Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

What is left of identity when both language and religion are gone?" This is the question posed at the outset of a monograph on six twentieth-century Italian writers whom the author, the late H. Stuart Hughes, designates as Jewish. ¹ The difficulty of answering his own question is not reduced because of his choice of writers: Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia were baptized Catholics whose novels barely contain any Jewish characters. Also a Roman Catholic was the mother of Natalia Ginzburg, who herself grew up without any religious instruction. Both Carlo Levi and Primo Levi suffered under Italian fascism for their political activities, rather than for the faith that they did not practice; nor did either have a strong sense of peoplehood. Of Hughes's writers, only Giorgio Bassani--the author of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, translated in 1965 as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, adapted into a famous film by Vittorio De Sica--wrote fiction in which Jewish life was presented not merely as a parenthesis, and he showed a keen interest in cultivating his ethnic heritage.

The Jewish patrimony of these half-dozen authors is therefore an elusive one. A distinctive Jewish language had already disappeared in Italy a couple of centuries earlier, and so fully had most of its Jews propelled themselves from the severities of law and ritual that, as Hughes noted, Reform Judaism exercised no attraction because it seemed so unnecessary. Although Carlo Levi and Primo Levi brandished priestly appellations, the surnames of many Italian Jews--a synonym like "coreligionists" does not seem apt--have often been drawn from the towns their families inhabited. How might the historian of modern Jewry penetrate what Freud, in a seemingly offhand remark to the B'nai B'rith in Vienna in 1926, called "innere Identität"? In the course of a lifetime of the conflicting demands that modernity seems to entail, how might Jewishness affect the struggle to sustain identity, and how might it in turn mark the contours of Diaspora history?

Within the constraints of this article, I cannot do more than suggest how deep the mysteries of categorization and understanding are. Any historian wishing to explore identity is probably most indebted to one thinker whose own life suggests what can be so enigmatic about modern Jewish identity: Erik Erikson. His father was a Dane (almost certainly a gentile) whose name and identity remain unknown. But a Jewish stockbroker named Valdemar Salomonsen married Erik's mother, Karla Abrahamsen, a middle-class Jew from Copenhagen, and gave Erik his first surname before disappearing (to somewhere in this hemisphere). Then Theodor Homburger, a German-Jewish pediatrician who married Karla Salomonsen on her son's third birthday, gave Erik his second surname. (Later there was a surrogate father whose daughter, Anna Freud, also psychoanalyzed Erik Homburger.) Born out of wedlock in Frankfurt in 1902, the blond, blue-eyed child had been told by his dark-haired mother that the dark-haired Dr. Homburger was his biological father; clearly something did not make sense. Out of such family uncertainties, the invention of such conceptions as "identity crisis" and "identity diffusion" looks in retrospect inevitable. Erik wanted to be Danish and Germanic and American too, and thus he testified to the alluring power of the West's majority culture. In 1939, when U.S. citizenship was granted, a third--and final--surname was bestowed. As though asserting himself to be a truly self-made man, Homburger became Erik's son. ²

In the index to Lawrence J. Friedman's recent outstanding biography of Erikson are an impressive 27 citations to his Jewishness, one of which covers four pages. And yet no one seemed less interested (or more ambivalent about it) than the subject himself. He liked living at the edge of boundaries that he ignored or surmounted as he chose. He shared the American proclivity to want to combine options, to have it all...