Zionist, Roudinesco betrays Freud’s thought1;
he never engaged with Zionism in Palestine
To mutilate, invade, enslave, dominate, normalize, categorize, classify, hierarchise, intimidate, humiliate, domesticate, trivialize,...
"As a Jew, I was ready to enter into the opposition and give up getting on with the compact majority."2
Freud always was a Zionist, a passage, sexist (must we see there a symptom of the trauma of circumcision?), in his 1913 letter to Sabina Spielrein, testifies to it:
"I want to assume, if your child is a boy, that he will become an unwavering Zionist."
This does not mean that he would have joined Zionism in Palestine.
Despite his conviction that Moses was Egyptian, he once pretended – in private towards a leader of the Keren Ha Yesod (Jewish resettlement foundation in Palestine) – that Palestine was the ancestral land of the Jews(*)(*)(*)(*)(*), which is not believable according to Christiane Desroches Noblecourt3, Joseph Davidovits4 and Messod and Roger Sabbah5 who demonstrated that the Hebrews were pure Egyptians:
"I want to assure you that I know very well how your foundation is an effective, powerful and beneficial instrument for the installation of our people on the land of their ancestors."6
The fact is that he sometimes was, but still in private, tempted by Zionism in Palestine; in 1917, he writes:
"Presently, my only joy is the storming of Jerusalem and the experience that the English tempt with the elected people."7
His 1926 letter to Marie Bonaparte, in which he seems to designate Judeity by Judaism, looks more like his long-term stand in which he seems to designate Judeity by Judaism:
"… the Jews as a whole feasted me like a national hero, although the services I rendered the to Jewish cause were limited to the fact that I never denied my belonging to Judaism."8
Guernica, Oradour sur Glane, Gaza
Sexist, Roudinesco signed a petition against excision but refused to sign the Montagu-NOCIRC petition against sexual mutilation without distinction of sex. She long publicly pretended that the Shoah would justify Zionism (does she still think it?) and that the great below official stand about Zionism by Freud would only be an opinion without an ideological nature. However, the epistolary sympathy of the founder of psychoanalysis to the Keren Ha Yesod (Jewish resettlement foundation in Palestine) remained merely diplomatic; he never made a gift to the foundation. His discourse is always kind towards the Zionist psychoneurotics, his possible customers, but he only has contempt for nationalism and religion; we are going to see that he unequivocally disapproves of a Zionism that intends to invade Palestine and that he clearly disengaged from it. He only shows compassion to it and sticks to good words. His repeated stands testify to that:
1/ In his 1930 letter to the manager of the Jewish Agency in Vienna, he is not content with refusing to publicly approve Zionism in Palestine; he denounces its fanatical racism. That letter will remain secret for forty-three years. Here is the significant excerpt of it:
"I find with regret that the unrealistic fanaticism of our people is partly responsible for the awakening of the mistrust of the Arabs. I cannot find in me any sympathy for this misguided piety that makes a national religion with the remains of the wall Herod, hurting the sensitivity of the natives."9
Roudinesco seems to ignore that this letter was published in 1973 by the review Freudiana (cf. note 1).
Her blindness compels us to insert here an attempt to understand her thinking. It seems that the very diplomatic language of Freud does not only make her ignore the various qualifications of Zionism in Palestine in this letter:
- nationalist (“a national religion”)
- fanatical,
- religious (“misguided piety”),
- racist (hurting the sensitivity of the natives),
- provocative of Islamism (“responsible for the awakening of the Arabs' mistrust”)
… it also makes her disregard the cruelly anti-religious mocking of a no longer diplomatic Freud: “(making) a national religion with the remains of the wall Herod”.
That is much and we are forced to think that such blindness results from a Zionist, racist reading.
All that, to the point of affirming, in her comment, that Freud showed solidarity where he clearly did not:
”... solidarity with his Zionist brothers...”
2/ On the same day, Freud sent a similar letter to Einstein who made the same claim:
"I cannot find in myself a shadow of sympathy for this misguided piety which makes up a national religion from the wall of Herod, and which, for the love of a few stones, is not afraid to hurt the feelings of the natives. "10
Einstein was convinced to the point of adopting Freud's thoughts five years later:
"In my opinion, it would be more reasonable to reach an agreement with the Arabs based on a peaceful common life than to create a Jewish state... My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism runs up against the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a project of temporal power, no matter how modest. I fear the internal damage that Judaism will suffer because of the development of our ranks, of a narrow nationalism... We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabean period. Becoming a nation in the political sense of the word would amount to turn away from the spiritualization of our community that we owe to the genius of our prophets." Quoted by Moshe Menuhin, The Decadence of Judaism In Our Time, 1969, p. 324.
3/ In 1934, in a public way since in the Hebrew translation of Totem and taboo, he declares himself:
"unable to participate in its (of the Jewish people) nationalist ideals"11
4/ Roudinesco tells us: "… upon his arrival in London in 1938, when the English representative of Keren Ha Yesod asked him again for a letter of support, Freud replied again negatively. The anti-Semitic persecutions that had forced him to leave Vienna had not changed his opinion. He still felt solidarity with his people, but he continued to hate all forms of religion. He accepted with difficulty the idea that a Jewish state could be viable precisely because such a state, claiming to draw its inspiration from a "Jewish being," could in no way, in his eyes, become secular.":
"Although I am a good Jew who has never renounced Judaism, I cannot ignore my totally negative attitude towards all religions, including Judaism, which differentiates me from my fellow Jews and makes me unfit for the role you would like to assign to me."12
Freud does not deny Judaism; he denies all religions and uses the double meaning of the term Judaism in a way that we would qualify as demagogic if we did not bear to be taken as antiJews, whereas the term is often used (by Freud here) by conflation between its two meanings: religious and cultural. Concerning the latter, we prefer to speak of Judeity. The here-above-quoted letter to Leib Jaffé was not any more than the others accompanied with a check. Freud is diplomatic and warm towards the neurotics, his possible customers, but without ever doing anything concrete in their way, according to the psychoanalytic rule.
Resolutely ideological – and prophetical – these stands severely criticize the Zio-nist fanaticism, neo-colonialism, and racism. With exemplary compassion, Freud did his utmost to spare the sensitivities of Zionists but he never showed solidarity and never collaborate with them. On the contrary, he vigorously criticized them, all the more firmly opposing their nationalism that it is religious. Firstly, he reproves the invasion of Palestine narrowly linked with Judaism and circumcision in return for the divine gift of the land of Canaan (Genesis 17). Secondly, as an atheist, he opposes the idea of a state that would put at its principle the only religion utterly racist, since narrowly linked to physical discrimination that would earn it to be privileged by God. He had prophesized the racist hatred we are the witnesses of. An adamant opponent of religions, and very particularly of the circumcising ones13, Freud is proud of his belonging to the Jewish people. If he did not analyze sexual mutilation as the worst racism14, we may not suspect him of belonging to the obese communitarianism that states that wanting to forbid circumcision amounts to wanting to chase the Jews. Had he lived until 1945, it is obvious that he would not have changed his position, identical to that of the great Jewish intellectuals: Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappé.
Nevertheless, the following of his 1912 letter to pregnant Sabina Spielrein testifies to paranoia:
"He has to be brown-haired or, in any case, become so; no more fair-haired head. We are and remain Jewish; the others will always only use us without ever understanding or respecting us."15
Freud was not racist; he was paranoiac, and incited Spielrein to paranoia close to racism; to follow him, there would not have been a single Just under Nazism. That paranoia is as trite in circumciseds as in their intact neighbours, but Freud could only see it at the end of his life:
"The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy's relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general."16
His footnote discreetly suggests, in a way biased by the nebulous theory of submission (which is not submission to the father but submission of the father to society, notably to the grandparents) that circumcision is one of those destructurating threats:
"(1) … The primaeval custom of circumcision, another substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father's will… " (p. 190)
He was himself destructurated; his gross projection of inserting the threat of castration into the Oedipus complex testifies to it17.
In psychosis, affirmed Lacan who subtly and ironically criticized circumcision18, the unconscious is all open sky down. Then, precisely, the unconscious ignores contradiction and does not back down from affirming one thing and its contrary. In 1935, Freud will affirm with great gullibility:
"As long as the Jews will not be admitted in Christian circles…"19
Weird ambition from an atheist.
Freud stood against both circumcision and Zionism in Palestine. Reporting that, since Munich in 1980, the great majority of antiJews attacks were committed by Muslims, we are forced to think that Zionist communitarianism comes within as much self-hatred as circumcision and that a majority of Jews actively participate in the rise of racisms forecast by Lacan. The same majority persists, with a discriminatory arrogance, in the pedo-sexual criminality against humanity.
To conclude, Roudinesco’s both stands: refusal to condemn circumcision (Montagu petition) and pretending that Freud would have engaged with Zionism must be compared; would she have approved the refusal of an Israeli minister to give asylum to a person who wanted to avoid excision:
“it is unthinkable, the Minister wrote in the press release, that the state of Israel should grant political asylum for an alleged persecution, similar or close in essence to a custom common to its own citizens.”
However, after her reading this paper, on the one hand, she gave me the title of superfan on her FB page, on the other hand and in spite of October 7th 2023, her present standpoint is more equilibrated: « Athéna, nous t’implorons… » (ihldp.com)
1 Roudinesco E. À propos d'une lettre inédite de Freud sur le sionisme et la question des lieux saints. Cliniques méditerranéennes 2004/2 (no 70), pages 5 à 17.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-cliniques-mediterraneennes-2004-2-page-5.htm
2 Freud S. lettre du 6 mai 1926, Correspondance 1873-1939, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.
(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) On that topic, see Bertaux-Navoiseau M. The birth of Judaism, between exegesis and Egyptology: Bertaux-Navoiseau, Michel Hervé: 9781070252629: Amazon.com: Books
3 Desroches Noblecourt C. Le fabuleux héritage de l'Égypte. Paris : Télémaque ; 2004.
4 Davidovits J. La Bible avait raison. Paris: Jean-Cyrille Godefroy; 2005.
5 Sabbah M. et R. Les secrets de l’Exode. Paris : Jean-Cyrille Godefroy ; 2000.
6 Freud S. Lettre du 20 juin 1935 à Leib Jaffé, citée par Jacquy Chemouny, Freud et le sionisme, Paris, Solin, 1988, p. 127 et 266.
7 Mijolla A. 100 questions sur Freud. Editions La Boétie : Paris ; 2014. p. 161.
8 Mijolla A. 100 questions sur Freud. Editions La Boétie : Paris ; 2014. p. 161.
9 Freud S. Lettre du 26 février février 1930 à Chaim Koffler (membre viennois du Keren Ha Yesod). Freudiana 1973: 19.
10 Freud S. Extrait d'une lettre à Albert Einstein du 26 février 1930, citée par Peter Gay, Freud, une vie, Paris Hachette, 1991, p. 688.
11 Introduction to the Hebrew translation of Totem and taboo. 1934. Quoted by Gay P. in Freud, a life of our time. London - Melbourne: J. M. Dent & sons ltd.; 1988. p. 599.
12 Freud S. cité par Jacquy Chemouny, Freud et le sionisme, Paris : Solin ; 1988, p. 127 et 266.
13 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Freud and circumcision, a chronicle of an unconscious trauma.
14 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Between barbarity and exclusion, circumcision, an artificial racism masked behind religion, tradition, culture and folklore and the greatest crime against humanity, a catalyst of fanaticism, terrorism, war, genocide and feminicide
15 Quoted by Mijolla A. in 10 questions sur Freud. Paris : La Boétie ; 2014.
16 An outline of psychoanalysis. 1938. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXII, p. 189-191.
17 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. (DOC) "Oedipus without complex"... of castration! (as blind as Oedipus, Freud distorts Sophocles' myh), a first version of this article was accepted for the 2015 IPSO congress (updated 08.13.2021) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau - Academia.edu
18 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. (DOC) Jacques Lacan anti-circumcision, like Freud (updated 10.25.20) | Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau - Academia.edu
19 Freud S. 1935 letter to Joseph Wortis.