19
(pt. 1)
THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM
"Surely Jews understand that in identifying an
anti-Semite one
must use a sum-of-all-its-parts test. If it is yellow,
has a four-foot neck, spots,
and little horns, it is a giraffe."
--
Jewish comedian Jackie Mason
and Jewish lawyer Raul
Felder,
9-2000, p. 57
"If you want to understand anti-Semitism, read the Old
Testament." -- George
Orwell
"So long as there is a
single anti-Semite in the world, I shall
declare with pride that I
am a Jew." --
Ilya Ehrenburg,
Jewish
Russian author, (in DERSHOWITZ, p. 14]
"Fighting anti-Semitism
seems to be for some Jews more
important than any other
expression of Jewishness ... The
danger appears when one
becomes dependent upon them for
one's identity, so that
one begins to need anti-Semitism."
Stanislaw Krajewski,
(Polish Jew)
"For some Jews and perhaps
some of the Jewish leadership, the
fear is that if
anti-Semitism completely disappears then the
Jewish community might
erode or dissolve."
Stanley Rothman,
(in STALLSWORTH, p. 67)
"And if real peace does
come to Israel, the question will be
asked: Can we, and how do
we, survive without an external
enemy?"
Avraham Burg, head of
the Jewish Agency,
[HARTUNG, J., 1995]
"The assumption of an
eternal anti-Semitism ... has been adapted
by a great many unbiased
historians and by even a greater
number of Jews. It is this
odd coincidence which makes the
theory so very dangerous
and confusing. Its escapist basis is
in both instances the same;
just as anti-Semites understandably
desire to escape
responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked
and on the defensive, even
more understandably, do not wish to
under any circumstances
discuss their share of responsibility."
Hannah
Arendt, Origins, p. 7
(Jewish
historian)
"The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself
anti-Semitic."
Evelyn Torton Beck,
1982, p. xxii
"[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
[representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to
see
themselves and groups within which they identify as victims
who are
being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly
from
unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by
feelings
of self-righteousness, is rarely satisfying. Indeed, he can
often
achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the
punishment
is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish
psychoanalyst]
Theodore Reik, who was Nyde's teacher, suggested that a
'paranoid
masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish
authors,
1982, p. 133
"I felt that the
bigotry always blamed on those who said anything
negative about Jews was
equally visible on the other [Jewish]
side of the
fence." Evelyn Kaye, (Jewish author, p. 114)
"Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to
prejudice."
Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his
article
about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility
to it,
1998, p. 266
"For all my life, I have never felt any substantial
anti-Semitism, and
was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something
clicked,
and I thought, Well, I am over 40, I have made a successful
career,
I have made a forturne. But what will tell my children when I
am 70?"
-- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming
president of the
Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]
"We should be able to
discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their
virtues or their vices, as
one can any other identifiable group
without being called an
anti-Semite. Frankness does not feed
anti-Semitism; secrecy,
however, does." Kevin Meyers,
(British journalist), p. 26
"Telling the truth is not
anti-Semitic. Am I right?"
Joe Wood,
(African-American)
p. 112
"It seems that [poet Allen]
Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in
the dust of a dormitory
window; the words were too shocking
for the Dean of Students to
speak, so he had written them on a
piece of paper which he had
pushed across the desk to my
husband: 'Fuck the Jews.'
... 'He's a Jew himself,' said the Dean.
'Can you understand his
writing a thing like that?' Yes, Lionel
could understand; but he
couldn't explain it to the Dean."
Dianna Trilling,
(Jewish author) in BLOOM, p. 302
The foundation of modern Jewish
identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable
omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this
threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the
most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish" -- above all
else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is
still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous
persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction --
traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for
transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish
religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of
this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark
Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:
"the goyim represent, quite
literally, an act of God. When they are
persecutors they are also
instruments of justice, punishing the Jews
for transgressing the Law, and in
any case they do not know better."
[ZBOROWSKI, p. 154]
The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in
1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an
all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,1998, p. 62]
The notion that Jews, scattered
throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all
others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual
framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes
authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand
the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old
Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called
anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish
people:
"And the Lord shall scatter thee
among all people from one end of
the earth unto the other ... And
among these nations shalt thou find
no ease, neither shall the sole of
they foot have rest: But the Lord
shall give thee there a trembling
heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow
of mind. And they life shall hang in
doubt before thee; and thou shalt
fear day and night and have none
assurance of thy life ... and thou
shalt be only oppressed and crushed
always."
It is clear that the Jewish
conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious
conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:
"The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least
in their
in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as
deserved
without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they
were
treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins,
especially for
deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea
of grandeur
is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There
is even
even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid
attitude in
the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an
exceptional
position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
[REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]
When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the
grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious
backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the
omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much
conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular
worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm:
among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above
others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman
and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen
people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d]
the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a
special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a
self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be
found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of
traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted
atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty.
And all Jews, innocent.
The combined post-Holocaust Jewish
emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed
and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual
distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious
and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation
of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the
Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not
non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly
incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to
render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies --
beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then,
now, and across history.
The framework for this Jewish moral
dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the
age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a
metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews
(post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion.
Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that
most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no
anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an
Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism."
[HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism
is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one
with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one
that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the
innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then
feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of
these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN
p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The
mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they
are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and
conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]
In the political context of the
modern nation of Israel, even its areligious state ideology -- Zionism
-- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent
'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma.
"Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman
in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and
inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and]
that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever
engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be
eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]
"It is impossible to comprehend the
largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish
polemicist Alan Dershowitz, "...The important point is that Jews
are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the
bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can
profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ,
p. 102, 101] In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David
Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has
nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate
nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar,
Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy
theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world,
saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not
anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply
that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews."
[PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]
"The term Jew has been used as a term
of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene
Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s
virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the
preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had
thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time
immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26] "Among most anti-Semites," adds
another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their
irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that
is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the
discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176]
Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic
accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of
real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to
which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things
against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings.
Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because
they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because
they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]
"Anti-Semitism," says prominent
(Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What
Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of
the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that
anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah
Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live." "The
psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of
Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and
appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and
functions independent of its object." "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to
Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is
independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p.
xvii]
"The existence of anti-Semitism and
the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his
best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally
not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions
... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent
of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases;
FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden,
""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be
recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as
much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble
core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]
In Jewish folklore, even
intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical
innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a
Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:
"A few months after the end of
World War I, the premier of Poland
had a meeting with President Woodrow
Wilson. 'If you don't meet
our nation's demands at the peace
conference,' warned the premier,
'I foresee great troubles ahead. The
Polish people will be very
angry, and they'll go out and
massacre the Jews.'
'And if your demands are
met?' asked Wilson.
'In that case,' responded the
premier, 'my people will be delighted.
They'll go out in the streets and get
drunk -- and then they'll massacre
the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p.
60]
"When it comes to the millions of
Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author
Michael Medved,
"historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the
victims had done
to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious
antagonisms,
we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality."
[MEDVED, M.
11-12-01]
"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann
Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of
gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape
of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that
anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews,"
proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even
when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of
anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Eventual New York Times
Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the
standard Jewish theme this way:
"The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental
disorder, because
the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but
as objects. They
are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to
recognize them for
what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a
symptom of
mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons,
but since he
is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a
clinical example
of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]
"Not only does anything Jews do or
refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a
non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and
exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to
the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of
anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Such widespread Jewish Orwellian
doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for
their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself,
popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all
non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with
locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable,
and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes
Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been
causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact
causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally
blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ...
'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
This outrageously ahistorical
perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining
Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and
beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]
In the modern Jewish community
post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and
self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment
period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a
kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything
pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist
party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been
defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his
peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the
always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278]
Milton Steinberg notes that:
"Unfortunately Jews, like other human
beings, are so constituted as
to be reluctant to pass adverse
judgment on themselves. Hence,
whether with justice or not they will
hold their Jewishness at fault
for whatever goes wrong in their
lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]
"The Cult of Victimhood," observes
David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with
guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us
that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But
it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We
believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is
entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American
Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have
gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon,
we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]
Facing this suffocating shield, once
defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the
offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America.
"During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg,
"anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of
extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a
result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed
fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187] Once labeled an
"anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most
preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish
community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent
to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a
Jewish journal in Poland, :
"The reality of [the Nazi death
camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and
contemporary anti-Semites do not
have the option of stating that it is not
their goal." [GEBERT]
Albert Lindemann notes such
accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the
distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their
systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with
Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on
extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all
anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism
is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv]
(Professor Lindemann wrote an
extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and
the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume
that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish
belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for
the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine
decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply
pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little
better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes."
[WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63] Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's
Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's
reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers
that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual
position on American and British college campuses, including history
department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners
and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German
academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork
for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR
99, p. 44-45]
Central to the modern Jewish world
view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,
"serves as the point from which
Jews can morally survey the entire past
and classify all present society
... Some Jewish thinkers consider the
Holocaust [as] providing a singular
point of wrong innocence against
which they can judge everyone else.
It has consciously been chosen by
Jews to be their crucifixion: the
great sorrow they must mediate. Non-
Jews are tried by two questions:
What did they do (collectively or
individually, directly or
indirectly, by commission or omission) to further
anti-Semitism? What did they do to
stop the Holocaust? The most
severe judges find everyone guilty
who did not risk his family's lives
to save Jews in the Holocaust."
[AMATO, p. 181]
Reflecting again the old Chosen
People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a
"unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had
written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against
Jewish attack, saying:
"[It is accused] that I have violated
the uniqueness of anti-Semitism
by comparing it with other
exclusionary movements -- illustrating
the unwillingness of some Jews to
measure their own experience
on a general human scale, unless
anti-Semitism is presented ... as
the very archetype of all prejudices
and anti-democratic attitudes.
For me the uniqueness of
anti-Semitism was not a foregone
conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM,
J., 1986, p. 225]
(It is interesting to wonder what
Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so
beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject
had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee --
[HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])
Despite the long historical list of
very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world
through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as
a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness
of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of
Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel
echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his
introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other
tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the
Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March
of the Living, p. 5]
Jewish blameless innocence
throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old
religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively
expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that
Steiner's
"theory of anti-Semitism [is that
it] is caused by the atavistic pagan
element in western religion by which
Jews are regarded as a collective
Executioner of a central human
sacrifice. We have to do here with a
shifting moral responsibility, by
which the individual lays his moral
burden firstly on Jesus himself, who
dies to save him; and secondly,
on the Jews who bring about the
necessary death of Jesus ... In any
event, the Jews have been elected,
'chosen' if you will, to the position
of scapegoat so that all others can
escape guilt into the innocence of
childhood and recover the joy of
Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]
Roger Kamenetz notes his discomfort
as a Jew when the beliefs he had been emphatically taught about
the Holocaust were challenged by the Buddhist world view, that humans
must take responsibility for their actions that effect their fate:
"I had been shocked, a little
outraged, by what I'd heard about
the Buddhist view of the Holocaust. I
could not accept that the
suffering of the Jews was somehow a
result of their previous
actions. Wasn't the knowledge of
shared victimization the source
of Jewish identification with the
Tibetans? Weren't we fellow
victims, fellow innocent victims? ...
In Buddhism, the whole
notion of an innocent victim carried
little weight in assessing
how one responded to tragic
circumstances." [KAMENETZ, R.,
1994, p. 185]
Note the American Jewish Congress
fury at Israeli rabbi and Shas party leader Ovadia Yosef ("who plays a
critical role in coalition politics in Israel") when he dared to
challenge modern Jewish convention about the Holocaust. In 2000, he
suggested that it seemed to him that "Holocaust victims were punished
for sins in an earlier life." However one might interpret this view, it
is something considerably less than innocence. The AJC's reaction was
outrage, and formally, that
"Rabbi Yosef must be charged with
knowing that his statements can
be used as an excuse for Nazi
barbarisms, as a kind of Nazi apologetics
... He acknowledges the Holocaust
but then claims God's justification
for its horrors. If that is not
blasphemy, then nothing is." [PR
NEWSWIRE, 2-6-98]
Berel Lang looks upon the widespread
Jewish effort to elude their own honest history and attendant moral
responsibility for it with concern. In modern Jewish historical
revisionism, "the reasonable ... concern to understand anti-Semitism has
... nothing to do with Jews. This view ... has served as a premise in
the most serious historical attempts to analyze the phenomenon of
anti-Semitism ... This resistance to the possibility of a connection
between anti-Semitism and Jewish history is ... pernicious." [CUDDIHY,
p. 23-24] "Jews," notes Robert Segal, "fear that a historical
explanation [of anti-Semitism] will make Jews responsible for
anti-Semitism, and will thereby excuse it." [CUDDIHY, p. 34] "It seems
clear that Jews exhibit an all-too common human failing," says Albert
Lindemann, "They actually do not want to understand their past --
or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred
directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of
their complex and often contradictory identities." [LINDEMANN, 1997, p.
535] "Jews come honorably to their paranoia," adds Cuddihy,
"Nevertheless, when it comes to their own behavior, they go on a moral
holiday." [CUDDIHY, p. 35]
This widespread Jewish "moral
holiday," however secularly guised, is nonetheless rooted in the old
rabbinical ghettos; as we have seen, many centuries passed with Jewish
history self-understood to begin and end with itself, the sacred history
of a "people apart" unrelated to the history of others around them.
There is also -- more importantly in
a largely areligious age -- an entire "science" (albeit a newly-created,
and distinctly Jewish, one, even built in some ways upon a rabbinical
model; some have called it a "surrogate religion") [GAY, p. 19-20] to
use in service to prove the modern Jewish theses of identity, an
identity largely based upon an oppositional antithesis: lofty Jewish
moral worth versus an omnipresent, generic, and irrational
anti-Semitism. This controversial "science" to prove the major premises
of Jewish self-conception is psychoanalytic theory, the invention of a
Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, itself a field of endeavor and allegiance
overwhelmingly populated, predominated, and propagandized by Jews to our
own day.
Let us start with the fact that all
17 original members of Freud's Psychological Wednesday Society were
Jewish and most of his patients, by which Freud developed his theories
of human neurosis, were women from "eminent Austrian Jewish families."
The original Society members, notes Dennis Klein, "were aware of their
Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and
solidarity ... [Their] feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the
matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytic circle ... it tightened the
bond among members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite."
[KLEIN, p. vii] (Absorbed with notions of elitism and clandestine
intrigues, by 1912, six die-hard loyalists to Freud were joined in a
behind-the-scenes "committee," described by Freud as a "secret council
composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men." This group,
said The Master, "would have to be strictly secret [Freud's
emphasis] in its existence and its actions." [MASSON, 1990, p. 113])
"Freud," says another Jewish author,
Earl Grollman,
"may also have experienced the
'essence of Judaism' through his
community activities with other Jews.
Many of his important
theories were delivered before the
Fraternity of Jewish Students
and the B'nai B'rith organization.
Most of the colleagues in his
movement were Jewish ... But whatever
the reasons -- historical,
sociological, psychological -- group
bonds did provide a warm
shelter with other Jews, informality
and familiarity formed a kind
of inner security, a 'we-feeling,'
illustrated even by the selection
of jokes and stories recounted in the
group. It is what Freud called
'the clear awareness of an inner
identity, the secret of the same
inner construction.'" [GROLLMAN, E.,
1965, p. 41]
"All over the world," says Jewish
psychoanalyst Earl Hopper, "Jews are drawn to the profession of
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The 1990 roster of the
International Psychoanalytical Association reads like the membership
list of a synagogue." [HOPPER, p. 18] "That vast apparatus of putative
concern, psychiatry," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "is largely a Jewish
monopoly." [KAHN, R., p. 53] "An area of medicine which Jews have made
almost their own is psychiatry." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 119] "Jews,"
says Ann Roiphe, also Jewish, "have rushed to psychoanalysis as lemmings
to the sea." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 76] Psychotherapy is also in all respects
so overwhelmingly a Jewish consumer domain that in a 1996
survey (in which nearly half of 17 psychoanalysts in a research project
were expressly solicited as non-Jews), 75% of the patients
for all of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish therapists) were found to be
Jewish. [OSTROW, p. 27]
As James Yaffe observed in 1968:
"There is little question that a
comparatively large proportion of the
patients undergoing psychoanalysis
in America are Jewish. It
also seems to be true that Jewish
parents are more likely than
equally affluent non-Jewish parents
to send their children for
psychiatric treatment. Those who
can't afford analysis are just
as enthusiastic about the blessings
of less expensive psychiatry.
According to one leader in the
field, 'If you open a mental health
clinic and don't advertise, Jews
will be the only people who
flock to it.' In some sections of
the Jewish community, in fact,
psychiatry has become a way of life,
almost a substitute religion.
In southern California it's hard to
find a Jewish family that hasn't
got at least one member in
analysis." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 293]
With advancement out of the Jewish
ghetto in the 18th century, and increased secular questioning about the
religiously-based myths about themselves and how they fit into
mainstream societies, over the last couple of centuries "the behavior
pattern of assimilated Jews," says Hannah Arendt, "determined by this
continuous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves ... created a
Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere ... Judaism became a
psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved problem
for every individual Jew." [ARENDT, p. 67] The Jewish novelist Franz
Kafka, for instance, once remarked that poet Heinrich Heine's "conflict
with Jewry" was "exactly what made him so typically Jewish," [SILBERMAN,
p. 63] i.e., being Jewish, post-Enlightenment, was a war within the
psyche about being Jewish.
"Whatever the reasons for their
philosophical disarray and mental anguish," observes Gerald Krefetz,
"Jews were among the first groups to seek relief from psychologists,
psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists ... perhaps
psychiatry is today's secular rabbinate." [KREFETZ, p. 180] This theme
is inverted from a negative to a positive and romanticized by Harriet
Fromkin: "If we had no further illustration than the character of Freud,
we should have a basis for suspecting some connection between the Jew
and psychological genius." [KAHN, R., p. 72]
Freud eventually directed his
projective obsessions towards his Old Testament Jewish heritage,
asserting -- among other things -- that the revered patriarch, Moses,
may not have even been Jewish. And that Jews killed him. "Biblical
religion, according to Freud," said Joseph Campbell, "had the character
of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figures hides a repressed
conviction of guilt which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be
consciously faced." [CAMPBELL, MASKS, p. 126] Freud believed that Jews
had a continuous anxiety and resentment about breaking the many laws of
their Father God. Freud wrote that
"In the religion of Moses itself
there was no direct expression for the
murderer's father-hate. Only a
powerful reaction to it could make
its appearance: the
consciousness of guilt because of that hostility,
the bad conscience because one
had sinned against God and
continued to sin. This feeling
of guiltiness, which the Prophets kept
incessantly alive ... cleverly
veiled the true origin of the feeling. The
people met with hard times...
it became not easy to adhere to the
illusion ... they did not
observe the laws. The need for satisfying
this feeling of guilt ... was
insatiable, more exacting, but also more
petty ... It [the feeling of
neurosis] bears the characteristic of being
never concluded ... with which
we are familiar in the reaction-
formation of obsessional
neurosis." [KREFETZ, p. 181-182]
In the Freudian worldview, Richard
Rubenstein explains that the blueprint to understand the troubled
anti-Semitic mind (and everyone's, for that matter) starts
here:
"According to Freud, civilization and
religion began with a 'primal
crime' in which the father of the
original human horde was
cannibalistically murdered by his
sons to gain sexual possession
of his females. The unconscious
memory of the deed continues
to agonize the sons and their
progeny, thereby causing the
murdered father to be imagined as
the ever-lasting Heavenly Father.
For Freud, the supreme object of
human worship [the Father God]
is none other than the first object
of human criminality." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 36]
From this bizarrely fictional
speculation, a Judeo-centric argument can be, and is, often created that
explains anti-Semitism in western tradition as Christianity's
(psychoanalytically-based) conflict with Judaism. This includes
Christian envy of God's favoritism of Jewry, traditional Christian
belief that Jews were the killers of Christ (an echo of the "murder God"
theme), Judaism itself as a "father" religion to Christianity, and on
and on. In this scenario, Jews are scapegoated by Christians for the
very death of God. Not surprisingly, the Freudian paradigm for the
relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a violent one. "The
Jews had a father religion," said Freud, "and the Christians a son
religion, and the subconscious is to kill the father from time to time."
[PERLMUTTER, p. 141] Hence, in this view too, Nazi fascism was not
really (as declared and practiced by them) an anti-Christian creed, but
-- however incongruous -- an expression of it. "In a sense,"
declares Rubenstein, "the death camps [for Jews] were the terminal
expression of Christian anti-Semitism ... [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 43] ...
since the sins and guilts that beset the anti-Semites existence demands
the death of the Jews." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 41]
Elsewhere in the psychoanalytic
world, John Murray Cuddihy has even argued that the essence of Freud's
unconscious "id" theory was really the Jewish "ordeal of civility," the
struggle to "civilize," to acculturate into the interpersonal norms of
Gentile culture. (Freud's name for frustrated human desire can even been
seen as a pun on the Yiddish word for Jew: Yid). In this vein,
Maurice Samuels reflected widespread social issues of the day when he
suggested in 1932, however facetiously, that anti-Semitism was probably
rooted in "a lack of niceness in the Jews. If the Jews would only temper
their voices, their table manners and their ties, if they would be
discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobtrusive in their comings and
goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get
along very well." [SILBERMAN, p. 30] Albert Lindemann notes also the
undercurrent of agitated Jewishness (antithetical to non-Jewish Others)
in three major Jewish-dominated ideologies in the last 150 years: "Such
modern ideologies as socialism, (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism,
and various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis
and related schools) all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of
Gentile existence, be it in exploitive capitalism, aggressive
nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery." [LINDEMANN, Esau's,
p. 14]
On one hand deconstructing their
traditional religious faith in terms of collective neurosis, the Jewish
nature of the psychoanalytic community yet echoes the exclusivist tribal
ethic -- the "chosenness" and "apartness" from others -- of classical
Judaism. "Psychoanalysis from its origins," notes Kevin MacDonald, "has
been a "science apart' from the rest of psychology and psychiatry,
resulting in two separate and incompatible discourses about human
behavior. Psychoanalysis was and remains a highly authoritarian movement
in which group boundaries are rigidly maintained and in which heretics
are expelled." [MACDONALD, p. 237] This ethos of a psychoanalytic chosen
people was criticized by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, who was
courted by Freud to join the early psychoanalytic movement. Bleuler
resisted the absolutism of the Freudians, telling Freud that "this 'who
is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for
religious and political parties ... for science I consider it harmful."
[GAY, p. 145]
In 1990, a (Jewish) psychoanalyst,
Jeffrey Mouisaieff Masson, former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud
Archives in London and thereby a member of the international
psychoanalytic "inner circle," wrote a volume exposing the secretive
behind-the-scenes foundations of the psychoanalytic community:
"No book has yet told what it is like
to undergo training as an orthodox
Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any
book tell what it is like to leave
that profitable and prestigious
profession -- those who have been part of
the inner circle of psychoanalysis
either do not leave, or have left in
discrete silence. Thus, until now it
has been almost impossible to get
an internal view of the workings of
this 'men's club' with its initiation
rites; expectations of membership
loyalty over truth; pressures to accept
concepts handed down from the leader,
no matter how irrational;
xenophobic banding together against
outsiders; and the punishment
of anyone who poses questions or
finally wants out. It is worth asking
why no book like this has appeared
before, since people have written
accounts of leaving almost every
other cult." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p.
1-2]
Many Jewish scholars these days are
trying to more openly claim Freud as one of their own and find in
psychoanalysis its distinctly Jewish foundation. (An important impetus
in Freud's construction of his theories of psychoanalysis is
anti-Semitism. See Eric Grollman's Judaism in Sigmund Freud's World,
for example, for a dose of this perspective). [GROLLMAN, E., 1965] While
Freud always presented himself as an atheist and a completely
"assimilated" Jew in mainstream Viennese society, there is evidence and
argument that Freud was hiding his traditionally Jewish background and
conflict with his (now believed to be) religious parents. Freud was
even, beginning in 1897, a member of the Vienna chapter of the Jewish
fraternal order, B'nai B'rith. Concerning their roots in traditional
Judaism, Emmanuel Rice believes that Freud and his family were -- to the
public -- deceptive at the least. "The fact," says Emmanuel Rice, "that
these people were lying either did not occur to or seem to bother them."
[RICE, p. 254] "It appears," continues Rice, "the family environment of
Sigmund Freud's formative years was far more involved with Judaic
scholarship, theological beliefs, and ritual practices than has been
traditionally thought to be the case." [RICE, p. 257] This has
significant implications -- by the very dictates of psychoanalytic
theory which demands an exploration of childhood experiences for the
roots of adult psychological behavior-- to understand what were Freud's
own "internal conflicts." And it inevitably leads more deeply to a
Jewish specificity in the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory,
something that Freud emphatically resisted through most of his life,
publicly conceding. Rice even asserts that Freud's last major work,
Moses and Monotheism, which scandalized traditional Judaism, must be
understood not as scientific theory, but "as a novel with
autobiographical elements." [RICE, p. 235]
Freud was even married to a woman,
Martha Bernaya, whose grandfather was the chief rabbi of Hamburg. Raised
in an Orthodox household, after Freud's death she resumed traditionalist
customs. [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 70-71]
As Jewish scholar Samuel Klausner
notes:
"Freud himself was a Jew, and most of
the members of his immediate
Vienna circle were Jews. Admittance
to the psychoanalytic
movement required analysis by a
previous initiate, a sort of
'apostolic succession.' The original
Jewish group tended to analyze
Jews. Unwittingly, psychoanalytic
ideology may be couched in a
Jewish ethic strange to individuals
socialized in the Protestant ethic."
[GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 43]
Karl Abraham, a close disciple of
Freud, took issue with the Master's reluctance to concede that his
completely rationalist view of human psyche -- putting the human mind
into square pegs -- was particularly Jewish. "After all," said Abraham,
"the Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us."
[GAY, p. 131] Freud's technique, in its exegetical method, he suggested,
was "essentially Talmudic." [OSTROW, p. 25] Aaron Rabinowitz has even
written a recent article that "enumerates and discusses some halachic
[Jewish religious law] principles and values which are exerting
influence on the practice of psychotherapy." [RABINOWITZ, A., 2000, p.
193]
Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle
revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and
Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:
"Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an
avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing
halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that
stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The
argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that
basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness
or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all
be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended
discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah
[Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are
ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while
continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like
naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an
act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more
convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D,
11-22-02, p. 28]
(Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and
Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the
Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always
closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in
there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's
doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his
medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from
hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is
accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in
the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he
comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction
on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects
you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p.
39-40]
Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some
place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am
very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my
efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977,
Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in
Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of
psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor."
[GAY, p. 118]
"Although Freud openly questioned all
religion," says M. H. Goldberg,
"including Judaism, he always thought
of himself as a Jew and raised
his six children as Jews. In a letter
to his fiancé written in 1882, Freud
concluded that 'something of the
core, of the essence of this
meaningful and life-affirming Judaism
will not be absent from our
home." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 30]
"Freud's Jewishness [was] ever
present in his mind," suggests Benno Weiser Varon, "This mind, by the
way, was a Talmudic mind, searching and speculative." [VARON, p. 9] Karl
Krauss, a prominent Viennese leftist, journalist and baptized Jew, knew
Freud and even declared psychoanalysis to be "the conquest of the
confessional by the Jews of Vienna." [VARON, p. 9] He also asserted that
"they have the press, they have the stock exchange, they also have the
subconscious!" and that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it
purports to cure." [WINOKUR, J., 1992, p. 151-152]
Freud himself wrote a special
preface to the Hebrew edition of his volume, Totem and Taboo,
speaking of himself in the third person:
"[He] has never repudiated his
people, who feels in essential nature a
Jew, and who has no desire to alter
this nature. If the question were put
to him: 'Since you have abandoned all
the common characteristics of
your countrymen, what is there left
that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A
very good deal and probably its very
essence,' though he could not
express that essence clearly in
words." [VARON, p. 9]
Freud once wrote to a Jewish friend
that "racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual
constitution." [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 290] Willy Aron adds that "in his
famous address, 'On Being of the Sons of the Covenant,' delivered on May
6, 1926, on his 70th birthday, Freud spoke of 'the irresistible
attraction of Judaism and Jews' and 'of the clear consciousness of an
inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic
structure.'" [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 293] Freud further noted his link to
the "racial" dimension of Jewishness, that "I can say that I am as
little an adherent of the Jewish religion as of any other religion,
i.e., I consider them all important as objects of scientific interest,
but I do not share the emotional attitudes that goes with them. On the
other hand, I have always felt a strong feeling of kinship with my race
and have fostered it in my children." [ARON, p. 294]
Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his
Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the
gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not
belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which
made the attractiveness of Judiams nad Jews irresistible ... many
obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were
defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two
qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because
I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I
was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the
compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds
Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people;
there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only
shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p.
xiii]
"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says
Arnold Jacob Wolf,
"Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he
himself was,
the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still
dismiss it as
peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the
biblical roots of
the new wisdom. Not only are many practitioners of the art, like
the very first
analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a
widespread conviction
that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of
psychoanalysis are
para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry
upon his deepest
feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the
Jewish style
both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized
prudishness
together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is
Talmudic."
[WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]
Earl Hopper, who acknowledges that
"my identity as a Jew is inseparable from my identify as a
psychoanalyst," understands psychoanalysis to be of course a "Jewish
science," but ascribes its roots to Freud's view that psychoanalysis
represents the revolutionary insights of a "marginalized" people, i.e.,
Jews had been in the past conceptually lumped by gentiles together with
thieves, lepers, and misfits of all kinds. [HOPPER, p. 19] The
insightful Jewish world view, this argument insists, has therefore
keener "outsider" perceptions of the norms of mainstream cultures of the
Jewish diaspora. And Jewish genius is to criticize and deconstruct them.
(It is interesting that this "marginalized victim people" concept
emerges from the minds of rich, elitist Jewish psychoanalysts who
imprint their paradigms of victimhood upon usually affluent
patient-sponges, Jewish or not).
Arnold Meadow and Harold Vetter even
argue that Freudian theory is based on the "Judaic value system"
including Judaism's "this life" (not afterlife) orientation, a
"rationalist control over ... sexual urges," the "hidden meaning of
words," and the presence of the "Oedipus complex ... in Jewish culture,
perhaps in peculiarly intense form." [MEADOW, p. 164] This includes
Freud's notion, claim the authors, that a woman tries to make her
husband her child to "act the part of a mother to him." Furthermore, the
authoritarian nature of psychoanalysis emphasizes "rationality as a
basis for authority [which] closely parallels the authority relationship
found in Jewish culture." [MEADOW, p. 163] The patient's resistance to
the psychoanalyst's insights into the patient's troubles "is diminished
by the analyst's rational interpretation, or by the patient's positive
transference toward the analyst." [MEADOW, p. 162] To follow the logic
of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Jewish revelation and world
view, the patient's "transference" is ultimately -- whatever
else it is claimed to be -- a sensitization to "being Jewish."
Economist Peter F. Drucker -- whose
parents knew Freud -- has argued that one of the major reasons for the
early resistance to Freud was not only his strange theories, but his
elitist and exploitive ethics:
"Freud did not accept charity
patients, but taught instead that the
psychoanalyst must not treat a
patient for free, and that the patient will
benefit from treatment only if
made to pay handsomely ... Medical
Vienna did not ignore or neglect
Freud, it rejected him. It rejected him
as a person because it held him to
be in gross violation of the
ethics of healer." [TORREY, p. ]
Freud, notes Sylvia Rothchild, had
an
"inability to take any experience
at face value. He treated his pupils as
patients, urged them to 'absorb
things, not argue back.' Freud had no
wish to serve suffering humanity.
He saw in that wish only sadism,
'the apparent desire to help the
sick a device to conceal from oneself
the wish to do the opposite' ...
He feared death, chased after money,
position and reputation."
[ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]
(Yet, in allegiance to his Jewish
identity, "whenever any of his works were translated into Hebrew or
Yiddish, Freud refused to accept royalties.") [ARON, W., 1956-57, p.
294]
In 1988, Jeffrey Moussaieff, the
former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and also Jewish,
wrote one of his volumes attacking the psychoanalytic community, this
book entitled Against Therapy, which outlines his enormous
disillusionment with the principles and Thought Police practices of
psychoanalysis. This includes Masson's outrage over the field's innately
authoritarian manner, its manipulative control of patients, abridgement
of ethical norms, and the systematic exploitation for personal profit of
the emotionally vulnerable. Masson's observations of the psychoanalytic
community include many general themes from Jewish history we have often
seen before. "It is the world of therapy," he charges,
"it is therapy itself that is
at the core of the corruption I have described
in this book. Every therapist, no
matter how kindly and benign in
appearance and behavior, is sooner or
later drawn into that corruption,
because the profession itself is
corrupt. A profession that depends
for its existence on other people's
misery is at special risk. The very
mainspring of psychotherapy is profit
from another person's
suffering ... [MASSON, p. 251] ...
Abuse of one form or another
is built into the very fabric of
psychotherapy -- that power corrupts,
that psychiatric power corrupts just
as political power does and that
the greater the power [over
patients], the greater the propensity for
corruption ... The psychotherapeutic
relationship is a self-policing
profession. The psychotherapeutic
relationship is a privileged one,
protected by a tradition of secrecy."
[MASSON, 1988, p. 168]
In another volume, Masson observes
that Freud's teachings became a "profitable profession with all the
trappings of a jealously protected guild. The price for joining this
fraternity is silence about its membership policy. Corruption is
incorporated, not exposed; prejudice and bias have been accepted, even
embraced." [MASSON, 1990, p. 4] In this volume, Final Analysis,
Masson exposes the Orwellian, irrational, and totalitarian world of the
psychoanalytic community. As part of his training to become a
psychoanalyst, Masson was forced to undergo five years of psychoanalysis
himself (at a 1971 cost of $75 an hour, five days a week). [MASSON,
1990, p. 21] Masson discovered soon that the psychoanalyst, Irvine
Schiffer (also Jewish), for his sessions was a manipulative, unethical,
maniacally sexist, two-faced and exploitive dictator/liar who eventually
sought to exploit Masson to further his own career, insisting that a
paper Masson planned on writing should be partially credited to his
therapist. [MASSON, 1990, p. 69-70, 75, 82-83] This therapist was also
the president of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. [MASSON, 1990, p.
21] In telling one's most intimate and embarrassing secrets to another
(with no parallel exchange), the confessor becomes profoundly vulnerable
and beholding to the Listener. As in all of psychoanalytic terrain, the
therapist ultimately holds the revelations of the Confessor as a
potential weapon against him. Masson was also outraged when the
therapist inanely decided that Mr. Masson's fundamental psychological
problem was that he wanted to be a beautiful woman! [MASSON,
1990, p. 104] In his training to become a therapist in the secretive and
authoritarian world of psychoanalysis, Masson was also told by a
professor that copies of some psychoanalytic journals could not be
exposed to the "lay public." [MASSON, p. 111] Another taught that spies
should sometimes investigate patients' lives. [MASSON, p. 110]
In the early days of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud was actually relieved to count Carl Gustav Jung -- a
non-Jew -- as an adherent to the psychoanalysis bandwagon and was
careful to keep him in the fold. "Gentile proselytes," notes John Murray
Cuddihy, "could shore up [Freud's] self-doubt that psychoanalysis might
not be, as its adherents claimed, a "science" at all ... but a
social-cultural movement of Diaspora Jews." [CUDDIHY, p. 77] Without
non-Jews in the psychoanalytic fold, Freud and his Jewish associates ran
the profound risk -- with the emphasis on the likes of penis envy, the
Oedipal Complex, strange sexual obsessions, the Death Wish, the focus on
neurosis and anxiety, and all the rest of it -- of being mercilessly
ridiculed and humiliated as merely participants in a bizarre Jewish
cult, evidence, for anti-Jewish critics, of Jewish degradation.
Freud, in a letter to fellow Jewish
psychoanalyst, Karl Abraham, wrote: "You are closer to my intellectual
constitution because of racial kinship while he [Jung] as a Christian
and pastor's son finds his way to me only against great inner
resistances. His association with us is very valuable for that. I nearly
said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis
escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair." [CUDDIHY p.
77] Later, in another letter to Abraham, Freud added: "Our Aryan
comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise
psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 82] There
are those who even suggest that Sabina Spielrin, a Jewish woman (and, as
one journalist put it, "a compulsive masturbator") who was Jung's
patient and lover, was a "'honey trap' offered by Freud ... to keep Jung
in the analytic movement." [KELLAWAY, K., p. 10]
Freud was a contemporary in Vienna of
Theodore Herzl, the acknowledged "founder" of Zionism and modern state
of Israel. "Freud had a high regard for Theodore Herzl and was closely
acquainted with him." [MEITLIS, J., p. 21] Herzl, remarks Cuddihy,
believed that non-Jews are found "in two and only two varieties, namely
... overt and covert anti-Semites. Any wide reading in Freud puts it
beyond doubt that he shared this conviction." [CUDDIHY, p. 78] "Freud
"always gave a generous contribution" to the Zionist youth organization
Hechaluz [the Pioneers] and in 1936 finally "openly aligned himself with
the Zionist cause." [BERKELEY, p. 235, p. 191] "Zionism," Freud wrote
in a private letter in 1930, "awakened my strongest sympathies, which
are still faithfully attached to it today." [GAY, p. 123] "We are all
of the same blood," Freud once told Jewish friend Jacob Meitlis.
"Basically, all are anti-Semites. They are everywhere. Frequently it is
latent and hidden, but it is there." [MEITLIS, p. 20]
Dr. Leo Goldhammar, a friend of
Freud, noted an arresting dream Freud had in the early 1900s. Goldhammar
"recorded a dream of Freud about
Theodore Herzl. In this dream, as
told by Freud, Herzl conveyed to
Freud the idea of immediate action
regarding Palestine if the Jewish
people is to be saved. Freud remarked
in his lecture on the dream that
never before had he been interested
in Herzl's ideas. Some time later he
met the real person of his
dream on a bus and was struck by the
great resemblance of the
real Herzl to the image beheld in his
dream." [ARON, W., 1956-57,
p. 294]
Freudianism proved useful in arguing
Zionist theory. "The Zionist critique of assimilation ... [i.e., that
Jews are perpetually destined to be a 'nation apart' as an inassimilable
people in non-Jewish lands]," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a
certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead
unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of
psychoanalysis was mustered to demonstrate the neurotic effects of
divided consciousness. Rootlessness and inferiority complexes were shown
to generate everything from revolutionary activity to Jewish
anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide." [NIEWYK, D., p.
126]
"Freud's Jewish identity," says Sander
Gilman, "echoes throughout the history of psychoanalysis as part of its
rhetoric." [GILMAN, p. 93] As such, it was -- and is -- a warped and
constrictive system for a non-Jew. "When one rebels within or against
psychoanalysis," adds Gilman, "one seemingly natural rhetoric in which
this rebellion takes place in articulation is an opposition to the
'Jewish' nature of the field."
What non-Jew would respond
positively, favorably, to the inevitable manifestations of Freud's core
belief about himself and his people, (an undercurrent of
psychoanalysis), and how Jews traditionally treat those outside
their own community? Freud wrote it this way:
"We may start from a
character of the Jews which
dominates their relationship
to others. There is no doubt that
they have a particularly high
opinion of themselves, that they
regard themselves as more
distinguished, of higher standing,
as superior to other peoples.
" [FREUD, p. 105-106]
This is the very paradigm of the
foundations of psychoanalysis itself. As Freud wrote, the doctor-patient
relationship is a "situation in which there is a superior and a
subordinate." [MASSON, p. 3] That subordinate, of course, is the
patient who, by virtue of the very principle of psychotherapy, does not
negotiate understanding with an overseer, but must entirely bend
to the analyst's dictatorial will. And this dictatorial will, by
conceptual origin, rationalist method, and omnipresent propagation, is
Jewish-centered.
Freud's sense of Jewish superiority
was documented a number of times, once expressed in the context of the
death of a Jewish colleague. "We were both Jews," said Freud, "and knew
of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common which --
inaccessible to any analysis so far -- makes the Jews." [GAY, p. 133]
One scholar notes that "Freud's undefined sense of Jewishness represents
a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired
characteristics," as manifest in their "harsh, obsessive, self-punishing
religion." [GAY, p. 133] Among Freud's later disciples, A. A. Roback, a
Jew and Russian-American psychologist, sought "the actual causes of the
Jewish birth and nursing of psychoanalysis in the peculiar makeup of the
Jew." [GAY, Moment, p. 48]
Understandably, eventually Freud and
Jung began having serious disagreements. Jung, attributing many of the
Jews' psychological problems to their own particular sense of
rootlessness, decided that Freud's special Jewish hang-ups couldn't be
generalized and universalized onto everybody else’s' psyche too. Said
Jung:
"The Jewish problem is a
regular complex, a festering wound...
Are we really to believe that
a tribe which has wandered
throughout history for several
thousand years as 'God's
Chosen People' was not put up
to such an idea by some
quite special psychological
peculiarity? If no difference exists,
how do we recognize Jews at
all? ... All branches of humanity
unite in one stem -- yes, but
what is a stem without separate
branches? Why this ridiculous
touchiness when anybody
dares to say anything about
the psychological differences
between Jews and Christians?"
[HANNAH, p. 224-225]