From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Whatever role a mature Jew may play in the community, each Jew experiences during his youth an inner rupture between his Jewishness and his humanity, and for better or worse must manage this paradoxical double identity. As sociologist Daniel Bell explains: “I was born in galut [exile] and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes [Deuteronomy 11:18], and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me.” Like many other fully assimilated Jews who have achieved social success in their host nation, Bell feels ever-more-acutely with age “that one does not stand alone, that the past is still present, and that there are responsibilities of participation even when the community of which one is a part is a community woven by the thinning strands of memory.”730

  Anyone who finally submits to the communal sociopathic mentality becomes a vector of it in his turn. Although the transmission is not exclusively generational, we observe among the elites a propensity to pass this mentality from father to son. The neoconservatives, one of the most sociopathic elites in history, are a case in point: Irving Kristol was succeeded by his son William, Donald Kagan by his son Robert, Richard Pipes by his son Daniel, and Norman Podhoretz by his son John and son-in-law Elliott Abrams. The champion of the second generation, Benjamin Netanyahu, is himself the son of Benzion Netanyahu, a paranoid Zionist who in February 2009, the day before his son’s election, declared: “Today we are facing, plain and simple, a danger of annihilation. This is not only the ongoing existential danger to Israel, but a real danger of complete annihilation. People think that the Shoah [Holocaust] is over but it’s not. It is continuing all the time.”731

  There has always been a minority of Jews who, by self-examination (often under painful circumstances) succeed in escaping from the mental shackles of their Jewishness. They are stigmatized as suffering from “self-hatred,” and the anathema or persecution they endure only makes their emancipation more heroic. They have symbolically killed the father. The “murder of the father” is one of Freud’s most fertile intuitions, but Freud has mistakenly generalized: only the son of the destructive and manipulative father needs to “kill the father.” This is why Freudian psychoanalysis, born of the “self-cure” of its founder, is indeed, if not a “Jewish national affair” as Freud said, at least a theory deeply marked by the Jewish collective psyche.732 For the Jewish father is the representative of the Jewish collective superego, whose other name is Yahweh, and every Jew aspires to the depths of his soul to free himself from Yahweh.

  But we must also understand what is meant by “killing the psychopathic father” (as representative of the collective Jewish sociopathy). Anyone who simply hates the father is in danger of unknowingly absorbing his inheritance. He resembles him in his very rejection. Jewish revolt often assumes this character; the Jewish revolutionaries of Russia who rejected the Talmud, the synagogue, and the Kahal were, in their internationalism, just as petrified with hatred of “the nations” as their rabbis. The metaphysical revolt of the emancipated Jew sweeps away everything in its path. Perpetually on the run, he does not find the rest he aspires to, but carries away those he meets in his flight, recreating wherever he passes the disenchanted world of his native prison. To kill the sociopathic and destructive father, in the sense of true emancipation, must be understood as transcending the hatred of the father. For hatred is still a manifestation of his grip. To extirpate the toxic father from one’s soul presupposes having identified his nature and influence: an eminently perilous, almost superhuman undertaking, since the son thus emancipated finds himself without a father at all. Perhaps such emancipation is impossible without an encounter with the transcendent.

  It goes far beyond family roots and uprootings. To renounce his Jewishness, for a Jew, is like tearing himself from that collective part of his soul of which we have spoken. Ideas do not flow in the blood, but each person carries within himself his ancestors, in a mysterious and largely unconscious way. In other words, ideas are not simply a question of choice, for no one chooses the way in which he structures his vision of the world and of himself, his relation to the group and to men outside the group, from early childhood onward, beginning even before the acquisition of language. Our cultural heritage is deeply rooted in an unconscious whose deepest layers are ancestral. From this point of view, tribal endogamy creates a hermetically sealed chamber that is mental and not merely genetic.

  To understand this human reality, one must appeal to transgenerational psychology, one of the most enriching developments in depth psychology. Based on a few observations by Freud, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török introduced the notion of the “phantom,” defined as “a formation of the unconscious which has the peculiarity of never having been conscious […] and resulting from transmission, the mode of which remains to be determined, from the unconscious of a parent to the unconscious of a child.”733 Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy speaks of “invisible loyalties” that unconsciously connect us with our ancestors. Such loyalties, which shape our destiny largely unconsciously, are based on value systems that vary from one culture to another: “The development of loyalty is determined by the history of the family, by the type of justice that the family practices, and by family myths. It finds resonance in each member of the family. Upon each one falls on the one hand, obligations, according to position and role; and on the other hand, a sense of debts and merits, along with a personal style and manner of compliance.”734 Vincent de Gaulejac evokes “sociopsychic knots” and “genealogical impasses,” paradoxical and neurotic situations of the type: “I do not want to be what I am.” In seeking to escape from a painful family situation that has helped form his identity, the individual is led to reproduce it. “While wanting to break away at any cost, he remains attached without understanding why. In attempting to construct himself in an elsewhere, he remains overdetermined by a filiation which imposes itself on him even if he thinks he is escaping from it. These unconscious inscriptions lead us to postulate the existence of a genealogical past that imposes itself on the subject and structures his psychic functioning.”735

  Such considerations help us understand the psychological tensions that seize every person in the Jewish community who seeks to move away from it; no community cultivates a more powerful sense of ancestral loyalty. Consider the case of Robert, the son of a deportee to the concentration camps who was interviewed by Claudine Vegh for her collection of testimonies I Didn’t Say Goodbye (first published in French in 1979). Robert was fourteen when his father was deported to Auschwitz. When he was torn from his son, he shouted: “‘Robert, never forget, you are Jewish and you must remain Jewish!’ These were his last words, I hear them as if it were yesterday. He did not say to me: ‘I love you, do not fear anything, take care of yourself,’ but this one sentence. […] I resent them, you understand? Yes, I resent the dead who have paid for their lives with mine! It’s unbearable! […] My eldest daughter, who is a student, is leaving to settle permanently in Israel! She told me she had to do what I had not been able to accomplish […] The buckle is closed, he adds, the torch is passed on . . . Suddenly very tired: ‘My father would have been proud of her.’”736 This kind of personal testimony helps us understand the power of this invisible loyalty that the funeral cult of Auschwitz crystallizes in a whole generation of Jews.

  When considering the traumatic essence of Judaism, we must consider the issue of ritual circumcision performed on eight-day-old infants as commanded by the Biblical God to Abraham (Genesis 17:9-14). It must be distinguished from the circumcision practiced in ancient Egypt on fourteen-year-old boys as a kind of rite of passage, or from Islamic circumcision, which is not done before the age of five, generally later. Unlike the child or teenager, the infant is psychologically incapable of giving any positive meaning to the violence done to him. Eight days after emerging from his mother’s womb—a trauma in itself—
what he needs most of all is to develop trust in the benevolence of those who welcomed him into this world, starting with his mother.

  Because infants cannot speak, rabbis who justify the tradition speak in their place to minimize their physical pain and psychological plight. But according to Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma, scientific studies prove the neurological impact of infant circumcision, for which there exists no effective anesthetic. Behavioral changes observed after the operation, including sleep disorders and inhibition in mother-child bonding, are signs of a post-traumatic stress syndrome. The loss of trust in the mother is the potential source of a future unconscious hatred of women, the social consequences of which can be tremendous.737

  During the Jewish ceremony, the mother is normally kept away from the scene, and the baby’s screams are partly covered by the loud cheers of the men surrounding it—a clear message to the baby if it could think about it. But mothers who happen to witness the ritual empathize with the trauma of their child, and suffer enduring trauma themselves: “The screams of my baby remain embedded in my bones and haunt my mind,” says Miriam Pollack. “His cry sounded like he was being butchered. I lost my milk.” Nancy Wainer Cohen: “I will go to my grave hearing that horrible wail, and feeling somewhat responsible.” Elizabeth Pickard-Ginsburg: “I don’t feel I can recover from it. […] We had this beautiful baby boy and seven beautiful days and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it was like something had been shattered! … When he was first born there was a tie with my young one, my newborn. And when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it I had to cut off the bond. I had to cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so I cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut it off to repress the pain and to repress the natural instinct to stop the circumcision.” These testimonies, and more, can be found on the Circumcision Resource Center web page “Mothers Who Observed Circumcision.”738 They illustrate the repressed guilt that lies behind the stereotype of the Jewish mother.

  Sigmund Freud, that great explorer of infantile traumas, is rather discreet on the subject—though he didn’t have his own children circumcised. He broaches it in his latest books, but only in the context of his anthropological speculations, without delving into the psychological implications. In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, we read: “It is our suspicion that during the human family’s primeval period castration used actually to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so frequently plays a part in puberty rites among primitive people, is a clearly recognizable relic of it.”739 Freud touches again on the subject in Moses and Monotheism, published a few months before his death: “Circumcision is a symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primaeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the awfulness of his power, and whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to his father’s will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice.”740 Among Freud’s disciples, almost all of them Jewish, the only one to have reflected upon the trauma of infantile circumcision is Sándor Ferenczi, whom Freud long considered his most gifted acolyte, but who was ostracized when he started defending the veracity of his patients’ memories of infantile sexual abuses, rather than following the Freudian theory that these memories were mere repressed fantasies.741

  The link between circumcision and paternal violence is also recognized by Jewish tradition, which has always related God’s two commands to Abraham—to circumcise his sons, and to sacrifice Isaac—although they are separate events in the Bible. Infantile circumcision physically impresses on every Jew, and on all Jews collectively, Yahweh’s abusive and traumatic domination. It is like a genetic mark, passed on from father to son, to engrave the Yahwist covenant in pain and in sexuality. It is also the ultimate sign of separation: The uncircumcised are deemed impure and the Torah forbids socializing with them, let alone marrying them. Circumcision is the lock of the “Jewish prison.”

  Jewishness and Selective Empathy

  The most optimistic low-end estimate of the proportion of psychopaths in the Western population is one percent. They should not be confused with the proverbial one percent who own half the world’s wealth. Yet a study among senior executives of large companies, published under the title Snakes in Suits, shows that psychopathic traits are widespread among them.742 This is not surprising, since modern society values psychopathic traits and favors the upward mobility of psychopaths.

  The fact that Jews today are disproportionately represented among the elite (“though barely 2% of the [American] nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews,” remarks Benjamin Ginsberg in The Fatal Embrace)743 should not lead us to conclude that psychopathy is more prevalent among the chosen people. In a way, quite the opposite is the case: Jews demonstrate among themselves an extraordinary capacity for empathy, or at least familiarity, that breeds exceptional solidarity to the point of self-sacrifice. The anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are more egotistical, less loyal, less courageous, and less generous than non-Jews is totally unfair, as Hilaire Belloc pointed out in 1922. On the contrary, their loyalty, courage, and generosity often far outstrip those of their neighbors. However, these qualities tend to be oriented selectively toward themselves, and it is perhaps for this reason that they are more intense.744 It is true that Otto Weininger (a self-hating Jew according to Lessing) argued against the notion of “solidarity” among Jews: “When some accusation is made against some unknown member of the Jewish race, all Jews secretly take the part of the accused, and wish, hope for, and seek to establish his innocence. But it must not be thought that they are interesting themselves more in the fate of the individual Jew than they would do in the case of an individual Christian. It is the menace to Jewry in general, the fear that the shameful shadow may do harm to Jewry as a whole, which is the origin of the apparent feeling of sympathy.”745

  The selective nature of this empathy suggests that it is addressed less to the humanity of others than to their Jewishness. Here is what happens when two New York Jews meet: “We have never met before, but I instantly know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He is New York. He is Jewish. He looks like my uncle Louis, his voice is my uncle Sam. I feel we’ve been together at countless weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. I know his genetic structure. I’m certain that within the last five hundred years—perhaps even more recently—we shared the same ancestor.”746 This is Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s memory of his first meeting with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Council of the Federal Reserve, two very influential Americans, about whom we would like to believe that such familiarity does not affect their judgment of the American national interest.

  As Tacitus suggested two thousand years ago, there seems to be a correlation between the intensity of solidarity with kinsmen and the lack of it with others: “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies” (Histories V.5). The relationship between these two contrary attitudes can be understood with the help of Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis studied the psychopathology of religion in three books: Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion, in which he describes religion as “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.” Freud was not here talking about neurosis in the strict sense. On the contrary, by adopting the cognitive framework of religious faith, “devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”747 Expressed in a less polemical way, the idea is that religion makes it possible to sublimate the neurotic tendencies. Freud was mainly concerned with the majority religion of the Viennese bourgeoisie he rubbed shoulders with: Catholicism. We can adopt a similar approach to Judaism, but then must t
urn from neurosis to psychopathy or sociopathy. In certain essential aspects, Judaism is a form of “collective sociopathy.” This does not mean that “the Jews” are sociopaths, but rather that they are victims of a mental trap inherited from their ancestors and imposed by their elites. The difference between collective sociopathy and individual sociopathy is the same as between collective neurosis and individual neurosis according to Freud: participation in a collective sociopathic mentality allows members of the community to channel sociopathic tendencies toward the outside of the community, and to maintain within it a high degree of sociability.

  The idea is easy to illustrate: The individual who feels exceptional and surrounded by hostile people is a megalomaniac and a paranoiac; but the English Jew of Romanian origin Maurice Samuel speaks acceptably on behalf of his community when, in his 1924 book You Gentiles, he shares his “belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.” The individual possessed by the passion to destroy is considered dangerously insane, but Samuel is simply a communitarian Jew when he writes: “We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. […] We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.”748 Maurice Samuel was undoubtedly a charming and quite sane man. It is only when the Jews think and act as representatives of the Jews and in the name of the Jews—when they say “we Jews . . .”—that their behavior toward non-Jews and their conception of relations with non-Jews betrays a sociopathic structure.