"Surely Jews understand that in identifying an anti-Semite one

                                                               (Jewish historian)

              "The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic."
                                            Evelyn Torton Beck, 1982, p. xxii

         "[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
          [representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to see
          themselves and groups within which they identify as victims who are
          being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly from
          unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
          engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
          to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by feelings
          of self-righteousness, is rarely satisfying. Indeed, he can often
          achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the punishment
          is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
          persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish psychoanalyst]
          Theodore Reik, who was Nyde's teacher, suggested that a 'paranoid
          masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
          -- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
           1982, p. 133

"I felt that the bigotry always blamed on those who said anything

negative about Jews was equally visible on the other [Jewish]

side of the fence." Evelyn Kaye, (Jewish author, p. 114)

              "Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to prejudice."
                    Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his article
                    about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
                    elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility to it,
                    1998, p. 266

    "For all my life, I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and
     was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked,
     and I thought, Well, I am over 40, I have made a successful career,
     I have made a forturne. But what will tell my children when I am 70?"
        -- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming president of the
            Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]

"We should be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their

virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group

without being called an anti-Semite. Frankness does not feed

anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does." Kevin Meyers,

(British journalist), p. 26

"Telling the truth is not anti-Semitic. Am I right?"

Joe Wood, (African-American)

"It seems that [poet Allen] Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in

the dust of a dormitory window; the words were too shocking

for the Dean of Students to speak, so he had written them on a

piece of paper which he had pushed across the desk to my

husband: 'Fuck the Jews.' ... 'He's a Jew himself,' said the Dean.

'Can you understand his writing a thing like that?' Yes, Lionel

could understand; but he couldn't explain it to the Dean."

Dianna Trilling, (Jewish author) in BLOOM, p. 302

The foundation of modern Jewish identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish" -- above all else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction -- traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:

"the goyim represent, quite literally, an act of God. When they are

persecutors they are also instruments of justice, punishing the Jews

for transgressing the Law, and in any case they do not know better."

The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in 1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,1998, p. 62]

The notion that Jews, scattered throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish people:

"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of

the earth unto the other ... And among these nations shalt thou find

no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: But the Lord

shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow

of mind. And they life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt

fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life ... and thou

shalt be only oppressed and crushed always."

     It is clear that the Jewish conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:

     "The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
      in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
     without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
     treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
     deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
     is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
     even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
     the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
     position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
     [REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]

      When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.

The combined post-Holocaust Jewish emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies -- beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then, now, and across history.

The framework for this Jewish moral dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews (post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion. Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]

In the political context of the modern nation of Israel, even its areligious state ideology -- Zionism -- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent 'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma. "Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and] that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]

"It is impossible to comprehend the largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz, "...The important point is that Jews are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 102, 101] In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar, Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world, saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]

"The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26] "Among most anti-Semites," adds another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176] Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]

"Anti-Semitism," says prominent (Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live." "The psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and functions independent of its object." "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xvii]

"The existence of anti-Semitism and the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions ... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases; FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden, ""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]

In Jewish folklore, even intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:

"A few months after the end of World War I, the premier of Poland

had a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. 'If you don't meet

our nation's demands at the peace conference,' warned the premier,

'I foresee great troubles ahead. The Polish people will be very

angry, and they'll go out and massacre the Jews.'

'And if your demands are met?' asked Wilson.

'In that case,' responded the premier, 'my people will be delighted.

They'll go out in the streets and get drunk -- and then they'll massacre

the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 60]

     "When it comes to the millions of Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author Michael Medved,

    "historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done
    to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
    we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
    11-12-01]

      "Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

     Eventual New York Times Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the standard Jewish theme this way:

     "The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
     the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
     are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
     what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
     mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
     is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
     of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]

"Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

Such widespread Jewish Orwellian doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself, popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable, and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ... 'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

This outrageously ahistorical perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]

In the modern Jewish community post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278] Milton Steinberg notes that:

"Unfortunately Jews, like other human beings, are so constituted as

to be reluctant to pass adverse judgment on themselves. Hence,

whether with justice or not they will hold their Jewishness at fault

for whatever goes wrong in their lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]

"The Cult of Victimhood," observes David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]

Facing this suffocating shield, once defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America. "During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187] Once labeled an "anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a Jewish journal in Poland, :

"The reality of [the Nazi death camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and

contemporary anti-Semites do not have the option of stating that it is not

their goal." [GEBERT]

Albert Lindemann notes such accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv]

(Professor Lindemann wrote an extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes." [WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63] Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual position on American and British college campuses, including history department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR 99, p. 44-45]

Central to the modern Jewish world view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,

"serves as the point from which Jews can morally survey the entire past

and classify all present society ... Some Jewish thinkers consider the

Holocaust [as] providing a singular point of wrong innocence against

which they can judge everyone else. It has consciously been chosen by

Jews to be their crucifixion: the great sorrow they must mediate. Non-

Jews are tried by two questions: What did they do (collectively or

individually, directly or indirectly, by commission or omission) to further

anti-Semitism? What did they do to stop the Holocaust? The most

severe judges find everyone guilty who did not risk his family's lives

to save Jews in the Holocaust." [AMATO, p. 181]

Reflecting again the old Chosen People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a "unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against Jewish attack, saying:

"[It is accused] that I have violated the uniqueness of anti-Semitism

by comparing it with other exclusionary movements -- illustrating

the unwillingness of some Jews to measure their own experience

on a general human scale, unless anti-Semitism is presented ... as

the very archetype of all prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes.

For me the uniqueness of anti-Semitism was not a foregone

conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM, J., 1986, p. 225]

(It is interesting to wonder what Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee -- [HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])

Despite the long historical list of very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March of the Living, p. 5]

Jewish blameless innocence throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that Steiner's

"theory of anti-Semitism [is that it] is caused by the atavistic pagan

element in western religion by which Jews are regarded as a collective

Executioner of a central human sacrifice. We have to do here with a

shifting moral responsibility, by which the individual lays his moral

burden firstly on Jesus himself, who dies to save him; and secondly,

on the Jews who bring about the necessary death of Jesus ... In any

event, the Jews have been elected, 'chosen' if you will, to the position

of scapegoat so that all others can escape guilt into the innocence of

childhood and recover the joy of Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]

Roger Kamenetz notes his discomfort as a Jew when the beliefs he had been emphatically taught about the Holocaust were challenged by the Buddhist world view, that humans must take responsibility for their actions that effect their fate:

"I had been shocked, a little outraged, by what I'd heard about

the Buddhist view of the Holocaust. I could not accept that the

suffering of the Jews was somehow a result of their previous

actions. Wasn't the knowledge of shared victimization the source

of Jewish identification with the Tibetans? Weren't we fellow

victims, fellow innocent victims? ... In Buddhism, the whole

notion of an innocent victim carried little weight in assessing

how one responded to tragic circumstances." [KAMENETZ, R.,

Note the American Jewish Congress fury at Israeli rabbi and Shas party leader Ovadia Yosef ("who plays a critical role in coalition politics in Israel") when he dared to challenge modern Jewish convention about the Holocaust. In 2000, he suggested that it seemed to him that "Holocaust victims were punished for sins in an earlier life." However one might interpret this view, it is something considerably less than innocence. The AJC's reaction was outrage, and formally, that

"Rabbi Yosef must be charged with knowing that his statements can

be used as an excuse for Nazi barbarisms, as a kind of Nazi apologetics

... He acknowledges the Holocaust but then claims God's justification

for its horrors. If that is not blasphemy, then nothing is." [PR

Berel Lang looks upon the widespread Jewish effort to elude their own honest history and attendant moral responsibility for it with concern. In modern Jewish historical revisionism, "the reasonable ... concern to understand anti-Semitism has ... nothing to do with Jews. This view ... has served as a premise in the most serious historical attempts to analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism ... This resistance to the possibility of a connection between anti-Semitism and Jewish history is ... pernicious." [CUDDIHY, p. 23-24] "Jews," notes Robert Segal, "fear that a historical explanation [of anti-Semitism] will make Jews responsible for anti-Semitism, and will thereby excuse it." [CUDDIHY, p. 34] "It seems clear that Jews exhibit an all-too common human failing," says Albert Lindemann, "They actually do not want to understand their past -- or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities." [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. 535] "Jews come honorably to their paranoia," adds Cuddihy, "Nevertheless, when it comes to their own behavior, they go on a moral holiday." [CUDDIHY, p. 35]

This widespread Jewish "moral holiday," however secularly guised, is nonetheless rooted in the old rabbinical ghettos; as we have seen, many centuries passed with Jewish history self-understood to begin and end with itself, the sacred history of a "people apart" unrelated to the history of others around them.

There is also -- more importantly in a largely areligious age -- an entire "science" (albeit a newly-created, and distinctly Jewish, one, even built in some ways upon a rabbinical model; some have called it a "surrogate religion") [GAY, p. 19-20] to use in service to prove the modern Jewish theses of identity, an identity largely based upon an oppositional antithesis: lofty Jewish moral worth versus an omnipresent, generic, and irrational anti-Semitism. This controversial "science" to prove the major premises of Jewish self-conception is psychoanalytic theory, the invention of a Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, itself a field of endeavor and allegiance overwhelmingly populated, predominated, and propagandized by Jews to our own day.

Let us start with the fact that all 17 original members of Freud's Psychological Wednesday Society were Jewish and most of his patients, by which Freud developed his theories of human neurosis, were women from "eminent Austrian Jewish families." The original Society members, notes Dennis Klein, "were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity ... [Their] feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytic circle ... it tightened the bond among members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite." [KLEIN, p. vii] (Absorbed with notions of elitism and clandestine intrigues, by 1912, six die-hard loyalists to Freud were joined in a behind-the-scenes "committee," described by Freud as a "secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men." This group, said The Master, "would have to be strictly secret [Freud's emphasis] in its existence and its actions." [MASSON, 1990, p. 113])

"Freud," says another Jewish author, Earl Grollman,

"may also have experienced the 'essence of Judaism' through his

community activities with other Jews. Many of his important

theories were delivered before the Fraternity of Jewish Students

and the B'nai B'rith organization. Most of the colleagues in his

movement were Jewish ... But whatever the reasons -- historical,

sociological, psychological -- group bonds did provide a warm

shelter with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind

of inner security, a 'we-feeling,' illustrated even by the selection

of jokes and stories recounted in the group. It is what Freud called

'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same

inner construction.'" [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 41]

"All over the world," says Jewish psychoanalyst Earl Hopper, "Jews are drawn to the profession of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The 1990 roster of the International Psychoanalytical Association reads like the membership list of a synagogue." [HOPPER, p. 18] "That vast apparatus of putative concern, psychiatry," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "is largely a Jewish monopoly." [KAHN, R., p. 53] "An area of medicine which Jews have made almost their own is psychiatry." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 119] "Jews," says Ann Roiphe, also Jewish, "have rushed to psychoanalysis as lemmings to the sea." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 76] Psychotherapy is also in all respects so overwhelmingly a Jewish consumer domain that in a 1996 survey (in which nearly half of 17 psychoanalysts in a research project were expressly solicited as non-Jews), 75% of the patients for all of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish therapists) were found to be Jewish. [OSTROW, p. 27]

As James Yaffe observed in 1968:

"There is little question that a comparatively large proportion of the

patients undergoing psychoanalysis in America are Jewish. It

also seems to be true that Jewish parents are more likely than

equally affluent non-Jewish parents to send their children for

psychiatric treatment. Those who can't afford analysis are just

as enthusiastic about the blessings of less expensive psychiatry.

According to one leader in the field, 'If you open a mental health

clinic and don't advertise, Jews will be the only people who

flock to it.' In some sections of the Jewish community, in fact,

psychiatry has become a way of life, almost a substitute religion.

In southern California it's hard to find a Jewish family that hasn't

got at least one member in analysis." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 293]

With advancement out of the Jewish ghetto in the 18th century, and increased secular questioning about the religiously-based myths about themselves and how they fit into mainstream societies, over the last couple of centuries "the behavior pattern of assimilated Jews," says Hannah Arendt, "determined by this continuous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves ... created a Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere ... Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved problem for every individual Jew." [ARENDT, p. 67] The Jewish novelist Franz Kafka, for instance, once remarked that poet Heinrich Heine's "conflict with Jewry" was "exactly what made him so typically Jewish," [SILBERMAN, p. 63] i.e., being Jewish, post-Enlightenment, was a war within the psyche about being Jewish.

"Whatever the reasons for their philosophical disarray and mental anguish," observes Gerald Krefetz, "Jews were among the first groups to seek relief from psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists ... perhaps psychiatry is today's secular rabbinate." [KREFETZ, p. 180] This theme is inverted from a negative to a positive and romanticized by Harriet Fromkin: "If we had no further illustration than the character of Freud, we should have a basis for suspecting some connection between the Jew and psychological genius." [KAHN, R., p. 72]

Freud eventually directed his projective obsessions towards his Old Testament Jewish heritage, asserting -- among other things -- that the revered patriarch, Moses, may not have even been Jewish. And that Jews killed him. "Biblical religion, according to Freud," said Joseph Campbell, "had the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figures hides a repressed conviction of guilt which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced." [CAMPBELL, MASKS, p. 126] Freud believed that Jews had a continuous anxiety and resentment about breaking the many laws of their Father God. Freud wrote that

"In the religion of Moses itself there was no direct expression for the

murderer's father-hate. Only a powerful reaction to it could make

its appearance: the consciousness of guilt because of that hostility,

the bad conscience because one had sinned against God and

continued to sin. This feeling of guiltiness, which the Prophets kept

incessantly alive ... cleverly veiled the true origin of the feeling. The

people met with hard times... it became not easy to adhere to the

illusion ... they did not observe the laws. The need for satisfying

this feeling of guilt ... was insatiable, more exacting, but also more

petty ... It [the feeling of neurosis] bears the characteristic of being

never concluded ... with which we are familiar in the reaction-

formation of obsessional neurosis." [KREFETZ, p. 181-182]

In the Freudian worldview, Richard Rubenstein explains that the blueprint to understand the troubled anti-Semitic mind (and everyone's, for that matter) starts here:

"According to Freud, civilization and religion began with a 'primal

crime' in which the father of the original human horde was

cannibalistically murdered by his sons to gain sexual possession

of his females. The unconscious memory of the deed continues

to agonize the sons and their progeny, thereby causing the

murdered father to be imagined as the ever-lasting Heavenly Father.

For Freud, the supreme object of human worship [the Father God]

is none other than the first object of human criminality." [RUBENSTEIN,

From this bizarrely fictional speculation, a Judeo-centric argument can be, and is, often created that explains anti-Semitism in western tradition as Christianity's (psychoanalytically-based) conflict with Judaism. This includes Christian envy of God's favoritism of Jewry, traditional Christian belief that Jews were the killers of Christ (an echo of the "murder God" theme), Judaism itself as a "father" religion to Christianity, and on and on. In this scenario, Jews are scapegoated by Christians for the very death of God. Not surprisingly, the Freudian paradigm for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a violent one. "The Jews had a father religion," said Freud, "and the Christians a son religion, and the subconscious is to kill the father from time to time." [PERLMUTTER, p. 141] Hence, in this view too, Nazi fascism was not really (as declared and practiced by them) an anti-Christian creed, but -- however incongruous -- an expression of it. "In a sense," declares Rubenstein, "the death camps [for Jews] were the terminal expression of Christian anti-Semitism ... [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 43] ... since the sins and guilts that beset the anti-Semites existence demands the death of the Jews." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 41]

Elsewhere in the psychoanalytic world, John Murray Cuddihy has even argued that the essence of Freud's unconscious "id" theory was really the Jewish "ordeal of civility," the struggle to "civilize," to acculturate into the interpersonal norms of Gentile culture. (Freud's name for frustrated human desire can even been seen as a pun on the Yiddish word for Jew: Yid). In this vein, Maurice Samuels reflected widespread social issues of the day when he suggested in 1932, however facetiously, that anti-Semitism was probably rooted in "a lack of niceness in the Jews. If the Jews would only temper their voices, their table manners and their ties, if they would be discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobtrusive in their comings and goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get along very well." [SILBERMAN, p. 30] Albert Lindemann notes also the undercurrent of agitated Jewishness (antithetical to non-Jewish Others) in three major Jewish-dominated ideologies in the last 150 years: "Such modern ideologies as socialism, (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism, and various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis and related schools) all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of Gentile existence, be it in exploitive capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 14]

On one hand deconstructing their traditional religious faith in terms of collective neurosis, the Jewish nature of the psychoanalytic community yet echoes the exclusivist tribal ethic -- the "chosenness" and "apartness" from others -- of classical Judaism. "Psychoanalysis from its origins," notes Kevin MacDonald, "has been a "science apart' from the rest of psychology and psychiatry, resulting in two separate and incompatible discourses about human behavior. Psychoanalysis was and remains a highly authoritarian movement in which group boundaries are rigidly maintained and in which heretics are expelled." [MACDONALD, p. 237] This ethos of a psychoanalytic chosen people was criticized by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, who was courted by Freud to join the early psychoanalytic movement. Bleuler resisted the absolutism of the Freudians, telling Freud that "this 'who is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for religious and political parties ... for science I consider it harmful." [GAY, p. 145]

In 1990, a (Jewish) psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Mouisaieff Masson, former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London and thereby a member of the international psychoanalytic "inner circle," wrote a volume exposing the secretive behind-the-scenes foundations of the psychoanalytic community:

"No book has yet told what it is like to undergo training as an orthodox

Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any book tell what it is like to leave

that profitable and prestigious profession -- those who have been part of

the inner circle of psychoanalysis either do not leave, or have left in

discrete silence. Thus, until now it has been almost impossible to get

an internal view of the workings of this 'men's club' with its initiation

rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept

concepts handed down from the leader, no matter how irrational;

xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment

of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out. It is worth asking

why no book like this has appeared before, since people have written

accounts of leaving almost every other cult." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p.

Many Jewish scholars these days are trying to more openly claim Freud as one of their own and find in psychoanalysis its distinctly Jewish foundation. (An important impetus in Freud's construction of his theories of psychoanalysis is anti-Semitism. See Eric Grollman's Judaism in Sigmund Freud's World, for example, for a dose of this perspective). [GROLLMAN, E., 1965] While Freud always presented himself as an atheist and a completely "assimilated" Jew in mainstream Viennese society, there is evidence and argument that Freud was hiding his traditionally Jewish background and conflict with his (now believed to be) religious parents. Freud was even, beginning in 1897, a member of the Vienna chapter of the Jewish fraternal order, B'nai B'rith. Concerning their roots in traditional Judaism, Emmanuel Rice believes that Freud and his family were -- to the public -- deceptive at the least. "The fact," says Emmanuel Rice, "that these people were lying either did not occur to or seem to bother them." [RICE, p. 254] "It appears," continues Rice, "the family environment of Sigmund Freud's formative years was far more involved with Judaic scholarship, theological beliefs, and ritual practices than has been traditionally thought to be the case." [RICE, p. 257] This has significant implications -- by the very dictates of psychoanalytic theory which demands an exploration of childhood experiences for the roots of adult psychological behavior-- to understand what were Freud's own "internal conflicts." And it inevitably leads more deeply to a Jewish specificity in the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory, something that Freud emphatically resisted through most of his life, publicly conceding. Rice even asserts that Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism, which scandalized traditional Judaism, must be understood not as scientific theory, but "as a novel with autobiographical elements." [RICE, p. 235]

Freud was even married to a woman, Martha Bernaya, whose grandfather was the chief rabbi of Hamburg. Raised in an Orthodox household, after Freud's death she resumed traditionalist customs. [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 70-71]

As Jewish scholar Samuel Klausner notes:

"Freud himself was a Jew, and most of the members of his immediate

Vienna circle were Jews. Admittance to the psychoanalytic

movement required analysis by a previous initiate, a sort of

'apostolic succession.' The original Jewish group tended to analyze

Jews. Unwittingly, psychoanalytic ideology may be couched in a

Jewish ethic strange to individuals socialized in the Protestant ethic."

[GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 43]

     Karl Abraham, a close disciple of Freud, took issue with the Master's reluctance to concede that his completely rationalist view of human psyche -- putting the human mind into square pegs -- was particularly Jewish. "After all," said Abraham, "the Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us." [GAY, p. 131] Freud's technique, in its exegetical method, he suggested, was "essentially Talmudic." [OSTROW, p. 25] Aaron Rabinowitz has even written a recent article that "enumerates and discusses some halachic [Jewish religious law] principles and values which are exerting influence on the practice of psychotherapy." [RABINOWITZ, A., 2000, p. 193]

      Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:

"Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah [Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D, 11-22-02, p. 28]

     (Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p. 39-40]

      Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977, Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor." [GAY, p. 118]

"Although Freud openly questioned all religion," says M. H. Goldberg,

"including Judaism, he always thought of himself as a Jew and raised

his six children as Jews. In a letter to his fiancé written in 1882, Freud

concluded that 'something of the core, of the essence of this

meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our

home." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 30]

"Freud's Jewishness [was] ever present in his mind," suggests Benno Weiser Varon, "This mind, by the way, was a Talmudic mind, searching and speculative." [VARON, p. 9] Karl Krauss, a prominent Viennese leftist, journalist and baptized Jew, knew Freud and even declared psychoanalysis to be "the conquest of the confessional by the Jews of Vienna." [VARON, p. 9] He also asserted that "they have the press, they have the stock exchange, they also have the subconscious!" and that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." [WINOKUR, J., 1992, p. 151-152]

Freud himself wrote a special preface to the Hebrew edition of his volume, Totem and Taboo, speaking of himself in the third person:

"[He] has never repudiated his people, who feels in essential nature a

Jew, and who has no desire to alter this nature. If the question were put

to him: 'Since you have abandoned all the common characteristics of

your countrymen, what is there left that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A

very good deal and probably its very essence,' though he could not

express that essence clearly in words." [VARON, p. 9]

    Freud once wrote to a Jewish friend that "racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual constitution." [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 290] Willy Aron adds that "in his famous address, 'On Being of the Sons of the Covenant,' delivered on May 6, 1926, on his 70th birthday, Freud spoke of 'the irresistible attraction of Judaism and Jews' and 'of the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.'" [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 293] Freud further noted his link to the "racial" dimension of Jewishness, that "I can say that I am as little an adherent of the Jewish religion as of any other religion, i.e., I consider them all important as objects of scientific interest, but I do not share the emotional attitudes that goes with them. On the other hand, I have always felt a strong feeling of kinship with my race and have fostered it in my children." [ARON, p. 294]

     Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which made the attractiveness of Judiams nad Jews irresistible ... many obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people; there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xiii]

     "Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says Arnold Jacob Wolf,

     "Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he himself was,
     the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still dismiss it as
     peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the biblical roots of
     the new wisdom. Not only are many practitioners of the art, like the very first
     analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a widespread conviction
     that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of psychoanalysis are
     para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry upon his deepest
     feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the Jewish style
     both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized prudishness
     together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is Talmudic."
     [WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]

Earl Hopper, who acknowledges that "my identity as a Jew is inseparable from my identify as a psychoanalyst," understands psychoanalysis to be of course a "Jewish science," but ascribes its roots to Freud's view that psychoanalysis represents the revolutionary insights of a "marginalized" people, i.e., Jews had been in the past conceptually lumped by gentiles together with thieves, lepers, and misfits of all kinds. [HOPPER, p. 19] The insightful Jewish world view, this argument insists, has therefore keener "outsider" perceptions of the norms of mainstream cultures of the Jewish diaspora. And Jewish genius is to criticize and deconstruct them. (It is interesting that this "marginalized victim people" concept emerges from the minds of rich, elitist Jewish psychoanalysts who imprint their paradigms of victimhood upon usually affluent patient-sponges, Jewish or not).

Arnold Meadow and Harold Vetter even argue that Freudian theory is based on the "Judaic value system" including Judaism's "this life" (not afterlife) orientation, a "rationalist control over ... sexual urges," the "hidden meaning of words," and the presence of the "Oedipus complex ... in Jewish culture, perhaps in peculiarly intense form." [MEADOW, p. 164] This includes Freud's notion, claim the authors, that a woman tries to make her husband her child to "act the part of a mother to him." Furthermore, the authoritarian nature of psychoanalysis emphasizes "rationality as a basis for authority [which] closely parallels the authority relationship found in Jewish culture." [MEADOW, p. 163] The patient's resistance to the psychoanalyst's insights into the patient's troubles "is diminished by the analyst's rational interpretation, or by the patient's positive transference toward the analyst." [MEADOW, p. 162] To follow the logic of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Jewish revelation and world view, the patient's "transference" is ultimately -- whatever else it is claimed to be -- a sensitization to "being Jewish."