by Paul Johnson
So Jewish painters went to Paris, and immediately the iconoclastic spirit asserted itself and they passed into the vanguard of artistic adventure. Chagall got there in 1910 and lived in the colony set up in the famous wooden La Ruche, off the Rue de Vaugirard, which once housed Léger, Archipenko and Lenin, among others. There he found the Jewish sculptors Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). Moise Kisling (1891-1953) was in Paris too. These artists were Polish or Russian Ashkenazis but there were Sephardis too: the Rumanian Jules Pascin (1885-1930) and the Italian from Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), with whom Soutine, when he too arrived, shared a single cot, taking turns to sleep in it. There had been Jews in the artistic forefront already: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and his son Lucien (1863-1944), and Max Liebermann (1847-1935) who took Impressionism to Germany. But these new young Jews were wild men, fauves. Except for Chagall, who lived to adorn the new Zion, they had little respect for their religious inheritance. Soutine later denied that he was a Jew or had been born in Vilna and in his will he left 100 francs to the rabbi’s children to buy sweets and dance on his grave. But they all had what had now become the characteristic Jewish impulse to push forward ruthlessly into new cultural territory.
It was not that Jews had any general tendency to embrace modernism as such. There was no Jewish world-outlook, let alone a plan to impose modernism on the world. One cultural historian has gone so far as to write that to ascribe modernism to the Jews is ‘sheer anti-Semitic tendentiousness or philosemitic parochialism’.207 Jews who were decisive innovators in their own fields were often highly conservative in every other aspect of life. Thus Max Liebermann, whose paintings once shocked and alarmed Germans—his ‘Infant Christ Teaching in the Temple’ (1879) showed Jesus as a Jewish boy—boasted that he was ‘the complete bourgeois’. He lived in the same house where his parents had lived, and ‘I eat, drink, sleep, take walks and work with the regularity of a church clock’.208 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), perhaps the greatest of all Jewish innovators, detested ‘modernism’ in almost all its forms. He had a particular contempt for modern art, accusing those who produced it of having ‘congenital defects in their eyesight’.209 He loved the graven images he collected, from Ancient Egypt, China, Greece and Rome, and he sat at his desk surrounded by them, rather like Abraham with his household gods, but not one was older than the Renaissance. Like Liebermann, Freud had a rigid daily, weekly, monthly, annual routine. Thus: 8-1 p.m., patients. Lunch 1-2, the main meal, which had to be promptly served. Constitutional walk, 2-3 p.m. (in bad weather and in old age he would take it striding round the vast family apartment). Then, 3-4 p.m. consultation, then patients until a late supper, then another constitutional followed by writing until 1 a.m. The weekly schedule was equally rigid: every Tuesday fortnight, meeting of B’nai B’rith; Wednesday with his professional group; Thursday and Saturday evenings, lectures at the university, followed on Saturday by his one relaxation, a game of four-handed tarok; Sunday morning, visit to his mother.210 Disciples who wished to see him had either to make an appointment or wait at certain places on his regular walks. Like Marx, who would not allow his daughters to train or work but kept them genteelly at home sewing, painting watercolours and playing the piano, Freud ran his large household in patriarchal fashion. Neither Marx nor Freud applied his theories to his home and family. Freud was the eldest son of a powerful mother and the pair of them bossed around his five younger sisters. In due course his wife took a subordinate role too. She did everything for him, even spreading his toothbrush with paste, like an old-fashioned valet. He never discussed his ideas with his wife, who tended privately to dismiss them: ‘Women have always had such troubles, but they needed no psychoanalysis to conquer them. After the menopause, they become quieter and more resigned.’ Nor were his ideas applied to his children. He sent his sons to a family doctor to find out the facts of life. His own behaviour was always ultra-respectable.211
The case of Freud is worth examining not only because of his enormous intrinsic importance but because of the way his work constantly echoes many of the great themes of the Jewish spirit and history. Indeed, he has some claims to be considered the most representative of all Jews. Not that Freud was a believer, let alone a believer in Torah. He considered all religion to be a form of collective delusion and all his work tended to show that religious (and other) beliefs were wholly man-made. There is some conflict of evidence about how much Hebrew and Yiddish he knew,212 and his education, rather than Judaic, was European, classical and scientific; he wrote superb German and his style won him the Goethe Prize. But both his parents came from hasidic Galicia, his mother from the ultra-hasidic town of Brody. None of his children converted or married gentiles (his son Ernest became a Zionist). He himself always identified with the Jews and in his last decade he announced that he was neither an Austrian nor a German but a Jew. He knew Herzl and respected him, and he would never take royalties from Hebrew or Yiddish translations of his works. His biographer Ernest Jones wrote that he ‘felt himself to be a Jew to the core…he made very few friends who were not Jews’.213 When his discoveries made him unpopular, it was to B’nai B’rith that he turned, as he later explained: ‘In my isolation the longing arose in me for a circle of chosen, high-minded men who, regardless of the audacity of what I had done, would receive me with friendliness…. That you were Jews only suited me the more, for I myself was a Jew, and it always seemed to me not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it.’214
However, Freud turned to his background for more than comfort. He ascribed great powers to the Jewish spirit. ‘If you do not let your son grow up a Jew,’ he told Max Graf, ‘you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else.’ But the Jews not only had immense energy, a quality Freud greatly admired, they placed supreme value on ideas, which he thought even more vital: ‘We preserved our unity through ideas’, he wrote, ‘and because of them we have survived to this day.’ He believed in the Jewish cathedocracy, the paramountcy of mind, and said that the founding of the Jabneh academy was ‘for me always one of the most significant manifestations in our history’.215
Freud’s abrupt discovery of psychoanalysis, his move from the posture of a physician to a healer, had something of the nature of a conversion, and of a Jewish kind. Until he was in his mid-thirties, he was a medical scientist. Thereafter he suddenly lost interest in conventional medicine. It was a Jewish tradition that mysteries should be reserved for middle age. Maimonides, rationalist though he was, accepted this view: he did not treat mental cases until well into life. The year thirty-six was considered especially significant. The Ba’al Shem Tov, for instance, revealed himself in his thirty-sixth year. In fact Ernest Jones dates Freud’s ‘latency period’ from the end of 1887, when he was thirty-one, culminating in the publication of ‘A Case of Successful Treatment of Hypnosis’ in 1892, when he was indeed thirty-six. But Freud himself, while believing in the sudden-miracle theory of scientific discovery, dated it three years later. He said a marble tablet ought to be placed on the house where he had a critical dream. It should read, he said: ‘In this house on 24 July 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr Sigmund Freud.’ Jones argued that the actual discovery was preceded by a change in personality. What is clear is that, from this point, Freud was elaborating an entirely new way in which human beings should look at themselves. He was seeking, as Jones put it, the answer to ‘the great problem of how man came to be what he is’, the ultimate goal of ‘the secrets of man’s inner nature’.216
This is essentially a religious quest and, as with all founders of new religions, Freud distanced himself rapidly from former associates. ‘With every step he took in his new venture he became more of a stranger to his colleagues. They could see no link whatever between [his] years of solid and fruitful medical research and his new interests and methods.’217 The spark of insight broadened out into a whole new faith. ‘What was at first a small clue in psychopathology’, wrote his colleague H
ans Sachs, ‘widened out by the untiring concentration of an original mind until eventually it grew into a fundamental concept, of psychology, of human civilization, and lastly of all organic development.’218
That Freud had the dynamism of a religious founder or a great heresiarch cannot be doubted. ‘Because I was a Jew’, he said, ‘I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect.’ Or again: ‘I often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history.’ He was, he confided to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, not so much a scientist, an experimenter or even an observer as a man of action: ‘I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador, an adventurer…with the curiosity, the boldness and the tenacity that belongs to such a being.’219 In his view it was Moses, not Abraham, who had founded Judaism, and he was fascinated by the great lawgiver, especially his statue in Rome by Michelangelo: ‘For three lonely September weeks in 1913 I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied it, measured it, sketched it, until I captured the understanding of it.’220 He also identified himself with Joseph, the dreamer and seer, and liked to point out that the experts who interpreted dreams were among the most important members of Alexander the Great’s staff.
Freud took many elements from Judaism. His technique of interpreting dreams is similar in some ways to the method used in the Zohar.221 From his friend Fliess he derived what he termed (in a letter to Jung) ‘the specifically mystic nature of my mysticism’, above all a fascination with the significance and predictive quality of numbers.222 He believed in, to the point of dread, such concepts as the Doppelgänger—‘I think I have avoided you’, he wrote to a surprised Arthur Schnitzler, ‘from a kind of reluctance to meet my double.’ He suffered from appalling Todesangst (death-anxiety).223 If Freudianism, like Marxism, is a system of superstition in some ways, if it suffers from the same osmotic quality as Nathan of Gaza’s messianic kabbalah—an ability to accommodate inconvenient facts as they emerge—that is not surprising, because it comes from the same background: western science is more a veneer than a substance. But the Jewish element in Freudianism is not primarily hasidic; it is Mosaic. Freud wanted to found a new system of quasi-religious law, with all the power and permanence that implied. As he put it, ‘We possess the truth’—no religious leader could have phrased it more dogmatically.224
The new creed was Jewish in two more important ways. Its Torah, its essential documents, were Freud’s own writings and cases, and they, like the Bible, were the apotheosis of the short story. The skill in illustrating a thesis by a tale had been a characteristic of the sages which had re-emerged in hasidism. Freud gave it scientific and secular status. It was, and to some extent still is, the key to his tremendous power over people. Referring to his 1901 ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (the story of Dora), he noted, with authorial satisfaction: ‘it is the most subtle thing I have yet written and will produce an even more horrifying effect than usual’.225 As Steven Marcus has pointed out, Freud is never less convincing than when denying his literary intentions: ‘I must now turn’, he wrote disingenuously, ‘to consider a complication to which I should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story, instead of being a medical man engaged on its dissection.’ Or again: ‘It still strikes myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.’226 In fact he took as much trouble with the shape and style of his cases prepared for publication as other contemporary doctor-short-story writers, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Somerset Maugham—but in addition he brought to them the conviction of truth, the portentousness and the underlying faith of the author of the First Book of Kings. Such cases as those of Dora, the Rat Man, Little Hans, Schreber and the Wolf Man, are the heart and essence of his revelation.
Secondly, Freudianism was a creed spread and practised primarily by Jews. It is not true, as has been often alleged, that it sprang from the treatment of wealthy Jewish women in Vienna. But Josef Breuer, Freud’s John the Baptist—in so far as he had one227—was a Jew, and so were all the original psychoanalysts. The significance of Jung to Freud was that he was the first important gentile follower he had been able to attract. That was why at the Second Psycho-Analytical Congress at Nuremberg in 1910 he overruled objections and proposed that Jung be made permanent president:
Most of you are Jews, and therefore you are incompetent to win friends for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modern role of preparing the ground. It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science. I am getting on in years and am weary of being perpetually attacked. We are all in danger…. The Swiss [Jung] will save us—will save me, and all of you as well.228
Freud was Mosaic in his conviction of righteousness too. The alternative Jewish tradition of tolerance, of the polycentric leadership and views, did not appeal to him. Max Graf, father of Little Hans, said the atmosphere in Freud’s study was that of ‘the foundation of a religion’. The patients were ‘the apostles’ and Freud himself, ‘good-hearted and considerate though he was in private life’, was ‘hard and relentless in the presentation of his ideas’.229 Freud had his little court, like a hasidic sage, first formed in 1902, and he never tolerated serious opposition to himself within it. Alfred Adler (1870-1937), one of the first and most brilliant of its members, was treated—once he ventured to disagree—not as a critical colleague but as a heresiarch or, in a term the Marxists would popularize, as a ‘defector’. As Graf put it, ‘It was a trial and the charge was heresy…. Freud, as the head of a church, banished Adler; he rejected him from the official church. Within the space of a few years, I lived through the whole development of a church history.’ Thereafter the herem was often in use, notably in the case of Jung, the greatest heresiarch of all. The break with Jung was especially bitter because, as Jones put it, he was to have been ‘the Joshua to Freud’s Moses’. His ‘face beamed whenever he spoke of Jung: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” ’ ‘When the empire I have founded is orphaned’, he wrote, ‘no one but Jung must inherit the whole thing.’230
The detection and expulsion of heretics was attended by odium theologicum. As Sachs said, Freud was ‘hard and sharp as steel, a good hater’. He denounced Albert Moll, author of The Sexual Life of the Child, as ‘a brute’ with ‘the intellectual and moral constitution of a pettifogging lawyer’, and (throwing him out of his study) ‘he has stunk up the room like the devil himself’. Adler was ‘trash’, ‘full of venom and meanness’; ‘I have made a pigmy great.’ Wilhelm Stekel, another ‘apostle’, was ‘a louse on the head of an astronomer’—a piece of abuse Freud stole from Heine, another good hater. Jung became ‘the heretic’, ‘the mystic’, and ‘Jungian’ the worst term in the Freudian vocabulary. Ex-followers were cut in the street, references to them excised from new editions of Freud’s works or changed to ‘formerly an analyst’. Jung’s letters to Freud were ‘lost’ for many years.231 On these searing controversies, Freud quoted Heine again: ‘One must forgive one’s enemies, but not before they have been hanged.’ There is much evidence of hanging, none of forgiveness. When Adler died in 1937 on a trip to Aberdeen, Freud—then over eighty—wrote to Arnold Zweig: ‘I don’t understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jew-boy out of a Viennese suburb, a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself.’232
If Freud had the intolerance of an Ezra and the characteristic faults of the cathedocracy, he also had some of its heroic virtues: dauntless courage in the defence of what he saw as the truth; passionate industry in pursuit of it, right to the end of a life marked by unremitting labour; a saintly death, after a slow cancer for which he refused morphia: ‘I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.’233 Arthur Koestler, who saw him at the end, found
a ‘small and fragile’ sage, with ‘the indestructible vitality of a Hebrew patriarch’.234 Freud was in the irrationalist Jewish tradition, more of a Nahmanides or a Besht than a Maimonides. But, perhaps because of this, he became a central pillar of the twentieth-century intellectual structure, itself a largely irrational edifice. To vary the metaphor, he gave humanity a new mirror, and no man has ever changed so radically and irreversibly the way in which people see themselves; or indeed talk about themselves, for he changed the vocabulary of introspection too.
If Freud transformed the way we see ourselves, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) changed the way we see the universe. That made him a central pillar of the twentieth century and perhaps of the twenty-first too, for history shows that great new reformulations of scientific law, such as Galileo’s, or Newton’s, or Darwin’s, continue to impose their consequences on society for huge spans of time. Einstein was a Jew from Ulm, where his father ran a small electro-chemical firm. He worked in the Swiss patent office in Berne, where he formulated the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and the General Theory (1915). His essential discoveries, like Freud’s, were made before the First World War; thereafter, he searched persistently but vainly for a general field theory which would accommodate Quantum Physics, in whose formulation he also played a key role.235
Einstein never seems to have been a practising Jew in the ordinary sense. In this he resembled Freud. But unlike Freud he did not dismiss belief in God as an illusion; he sought, rather, to redefine it. Intellectually, he was wholly in the Jewish-rationalist tradition of Maimonides and Spinoza. He was an empirical scientist of the most rigorous kind, formulating his theories specifically to make exact verification possible, and insisting it take place before according his views any validity—almost the exact opposite of Freud’s dogmatics. But he was prepared to admit the existence of non-verifiable truth. In this respect too he was more honest than Freud. Freud denied mystic truth while remaining, essentially, a mystic himself; Einstein remained a rationalist, while admitting a mystic sphere. He thought that ‘the mysterious’, which he saw as emotional rather than factual, ‘stands at the cradle of true art and true science’. Beyond ‘the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty’ there were impenetrable truths ‘which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds’. Awareness of this, he argued, was what constituted true religious feeling and ‘in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man’.236