ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s response to Jews and Judaism during his late adolescence was marked by considerable equivocation, as his letters to a close Rumanian friend, Eduard Silberstein, make plain. The transparent desire to dissociate himself from such undesirable provincial Jewish characteristics coincided with Freud’s growing aspirations to identify with liberal German Kultur. Freud’s respect for the ethical and pedagogical values of Judaism had been strongly shaped during his adolescence by an able religious instructor, Samuel Hammerschlag, who had taught him Bible studies at the Leopoldstadt Gymnasium. Freud’s most active participation in the B’nai B’rith society during 1901-2 immediately preceded his creation of the first Viennese psychoanalytic circle which was composed, at the outset, exclusively of Jews. The ‘Egyptian’ Moses had given the self-esteem of the Jews a religious anchorage and therefore it was solely to him that ‘this people owes its tenacity of life but also much of the hostility it has experienced and still experiences’.
