ABSTRACT
In tracing the range of qualities with which Freud endowed the meaning of his Jewishness, we find a decisive link with humanism and the artisitic tradition. Freud himself referred directly to this connection on only one occassion — in an obituary notice written for the Neue Freie Presse in 1904, following the death of the man who had taught him the Scriptures and Hebrew, Professor S. Hammerschlag. "A spark from the same fire which animated the spirit of the great Jewish seers and prophets burned in him," Freud observed. "The passionate side of his nature was happily tempered by the ideal of humanism. ... Religious instruction served him as a way of educating towards love of the humanities" (1903-1904, p. 225).
