302
PARTISAN IliVIEW
Sigmund Freud perhaps never consciously realized how anxious he
was to "cancel" parts of his complex and at times cumbersome Jewish
identity. Taking him at his word, or at least some of his words, Freud's
biographers have repeatedly explained away his Jewishness as aggressively
secular or, appropriating Freud's own term , "inessential,"
/{Jeselifrellid.
This
"inessentialness" was curiously, if inadvertently, reflected in the 1991
traveling exhibition of antiques from Freud's study. With the exception of
the exhibit at New York City's Jewish Museum, not a single of Freud's
twenty Jewish artifacts appeared at any of the exhibit's various installa–
tions. The overlooking of so many Jewish items from his collection, such
as a Hanukkah menorah and an engraving of Rembrandt's
Moses Breaks
the Tablets <if the L(1I{J,
parallels the persistent glossing-over that numerous
clues to Freud's "Jewish problem" have been given . As YosefYerushalmi
astutely points out in the exhibit's catalogue, "We did not see the kiddush
cups because, aware of Freud's well-known contelllpt for religious ritual,
we did not expect to sec them there."
The publication of Yerushalmi's
frelld's Moses
(the dust jacket of
which is graced by a reproduction of Freud's own Moses engraving) and
Emanuel Rice 's
Frelld alld Moses
have prompted a radical reconsideration
of Freud's Jewishness. Both books arrive independently at strikingly simi–
lar conclusions and deal extensively with the troubling and troublesome
Moses alld MOllotheislll,
Freud's only book to dc::tl specifically with Jewish
themes. Neither Yerushalmi, a distinguished historian who has devoted
much of his writing to Jewish themes (his best-known book is
Zakhor:
Jelliish History alld Je/Fish Melllory),
nor Emanuel R.ice, a psychiatrist, had
any trouble recognizing, as one of A.B. Yehoshua's character puts it,
"what anything Jewi sh might look like or how to go about finding it. "
The results of their extensive searches through the paper trail Freud left
behind, however unconsciously, arc intriguing, illuminating, and disturb–
ing. For those who have invested Freud with an aura of detached secular–
ism, this dramatic pair of books must be quite distressing, as the melee
which broke out at the December 1991 meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association in New York made rather clear.
At that meeting, Dr. Rice , drawing from his book, tried to show that
the Freud family was "far more involved with Jewish religion and tradi–
tion than has been reflected in the public image ," accusing past scholars of
missing the Jewishness of Freud because they did not "share the back–
ground" of the Freud parents , and because - here Rice must certainly
have struck a nerve - Freud's biographers wanted to see Freud as they saw
or hoped to see themselves, as "urbane people of Western culture and en–
lightenment." Those with heavy psychological or professional investments
in the belief that Freud was less Jewish than Rice 's portrayal accused Rice
