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Soaring on the Wings of the Wind: Freud, Jews and Judaism

Objectives: This paper looks at Freud's Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud's life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew “in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial”. The 18th century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life. In this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new 20th century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's life and work needs to be understood in the context of fin-de-siécle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanization of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. Conclusions: Freud, despite a deliberate attempt to play down his Jewish origins to deflect anti-Semitic attacks, is the most representative Jew of his time and his thinking and work represents the finest manifestation of the Litvak mentality.