Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny: A Jewish Biogenetic Law?

Let me begin by saying how fruitful for my own thinking about the Jewish Question has been Eliza Slavet’s carefully researched and innovative study of Freud’s notion of Jewishness as the product of inherited memory. I am currently at work on a study of Oskar Goldberg, like Freud a thinker committed to a biological understanding of Jewishness, and Slavet’s work has convinced me that Goldberg’s speculations about the evolution of the human species in Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (2005), originally published in 1925, should not be dismissed as mere pseudoscience, though perhaps they fall on the margins of the evolutionary biology of the period. What I think links Freud and Goldberg is their belief that the Jewish people have a significant role to play in the evolution of the human species. To put it simply, both thinkers take the emergence of the Jewish people (the “Hebrews”) in the matrix of ancient Egypt to be a turning of human biology against itself, the beginning of a new stage in the replacement of instinct with consciousness as the force directing social change. I will describe this as the reversal of the biogenetic law in what follows. Slavet has shown how Freud’s embrace of neo-Lamarckism is part of a leftist (often communist-leaning and frequently Jewish) rejection of a Darwinism according to which natural selection and der Kampf ums Dasein (struggle for existence) alone functioned as the motors of evolutionary change. Freud and Goldberg were looking for an alternative form of Darwinism that allowed a space for the deliberate and nonaggressive shaping of human evolution. Slavet’s great contribution in Racial Fever is that she not only draws our attention to Freud’s quest for a biology that supported human evolution beyond Kampf, but also that she demonstrates that this quest is inseparable from his quest to find a central place for the Jewish people (hardly a likely candidate for a winner in the struggle for existence) in this evolutionary process. It may seem that putting Freud together with a figure like Goldberg (and others of the Goldberg circle, like Erich Unger and Alfred Caspary, and one might also mention the psychoanalyst Adrien Turel, though he is neither Jewish nor a Goldberg follower) would do little to enlighten us about Freud’s relation to Judaism and Jewishness or to the biological science of his day. But I am persuaded that Slavet has opened up a very fruitful field for further study. In what follows I want only to adumbrate some of the ways that I find Slavet’s work so pathbreaking.

Unlike almost all other scholars who have dealt with Freud’s apparent attraction to the neo-Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics, Slavet has dared to confront this side of Freud without either embarrassment for the great man’s peculiar intellectual “foible,” or gloating triumph over another proof of his lack of a “true” scientific spirit. By daring to delve straight and deep into the murky waters of neo-Lamarckism, Slavet has been rewarded with some fascinating discoveries and insights into the nature of Freudian theory and Jewish identity more generally. Slavet is willing to take seriously not only Freud’s “pseudoscience” but also his thesis that, somehow or other, Jewishness is inherited. What she has shown us is, first of all, that the Jewish Question is deeply imbricated in the history of evolutionary theory. Neo-Lamarckism was, as Slavet shows, identified with Jews—and sometimes embraced by Jews—seeking to show that they could “assimilate” to their environment and remove the “stain” of Jewishness from their children. But it also offered hope to Jews (and others) who wanted to show that natural selection’s survival of the fittest principle could be overridden, or at least reshaped, through cultural processes that favor intelligent and cooperative planning over the aggressive and violent reflexes of instinct. I would like to mention in passing one of the great theorists of Darwinism as applied to psychology and sociology, the American James Mark Baldwin. Baldwin’s major work, Development and Evolution (1902), offered a brilliant...