Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud’s best-known disciple, stood out among early psychoanalysts because he was one of very few Gentiles. In the 1930s, long after he had broken with his erstwhile mentor, Jung—as Reuven Kruger puts its—came under “a barrage of fire for his views on racial psychology that seemed to imply tacit support, if not outright admiration, for National Socialism.” Yet the German Jewish philosopher Erich Neumann considered Jung “his tsaddik,” and Neumann, in turn, was one of Jung’s favored disciples. Neumann’s two-volume The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, which he declined to publish in his own lifetime, have now been issued in English translation. Kruger writes in his review:

Neumann, who died at age fifty-five in Tel Aviv, [would never] realize his ambition to write a third and final volume, which would diagnose the spiritual crisis of modern Jewry. “Spiritual crisis,” as understood by Neumann, required first and foremost a return to the ethos of Ḥasidism, which Neumann knew largely, though not entirely, from the writings of Martin Buber. Neumann was inspired by Buber’s retelling of ḥasidic stories and his romantic vision of a Jewish cultural renaissance, . . . though, unlike Buber, he had no access to the primary sources and had to rely on the selection of scholars and popularizers like Buber and Samuel Horodetzky.

In a brilliant introduction to the second volume of The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Moshe Idel describes Neumann’s distinctive approach to reading ḥasidic texts as a Jungian version of Buber’s “this-worldly” approach. Idel notes that already in Ḥasidism itself, “one can discern a propensity to interpret biblical and kabbalistic topics, figures, and values as referring to inner human powers and processes,” which lends itself to Neumann’s call for “an introverted type of Judaism.” Thus, the ubiquitous prince in ḥasidic homilies, who is banished from the royal palace, represents, for Neumann, an alienated ego, assimilated into the surrounding culture, oblivious to any possible connection to the numinous source of being.

In a 1955 interview on his 80th birthday, Jung cryptically said that “the ḥasidic Rabbi Baer from Meseritz, whom they called the Great Maggid,” anticipated his entire psychology. In his introduction, Idel takes Jung to have been pointing to the Maggid’s prescient understanding of interplay between the masculine and the feminine, which Jung undoubtedly learned about from Neumann.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.