The Puzzle of Sigmund Freud’s Jewishness

June 19 2023

Sigmund Freud was named after his grandfather, the Galician rabbi Schlomo Freud, who ensured that his own son, Jacob, received a yeshiva education. No small number of experts, biographers, and critics have made much of Sigmund’s Jewish extraction—although it was paired neither with belief nor with much knowledge of Jewish matters. Taking a hard look at the contested question of the relationship between the founder of psychoanalysis and the Jews, Adam Kirsch writes:

Freud was bemused by Jewish attempts to take pride in his achievements. “The Jews have celebrated me as a national hero,” he wrote after his seventieth birthday in 1926, “although my merit in the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Judaism.” For Freud, it was important not to be thought of as a Jewish thinker, even though—or precisely because—his first followers and most of his early patients were Jewish. He was certain that psychoanalysis was a universal, objective science, and as he wrote, “There should be no distinct Jewish or Aryan science. Their results should be identical.”

On this view, the fact that a Jew discovered psychoanalysis didn’t mean it was a “Jewish science,” any more than Einstein’s E = mc2 was a Jewish equation. For Freud, the adherence of Carl Jung, the most prominent Gentile among early psychoanalysts, was especially important as proof of this point. The most Freud was willing to grant was that being Jewish facilitated his discoveries by setting him outside the scientific and medical establishment of his time. “Because I was a Jew,” he wrote, “I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects, and as a Jew I was prepared to go into opposition.”

The reality, of course, was always more complicated. . . . If Jacob Freud had been alive when The Interpretation of Dreams was published, he might have pointed out to his son that the same ratio of interpretation can be found in the Talmud, where a few lines of Mishnah often give rise to many pages of Gemara. Just as the meaning of a dream is far richer than can be guessed from the events alone, so the meanings of Torah, both Oral and Written, go far beyond what the text says explicitly. Freud’s distinction between the manifest content of a dream and its latent content parallels the rabbinic distinction between p’shat, the plain meaning of the Torah’s words, and d’rash, the meaning revealed by interpretation.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Midrash, Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud

 

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023