Racial Fever

Freud and the Jewish Question

Eliza Slavet

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823231423, 9780823231416
• eBook ISBN: 9780823231430
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

What makes a person Jewish? Why do some people feel they have physically inherited the memories of their ancestors? Is there any way to think about race without reducing it to racism or to physical differences?These questions are at the heart of Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. In his final book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud hinted at the complexities of Jewishness and insisted that Moses was really an Egyptian. Slavet moves far beyond debates about how Freud felt about Judaism; instead, she explores what he wrote about Jewishness: what it is, how it is transmitted, and how it has survived. Freud's Moses emerges as the culmination of his work on transference, telepathy, and intergenerational transmission, and on the relationships between memory and its rivals: history, heredity, and fantasy. Writing on the eve of the Holocaust, Freud proposed that Jewishness is constituted by the inheritance of ancestral memories; thus, regardless of any attempts to repress, suppress, or repudiate Jewishness, Jews will remain Jewish and Judaism will survive, for better and for worse.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Which half? Top or bottom? Right or left? Such questions are met with
quizzical looks. Apparently, the only appropriate answers are “my mother” or “my father.”

2. While moving beyond the color line is deeply important to overcoming seemingly irreconcilable differences between human groups, it will not move us beyond the other kinds of lines (political, genealogical, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, religious) that race often represents. Indeed, my book is an attempt to counterintuitively think about race as a concept already beyond the color line. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

3. It is no coincidence that I became interested in these questions while living in Germany, a country that in the last twenty years has seen an enormous growth of Jewish museums, Jewish organizations, Jewish archives, and perhaps most interestingly, Jewish communities. This is not simply because of a rising birth-rate among German Jews. First, with the fall of Communism, there was a huge wave of post-Soviet Jewish immigration to Germany. Second, many Germans have discovered that one or more grandparents were Jewish, perhaps even just “half-Jewish”; this has (partially) motivated many to convert or “return” to Judaism. See Barbara Kessel, Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000).

4. On the curious history of archives and definitions of Jewishness in Germany, see Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–16. Though I learned of Hertz’s work long after proposing my exhibit to the Jewish Museum, there is an uncanny resonance between the logic displayed in the actual Judenkartei that Hertz stumbled upon and in the chart that I imagined.

5. Particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, there were good economic reasons to attempt to prove one’s Jewish identity in Germany. If immigrants to Germany could prove that they were Jewish, they were eligible for various state benefits and financial assistance. This aspect of the Jewish Question added a new reason for some people to feel suspicious about their new “brethren.” See Larissa Remennick, “ ‘Idealists Headed to Israel, Pragmatics Chose Europe’: Identity Dilemmas and Social Incorporation among Former Soviet Jews Who Migrated to Germany,’ ” Immigrants & Minorities 23.1 (2005).

6. The irony, of course, is that one of the most inclusive definitions of Jewishness was established by the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. While I had a very positive first meeting with the curatorial committee, when I introduced this aspect of the exhibit (at the second meeting), I received an icy reaction. “Why do you want to complicate things?” the curator asked. “Why not choose normal Jews, real Jews, people we know are Jewish?!” The questions persist, particularly in Israel where Jews with even the most “normal” Jewish biographies are asked to prove their Jewish matrilineage. See Gershom Gorenberg, “How Do You Prove You’re a Jew?,” New York Times, March 2, 2008.

7. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.

8. Ibid., 68.

9. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

10. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 103.

11. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 2.

12. Ibid., 9–10. Yerushalmi derives his notion of the Psychological Jew from Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking Press, 1959).

13. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 11.

14. Ibid., xvii.

15. Thus, where Freud ironically denied knowing what a menorah was and asserted that he knew no Hebrew, Yerushalmi finds that Freud was far “more” Jewish than he let on: not only was his mother tongue probably Yiddish, he also knew a fair amount about particular Jewish holidays, rituals, and historic figures. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 64–79.

16. Thus Yerushalmi dedicates his book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory to “the memory of my father Yehuda Yerushalmi for the loving gift of a living past and to my son Ariel who brings joy to the present and past into future.” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), v.

17. Interestingly, Yerushalmi does not mention his training or brief position as a rabbi in his books or in his “autobiographical study” in “Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim (1932–),” Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group (2002).

18. Yerushalmi and Frédéric Brenner, Marranes (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1992), 44. Quoted in Derrida, Archive Fever, 70.

19. Peter Schäfer argues that “Yerushalmi’s attempt to fetch him [Freud] home to the Jewish fold can probably be termed a failure.” In particular, he takes issue with Yerushalmi’s presumptuous use of Jakob Freud’s presentation of a Hebrew Bible to his son, Sigmund, as the key piece of evidence. Yerushalmi and other scholars have seen the Hebrew dedication in melitzah (a form of poetry composed entirely in allusive Hebrew quotations) as the key evidence proving that, contrary to Sigmund’s protestations, he could probably read Hebrew and was more Jewish than he let on. Schäfer argues that there is no evidence that Sigmund could actually read the dedication: Jakob wrote the dedication in Hebrew “just because such dedications were traditionally written in Hebrew.” See Peter Schäfer, “The Triumph of Pure Spirituality: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 9 (2002), 384. In my work, such debates are irrelevant: Perhaps Sigmund learned Hebrew, perhaps he did not. Perhaps some Hebrew words looked or sounded familiar, perhaps they did not. What is more important, or rather more interesting, is Freud’s own circuitous explorations of what does make a person Jewish and how this Jewishness has survived despite all odds.

20. I am resisting the temptation to interrupt this discussion with excursive acknowledgments of my own situation. Most explicitly: As neither a son nor a father nor a rabbi, I am aware that I am breaking into a sort of sacred chain of homosocial transference and transmission, both Jewish and psychoanalytic. Where Freud, Yerushalmi, and Derrida wrote their seminal books (Moses and Monotheism, Freud’s Moses, and Archive Fever, respectively) after establishing their scholarly reigns and producing both biological and non-biological sons, is it not somewhat outrageous for a young woman to explore these matters as a first foray in the world of scholarship, Judaism, and psychoanalysis? The question of whether a daughter can speak in her own name is raised by both Yerushalmi and Derrida: Freud’s Moses, 100; Archive Fever, 43. These questions are echoed (or anticipated?) by Liliane Weissberg: “How should we position ourselves as readers … vis-à-vis the figure of … Freud, if we are circumcised, not yet circumcised, or worse—a woman?” Weissberg, “Introduction: Freudian Genealogies,” The Germanic Review 83.1 (2008), 10.

21. Throughout this book, I refer to Freud’s final book as Moses and Monotheism (the English title of the 1939 translation by Katherine Jones and of James Strachey’s version in The Standard Edition). A literal translation of Freud’s German title would be The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion: Three Essays.

22. Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference,” 99n92.

23. Like most jokes, the origins of this joke are unknown. Freud is reported to have discussed it with Otto Rank sometime before 1908. Rank incorporated the question of Moses’ origins into his Myth of the Birth of the Hero, which (though not cited by Freud) is an explicit forerunner of Freud’s theory about Moses’ origins. Freud later presents the joke in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (161), but he most fully explored its contours twenty years later in Moses and Monotheism. Finally (though who can say what “finally” will be?), Yerushalmi presents ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• A NOTE ON SOURCES
• INTRODUCTION
• ONE: Moses and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis
• TWO: Freud’s “Lamarckism” and the Politics of Racial Science
• THREE: Circumcision: The Unconscious Root of the Problem
• FOUR: Secret Inclinations beyond Direct Communication
• FIVE: Immaterial Materiality: The “Special Case” of Jewish Tradition
• Belated Speculations: Excuse me, are you Jewish?
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX