The Ordeal of Civility

Freud’s Jewishness

Many students of Freud have tackled the question of Freud’s Jewishness." The WASP philo-Semite (think of Edmund Wilson on Marx in To the Finland Station, for example) usually begins talking about Old Testament prophets in their lonely crusade against corruption and hypocrisy. Philip Rieff and Lionel Trilling transform this Jewish prophetism into a psychological moralism in their versions of Freud. Rieff, for example, considers him an ascetic, psychological Jew, with an “animus” against Catholicism,¹ whose objective, like Hannibal’s, was “to bring down the mighty Romes of our ascetic civilization.”² The “Semitic mystique” of this “great Jew manqué” was “an élitist mystique by which he turned an objective disadvantage into a subjective advantage.”³ This is all true, but too much lonely psychologism-prophetism, and too much French.

We learn much more about Freud’s Jewishness if we turn to a product of the Bloch Publishing Company, Earl A. Grollman’s Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World (1965). We would learn a good deal about post-Emancipation Jewish intellectual prophets if we were to take our cue from the recent scholarship on Old Testament prophetism. Studies show that if the Israelitish prophets were not exactly “company boys,” they were nevertheless a good deal closer to the Jewish community than their reputation would lead us to believe.⁴ Grollman, for example, suggests that the social location of Freud’s prophetism, the “essence of his Jewishness,” was his convivium with other Jews. Yiddishkeit is “life-is-with-people”—a social and sociological, and not primarily a psychological-moral, phenomenon. (The same applies, of course, to “Irishkeit,” “*Goyishkeit,” etc.) Grollman speaks of Freud’s “community activities with other Jews”:

Many of his important theories were delivered before the Fraternity of Jewish students and the B’nai B’rith organization. Most of the colleagues in his movement were Jewish, including Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, Rudolph Loewenstein, Barbara Low, Van d’Chys, Sandor Ferenczi, A. A. Brill, Otto Rank, Paul Federn, Joseph Breuer, A. J. Storfer, Wilhelm Fliess and Theodor Reik. But whatever the reasons—historical, sociological, group bonds did provide a warm shelter from the outside world. In social relations with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind of inner security, a “we-feeling,” illustrated even by the selection of jokes and stories recounted within the group. It is what Freud called “the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same inner construction.”⁵ [My emphasis]

If Jews are, as Max Weber observed that they were, “a ritually segregated guest people (pariah people),”⁶ “a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization and characterized by prohibitions against commensality and intermarriage originally founded upon magical, tabooistic, and ritual injunctions,”⁷ then they remain faithful members of the community of Yiddishkeit even after Emancipation to the degree that they live their social lives among “their own,” avoiding—consciously or unconsciously—commensality, connubium, and convivium with the goyim. The post-Emancipation embourgecisement of the Jewish community, its life in the Euro-American Gesellschaften, forced their premodern identity to go psychologically “underground.” Emancipation is at the root of the moral “Marranoism” that even “secular Jewish intellectuals,” from Freud to present day figures like Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, are constrained to practice. Even in the “universal otherhood” (the societal community of the goyim), Jews can recognize the “tribal brotherhood” of their lost convivium. “I was born in galut and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness,⁸ the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew,” writes Bell. “I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me.”⁹ The American “outward” life, the “inward secret” of the Jew as “sign” between the eyes visible only to “some secret others” (presumably other Jews), etc., etc.: this is pretty heady stuff from a secular Jewish intellectual—a Harvard sociologist—in late twentieth century! But it is perfectly understandable as an account of the way the structural differentiation involved in the Emancipation-modernization process is experienced by an articulate member of the second generation of Eastern European Jewry. This differentiation is experienced, social-psychologically, as doubleness, as “the double burden and the double pleasure” of “self-consciousness,” of “alienation.” The Diaspora prescription runs: Be a man in the street, a Jew at home. The old unitary Jewish ethnic solidarity prolongs itself in Galut, but as a private experience sharable only with others who have the same “inner construction.” Sometimes, in partibus infidelium, it is “magically,” uncannily revived: in the very midst of the cool civil nexus that binds the goyim into their solidarity of the surface, in the very heart of the sociable Gesellschaft, across a crowded room, you “know” that “somehow” you share a primordial solidarity of the depths. “I believe the links holding Jews together—in the words of Edmund Burke,” writes Jacob L. Talmon, “to be as invisible as air and as strong as the heaviest chains, and the Jewish ingredient to be as imperceptible to the senses yet as effective in results as vital energy itself.”¹⁰ This isn’t Henry Ford talking, come back to life, retooling the old “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” for another go-round. It is Professor Talmon, of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, trying to locate and define the staying power of an “uncanny” premodern nexus.¹¹

Almost forty years earlier Freud, in a speech prepared for delivery at the B’nai B’rith Lodge in Vienna, explained his early joining of that group as the “irresistible” attraction, for him, of Judaism and Jews, of the “many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to group in words, as well as the clear consciousness of our inner identity, the uncanny intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure [die Heimlichkeit der gleichen seelischen Konstruktion].”¹² The most common translation of Heimlichkeit in the literature of psychoanalysis is “the uncanny.” In 1919, Freud wrote a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The ‘Uncanny’”¹³ which exactly catches the psychological coefficient of the ambiguous sociological solidarity experienced by Jews in the modernizing period of the Emancipation—namely, an unfamiliar familiarity, an open secret, an “us-in-the-midst-of-them” uncanniness.

Everybody knows that Freud—and Bell and Talmon after him—are not talking of Judaism in some religious denominational sense (which is the only culturally legitmate—that is, respectable—definition of religious identity the West supplies). What is most inward in their Jewish self-definitions is precisely what cannot become outward and legitimately Anglo-American, namely, the particularist inwardness of the ethnic nexus. The Western value system refuses to legitimate publicly this primordial ethnic tie as ethnic tie. (As exotica, yes, it has cultural rights.) Hence its stubborn, residual reality is forced “underground,” and, when it travels aboveground, it is forced to assume the fictive identity of a denominational religion (Conservative Judaism serves this function in America).¹⁴ The Eastern European ethnic-“tribal” identity dissolves only when, as, and if the social structural milieux that maintain its plausibility dissolve. In the meantime, the rites of segregation, the magically derived taboos on connubium, commensalism, and convivium—listed in the order of their staying power—are more or less observed in Galut. In the meantime, Jews join the Vienna Lodge of B’nai B’rith (like Freud) or give lectures before the Jewish Graduate Society at Columbia or Hillel at Harvard and publish them in the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine (like Bell). In the meantime, Jews tend to marry other Jews, eat with other Jews, live among other Jews, socialize with other Jews.

Sociological studies indicate that this pattern continues to be the case. In measuring the relative degree of residential concentration of the major socioreligious groups in the United States, for example, Gerhard Lenski finds that while white Protestants rank with Catholics as the most widely scattered and the least concentrated, Jews and black Protestants are the most concentrated. “The fact that the coefficient for the Jewish group [.39] was even higher than for the Negro Protestants [.37] is especially remarkable,” Lenski writes of this finding, “since Negroes are so severely limited in their choice of residential areas both by finances and by out-group hostility…. One can only conclude that the magnitude of the coefficient is one more indication of the strength of the communal spirit [among Jews].”¹⁵

If this is so in America in the latter half of the twentieth century, it was all the more so in Freud’s Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Jews, whatever their degree of occupational and cultural assimilation, lived—that is, socialized—-apart from Gentiles. Social interaction on both sides of the Jewish-Gentile line took place with one’s “own kind.” Social cleavage persisted. This is the “Jewishness” into which Freud and other secular Jewish intellectuals were socialized. In twenty years (circa 1900) in his father’s assimilated Berlin house, according to Gershom Scholem, the authority on Jewish mysticism, “he never met a non-Jew. The paradoxical coexistence of assimilation with social apartness seems to have struck him early.”¹⁶ It was this paradox of social apartness, of having no crosscutting social ties with the Gentile community, that encouraged Freud’s audacity. When he lobbed psychoanalysis up over the social barricades of his Jewish enclave and into the precincts of the Gentile, opposition was inevitable. Social cleavage had preceded intellectual cleavage. “One of the reasons that Jews have been a major focal point of conflict,” writes the author of the Coleman Report, “is that there have seldom been cross-cutting lines of cleavage which tied various segments of them to other persons in society.”¹⁷

Freud preferred the company of other Jews. If, as Nathan Rotenstreich notes, “a Jew is a Jew when he is with other Jews,”¹⁸ then Freud remained a fairly full-time “observant” Jew. Freud’s Jewishness was the company he kept.