FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN - Centre for the Study of

FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN

Edwtrd W, Slid

There are two ways in which I shall be using the term"non-European" in this lecture — one that applies to

Freud's own time; the other to the period after his deathin 1939. Both are deeply relevant to a reading of hiswork today. One, of course, is a simple designation ofthe world beyond Freud's own as a Viennese-Jewishscientist, philosopher and intellectual who lived andworked his entire life in either Austria or England. Noone who has read and been influenced by Freud'sextraordinary work has railed to be impressed by theremarkable range of his erudition, especially in literatureand the history of culture. But by the same token, one isvery struck by the fact that beyond the confines ofEurope, Freud's awareness of other cultures (with per-haps one exception, that of Egypt) is inflected, and,indeed shaped by his education in the Judaeo-Christiantradition, particularly the humanistic and scientific


assumptions that give it its peculiarly "Western" stamp.This is something that doesn't so much limit Freud inan uninteresting way as identify him as belonging to aplace and time that were still not tremendously botheredby what today, in the current postmodern, post-structuralist, postcolonialist jargon, we would call theproblems of the Other. Of course Freud was deeplygripped by what stands outside the limits of reason,convention, and, of course, consciousness: his wholework in that sense is about the Other, but always aboutan Other recognizable mainly to readers who are wellacquainted with the classics of Graeco-Roman andHebrew Antiquity and what was later to derive fromthem in the various modern European languages, lit-eratures, sciences, religions and cultures with which hehimself was well acquainted.

Like most of his contemporaries, Freud knew thatother, noteworthy cultures existed and deserved recog-nition. He referred to those of India and China, forinstance, but only in passing and only when, say, thepractice of dream interpretation there might be ofcomparative interest to the European investigator of thesubject. Much more frequent are Freud's references tothe "primitive" non-European cultures - mostly viaJames Frazer — on which he drew for his discussion of


early religious practices. These references provide mostof the substance for Totem and Taboo,8 but Freud's eth-nographic curiosity hardly goes beyond looking at andciting aspects of these cultures (sometimes with anumbing repetitiveness) as supporting evidence for hisargument about such matters as defilement, prohibitionsagainst incest, and patterns of exogamy and endogamy.To Freud, the Pacific, Australian and African cultures hetook so much from had been pretty much left behind orforgotten, like the primal horde, in the march of civil-ization; and even though we know how much of Freud'swork is dedicated to recovering and acknowledging whathas either been forgotten or won't be admitted, I don'tthink that in cultural terms non-European primitivepeoples and cultures were as fascinating to him as werethe people and stories of Ancient Greece, Rome andIsrael. The latter were his real predecessors in terms ofpsychoanalytic images and concepts.

Nevertheless, in view of the dominant race theories ofthe time, Freud had his own ideas about non-Europeanoutsiders, most notably Moses and Hannibal. Both wereSemites, of course, and both (especially Hannibal) wereheroes for Freud because of their audacity, persistenceand courage. Reading Moses and Monotheism,9 one isstruck by Freud's almost casual assumption (which also


applies to Hannibal) that Semites were most certainlynot European (in fact, Hannibal spends his life fruitlesslytrying to conquer Rome, but never even gets there) and,at the same time, were somehow assimilable to its cul-ture as former outsiders. This is quite different fromtheories about Semites propounded by Orientalists likeRenan and racial thinkers such as Gobineau andWagner, who underlined the foreignness and exclud-ability of Jews - as well as Arabs, for that matter - toGraeco-Germanic-Aryan culture. Freud's view of Mosesas both insider and outsider is extraordinarily interestingand challenging, I think, but I want to talk about thislater. In any event, I believe it is true to say that Freud'swas a Eurocentric view of culture — and why should itnot be? His world had not yet been touched by theglobalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, thatwere to make many formerly unknown or repressedcultures available to metropolitan Europe. He lived justbefore the massive population shifts that were to bringIndians, Africans, West Indians, Turks and Kurds intothe heart of Europe as guest-workers and often unwel-come immigrants. And, of course, he died just as theAustro-Getmanic and Roman world portrayed somemorably by great contemporaries such as ThomasMann and Romain Rolland would lie in ruins, with


millions of his fellow Jews slaughtered by the NaziReich. In effect, it was also the world commemorated inErich Auerbach's Mimesis, the autumnal exilic bookwritten during the war years in Istanbul, whence thisgreat Gelehrter and philologist could sum up the passingof a tradition seen in its coherent wholeness for the last

time.The second - and far more politically charged -

meaning of "the non-European" that I'd like to drawattention to is the culture that emerged historically inthe post-World-War-Two period - that is, after the fellof the classical empires and the emergence of manynewly liberated peoples and states in Africa, Asia and theAmericas. Obviously, I cannot go into the many newconfigurations of power, people and politics that haveresulted, but I would like to stress one in particular thatseems to me to give a rather fascinating perspective, andindeed enhances the radicality of Freud's work on humanidentity. What I have in mind is how, in the postwarworld, that constellation of words and valences thatsurrounds Europe and the West acquired a much morefraught and even rgbarbative meaning from observersoutside Europe and the West. Because of the CoLd War ithere were first of all two Europes, East and West; andthen, in the peripheral regions of the world going


through the throes of decolonization, there was theEurope that was representative of the great empires, nowseething with insurrections that were finally to developinto struggles beyond European and Western control.Elsewhere I have tried to describe the new light in whichEurope is now seen by articulate anticolonial comba-tants, so I won't go into it here, except briefly to quoteFanon - surely Freud's most disputatious heir - from thefinal pages of his last, posthumously published book, TheWretched of the Earth.10 The section I shall be citing isone of the appendices to the book entitled "ColonialWars and Mental Disorders", in which — as you willrecall - Fanon catalogues and comments on a series ofcases he has dealt with that emanate, as it were, from thecolonial battlefield.

First of all, he notes that to the European, the non-European world contains only natives, and "the veiledwomen, the palm trees and the camels make up thelandscape, the natural background to the human pre-sence of the French".11 After listing how the native isdiagnosed by the European clinical psychiatrist as asavage killer who kills for no reason, Fanon cites aProfessor A. Porot, whose considered scientific opinion isthat the native's life is dominated by "diencephalicurges" whose net result is an undevelopable primitivism.


Here Fanon quotes a chilling passage from a learnedtechnical psychiatric analysis by Professor Porot himself:

This primitivism is not merely a way of livingwhich is the result of a special upbringing; it hasmuch deeper roots. We even consider that it musthave its substratum in a particular predisposition ofthe architectonic structure, or at least in thedynamic hierarchization of the nervous centers. Weare in the presence of a coherent body of com-portment and of a coherent life which can beexplained scientifically. The Algerian has no cortex;or, more precisely, he is dominated, like the inferiorvertebrates, by the diencephalons. The corticalfunctions, if they exist at all, are very feeble, and arepractically unintegrated into the dynamic of exis-

tence.12

While it may be possible to see in this sort of thing afundamentalist perversion of Freud's description of pri-mitive behaviour in Totem and Taboo, what seems to bemissing is Freud's implicit refusal, in the end, to erect aninsurmountable barrier between non-European primi-tives and European civilization; on the contrary, theseverity of Freud's argument, as I read it, is that what


may have been left behind historically catches up withus in such universal behaviours as the prohibitionagainst incest, or — as he characterizes it in Moses andMonotheism - the return of the repressed. Of course,Freud posits a qualitative difference between primitiveand civilized that seems to work to the latter's advan-tage, but that difference, as in the fiction of his equallygifted subversive contemporary Joseph Conrad, doesn'texcuse or in any way mitigate the rigour of his analysesof civilization itself, which he sees in a decidedlyambiguous, even pessimistic, way.

The point for Fanon, though, is that when you extendnot just Freud, but all the scientific achievements ofEuropean science, into the practice of colonialism, Eur-ope ceases to occupy a normative position with regard tothe native. Hence, Fanon proclaims:

leave this Europe where they are never done talkingof Man, yet murder men everywhere they findthem, at the corner of every one of their own streets,in all the corners of the globe.... Europe undertookthe leadership of the world with ardor, cynicism,and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palacesstretches out ever further! Every one of her move-ments has burst the bounds of space and thought.

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Europe has declined all humility and all modesty;but she has also set her face against all solicitudeand tenderness. . . . When I search for Man in thetechnique and the style of Europe, I see only asuccession of negations of man, and an avalanche ofmurders.

Not surprisingly, then, and even though his prose andsome of his reasoning depend on it, Fanon rejects theEuropean model entirely, and demands instead that allhuman beings collaborate together in the invention ofnew ways to create what he calls "the new man, whomEurope has been incapable of bringing to triumphantbirth".13

Fanon himself scarcely provides his readers withanything like a blueprint for the new ways he has inmind; his main purpose, however, is to indict Europe forhaving divided human beings into a hierarchy of racesthat reduced and dehumanized the subordinates to boththe scientific gaze and the will of the superiors. Theactualization of the scheme, of course, is what wasbrought forth by the colonial system in the imperialdomains, but I think it is true to say that the gist ofFanon's attack was to include the whole edifice of Euro-pean humanism itself, which proved incapable of going


beyond its own invidious limitations of vision. AsImmanuel Wallerstein described so well,14 subsequentcritics of Eurocentrism in the last four decades of thetwentieth century furthered the attack by taking onEurope's historiography, the claims of its universalism,its definition of civilization, its Orientalism, and itsuncritical acceptance of a paradigm of progress thatplaced what Huntington and others like him have called"the West" at the centre of an encroaching mass of lessercivilizations trying to challenge the West's supremacy.

However much or little one agrees with Fanon orWallerstein, there is no doubt that the whole idea ofcultural difference itself - especially today - is far fromthe inert thing taken for granted by Freud. The notionthat there were other cultures besides that of Europeabout which one needed to think is really not the ani-mating principle for his work that it was in Fanon's, anymore than it was for the major work of his con-temporaries Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland and ErichAuerbach. Of the four, Auerbach was the one who sur-vived somewhat into the postcolonial era, but he wasmystified - perhaps even a little depressed - by what hecould intimate of what was coming. In his late essay"Philologie der Weltliteratur" he spoke elegiacally ofthe replacement of Romania as the research paradigm

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that had nourished his own career by a welter of what hecalled "new" languages and cultures, without realizingthat many of them in Asia and Africa were older thanthose of Europe, and had well-established canons andphilologies that European scholars of his generationsimply never knew existed. At any rate, Auerbach hadthe capacity to sense that a new historical era was beingborn, and he could tell that its lineaments and structureswould be unfamiliar precisely because so much in it wasneither European nor Eurocentric.

I feel I should add something else here. I have oftenbeen interpreted as retrospectively attacking great wri-ters and thinkers like Jane Austen and Karl Marxbecause some of their ideas seem politically incorrect bythe standards of our time. That is a stupid notion which,I just have to say categorically, is not true of anything Ihave either written or said. On the contrary, I am alwaystrying to understand figures from the past whom Iadmire, even as I point out how bound they were by theperspectives of their own cultural moment as far as theirviews of other cultures and peoples were concerned. Thespecial point I then try to make is that it is imperative toread them as intrinsically worthwhile for today's non-European or non-Western reader, who is often eitherhappy to dismiss them altogether as dehumanizing or


insufficiently aware of the colonized people (as ChinuaAchebe does with Conrad's portrayal of Africa), or readsthem, in a way, "above" the historical circumstances ofwhich they were so much a part. My approach tries to seethem in their context as accurately as possible, but then- because they are extraordinary writers and thinkerswhose work has enabled other, alternative work andreadings based on developments of which they could nothave been aware - I see them contrapuntally, that is, asfigures whose writing travels across temporal, culturaland ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emergeas part of a new ensemble along with later history andsubsequent art. So, for instance, rather than leavingConrad's compelling portrait of Leopold's Congo in anarchive labelled as the dead-end rubbish bin of racistthinking, it seems to me far more interesting to readConrad's late-nineteenth-century work as - in all sorts ofunforeseen proleptic ways - suggesting and provokingnot only the tragic distortions in the Congo's subsequenthistory but also the echoing answers in African writingthat reuse Conrad's journey motif as a topos to presentthe discoveries and recognitions of postcolonial dynam-ics, a great part of them the deliberate antitheses ofConrad's work. Thus - to give a brief pair of examples -you have the radically different responses embodied in


Tayib Salih's Mawsim al Hijra illal Shirnal andV.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River. These two workscouldn't be more different from each other, but both areunimaginable without the structure of Conrad's priorimaginative feat to guide and then push them, so tospeak, into new avenues of articulation true to the visionof a Sudanese Arab's experience in the 1960s and that ofa Trinidadian Indian expatriate a few years later. Theinteresting result is not only that Salih and Naipauldepend so vitally on their reading of Conrad, but thatConrad's writing is further actualized and animated byemphases and inflections that he was obviously unawareof, but that his writing permits.

Thus later history reopens and challenges what seemsto have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought,bringing it into contact with cultural, political andepistemological formations undreamed of by - albeitaffiliated by historical circumstances with - its author.Every writer is, of course, a reader of her or his pre-decessors as well, but what I want to underline is thatthe often surprising dynamics of human history can - asBorges" fable of Pierre Menard and the Quixote so wittily

argues - dramatize the latencies in a prior figure or formthat suddenly illuminate the present. The horriblyattenuated and oppressed black porters and savages that


Conrad portrays in terms that Achebe finds so objec-tionable not only contain within them the frozen essencethat condemns them to the servitude and punishmentConrad sees as their present fate, but also pointprophetically towards a whole series of implied devel-opments that their later history discloses despite, overand above, and also paradoxically because of, the radicalseverity and awful solitude of Conrad's essentializingvision. The fact that later writers keep returning toConrad means that his work, by virtue of its uncom-promising Eurocentric vision, is precisely what gives itits antinomian force, the intensity and power wrappedinside its sentences, which demand an equal and oppo-site response to meet them head on in a confirmation, arefutation, or an elaboration of what they present. In thegrip of Conrad's Africa, you are driven by its sheer sti-fling horror to work through it, to push beyond it ashistory itself transforms even the most unyielding stasisinto process and a search for greater clarity, relief,resolution or denial. And of course in Conrad, as with allsuch extraordinary minds, the felt tension between whatis intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion toescape from it is what is most profoundly at stake - whatthe reading and interpretation of a work like Heart ofDarkness is all about. Texts that are inertly of their time


stay there: those which brush up unstintingly againsthistorical constraints are the ones we keep with us,generation after generation.

Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whomscientific work was, as he often said, a kind of archaeo-logical excavation of the buried, forgotten, repressed anddenied past. Not for nothing was Schliemann a modelfor him.15 Freud was an explorer of the mind, of course,but also, in the philosophical sense, an overturner and are-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and gen-ealogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading indifferent contexts, since his work is all about how lifehistory offers itself by recollection, research and reflec-tion to endless structuring and restructuring, in both theindividual and the collective sense. That we, differentreaders from different periods of history, with differentcultural backgrounds, should continue to do this in ourreadings of Freud strikes me as nothing less than avindication of his work's power to instigate newthought, as well as to illuminate situations that hehimself might never have dreamed of.

Freud's intense concentration on Moses occupied thelast months of his life, and what he produced in his lastmajor book, Moses and Monotheism, is a composite ofseveral texts, numerous intentions, different periods of

TREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN

time — all of them personally difficult for him in view ofhis illness, the advent of National Socialism and thepolitical uncertainties of his life in Vienna which meantthat he had to contend with sometimes contradictoryand even disorganizing, destabilizing effects.1 Anyonewith an interest in what has been called late style[Spatstil] will find in Freud's Moses an almost classicexample. Like the bristlingly difficult works thatBeethoven produced in the last seven or eight years ofhis life — the last five piano sonatas, the final quartets,the Missa Solemnis, the Choral Symphony, and the Opus119 and 121 Bagatelles — Moses seems to be composed byFreud for himself, with scant attention to frequent andoften ungainly repetition, or regard for elegant economyof prose and exposition. In this book, Freud the scientistlooking for objective results in his investigation, andFreud the Jewish intellectual probing his own relation-ship with his ancient faith through the history andidentity of its founder, are never really brought into atidy fit with each other. Everything about the treatisesuggests not resolution and reconciliation — as in somelate works such as The Tempest or The Winter's Tale - but,rather, more complexity and a willingness to let irre-concilable elements of the work remain as they are:episodic, fragmentary, unfinished (i.e. unpolished).


In Beethoven's case and in Freud's, as I hope to show,the intellectual trajectory conveyed by the late work isintransigence and a sort of irascible transgressiveness, asif the author was expected to settle down into a har-monious composure, as befits a person at the end of hislife, but preferred instead to be difficult, and to bristlewith all sorts of new ideas and provocations. Freudexplicitly confesses to this unseemliness in a footnoteearly in Moses where, without embarrassment, he refersto his autocratic, arbitrary and even unscrupulous waywith biblical evidence. There are also explicit remindersto the reader that the author is an old man, and may notbe up to his task; at the end of the second part and thebeginning of the third Freud draws attention to hisfailing strength as well as to the diminishment in hiscreative powers. But this admission doesn't stop or inany way deter him from reaching difficult and oftenmystifyingly unsatisfactory conclusions. Like Beetho-ven's late works, Freud's Spatwerk is obsessed withreturning not just to the problem of Moses's identity -which, of course, is at the very core of the treatise — butto the very elements of identity itself, as if that issue socrucial to psychoanalysis, the very heart of the science,could be returned to in the way that Beethoven's latework returns to such basics as tonality and rhythm.


Moreover, the combination in Freud of interest in thecontemporary expressed in sometimes arcane excavationsof the primordial are parallel to Beethoven's use ofmedieval modes and startlingly advanced counterpointin works like the Missa Solemnts. Above all, late style'seffect on the reader or listener is alienating — that is tosay, Freud and Beethoven present material that is ofpressing concern to them with scant regard for satisfy-ing, much less placating, the reader's need for closure.Other books by Freud were written with a didactic orpedagogic aim in mind: Moses and Monotheism is not.Reading the treatise, we feel that Freud wishes us tounderstand that there are other issues at stake here —other, more pressing problems to expose than oneswhose solution might be comforting, or provide a sort ofresting-place.

In one of the most interesting of several books onFreud's Moses — Josef Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses: Judaism

Terminable and Interminable11 - Yerushalmi expertly fills

in the personal Jewish background to Freud's probing ofthe Moses story, including his painfully longstandingawareness of anti-Semitism in such episodes as hisspoiled friendship with Carl Jung, his disappointmentwith his father's inability to stand up to insults, hisconcern that psychoanalysis might be considered only a

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"Jewish" science, and, centrally, his own complicatedand, in my opinion, hopelessly unresolved connection tohis own Jewishness, which he seemed always to hold onto with a combination of pride and defiance. Yet Freudrepeats over and over that although he was a Jew he didnot believe in God, and only in the most minimal waycould be said to have any religious sense at all. Yeru-shalmi shrewdly points out that Freud seemed to havebelieved, perhaps following Lamarck, that "the charactertraits embedded in the Jewish psyche are themselvestransmitted phylogenetically and no longer requirereligion in order to be sustained. On such a finalLamarckian assumption even godless Jews like Freudinevitably inherit and share them". So far so good. Butthen Yerushalmi goes on to ascribe a kind of almostdesperately providential leap to Freud that I find largelyunwarranted. "If monotheism", he says, "was geneticallyEgyptian, it has been historically Jewish". He then adds- quoting Freud - that "it is honor enough for theJewish people that it kept alive such a tradition andproduced men who lent it their voice, even if the stimulushad first come from the outside, from a great stranger" (italics

added).18

This is so central a point in Freud's argument that itbears looking into further; certainly, I think, Yerushalmi


has jumped to conclusions about what is historicallyJewish that Freud himself doesn't actually reach because,as I shall try to show, the actual Jewishness that derivesfrom Moses is a far from open-and-shut matter, and is infact extremely problematic. Freud is resolutely dividedabout it; indeed, I would go so far as to say that he isdeliberately antinomian in his beliefs. You will recallthat Freud's opening sentence is an astonishinglyhybristic celebration of what he has done and will do inthe pages that follow, which is nothing less than "todeny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest ofits sons"; he then goes on to say that a feat of this kindcannot be entered into gladly or carelessly, "especially byone belonging to that people". He does so in theinterests of a truth — he minces no words at all — farmore important than what are "supposed [to be]narional interesrs". The sarcasm in this last phrase fairlytakes your breath away, as much for its arrogance as forits willingness to subordinate the interests of a wholepeople to what is more important: the removal of areligion's source from its place inside the communityand history of like-minded believers.19

I won't rehearse all the main points of Freud's argu-ments — I too wish to be a bit arbitrary — except to recallemphases that he makes in them. First, of course, is


Moses's Egyptian identity, and the fact that his ideasabout a single God are derived entirely from theEgyptian Pharaoh, who is universally credited with theinvention of monotheism. Unlike Yerushalmi, forinstance, Freud goes out of his way to credit Akhenatonwith this idea, insisting that it was an invention whichdid not exist before him; and although he says thatmonotheism did not take root in Egypt, Freud musthave known perfectly well that monotheism returned toEgypt first in the form of primitive Christianity (whichremains in the Coptic Church of today) and then viaIslam,, which he does in feet discuss briefly later in thetext. Recent work in Egyptology in fact suggests thatconsiderable traces of monotheism are found well beforeAkhenaton's reign, and this in turn suggests thatEgypt's role in the development of the worship of oneGod is a good deal more significant than has often beenallowed. Yerushalmi is far more anxious than Freud to<scrape away all traces of monotheism from Egypt afterAkhenaton's death, and he implies that it was the geniusof Judaism to have elaborated the religion well beyondanything the Egyptians knew about.

Freud, however, is more complex, and even contra-dictory. He grants that the Jews eliminated sun-worship Ifrom the religion they took over from Akhenaton, but/

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further undercuts Judaic originality by noting (a) thatcircumcision was an Egyptian, not a Hebrew, idea; and(b) that the Levites, surely as Judaic a group as conven-tion says ever existed, were Moses's Egyptian followers,who had come along with him to the new place.

As for that place, Freud departs further from theconventionally attributed Israelite geography and statesthat it was Meribat-Qades: "in the country south ofPalestine between the eastern end of the Sinai peninsulaand the western end of Arabia. There they took over theworship of a god Jahve, probably from the neighbouringArabian tribe of Midianites. Presumably other neigh-bouring tribes were also followers of that God".20 SoFreud first restores to their place components of theorigin of Judaism that had been forgotten or deniedalong with the murder of the heroic father common toall religions, then shows — via his theory of dormancyand the return of the repressed - how Judaism con-stituted itself as a permanently established religion. Theargument is strangely subtle and discontinuous, asanyone who has read Moses and Monotheism will quicklyattest. Repression, denial and return pass before thereader almost magically as experiences from the indivi-dual to the collective: they are arrayed by Freud in asequence of narrative followed by submerged and then

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manifest positivity, all of which gives rise not only toJewishness but to the anti-Semitism that goes alongwith it. The main points I want to underscore are first,that all of this is given an entirely secular setting byFreud, with no concession made that I have been able tofind to the divine or the extra-historical; and second,that Freud makes no effort to smooth out his story orgive it a clear trajectory. This is perhaps because so muchof the material he is dealing with as he chronicles theaftermath of Moses's legacy is uneven, as radicallyantithetical in its startlingiy sharp contrast between thefounding outsider and the community he established(which also killed him) as the primal words he hadstudied and written about decades earlier.

On one level, this is no more than to say that theelements of historical identity seem always to be com-posite, particularly when seminal events like the killingof the father and the exodus from Egypt are themselvesso tied up in prior events. As to whether Moses can besaid to be "foreign" to the Jews who adopt him as theirpatriarch, Freud is quite clear, even adamant: Moses wasan Egyptian, and was therefore different from the peoplewho adopted him as their leader - people, that is, whobecame the Jews whom Moses seems to have later cre-ated as bis people. To say of Freud's relationship with


Judaism that it was conflicted is to venture an under-statement. At times he was proud of his belonging, eventhough he was irremediably anti-religious; at othertimes he expressed annoyance with and unmistakabledisapproval of Zionism. In a famous letter about thework of the Jewish Agency in 1930, for instance, herefused to join in an appeal to the British to increaseJewish immigration to Palestine. In fact he went so far asto condemn the transformation "of a piece of Herodianwall into a national relic, thus offending the feelings ofthe natives". Five years later, having accepted a positionon the board of the Hebrew University, he told theJewish National Fund that it was "a great and blessed . . .instrument . . . in its endeavour to establish a new homein the ancient land of our fathers".21 Yerushalmirehearses both Freud's comings and goings subtly aswell, and he painstakingly shows that Freud's Jewishnessruns the entire gamut from his identity as a Jew, arisingfrom stubborn resistance to the "compact majority",through the whole process of recalling and accepting thetradition that develops out of Moses (and hence ofreconciliation with the slain father), to the grandest ideaof all: that in an act of sublimation peculiar to mono-theistic religion (borrowed from Egypt: Freud can'tresist inserting that phrase), Jews subordinated sense


perception to the spirit, disdained magic and mysticism,were invited "to advances in intellectuality" (I take thisphrase from Strachey's translation, since it is inexplic-ably left out by Jones: the German word is Geistigkeit),and "were encouraged to progress in spirituality andsublimations". The rest of that progress, however, is yetto come in rather less evenly happy forms: "The people,happy in their conviction of possessing truthy overcomeby consciousness of being the chosen, came to valuehighly all intellectual and ethical achievements. I shallalso show how their sad fete, and the disappointmentsreality had in store for them, were able to strengthen allthese tendencies."22

An even more detailed analysis of the relationshipbetween Freud's Jewish identity and his quite con-voluted attitudes, as well as actions, vis-a-vis Zionism ispresented by Jacquy Chemouni in Freud et le sionism:terrepsycbanalytique, terre promise.25 Although Chemouni's

conclusion is that Herzl and Freud divided the Jewishworld between them - the former locating Jewishness ina specific location, the latter choosing instead the realmof the universal - the book presents a daring thesis aboutRome, Athens and Jerusalem that comes quite close toFreud's antithetical views about the history and future ofJewish identity. Rome, of course, is the visible edifice

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that attracted Freud — perhaps, says Chemouni, becausehe saw in the city the destruction of Jerusalem's templeand a symbol of the Jewish people's exile and, as a result,the beginning of a desire to rebuild the temple inPalestine. Athens was a city of the mind, a generallymore adequate representation of Freud's lifelong ded-ication to intellectual achievement. From that vantagepoint, the concrete Jerusalem is an attenuation of thespiritual ascetic ideal, even if it is also a realization thatloss can be addressed through the concerted labour thatwas in fact Zionism.

What I find interesting — whether we accept Yeru-shalmi's sophisticated reclamation of Freud as a Jewforced to accede to his people's reality in Fascist Europeand anti-Semitic Vienna in particular, or Chemouni'ssomewhat more complex (a trifle fanciful?) and largelyunresolved triangulation of the dilemma of exile andbelonging - is that one element keeps importuning, andnagging at whoever thinks about these issues of identityin either uniformly positive or negative terms. And thatelement is the issue of the non-Jew, which Freud treatslackadaisically late in Moses and Monotheism. Jews, hesays, have always attracted popular hatred, not all ofwhich is based on reasons as good as the charge that theycrucified Christ. Two of the reasons for anti-Semitism


are really variations on each other: that Jews are for-eigners, and that they are "different" from their hosts;the third reason Freud gives is that no matter howoppressed Jews are, "they defy oppression, [so] that eventhe most cruel persecutions have not succeeded inexterminating them. On the contrary, they show acapacity for holding their own in practical life, andwhere they are admitted, they make valuable contribu-tions to the surrounding civilization". As for the chargeof Jews being foreigners (the implied context is, ofcourse, European), Freud is dismissive of it, because incountries like Germany, where anti-Semitism is perva-sive, the Jews have been there longer, having arrivedwith the Romans. On the accusation that Jews are dif-ferent from their hosts, Freud backhandedly says thatthey are not "fundamentally so", since they are not "aforeign Asiatic race, but mostly consist of" the remnantsof Mediterranean peoples and inherit their culture".24

In the light of Freud's early harping on Moses'sEgyptianness, the distinctions he makes here strike meas limp: both unsatisfactory and unconvincing. Onseveral occasions Freud described himself, so far as lan-guage and culture were concerned, as German, and alsoJewish; and throughout his correspondence and scientificwritings he shows himself to be quite sensitive to issues

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of cultural, as well as racial and national difference. Tothe pre-Second-World-War European, though, the term"non-European" is a relatively unmarked term denotingpeople who come from outside Europe - Asiatics, forexample. But I am convinced that Freud was aware thatsimply saying of the Jews that they were the remnants ofMediterranean civilization, and therefore not really dif-ferent, is janglingly discordant with his show of forceabout Moses's Egyptian origins. Could it be, perhaps,that the shadow of anti-Semitism spreading so omi-nously over his world in the last decade of his life causedhim protectively to huddle the Jews inside, so to speak,the sheltering realm of the European?

But if we move forward very rapidly from theimmediate pre- to the post-World-War-Two period, weshall immediately take note of how designations like"European" and "non-European" dramatically acquiremore sinister resonances than Freud appeared to havebeen aware of. There is, of course, the charge made byNational Socialism, as codified in the Nuremberg Laws,that Jews were foreign, and therefore expendable. TheHolocaust is a ghastly monument, if that is the rightword, to that designation and to all the suffering thatwent with it. Then there is the almost too-perfectliteralization that is given the binary opposition Jew-


versus-non-European in the climactic chapter of theunfolding narrative of Zionist settlement in Palestine.Suddenly the world of Moses and Monotheism has comealive in this tiny sliver of land in the Eastern Medi-terranean. By 1948 the relevant non-Europeans wereembodied in the indigenous Arabs of Palestine and,supporting them, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese andJordanians who were descendants of the various Semitictribes, including the Arab Midianites, whom the Israel-ites had first encountered south of Palestine and withwhom they had a rich exchange.

In the years after 1948, when Israel was established asa Jewish state in Palestine, what had once been a diverse,multiracial population of many different peoples —European and non-European, as happened to be the case— there occurred anew a re-schematization of races andpeoples, which, to those who had studied the phenom-enon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe,seemed like a parodistic re-enactment of the divisionsthat had been so murderous before. In this setting, Israelwas internationally adopted by the Atlantic West (infact had already been granted early title to Palestine bythe Balfour Declaration of 1917) as, in effect, a quasi-European state whose fate, it seemed - in an eerieasseveration of the Fanonist argument, was to hold


non-European indigenous peoples at bay for as long aspossible.

The Arabs joined the non-aligned world, which wasundergirded by the global struggle against colonialismas described by Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah and Cesaire.Inside Israel, the main classificatory stipulation was thatit was a state for Jews, whereas non-Jews, absent orpresent as so many of them were, were juridically madeforeigners, despite prior residence there. For the firsttime since the destruction of the Second Temple, theconsolidation of Jewish identity occurred in the ancientplace which, as it had been during biblical times, wasoccupied by several other nations, races, peoples, nowmade foreign or driven into exile, or both.

You see, perhaps, where I am going. For Freud,writing and thinking in the mid-1930s, the actuality ofthe /ion-European was its constitutive presence as a sortof fissure in the figure of Moses - founder of Judaism,but an unreconstructed non-Jewish Egyptian none theless. Jahveh derived from Arabia, which was also non-Jewish and non-European. Yet the Egyptian realitiesthat were contemporary with Freud, as well as Egypt'splentiful antique history — exactly as for Verdi writingAi'da - were of interest because they had been mediatedand presented for use by European scholarship, princi-


pally by way of Ernest Sellin's book on which Moses andMonotheism draws so abundantly.25 There's an almost tooperfect symmetry in the fact that Naguib Mahfouz,Egypt's great narrative genius, writes a novel aboutAkhenaten, Dweller in Truth,2 which is as complex asany story he writes, but although there are many pointsof view explored in order to understand retrospectivelywho Akhenaten was, there is no mention at all of theincipient Jewish presence in the man Moses. The novel isas resolutely Egyptian as Israel was to be Jewish.

I very much doubt that Freud imagined that he wouldhave non-European readers, or that in the context of thestruggle over Palestine, he would have Palestinianreaders. But he did and does. Let us look quickly at whatbecomes of his excavations - both figuratively and lit-erally — from this new set of unexpectedly turbulent, aswelJ as startlingly relevant, perspectives. I would say,first of all, that out of the travails of specifically Euro-pean anti-Semitism, the establishment of Israel in a non-European territory consolidated Jewish identity politi-cally in a state that took very specific legal and politicalpositions effectively to seal off that identity from any-thing that was non-Jewish. By defining itself as a state ofand for the Jewish people, Israel allowed exclusiveimmigration and land-owning rights there for Jews

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only, even though there were former non-Jewish resi-dents and present non-Jewish citizens whose rights wereattenuated in the case of the latter, abrogated retro-spectively in the case of the former. Palestinians wholived in pre-1948 Palestine can neither return (in thecase of the refugees) nor have access to land as Jews can.Quite differently from the spirit of Freud's deliberatelyprovocative reminders that Judaism's founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian,non-Jewish monotheism, Israeli legislation counter-venes, represses, and even cancels Freud's carefullymaintained opening out of Jewish identity towards itsnon-Jewish background. The complex layers of the past,so to speak, have been eliminated by official Israel. So -as I read him in the setting of Israel's ideologicallyconscious policies — Freud, by contrast, had left con-siderable room to accommodate Judaism's non-Jewishantecedents and contemporaries. That is to say: inexcavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freudinsisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, withother identities (Egyptian and Arabian) which hisdemonstration in Moses and Monotheism goes a greatdistance to discover, and thus restore to scrutiny. Thisother non-Jewish, non-European history has now beenerased, no longer to be found in so far as an official


Jewish identity is concerned.More relevant, I think, is the fact that by virtue of one

of the usually ignored consequences of Israel's estab-lishment, non-Jews - in this case, Palestinians - havebeen displaced to somewhere where, in the spirit ofFreud's excavations, they can ask what became of thetraces of their history that had been so deeply implicatedin the actuality of Palestine before Israel? For an answer,I want to turn from the realm of politics and law to adomain much closer to Freud's account of how Jewishmonotheism originated. I think I am right in surmisingthat Freud mobilized the non-European past in order toundermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made toput Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis,whether religious or secular. Not surprisingly, then, wewill find that when Jewish identity has been consecratedby the establishment of Israel, it is the science ofarchaeology that is summoned to the task of con-solidating that identity in secular time; the rabbis, aswell as the scholars specializing in "biblical archae-ology", are given sacred history as their domain.27 Notethat a huge number of commentators on and practi-tioners of archaeology - from William Albright andEdmund Wilson to Yigal Yadin, Moshe Dayan, andeven Ariel Sharon - have noted that archaeology is the

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privileged Israeli science par excellence. As Magen Broshi,a noted Israeli archaeologist put it:

The Israeli phenomenon, a nation returning to itsold-new land, is without parallel. It is a nation inthe process of renewing its acquaintance with itsown land and here archeology plays an importantrole. In this process archeology is part of a largersystem known as yedi'at ha-Aretz, knowledge of theland (the Hebrew term is derived most probablyfrom the German Landeskunde). ... The Europeanimmigrants found a country to which they felt,paradoxically, both kinship and strangeness.Archeology in Israel, a sui generis state, served as ameans to dispel the alienation of its new citizens.28

Thus archaeology becomes the royal road to Jewish-Israeli identity, one in which the claim is repeatedlymade that in the present-day land of Israel the Bible ismaterially realized thanks to archaeology, history isgiven flesh and bones, the past is recovered and put indynastic order. Such claims, of course, uncannily returnus not just to the archival site of Jewish identity asexplored by Freud, but to its officially (we should alsonot fail to add: its forcibly) sanctioned geographical


locale, modern Israel. What we discover is an extra-ordinary and revisionist attempt to substitute a newpositive structure of Jewish history for Freud's insistentlymore complex and discontinuous late-style efforts toexamine the same thing, albeit in an entirely diasporicspirit and with different, decentring results.

This is a good moment to say that I am greatlyindebted to the work of a young scholar, Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose major book is entitled Facts on the Ground:Arcbeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in

Israeli Society. What she provides first of all is a history ofsystematic colonial archaeological exploration in Pales-tine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenthcentury. She then continues the story in the periodbefore Israel is established, connecting the actual prac-tice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology - anideology with plans for the repossession of the landthrough renaming and resettling, much of it givenarchaeological justification as a schematic extraction ofJewish identity despite the existence of Arab names andtraces of other civilizations. This effort, she arguesconvincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for afully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identitybased on assembling discrete archaeological particulars -scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs,


etc. - into a sort of spatial biography out of which Israelemerges "visibly and linguistically, as the Jewishnational home".

More significantly, she argues that this quasi-narrativebiography of a land enables - if it does not actually cause- and goes hand in hand with a particular style ofcolonial settlement that governs such concrete practicesas the use of bulldozers, the unwillingness to explorenon-Israelite (e.g. Hasmonean) histories, and the habit ofturning an intermittent and dispersed Jewish presence ofscattered ruins and buried fragments into a dynasticcontinuity, despite evidence to the contrary and despiteevidence of endogamous non-Jewish histories. Whereverthere is overwhelming and unavoidable evidence of amultiplicity of other histories, as in the massivepalimpsest of Jerusalem's Byzantine, Crusader, Hasmo-nean, Israelite, and Muslim architecture, the rule is toframe and tolerate these as an aspect of Israeli liberalculture, but also to assert Israel's national pre-eminenceby hitting at the Orthodox Jewish disapproval ofmodern Zionism by making Jerusalem even more of aJewish-national site.30

Abu el-Haj's meticulous deconstruction of Israeliarchaeology is also a history of the negation of ArabPalestine which, for obvious reasons, has been regarded


as not worthy of similar investigation. But with theemergence of post-Zionist revisionist history in Israelduring the 1980s and, simultaneously, the gradual riseof Palestinian archaeology as a practice in the liberationstruggle of the past twenty or so years, the heritage-styleattitudes of an exclusively biblical archaeology are nowbeing challenged. I wish I had the time to go into thishere, and to discuss how the nationalist thesis of separateIsraeli and Palestinian histories has begun to shapearchaeological disputes in the West Bank, and how, forinstance, Palestinian attention to the enormously richsedimentations of village history and oral traditionspotentially changes the status of objects from deadmonuments and artifacts destined for the museum, andapproved historical theme parks, to remainders of anongoing native life and living Palestinian practices of asustainable human ecology.31

Nationalist agendas, however, tend to resemble eachother, especially when different sides in a territorialcontest look for legitimacy in such malleable activities asreconstructing the past and inventing tradition. Abu el-Haj is therefore quite right to suggest that despite theprevalence of an underlying Enlightenment commit-ment to the unity of the sciences, they are really quitedisunited in practice. You can immediately grasp the

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ways in which archaeology in the Israeli and the Pales-tinian context is not the same science. For an Israeli,archaeology substantiates Jewish identity in Israel andrationalizes a particular kind of colonial settlement (i.e. afact on the ground); for a Palestinian, archaeology mustbe challenged so that those "facts" and the practices thatgave them a kind of scientific pedigree are opened to theexistence of other histories and a multiplicity of voices.Partition (as envisaged by the Oslo process since 1993)doesn't eliminate the contest between competingnational narratives: rather, it tends to underline theincompatibility of one side with the other, therebyincreasing a sense of loss and the length of the list ofgrievances.

Let me return finally to Freud and his interest in thenon-European as it bears on his attempt to reconstructthe primitive history of Jewish identity. What I find socompelling about it is that Freud seems to have made aspecial effort never to discount or play down the fact thatMoses was non-European - especially since, in the termsof his argument, modern Judaism and the Jews weremainly to be thought of as European, or at leastbelonging to Europe rather than Asia or Africa. Wemust once again ask: why? Certainly Freud had nothought of Europe as the malevolent colonizing power


described a few decades later by Fanon and the critics ofEurocentrism, and except for his prophetic commentabout angering the Palestinian Arabs by giving undueimportance to Jewish monuments, he had no idea at allof what would happen after 1948, when Palestiniansgradually came to see that the people who arrived fromabroad to take and settle on their land seemed just likethe French who came to Algeria: Europeans who hadsuperior title to the land over the non-European natives.Neither - except very briefly - did Freud pause over howstrong and often violent the reaction of decidedly non-European Arabs might have been to the forcible embo-diment of Jewish identity in the nationalist fulfilment ofJudaism by the Zionist movement. He admired Herzl,but I think it is correct to say that most of the time hehesitated — indeed, he equivocated — so far as Zionismitself was concerned. From an instrumental point ofview, Moses had to be a non-European so that in mur-dering him the Israelites would have something torepress, and also something to recall, elevate and spir-itualize during the course of their great adventure in therebuilding of Israel overseas. That is one way to interpretwhat Yerushalmi calls Freud's interminable Judaism:that it was condemned to remember what it could noteasily forget, but that it pressed on with making Israel


stronger and more powerful none the less.But that, I think, is not the only interpretative

option. Another, more cosmopolitan one is provided byIsaac Deutscher's concept of the non-Jewish Jew.Deutscher argues that a major dissenting traditionwithin Judaism is constituted by heretical thinkers likeSpinoza, Marx, Heine and Freud; these were prophetsand rebels who were first persecuted and excommuni-cated by their own communities. Their ideas werepowerful critiques of society; they were pessimists whobelieved that scientific laws governed human behaviour;their thinking was dialectical and conceived of reality asdynamic, not static, and human reality for them was (asin Freud's case) typified by the homme moyen sensuel"whose desires and cravings, scruples and inhibitions,anxieties and predicaments are essentially the same nomatter to what race, religion, or nation he belongs"; they"agree on the relativity of moral standards", giving noone race, or culture, or God a monopoly of reason orvirtue; finally, Deutscher says, they "believed in theultimate solidarity of man", even though in the latetwentieth century the horrors of our time compelledJews to embrace the nation-state (which is "the para-doxical consummation of the Jewish tragedy"); eventhough, as Jews, they had once preached "the interna-


tional society of equals as the Jews were free from allJewish and non-Jewish orthodoxy and nationalism".32

Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of hisown community is very much a part of the complex ofideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets tomention what I think is an essential component of it: itsirremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is asubject which George Steiner has celebrated with greatelan for many years. But I would want to qualifyDeutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as aJewish characteristic; in our age of vast populationtransfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants,it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering,unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone whois both inside and outside his or her community. This isnow a relatively widespread phenomenon, even thoughan understanding of what that condition means is farfrom common. Freud's meditations and insistence on thenon-European from a Jewish point of view provide, Ithink, an admirable sketch of what it entails, by way ofrefusing to resolve identity into some of the nationalistor religious herds in which so many people want sodesperately to run. More bold is Freud's profoundexemplification of the insight that even for the mostdefinable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn

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communal identity — for him, this was the Jewishidentity — there are inherent limits that prevent it frombeing fully incorporated into one, and only one, Iden-tity.

Freud's symbol of those limits was that the founder ofJewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian.In other words, identity cannot be thought or workedthrough itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagineitself without that radical originary break or flaw whichwill not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, andtherefore always outside the identity inside which somany have stood, and suffered - and later, perhaps, eventriumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe,that it can be articulated in and speak to other besiegedidentities as well - not through dispensing palliativessuch as tolerance and compassion but, rather, byattending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizingsecular wound — the essence of the cosmopolitan, fromwhich there can be no recovery, no state of resolved orStoic calm, and no Utopian reconciliation even withinitself. This is a necessary psychological experience, Freudsays, but the problem is that he doesn't give any indi-cation of how long it must be tolerated or whether,properly speaking, it has a real history — history beingalways that which comes after and, all too often, either

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overrides or represses the flaw. The questions Freudtherefore leaves us with are: can so utterly indecisive andso deeply undetermined a history ever be written? Inwhat language, and with what sort of vocabulary?

Can it aspire to the condition of a politics of diasporalife? Can it ever become the not-so-precarious founda-tion in the land of Jews and Palestinians of a bi-nationalstate in which Israel and Palestine are parts, rather thanantagonists of each other's history and underlying rea-lity? I myself believe so - as much because Freud'sunresolved sense of identity is so fruitful an example, asbecause the condition he takes such pains to elucidate isactually more general in the non-European world thanhe suspected.

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FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN - Centre for the Study of