Jewish and Durkheim

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A Secular Alchemy of Social ScienceThe Denial of Jewish Messianism in

Freud and Durkheim

Philip Wexler

Abstract: This essay presents a reading of the work of two centralfigures of modern social theory that locates their work within notsimply mainstream Jewish thought, but a particular Hasidic tradition.

Further, I argue that lying behind this, in a repressed form, is an evenolder tradition of Jewish alchemy. I make no claim to have evidence

that either Freud or Durkheim were directly influenced by Hasidism

or alchemy, but I examine the parallels between the structure of their thoughts and those of the two traditions. Both Freud and Durkheim

display a social psychology that is analytically similar to the dualism

of Hasidism’s Tanya and the general transformational models of alchemy. This formal model is in opposition to the messianic tradi-

tion in Jewish thought and analyzes Freud and Durkheim as anti-

messianic social psychologists. Hasidism offers a template for modern theories of social psychology, social interaction and the rela-

tion between the social and the individual, that is, collective identity.

This essay also considers more generally how modern social theorymight make sense of contemporary social phenomena by opening

itself to the messianic and mystical traditions in Jewish thought. Isuggest that the social and structural transformation associated withthe information or network society requires new analytic tools that

allow us to explain social energy differently to the way Freud and

Durkheim have guided social theory. Contemporary analyses of indi-

vidualization, social movements and sacralization as forms of and reactions to alienation are inadequate. Instead, I ask whether we

should not ‘restore a messianic, truly utopian “lost unity”, which the

alchemical, secular gnosis of modern social science displaced, and sorenew social theory?’


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Intellectual Force Field

I read Freud’s religious studies from the vantage point of a late post-modern social theory, as a social psychologist, and with an interest

in a redemptive Jewish archaeology of knowledge. To Freud’s uni-

versal, evolutionary theory of religion, I suggest a particular Jewish

counter-narrative, although one no less causally speculative, while

embracing—against later readers of Moses and Monotheism —his

faith in unconscious historical transmission, in the historical cen-

trality of the return of the repressed, and in the role of sublimation

and transmutation as defining core processes of social interaction, or social/‘mass’ psychology.

I want to retain the postmodern impulse that eschews one-dimen-

sional discursive hierarchies in favor of a more egalitarian relation

among discourses. The relation between social science and religion is

not seen here as a one-way imperialism of the triumph of scientific

explanation over vestigial religious belief, but a two-way street, where

it is no longer taboo to understand social explanations as secularized

representations, or even, re-codings, of earlier constellations of reli-gious belief. Or, as Buc, following Millbank, in his study of the relation

between anthropological theory and medieval thought and practice of

‘ritual’ puts it, to grasp the ‘“concealed affinities”—the twisted conti-

nuities and half-ruptures between theology and social science’.1

In Mystical Society,2 I read Durkheim that way, although Strenski3

provided a more nuanced contextual, historical analysis of the relation

between Durkheim’s religious particularism, his Jewishness, and his

universal social theory of religion. Without abandoning a Jewish read-

ing of Durkheim, the interest here is to show how Durkheim’s analy-

sis of religion, like Freud’s, is an important medium for the expression

of his social psychology, and how this social psychology—in itself,

like Freud’s—is a key to an archaeology of Jewish knowledge in

social psychology—as a theory of social interaction—and even in

social theory more generally.

I want to supplement my earlier, ‘new age’ analysis of Durkheim’s

canonical work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, as a theory

of social energy, with a reading that draws more upon his later shortessay on ‘The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions’,

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est …’.4 He then goes on to assert ‘the constitutional duality of human

nature’, in a way, I suggest, that brings the avatar of ‘social facts’,

whose strong social determinism has even been labelled as ‘sociolo-gism’, not only remarkably close to Freud’s apparently more individ-

ual social psychology, but also displays a less evident similarity that I

think he shares with Freud: a secular representation of one ancient

Jewish theory and a determined denial and repression of still another.

In a recent attempt to simultaneously show that classical social

theory which is ordinarily seen primarily as structural and compara-

tive and historical is also social psychological, and that there are at

least ‘analogies’ if not ‘identities’ between social scientific analysesand religious ones, I explored the relation between Weber’s social

psychology, within his sociology of religion, and Hasidism’s social

international theory of devequt .5 Hasidism, about which so much has

been written (and much less known), now seems to me a salient

bridge between ancient Jewish thought and modern social science.6 I

do not know and cannot here examine whether a case can be made for

any direct influence of Hasidic theory and culture on modern social

theory generally, or in the specific instances of Freud and Durkheim,although parallel attempts have been made with regard to Kabbalah

and Halacha7 and there are enticing genealogies that might be devel-

oped between rationalist and mystical traditions and intra-ethnic Jew-

ish divisions between Litvak and Galizianer cultures.

Rather, I suggest simply that there is a recognizable analytical

resemblance and affinity between Freud and Durkheim’s social psy-

chologies and that they both also resemble, as a third term, the social

psychology of the Hasidic theory of the soul; particularly as repre-

sented in the so-called Tanya, or Liqquãei ’Amarim of the founda-

tional Lubbovitch theorist, R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Both the

structural and dynamic, teleological assumptions of Tanya may, I sug-

gest further, be related to a broader model of social interaction that

Patai described as ‘Jewish Alchemy’.8 Hasidism may be seen as a

bridge taken as a bridge in two senses: first, as a model that illustrates

a parallel between ancient Jewish theory and modern social theory;

and second, it can be analogized as a humanistic version of a still

older tradition of theories of transmutation, including Jewish alchemy.I want to be clear that this second view—using alchemy as a tem-

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While historians may wish to compare the counter-assertions of

Scholem and Patai regarding the dating and influence of Jewish

alchemy, my interest is not to suggest an historical line between Jew-ish alchemy and Hasidism, or even between Hasidism and social sci-

ence. Rather, my point is this: both Freud and Durkheim, particularly

in their analyses of religion, display a social psychology that is ana-

lytically similar to the dualism of Tanya and the general transforma-

tional models of alchemy. This formal model is one that I consider as

opposed to a messianic tradition. Freud and Durkheim are analyzed as

anti-messianic social psychologists, whose theories may fruitfully be

described as a ‘spiritual, secular alchemy’.At the same time, I follow (with qualifications added by Idel) the

paradigmatic analysis of Gershom Scholem who saw in Hasidism a

‘neutralization’ of Jewish messianism, and the transformation of the

messianic tradition into a more interpersonal, or ‘anthropological’

doctrine.9 This view of the ‘humanization’ of Hasidism could be said

to articulate, or even, to ‘sublimate’ a general alchemical model into

a more modern discourse, while it defers, ‘neutralizes’ or represses

messianism (though it was obviously not Scholem’s intent to assertany such historical relation; on the contrary, alchemy is important

only for Christian cabala). In this analytical way, Hasidism offers a

template for modern theories of social psychology, social interaction,

the relation between the social and the individual, or, as we now say,

‘collective identity’. Not only in general terms of advancing an

alchemical model and repressing a messianic one; the specific terms

of Hasidism’s transmutational teleology of social interaction, antici-

pate the social psychologies of Freud and Durkheim.

Yet, Hasidism, in one of its Habad variants, now plays an addi-

tional and historically contrary role; and that is in its contemporary,

practical de-sublimation of repressed messianism. I argued in Mysti-

cal Society that current macro-social structural changes as analyzed

by Castells,10 Harvey,11 Melucci12 and others in terms of an ‘informa-

tional society’ encouraged resacralization, revitalization movements

and mysticism. Similarly, messianic social movements can lead us to

reexamine academic, theoretical, as well as popular cultural assump-

tions, and so shed light both on the historic theoretical repression of messianism and on the question of what its social reappearance can

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Jewish knowledge that is denied in one case and displaced in the

other, in favor of an abstract universalism so characteristic of the

modern temper and of its social science.

Social Psychology as Spiritual Alchemy

Like Weber, both Durkheim and Freud assert that religion is central to

any cultural analysis. Durkheim’s assertions may be more well-

known. In the later Annee Sociologique programmatic statements, he

insisted that religion be put analytically front and center, since it was,after all the ‘germ from which all other social phenomena are

derived’. Early in the argument of Forms, he wrote:

Today we agree to recognize that law, morals, and scientific thought itself

were born in religion, and were long confounded with it, and have

remained imbued with its spirit.13

Freud’s critical analysis of religion and his scientific faith hardly con-tradict, and indeed confirm, religion’s cultural importance – ‘the most

important part of the psychical inventory of a culture’ are ascribed to

‘religious ideas’.14

In their respective analyses of religion, with an only apparent dif-

ference between Durkheim’s emphasis on ritual and Freud’s on belief,

they display social psychologies that are remarkably resonant with

each other. Any reader of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method or

Suicide accustomed to the view of causation as due to the ‘exteriority’

and ‘constraint’ of social facts, and then later to the power of ritual

deeds in sacralization, might have been surprised to find in Forms the

observation that religion gains its efficacy by working through ‘indi-

vidual consciousness’, through ‘mind’, that ‘the idea creates the real-

ity’,15 and that ‘… the representations of the totem that are more

efficacious than the totem itself’.16

The later essay on dualism leaves little doubt that a structuralist,

‘sociologistic’ interpretation misses Durkheim’s social psychological

interest in what he calls ‘our psychic life’, ‘our inner life’, ‘psychicconstitution’ of the ‘individual who is the basic element’.17 Anticipat-



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Freud too saw civilization as the result of collective activity, though

he locates the energy drive of the process in the individual, in appar-

ent contradiction to Durkheim’s location of energy in sociality.Indeed, I am going to claim that it is the third, religious term that

undergirds and obviates this difference, since they both ascribe the

energy source—whether in instinct or interaction—ultimately to

‘divinity’, which, as Freud put it, is the ‘ primo motore’. But even

short of that, Freud’s ‘instinct’, which we read within his interest in

‘civilization’, is a social, combinatory process, and Durkheim’s ‘col-

lective effervescence’ is actually the non-civilizational, the residue of

our individual bodily constitution at the moment of the creation of itsantinomous sacred social. So, Freud’s ‘civilization is a process in the

service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individu-

als, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one

great unity, the unity of mankind’.18 It is aim-inhibited love that ‘…

continues to carry on its function of binding together considerable

numbers of people …’19 The civilizational process is the same social

combinatory, aggregating integration that creates solidarity as

described by Durkheim, though it is more consistently subject to dis-solution by the opposing instinct of death and destruction, rather than

atrophy in the banality of the profane that is described by Durkheim.

If Freud’s individual instinct is deeply social, in an eros that strives

toward social aggregation—the very point of Durkheim’s theory of

social energy that ‘replenishes’ the sacred—Durkheim’s energetic rit-

ualism is deeply ideational, in his view of collective ideals as the

source of vitality. ‘But religion’, he writes ‘is first and foremost a sys-

tem of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of

which they are members … such is its paramount role’.20 Its ideals are

the ‘soul’ of collectivity.

Beyond the shared emphasis on the analytical centrality of religion

for a science of culture, or civilization, there is also a social psychol-

ogy which they share, despite the polar points of embarkation in the

collective and the individual. It is a social psychology based on a the-

ory of energy transmutation, from the individual, bodily to the social

sacred or spiritual. The transmutational process is a teleological, pro-

gressive movement from the sensory to the conceptual, a sublimatoryand symbolizing activity that marks a truly human development.

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us, attributing this initiatory duality to Pascal. The bodily beast of

individualized sensations is opposed by, and subject to, ‘conceptual

thought and moral activity’,22

by what Durkheim’s modern translator,Karen Fields,23 refers to as ‘a true metamorphosis’. Individual, bod-

ily sensational experience is elevated; the ‘inferior can become the

superior’24 if we are willing to ‘sacrifice’, for ‘there is no moral act

that does not imply a sacrifice’. Our concepts can, though never

‘completely’, succeed in ‘mastering our sensations’ by ‘partially

renouncing a feeling for life’. The product of collective activity is

civilization, the contested result of the incomplete mastery of sensa-

tion by concept and the representation of the social energy of com-munion by the collective representations which are a ‘higher life’25

‘… that acts on the elements from which it is made, thereby raising

them to a higher form of life and transforming them’.

This elevation, this ‘growth of civilization’, that characterizes the

renunciation or sacrifice of sensation for concept and representation

is the realm of the sacred, that begins in the frenetic energy of a de-

socialized Australian totemic corroborree, but endures beyond such

temporary ritual ‘replenishments’ only through the socially bindingforce of its shared moral or ethical representations: ‘… there truly is

a parcel of divinity in us because there is in us a parcel of the grand

ideals that are the soul of collectivity’.26

If we can already see Freud’s anticipated shadow in his own moral

elevation of thought against the senses, his own evolutionary story of

totemism’s metamorphosis, let me adumbrate further the debate of

Moses and Monotheism’s hermeneutic historical commentators with

Freud, on the question of what they call ‘tradition’, or simply the

transmission of culture.

In this too, a resemblance between Durkheim’s social psychology

of a teleological, civilizational transmutation that aims toward an

incomplete sacred, rational victory over experienced, individualized

sensations of the body by symbolization, and Freud’s, is intriguing.

So how does the collective symbol of the totem, which, after all, is

more efficacious than the totem itself, and which enables the ‘perpe-

tuity of group life’, the shared spirituality which is the enduring

moral force or energy of collective life, survive individual death tocreate social continuity?



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same realm of the senses that Durkheim placed on the superceded

side of an historical dualism of human nature. ‘This turning’, Freud

writes in Moses and Monotheism, ‘from the mother to the father,however, signifies above all a victory of spirituality over the

senses—that is to say, a step forward in culture, since maternity is

proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a

deduction and a premise’.

The hermeneutical restoration called for by these critics of Freud

misses the point of the core psychological, sociological and historical

universal transformation that is concretized in Jewish history and

through its great man and founder, Moses. Ritual and ceremony belong to pre-history. From the starting point of Amenhotep, the sen-

sory is replaced by the symbolic, the concrete by the abstract, the

instinctual by the spiritual.

Durkheim’s dualism is repeated, in a related but somewhat differ-

ent tone. His ‘constitutional duality’ is instead a ‘union of two con-

stituents’,33 represented by the duality embedded within the great

murdered man, the duality of the later prophetic, Mosaic abstract,

invisible, dematerialized mind—against the man of the volcano-god,who represents a lower level of culture than what the higher cultural

level Levites would transmit into the evolution of a spirituality that

would finally become ethics and science. It is this Mosaic religion

that ‘… signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea;

it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses: more precisely, an

instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically neces-

sary consequences’.34 Leaving no doubt about his view, he reiterates:

‘The progress in spirituality consists in deciding against the direct

sense perception in favour of the so-called higher intellectual

processes—that is to say, in favour of memories, reflection, and

deduction’.35 Like Durkheim’s ‘beast and angel’, religions display the

core dynamics of social psychology, which are those of the transmu-

tation from the lower instinctual to the higher mind, which, here too,

is ultimately a divine teleology.

For if Durkheim replaced god with society’s collective conscience,

Freud replaced religion with science, ‘which is no illusion’. But, the

movement from the lower animal to the higher truly human is never-theless driven, as Durkheim put it, by ‘that parcel of divinity within



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dismissed magic and mysticism (‘There is no church of magic’,

Durkheim declared), in favor of a unitary symbolic process of repre-

sentation, or sublimation. As Freud observed of the effects of monotheistic religion on the Jewish people: it formed their character

for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism and encour-

aging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations’.38

What is it that the reincarnated great man and founder, Moses’

Freud himself sublimates? Is it simply the identification with his own

paternal Jewishness, fully expressed? His own ambition, as

Yerushalmi would have it, to incarnate Judaism within psychoanaly-

sis? All this would be the return of the father’s will, but not of hisworld, or, more precisely, perhaps of his conscious, articulated, but not

of his repressed, unconscious, world. What Freud understood, as the

other side of his idealist transmutation of bodily materialism, was that

it is the unconscious ideational world as well as both the will and

expressed ideas of the father which is the return of the repressed. This

‘archaic heritage’, which later hermeneuts would like to forget as a

superstition that modern science has passed by, Freud acknowledges

as ‘memory residues (which) are then unconscious and operate fromthe Id … a new complication arises, however, when we become aware

that there probably exists in the mental life of the individual not only

what he has experienced himself, but also what he brought with him

at birth, fragments of phylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage’.39 He

continues: ‘… the archaic heritage of mankind includes not only dis-

positions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experi-

ences of former generations’.40

Repressed ideational contents can be more generationally, histori-

cally, recent and not only those of the extreme, primordial, archaic

heritage. If the contents of the unconscious include historical as well

as archaic contents, it might, however, have been more difficult to

assimilate the particular Jewish narrative of religious evolution to the

universal model of the parricidal dynamic of all religious develop-

ment: the modern story.

I want to suggest a ‘different ground’, otherwise than the

hermeneutical return to ceremonial that Freud wanted to sublimate

(and contemporary hermeneutics and ritual theory want to resusci-tate) and the deep, originary ‘human’ memory that he courageously

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nineteenth century East European Jewishness itself, are embarrassing

and inadmissible (and in that sense, ‘traumatic’) to a modern, assim-

ilated, scientific consciousness, but, perhaps, no less influential.I want to offer a reconstruction of the Freudian narrative, while

accepting its dynamic principles. This too is a speculative reconstruc-

tion, based in ideas about repression, sublimation, and finally de-

repression and de-sublimation. The transmutational teleology of

social psychology that Durkheim and Freud share (despite intermedi-

ate differences of emphasis, on ritual and repression, respectively)

parallels the same transmutational theory of the soul that is articulated

within Hasidism, notably in the Tanya of Schneur Zalman of Liadi. Inthe same way that Hasidism has been seen as a humanistic repression

of messianism, the secular social psychologies of Freud and

Durkheim can be interpreted as repression of the messianic drive in

Jewish history. The forms in which this repression is expressed, which

is to say, not expressed or disguised, are different, but the theories

occlude the exploration of a more radical, alternative messianic the-

ory of history, of social interaction, and of social science.

I want to suggest, finally, that the articulation of these alternative,radical repressed approaches has now been made relevant again,

not by force of intellectual archaeology,nor by psychoanalytical

hermeneutics, in individual or collective forms, but by events in social

history itself—which more than the individual analyst, acts as the

‘therapeutic agent’. Recent historical events uncover the repression of

messianism and enable us to ask the constructive theoretical question

of what analytical forms the new sublimation may now take.

Both in Mystical Society and in the most recent work on Weber’s

social psychology within his sociology of religion,42 I have explored

the extensive Hasidic opus, from a social theoretic perspective. There

is also the recent work of Yitzchak Kraus,43 which offers a theoretical

history of Lubbavitch Hasidism, in particular. Here, I want only to indi-

cate the basic outline of a model that organizes a divinely teleological

movement of the soul’s duality—the animal and the divine—as the

core interactive process. The ‘elevation’, ‘refinement’ or ‘purification’

of the soul occurs by practices which metamorphose or transmute the

animal to the divine elements, which is particularly one of intellectual,contemplative effort directed toward the attainment of spirituality. Of



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The abode of the animal soul (nefesh ha-behemit ) derived from the keli-

pat nogah in every Jew, is in the heart, in the left ventricle that is filled

with blood. It is written, “For the blood is the nefesh”. Hence, all lustsand boasting and anger and similar passion are in the heart, and from the

heart they spread throughout the whole body, rising also to the brain in

the head, so as to think and meditate about them and become cunning

in them…

But the abode of the divine soul is in the brains that are in the head, and

from there it extends to all the limbs; and also in the heart ….

It is written, however, “One nation shall prevail over the other nation”. The

body is called a “small city”. Just as two kings wage war over a town,

which each wishes to capture and rule, that is to say, to dominate its inhab-

itants according to his will, so that they obey him in all that he decrees for

them, so do the two souls—the Divine and the vitalizing animal soul that

comes from the kelipah—wage war against each other over the body and

all its limbs. It is the desire and will of the Divine soul that she alone rule

over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey her and

surrender themselves completely to her ….44

Idel45

has recently revised the conventional wisdom in Hasidic his-toriography to underline the magical, astrological elements of its his-

toric, theurgical theory of interaction. Patai’s46 controversial inquiry

invites further analysis of the deep transmutational, social psycholo-

gies of Hasidism, Durkheim and Freud. Patai observed:

The prevailing attitude of Jewish scholars to the role Jews played in the

history of alchemy is reminiscent of the scholarly position on Jewish mys-

ticism a hundred years ago …. My shock was the greater since my father,

who was the dominant influence in my young life, was a great admirer of both the Kabbalah and Hasidism, and I simply could not understand how

a Jewish historian could denigrate this wonderful manifestation of lofty

spiritualism in Judaism. Fortunately, the Zohar and the Kabbalah in gen-

eral have been fully rehabilitated in the last half century, due primarily to

the work of Gershom Scholem and his followers. Martin Buber and his

disciples have done the same for Hasidism, which is recognized today as

a powerful religious movement that has played such a crucial role in Jew-

ish history since the eighteenth century. No such redemption has as yet

come to alchemy.47

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well-known alchemy of transmuting matter, which he sees as a fore-

runner of chemistry, and the transmutation, as he puts it, of ‘the

imperfect human soul into a more perfect spiritual entity’.48 Thistransmutational, interactive process of spiritual regeneration com-

plements the material alchemy of the transmutation of base metals

to gold with a ‘mysterious process’ that we might call a ‘spiri-

tual alchemy’—analogously to chemistry in material alchemy,

the spiritual template of an interpersonal, healing transmutation of

later secularized social and psychological ‘scientific healing’, or

social ‘progress’.

It is this very sort of transformative process that psychoanalysisrecapitulates, under the term ‘sublimation’, which Loewald 49 self-

consciously relates to the ancient process (associated with Libra,

‘sublimation’ is the name of one of the basic alchemical processes,

along with ‘projection’, in one eighteenth century alchemical formu-

lation). ‘Sublimation’, he writes, ‘is passion transformed’. But, then

more generally, he locates the Freudian sublimation of the sexual to

the divine in a more general model as the ‘transmutation into some-

thing higher’.50 Further: ‘Sublimation, in both the chemical and psy-choanalytic sense, denotes some sort of conversion or transmutation

from a lower to a higher, and presumably purer state or plane of exis-

tence—be it the transmutation of a material substance or of an instinct

and its objects and aims’.

In his own view of sublimation, Loewald wants to assert not only

a transmutational process, but to suggest a restorative one. In this

view, sublimation overcomes alienating differentiation to provide a

‘fresh unity’ (of sexuality and spirituality). It is not only a transfor-mation, but a ‘… kind of union, a reconciliation of polarities, of

separateness’.51 The process of sublimation itself is a healing reinte-

gration: ‘Could sublimation’, he asks, ‘be both a mourning of a lost

original oneness and a celebration of oneness regained’?52 Can this

restorative integration of psychological sublimation itself, we add,

represent an individualized displacement of restoration of oneness

that is the aim of an historical, external, social process? If Hasidism

anthropologized and ‘neutralized’ messianism, the effect of secular social psychology—in both its general logic of transmutation and in



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they also participate in those denials of a collective transmutation,

which is repressed Jewish messianism?

Social Psychology as Mystical Messianism

Messianism embodies those utopian, restorative and revolutionary

social tendencies which are much less important in alchemy,

Hasidism and in modern social psychological theory. The Jewish

tradition of cataclysmic, apocalyptic messianism has undergone a

long history of suppression and denial. According to Scholem: ‘For

this denial of apocalytpicism set out to suppress exceedingly vital

elements in the realm of Judaism, elements filled with historical

dynamism even if they combined destructive with constructive

forces’.53 ‘It is the view of a purified and rational Judaism’ which

has offered ‘modern conceptions of development’ as secularized

messianism in the form of a progressive and continuous view of

history. Rather:

The Bible and the apocalytpic writers know of no progress in history lead-ing to the redemption. The redemption is not the product of immanent

developments such as we find it in modern Western reinterpretations of

Messianism since the Enlightenment where, secularized as the belief in

progress, Messianism still displayed unbroken and immense vigor. It is

rather transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which his-

tory itself perishes.

In the catastrophic, spontaneous idea of messianic redemption, the

coming of the Messiah is not a matter of ‘moralism’, or even,

Scholem writes, of a ‘rational and sensible utopianism’. He comes

‘suddenly, unannounced, and precisely when he is least expected or

when hope has long been abandoned’.54

Hasidism, which in our particularistic counter-narrative of the

religious, and Jewish, archaeology of modern social psychological

theory, is the gate to modernity, does not only show how a human-

ized alchemy transmutes the soul, but, according to Scholem how it

does so at the sacrifice of a messianic social view of redemption: ‘Itconquered in the realm of inwardness, but it abdicated in the realm

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‘devekut’, or uplifting intimacy. Now it is the individual soul which is

purified. ‘The great cosmic vision of the Messianic mission of the

Jew in performing the task of tiqqun has receded into the background and a vision of a different character has taken the stage’.56 The trans-

mutation of the individual soul, its refinement or elevation, that can

draw initiating energy from both instinct and interaction, an individ-

ual rather than social teleology, becomes, in Scholem’s view of early

Hasidism, a substitute for a collective redemption.

The goal of ‘spirituality’ is here not the triumph of the Egyptian

Moses over the volcano-god of the desert, of ethical abstraction or

ideals over the senses, but of individualism over collectivity, both his-torical and cosmic. ‘The goal’, writes Scholem, ‘as formulated in the

works of the Rabbi of Polnoye is the mystical redemption of the indi-

vidual here and now, i.e., redemption not “from” exile, but “in” exile,

or in other words, the destruction of exile by its spiritualization’.57

This individualized spiritualization is part of the historic repression of

messianism, which, as Scholem explains, is a revolutionary theory:

‘Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature—this cannot be

sufficiently emphasized—a theory of catastrophe. This theorystresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from

every historical present to the Messianic future’.58

Idel59 continues the counter-modern, or now postmodern, project

of restoring mysticism and messianism to the scene of Jewish histori-

ography. Indeed, to the centrality of a collective messianism, Idel adds

its simultaneously mystical, experiential component, which is not an

antithesis to collective messianism, but a crucial constitutive element.

‘My main concern here’, he states early on, ‘is to focus on a number

of related cases where the mystical experience is at the very heart of

a messianic self-awareness’. This revision of Scholem supplements

Idel’s earlier correction of the tendency to spiritualize Hasidism, by

recollecting the role of magic, as well as mysticism.

Our suggestion then has been that messianism, but also mysticism

and magic are the repressed ‘ideational contents’ in modern, secular

social psychology. Also, that Freud’s daring reflexivity to replace

Judaism, and modern consciousness more generally, within religious

history, displays a social psychology in which he shares much withanother great Jewish modern, ‘David’, Emile Durkheim—and that,



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The ‘return’ of this repressed may also be particular, historically

specific. While, it, like the transmutational teleology of spiritualiza-

tion and collective ideals, may be retrieved from earlier Jewish knowl-edge and represented as a scientific theory of social interaction or

‘collective identity’, we should, I think, f irst ask about the sources of

its de-repression, of a de-sublimation that may require more than the

hermeneutical insight of the historian or psychoanalyst.

Theory is not only a work of sublimation, as Loewald 60 observed,

but also a work of social practice, and a symbolization of social prac-

tice, in history. The suggestion that a speculative reconstruction of the

archaeology of Jewish knowledge that social psychology, which belongs to the family tree of Hasidism and arguably, alchemy, and less

so to a messianic, mystical tradition, can be simply ‘rethought’ mes-

sianically would deny the very power of collective social action for rev-

olutionary transformation which is at the heart of Jewish messianism.

In Mystical Society, I tried to show how the historical structural

transformations of the ‘information society’ are mediated by new

social movements of sociocultural and social psychological revital-

ization. From this social transformational base, I aimed to draw impli-cations for the rethinking of prevailing social scientific concepts.

Those were general concepts, and the driving social revitalization

movements were considered generally, and outside our specific

counter-narrative of the selective secularization of Jewish thought.

Yet, the historic repression of messianism and mysticism that

Scholem and Idel have signally brought to scholarly consciousness

has a history in social consciousness—however much forgotten by

the moderns—and it is being challenged in social, collective con-

sciousness and in the practice of everyday, Jewish life. The most

extreme example is within that very Hasidism that Scholem

described as ‘neutralized’, or repressed, in its early stages. Now, in

the Chabad example,61 there is a return of the repressed messianic.

Against the mass practice of Hasidic messianism within the Lubbav-

itcher religious movement, modern Jewish orthodoxy62 aims to sup-

press its appearance as contemporary Jewish heresy. Instead, I want

to suggest that this aspect of the Chabad movement offers an exam-

ple of an embodied social prophecy, of an emergence from the ‘sub-terranean tradition’, that is an actualized instance of a strongly coded

16 Philip Wexler


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identity reconstruction against the effects of globalizing informa-

tionalism, I want to suggest that such movements go beyond defen-

sive strategies. Instead of reverse flow, imagine that societal changesets new arenas of collective problem-solving. From modern alien-

ation to postmodern self-saturation,64 the problem of self-diminution

is intensified as individualization continues to replace collective

identity. Simultaneously, boundary-smashing of all but the most pro-

tectively coded meanings65 implies that culture needs to become

increasingly cosmic.

In these conditions, the sacred is no longer about the unified tribe’s

collective representations, or ‘human’ wish-fulfillment. Rather, it iscomposed of the combined and conflicting practices of re-personal-

ization and re-narrativization. Re-personalization returns needed

vitality to the hyper-individualized self by re-auratizing that which the

mechanical reproduction of the commodity destroyed.66 Re-narra-

tivization goes beyond a social story to effect an integration of mean-

ing by countering chaos with a re-cosmicized narrative.67 Following

Rappaport’s68 informational approach to the discursive (sacred) and

numinous (experiential) constitution of then ‘holy’, unverifiability isreinforced by informational minimalism as a method for creating

meaningful order.

Acquisition of personal aura is obtained by the production of

exemplary individual auras who can be identified with, from whom

auratic power can be transferred, to work at the self level. Religious

re-auratization, as a method of mass re-personalization means that

stars, gurus and rebbes are not, as Critical Theory taught, mere iconic

forms of self-alienation. By investing the super-person with more

vital power, there is, as Idel69 described the shamanistic aspect of

Hasidism, more ‘ shefa’ (abundant energy) to be redistributed. The

reinvestment of selfhood by identification and transfer (devequt ) from

auratic rebbe to vital self, threatens, as Mitnagdim and their descen-

dants have historically understood, the integrative power of meaning,

of Torah and ‘text’.

Messianism overcodes and reinforces these social psychological

processes. The auratic power of a de-temporalized guru is multiplied

by making him the dramatic repository of a transferable selfhood that is securely anchored in the end of time. The ego-ideal of the



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dent cosmos is expanded and fortified by the dramatic emphasis of

imminent redemption.

In Kraus’70

analysis of the writings of the seventh Lubbavitcher Rebbe, the ‘Ramam’, re-personalization is made explicit. Not only is

salvation individualized—‘geulah praṭit’—but even more directly, aura-

tized guru-energy, reinforced by messianic boundlessness, is expressly

mass distributed for collective purposes of re-vitalized selfhood. ‘She-

bechol yehudi yeshno niṣuṣ shel meshiaḥ’. Indeed, there is now a reve-

lation of a ‘niṣuṣ hameshiḥi ha-praṭi’—personalized revitalization

through messianism. An efficient recosmic integration of meaning is

accomplished by what Kraus describes as Chabad’s ‘acosmism’. ‘Ein“od milvado”’. The process of providing orienting integrative meaning

where the social narrative is digitally dissolved, is best accomplished

with the least information—an acosmic, cosmic narrative.

There are contemporary examples of messianic movements, out-

side of Judaism, which offer additional examples of embodied post-

modern social psychological practices.71 Exactly how premodern

cultural resources are adapted to postmodern conditions, and how

these practices serve as inspiration for social scientific conceptual-ization needs to be shown in each case.

Here, I want to suggest that the repressed which returns is not only

the will of a primordial, but an ideational, historic, Jewish, father—

one aspect of whose pre-modern world was constitutive of Durkheim

and Freud’s contemplative ‘elevation’ in social psychological theory,

though it was marked largely by its absence. If we work to restore this

mystical, magical, messianic tendency theoretically to social science,

while it returns in social practice, do we only vicariously countenance

still another form of regression, in pseudo-messianic ‘fusion’? Or, do

we, instead, restore a messianic, truly utopian ‘lost unity’, which the

alchemical, secular gnosis of modern social science displaced, and so

renew social theory? Do we then shift from a secular alchemy of anti-

messianic social psychology to asking what the shape of a secular,

messianic social psychology would look like?

PHILIP WEXLER is Professor of Education and Director of the School

of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of many publications, including Social Analysis of Education (1987),

18 Philip Wexler


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This article was originally published in Kab-balah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 12, 2004, pp.

7-26, and is reprinted here with permission of Cherub Press,www.cherub-press.com.

Notes

1. Phillippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual , Princeton, 2001, p. 238.

2. Philip Wexler, Mystical Society, Boulder, 2000.

3. Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, Chicago, 1997.

4. Robert Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago, 1973,

pp.149-163.

5. Philip Wexler, ‘Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age’,

Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 7, 2002, pp.11-36.

6. See, for example, Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, Albany,

1995; and Moshe Idel, ‘The Origin of Alchemy according to Zosimos and aHebrew Parallel’, Revue des études juives, 145, 1986, pp.117-124.

7. David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, Princeton,

1958; Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, Chicago, 1997.

8. Uri Kaploun (ed.) Lessons in Tanya: the Tanya of R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (elu-

cidated by Yosef Wineberg, translated by Levy Wineberg), Brooklyn, 1996. See

Raphael Patai, ‘Esh M’tzaref: A Kabbalistic-Alchemical Treatise’, Occident and

Orient , 1988, pp. 299-313; Raphael Patai, Sephardic Alchemists From Iberia to

Diaspora, Frankfurt, 1994, pp. 235-244; and Raphael Patai, The Jewish

Alchemists, Princeton, 1994. While Patai identifies the work of Jewish

alchemists in the fourteenth century, Scholem sees no alchemical influence onJewish kabbalah before the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Idel notes

alchemical Greek texts as representing earlier Jewish myths, at the end of the

third century. While all these positions may not necessarily be contradictory,

among these historians of Jewish mysticism and esotericism, only Patai assigns

real importance to the alchemical influence in Jewish thought. Scholem, for

example, observes in Alchemie und Kabbala, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 21

(citing from the translation prepared by Dirk Michel, Claudia Schertges and

Philip Wexler): ‘In no Hebrew, kabbalistic book or manuscript before 1500 have

I found alchemical formulae referring to the “famous work”. Insofar as such for-

mulae are to be found in the older manuscripts of the 14th or 15th century, theyhave nothing to do with kabbalah and come from non Jewish kabbalist sources.

d l i di h i h h d i l h b h l h i



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Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala: Ein Kapitel aus der Gerschichte der Mystik ,

Frankfurt am Main, 1994.

10. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

11. David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity, Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

12. Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Soci-

ety, New York, 1996.

13. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (trans. by Karen E.

Fields), New York, 1995, p. 66.

14. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, New York, 1957, p. 20.

15. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 229.

16. Ibid. p.133.

17. Robert Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago, p. 152.

18. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, London, 1961, p. 81.

19. Ibid . p. 57.

20. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 227.

21. Ibid . p. 275.

22. Ibid. p. 151.

23. Karen Fields, translator of Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p.37.

24. Bellah, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, p. 155.

25. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 447.

26. Ibid . p. 267.

27. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, New Haven, 1991.

28. Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, Cambridge, 1998.29. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, p. 89.

30. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, p. xi.

31. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Boston, 1955.

32. Ibid . p.16.

33. Bellah, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, pp. 149-163.

34. Ibid . p. 144.

35. Ibid . p. 150.

36. Hans Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis, New

Haven, 1988.

37. Ibid.38. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, New York, 1967, p. 109.

39. Ibid. p. 125.

40. Ibid. p. 127.

41. Loewald, Sublimation, p. 15.

42. Wexler, ‘Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age’.

43. Yitchak Kraus, ‘Living with the Times: Reflection and Leadership, Theory and

Practice in the World of the Rebbe of Lubavitch, Rabbi Menachem Mendel

Schneersoon’, Ph.D thesis, Bar Ilan University, 2001.

44. Kaploun (ed.) Lessons in Tanya, pp. 35-37.

45. Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, pp. 170-202.46. Patai, The Jewish Alchemists.

47 Ibid p 7

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52. Ibid. p. 80.

53. Gershom Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in

Judaism’, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York, 1973, p. 9.

54. Ibid. p. 10

55. Ibid. p.202.

56. Ibid. p. 191.

57. Ibid. p. 195.

58. Ibid. p. 7.

59. Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, New Haven, 1998.

60. Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis.

61. Wexler, ‘Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age’.

62. David Berger, The Rebbe, The Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indiffer-

ence, London, 2001.

63. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.

64. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary

Life, New York, 1991.

65. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 66: ‘God, nation, family and com-

munity will provide unbreakable, eternal codes, around which a counter-offen-

sive will be mounted against the culture of real virtuality’.

66. Walter Benjamin, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations

(edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn),

New York, 1968, pp. 217-251; and see ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Tech-

nological Reproducibility: Third Version’, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,Volume 4, 1938-1940 (translated by Edmund Jephcott and others, edited by

Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings), London, 2003, pp. 251-283.

67. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology, Berkeley, 1985.

68. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge,

1999.

69. Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic.

70. Kraus, ‘Living with the Times’.

71. See, for example, Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, Millennium, Messiahs

and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, New York, 1997.



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Documents

Jewish and Durkheim