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PARTISAN REVIEW
views are distortions. Gay's lifting out the influence of mainstream
German culture on Freud is not wrong, but it is one-sided. The
mixture of Jewish background with German and classical Latin
culture in Vienna, Freud's transmission of what he learned from
Charcot, Janet, and Bernheim in France, created the amalgam of fertile
mixing between cultures for which Freud and his generation of
secularized Jews were the catalysts. The specific historical resistances to
this blending, such as clerical reaction and Freud's reception by the
Viennese medical and academic communities, are what made the
unique seedbed that spawned and nurtured the psychoanalytic strand
of modernist thought.
In his new work on Thorstein Veblen, John Diggins suggests that
the Wisconsin-born son of Norwegian immigrant parents wrote "the
closest thing to a self-portrait that Veblen ever committed to print" in a
1918 essay on "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern
Europe." Veblen noted "a fact which must strike any dispassionate
observer-that the Jewish people have contributed much more than an
even share to the intellectual life of modern Europe." The Norwegian
American social critic hailed Jews as "the vanguard of modern in–
quiry," moved by a "skeptical animus,
Unbefangenheit
[and] released
from the dead hand of conventional finality," who were the creators of
new knowledge and productive insights. Said Veblen,
The intellectually gibed Jew is in a peculiarly fortunate position in
respect of this requisite immunity from the inhibitions of intellec–
tual quietism. But he can come in for such immunity only at the cost
of losing his secure place in the scheme of conventions into which he
has been born, and at the cost, also, of finding no similarly secure
place in that scheme of gentile conventions into which he is thrown.
For him as for other men in the like case, the skepticism that goes to
make him an effectual factor in the increase and diffusion of
knowledge among men involves a loss of that peace of mind that is
the birthright of the safe and sane pietist. He becomes a disturber of
the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellec–
tual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man's-land,
seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over
the horizon. They are neither a complaisant nor a contented lot,
these aliens of uneasy feet.
In 1958 Isaac Deutscher conceptualized the roots of this creativity
as that of the "non-Jewish Jew" -who
dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and
national cultures. They were born and brought up on the border-
