ABSTRACT
Since the Second World War, it has become almost normal to associate antisemitism with right-wing and reactionary movements. But during the course of the nineteenth century this was in no way a foregone conclusion. There was, instead, an unceasing struggle that went on within the workers' movement itself. Babel's famous slogan that 'antisemitism is socialism for imbeciles' was more than just a motto. It shows just how difficult it was in the democratic and socialist movement itself to fight against the germ of a hatred whose roots lay in remote and almost impregnable corners of the psyche and fed on ancient fears that the great social changes helped to render explosive. However paradoxical it may seem today, the antisemites' hatred of the emancipated Jews who are not recognizable by any distinctive marks and mingle with the rest of the popula74Hon, 'contaminating' It with the possession of its women and 'secretly plotting' against it, could be far greater than hostility towards traditional Jews, who at least 'could keep in their place' and at night slept inside the walls of their ghettos. It is no coincidence, moreover, that hatred of modernity and everything connected with it has been historically related to hatred of that part of the population that derived the very conditions for entry into society from the birth of modem concepts. The fact that Judaism itself paid for this entry with an unparalleled upheaval did not alter this attitude much. The Jews remained the principal object of all reactionary feelings in that they were the tangible image of the change that had taken place with the collapse of the old feudal order, the very negative image of modernity, the symbol and quintessence of capitalism and democracy, of socialism and communism.
So in order to justify the need to fight against antisemitism, it was for a long time necessary to demonstrate, if not that the Jews themselves had proletarians in their midst, then at least that this struggle was necessary from the proletarians' point of view, which was not always easy since there were also those who justified antisemitic agitation as the first stage of an 'antlcapitalist' awareness. Becoming clearly aware that antisemitism was an evil in itself, the most odious and aberrant manifestation of hatred between human beings, was no easy thing to do. In order for people's thinking to change it took several decades and, above all, the greatest catastrophe in modem European history—the rise of Nazism, the war, and the extermination of the Jews.
Mention of these aspects Is essential in order to understand not only Freud's Jewishness but also the conception he himself had of it: Judaism as the religion of reason in contrast to the irrationalistic Utopias pervading the culture of his time, especially in Germany. This idea of Judaism is common to a whole generation of emancipated Jews. As Mosse has rightly pointed out, the historical origins go back to the brief, prolific period of 75the Bildung, with which Freud identified. His liking for Goethe went in the same direction, and one could argue that the prize he received in 1930 was a sort of'acknowledgement on the part of the Jews', since there were so many Jews present in the 'Goethe Associations'.
What distinguishes Freud from other representatives of German Jewishness is not the shared ideal of the Bildung, but the way in which he shared it, transforming everything that Germanic society rejected in Jews into open, positive revindication. Freud's position was the specific one of a person taking up a stance of positively understood marginality within a tradition. Like Kafka, whose thinking was encouraged by the outlying position of the place he lived in with regard to the great centres of German culture, Freud transformed into something positive what to many German Jews had seemed to be a stigma to be rid of or to hide from.
Among the criticisms levelled at Freud there is one that is particularly malicious: that he sacrificed the necessity for an open battle with dictatorial regimes, and with Nazism in particular, to the survival of the movement he had founded. In its most malicious form, this criticism centres on the fact that some of his followers (non-Jews), in order to continue working, agreed to collaborate and compromise themselves with the Nazi regime. In this orgy of accusation nothing has been spared—not even the subtle irony of the phrases he asked to be added to the declaration he was forced to sign before leaving Vienna for exile in London ('I would advise anyone to experience the Gestapo!').
To involve the victims in the responsibility for the persecutions they have suffered—states Chasseguet-Smirgel—is one of the ways of perpetrating persecution and the culture of indifference in other forms. Apart from the fact that the responsibility for compromising themselves with the Nazis lay with the non-Jewish analysts who did so, the criticisms levelled at Freud are shown to be devoid of foundation as soon as one analyses what Freud wrote and did during his lifetime, espe76cially if one bears in mind the context in which he found himself living and working. The first part of Chasseguet-Smirgel's work deals with the reconstruction of this historical context. In a long historical digression the author shows the seriousness of the climate of antisemitism in the German-speaking area (and not only there) long before the Nazis came to power, and how such a climate not only contributed to rendering the Jews more and more isolated, but also disarmed them completely by forcing them to 'hate themselves* and 'reject themselves'. All this makes all the more significant the fact that Freud was left untouched by this syndrome and at all times retained the awareness of the distance separating him from the rest of German society, and that through his work he indicated that the rejection of themselves by many of the German Jews was the gravest of the dangers facing Jewish people.
[ED.]
