Freud's Theory of the Jews

In 1937, Hitler and the NAZIs are consolidating power in the Third Reich and preparing to swallow neighboring Austria whole. Meanwhile, famous Viennese neurologist and father of modern psychology Sigmund Freud is releasing a final original work. The book, in three parts, is called Moses and Monotheism. Parts one and two come out in German in 1937, and part three emerges for the first time in German and English editions in 1939.

So, a book, on the foundational meaning of the Jew, at a time when ever present but previously latent antisemitism is becoming the rallying cry of Europe’s most dynamic leader, the newly minted Fuherer. But Freud’s last book is no defence of the Jewish people. In fact, it’s the opposite. Freud notes at the outset that many won’t like what he has to say: “To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken light-heartedly especially by one belonging to that people.”

Nevertheless, Freud plunges ahead. AS An important JEW he feels he has the moral right to offer his preferred revisionist critique, his more correct (per)version of Jewish truth. He writes: “No consideration, however, will move me to set aside truth in favour of supposed national interests.” Europe is, once again, a cesspool of Jew hate, Hitler’s brownshirts are massed on the Austrian border, but Freud’s going to say what he has to say, regardless of the “national interests”, by which he means, presumably, the rest of his Jewish brethren.

So what does he have to say? The book is a fever dream reinterpretation of the biblical Exodus. Freud claims to be inspired by late 19^th century discoveries in archeology that have altered the historical record. The great Doctor leaps from these archeological discoveries in Egypt—which he claims reveal the tomb of a Pharaoh said to have exclusively worshipped the sun god Ra—to the assertion that Moses was not a Jewish slave at all. He was, in fact, part of a splinter group still dedicated to worshiping Ra over and above all other deities. “Moses is an Egyptian probably of noble origin whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion!”

In his day, Egyptian Moses, according to Doctor Freud, is a popular figure, but not with authorities. When he and his followers are challenged by the current Pharoah, Moses flees, taking a good part of the pre-Jew Jewish slaves with him. In the desert, they meet up and sort of merge with another tribe that also has monotheistic tendencies focused on a volcano god called Jahve. Somewhere in there, I think, Freud has everyone show up at Jahve’s volcano (aka Mount Sinai) which goes off in thunderous, murderous rage. In Freud’s telling, Moses doesn’t die right before his rescued tribe enters the promised land, but rather the meshed tribe kills Moses to placate Jahve. Freud laments the killing of Moses and goes out of his way to trash Jahve—future god of the Jewish people aka Yahweh. He writes: “The god Jahve was probably in no way a remarkable being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty…”

“The god Jahve was probably in no way a remarkable being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty…”

Meanwhile, the blood-thirsty NAZI terror looms. For Jewish Vienna, everything will soon be reduced to one thing only: survival. Freud’s book is quickly forgotten as chaos mounts in Western Europe. In 1938 the NAZIs take over Austria without firing a single shot. They are met with brutish enthusiasm by the rank-and-file citizenry, particularly the million or so ethnic Germans Hitler claims require protection and reunification via the Thousand-Year Reich. Almost immediately the dictates of the NAZI eugenics project are applied. Jews are expected to wear stars on their clothes and brandish passports stamped with a “J”. Hitler sends over emerging uber-bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann to organize the methodical imposition of ever more restrictive rules; rules designed to reduce the 200,000 mostly well-off Austrian Jews, almost all of them in Freud’s Vienna, to impoverished castaways.

For several generations, after the last paterfamilias ruler of the Austrian empire ended all restrictions on Jewish citizens, Vienna had been a paradise. Jewish citizens opened businesses and pursued higher education. Freud studied medicine at The University of Vienna. On pleasant evenings after his classes, he strolled the Stephansplatz with his mates, stopping to buy cones of chestnut puree topped with whipped cream from street vendors.

Mere days after NAZI rule is imposed, everything changes. The assimilated middle classes of Jewish Vienna show up for suddenly required police registration. Eager to make a good impression on the NAZI overseers, many wear suits and dresses. They are registered and immediately ordered to work picking up trash and cleaning the sidewalks with toothbrushes and rags. Those who protest are arrested and shipped to Dachau from which they never returned except as bags of ashes. The Jewish Viennese are totally unprepared, even dumbfounded. Since 1933 students had been publicly burning Dr. Freud’s “Jewish” books across campuses in Germany. But before the NAZIs took over, Freud echoed the general sentiment of the Viennese Jews when he wrote to his nephew, Sam: “The only thing I can say, is that we are determined to stick it out here to the last. Perhaps it may not come out too bad.”

Things, in fact, are coming out very bad indeed. Desperate Viennese Jews place clumsily worded classified adverts in the Manchester Guardian. “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.” The ads sought kindness but also offered up genteel children as young as ten as maids, au pairs, cooks and domestic servants, anything to get them a visa to the UK. Under the new German regime, no Jew was allowed to leave without a visa to another country.

Freud remains steadfast, ignoring the entreaties of his horrified contemporaries to leave immediately. “Vienna has been in panicky spirits,” his daughter Anna Freud wrote to British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in February 1938. “We are not going along with the panic.” Freud works on his Moses book. He begins to apply some of his most famous theories to excuse the strange behaviour of the proto-Jews united around the lava god Javeh. Why do these two merged tribes murder their savior, Moses? Freud asks rhetorically. This act of Oedipal self destruction is, according to him, perfectly natural, even universal. It’s myth incarnate, nothing special. Since time immemorial, the people have needed to kill their father figures, slaughter their godheads. From this necessary primal act of rage, followed by guilt, unrequited longing and, of course, repression, comes the entire edifice of human relationship to the eternal. He writes: “The murder of Moses by his Jewish people… becomes an indispensable part of our construction, an important link between the forgotten event of primeval times and its later emergence in the form of the monotheistic religions.”

The NAZI noose tightens. The Freud home and his Vienna publishing house are searched. The great man’s passport is taken.

All very interesting except to the Jews of Vienna. By now there are but some 60,000 Jews left, everyone else having either been shipped off to Dachau or stripped of their life savings and forced to flee. Those that remain desperately await papers to leave. The NAZI noose tightens. The Freud home and his Vienna publishing house are searched. The great man’s passport is taken. Still Freud prevaricates.

Then, in March of 1939, his beloved daughter Anna is picked up off the street and questioned for hours by the Gestapo. Anna returns home, unlike so many others, and Freud, shaken, announces it is now time to depart. Papers are supplied by the UK, but the SS demurs. International outrage accrues and finally the NAZIs relent after Freud signs documents stating that the Third Reich has treated him and his family very kindly. (“I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone,” Freud was rumoured at the time to have written jauntily at the bottom of this formal document.) The family departs in June. They follow the same train and ferry route taken by thousands of formerly Austrian Jewish children—sent ahead by their parents who, though they don’t yet know it, they will never see again.

Safely ensconced outside London, Freud finishes his book, with final parting shots at the Jews and their nature. “Moses,” Freud laments, “created their character by giving to them a religion which heightened their self-confidence to such a degree that they believed themselves to be superior to all other peoples. They survived by keeping aloof from the others.” Freud is apologetic. He urges his readers to see that his peers are nothing special, not really. They may seem strange but they’re just Egyptians who feel bad about killing Daddy, no different than so many other tribals and primaevals whose myths the authors of the bible inverted and reinvented for their own misguided purposes. “Out of this guilt-laden compromise between acceptance and rejection,” Freud concludes, “there arose that peculiar character of the Jewish people which has ever since been a puzzle to other nations.”

Meanwhile, through that hot, restless summer since arriving in England, the Freuds anxiously await extended family left behind, particularly four of the Doctor’s sisters. Then, all at once, three blows are dealt to the Freuds. The first blow comes on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am. The Germans invade Poland. England and France declare war on the Reich. Almost immediately, the waterways are infested with German U-boats. All civilian shipping and transport between continental Europe and the UK and the Americas cease. Exit visas become worthless. There is no way out. Only a few weeks later, the patriarch, the undeniably brilliant Sigmund Freud, succumbs to his prolonged battle with mouth cancer. He dies on September 23, 1939 at the age of 83. Then a final heavy blow: the family gets word that Adolfine Freud, Pauline Freud Winternitz, Marie Freud, and Rosa Freud have been swept up in the NAZI purges and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. After that, communication ceases. There is no further news about the fate of the sisters.

Gradually through the fog of war, it becomes clear that Doctor Freud had overplayed his hand. He acted too late, waited too long, all the while believing his sisters and their families would be safe in Vienna, tied as they were to the great Doctor. He was wrong.

What else was Freud wrong about? Re-reading Moses and Monotheism, it’s possible to argue that he was wrong about the entire purpose of his own book. Freud himself seems to have been plagued at the end of his life by the very psychological phenomena of repression and unconscious self hate he identified as such a damaging part of human psychology. In this, I’m reminded of our current circumstances. Jew hate is the new norm, as if it never left. It’s the cause-du-jour for trendy urbanites and gullible co-eds alike. As in Freud’s time, we have a new generation of secular Jews busy helping and hating themselves by advancing revisionist history that harms, as Freud put it, “the national interest.” They follow the Viennese Doctor in making outlandish claims about the Jewish people, most notably, today, the assertion that Judaism and the land of Israel have no inherent connection. One should be, instead, the far more appeasing creature known as the “anti-Zionist” Jew. Like Freud, their true aspiration is to reinvent not Jewish history, but their own personal narrative. We are different! We are harmless! We gratefully give up our own tiny sliver of land!

Freud does not have to produce this book. He does not have to devote his valuable, diminishing energy to rewriting the bible in accordance with his preferred narrative, Jews as antecedents, perverse children on the right path worshipping the wrong God. Don’t hate the messenger, Freud is (unconsciously) saying. Instead, accept our peccadilloes, which, after all, as I have amply demonstrated, can still be used for the good of an enlightened, rational, Christian Western Europe.

The US, UK and Canada all currently have far-left parties absolutely obsessed with the nonexistent Gaza genocide. They are all, also, not coincidentally, led by men and women who claim Jewish heritage but work tirelessly to concoct a false narrative that denies the Jewish people a fundamental part of their heritage—their inalienable connection to the land of Israel. It’s all a bit cringe. Hitler was having none of it. Neither were the Austrians, the Dutch, the Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and others who plunged into the NAZI project of racial extermination with the zeal of true believers. Towards the end of the war, the Freud family discovers the fate of the Austrian sisters they left behind. Adolfine Freud dies after only a few months in the Theresienstadt transit camp. Pauline Freud Winternitz, Marie Freud, and Rosa Freud live long enough to be sent by cattle car to the hastily established concentration camp Treblinka, just outside Warsaw. There they are murdered along with almost a million others.