The Secular Trace

Abstract

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses (1991) shows how Freud, in spite of his professed atheism, continued to believe that Jewish identity is something that can be inherited through “the blood and nerves” (31). Yerushalmi carefully documents what he calls Freud’s “Lamarckianism”—in spite of Freud’s firm rejection of Carl Jung’s hypothesis of the “collective unconscious.” As provocative as this thesis may initially seem, especially in light of prevailing feminist and Marxist readings of Freud, the evidence gathered by Yerushalmi seems irrefutable. “Though Freud does not put it into words, the conclusion is inescapable,” Yerushalmi states. “The character traits embedded in the Jewish psyche are themselves transmitted phylogenetically and no longer require religion in order to be sustained” (52). Against Peter Gay’s influential reading of Freud as “a godless Jew,” Yerushalmi insists that Freud remained a Jew not only as a matter of family history but religious conviction. Yerushalmi’s case for Freud’s loyalty to historically Jewish religious beliefs turns on a few subtle points of Jewish theology, of which Gay and other non-Jewish critics seem unaware.¹