In the following passage from
Moses and Monotheism, the Jews are proposed to have fashioned themselves to become a morally and intellectually superior people:
The preference which through two thousand years the Jews have given to spiritual endeavour has, of course, had its effect; it has helped to build a dike against brutality and the inclination to violence which are usually found where athletic development
becomes the ideal of the people. The harmonious development of spiritual and bodily activity, as achieved by the Greeks, was denied to the Jews. In this conflict their decision was at least made in favour of what is culturally the more important. (Freud 1939, 147)
Freud’s sense of Jewish superiority can also be seen in a diary entry by Joseph Wortis based on an interview with Freud in 1935: Freud commented that he viewed gentiles as prone to “ruthless egoism,” whereas Jews had a superior family and intellectual life. Wortis then asked Freud if he viewed Jews as a superior people. Freud replied: “I think nowadays they are. . . . When one thinks that 10 or 12 of the Nobel winners are Jews, and when one thinks of their other great achievements in the sciences and in the arts, one has every reason to think them superior” (in Cuddihy 1974, 36).
Further, Freud viewed these differences as unchangeable. In a 1933 letter Freud decried the upsurge in anti-Semitism: “My judgment of human nature, especially the Christian-Aryan variety, has had little reason to change” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 48). Nor, in Freud’s opinion, would the Jewish character change. In
Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939, 51n), referring to the concern with racial purity apparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (see PTSDA, Ch. 2), stated, “It is historically certain that the Jewish type was finally fixed as a result of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.” “Freud was thoroughly convinced that once the Jewish character was created in ancient times it had remained constant, immutable, its quintessential qualities indelible” (Yerushalmi 1991, 52).
The obvious racialism and the clear statement of Jewish ethical, spiritual, and intellectual superiority contained in Freud’s last work,
Moses and Monotheism, must be seen not as an aberration of Freud’s thinking but as central to his attitudes, if not his published work, dating from a much earlier period. In SAID (Ch. 5) I noted that prior to the rise of Nazism an important set of Jewish intellectuals had a strong racial sense of Jewish peoplehood and felt racial estrangement from gentiles; they also made statements that can only be interpreted as indicating a sense of Jewish racial superiority. The psychoanalytic movement was an important example of these tendencies. It was characterized by ideas of Jewish intellectual superiority, racial consciousness, national pride, and Jewish solidarity (see Klein 1981, 143). Freud and his colleagues felt a sense of “racial kinship” with their Jewish colleagues and a “racial strangeness” to others (Klein 1981, 142; see also Gilman 1993, 12ff).
[. . .]
Freud and other early psychoanalysts frequently distinguished themselves as Jews on the basis of race and referred to non-Jews as Aryans, instead of as Germans or Christians (Klein 1981, 142). He wrote to C. G. Jung that Ernest Jones gave him a feeling of “racial strangeness” (Klein 1981, 142). During the 1920s Jones was viewed as a gentile outsider even by the other members of
the secret Committee of Freud’s loyalists and even though he had married a Jewish woman. “In the eyes of all of [the Jewish members of the committee], Jones was a Gentile. . . . [T]he others always seized every opportunity to make him aware that he could never belong. His fantasy of penetrating the inner circle by creating the Committee was an illusion, because he would forever be an unattractive little man with his ferret face pressed imploringly against the glass” (Grosskurth 1991, 137).
