The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One

Revelation and Apocalypse

Erich Neumann, Ann Conrad Lammers, Ann Conrad Lammers, Mark Kyburz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351369114
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One: Revelation and Apocalypse is the first volume, fully annotated, of a major, previously unpublished, two-part work by Erich Neumann (1905–1960). It was written between 1934 and 1940, after Neumann, then a young philosopher and physician and freshly trained as a disciple of Jung, fled Berlin to settle in Tel Aviv. He finished the second volume of this work at the end of World War II. Although he never published either volume, he kept them the rest of his life.

The challenge of Jewish survival frames Neumann's work existentially. This survival, he insists, must be psychological and spiritual as much as physical. In Volume One, Revelation and Apocalypse, he argues that modern Jews must relearn what ancient Jews once understood but lost during the Babylonian Exile: that is, the individual capacity to meet the sacred directly, to receive revelation, and to prophesy. Neumann interprets scriptural and intertestamental (apocalyptic) literature through the lens of Jung's teaching, and his reliance on the work of Jung is supplemented with references to Buber, Rosenzweig, and Auerbach. Including a foreword by Nancy Swift Furlotti and editorial introduction by Ann Conrad Lammers, readers of this volume can hold for the first time the unpublished work of Neumann, with useful annotations and insights throughout.

These volumes anticipate Neumann's later works, including Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, The Origins and History of Consciousness, and The Great Mother. His signature contribution to analytical psychology, the concept of the ego–Self axis, arises indirectly in Volume One, folded into Neumann's theme of the tension between earth and YHWH. This unique work will appeal to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists in training and in practice, historians of psychology, Jewish scholars, biblical historians, teachers of comparative religion, as well as academics and students.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME ONE

About the work

The present two-volume book is Neumann’s only full-length work devoted to Jewish psychology and spirituality. Conceived when he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and written in stages over more than a decade, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness¹ reveals the young author’s acute intellect and wide range of learning. It also shows his deep affinity with Jewish mysticism, his early commitment to Jung’s analytical psychology, and—perhaps most important—his fiercely independent spirit.

While Neumann was training with Jung in 1933–34, he conceived the plan for a major work, in three parts, on the psychological history and present situation of the Jews. He completed the first part, on the problem of revelation in Jewish antiquity, in 1940, and the second part, on the psychological meaning of Hasidism, early in 1945. But he never wrote his third part, on the psychological experience of modern Jews. Instead, for reasons explored below, he put the entire book aside.

Part One launches into an interpretation of biblical texts, using a combination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biblical criticism, Buberian hermeneutics, and archetypal symbology. Part Two explores the Jewish mystical tradition of Hasidism, in Kabbalah, and particularly the Zohar. Here Neumann leans heavily on writings by Martin Buber, while making far less reference to the many studies of Hasidism by Gershom Scholem that were available at the time of writing.²

Although Neumann chose not to publish either of the completed volumes of this work, he never lost interest in them. He kept typescripts of the two parts and occasionally shared them with colleagues. In a paper published in 1980, the Jungian analyst Dr. Gustav Dreifuss describes the impact of reading Neumann’s unpublished work in the 1950s, and the important dialogue with Neumann that ensued.³

About the author

Erich Neumann (1905–60) was born in Berlin, the third child of a successful grain merchant, and raised in a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family. He received a first-rate German education at the height of the Weimar Republic, graduating from his Gymnasium⁴ in 1923 and entering the university of Erlangen. As a student he tended to skip classes and devote himself to Jewish discussion groups,⁵ and at nineteen he joined the Berlin Zionist Union. Once at university, he completed his doctorate in six semesters, studying philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, literature, art history, and Semitic studies. In these years he developed a keen interest in Freudian theory and Jung’s psychology of the collective unconscious. His dissertation, on Johann Arnold Kanne, a philosopher–poet of the Romantic period, was accepted in March 1927. The following year he married Julie Blumenfeld, whom he had met in Berlin when they were both fifteen.

After university, the young Neumann began to study medicine in Berlin, intending to become a psychoanalyst. He completed his medical degree in 1933 but was prevented by anti-Jewish laws from entering a medical internship. In late summer of 1933, recognizing the disaster that had overtaken the nation, Erich and Julie Neumann, with their one-year-old son, Micha, left Berlin to settle in Palestine/Israel.

FIGURE I.1 Erich and Julie Neumann, Berlin: taken before Micha’s birth and their departure for Tel Aviv.

Photograph: © 1931, Tim Gidal. Courtesy of the Erich Neumann Estate.

On the way, they stopped in Switzerland to attend the first Eranos Tagung,⁶ which took place that August in Ascona, and spent several months in Zurich, where both received analytic training (Löwe, 2014, p. 364). Until February 1934, Julie trained with Toni Wolff; then she and Micha moved to Tel Aviv. Erich stayed behind for a total of eight months, continuing his training with Jung, during which he began to plan the present work. He rejoined his family in Tel Aviv in May of 1934.

Neumann’s plan for this book

Erich Neumann produced major works during his lifetime. Some, like The Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother, have never been out of print. He is also known for significant monographs, including Depth Psychology and a New Ethic and Amor and Psyche. Another important title, Jacob and Esau,⁷ written in 1934 but not published until 2015, provides a first glimpse of the young Neumann’s interpretation of Jewish biblical themes, seen through the lens of Jung’s psychology. In that sense, it is a forerunner of The Roots of Jewish Consciousness.

In a letter to Jung dated 5 December 1938, Neumann described the contents of a three-part work, the first two parts of which he had already begun to draft:

In the first part, I want to present how in Jewish antiquity the principle of direct revelation was valued, and how it stood in productive dialogue with the strong dependence of the people on earth and reality. The Law as a secularization of the traumatic experience of exile, whereby, in the seeming acceptance of theocratic prophetism, the earth-principle asserted itself to the exclusion of direct revelation. Apocalypse, eschatological messianism (primitive Christianity). Gnosticism, as the emergence of the direct inner revelation that had been suppressed into a sideline. This is as far as I have got in the first draft.

Then follows his sketch of Part Two:

After a short chapter on the repression of direct revelation in the Talmud and the counter-movement in Kabbalah, there follows, as a comprehensive chapter, Hasidism. Religious renaissance of Judaism with the individual as central phenomenon, but in collective constraint, through the enduring acceptance of the Law as a confining cage for direct revelation. (A course on this is already prepared in note form.) Assimilation and emancipation as a necessary de-collectivization of Jewish consciousness. Uprooting and the loss of memory.

This letter suggests that he had already drafted a significant part of the work,⁸ for his list of contents, so far, closely resembles the work we have today.

Finally, he shares his plan for the never-completed third part, the projected table of contents for which makes one wish he had gone on to write this part, as well:

On the problem of the modern Jew. Using dream and fantasy material to illustrate the historic–collective connections. Reemergence of direct revelation, but now in the individual, in direct connection first with individuation and second with the collective problem of revelation in Judaism. Emergence of the earthly dimension as the location of revelation today—the converse of where the problem was located in Jewish antiquity—in a tension of opposites with the “spirit” principle that seems to hinder revelation. That is, while the revelation-principle used to stand opposed to the pagan earth-principle, now it arises positively paired with a strong Near Eastern Gnostic and pagan symbolism, in a strong tension of opposites with the Law.

(J-N Corresp, pp. 141f; alt. trans from Briefe J-N, pp. 189f)⁹

This book bears witness to the author’s resilient spirit. In the shadow of the Hitler era, to write about the psychological and religious roots of Jewish self-awareness was implicitly an act of existential resistance. Nevertheless, Neumann’s approach is almost never polemical. Rather, it reflects the close study and integrative thought of a disciplined and often masterful young writer.

Steps in the work’s creation

Erich and Julie Neumann had been Zionists since their teens. They had long imagined life in Eretz Israel and were mentally prepared to emigrate. Nevertheless, the shock of Hitler’s rise and the violence and destruction that quickly followed caused them to experience personal loss, separation from family and community, and cultural disruption in abandoning the country where they had grown up and received their educations. It therefore may be that writing a book about Jewish psychological identity and spiritual heritage was partly a form of self-healing for the author.

Neumann’s most significant motivation for the project, however, was his conviction, shared by Jung, that psychological and spiritual renewal was urgently needed by modern Jews. He wrote that he wanted to contribute to a “self-meditation from a new angle” (“Introduction to the work,” Roots I, p. 9) for individual Jews, whom he saw at risk of spiritual as well as physical annihilation.

In preparing to write, Neumann studied sources in German, including Martin Buber’s and Franz Rosenzweig’s recently published translations of scripture;¹⁰ Buber’s Die chassidischen Bücher (English edition: Tales of the Hasidim); ¹¹ works on Kabbalah and the Zohar, including Bin Gorion’s Sagen der Juden (Jewish legends), and a few of Scholem’s writings.¹² He studied all the works of Jung that had been published up to that point, and those of contemporary Jungians. He read sources in Hebrew, including Samuel Horodezky’s works on the great Hasidic teachers.¹³ He also lectured and gave seminars on this material.

Starting in early 1935, Neumann drafted several versions of Part One, to which he gave the title, “Beiträge zur Tiefenpsychologie des jüdischen Menschen und zum Problem der Offenbarung” (“On the depth psychology of the Jewish person and the problem of revelation”). His final revision of this part was written between December 1938 and May 1940. Meanwhile, in mid-1935, he began to draft Part Two, which he called “Der Chassidismus und seine psychologische Bedeutung für das Judentum” (“Hasidism and its psychological meaning for Judaism”). The final draft of this part appears to have been written between May 1940 and the spring of 1945.¹⁴ Although we do not have his planned Part Three, his lecture of April 1940, “Die religiöse Erfahrung in der Tiefenanalyse” (“Religious experience in depth analysis”),¹⁵ and his four-lecture series of 1942–43,¹⁶ provide glimpses of what he intended for that final part.

On 5 December 1938, he writes to Jung that he is finally about to revise the Jewish work that he had conceived in 1933. Two events seem to have moved ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface, by Nancy Swift Furlotti
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction to Volume One, by Ann Conrad Lammers
• Introduction to the Work, by Erich Neumann
• The Problem of Revelation in Jewish Antiquity
• Editorial Note
• Bibliography
• Index
• Scriptural Index