In an earlier post, I wrote about Freud's essay on "The Uncanny" and mentioned that it related to his views on religion and on Jewishness. A reader, Rabbi Shai Gluskin, was intrigued and wanted to know how the ideas in that essay could connect to "a more positive view of Judaism". In fact, Freud's essay relates to a more positive, although still ambivalent, view of religion and it speaks to the issue of Jewishness, but not Judaism--as we make that distinction. In German, the noun das Judentum means three things that in English have three separate words--Judaism, Jewry and Jewishness. (This should be interesting to Reconstructionists.) So it is Jewishness that is implicated here, not Judaism, although in German the distinction would be hard to get at linguistically.
In order to understand the argument, one needs to know a bit about antisemitism in the German speaking world in Freud's day and the centuries before. Among the themes of the voluminous literature of antisemitism is the theme of the Jew as the "unheimlich" man. This is played out in two ways: 1)the Jew is without a country, thus without a home and 2) Judaism was supposed to have died when Christianity replaced it and yet the Jews are still around, "dead men" who wander into the world of living. How uncanny is that? The dead should stay dead. This is one of the strongest held beliefs of human beings. Across every culture, things that are dead that appear to move are really creepy--at least according to evolutionary psychologists. The border between life and death must be vigilantly patrolled. The Jew is a spook.
So..when Freud takes the trope of the "unheimlich" and deliberately never mentions das Judentum but puts the locus of the whole thing in women's genitals, he is(according to the scholars who hold this view--seeSusan Shapiro in Judaism,1997) entering a larger conversation about Jewishness. He is neatly taking the disgust/fear held by his culture toward Jewish men and deflecting it onto women in general. The idea is that his misogyny connects to his own situation as a Jewish man in an antisemitic culture.
In terms of religion per se, Freud still is not endorsing the religious solutions to the problems of life, but he is sure explaining with great nuance some of the aspects of our human condition that are at the source of our religious concerns. By moving beyond the simplistic "we can't live without illusions" or "we want to appease our daddy in the sky to deflect our desire to kill our own daddy" Freud is providing a more profound understanding of religion than is usually attributed to him. We might get over our oedipal issues or find other ways to be compensated for the suffering of life, but the complexity of our emotional response to the boundary between life and death, not least problematic being our own death, is not likely to go away anytime soon. Nor is religion, in that view.
Thanks for asking, Shai!
In order to understand the argument, one needs to know a bit about antisemitism in the German speaking world in Freud's day and the centuries before. Among the themes of the voluminous literature of antisemitism is the theme of the Jew as the "unheimlich" man. This is played out in two ways: 1)the Jew is without a country, thus without a home and 2) Judaism was supposed to have died when Christianity replaced it and yet the Jews are still around, "dead men" who wander into the world of living. How uncanny is that? The dead should stay dead. This is one of the strongest held beliefs of human beings. Across every culture, things that are dead that appear to move are really creepy--at least according to evolutionary psychologists. The border between life and death must be vigilantly patrolled. The Jew is a spook.
So..when Freud takes the trope of the "unheimlich" and deliberately never mentions das Judentum but puts the locus of the whole thing in women's genitals, he is(according to the scholars who hold this view--seeSusan Shapiro in Judaism,1997) entering a larger conversation about Jewishness. He is neatly taking the disgust/fear held by his culture toward Jewish men and deflecting it onto women in general. The idea is that his misogyny connects to his own situation as a Jewish man in an antisemitic culture.
In terms of religion per se, Freud still is not endorsing the religious solutions to the problems of life, but he is sure explaining with great nuance some of the aspects of our human condition that are at the source of our religious concerns. By moving beyond the simplistic "we can't live without illusions" or "we want to appease our daddy in the sky to deflect our desire to kill our own daddy" Freud is providing a more profound understanding of religion than is usually attributed to him. We might get over our oedipal issues or find other ways to be compensated for the suffering of life, but the complexity of our emotional response to the boundary between life and death, not least problematic being our own death, is not likely to go away anytime soon. Nor is religion, in that view.
Thanks for asking, Shai!
p.s. The photo on the left is an antisemitic poster from Freud's era in Germany.
4 comments:
Wow, there is so much in that post to digest! I'm most intruiged by the image of "Jew as the Undead." Tho I've heard about this antisemitic meme before, I'd love to know more about how it has developed over the years. (Among other things, there might be rich horror movie potential in this...)
Wow -- so Freud bucks the prevalent anti-semitic imagery and deflects it onto women's genitals. Doesn't exactly make me want to bone up on my Freud.
It sounds like the "positive" connection to his Jewishness comes of connections he does not, good news through inaction.
Just today I alighted upon another reference to Freud's "unheimlich" in Aviva Zornberg's The Particulars of Rapture where it is mentioned on pp. 167 and 192 in reference to the 9th plague, darkness.
Thanks for the response.
Shai,
I am not sure I understand why his misogyny makes you not want to bone up on Freud. I think it is fascinating. What a brilliant mind and what a difficult and screwed up world he lived in. But it helps me understand part of his genius as well as the unhelpful legacy he bequeathed.
You wonder that I call defending against antisemitism a "positive" Jewishness. In Freud's day mounting a defense of Judaism against antisemites(what he does in Moses and Monotheism) was a kind of heroism. Everyone has their own tools. His was writing theories, not going to Palestine to settle the land. But like Yerushalmi, I want to acknowledge that he cared a lot about the Jewish fate and also actually believed that Judaism was superior to Christianity.
Thanks for the Zornberg reference. So now you bumped into the unheimlich twice in a short time when you went 40 years without it. That is funny, isn't it? Not quite uncanny, but funny...
Nancy, thanks for the response. I am intrigued now. Do any of these texts show up in audio books?
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