Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew

Dual Allegiance and Modern Identity

5 Dual Allegiance and Modern Identity From this survey, it is obvious that Freud's attitude toward his Jewishness over the course of his life was a critical, and not incidental or peripheral, element of his identity. Freud's Jewishness mattered to him, and he credited it with some basic elements of his character, including independence of mind, courage to stand firm in his convictions when alone and opposed, and particularly the capacity for self-restraint and self-transcendence . By the end of his life, he comes to understand why it matters so much: it is an inalienable, almost physical, phylogenetic link to the dawn of human and Jewish history. To some extent, as Yerushalmi points out, Freud's story in Moses andMonotheism is a way ofexplaining "the enormous weight, the gravitational pull, of the Jewish past, whether it be felt as an anchor or a burden ." In Jewish terms, what is Lamarckism if not the powerful feeling that, for better or worse, one cannot really cease being Jewish, and this not merely because of current antisemitism or discrimination, and certainly not because of the Chain of Tradition, but because one's fate in being Jewish was determined long ago by the Fathers, and that often what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the blood.l Like Heinrich Heine, Freud felt the inherited and indelible "longevity and irremediability of being Jewish."2The high assimilation and intermarriage rates in recent surveys3 indicate that for many this psychological root has not taken hold, or is no longer felt. The truth is that "Psychological Judentum" is terminable-it is not biologically transmitted-especially in the absence of an ideology that gives Jews a reason to choose the tradition, as opposed to being chosen by it. 245 246 DUAL ALLEGIANCE David Stern makes this point powerfully in his review ofYerushalmi's book, where he argues that Freud's Jewish identity cannot serve as a model for modern Jews in part because of "the strange passivity ofhis prescription for Jewishness,"4 namely, its phylogenetic nature, "a notion ofJewish identity that excluded the individual will altogether."5 Since, as Stern rightly says, voluntarism is the most salient feature of modern Jewish identity, and furthermore since Freud "sincerely took psychoanalysis for the future of Judaism" (a belief that today appears "fatuous and tragically mistaken"), Freud disqualified himself as a progenitor of modern Jewish identity: "In the case of Jewish identity, heroism eluded him."6 It is likely that Stern overstates his case. Freud's example may convey aform while leaving us free to choose a Jewish content that will serve us better. For it is not true that Freud's Judaism was purely a passive inheritance: of status. In choosing psychoanalysis as the content of his godless Judaism/ Freud was in fact not passive. As a humanistic discipline, psychoanalysis quo Judaism functioned for Freud in the same way that his involvc!ment in B'nai B'rith did, namely, as a Jewish vehicle for the expression of liberal and humanistic values. Contrary to Stern's insistence that Freud could not overcome the false opposition between the parochial and the universal, so that he "succumbed to the belief that being a Jew and be:ing a modern secular Western intellectual are mutually exclusive,"8 in fact Freud's Jewish identity was modern precisely in its Jewishness of dual allegiance-the combined commitment to Jewish particularity (even if genetically imposed) and human universality, mediated by Jewish tradition and the universal horizon of biblical particularism . Freud's Jewish identity in his understanding is not confined to his physically inherited Jewishness; it is also expressed by his Mosaically linked humanism. And contrary to Stern's claim that Freud's "Moses and Monotheism Judaism" excludes voluntarism, it in fact embodies Freud's chosen embrace of his Jewishness, namely, the status of being chosen. It is a Jewishness of chthonic commitment, choosing to accept a fanatical belonging to one's people independently of and even in opposition to rational assent. That is, Freud chooses to be chosen. It is doubtful whether this feeling of belonging can continue over many generations without rational Jewish content (defined in terms of Jewish literature, life, and practice ), though there: are many spectacular stories of return after several generations of assimilation to make us wonder. On the other hand, Jewish content without the feeling of belonging is equally sterile, as is evident from the many knowledgeable yet disaffected Jews in both Israel and...