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333 15 : The Purloined kiddush CuPs reoPening The Case on Freud’s Jewish idenTiTy Introductory essay to the exhibition catalog Sigmund Freud’s Jewish Heritage (Binghamton and London: State University of New York and the Freud Museum, 1991). This brief essay was written as part of a small catalogue published in 1991 as an addendum to an earlier volume that had accompanied an exhibition devoted to Sigmund Freud’s private collection ofantiquities.1 This second publication dealt with Freud’s collection of Judaica objects, whose existence had been overlooked for decades by those who knewof the careful photographic cataloguing of Freud’s home in Vienna on the eve of his departure to London. Only in 1989, after the exhibition of Freud’s antiquities was already traveling, did David Becker, a graduate student in Jewish studies at suny Binghamton, notice that in the front of the photograph of a small table in Freud’s study stood two kiddush cups. Closer investigation of additional photos of Freud’s house yielded another discovery: a Rembrandt etching of the great Dutch rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657). The long-standing oversight of these and other Jewish-related objects was, Yerushalmi announced here, “both parable and cautionary tale for what has occurred in the larger scholarly quest to understand the nature of Freud’s Jewish identity.” This essay allowed him the opportunity to correct and enrich the historical record. Yerushalmi had been reading Freud for years and had undertaken serious research in advance of delivering the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale in 1989. It was on the basis of those lectures, and his ongoing archival explorations, that Yerushalmi published his well-known book Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991). The new material evidence of the kiddush cups fortified Yerushalmi’s strong sense that while Freud was indeed “godless,” as the Yale historian Peter Gay had asserted in his own book in 1989, he was at the same time “very much a Jew.”2 To a great extent, Yerushalmi’s perspective in this essay is 1. The exhibition was memorialized in Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Abrams, 1989). The second volume, from which Yerushalmi ’s essay is taken, was Sigmund Freud’s Jewish Heritage (Binghamton and London : State University of New York and the Freud Museum, 1991). 2. Peter Gay, Freud: A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 334 | The yoke of memory a direct rebuttal to Gay’s conclusions about Freud and his Jewishness. Drawing on his grasp of the full sweep of Jewish history, Yerushalmi declared that “secular , godless Jews have been a ubiquitous component of Jewish modernity . . . and many have retained the most passionate Jewish loyalties, feelings, and convictions .” Freud was an excellent example of this tradition, according to Yerushalmi. In making the case, he moved beyond the well-known facts, for example, of Freud’s membership in the B’nai B’rith chapter inVienna. He argued that Freud came from a far more Jewish and religious background than had been assumed.Thus, Freud’s father, Jakob, was not an antireligious “Voltairian,” as Freud himself had once said, but rathera “tradition-minded Jew” who likely studied Talmud daily, kept a kosher home, and spoke Yiddish with his family (including Sigmund). It was Jakob who wrote an intricate and florid Hebrew inscription to his son when he presented him with a German-language Bible on Sigmund’s thirty-fifth birthday. This provided Yerushalmi with evidence that Freud must have been concealing or even prevaricating when he said that he knew no Hebrew. His enhanced portrait of Freud’s Jewish background went hand in hand with— indeed, was the grounding for—Yerushalmi’s larger claim that Freud was neither “ambivalent about his Jewish identity nor did he have any desire to discard it.” The culmination of this argument would be Yerushalmi’s detailed rereading of Moses and Monotheism (originally published in German in 1937) in Freud’s Moses. In the following essay, he offered a brief, but significant, distillation when he declared that Moses and Monotheism was hardly Freud’s farewell to Judaism, but rather “its triumphant vindication.” Yerushalmi acknowledged that his own work of historical reclamation—both of Freud’s reputation and of neglected historical material —was incomplete. Newdiscoveries, he recognized, might unravel even more surprises and dimensions to Freud’s complex personality. In May 1938, some three months after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria, and only...

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