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  • Atheist Jew or Atheist Jew:Freud’s Jewish Question and Ours
  • Jay Geller (bio)

My fellow unbeliever Spinoza.

—Heinrich Heine, cited in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

I too should credit the believer's solution with containing the truth; it is not, however, the material truth, but a historical truth.

—Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

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The Diary of Sigmund Freud

The title for this article takes its lead from Freud's famous self-description in his October 1918 letter to the Swiss Analyst-Pastor Oskar Pfister: "Quite by the way, why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew—einen ganz gottlosen Juden?"1 Numerous analysts, scholars, theologians, and commentators have endeavored to parse the meanings of and relationships between Godless and Jew in Freud's pithy phrase and no-less pithy life. Their efforts have led to a plethora of sequels to Freud's own self-description: non-Jewish Jew, secular Jew, modern Jew, psychological Jew, self-hating Jew, renegade Jew, ambivalent Jew. After detailing some of Freud's own explicit assertions of Jewish identity, this essay will examine some of the ways and whys Freud's Jewishness has become a major focus of contemporary reflections on the man, his writings, and his legacy.

The diverse reactions to the phrase "Godless Jew" suggest an uncanny discomfort. There are actually at least two sources of discomfort. The first source is generated by the question: What is a Jew? Is "Jew" a religious designation? If so, then the notion of Godless Jew is either an oxymoron or an indirect representation, such as Freud analyzed in the dream work or noted in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and it recalls Heine's witticism, cited by Freud in Jokes, "my fellow unbeliever Spinoza."2 Or, conversely, is the notion of Jew related to the German term Judentum, which condenses three fields [End Page 1] often kept distinct in English: Judaism (religion), Jewry (people), and Jewishness (character and custom)? Consequently, how one translates Judentum into English betrays one's agenda.

The second source is the relationship between the construction of psychoanalysis and Freud's identity—let us call it his "Jewish" identity following Freud's own self-designation: whether in 1886, when, in a "political conversation" with Gilles de la Tourette chez Charcot, Freud "promptly explained that I am a Jew"; or forty years later (1926), when, in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, Freud commented that "I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time I prefer to call myself a Jew."3 Indeed, Freud never did have a problem with affixing the label "Jew" to his person. In his letters, prefaces, and addresses he repeatedly laid claim to that identification. Thus, in his address to the Vienna B'nai B'rith on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Freud remarked on why he gravitated to the group: "For I was myself a Jew, and it had always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny the fact." He continued: "What bound me to Judentum . . . [what made] the attraction of Judentum and Jews irresistible—[were] many obscure emotional forces which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common psychological structure."4

These remarks were echoed a few years later in his 1930 introduction to the Hebrew translation of Totem und Taboo, where he describes himself as one "who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature." Freud then posed to himself the question: "'Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A very great deal, and probably its very essence.'"5 In a letter to the translator of that work, J. Dwossis, Freud further commented that "I had felt myself to be a Jew...

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