness in the late period are related to his awareness ofhis approaching death. In characterizing his Jewishness by the "home-feeling" ofHeimlichkeit, Bakan argues, Freud is reflecting a natural and common association in the Jewish experience. Furthermore , "with his sense of impending death Freud is then returninghome," and since Freud gives this address to B'nai B'rith, Bakan concludes that Freud is in fact "returning to membership in the body of Israel."91 This movement of return corresponds to my thesis about the periodicity of Freud's Jewish identity, namely, that having spent the middle period with his Jewishness in the background (and that didn't work out well), in the late period Freud brings it to the foreground, an interest that culminates in Moses and Monotheism. That book, as Emanuel Rice also argues, is Freud's return. Its seemingly ambivalent form is in part a reflection of Freud's dual allegiance as a modern Jew, and it is for this reason all the more interesting to us. Four days after the B'nai B'rith celebration, Freud writes to Marie Bonaparte, The Jewish societies in Vienna and the University in Jerusalem (of which I am a trustee), in short the Jews altogether have celebrated me like national hero, although my service to the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Jewishness.n In other words, by openly affirming his Jewish origin, Freud allowed psychoanalysis to be an advocate for the inclusion ofJews in the humanistic culture liberal Jews like him sought. This was Freud's idea of die jiidische Sache, namely, that the Emancipation should reach its full horizon , a "glorious time" of freedom and unity, as envisioned by many in The Late Period 195 Freud's B'nai B'rith lodge.93 If Freud is Jewish, then people (especially Jews) can point to the valuable contributions to civilization that Jews are capable of, and Freud has served "the Jewish cause." The proud way in which many Jews today point to men like Freud, Einstein and Marx for their role in the construction ofmodernity seems a confirmation ofFreud's view. Freud can write similarly later in the same month to Arthur Schnitzler, Jews ofall types and from many different places have adopted me with enthusiasm, as though I were a famous God-fearing Rabbi. I am not opposed to this, since I have left no doubt about my attitude towards religious faith; Jewishness is still very important to me emotionally.94 As long as the Jews accept Freud on his own non-religious terms, he does not mind being their "Rabbi"; he even seems pleased. As he says, "Das Judentum bedeutet mir noch sehr viel affectiv." Why? Though the wordludentum can mean "Judaism," as well as the collective, "Jewry," Freud makes his meaning clear. He feels emotionally connected to his people, not to his people's religion or its doctrine. "Affectively," they are still an extension of his family. ludentum is still important to Freud because it is a primary link to his roots, his parents and family, and in the years leading up to his death, he seems to connect himself to his pastas Bakan says, "returning home"-rather than sever himself from it (contra Marthe Robert). Furthermore, the Jews' attachment to him will prompt interest in psychoanalysis among the Jewish people, and so the psychoanalytic "cause" and the "Jewish cause" can unite in celebrating Freud's seventieth birthday. Letters in 1927 Given Freud's strong affirmation of his Jewishness in 1926, perhaps it is no wonder that in 1927 he publishes his most sustained attack on religious belief, The Future ofan Illusion. He is glad he has no religion, Freud tells Pfister in April 1926, lest he be divided in his allegiance.95 It may be that Freud is in fact tempted unconsciously toward a belief in the supernatural , but publically he insists on his atheism (proudly, because he believes it is the truth). As he will tell Pfister in 1929, the essence of the religious Weltanschauung is "the pious illusion of providence and a moral world order, which reason contradicts."96 Having been adopted like ein gottesfurchtigergrosser Rabbi, Freud may feel the need to clarify again his attitude to religious faith. On 16 October 1927 he writes to Pfister of the imminent publication of a "pamphlet" "which has a great deal to do 196 DUAL ALLEGIANCE with you" and whose subject matter is "my completely negative attitude to religion, in any form, and however attenuated." He hopes that his friend will nevertheless be able to have some tolerance and understanding for "the unholy heretic." Freud has told Romain Rolland in 1923 that he is a "destroyer of illusions" and that he has "spent a great part" of his life destroying his "own illusions and those of mankind."97 Yet he writes Pfister six days after his letter cited above, "We know that by different routes we aspire to the same objectives for poor humanity."98 Freud seeks to serve humanity, but he does so on his own terms, as an "infidel Jew."99 Yet he can recognize his own goals in the Christian Pfarrer, for his humanism transcends this difference. Georg Brandes A respect for the Je:wish Bible continues to be a part of Freud's identity, in spite of his atheism. On 4 March 1927, Freud writes to his niece, Margit Freud, a journalist in Copenhagen, about the death of the JewishDanish literary critic and writer, Georg Brandes. Saying that he too had been hurt by Brandes's death, Freud recalled one of their conversations "as he lay in the hotel room in Vienna": When he modestly tried to take second place behind the "scientist" [Forscher, i.e., Freud himself], I pointed out to him his position among the descendants of our prophets. The "prophets" still take precedence over the "scientists" in Freud's mind. But the fact that Freud will rank Brandes with the biblical prophets is indicative in itselfof the cosmopolitan character of Freud's "prophetic line." Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was one of Denmark's greatest writers, and he had an enormous influence on European literature, opposing Romanticism and demanding that literature should stimulate discussion of modern problems. He wrote studies of major cultural personalities, such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Heine, Borne, and Michelangelo, and his essay on Nietzsche marked the starting point of the philosopher's world fame. Like many assimilated European Jews, he was ambivalent about his own Jewish identity, though he did not convert. He denounced the pogroms in Eastern Europe, but he repudiated his own Jewishness (he was born "Morris Cohen"), and he disliked "Jewish" characteristics in others. He def,ended Dreyfus, but did not take Herzl or Zionism seriously until after the Balfour Declaration, expressing this change in an article, "Das neue Judentum" (1918).100 Thus Brandes was a Euro- The Late Period 197 pean humanist who had only a tangential relationship to the Jewish tradition. It is significant that the Jewish figures whom he tried to understand were Heine and Borne (both ofwhom converted to Lutheranism), Disraeli (baptized at age thirteen), and Lassalle (who openly repudiated his Jewishness). Yet Freud gives Brandes a position "among the descendants of our prophets," clearly indicating a belief in the confluence of the Jewish prophetic tradition and that of European humanism. In this Freud is following the ideals of his instructors in Jewish religion in the Gymnasium. The overlap with Freud's own literary and cultural interests is also clear, and Freud indicates the "unclouded respect" he had for Brandes by associating him with "great Jewish personalities" like Einstein and Popper-Lynkeus. The point with respect to Freud's Jewish identity is twofold. Despite his tremendous respect for science, at some level Freud's respect for the Jewish prophets outweighs that which he has for scientists . Secondly, despite a humanist's distance from Judaism, as far as Freud is concerned the Jew is still the proud descendent of biblical prophets. To Freud, he and Brandes share the same culture and the same roots. They are still "family." YIVO In 1925 the "Institute for Jewish Research" (Yidisher Visenschaftlikher Institut, YIVO) was founded in Vilna, dedicated to collecting and preserving Jewish and Yiddish culture, and to promoting scholarly research connected with it. Known also as the "Yiddish Scientific Institute," it sought to have Jews participate in scholarly research in their own language (i.e., in Yiddish) and to have the results ofworld scholarship made available to those Jews unfamiliar with languages other than Yiddish. The institute was guided by three principles: 1) the peoplehood of Jews all over the world; 2) the enrichment of the life of that people by means of Jewish scholarship; and 3) the application of the most modern methods of social science in the quest for a better understanding of Jewish identity and Jewish group phenomena . lot This agenda and these guiding principles make Freud's interest in and support ofYIVO quite understandable, and significant for his Jewish self-understanding. On 29 December 1929, he wrote to the institute and offered his help: 198 DUAL ALLEGIANCE If you can still use my name in your World Presidium, avail yourselves of it. I wish you best success in your endeavor. Your devoted FreudlO2 Jacob Meitlis reports that Freud became "a member of the honorary praesidium [ofYIVO] and showed great appreciation for its research work."I03 Freud may have hoped to have the results of psychoanalytic research made available to Yiddish-speaking Jews; or, he may simply have identified with the interests and goals of the institute. In any event, Freud's warm support and identification are clear, and they will reappear later. Romain Rolland The year 1930 begins Freud's last decade of life, and it is full of evidence of his Jewish identity, expressed both publically and privately. This flurry is not unexpected, for death confronts us with the question of our ultimate commitments, what we think it has meant to have lived. Jewish humanist, humanist Jew, Freud seeks in the last years of his life to state the truth about himself. The compromise-formation expresses his dual allegiance. Freud's multifaceted sense of identity appears in a letter he wrote in 1930 to Romain Rolland, the French novelist, dramatist, essayist, and one of the great mystics of contemporary French literature. An exchange of ideas about religion and religious sensation began between them when Freud sent Rolland a copy of Future ofan Illusion in November 1927 (the same month it was published). Rolland replied, saying that although Freud's analysis was "fair," he would have liked to have seen Freud deal with thl~ real source of religion, namely, religious feeling or religious sensation, "the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the 'eternal' (. .. simply without perceptible limits, and in that way oceanic )."lo4 Rolland documented and explored this mystical "sensation of the eternal" in a three-volume study of Hindu mysticism and its modern Indian personalities,105 and he sent Freud a copy in January 1930, in response to Freud's analysis of Rolland's mystical feeling in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud replies on 19 January, thanking Rolland for the gift, and though aware that they are utterly different, he tells his friend that he will now try with your guidance to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now a certain blending of Hellenic love of measure (sophrosune), Jewish sobriety [jiidische Niichternheitl, and philistine uneasiness has kept me away. The Late Period 199 This three-part self-description ofthe "limits" of Freud's "nature" reveals both his classical humanist training (and the expectation of cultivation that attends upon it) and his natural Jewish inheritance, a sober outlook on life. Sophrosune, Freud's Greek gloss on his Mass/iebe, refers to a "soundness of mind, prudence, discretion, moderation in sensual desires, self-control, temperance,"106 which accords well with "sobriety." "Niichternheit" literally means "emptiness," that is, empty of intoxicating drink, temperate, and so it implies a kind of c1ear-headedness, sobriety. Perhaps because Jews use wine almost exclusively in religious rituals, or perhaps because they could not afford the indulgence of getting drunk, Jews as a group have traditionally had a low incidence of alcohol abuse. They have been "typically" sober or temperate (or at least they have seen themselves that way). As Freud will reportedly tell Joseph Wortis in 1935, "The Jew does not drink."lo7 Thus there is a certain convergence here between these "Hellenic" and "Jewish" traits in Freud that have, along with an uneasiness that Freud identifies as a function of cultural narrowness (philistriise), kept him from exploring Indian mysticism . This convergence again seems to reflect the Jewish-humanist mix of Freud's Gymnasium education. Freud's rationality and distrust of intuition have also made mysticism unattractive. Yet we can also see in the very fact of his correspondence with Rolland (in spite of the standoff on the issue of religion),108 the humanist , cosmopolitan dimension of Freud's identity. As Freud wrote, "Across all boundaries and bridges, I would like to press your hand."109 David Fisher has pointed out that "for many men of Freud's generation, Rolland was the ideal 'European', the man who was committed uncompromisingly to internationalism, Franco-German reconciliation, and genuine cooperation among human beings."11O For this reason Freud respects him and is willing to define himself in relation to Rolland's work on mysticism, even though it represents a form of spirituality so utterly different from his own self-conception. Freud sent Rolland a copy of the second edition (1931) of Civilization and Its Discontents with the dedication : "To His Great Oceanic Friend, The Land Animal."111 The month following his correspondence with Rolland, Freud received A. A. Roback's book, Jewish Influence in Modern Thought (1929), in which Roback honors Freud by including him, as Freud puts it, "among the greatest names of our people," such as Bergson and Einstein. Freud questions the justice of the comparison, especially since he feels Roback does not understand psychoanalysis. But what is interesting is Freud's last paragraph. Responding to Roback's characterization of him as "the Chassidin the history of modern psychology,"IIZ Freud says, 200 DUAL ALLEGIANCE It will interest you to hear that my father actually did come from a Chassidic milieu. But then, as if to cast doubt on Roback's interpretation of him, Freud continues, He was 41 years old when I was born and had been estranged from his home-town connections for almost 20 years. Roback associates Freud's psychoanalytic hermeneutics with rabbinic techniques of biblical interpretation, such as gematria, notarikon, At-Bash, and Ik-B'A1har (though he thinks the rabbis' interpretive acrobatics seem like "common sense" when compared with "the palpable absurdity of [psychoanalysts'] speculations"),I l.l and he connects Freud's "humanitarian interest," "the catholicity of his views," "as well as the mystical halo" with '''Chassidism in its philosophical and historical aspects."114 Freud says, somewhat irritated, that he does not recognize himself in such characterizations ("no one has as yet reproached me with 'mystical leanings"'), and so we can well understand Freud's attempts to distance himself from his Jewish background. He continues, I had such an un-Jewish upbringing that today I am not even able to read your dedication which is evidently Hebrew characters [jiidischer Schrift]. In later years I have often regretted this gap in my education [Unbi/dung]. Roback himselfnotes Freud's surprising statement about his Jewish education ("he did have a Hebrew tutor in his childhood"). "Evidently" (offenbar) also seems a little forced. Admittedly, Freud will refer often in these years to his inability to read "our sacred old and now renewed tongue," 115 but here he seems to be trying to imply that Roback's thesis ofan influence of the Jewish mystical tradition and rabbinic hermeneutics is unlikely, given his father's estrangement and his own un-Jewish upbringing . Roback's claim is too close to home, as Freud will admit in a later letter trying to explain why he found himself arguing with Roback over his interpretations.116 Yet Freud closes with a sympathetic note of admiration for his fellow Jew: With the expression of that sympathy which your valiant championing of our people calls forth. Yours in deep respect, Freudl17 The Lote Period 201 It is clear that Roback (who was active in YIVO) touched a chord in Freud, as he says explicitly on 24 March 1930, puzzled at himself for having been drawn into argument over psychoanalysis with Roback: "You have struck the Jewish chord, which reverberates so sensitively in me [bei mir so empfindlich nachklingt]. My sympathies were aroused."118 Roback argues that psychoanalysis is "aJewish production," and that Freud "was merely giving expression to the hankering after purpose [emphasis his], which has characterized the Jewish race from the days of the Prophets ."1I9We remember Freud telling Enrico Morselli (in February 1926) that he would not be ashamed if psychoanalysis were indeed a product of the Jewish Geist, so we can understand why Freud's Sympathie was aroused by Roback's words, even if he quibbled at the "reproach" of "mystical leanings." Freud is sorry, however, to find "a discrepancy between the high position you wish to grant me and your knowledge of my person and your understanding of my work."120 Though Roback says he would be pleased to know that Freud spoke, read, or at least understood Yiddish -he says, "I think the nation cannot exist without its separate language"121-Freud closes his letter saying, "I have never learned or spoken Yiddish." This is a bit curt given Roback's reason for asking (he also says "the treasures of our fine literature are worth preserving"), and so Freud's words may indicate some pain at being cut off from his people through his Yiddish illiteracy. He will admit his regret explicitly in 1936 (see below). We should note too in this letter another Jewish character trait that Freud identifies: "Jewish 'Chuzba'." Roback suggests that this Jewish expression, whose meaning ranges from audacity and self-confidence to impudence, is best translated by "nerve."122 The trait can be related to a willingness to act independently ofsocial conventions in pursuit ofone's goal. Freud himselfwould have certainly needed his share ofchutzpah to have launched psychoanalysis. Freud and Zionism In February 1930, Freud writes nearly identical letters to both Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Koffler about his mixed attitude toward Zionism . In 1929 there were Arab riots in Palestine, in which 133 Jews were killed and 339 wounded by Arab gangs, 110 Arabs killed and 232 wounded in the repression of the attacks by the police and 6 Arabs killed by Jews in a counterattack.123 The events were related to British irritation at the inherent contradictions in the Balfour Declaration (support for a Jewish 202 DUAL ALLEGIANCE homeland; support for non-Jewish, chiefly Arab rights and sensibilities )'24 and the cooling of support for Zionism with the return of the Laborites under Ramsey MacDonald to office in Britain.125The commission appointed to investigate the Arab massacre of the Jews was inclined to halt or limit immigration in order to mollify the Arabs. In an effort to elicit criticism of British policy and create favorable public opinion in Western Europe and America, the Jewish Agency sent appeals to prominent European figures, seeking to safeguard both Jewish religious rights ofaccess to the Western Wall and immigration quotas to meet the needs of Eastern and Central European Jewry. The public nature this response was to take may have conditioned Freud's reaction. He wrote to Koffler on 26 February 1930: I cannot do what you wish. I am unable to overcome my aversion to burdening the public with my name and even the present critical time does not seem to me to warrant it. Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgement of Zionism does not permit this. I certainly sympathize with its goals, am proud of our University in Jerusakm and am delighted with our settlements' prosperity. But on the other hand, I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of an Herodian wa.1I into a national relic, thus offending the feelings of the natives. Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope. Your obedient servant, Freud'26 Given the situation in Palestine, Freud's response seems rather restrained. Nonetheless, this combination of sentiments is typical of the Jewish Freud we have come to know, especially when speaking for publication. His sober and somewhat overly rational, pessimistic assessment of the situation will not allow him too much enthusiasm, in spite of all his "sympathy" and pride. He prefers a "rational" solution, even though he is aware that it is unrealistic. He is explicitly proud of "our" university, where :rational solutions are found for problems. And though The Lote Period 203 "our" settlements give him pleasure, he rejects Jewish religious "fanaticism ," mocking its" misdirected piety" with his historical positivism, much as he mocked Tisha B'Av in the Nathan letter of the early period. The "Herodian wall" is of course a symbol ofJewish sovereign independence and freedom of worship, evidence ofJewish native presence, and it is for the possibility of recovering those that the Jews would challenge the Arab "natives," so perhaps their "fanaticism" was not baseless . Furthermore, Orthodox Jews about to pray on the eve of Yom Kippur in September 1928 with a mechitza (ritual prayer divide; the innocent origin of the riots), as they had done many times in the past, was hardly intended to offend the Arabs. And their piety was no more misdirected than the Muslim hallowing of the same area as "al-Buraq," where the Prophet Muhammed is thought to have "tethered his miraculous horse, Buraq, after his flight from Mecca to Jerusalem, and before his ascent to Heaven."127 Rather, the wall represents a joining of the national and the religious horizons of Jewish identity. Ernst Simon, in commenting on Freud's letter, notes "a certain blindness to the power of symbols characteristic of many intellectuals," but on the other hand he suggests that perhaps Freud implicitly recognized this power and is apprehensive of its being exploited for political purposes.128 Yerushalmi points out that Freud's positions were shared by many Jews, even Zionists, who doubted the feasibility of a Jewish state in Palestine.129 It is fair to say that Freud is characteristically a little shortsighted when it comes to Jewish religion. Still, even when he is judging the Jews and their aspirations, he does so on what are for him Jewish terms, that is, soberly, without illusions. And Freud remains attached to Zionism. He will write to his Hebrew translator in Jerusalem, Yehuda Devosis, at the end of the same year, in December 1930, that "Zionism has awakened my strongest sympathies, which remain faithfully attached to it today."130 Freud's reason for supporting Zionism is directly related to his concern about antisemitism; it is, he says, "something the present-day situation seems to justify." But he goes on to say, "I should like to be mistaken about this." Freud would prefer that there be no need for Zionism, in other words, that Jews be a part of a humanistic cultural whole as Jews, contributing their part, without the need to press their separate claims. As he will reportedly tell Wortis in January 1935, "Jew and Christian ought to meet on the common ground of irreligion and humanity," but "as long as Jews are not admitted into Gentile circles they have no choice but to band together."131 So antisemitism is one reason for Freud's support of Zionism as an expression of his Jewishness. Yet in June of this same year (1935), Freud writes to Leib Jaffe, 204 DUAL ALLEGIANCE president of the Keren HaYesod, the financial division of the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, to help celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the agency dedicated to supporting Jewish immigration and colonization in Palestine in order to lay the foundations for a Jewish National Home. "I want to assure you," he writes, that I know how great and blessed an instrument this foundation has become in its endeavor to establish a new home in the ancient land of our fathers. It is a sign of our invincible will to survive which has, until now, successfull) defied two thousand years of severe oppression! Our youth will continue the struggle. Your devoted Sigm. Freudl32 So clearly Zionism also symbolized for Freud the positive Jewish will to survive and flourish (arguably a nonrational drive for life). It is not only a rational defense against antisemitism. Freud's joining the Zionist youth group Kadimah in 1936 expressed his identification with this struggle by "our" Jewish youth (see below). Freud and Hebrew In the same letter to Devosis in which Freud discussed his attitude toward Zionism, he spoke of his father's Hebrew and his own lack of Jewish education, as well as the role of antisemitism in creating his Jewish self-awareness. Again Gay reports Freud's words: "My father spoke the sacred language as well as German or better. He let me grow up in complete ignorance of everything that concerned Judaism." It was only as a mature man, he added, that he had taken this neglect in bad part. "But I had already felt as a Jew earlier-under the impact of German antisemitism, whose more recent outbreak occurred during my university days."1J3 Perhaps Freud's age (seventy-four) and his anger at his father ("in bad pan") interferes with his memory ofhis years ofschooling with Hammerschlag , not to mention his father's reading the Bible with him. Note that Freud calls Hebrew "the sacred language" (his German reflects the Hebrew terminology, lashon ha-kodesh). Perhaps without being fully aware, Freud is evoking and affirming an ancient Jewish tradition about the Hebrew language (particularly prominent in Kabbalah, but basic to rabbinic Judaism too), namely, that Hebrew is holy above all other human languages; it is the language spoken by the angels (Hag. The Late Period 205 16a), even by God himself, the language with which the world was created. Freud spoke in the same terms in 1928 when writing to Devosis about his Hebrew translation of Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego. An unnamed relative "who is master of our sacred old and now renewed tongue" assured him that "the translation was really excellent ."134 In spite of Freud's ignorance, he is pleased at an "excellent" Hebrew translation of his work, whereas he was relatively indifferent about the English translations, even when his colleagues complained. The "sacred" language has a deep resonance for him, even though he insists again in 1929, "I adhere to the Jewish religion as little as to any other." 13.1 He is probably thinking of the conscious, rational adherence to religious doctrine and its ritual expression, but adherence is often irrational and unconscious in his case. Freud's ignorance of Hebrew contributes to his sense of "non-adherence," and the father's role as the child's teacher is traditionally important in this regard. The rabbis say that if a father does not speak to his child (i.e., teach him) in the Holy Tongue, "it is as though he had buried him."u6 So Freud's annoyance with his father's Jewish failure is understandable. Prefaces to Hebrew Translations.ln December of 1930, Freud wrote prefaces for Hebrew translations of Totem and Taboo and Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis. The former is moving and personal; the latter more distant and professional, perhaps because its subject matter is more general, whereas the Totem book "deals with the origin of religion and morality." Freud writes to Dvosis on 15 December 1930, "It is a source of extraordinary joy and satisfaction to me that some of my books are going to be published in Hebrew,"137 so it is safe to assume that both prefaces will reward our attention. Freud begins his preface to Totem and Taboo with a description of himself and his feelings: No reader of this book will be able so easily to place himself in the emotional position of the author, who does not understand the holy language, who is completely estranged from the religion ofthe fathersas from every other religion-who cannot take part in nationalist ideals, and yet who has never denied belonging [die Zugehb'rigkeitl to his people, who feels his own nature to be Jewish and who does not wish it otherwIse . Though we grant Freud's ignorance of Hebrew and his atheism, what are we to think of his statement that he "an nationalistischen Idealen nicht teilnehmen kann," given Freud's repeated confessions of sympa- 206 DUAL ALLEGIANCE thy for Zionism, his participation in B'nai B'rith (which he says is "based on national foundations"),138 as well as his wish at times to return to the Jews' "indestructible national feeling"? Perhaps Freud strikes this pose to differentiate himself from the "unrealistic fanaticism" of his fellow Jews living in Palestine who are making "a national religion" of Herod's wall and challenging the Arabs, as he wrote to Einstein and Chaim Koffler ten months earlier.139 Perhaps Freud is speaking rhetorically to focus on why he is so moved in the absence ofconventional allegiances, and to affirm his Jewishness on his own terms, using his published psychoanalytic work to establish a connection with his fellow Jews as they settle the ancient land. For he continues by replying to an imagined skeptic's question (perhaps Freud's alter ego) about what is left to him that is Jewish if he has abandoned Jewish language, religion, and national ideals: He would reply, "Still very much, probably the most important thing" [die Hauptsache].. One wonders if this "most important thing" that Freud is thinking of is related to the "intimacy of a common psychic structure" that Freud spoke of in 1926. He admits that he cannot define the essence he is speaking of here more precisely, "but someday surely it will become accessible to scientific insight." Moses and Monotheism may be Freud's attempt to provide that access. If Totem and Taboo is the beginning of this access, we can understand why Freud says that this translation put into the hands of readers of that "living tongue" is "an experience of quite a special kind." In spite of his Jewish illiteracy, irreligion, and "scientific" neutrality,140 he has with this translation formed a bridge with his people across formidable boundaries, perhaps the most important thing to him. In so doing Freud hopes to make a contribution, through "unprejudiced science," "to the spirit of the new Jewry."141 Given Freud's letter to his niece Margit in March I927, in which he placed Georg Brandes among "our prophets," one wonders if Freud has in mind Brandes's essay expressing his reassessment of Zionism, "Das neue Judentum" (1918). In contrast to Totem andTaboo, Freud's preface to the Hebrew translation of his Vorlestlngen begins with a presentation of the historical background to the lectures and a sketch of the progress the "young science" has made since their initial delivery. Freud describes not himself, but his work. And when he mentions Hebrew, he describes it as "that ancient language [jener uralten Sprach] which has been awakened to a new life by the will of the Jewish people." Freud's language is more "intellec- The Late Period 207 tual," as it were, and distant, the voice of the humanist scientist, almost as if Freud were not himself a jew. But lest there be any doubt, he refers to the likelihood that these Hebrew lectures would be unintelligible to "Moses and the prophets," and he explicitly numbers himselfamong their descendants [Ihren Nachkommen]. The indirect mode ofjewish self-reference recalls the middle period (when the lectures were originally delivered [1917-18]), and it is interesting that it occurs in association with Moses. In any event, Freud's humanism is more prominent in this preface than his jewishness, as is evident from its close. Freud does not speak of "the new jewry," but of the value these lectures in Hebrew have "for one who wants to understand the soul [Seele] and human life." Through his science of psychoanalysis, Freud seeks to link the Jewish people-the descendants of Moses and the prophets-with the larger life of all human beings. These two prefaces, written in the same month in 1930, vividly express Freud's dual allegiance and the role that Hebrew plays in disclosing it. Freud, the Fanatical Jew For the occasion of Freud's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Rabbi David Feuchtwang, wrote to Freud, saying, "The author of Future ofan Illusion is closer to me than he believes." 142 One wonders what the Rabbi could mean, given that book's sustained attack on religion. Freud in any event seems to have understood Feuchtwang (who like Freud was originally from Moravia), for he replied, Your words aroused a special echo in me, which I do not need to explain to you. It seems that Freud could have said here, as he did to Abraham in 1908, "We understand each other." He continues, In some place in my soul [Seele], in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew rein /anatischer Jude]. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?143 Freud may realize that he has more in common with the jews in Palestine than he had thought. What has Freud discovered, much to his own surprise (sehrerstaunt), that makes him realize that he is a "fanatical jew"? jozef Hes, who published the letter, suggests that Freud means his "relatedness" with other 208 DUAL ALL[,GIANCE Jews, his feeling of "being-at-home" (Heimlichkeit), "being of the same mental make-up as other Jews."I44 But Freud has been aware of this characteristic for a long time, at least since 1926, when he stated it to B'nai B'rith. Now he is "astonished" at the discovery "in a very hidden corner" of his "soul." It stands over against the lack of prejudice and the impartiality that Freud has struggled to maintain as a humanist and a scientist. It represents apparently an element of inner Jewishness that cannot (or will not) be assimilated to Enlightenment (i.e., Reasoned) humanism, but will take the Jews' part in an unabashedly biased and emotional way. Such a discovery at his age is indeed something amazing to the man who claimed to have no share in "nationalist ideals" only six months earlier. It seems that what Freud has discovered is not the presence of his Jewish belonging, but its hidden depth, a depth that transcends Reason. This astonishes the arch-rationalist Freud, and may be part of the emotion that drives him to write Moses andMonotheism in an effort to explain that depth rationally. For this reason we might wish to date the beginning of Moses and Monotheism to this time, when Freud discovers a hidden "fanatical" depth to his Jewishness that goes beyond his scientific will to reason. If Totem and Taboo was undertaken in part to explain Freud's own "lack of a religious need," the:n Moses andMonotheism will be undertaken to explain the depth of Freud's Jewish ZugehOrigkeit independently of that lack of belief and its rationality. It is no wonder, therefore, that Freud locates his Jewishness in phylogenesis, for what could be deeper in scientific humanist consciousness? Correspondence with ArnoldZweig With this in mind, let us turn to a letter Freud writes to Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), a well-known German author and former analysand, in May 1932, after Zweig has just returned from a month's visit to Palestine (to which he will emigrate when the Nazis come to power in 1933). The correspondence between Freud and Zweig (which began in 1927) will concern us repeatc:dly as we focus on the genesis of Freud's last book, for as Freud confesses, "I write to you with pleasure and with special ease and I notice that I write many things to you which I withhold from others."145The link is probably not coincidental, given Zweig's Zionism, literary stature, and German-European humanism. In Freud's letter to Zweig dated 8 May 1932, having just referred to his "soon-to-be boundaried life span" and then to his birthday just past, Freud speaks almost in a rapture of Palestine: The Late Period 209 How remarkable this tragic raving mad land which you have visited must have been for you. Just think, no other progress is connected with this strip of our mother-earth, no discovery or invention-the Phoenecians are said to have invented glass and the alphabet (both doubtful!), the island of Crete created Minoan art, Pergamon reminds us of parchment, Magnesia of the magnet and so on endlessly, but Palestine has cultivated nothing but religions, holy mad absurdities [heiligen Wahnwitz], presumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearances by means of the inner world of wishing, and we spring from there (though one of us considers himself a German as well; the other [i.e., Freud himself, N.B.] does not); our ancestors lived there for perhaps half, perhaps a whole millennium (but this [residence] too is only a perhaps), and it is impossible to say what we have taken over from the life in this land as an inheritance into our blood and nerves (as is mistakenly said). Oh, life could be very interesting if only we knew and understood more about it. The first thing that Jaffe notes about this lyric tribute to "Palaestina" is how often Freud qualifies his expressions, as though the two sides of his personality-the one soaring, the other rationally disciplining-were wrestling with each other, first the one and then the other winning to expression.146 Note too how Freud names what Palestine has cultivated: "progress" (Fortschritt). Needless to say, that word is not used to describe religion in The Future ofan Illusion. Here by contrast these "sacred delusions " are "daring" or "presumptuous" (vermessene) attempts. That is, they are characterized by a kind of "nerve" or "impudence," perhaps Jewish chutzpah. The difference in Freud's attitude here from that in Future of an Illusion may be because in that work Freud is thinking primarily about Christianity; here he may have Judaism in mind. True, this religion's holy ravings are still the products of wishing (Wahnwitz), but precisely because of his own root in this history, Freud is struck by the contrast between his self-understanding based in Reason ("Logos is our god")147 and his origins in this tragisch-tolle Land, this Muttererde. He almost seems to be reassessing himself, as though he has seen something new, perhaps something related to the (Jewish) "heritage in our blood and nerves." His nervous qualifications after each admission of connection only serve to confirm our suspicion that Freud has touched a nerve in his own Jewish identity, one that will become very interesting to him as he tries to understand it more deeply. We should note too that though Freud has never repudiated belonging to the Jewish people, he has repeatedly denied that he is German, and he does so again. In his interview with Viereck in 1926, Freud admitted that his language and his culture were German, but that intellectu- 210 DUAL ALLEGIANCE ally, since the rise: of antisemitism, he considered himself no longer German and preferred to call himself a Jew. When Freud now traces his origins to Palestine, he repeats his renunciation, as if to underscore Jewish origins as the only relevant ones. Three months later he tells Zweig, "I can relieve you of the delusion that one must be a German. Should one not leave this God-forsaken people to itself?"14K Freud's view may be based in part on a disgust for the political situation in Austria, in which national decline was accompanied by a rise in antisemitism. Close to financial and economic disaster in 1931, Austria's parliamentary government had been steadily disintegrating, and considerable support was being given to the National Socialists in Austria as they continued their rise to power in Germany. A Christian Socialist government with E. Dollfuss as chancellor came to power with a majority of one vote in May 1932. In March of 1933, parliamentary government in Austria broke down completely, and by this time too the Nazis, with Hitler at their head,' were in power in Germany, their party being declared the only legal one in July. In May 1933 the Nazis burned Freud's works, with those of other authors they didn't like, in a massive bonfire in Berlin, where it was declaimed, "Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life, for the nobility of the human soul! I consign to the flames the writings of the school ofSigmund Freud." 149 In July, Freud's grandson was called up in his Berlin classroom as Iud Freud. ISO There was a new order forbidding Jews from serving on any scientific council, which of course affected psychoanalysts. Clearly antisemitism was on the rise, and Freud had good reason to say to Pfister in May, "My judgement of human nature, above all the Christian-Aryan variety, has had little reason to change."ISI Already in 19:27, after reading Zweig's study of antisemitism dedicated to him (Caliban),IS2 Freud had surrendered to his "affective" response to antisemitism, saying that "on the average and taken by and large, mankind are: trash."IS.lAs time goes on, he will need to articulate a deeper, more rational understanding of antisemitism in order to define his Jewish identity more precisely. As Yerushalmi says, "The shock of anti-Jewish barbarism brought the question ofwhat it means to be a Jew to a new pitch of existential urgency." It was this internal urgency that "provided the immediate impulse to the actual writing of Moses and Monotheism," 154 and not just external political events. Freud analyzes Zweig's ambivalence towards his own Jewishness in a letter Schur reports, dated 18 August 1933. According to Freud, some of Zweig's conflicts over his German-Jewish allegiances relate to his ambivalence towards being Jewish. "One defends oneself in every way The Late Period 211 against castration," he tells him. That is, presumably, one defends against the limitations imposed by Judaism, whose symbol of allegiance is circumcision . Rather than suggesting that Zweig's ambivalence relates to doubts over his German humanist or Enlightenment allegiance, Freud suggests that "here a piece of opposition to one's own Jewishness may still be hiding cunningly." The implication may be that Freud opposes Judaism insofar as it prevents one's participation in the larger enterprise of Humanitat. Therefore, in order to identify himself more fully with "Judaism" later, Freud will come to locate the ultimate source of Humanitat in ludentum. But at this point in 1933 he says, Our great master Moses was, after all, a strong antisemite and made no secret of it. Perhaps he was really an Egyptian. And surely he was right. ISS Schur and Yerushalmi relate Freud's "Mosaic antisemitism" to Moses' attack on the Jewish people for their apostasy at the Golden Calf.,s6 If they are correct, then "antisemitism" in Freud's mind can be a way of calling (or driving) the Jewish people back to their higher selves, forcing them to transcend themselves. That antisemitism stimulated Freud to write his own search for a "higher" Judaism with which to identify conforms with this function and prepares the way for Freud's formulation in Moses andMonotheism. Ironically, it almost seems like the Nazis deserve a kind of unintended credit. Freud's proposed Egyptian origin for Moses implies that this recalling of the Jews must be initiated by an "outsider." In the Bible, the Outsider is of course God; in Moses andMonotheism the role will be played by an Egyptian Moses. Yerushalmi notes other similarities that imply that Freud writes as a kind of biblical historian: the compression of evolutionary time, the importance of remembering, and the "true pulse of history" beating far beneath its manifest surfaces. Freud's story presents the reader with "a countertheology of history in which the Chain of Tradition is replaced by the chain of unconscious repetition.",s7 As a result, "Moses and Monotheism is a direct alternative, a new Torah in which Moses is, in effect, apotheosized and takes the place ofGod." Freud does more than return to the Bible, as his father Jakob bid him do; he rewrites it, composing his own kind of midrash. If Mortimer Ostow is correct in his analysis ofJakob's "birthday inscription," the father's original midrash (exegetical homily), in which the fountain is a metaphor for Torah "s8 anticipated and paved the way for Freud's license with the Bible. 212 DUAL ALLEGIANCE In any event, this letter indicates, as we saw also in the early period,159 that Freud does feel some hostility towards Jews (being typically Jewish in this respect, too). Linking that hostility to Moses makes it seem almost inherent in being Jewish. Yet Freud is indignant about and disgusted by Jewish self-hatred,160 as we shall see below. Nor is this the first time Freud has suggested that Moses was an Egyptian. In 1910 he published "A Special Type ofObject-Choice Made by Men," in which this sentence appears: A woman rescuing someone else (a child) from the water acknowledges herself in this way as the mother who bore him, like Pharoah's daughter in the legend of Moses (Rank, 1909).161 In addition, Reik recalls Freud telling him a joke in connection with this psychoanalytic insight, whose punch line insists that Pharoah's daughter is really the mother of Moses: The boy Itzig is asked in grammar school: "Who was Moses?" and answers: "Moses was the son of an Egyptian princess." "That's not true," says the teacher, "Moses was the son of a Hebrew mother. The Egyptian princess found the baby in a casket." But Itzig answers: "Says she!"16Z Freud's humor anticipates an insight that he will try to "unpack" later in "scientific" (that is, psychoanalytic) terms in Moses andMonotheism. Two months later he writes to Zweig and describes himself by a Jewish joke: I am still alive and as I do not smoke anymore I am hardly likely to write anything again-except letters. It reminds me of that Chasen [cantor in the synagogue] of whom it was said: "Live he will, sing he will not." 163 But Freud will not only live; he will sing too. FreudandHebrew University Around this same: time, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was considering the question of whether psychoanalysis ought to be represented on the faculty at the university and "integrated" into its activities. In response to an inquiry from the chancellor, Judah Magnes, Freud writes to support the introduction ofpsychoanalysis into "our university." It would The Late Period 213 be significant for the humanities, he says (and he mentions specifically, "the science of religion"), as well as for the medical facuity, from whose curriculum psychoanalysis "must not be absent." 164 Freud refers to Hebrew University as "our university in Jerusalem" again when writing to Israel Wechsler, an American neurologist, in 1929 (i.e., before Wechsler became a member of the board of governors of Hebrew University in 1930), so it seems likely that Rosenbaum is correct in saying that Freud's phrase in his letter to Magnes "reflects his personal identification as a Jew, with Hebrew University, rather than his previous official connection "165 (Freud was on the board of trustees in 1925 and 1926). When Magnes writes Freud that the prevailing opinion is that it would be "premature to introduce psychoanalysis before a Chair of Psychology has been established,"166 Freud withdraws his identification, referring now to "the University of Jerusalem," angry at its "barely disguised rejection of psychoanalysis."167 Hebrew University bears his identification as a Jew only as long as it accepts psychoanalysis. Freudthe -Jew and Freud-the-psychoanalyst are inseparable in the late period, strengthening Yerushalmi's suggestion that Freud saw psychoanalysis as a replacement for (or the future of) Judaism. So it makes sense that he will soon use "applied psychoanalysis" to define the infrastructure of Jewish character. In any event, Freud will overcome his anger, and in 1936, thanking Hebrew University for its greetings to him on his eightieth birthday, he will once again confess himself "one ofyours."168 Freud's Jewish identification is deeper than an intellectual commitment, as important as that commitment is to him. Origins o/Moses and Monotheism Freud's last book deeply expresses his sense of himself as a Jew and is in fact its mature culmination, developing a Jewish identity that he can choose to affirm even while describing its involuntary basis. To illustrate this claim, I will focus on Freud's correspondence as it relates to this work. Chapter 5 will then discuss the model of voluntary dual allegiance that Moses and Monotheism presents us with as moderns and as modern Jews. In January 1934, Freud writes Arnold Zweig (who by now has emigrated to Palestine) that he is eager to read his new book, Bilanz der deutschen ludenheit 169 now that he knows that Zweig is cured of his "unhappy love" for his "so-called Fatherland." 170As Freud says, "Such revelling is not for the likes of us." At the end of this letter Freud complains of not being able to write. Accepting his decline by saying "One must 214 DUAL ALLEGIANCE not go on working indefinitely," Freud drops a hint nevertheless that something has begun to develop in the deeper layers: Not long ago something began to take shape, but it slipped away again. Had you been here, we could have chatted about it.1 II Freud's rejection of German identification due to German antisemitic barbarism, along with this tantalizing hint of something forming in the depths of Freud's mind, indicates the beginning ofMoses andMonotheism in relation to 1) an awareness of approaching death; 2) the rise of antisemitism; and 3) a sense of Jewish cultural superiority to such "barbarism ." The following letters support this suggestion. The first four months of 1934 brought a heightening of political tensions in Austria and Germany. In February, civil war broke out in Austria between the Social Democrats and the Dollfuss government. After four days of fighting, the Social Democrats were defeated and driven underground. Freud noted in a letter to Zweig that "our little bit ofcivil war was not at all nice." I72 Freud is aware that things are likely to get worse, and he admits that were a "Hitlerian viceroy" to rule in Vienna, he would have to go, "no matter where." The situation of the Jews in Austria declined rapidly after this point. In April 1934, the rump of the parliament that Dollfuss had disbanded a year before came together and accepted an authoritarian government. The "rights of man" guaranteed under the democratic constitution were swept away, and even the word "Republic" was removed from the official name of the state. At the beginnitng of May, Freud moved for the summer into the more rural setting of Dabling, a suburb of Vienna, describing his surroundings as being "beautiful as a fairy land."17.1 On the other hand, he also took along with him Zweig's Bilanz, which reminded him in detail of the brutal persecution of Jews taking place in Germany and their gradual exclusion from its cultural life since the Reichstag fire of February 1933. The book describes the substantial contributions made by German Jews to thl~ construction ofWestern civilization-German Jews in fact being particularly representative of the European humanism that Zweig says is the essence of true German culture. It also describes the tragic dismantling of that civilization and the destruction of its humanistic values by the Nazis. Thus it is no wonder that after reading the book, Freud wrote to its author in Haifa on 12 May 1934: I found it painful to read. I hope it has done you good to write it and that it has enabled you to let off steam, for I am almost choking with rancour and fury [Groll und Wutl. The Late Period 215 Zweig says himself in the book's preface that he wrote the work in a "paroxysm of wrath."174 His Bi/anz is clearly intended to defend the Jews and humanistic German Jewry against the slander and violence that is being perpetrated by the Nazis. Freud's anger stems from the indignation he shares with Zweig at the injustice of the attack and from the helplessness they both feel at not being able to prevent the "certain " destruction of the civilized culture they have helped to build. Zweig's portrait leaves no doubt about its tremendous worth and the vital role Jews played in helping to bring it to life. Now in scarcely two decades the Nazis will stamp it to death in a tantrum ofjealous violence. Freud has written only one other letter to Zweig the whole summer (on 15 July) when he writes on 30 September about his new work on Moses. So we are right to locate the genesis of Moses andMonotheism in this summer of 1934. The first page of the manuscript of Moses and Monotheism in the Library ofCongress is dated 9 August 1934, in Freud's hand.175 Jones tells us that Freud mentioned it to him and to Eitingon in August, but that the letter in September to Zweig is "the first full account." 176 The letter in July is taken up with discussion of Zweig's play about Napoleon, continuing remarks about the latter's planned novel about Nietzsche, and Freud's reaction to the "Roehm purge" of June, when the Nazis murdered a number of their own leaders. The "hors-d'oeuvres" left Freud hungry for still more, he joked grimly. With these images as background, let us turn to Freud's letter of 30 September 1934, in which he describes his own "historical noveL" Freud is aware that his summer in the 19th District is almost over, because he adds to his location, "nicht mehr lange." So his letter is written at the end of the period in which he did the bulk of his work. He writes now, he says, from a fear that a copy of Zweig's play about Napoleon has been lost in the mail. But he goes on in a strangely indirect way to explain the reason for his not having written in so long (two-and-ahalf months). Five sentences into the letter Freud writes, That is to say, I have in a time of comparative leisure, at a loss about what to start with the surplus of spare time, written something myself and this, contrary to my original intention, took up so much of my time that everything else was left undone.t77 This neglect is rather unusual for Freud, who usually found time to answer his mail even in his busiest times. Furthermore, the casual way in which Freud introduces his topic belies the deep meaning it held for him. For it is clear that he became completely engrossed by the project from its very inception, so captivated that he neglected "everything else." 216 DUAL ALLEGIANCE Freud goes on to describe the origin of the work and its structure. "The starting point of my work is familiar to you," Freud tells Zweig, It was the same as that of your Bilanz. Faced with the new persecutions , one asks oneself again how the Jew has come to be what he is [wie derJude geworden ist) and why he has attracted this undying hatred [diesen unsterblidien Hafl).178 One can ask initially, Why, when faced with renewed persecutions, should one ask about the nature of Jewish character? Why not ask again what is wrong with the persecutors? Zweig's book in fact implies that this is the real question. Freud instead turns inward, and Ernst Simon points out that Freud's response was not greatly different from [that of) many other Jews, who had been more or less isolated from Jewish sources and influences, and [who) with the increase of hatred against their people and religion sought to discover why they were so hated and what they were forced to defend. Formal community or national Judaism did not offer enough to afford them satisfaction, and thus they felt a spiritual need to seek the essential nature ofJewish life and values.179 The second of Freud's two questions-namely, Why the Jews?-is shared by both him and Zweig, and the latter's efforts to answer it in his Bilanz may indeed have pushed Freud to try his hand. For Zweig's answer centers on the psychotic needs of the Nazis,180 whereas Freud's effort is related to his approach in answering the first question; that is, he seeks to understand Jewish character. But the first question, Who is a Jew? is not a major focus for Zweig in his Bilanz. For Zweig is not just interested in the Jews; he also addresses his fellow Germans: "The aim of this book is to make the Germans understand what they are doing. For Germans are still what they are."181 That is, Germans illl their true nature are still fellow carriers ofpan-European humanism, and Zweig is writing in part to make them return to their senses. "We and they," Zweig wrote, meaning Jews and Germans, "are still soldiers in the same army of human spirituality and European civilization."182 Faced with the new persecutions that stimulate both him and Freud to write, Zweig does not ask who the Jew is, because he knows. The Jew is the sustainer of the European humanistic mentality, whose special province of mental life has been nourished by the Jews' "descent and by their religious history. It gave them the proud consciousness of being a chosen people dispersed throughout the world, sharers in a common promise."183 The Late Period 217 It is Freud, rather, finding the pan-European humanistic synthesis to which he has wedded his Jewish life threatened by the Nazi onslaught, who asks the question, Who is a Jew? Freud will answer the second question in the same way, namely, by locating antisemitism in Jewish character and culture. So we see that the central focus of Freud's work is the question of Jewish identity. The question has become intensely personal at the end of Freud's life, with so much that he has built in such danger-as Zweig's Bilanz makes clear. Freud is asking, Who am I as a Jew? and What has it meant? He soon discovered "the formula," he says. Moses created the Jew, and my work received the title: The Man Moses, a historical Novel (with more justification than your Nietzschenovel ). Freud's choice of genre and his later shift away from it raise questions about the nature of Freud's work. By examining Freud's original 1934 manuscript of Moses and Monotheism, Yerushalmi has shown that Freud used this subtitle "merely to indicate his own awareness that he had not found sufficient independent historical data to fully corroborate his reconstruction " in parts 1and 2. Freud knows that "given the extreme paucity of reliable historical facts concerning Moses, his reconstruction must be based to such an unusual extent on psychoanalytic probability."184 Therefore the subtitle is not evidence that Freud considered Moses andMonotheism a species of literary fiction, much less covert autobiography. He intended his book to uncover objective, scientific truth, not subjective, autobiographical truth. In any event, given Freud's lifelong identification with Moses, we could have predicted this "formula" as the endpoint to Freud's starting point to attack antisemitism and to define Jewish identity. The first sproutings ofthe work were hinted to Zweig in January, but it seems it took Freud's rage at the antisemitic destruction ofJewish contributions to European civilization described by Zweig in his Bilanz to catalyze Freud's Groll und Wut into a defiant protest: Moses created the Jew. That is, as the answer to his questions Freudcreates a new Jew, "Moses," the projection of his own identity as a "Psychological Jew," in Yerushalmi's felicitous phrase. But this answer takes the same form as his responses to attacks on psychoanalysis . He ignores his critics and publishes his "findings," making another contribution to the "upbuilding ofWestern civilization" through the discovery of "truth." Freud remains committed to this process as a scientist and as a humanist, believing that this approach will most effectively overcome the barbarism of the Nazis. 218 DUAL ALLEGIANCE But if Zweig's Bilanz is the starting point for Freud's work, then it is clear that we are justified in reading Moses andMonotheism as a defense of the Jewish people rather than as an attack, despite its form and the way it was received by most of Freud's contemporaries in 1939. Freud responds here to antisemitism justas he did in the past. The "fightingJew" prepares to defend both himself and his people in one blow. As mentioned above, Ernst Simon pointed out that Freud's response in seeking the nature of Jewish character (in order to discover what it was he was called upon to defend) was a spiritual need that he shared with many of his contemporaries. But this need was also a psychological one, namely, the need for wholeness, for an integrated self. At the collapse of liberalism and the death of his father in the early period, Freud sought out the B'nai B'rith to help him integrate his Jewish identity; now in the late period, when it is clear that the B'nai B'rith can offer no shelter against the Nazis and as Freud himself is about to die, the "old Jew" turns to his deepest Jewish identification, his old hero Moses, first encountered when he studied the Bible with his father, to help him disclose a new Jewish self. This identity develops a reaffirmation (as in the early period) of the dual allegiance-which he depicts as a dual origin-of his Jewish-humanist identity. In this letter to Zweig, Freud turns to his reasons for holding back the finished work from publication. He writes a long paragraph about the danger to psychoanalytic practice and publications in Vienna should his book (which he says extends the theory of religion developed in Totem and Taboo) arouse the wrath of the Catholic hierarchy.18s In this way, Freud keeps the work suspended in the same matrix that stimulated its birth, namely, antisemitism. He also felt the book needed more work: And in addition, there is the fact that the work does not seem to me sufficiently substantiated, nor does it altogether please me. It is therefore not the proper time for a martyrdom. Enough of this for the time being! Both Freud's frustration and his investment are clear. For the next four-and-a-half years Freud will labor over his Moses, obsessed with it, "fixated" upon it, as he says. He was aware from the very beginning in August 1934 that "it would offend the Jews to be told that their great Moses was really an Egyptian, but for some reason this consideration did not seem to have weighed heavily with him."186 If Freud's Moses is in large part an exercise in self-definition, then the reaction of other Jews is not particularly relevant. And if the work is an The Late Period 219 attempt to defend Jewry by identifying the spiritual and historical kernel of their religious truth, then there is not much he can do if that truth contradicts their wishes. Yet to Eitingon he justifies not publishing the work by saying, "Experts would find it easy to discredit me as an outsider."IB7 Freud is aware of the amateurish quality of his work. "More important," he tells Zweig in November, "is the fact that this historical novel won't stand up to my own criticism. I need more certainty."188 This is the real crux: Freud needs to be sure of the solution himself. He tries to give up on it now in November ("So let us leave it aside"),189 even saying to Eitingon, "I am no good at historical romances. Let us leave them to Thomas Mann." 190 But Freud cannot be free of the matter: "The man and what I wanted to make of him pursue me unrelentingly."191 Freud has no "inner uncertainty " about the solution, "for that is as good as settled," but he is distressed at the fact that, as he says, I was obliged to construct so imposing a statue [N.B.] upon feet ofclay, so that any fool could topple it.ln This fact restrains Freud from feeling that the work is successful (or finished). "Don't say any more about the Moses book," he pleads with Zweig in December 1934. Yet three weeks later Freud writes in a different mood to Lou Andreas-Salome. The historical foundations of his Moses story are not solid enough to serve as a basis for his conclusions and so he must remain silent, he says, but adds, It suffices me that I myselfcan believe in the solution of the problem. It has pursued me throughout the whole of my life.193 This extraordinaryconfession supports our reading ofthe role that Freud's Moses is playing in his own development. The "problem" here is the problem of his Jewish identity, and the figure of Moses, the giver of the Law, is at the center of that struggle. For the Law, the halacha, is the central defining and enabling feature of traditional Jewish identity, the inheritance of the fathers passed to the sons. In renouncing the Law, that is, in renouncing what Moses gave, Freud, like the modern Jew, loses touch with a primary resource for renewing his knowledge of what makes him Jewish. All that is left is ethnicity or psychology (character traits) or biology (therefore Freud's phylogenetics). The guilt attendant upon this rejection is unavoidable, even ifone's own father (like Freud's father, to some extent) joins the son in his "killing" ofMoses by refusing 220 DUAL ALL"GIANC" the Law and so give:s the son a kind of "permission."194 Because the guilt follows Freud throughout his life (note his following words to AndreasSalome , "Forgive me"), so too does the problem of Jewish identity in the absence of the Law, the problem of the Psychological Jew, and this problem becomes more acute, more present at the surface, when its humanist amalgam is undermined by antisemitism. For then it seems that no matter what, "the Jew must be burned." Significantly, when Freud describes the origins of his work to the Gentile Andreas-Salome, he does not mention the question of antisemitism-why the Jew has attracted this undying hated-but only the question of "what has created the particular character of the Jew." By eliminating the question ofantisemitism, Freud preserves his humanist -Jewish identity, and so can be satisfied with his solution of the wellborn Egyptian Moses as the deepest root for his own self. The answer in Moses andMonotheism to the question of antisemitism will be that Christians resent the renunciations of instinct required by the identity that this Moses transmi1:ted to them through the Jew Jesus.195 But in suppressing the mention of Christian antisemitism in his letter to Andreas-Salome, Freud seems to open the door to his own kind of antisemitism. The original "Jews" he describes are primitive and violent murderers of their Egyptian deliverer, and they worship a "volcano God." He goes on to deprive them of circumcision, their divinely "chosen" status, the passing through the Red Sea, and any presence at Mt. Sinai. So what is left to them that is Jewish? The main thing, Freud would answer, the historical truth, namely, parricide. The killing of the father, actually indicative in Freud's thought of a subtle but powerful identification,196 sets in motion the return of the repressed, the father's demands for the instinctual renunciations that are the basis of spiritual progress-that is, the return of the Law. Freud can now embrace what is for him the essence of being Jewish, namely, the instinctual renunciation demanded by the idea of the Law, since he has gotten rid ofits form, the practical details of the Law's actual observance. The practice ofsuch renunciation of drive has shaped the character of the Jew for refinement and Geistigheit, in opposition to the savage "God of the wilderness." As Freud will say to Zweig in February, complaining about the latter's poem, "Die: Schopfungsromanze," It seems to me to pay too much attention to the barbarous god of volcanoes and wilderness whom I grew to dislike very much in the course of my studies in Moses and who was quite alien to my Jewish consciousness.197 The Late Period 221 This god of volcanoes and deserts is the god of the id, the one that wishes to kill the father; the god of Freud's Jewish consciousness is that of his Egyptian Moses, who, as Schur puts it, stood for the "supremacy of the ego over raw instinctual drives,"198 making possible the rule of conscious reason and the ego where before there reigned only the unconscious compulsive drives of the id. Furthermore, Freud continues, "In my text I maintain that the hero Moses had never heard the name [the Tetragrammaton], that the Jewish people never were on Sinai-Horeb and that they never passed through the Red Sea, etc."199 Declaring its independence from inherited Jewish tradition, Freud's own "creation-romance" "discovers" a new and improved Jewish people to reflect Freud's sense of what a Jew-a Psychological Jew-is. In so doing, he may cut himself off from the resources of the rabbinic tradition that Jews need to formulate an authentic Jewish response to modernity. Freud will say in May, "Moses will not let go of my imagination [Moses gibt meine Phantasie nicht jreij."200 To Eitingon he wrote, "The 'Moses' has become a fixation for me. I can't get away from it and I can't get on with it. If no new finds at Tel-EI Amarna come to my aid I will hide it away forever.''201 Note Freud's concern for objective historical corroboration. The last time he was fixated on Moses was when he wrote (or created) his "Moses of Michelangelo." Now Freud will find his "Michelangelo-Moses" in the guise ofhis new Egyptian "statue," transferring the product of his conscious imagination to the realm of "history" (and biology/genetics), so that he can believe that the image is the legitimate root of his Jewish identity. The 1935 "Postscript" By the end of May 1935, Freud had written a "Postscript" to his autobiography of ten years earlier, the Selbstdarstellung. Among other things, the addition seems to express a sense of plateau with regard to the Moses. In early May, Freud is excited about the excavations at Tel el Amarna, where references to a "Prince Thothmes" make him think that "this Thothmes could be my Moses and I would be able to boast that I had guessed right."202 But by June he says that the Moses "has been laid aside" and that he can do no more on it.203 References to the Moses subside in Freud's correspondence after this point, until 1937, when he will take up the work again in connection with the publishing of the first two parts of the book,204 and again in April 1938, as he prepares to leave Vienna for England. There, safe from the Nazis, he will finally be able 222 DUAL ALLEGIANCE to complete the revision of the third and most substantial part. Therefore , a look at Freud's 1935 "Postscript" to his autobiography presents us with a glimpse of Freud's self-understanding just before the final push to complete and publish his Moses. Freud reports that a significant change has come about in the ten years since he first published the study, when it seemed as though his life "would soon be brought to an end." His words support my thesis about the character of the final period: Threads which in the course of my development had become intermingled [e.g., Jc=wishness and humanism?] have now begun to separate ; interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones became prominent once more.20S Freud speaks of having made "no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis " since that time. "This circumstance," he goes on to explain, "is connected with an alteration in myself, with what might be described as a phase of regressive development." His interests have returned to "the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking."206 These kulturellen Problemen concern "the origins ofreligion and morality," and Freud traces a genealogical line from Totem and Taboo (1912) [sic] through The Future ofan Illusion (1927) and Civilization andIts Discontents (1930). Moses and Monotheism clearly completes this series, as we see from how Freud describes his developing ideas about the import of religion. He views the events of human cultural history, and especially religion, as the result of the same psychological processes that go on in the individual , "repeated on a wider stage." At first, Freud expressed a negative valuation of these cultural products, labeling them "illusions." "Later," Freud says, he found a formula which did better "justice" to religion: ... while granting that its power lies in the truth [N.B.] which it contains, I showed that that truth was not a material [reale] but a historical truth.207 This formula is identical to the one Freud gives Lou Andreas-Salome in January 1935: Religions own their compulsive power to the return ofthe repressed; they are reawakened memories ofvery ancient, forgotten, highly emotional episodes of human history. I have already said this in Totem and Taboo; The Late Period 223 I express it now in the formula: the strength of religion lies not in its material [reale] but in its historical truth.20R From the letter to Andreas-Salome, we see that the formula for this insight is new, though its essence is found in Totem and Taboo. Furthermore , its development is connected with Freud's work on Moses and Monotheism. Thus his last book is really the culmination ofa long process of thinking on Freud's part about religion and his own cultural and psychological Jewishness. His words to Andreas-Salome about the problem of his Moses/Jewish identity having pursued him all this life, and his words in the Selbstdarstellung about "the origins of religion and morality ," are perhaps references to the same developmental circumstance, namely, the renewal of Freud's interest in his own Jewishness now that he is near death. The final resolution of his father's humiliation in the hat-in-the-gutter episode is at hand. Jakob's self-control becomes the Jewish expression of the basis of all spiritual progress. The "Postscript" indicates that Freud has reached a resting place with his Moses, having found a formula that does "justice"Z09 to the nature of religion's truth (and specifically that of Judaism). He has found a formula that reflects the form ofJudaism's (and his father's) claim on his own self-understanding: it contains a historical truth to which we are all deeply bound. The final "text" is vindicated. Though Freud is seventy-nine years old in 1935, his defiant Jewish pride is strong. During that summer there was an ironic Jewish joke going around about a parade ofJews in Berlin carrying banners that read "Throw us out." For some reason Freud thought the story was literally true, and he wrote a bitter letter about it to Arnold Zweig in which he said he had never heard anything so revolting, but that the lack of dignity it displayed was a characteristic feature of Jews. The only consolation he could find was that the people in question were half German.2lO Jones connects Freud's indignation with his reaction to his father's humiliation over his fur cap in the gutter. But if we look carefully at the two incidents, we realize that they are different. Jakob Freud in fact displayed great dignity in his self-restraint, and the mature Freud recognized this fact. The Jews in the joke, by contrast, show no self- restraint in their masochistic indulgence in self-hatred. They are cooperating with their oppressors. They have not "struggled against an inward passion for the sake of a higher cause," as did Jakob (and Freud). Freud's anger relates instead to the contrast between his father's dignity and the 224 DUAL ALLEGIANCE image of these Jews' "characteristic" lack of self-respect. The basis of Freud's capacity for defiance is his knowledge of self-worth and the dignity of his father's {:xample. If my thesis about Freud's mature identification with his father is correct, then his anger may be related to a sense ofviolence done to this new identification. In any event, Freud is "revolted." The feeling of connection is strong, and his only consolation is that those Jews are not "fully" Jewish. Freud feels less responsible for them if they are only half kin. It is at this point too, in June 1935, that Freud writes his letter to Leib Jaffe, the preSIdent ofKeren HaYesod, the agency dedicated to the building of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. "Keren Hajessod," Freud says, is a sign of our invincible will to live which has so far successfully braved two thousand years of burdensome oppression! Our youth will continue to carryon the fight.211 Freud's Jewish pride is fierce. Knowing he wrote this letter after he finished the first draft of Moses and Monotheism makes it difficult to believe that Freud intended his book as an attack on the Jewish people in whose "invincible will to live" he takes such pride. Rather he intended to provide them with the means to continue that fight, namely, by identifying the source of their strength. Psychoanalysis is to become the modern tool (replacing Judaism) for exchanging illusion for reality (or idolatry for truth), for the national transcendence of narcissism, and so for the education of mankind, with the Jews leading the way. Yet at the same time, Freud regrets the need for Zionism. He writes Zweig in October of how sad it is that "we even judge world events from the Jewish point of view, but how could we do it any other way!"212 In other words, given the existence of antisemitic persecution, Jews must view the world from a Jewish perspective, if only for self-protection. But Freud regards this negatively, for it represents a diminishing ofhis humanist ideals. He expresses a similar sentiment nine months later when he replies to a second letter from Erich Leyens, the young Jew who had written him thirteen years earlier about antisemitism in Germany. Leyens writes again now, reminding Freud of his earlier letter and telling him how much he had erred in not following "his prophetic advice."213 Freud answers, You surely do not believe that I am proud of having been right? I was right as the pessimist against the enthusiast, as the old man against the youngster. It would have been better to have been wrong.214 The Late Period 225 Freud's response makes his humanist preference clear. This letter suggests that in this polarized environment, Freud was a "nationalist" (Freud's own word) or Zionist Jew mainly when he was driven from a humanist position by antisemitism. Ideally, Freud would like to reach a humanist position through a Jewish one, as in B'nai B'rith. He will do so in Moses andMonotheism. Freud, the Galitzianer Freud's pride in his Jewish origins becomes even stronger at the end of his life. In November 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws are being promulgated in Hitler's Germany, Freud writes to a Dr. Sigfried Fehl: I hope it is not unknown to you that I have always held faithfully to our people, and never pretended to be anything but what I am: a Jew from Moravia whose parents come from Austrian Galicia.215 This open pride in his provincial origins contrasts sharply with Freud's "worldly" disdain for the Moravian Jews on his train ride from Freiberg in 1872.216 Freud has accepted his Jewish roots now and is defiantly proud, in an atmosphere ofrising Nazism, to say that he is a "Galitzianer" from the "old country." In defying antisemitism, Freud has come also to a positive identification with the authenticity of his parents' provincial origins. At the end of 1939, Martin Freud began a talk he gave to the Zionist Society in an internment camp in Huyton, England, with the words, "The Freuds came from Galicia and we are 'Galicianer'...."217 The pride with which Martin spoke of his family's East European roots before an assembly of assimilated West European Jewish professors, doctors, and scholars contained some of his father's defiant spirit as well. In November-December 1935, Freud made another statement to the B'nai B'rith about his relation to the lodge. He mentions having taken refuge in the sympathy ofsure friendship there, surrounded as he was in 1897 by "extreme hostility." He claimed that he had "never lost the feeling of belonging" to the brotherhood, and that the total agreement of our cultural and humanitarian ideals, as well as the same joyful acknowledgement ofJewish descent and Jewish existence , have vividly sustained this feeling.218 Freud is "joyful" at his Jewish descent, and he identifies intellectually with the humanitarian ideals of the society. Again, Freud's national and 226 DUAL ALLEGIANCE Jewish identifications ideally serve humanistic ends, those ofHumanitiit, as an expression of his Jewish identity. By contrast, Freud reacts to "Jewish self-hate" with disgust. We recall his reaction when he misunderstood the joke about Jews asking to be thrown out of Berlin. Jones mentions that in the summer of 1931 Freud had in his leisure time compiled a "hate list" of seven or eight people. One of the people on that list was a certain "Theodor Lessing," who had dedicated his book, Jewish Self-Hatred (which Freud thought "repulsive"), to Freud with the words, "In Devotion from an Opponent ." In February 1936, Freud replied to Kurt Hiller, who had written a biographical essay on Lessing and had sent it to Freud, by sending him an account of an e:xchange of letters he had had with Lessing "long before the War" over the latter's opposition to psychoanalysis. Lessing had ridiculed psychoanalysis "in the most hateful manner as a lucubration of the Jewish spirit." Freud had responded by recalling to him the memory of his namesake, of whom Freud assumed he was a descendent . Freud was astonished when Lessing replied that he was in fact a Jew himself, and he had even named his daughter from the Old Testament . This Jew's family had adopted the name of Lessing (as many Jewish families had at the time, Freud noted), out of respect for and (liberal Jewish) identification with the author of Nathan the Wise (though perhaps with an inadequate degree of respect for themselves as Jews). "I turned away from him in disgust," Freud told Hiller. Yet he went on to say that he thought such self-hatred as Lessing's was "an exquisitely Jewish phenomenon," reminding us that Freud knew that being Jewish in his time was not easy. Many Jews fell into this kind of neurosis, which Freud thought was caused by a combination of intense hatred for and yet identification with one's father.zI9 That Freud does not fall prey to such self-hate himself is evidence, by contrast, of his love for his father. Some interpreters have argued that Freud himself suffered from this splitting of the personality that results in self-hate, and they point to Moses andMonotheism as its manifestation. The broader base of evidence presented here supports a different conclusion.zzo One such piece of evidence for Freud's true Jewish pride is found in a letter he writes in English to the sister-in-law of the Zionist leader and psychoanalytic physician, David Eder, on the latter's death in 1936. Eder's death, Freud writes, had concerned him "in a quite special way" because of his own closeness to death, and he refers to the "speedy destruction" of th,:: world due to its own evil-the only palliative for him. Freud continues, The Late Period 227 I can imagine how he, too, must have suffered under the bitterness of these times. 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.221 Though the Jewish essence has remained inaccessible to scientific analysis , Freud knows it to be "miraculous," and Jews know that they carry it in common. It was to Eder that Freud had addressed his message in reply to the Hebrew University Zionists when they congratulated him in 1926 on his seventieth birthday, so he and Eder were bound as well by the common interest in that group. In a foreword Freud wrote a few months before his own death, Freud mentions Eder's "love of truth and undaunted courage, together with toleration and a great capacity for love," and he says he believes it was these qualities that aroused Eder's interest in psychoanalysis.222 Thus it may be too that Freud associated these qualities ofcharacter with the "miraculous thing which makes the Jew." Freud's argument for the origins of Jewish character in Moses and Monotheism supports this suggestion. Also in April 1936, Freud writes a "letter in place of a preface" for Max Weinreich's Yiddish translation of Freud's Introductory Lectures. Addressing his letter to the Executive Department of YIVO, Freud expresses his pleasure at hearing of the coming publication of this Yiddish translation of his work, and he takes the first sheet they sent him into his hand "with great respect." "Unfortunately," he says, I could not do more with it than that. At the time when I was a student, no attention was paid to cultivating the national tradition. I therefore learned to read neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, a fact which makes me now very sorry. Nonetheless I still became a good Jew, though as you probably know not a believing one.223 This combination of identification, atheism, and regret has become familiar by now. As noted, Freud's teachers paid more attention to cultivating the particularity of the Jewish "national" tradition than he acknowledges in such statements as this, and Freud's words probably describe his early response to this teaching. His projection reveals both his rejection in the early period and his wish in the late period to reclaim what he has lost. Note that language carries national implications for Freud; it is the voice of his people. The connection established by this translation between his work and his "national tradition" through the language spoken by his parents, and in particular by his mother,224 inspires Freud with "great respect." And again, Freud's atheism does not preclude his 228 DUAL ALLEGIANCE becoming a guter yid as far as he is concerned. In May, Freud will again tell Hebrew University that he is "one of yours."225 Freud's Jewish identification spans the Yiddish of the shtetland the Wissenschaft of the university . In June, Freud is so conscious of his Jewishness and he identifies with it so strongly that even his dog becomes Jewish. Taking mock umbrage at Zweig's mistaken spelling of his chow's (possibly Hebrew) name, Freud write:" My Jofie is a stickler for accuracy and does not like being called Zofie by you; Jo as in Jlew.ZZ6 Again we see Freud's Jewish projection. He colors his most personal ties with Jewishness. On the one hand, it is an attempt to create a "Jewish" environment for himself (N.B., using humor); on the other hand, it is a thrust towards self.·knowledge. Freud andthe Student Zionist Society, Kadimah One of the congratulatory greetings Freud received on his eightieth birthday in May 1936 was from the Viennese student Zionist society, Kadimah, to which his son Martin belonged. Freud replied, signing himself Yours, Freud, who would have liked to belong to your AIle Herren ["Old Boys," i.e., alumniJ2z7 Picking up on Freud's hint, Kadimah decided to elect him as an Ehrenbursch or honorary member, and Freud conveyed through Martin that he would be pleased to accept the honor. Kadimah was the first and oldest Jewish national students' association , having been established at the University of Vienna in 1882, originallyas a dueling fraternity. In 1892 a group of its alumni (Alte Herren) formed a Zionist group,228 and when Herzl published The Jewish State in 1896, Kadimah members became his closest collaborators. The Zionist society was founded upon a credo of three points: (1) the struggle against Jewish assimilation; (2) Jewish nationhood; and (3) the settlement of Palestine as a means towards Jewish independence. They bravely proclaimed the message ofJewish nationhood at a time when the leaders of Jewry around the world, and in Vienna in particular, rejected the concept .229 Martin had become a member in 1909, after he had witnessed a brawl at the University of Vienna between antisemites and Jews, the The Late Period 229 latter fighting back fiercely in a way that seemed to Martin at that time "out of character." He immediately joined the society/30 identifying naturally with "fighting Jews." When Martin got home and told his father about his decision, Freud was "plainly delighted,"231 and is reported to have said, "Your decision was right. That is fine and I am pleased about it."232 Ernst Freud too was "an active Zionist and was well known as a leader in 'Blau-Weiss'," the Zionist-oriented Jewish youth movement .233 So Freud's wish to identify publicly with Kadimah was anticipated by his sons' involvement in Zionism, acting with his approval. Freud's request on his eightieth birthday to become one of their "alumni" was perhaps a retrojection ofhis Jewish identification to his student days at the University of Vienna. As he wrote to Yehuda Devosis in December 1930, "I had already felt the influence of German antisemitism, of which a renewed outbreak took place during my university days."234 Freud's wish was fulfilled in a ceremony in his summer house in Dobling on 6 September 1936, when a delegation from Kadimah called upon Freud to present him with the honorary "sash" of the society. A speech was made, and Freud replied with his characteristic blend of proud affirmations and firm denials. He was not politically active, he said, but he had followed the Jewish-national and Zionist endeavors of Kadimah with interest and goodwill. He was not religious, but had always felt a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people and had encouraged this feeling in his children. All the family had remained Jewish, a matter of pride in a Viennese context. Then, as one ofthe "Kadimah" delegates handed him the red-purple-and-gold sash, he asked: "May I put it on?" -"We did not dare to ask you to do so, Herr Professor," answered one of the "Kadimah." He, thereupon, with the help of Or. H. Lifczis, put the honorary sash across his chest.235 Freud must have looked like a military hero, and felt like one of Hannibal's soldiers. Up to this time, there had been only five other men elected to be Ehrenburschen of Kadimah: Herzl; Zionist leader Max Nordau; Ruben Bierer, the co-founder of Kadimah; Karpel Lippe, early member of Hovevei Zion and senior delegate to the First Zionist Congress in 1897; and Perez Smolensky, the Hebrew author and co-founder of Kadimah.2.16 So Freud, as the sixth, was a member of an elite Jewish group. In Fraenkel's opinion, Freud's was not just a "gallant gesture," but rather "an open declaration to the world at large, at a time of danger and of Nazism, that he was a Jew who endorsed the Zionist aims for the Jewish people."237 Freud's own earlier statements on Zionism (e.g., to Einstein, 230 DUAL ALLEGIANCE Koffler, and Devosis in 1930) sounded a more cautious note. But Freud's Zionist act here at the end of his life may indicate a shift toward more wholehearted support. In any event, it is a vivid symbol of his defiant sense of himself in his eightieth year as a Jew fighting for the national survival of his people. Moses and Monotheism must be seen in this context , for it is Freud's hieroglyphic defense of his people. Moses and Monotheism Revisited By 1937 Freud is back at work on his "Moses"; he is also reading Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers at the time.238 At the beginning of the year, the first essay of what would become Moses and Monotheism was published in Imago under the title, "Moses ein Agypter."239 As he wrote to Eitingon on 5 February 1937, "A fragment which I could free from the Moses work (known to you and A. Zweig) is finished. But the most essential things about it must remain unsaid."240 Interestingly enough, the Freuds may have celebrated a Passover seder this year, 1937. The first night of the Jewish holiday fell on Friday, 26 March, and Easter Sunday was 28 March. Martha wrote to Ernst on 4 April (the last day of Passover week had been 3 April) that "not even the Pessach festivities [Pessach Feiertage] which occurred at the same time [as cold and rain] could save the weather."241 What kind of festivities were these that could have been expected to cheer things up? Even if the family didn't make a formal seder, Martha's words imply an attachment to or participation in the Jewish festival in some way. This year Freud failed to note in his Kronik the fifty-first Easter anniversary ofhis setting up in medical practice. Had he found some rest from his need for defiance? Freud finished the second "Moses" essay later in the year, on 11 August;242 it was published in the December issue of Imago, under the title, "Wenn Moses ein Agypter war ..."24.1 At the end of August, Freud tells Marie Bonaparte that he has begun rewriting Moses III, "but only very slowly." Jones reports that "he found it too difficult, would probably not finish it and in any event would not publish it."244 Two weeks later we hear again both of his difficulties and of his continuing engagement with the struggle: The grandiose nature of the perception that religion contains an historical truth continues to fascinate me, but the impetus to present it to others is paralyzed.245 He says that he cannot get over the conflict between the drive to express his own ideas and "political" considerations, that is, the threat to psy- The Late Period 231 choanalytic practice in Vienna. The lack of historical evidence in support of his thesis also hinders him.246 Knowing that Freud has been at work on the third part ofhis "Moses," in which the Lamarckian phylogenetic quality of the inheritance that is Jewishness in Freud's mind is made most clear, Freud's response to a letter from the Vienna B'nai B'rith saluting him on the fortieth anniversary ofhis membership takes on added meaning. Saying that he is touched that the lodge remembers him and wishes him well, Freud thanks his "dear brothers" and assures them, "That which has united us will surely not perish with the changing times."247 Given the antisemitic character of the "changing times," we may detect here evidence of Freud's conviction that the essence of what he shares with his Jewish brethren will outlast any destruction the Nazis might inflict in their brief reign of hate. That is, die Heimlichkeit der gleichen seelischen Konstruktion, whose secret Freud has penetrated in his Moses (as far as he is concerned), will endure, because it is a phylogenetic inheritance, a special case of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.24H Freud expresses this phylogenetic idea in ontogenetic terms to Hans Ehrenwald in December, when he acknowledges a copy of Ehrenwald's book, Uber den sogenanntenjiidischen Geist.249 Having begun to ask himself "several years ago" how the Jews had acquired "their particular character ," and following his usual practice of going back to the earliest beginnings , Freud had found that the first so to speak embryonic experience of the people, the influence of the man Moses and the exodus from Egypt, conditioned the entire further development up to the present day-just like a regular history of a neurotic individuaJ.250 Note that again Freud does not mention antisemitism as a catalyst for writing his book when describing it to this Gentile author, nor does he mention the question of the origins of antisemitism as one of his concerns . In any event, Freud goes on to list the spiritual consequences of the Mosaic conditioning he has discovered: In the first place there is the this-worldliness of the view oflife and the overcoming of magical thinking, and the rejection of mysticism, both of which can be traced back to Moses himself ... Jewish thinking, for Freud, is focused on "this side," rather than on "the beyond" that magic and the mystical occult concern themselves with. Remember Freud's Jewish "sobriety." This view of Jewish character is 232 DUAL ALLEGIANCE not new for Freud, as we have seen; what is new is his attributing it to Moses. Interestingly enough, Freud does not mention that his Moses is an Egyptian (though he asks Ehrenwald to look at his Imago essays). In December 1934 Frl;:ud tells Zweig that "Moses being an Egyptian is not the essential point, though it is the starting point."251 The essential point is what Freud does with it.252 Freud adds another "Mosaically derived" Jewish trait to this list the following month in a letter to his son Ernst: It is typically Jewish tech! jiidischl not to renounce anything and to replace what ha:; been lost. Indeed Moses, who in my opinion left a lasting imprint on the Jewish character, created the prototype for that.m Freud seems to be referring to his argument in Moses and Monotheism that Moses responded to the loss of the political support for the monotheism of the Egyptian Aton religion when Akhnaton died by choosing the Jewish people to serve as its new vehicle, replacing the Egyptian people, who had rejected it. The Jews became the material for the religion's imprint, and by means ofa refined form ofhis master Akhnaton's sun religion, Moses stamped the Jewish people with character traits that are a consequence of its spirituality. In this way Moses create the "Psychological Jew," where Jewish "content is replaced by character."254 This Jew survives through the centuries, even in the absence of Jewish observance (so Yerushalmi's subtitle, "Judaism Terminable and Interminable "). In this refusal to give up, Freud sees the "tenacity ofJewry," and evidence for the presence of the interminable Jew. In his letter to Ernst, Freud is thinking of his son's recent acquisition of a new house on the coast of England, which was a replacement for one Ernst had owned on the German island of Hiddensee,255 presumably property that was confiscated by the Nazis or made inhospitable by them. But the Jew will not give up so easily. Freud sees the Jewish character that he believes Moses created expressed in his son's act, confirming his theory of the transmission ofJewish identity. That is, he sees his own Jewishness passed on-genetically perhaps-to his son Ernst, and he responds with pleasure: "My best wishes for the opening of Hidden House!" Freud also confirms his conviction of the essential historicity of his "solution" to the problem of Jewish identity in this letter, when he says ofhis essay on Moses, "It is my first appearance as a historian, late enough!" But Moses is not the only famous Jewish figure in whose image Freud sees himself in 1938. On 13 March 1938, at a board meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society convened just after Hitler invaded and The Late Period 233 annexed Austria, "it was decided that everyone should flee the country if possible, and that the seat of the society should be wherever Freud would settle."256 Freud's comment at the time appears, significantly, also in Moses andMonotheism. At the meeting he said, After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakkai asked for permission to open a school at Jabneh for the study ofthe Torah. We are going to do the same. We are, after all, used to persecution by our history, tradition, and some of us by personal experience ...257 Freud will refer to this tradition (a well-known one) again in a letter of recommendation for Jacob Meitlis seven months later, with a significant introduction (see below), at which time the full meaning of Freud's identification with R. Yochanan ben Zakkai will become clear. At this point, it is worth noting again the metaphor of the Jerusalem Temple for the edifice of psychoanalysis and the parallel drawn between Torah study and psychoanalytic research. Furthermore, there is his identification with the Jewish historical "tradition" of persecution fueling this image of Jewish strength and tenacious perseverance in a cause. Rabbi Yochanan ensured the spiritual (and so physical) survival of the Jewish people by opening a school; mutatis mutandis, Freud says, "we are going to do the same." How closely does Freud understand the analogy? We recall his dream about Theodor Herzl at the end of the early period, in which Freud dreamed that "something must be done to save the Jewish people." But there is a significant addition here that follows what is quoted above. Freud qualified the "us" in his last sentence by laughing and pointing at Richard Sterba, the one Gentile present at the time, adding, "with one exception."258 The psychoanalytic "tribe" is at base humanist, and so its allegiances transcend the Jewish people. Though Freud at this point uses an image from Jewish history to characterize the psychoanalytic movement as a whole, shaping the group image using one of the Jewish people, nevertheless he does not relinquish his dual allegiance, which the psychoanalytic movement reflects. At the end of April, Freud writes Jones that he is working an hour each day at the third part of his "Moses," which he says, torments him like an "unlaid ghost."259 The image is psychologically apt, especially if the "Moses" is linked to Freud's relationship with his father. Jakob's "ghost" calls out for justice, namely, a positive link to Jews and Judaism, through a return to the Bible that began their journey together as Jews. Two weeks later Freud in fact compares himself "with the old Jacob who, when a very old man, was taken by his children to Egypt."260 234 DUAL ALLEGIANCE The biblical patriarch of course is the progenitor of the twelve tribes of the Jewish people, a potent Jewish identification. Schur reports that Freud used the metaphor of Jacob struggling with the "angel" (Gen. 32:24-32) "to describe the force of his drive toward making new discoveries ."261 The wish preceding the biblical image in Freud's letter to his son Ernst is Freud's desire "to die in freedom." Juxtaposed to the image of Jacob, these words point to the role Moses andMonotheism will play by means of its new ideas in freeing Freud (who also identified with Joseph,262 the biblical interpreter of dreams), from the guilts associated with his failures to fulfill his Jewish allegiances. His Egyptian Moses will fulfill Freud's Jewish responsibilities to his father and to his people, just as the biblical Joseph did, who also assumed an Egyptian identity in order to become hilS family's provider. Thus Freud will come to play both father and son in this projected Jewish familial metaphor. Freud continues the metaphor in his letter to identify himself with another figure from the Jewish "tradition" of antisemitism, namely, the Wandering Jew. Once Freud imagines himself safe in "Egypt" (and he mentions Thomas Mann's novel, Joseph the Provider), he says, Let us hope thac there won't follow in days to come an exodus from Egypt. It is high time that Ahasuerus come to rest somewhere.z63 Ahasuerus, the "Wandering Jew," or in the German version of the legend , Der ewige Jude, the "Eternal Jew," is the central figure of an antisemitic Christian legend that concerns in its most common form a shoemaker in Jerusalem who taunted Jesus on his way to crucifixion, and was therefore condemned by the latter to wander forever without a resting place, that is, without dying, until Jesus' Second Coming. Freud was familiar with this legend at least from 1928, for he wrote then to George Viereck, who had written a psychoanalytically conducted autobiography of the Eternal Jew, that "the memoirs of your 'Eternal Jew' are assured of my greatest interest."264 Freud's identification now ten years later may indicate that he feels that the persecution he has endured over the years is related to his "taunting" of Christianity with his views of religion (e.g., The Future of an Illusion, in 1927). In any event, the ideas embedded in the legend point us indirectly to themes in Freud's "unlaid ghost," Moses andMonotheism . The eternally Wandering Jew, Ahasver, is a Christian personification of the Jewish people as a whole, incorporating the themes of the participation in the crucifixion, condemnation to eternal suffering until Jesus' second coming, and the bearing of witness to the truth of the Christian tradition.z65 The Late Period 235 Freud's last book intersects with these themes, being very much concerned with the "eternality" of the Jewish people, that is, its uncanny survival over the centuries in spite of dispersion and persecution. But Freud also finds a new twist for Jewish "participation" in the crucifixion, namely, the killing of Moses as its prefiguration. In addition, the crucifixion represents, Freud says, the "return of the repressed" in its repetition of the killing of the father of the primal horde. Psychoanalysis here discloses the content of revelation. And so thirdly, Freud bears witness in Moses andMonotheism to the "historical truth" at the heart of the Christian tradition, namely, parricide. Christianity mediates in Freud's conception the consoling atonement for the inherited memory traces of this deed and its attending guilt, while at the same time satisfying the urge to repeat the deed. Christianity is the "fulfillment" of Judaism in this sense, though not a cultural advance over it,266 for the basis of cultural progress is not the satisfaction of a drive, but rather its renunciation.267 It is in this sense that psychoanalysis is a real advance over both Christianity and Judaism, in delivering to the Jews the "fourth humiliation " with which Moses andMonotheism opens, namely, the denial of the Jewish creation of monotheism. As Yerushalmi points out, in Freud's view this renunciation of narcissism is only the last in a series of painful humiliations which human beings have had to endure in order to exchange illusion for reality: the "cosmological" blow delivered by Copernicus to the idea of the centrality of our planet in the universe; Darwin's "biological" blow to Man's supposedly privileged place in the hierarchy of creation; andmost devastating of all-Freud's own "psychological" blow to Man's last imagined refuge ("the ego is not master in its own house").z68 In so far as Jews suffer this humiliation for the spiritual gain it offers, they will grow into a greater people, and psychoanalysis, godless though it be, will have functioned as the "last of the prophets," impelling the Jews to fulfill their destiny as a "light unto the nations." No wonder Freud considers his last book "quite a worthy exit." On 4 June 1938 Freud was finally permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna. When they insisted that he sign a statement that he had been well treated by the authorities, he added a sentence after his signature that shows the strength of his defiance, even at the age ofeighty-two: "I can recommend the Gestapo most highly to everyone."269 Martin Freud notes that the style is that ofa commercial advertisement, and he reports that its irony was missed by the Nazis as they passed the certificate from man to man, shrugged their shoulders, and marched off.270 Gay is puzzled 236 DUAL ALLEGIANCE by the risk that Freud takes at this moment. But Freud's act is consistent with his Jewish identity. For example, once Anna had obtained permission from the Nazis for the Freuds to leave Vienna, she was ordered by the Gestapo to report daily to the police. When Freud heard of the demand, he said, "You, Anna, have of course refused to obey so humiliating an order."Z7I That this same sense of dignity finds expression at such a dangerous final moment in the form of a joke in response to the absurd Nazi request, in defiance of the danger, shows the indomitable strength of Freud's Jewishness, especially when confronted by antisemitism, and it shows how connected Witz was to Freud's sense of himself as a Jew. As he was arriving in England on 6 June, Freud dreamed he was landing at Pevensey, the spot where William the Conqueror had landed in 1066.272 In his first letter written on the day he arrived, Freud told Eitingon that the enchantment of his new surroundings made him want to shout, "Heil Hitler!"27.1 Freud comes in and goes out with the same indomitable, fighting spirit of a "conquistador" (as he adventurously described himself to Fliess in 1900).274 Freud's arrival brought forth welcomes and appeals from Jewish groups anxious to attach themselves to their famous fellow Jew. Freud responded to YIVO, for example, having been a member of YIVO's honorary presidium for a long time, with a repetition of his characteristic combination of solidarity and denial: I was very glad to receive your greeting. You no doubt know that I gladly and proudly acknowledge my Jewishness though my attitude toward religion, including ours, is critically negative.275 By this time we know how to qualify Freud's negative attitude with his "Mosaic" participation. Two weeks after he arrived in England, Freud began the final rewriting of his "Moses III" (noted on 21 June in his Kronik). On 28 June, he writes to Zweig, saying, "I am enjoying [mit Lust] writing the third part ofMoses." The obstacles seemed to have been cleared from his path, for less than a month after he took up the task, Freud noted in his Kiirzeste Kronik, on 17 July 1938, what he wrote on the same day to his brother, Alexander: "Have just written down the last sentence of my Moses 111."276 That Alexander was his correspondent perhaps points to the familial context for the original formation of Freud's Jewish identity. Recall that it was Freud who named his brother. Is he now complementing by means of his Moses the implied commitment to classical humanism that the name "Alexander" represented? The Lute Period 237 In any event, it seems that Freud was eager to communicate a kernel of his new work to his fellow psychoanalysts, because he had Anna read "Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit" ("The Progress in Spirituality ")277 at the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Paris on 2 August.Z7H It is noteworthy that Freud chose to release a section that makes the hero Moses and his chosen people, the Jews, responsible for the triumph of Geistigkeit over Sinnlichkeit, of spirituality over sensuality, which, he originally wrote, is "the alternative that was more significant culturally."279 Freud makes the Jews ultimately responsible for the most culturally valuable and significant advances in Western civilization. Furthermore , the story about Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and his Torah school at Yavneh appears in this section, described as a political misfortune that taught the Jews to value at its true worth their religious literature , the Torah. "From that time on," Freud writes, "Holy Scripture and the spiritual endeavor with it were what held the dispersed people together ."280 It may be, as Freud told Jones in 1936, that his "historical novel" contains "a refutation of the Jewish national mythology"281 and that "its contents are suitable to wound Jewish feelings, insofar as they do not want to submit themselves to science," as he told Devosis in December 1938, when the latter inquired about a Hebrew translation of Moses and Monotheism.282 But in the context of Freud's values and allegiances, to attribute "progress in Geistigkeit" (intellectuality, spirituality) to the Jewish people is high praise, perhaps the highest he can give. Nor is it insignificant in this context that Freud contrasts this intellectual character of the Jewish people, which he says has had the effect of checking "the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal,"283 with that obvious reference to Nazi Germany. The Jews, not the Germans , are responsible for what is worthwhile in civilization. Jakob Freud's response to the antisemitic violence done to him looks now like "the worthier alternative." And "this characteristic development of the Jewish nature [i.e., valuing intellectuality over muscular strength] was initiated by the Mosaic prohibition against worshipping God in a visible form."284 Freud speaks here indeed as a Jewish spiritual patriot, as Simon says, though in a humanist form. In any event, he is hardly denigrating or attacking his people. As news spread that Moses andMonotheism was about to be published, Jews began to petition Freud in an attempt to dissuade him from publishing it. Freud's letter to Zweig of 28 June 1938 speaks of "a young American Jew imploring me not to deprive our poor unhappy people of the one consolation remaining to them in their misery." "What an over- 238 DUAL ALLEGIANCE estimation!" Freud exclaims. "Can one really believe that my arid treatise would destroy the belief of a single person brought up by heredity and training in the faith, even if it were to come his way?"285 Apparently Freud knows that Judaism is stronger than psychoanalytic reason. In mid-October, Charles Singer, an eminent British-Jewish historian ofscience and medicine, conveyed to Freud through his son Ernst a pamphlet (probably on Jewish affairs) and "the message that he would be wise to keep Moses andMonotheism in his desk, particularly since the English churches, !bulwarks against anti-Semitism, would take the book as an attack on religion."286 This was probably not the best tack to take with Freud, since the Catholic church, which was supposed to protect him from the Nazis, had proven to be such a "broken reed." Freud responded on 31 October, describing his Moses as an extension of Totem and Taboo, and insisting that "it can be called an attack on religion only insofar as any scientific investigation of religious belief presupposes disbelief." Repeating his commitment to atheism, Freud goes on to say that really only Jewry will have reason to feel offended by the book. This shortsightedness on Freud's part shows how closelyMoses andMonotheism was tied to Jewry in his mind, for there is certainly enough in it to offend Christendom too. However, his belief that Jewry will be offended places him in a dilemma: Needless to say, I do not gladly hurt my fellow people either. But what can I do about it? I have spent my whole long life standing up for what I held to be the scientific truth, even when it was uncomfortable and disagreeable to my fellow human beings. I cannot conclude it with an act of denial. Freud ofcourse opens Moses andMonotheism with this very issue, namely, the tension between truth and national Jewish solidarity (or "interests"), to both of which, as we have seen, Freud feels an allegiance.287 Yerushalmi shows how deliberately Freud names himself as a Jew in the very first sentence of his book: To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightly--especially when one belongs oneself to that people.ZBB The original sentence in Freud's 1934 manuscript read merely, "One will not easily decide to deny a nation its greatest man because of the meaning of a name."289 Note too the change from "nation" to "people" The Late Period 239 in the published version.290 Freud will suffer this ascesis in solidarity with his people. Though he does not gladly or lightly force his people (and himself) into this renunciation (Yerushalmi's "fourth humiliation"), he must do so, he says, in the name of truth, the hope of knowledge, and the exchange of illusion for reality, which take precedence over personal comfort, including his own. Recalling Freud's conclusions about the basis of civilization's development in "The Progress in Geistigkeit," we are not surprised to see Freud practicing a similar renunciation upon himself first. As at the beginning of his research on dreams, Freud submits himself to the first analysis. As the "starting point," such renunciation , the transcendence of narcissism, led him to the "essential point" of Jewish identity. In any event, Freud has another reason for going ahead with publication of his Moses: At present, we Jews are reproached with the charge that we have in the course ofthe centuries become cowardly (we were once a valiant nation). In this transformation I have had no part. So I must risk it. As a Jew Freud identifies with the brave nation that fought valiantly for its Temple and its religious/spiritual survival. The means by which Freud sees this battle being fought after the physical destruction ofthe Temple (the "visible Temple" of the Nathan letter) is the geistig endeavor for wissenschaftliche Wahrheit (cf. the "invisible edifice of Judaism"). Freud makes this point forcibly in a letter he writes on 30 November 1938 as part of a recommendation for Jacob Meitlis to go to South Africa "to revive among our fellow-people there interest in our scientific institute in ViIno" [i.e., YIVO). Freud says that he has no doubt that Meitlis will be successful, and he continues, We, Jews, have always known how to respect spiritual values. We preserved our unity through ideas, and because of them we have survived to this day. The fact that Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai immediately after the destruction of the Temple obtained from the conqueror permission to establish the first academy for Jewish knowledge in Jabneh was for me always one ofthe most significant manifestations in our history.291 Here at the very end of his life, Freud uses the Yochanan ben Zakkai story in an entirely Jewish social context, and with Freud's view of the role of the Jews in the progress of civilization, it bears the full weight of his pride. It is through ideas that Jews have been able to preserve their 240 DUAL ALLEGIANCE unity and survive, and for that reason they know how to respect "spiritual values." At the end of his life, Freud affirms a link with traditional Jewish learning, another link with his father,zn and he sees the survival of the Jews bound up with it., Freud comes by his own route to affirm a position closer to tradition than he may realize. He adds, Once again our people is faced with dark times requiring us to gather all our strength In order to preserve unharmed all culture and science during the present harsh storms.2