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Jacob's Ambivalent Legacy Joel Whitebook 139 JOEL WHITEBOOK Jacob’s Ambivalent Legacy This paper elucidates Freud’s ambivalent and complex relation to Judaism, tracing it to the “break with tradition” that ran through the center of his father’s life. Jacob Freud was a conflicted and tran- sitional figure, with one foot planted in the parochial world of Jewish traditionalism and the other in the cosmopolitan world of European modernity. And he wanted his son to partake of these two legacies in equal degree. But Sigmund found the conflict untenable and chose in favor of science, atheism, and the Enlightenment. The point to be appreci- ated, however, is that he did not see his choice of the Aufklärung as a simple rejection of the Jewish tradition. Rather, by construing Moses as an Aufklärer, he was able he was able to define his project as an inner transformation of the Jewish tradition so that he could thereby to be “a godless Jew,” thereby confirming both his atheism and his cultural heritage. 1 What are we to make of Freud’s provocative idea of a “godless Jew”? Is it simply a contradiction in terms that he uses to patch over an irresolvable and fundamental rift in his character and outlook? This is the position of those champions of Enlightenment universalism who want to inoculate Freud’s science against any taint of ethnic particularity. They argue that the godlessness ought to be retained and the Judaism discarded. This is also the position of certain Jewish thinkers when they want to claim Freud as a prodigal son who ultimately returned to the tribal fold.1 In this case, the idea is to drop the godlessness—or at least radically attenuate it—while holding onto the Judaism. I, on the other hand, will argue that the notion of a “godless Jew” is a coherent and meaningful concept. Explicating it will American Imago, Vol. 67, No. 2, 139–155. © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 139 140 Jacob’s Ambivalent Legacy not only help us understand the genesis of Freud’s thinking, but will also illuminate some of the inner dynamics of his position. To make my case, I will examine the origins of Freud’s godless Judaism in the ambivalent legacy his father, Jacob, left to his “second first-born” son (Krüll 1979, 108), Sigmund. 2 The fault line created by the break with tradition runs through the center of Jacob Freud’s life. He straddles the his- torical chasm: one foot planted in the narrowly circumscribed world of the traditional Judaism of the shtetl, and the other in the secular world of European modernity. The dislocating ef- fects of modernization were, as Ernst Simon (1957) observed, particularly acute for Jews such as Jacob. Because of “the rapid pace of assimilation,” Simon writes, a “modern Jew” of Jacob’s generation had to “pass through an evolution of 300 years during his own lifetime, leaping from the Middle Ages to the modern age” (295).2 Jacob himself had received a traditional upbringing. Ful- filling his paternal duty to transmit the Jewish tradition to his son, Jacob’s father, the “reb” Shlomo—after whom Sigmund was named—saw to it that his son received a thoroughgoing Jewish education. Emmanuel Rice (1990) reports that Jacob attended “a Heder, the Eastern European Jewish equivalent to primary school,” and then almost certainly moved on to “a Yeshiva, which was a much larger Talmudic academy” (30). The fact that Jacob, as an old man, could conduct the entire Passover service from memory and study the Talmud in the original Aramaic written in Hebrew letters attests to the depth of his Jewish education (Heller 1973, 355; Rice 1990, 93). At the same time, however, there is good reason to be- lieve that Jacob was exposed to and strongly influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which was particularly active in Tysmenitz, the Galician town where he grew up. This is not to say that Jacob was a full-blown maskil, a follower of the Haskalah, but only that the Jewish Enlightenment had a significant impact on him (Yerushalmi 1991, 62). We can as- sume, moreover, that, as a Wanderjude—a “wandering Jew,” as the Joel Whitebook 141 Austrian authorities categorized them—“a travelling salesman” plying his trade in Moravia, Jacob had ample opportunity to observe the attractions of the larger modern world. And what he saw must have played an important role in his decision to move from Tysmenitz to Freiberg and exchange the encrusted world of the shtetl for the openness of modernity. Like Shlomo, Jacob wanted to pass his people’s tradi- tion on to his son. The unorthodox—or “post-traditional”—way in which he chose to do it, however, indicates that the continuity of “The Great Chain of Tradition” had already been broken. Jacob did not require Sigmund to spend long hours hunched over the Gamarah absorbing its teachings in the manner of an orthodox Yeshiva Bokhur. (Freud would, however, later spend long hours hunched over a microscope in Brücke’s laboratory pursuing his modern scientific training.) Instead, when his son was seven, Jacob began to read to him from the family Bible—something the precocious boy would soon be able to do on his own. That it was the Israelitische Bibel, published by the Philippson broth- ers, Ludwig and Phoebus, is of the utmost consequence for our story. The exposure to the rich content and Enlightenment orientation of this very singular edition of the Hebrew Bible had, as Freud recognized years later, “an enduring effect upon the direction of [his] interest” (1925, 8). The importance of these early experiences for Freud’s emo- tional and intellectual development cannot be overestimated. We can imagine the aura of warmth, intimacy, and excitement that must have enfolded the precocious young boy—and future bibliophile—and his intelligent, adoring, and jocular father as they read the sacred texts together. In an admirable and sensitive piece of scholarship, Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1998, ch. 1) has demonstrated how deeply Jacob and the Bible were con- nected in Sigmund’s emotional life. Not only does she show that Freud began collecting antiquities two months after his father’s death as a way of working through the loss; she also shows that the figures he purchased often seem to have leapt off the illustrated pages of the Philippson Bible. In short, Freud was trying to re-create his father’s presence in his consulting room by surrounding himself with the familiar figures whom they had studied together. 142 Jacob’s Ambivalent Legacy Furthermore, twenty-nine years later, on Freud’s thirty- fifth birthday, Jacob had the same PhilippsonB ible rebound in leather, inscribed an emotional appeal in it, and presented the book to his brilliant, successful—and, we should add, atheist— son. Thus, Jacob literally passed the Book (which contained the Pentateuch) on to him. Deciphering the countless messages contained in this act will help us understand the complex legacy that Jacob bequeathed to his son, and how Sigmund took his father’s inheritance and made it his own.3 3 The story of the Freud family Bible begins much earlier than Sigmund’s thirty-fifth birthday. And Jacob’s birthplace, Tysmenitz—a town that was 50% Jewish—plays an important role in it. Tysmenitz is located in Galicia, a multiethnic region that, until 1772, had been part of Poland. At that point, it was annexed by the Austrian Empire, where it remained until the end of the First World War; today it is part of Ukraine. Because many of the conflicting currents that were surging through Jewish life converged in Tysmenitz, Jacob Freud grew up in a town where “the old traditions, and hence the orga- nization of the Jewish community, were being fundamentally challenged” (Krüll 1979, 78). Indeed, orthodox rabbinism, Hassidism, and the Haskalah all clashed there. To appreciate how unsettling the challenge to traditional authority would have been in this context, we must understand that the Juda- ism of that day was a thoroughly communal religion that en- compassed every aspect of life. The cohesiveness of the group had the highest priority, with the result that the individual was under enormous pressure to conform to the regulations that governed almost every moment of the day. Furthermore, a challenge to the cohesion of this closed community, with its “long-established theological and ritualis- tic system of thought and activity” (Rice 1990, 87), not only constituted a threat to the collective identity of the group. The extreme poverty of the shtetls and the precariousness of life in general meant that mutual support and solidarity were absolutely essential for physical survival, for, as Rizzuto notes, Joel Whitebook 143 “many Jews” in the region “died of starvation . in spite of community efforts” (1998, 28). Despite strong opposition from orthodox rabbis, the Haskalah was able to establish a presence in the town and its surrounding region. Jacob may have been a Hassid as a young man, but at some point the Haskalah came to play a decisive role in his life. Because the Haskalah, which was inspired by the European Enlightenment—especially the German Aufklärung—was a broad and complex movement, comprising many heterogeneous tendencies, one must be careful in mak- ing generalizations about it (see Yerushalmi 1991, 62). This much, however, can be said: the Haskalah sought to advance the process of physical and spiritual de-ghettoization of Jews, begun with the Napoleonic reforms, by transforming the Jewish tradition in such a way as to achieve full participation in the wider modern world. This meant adopting not only the civic values of the host culture, but its manners and mode of dress as well.
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