Last Letters and Moses and Monotheism: 1925-1939In Freud’s final correspondence, we still find the recurrence of the by now familiar theme of Pentecost. For example, he quoted from Goethe—“the pleasant feast of Whitsuntide”—in one of his letters to the secular Jewish writer Arnold Zweig141; he referred to Pentecost in a letter to Max Eitingon, who was also Jewish.142 There were no references to this distinctly Christian feast in any of the letters sent back to Freud by his corresponders. As for Easter, it appeared in only one instance in the last years—at least in the correspondence currently available. Jones reports on a letter from Freud to Suzanne Bernfeld on April 12, 1936, in which Freud wrote, “Easter Sunday signifies to me the fiftieth anniversary of taking up my medical practice.”143 Jones notes that it was suggested (by persons unreferenced) that Easter had an emotional significance dating from the Catholic nanny, but he thinks that for Freud to have begun work on such a day would seem “like an act of defiance.”144 Of course, Jones provides no evidence to show that Freud was disturbed by Easter, or felt “defiant.” Once again, Jones’s anxiety over this devout old nanny has blinded him to a key to the understanding of his subject. After all, Easter in this instance (as elsewhere) means rebirth, a new beginning. During the last decade or so of his life (from 1929 to 1939), Freud, like Jews everywhere, was made more and more painfully aware of the rising tide of anti-Semitism. He responded to it both by affirming his identity as a Jew and by conducting a variety of analyses of anti-Semitism and anti-Semites. But the affirmation of his Jewishness almost always took a rather peculiar form, especially as concerns Judaism as a religion. For example, in a letter to the members of the B’nai B’rith Lodge on May 6, 1926, Freud wrote as follows in a letter laced with ambivalence: That you are Jews could only be welcome to me, for I was myself a Jew, and it has always appeared to me not only undignified but outright foolish to deny it. What tied me to Jewry was—I have to admit it—not the faith, not even the national pride, for I was always an unbeliever…. But there remained enough to make the attraction of Judaism and the Jews irresistible [sic], many dark emotional powers all the stronger the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure. And before long there followed the realization that it was only to my Jewish nature that I owed the two qualities that have become indispensable to me throughout my difficult life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free of many prejudices which restrict others in the use of the intellect: as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition and to renounce agreement with the “compact majority.” So I became one of you, took part in your humanitarian and national interests….145 |