An introduction is often the occasion for authors to recount how they came up with the idea for a book. My first book, on the sexual dimension of the Hebrew-Yiddish language divide (a theme also touched on in this book), emerged from a class Aaron Lansky offered during the long-ago summer I worked as a college intern at the Yiddish Book Center. The seed for my most recent book, about the Orthodox girls’ school network Bais Yaakov, was planted one Friday afternoon in 2010, when I happened to meet a group of Bais Yaakov students in the courtyard of a synagogue in Krakow. Alas, for this book, I have no memory at all of an initial flash that sparked the project. In the ten years or so (but who remembers?) that this project has been marinating and simmering before finally—during the past year or two—coming to a boil, writing a book about Freud and Jewish languages meant mostly that those around me had go-to gifts for birthdays and other occasions: I am now in possession of a broad if still incomplete range of Freudiana, including Freudian refrigerator magnets (both the Freud Magnetic Poetry Kit and the dress-up Freud doll, with couch), a Freud finger puppet (with bespectacled eyes tragically chewed off by our dog), Freudian Post-its, Freudian slippers, a Pink Freud T-shirt, a Freud planter pot, a Freud pen with sliding couch (acquired from the Freud Museum in London), and a bespoke mug (courtesy of Rachel Biale) with the image that graces the cover of this book. The closet off our living room that became a pandemic home office, in which I stored much of this collection and wrote most of this book, is known to the members of my household as “the Freud closet.” In a memorial poem, W. H. Auden wrote that after his death Freud had gone from being a person to becoming “a climate of opinion.” But even Auden might not have guessed that Freud would also go on to become a subgenre of tchotchke. As a rough gauge of the popularity of Freud within this genre, the Unemployed Philosophers Guild lists only six Jesus items (for instance, the “Jesus Shaves” mug, which “when you pour in hot liquid, a miracle transpires—His beard gradually vanishes before your very eyes!”) to Freud’s twenty-one.1 For those alert to the Freudian resonances of everything and anything, it will not have escaped attention that assembled in my closet is a low-budget, kitsch, secular version of the “gods and idols” that crowded the surfaces of Freud’s own office and treatment room.
As do these rooms, the Freud closet also has a few hundred books, either by or about Freud—far from any kind of complete selection. The rarest and most prized of these books are the long-out-of-print Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud’s work that constitute a prime focus of the present research project. These, like Freud’s antiquities, arrived at their destination from far afield. Itzik Gottesman, a Yiddish folklorist at the University of Texas, generously mailed me a copy of the first edition of Sarah Lerman’s 1928 Yiddish translation of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that had sat for decades in the family cabin in the Catskills; the pages, after the first fifteen or so, were uncut—no surprise, really. Miriam Borden, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, was kind enough to send me a copy of the second edition (also issued in 1928) that she found in one of the boxes housing the contents of a defunct Jewish socialist library in Toronto; as the borrowers’ card attests, the book had last been due on February 19, 1948. I paid thirty-five shekels, a steal, for my first acquisition in this area, a tattered copy of Yehudah Dwossis’s Hebrew Totem and Taboo (1939), at the Book Gallery, a used bookstore in Jerusalem. The boxed set of M. Brachyahu’s 1959 Hebrew translation of The Interpretation of Dreams in two volumes (with a third volume devoted to Brachyahu’s explication of psychoanalysis), beautiful blue-green dust jackets intact, turned up a few years later in a Tel Aviv bookstore; the staff of the Naomi Prawdar Yiddish Program at Tel Aviv University generously offered to mail the set—too bulky for carry-on—to California, and then, after it was lost in transit for six months (during which I grievously mourned it) and then miraculously returned to sender, mailed it again. A few others, no less precious for that, came from eBay. The biggest treasure, Max Weinreich’s Yiddish Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, I have only in PDF form, though I have laid eyes and (careful) hands on physical copies in the Reading Room of the Center for Jewish History in New York and at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. But I do own a pristine copy, acquired from the Yiddish Book Center, of Weinreich’s 1935 The Path to Our Youth, the most interesting and important of the Hebrew and Yiddish psychoanalytically inflected works published during Freud’s lifetime. These books constitute the core of the research collection I acquired in order to write my book. Unless it is the case that I wrote this book as justification for acquiring such a collection.
Walter Benjamin might have thought so. In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” he touched on the bliss of the book collector, asserting that “no one has had a greater sense of wellbeing than the man who carries on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg’s ‘Bookworm.’”2 As do Benjamin’s books, my books hold the pleasurable memories of “the cities where I found so many things,” which include, for Benjamin, “a musty book cellar in North Berlin” and the “student den in Munich” where he immersed himself in some of the books.3 But the pleasure of collection, Benjamin acknowledges, hardly depends on reading. A collector has “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.”4 I did eventually put these books to use, but the title of this Introduction is designed to signal also “the scene, the stage, of their fate,” their place in the world, in my world.
I am well aware, of course, that the phrase “the closet” in the title of this Introduction may well be taken more metaphorically than I intend, conjuring a host of academic assumptions that all suggest that this book, like so many that preceded it, will demonstrate that Freud inhabited a “Jewish closet,” which is to say, that he hid his Jewishness in the interest of promoting psychoanalysis as free from the taint of Jewish associations or because he felt ambivalent about his own Jewishness. This has been the central insight in a range of Jewish studies scholarly monographs on Freud, whether or not they used the term “closet” (many did). In the 1990s, under the influence of postcolonial studies and queer theory, this became a major interpretive principle for understanding Freud. In the view of such scholars as Daniel Boyarin, Jay Geller, Sander Gilman, and Ann Pellegrini, psychoanalysis emerged not from the center of European thought (despite its Viennese birthplace) but from its (internal) colonial margins; accordingly, Freud’s “decentering” of the human psyche emerged from the double consciousness that is a primary effect of colonialism, in which the subjectivity of the colonized is alienated and split by the colonial gaze (a psychological insight associated most strongly with Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks). As Boyarin puts it,
Before Fanon, Freud seemed to realize that the “colonized as constructed by colonialist ideology is the very figure of the divided subject [that] psychoanalytic theory [posits] to refute humanism’s myth of the unified self” (Parry 29). In a profound sense, “humanism’s myth” is a colonial myth. It follows that psychoanalysis is au fond not so much a Jewish science as a science of the doubled colonized subject—more perhaps than its practitioners have realized or conceded.5
Queer theory plays an important role in conceptualizing the position of the Jewish “doubled colonized subject,” given that the colonial perspective on Jewish difference (particularly circumcision and Jewish gender roles) feminized and sexually stigmatized Jewish men. It was in this context that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), which itself explores the salience of the analogies between the homosexual and Jewish closets, contributed valuable tools for understanding the intersubjective and unstable terrain of Jewish visibility, concealment, avowal, recognition, and negation in Freud’s work.6 Gilman, working through this complicated knot of sex and Jewishness, argues in a number of works that Freud’s most distinctive theories about sexuality and gender differences, for instance, the role of penis envy in constructing female identity, by “recoding race as gender” serve as a universalizing cover for the sexual anxieties of Jewish men within a culture that feminized them: “Thus for Freud every move concerning the articulation of human sexuality responds to his desire to resist the charges of his own specificity by either projecting the sense of his own sexual difference onto other groups, such as women, or by universalizing the attack on Jewish particularism, mirrored in the particularism of the Jew’s body.”7 Even when Freud talked about circumcision without “recoding” it to refer to women, these references are sometimes so indirect that Boyarin can claim that Freud “discursively hid or closeted his circumcision,” for instance, in the little Hans case study, by speaking of it as if it were not his own body being described by the term. Nor could Freud’s apparently direct assertions of his own Jewishness fully release him from the Jewish closet, since
uncloseting this identity would not result in an automatic dissolving of the toxic energy of the anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and homophobic imagery (Dean). Rather, “coming out” is perhaps a prophylactic, a way of defending oneself from full participation in the most noxious forms of that discourse. In this respect, Freud hides in, and sometimes emerges from, the queer and Jewish closets of his time.8
By now, the “Jewish closet” is so ubiquitous a concept that a reader would be forgiven for assuming that this book, too, aims to explore these familiar themes.9 To take up residence in a closet stocked with Freud’s writings, writings about “the Jewish Freud,” and translations of his work into Jewish languages may be to invite the production of a book that is structured more or less as a metaphorical Jewish closet and that does the work of “outing” the Jewish Freud (again). So I will say at the outset that although I find much of the literature on the “Jewish closet” illuminating and compelling, early on in my thinking about this book I resolved to try a different path. My Freud closet holds precious translations of his work into Hebrew and Yiddish, works concealed only in the sense that few in the world of psychoanalysis (including Freud) can read them. But this does not make it a closet where Jewishness is concealed—quite the contrary. These translations, with their different script and greater age than most of the books with which they rub shoulders, despite being in a closet are not themselves a closet, unless they are a different sort of closet; and I do not claim that they supply a key by which to read the concealed Jewishness of Freud’s work. These books instead allow me to avoid the almost too attractive and powerful framing of the Jewish closet, given that their Jewishness hardly needs hunting down. Rather than hidden depths, the object of my study is accordingly surfaces, affects, and touch: surfaces that hold material objects marked as Jewish, affects that traverse these objects, and the touch that brings these domains together. This approach, as it turns out, also owes something to Kosofsky Sedgwick, not as an explorer of the Jewish and queer closets but in this case as a pioneer of “surface reading” and affect theory. Surface reading—exploring “what is beside rather than what is beneath or behind”—allows her to find “some ways around the topos of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of critical work of the past four decades.”10 Nowhere is this more true, it could be argued, than in studies of Freud’s Jewishness, which in this way are archetypes of the “drama of exposure.” In keeping with its avoidance of academic argumentation, attention to objects, touch, and affect is not meant to challenge or displace “paranoid” or “symptomatic” readings. Rather, the surface functions as a supplement, building on an awareness that our well-established, disciplinarily inculcated suspicious habits about how texts mean and what texts conceal occasionally blind us to what they convey, for instance, as books that can be touched rather than as texts that must be “interrogated.”
In Chapter 3, I discuss the surface-reading approach to Freud in detail—what it entails, and the peculiarity of applying it to Freud, who is generally credited with forging (along with Marx) the “symptomatic” hermeneutic style that surface readings avoid. So I will just say here that Freud himself had what could be described as a surface relationship with a few of the books in my closet, writing prefaces for Dwossis’s Hebrew translations of Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Totem and Taboo, and a letter that served as a preface for Weinreich’s Yiddish Introduction to Psychoanalysis. In each case, Freud made clear that he was unable to read or understand the Hebrew or Yiddish. The much-quoted prefaces to the two Hebrew translations appear in the Standard Edition (SE) and indeed are the only such prefaces to achieve this canonical status. The preface for Totem and Taboo begins with Freud’s acknowledgment that he is someone who is “ignorant of the language of the holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers . . . and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature.”11 Ignorance of the language in which it is written does not make Freud’s relationship with Dwossis’s translation any less meaningful: “It is an experience of a quite special kind for such an author when a book of his is translated into the Hebrew language and put into the hands of readers for whom that historic idiom is a living tongue: a book, moreover, which deals with the origin of religion and morality, though it adopts no Jewish standpoint and makes no exceptions in favor of Jewry.” This passage, like so many of Freud’s others, has been subject to symptomatic analysis, turning Freud’s own hermeneutical key of “negation” against him.12 Freud, in these readings, is attempting to hide the true extent of his Hebrew knowledge, as part of a more general strategy of concealing the depth and breadth of his Jewishness. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi notes that Freud approaches the question of his Jewishness in this passage “via negationis, by a series of reductions” that reveal his ambivalence.13 More generally, Yerushalmi believes that “the very violence of Freud’s recoil against Jewish belief or ritual must arouse our deepest suspicion.”14 As evidence that Freud did indeed know Hebrew, Yerushalmi notes his insistence in a letter to Arnold Zweig on the correct pronunciation of his beloved dog’s name, Jofie—“Jo wie Jud.” Reflecting on the meaning of this name, Yerushalmi continues: “Of all the languages Freud knew or could have known there is only one that makes sense. In Hebrew, Yofi means—Beauty.”15
But to view Freud’s preface to Totem and Taboo as a ruse to throw readers off the suspicion that he can understand the Hebrew letters he claims not to be able to make out is to miss what happens when we take Freud at his word. As with Poe’s purloined letter, what we are looking for might be right in front of our noses, on the surface of the text and only on the surface, since it is the visible fact that Dwossis’s work is in Hebrew, a script Freud can recognize but not read, that excites Freud’s response. Even if Dwossis’s translation is opaque to him—or rather, because Dwossis’s reading is opaque to him—Freud’s relationship with the book he is introducing is far from devoid of content or affect, and only the narrowest understanding of how books signify or how languages work would suggest that it is. It is the barest minimum of comprehension Freud claims: that the book is in Hebrew, that it contains his own German words clothed in Hebrew garb, and that there are readers who unlike him can understand this language, by virtue of their participation in the modern transformation of Hebrew from “holy writ” to “living language.” The book Freud holds in his mind’s eye, in the case of Totem and Taboo, or the page of (the proofs of?) the Yiddish Introduction to Psychoanalysis, sent by Weinreich, that “I held in my hand with great respect,” is thus a book or page rather than a “text,” and the feelings Freud describes in holding it are rendered not clearer but more puzzling if we suppose, with Yerushalmi, that Freud is only pretending not to be able to read its contents.
In this sense, the books in my closet, some of which were also in Freud’s library, might be thought of as fetishes, not so different from those beautiful, fascinating, inscrutable objects in Freud’s antiquity collection.16 As objects rather than “texts,” they signify in their appearance, in their visible and material reality. Writing about what goes missing in translations of Yiddish texts, Anita Norich points to their Hebrew script, “the physical and spatial relations of the text on the page.”17 These Hebrew and Yiddish books are fetishes also in the Freudian sense, defined by the way they combine lack and presence. This is the case for Freud, who could not read these languages but nevertheless thought and wrote about these books. But it is also the case, differently, for contemporary Yiddish and Yiddishists (including myself), in this post-Holocaust, post-vernacular moment. This is true, in Norich’s view, for Yiddish translators, who are now responsible for making readers “feel heymish (at home, but also intimate, familiar), for giving them (back?) the home many of them have never known.”18 Zohar Weiman-Kelman similarly describes the losses “tied to the turbulent history of Yiddish [that] bind the language itself to a traumatic encounter with lack.” Despite the risk of fetishizing Yiddish, the fetish, “as a figure holding both absence and presence,” enables “an interaction with Yiddish content as a way of feeling lack rather than disavowing it.”19
The powerful affects that stir Freud’s words about Dwossis’s Hebrew book and the ones palpable in Norich and Weiman-Kelman reflect very different historical contexts. My own feelings about the books in my closet are certainly not identical with what Freud felt about them: Freud was seeing his own thought, which he had expressed in German (a Viennese German crossed by and suffused with other languages), rendered in a Hebrew and Yiddish that I am willing to believe (contra Yerushalmi) he could recognize but not really read. The translations are old-fashioned, dense, and often clunky, but what I feel for them is hardly limited to what they say or how they say it. If Freud was moved at his own words in a foreign-but-familiar tongue, I am moved by what are in some complicated sense my “own” languages (one a half-lost “mother tongue,” the other learned in school as a child) speaking Freud’s words, a different but not entirely unrelated constellation of relationships. It is not the Jewish words but the psychoanalytic content that registers as the more foreign element to me, culturally if not intellectually. I wasn’t raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan among professors and professionals who spoke psychoanalysis as something of a native tongue. I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that I am guessing housed not a single psychoanalyst or analysand. Karl Kraus wrote that “psychoanalysis was the disease of assimilated Jews; Eastern European Jews made do with diabetes.”20 Despite my father being an Orthodox Yiddish journalist and an intellectual, it would be fair to say that my upbringing was among Jews who made do with diabetes, a background that contributed to my feeling an outsider to the field even as I plunged into writing this book. In other words, in some stratum of my psychic development I share something of the attitude toward Freud of his Hebrew and Yiddish readers in the 1920s and 1930s, and maybe even of some of his translators, who were generally untrained in psychoanalysis and had little connection to its formal structures (although Weinreich spent the autumn of 1933 studying with the child psychologist Charlotte Bühler in Vienna, where he also established a friendship with the psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld).
Freud was well aware of the resistance, dismissal, and outright hostility aroused by his thought among so many of his potential readers. He knew that many reduced his complex ideas to absurd and “wild” caricature.21 He was also aware of all the people (Jewish and not) for whom psychoanalysis was less a threatening or daring set of ideas than a famous, fascinating, and fancy thing that was basically for other people: a famous and fascinating field, however, discovered or invented by a Jew. This, of course, is an absurdly superficial relation to the complex, brilliant, groundbreaking, rich insights that make up Freud’s thought, and Freud can hardly be blamed for trying to resist such reductive readings of his work (even if they occasionally worked in his favor). But these efforts were entirely unsuccessful, in his own day and into ours, in which the fascination with Freud’s Jewishness persists in both popular and academic circles, superficial and “deep” variations. This is certainly part of why I am moved by these particular material objects, the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of his work, and moved that Freud was moved by them as well.
I have no doubt that Freud’s Jewishness contributed to my interest in the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of his work, giving the translations surplus meaning beyond the odd and fusty words on the brittle pages. But actually opening up and reading these books produced a whole new affective dimension to the work. It was true that I have never been analyzed and never troubled myself to purchase a complete Standard Edition (I make do with a conveniently searchable PDF). Nevertheless, I am in possession of a little collection of Freud books that almost no one else in the field has read, despite whatever store of Freudian knowledge they acquired that no doubt far exceeds my own. What I have, in other words, is not only a closet but also a niche, a little piece of valuable real estate more appealing for its location at the peaceful outer margins of the teeming centers of the dauntingly vast field of psychoanalysis. Like my closet, my niche is small, manageable, and cozy, combining hygge with historical pathos and a touch of humor. Having a niche (and what a niche!) reverses certain structures of exclusion: I, who even at the moment of completing this book still feel myself to be essentially an outsider to the field, had somehow found an unexpected and neglected corridor—a royal road—straight into the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Only this feeling (or fantasy), embodied for me in a shelf of hard-to-find books I painstakingly, pleasurably procured, could have persuaded me to plant a flag in this particular terrain.
The translations also helped reassure me that I wasn’t writing what one colleague of mine called “another Jewish Freud book.” If indeed the Hebrew and Yiddish books on my shelf helped me escape this fate (the reader will have to judge that), the reason is that they offered a new frame for understanding the Jewish Freud. Taking as my research subject not Freud and his Jewishness but the Jewish frame around Freud’s work constructed by others (especially his early translators in Hebrew and Yiddish) allowed me what I hope is a greater measure of self-consciousness about the Jewish framings of Freud and psychoanalysis than practitioners in the field have sometimes shown. Focusing on the Jewish interpellation-as-recognition of Freud calls attention to the desires and habits of thought of researchers, rather than (yet again) the purported Jewish anxieties and ambivalences of their research subject. By tracing the history of the ways scholars and translators have engaged with and constructed Freud’s Jewishness, I am exploring the Jewish Freud at one remove rather than throwing myself directly into a game of detection and discovery. What I am studying is thus not so much Freud’s Jewishness as the persistent desire to discover and engage with Freud’s Jewishness, a feature that propels much of the Hebrew and Yiddish translation and reception of Freud’s work and one I readily acknowledge as a motivation in my own work. Freud’s Jewishness in this sense set loose what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call, as their revisionary (and surface-oriented) term for what Freud called the unconscious, a “desiring-machine,” which does not so much “mean” as produce and work.22 What the Jewish-Freud desiring-machine desires, obviously enough, is the Jewish Freud, a more Jewish Freud, a Freud who will speak his Jewishness; what the desiring-machine produces is translations and works of scholarship (my own and others) in which Freud’s Jewishness is discovered, “exposed,” explored, played with, and touched. This game, when played by academics, has a built-in source of pleasure (beyond the sheer pleasure of touch) that helps explain its “stickiness,” its ability to retain players, which is that it places the Jewish studies scholar in the pleasurable and rewarding position vis-à-vis Freud as the “subject supposed to know” (to use Jacques Lacan’s phrase for the typically American misunderstanding of what a psychoanalyst is). This desire is certainly a major component of the engine that drives my research (I can read those languages that Freud couldn’t!), but it is also the subject of the research, given that along with riding I also explore this engine of Jewishness, this Jewish desire to make Jewish connections, to find Jewish “secrets,” to touch the Jewishness of famous Jews, to signal one’s own Jewishness to others, to recognize Jewishness in a stranger—desires that may be nearly coextensive with Jewishness itself in its social, intersubjective, and transferential dimension.
Translating the Jewish Freud traces the affective pathways, surface associations, and networks of relationship that connect Freud and Jewish languages, Freud’s work and their translations into Hebrew and Yiddish, and readers of Jewish languages (a category in which I include myself). The phrase “Jewish languages” is awkward shorthand in this context, given that what constituted a “language” shifted over the periods I am studying, and given that the concept of a “Jewish language” is no neutral descriptor but carries with it a set of Jewish nationalist or ethnocentric assumptions I hope to avoid reifying. But these concepts of Hebrew and Yiddish as tightly associated with Jews and Jewishness, even Jews who could not speak or read those languages, are also an important part of the story I am investigating. Freud’s lifetime spanned major shifts in the historical phenomena and ideological conceptions of Hebrew and Yiddish and in understanding the Jewishness of Jewish languages. The prefaces he wrote for Dwossis’s and Weinreich’s translations remind us that exploring Freud’s relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish should not end, as it sometimes does, with references to his early childhood and youth, his father’s Hasidism or Haskalah, his mother’s Galician Yiddish, his family’s Eastern European ancestry—the buried sites typically mined for evidence of Freud’s authentic-because-concealed attitudes toward or knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish. Nor is the only relevant context for discussions of his attitude toward Yiddish the views prevalent in Jewish and non-Jewish circles that characterized Yiddish as a grotesque and deformed jargon. Freud wrote this preface in 1930, during the last decade of his life, and in the period in which he was first being translated into Hebrew and Yiddish as part of a lively, mutual, and openly acknowledged engagement between Freud and the Hebrew and Yiddish cultural scenes. Hebrew, as reflected in the preface, is in some more-or-less remote but still meaningful sense his ancestral language as well as, more collectively and religiously, the “holy writ.” But Freud makes clear that he is fully aware of the modern secular revival of Hebrew, a revival whose secularity and modernity are indeed signified by its capacity to speak Freud’s words and express thoughts unbound (in his view) by any “Jewish standpoint.”
These translations allow us another point of entry to the persistent questions of whether Freud’s findings in books such as Totem and Taboo derived in any way from Jewish experience, either Freud’s own or a broader cultural inheritance. Whatever arguments can be made on that score, and in particular about this book, however free it was of a Jewish standpoint, Freud had no doubt that its translation into what he recognized as a Jewish language had profound Jewish meaning. Freud’s son Ernst reported that his father “always had a genuine love for Hebrew and Yiddish” and “refused to accept royalties” when his works were translated into either of those languages.23 The “always” may be referring to Ernst’s perspective, as witness to the later decades of his father’s life. Nevertheless, it is fair to guess that the feelings stirred by the appearance of his words in an openly Jewish script involved not only the deep-rooted shame and denial that are a staple of the discourse on Freud’s “Jewish closet,” even if these, too, may have played a part. This shame, part of a broader spectrum of the shame of being Jewish in a culture that denigrated Jewishness, by the 1930s also evidently included the shame of not being Jewish enough, in the sense of not being able to read Hebrew or Yiddish. But shame, of whatever variety, is not the whole story: Freud also participated in and no doubt benefited from the culturally therapeutic attempts to transvalue Jewish languages. The Hebrew revival and the resurgence of Yiddishist nationalism are often studied through the writings of participants or ideologues associated with the revolutionary shifts in these languages. Freud’s words stand as evidence that these language revolutions could also affect those further afield whose access to Hebrew and Yiddish was largely limited to their meaningful, opaque surfaces.
These affects, specific, contingent, and historically rooted as they are, are also contagious, collective, and thus intergenerational. Among “the hands of readers” that have touched a copy Dwossis’s Totem and Taboo, with Freud’s preface in Hebrew garb, are my own, though I avoid handling it, since the loose pages rain brittle brown fragments. I confess that I also long avoided reading it, for many years considering mere ownership satisfying enough. All three of the Hebrew translations of Freud’s works by Yehuda Dwossis and two of the three completed volumes of Max Weinreich’s (unfinished) Yiddish Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis are in Freud’s library in London and so are among the small portion of his library he transported to that city (others went to friends or booksellers).24
1. “Jesus Shaves Heat-Changing Mug,” Unemployed Philosophers Guild, 2023, https://philosophersguild.com/products/jesus-shaves-mug?_pos=425&_sid=3a7c6fa6b&_ss=r.
2. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 67. Benjamin’s reference is to a humorous painting of that title by Carl Spitzweg, circa 1850.
3. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 67.
4. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60. For a recent study of Jewish books as material objects, see Barbara E. Mann, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
5. Daniel Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” Discourse 19, no. 2 (1997): 22. The reference is to Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–58.
6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
7. Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 202. See also Boyarin’s summary of Gilman’s view in Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?,” 28.
8. Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?,” 33. The reference is to Tim Dean, “On the Eve of a Queer Future,” Raritan 15, no. 1 (1995): 116–34.
9. The “Jewish closet,” as a masquerade or form of double consciousness, functioning in parallel to or differently from the “queer closet,” continues to animate discussions of Jewish identity in modernity, with many critics arguing against Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim that Jewishness is the more stable referent than queerness. Jonathan Freedman contrasts the gay and Jewish closets in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, in which “Jewishness and perversion return over and over as topics of mystery and interrogation.” According to Freedman, a comparison of these closets seems “to establish the Jew as the ‘out’ other, the one whose closetedness has, at least, a local habitation and a name; indeed, since the name Jew has been sounded as a synonym for other throughout the long history of Christian Europe, sodomy appears yet more secret, yet more epistemologically unstable when brought into contact with it—it is knowable through, or is best defined by, the image of the Jew.” Jonathan Freedman, “Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 527. In her essay on Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film Europa, Europa, Ruth Johnston explores the racial masquerade that allows the film’s protagonist, Salomon Perel, to survive the Holocaust, citing “the epistemological space of the Jewish closet” and demonstrating “its structural affinities with the gay closet,” literally, as when the protagonist dreams that he is hiding in a closet with the naked Hitler, who conceals his genitals with his hands. See Ruth D. Johnston, “The Jewish Closet in Europa, Europa,” Camera Obscura 18, no. 1 (2003): 1.
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8.
11. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 13: xv. Hereafter abbreviated as SE.
12. “Negation” (1925), SE 19: 235–39. It is worth pointing out that Freud’s concept is aimed more narrowly than common usage of the term, at illuminating how a free association draws meaningful connections even when one element is denied or framed in a denial.
13. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 69.
14. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 68.
15. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 70. The citation is from Sigmund Freud, “Letter to ‘Meister Arnold’” (June 17, 1936), in The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Elaine Robson-Scott and William Robson-Scott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 131; emphasis in original.
16. Freud sees the fetish as a substitute for the missing maternal phallus and a displacement for castration anxiety. Sigmund Freud et al., “Fetishism,” SE 21: 147–58. Julia Kristeva brings this insight to bear on language, as substituting for a lost connection to reality and the object, asking, “Is not language our ultimate and inseparable fetish?” Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 37.
17. Anita Norich, “A Response from Anita Norich,” Prooftexts 20, no. 1–2 (2000): 217; responding to Kathryn Hellerstein, “Translating as a Feminist: Reconceiving Anna Margolin,” Prooftexts 20, no. 1–2 (2000), 191–208.
18. Norich, “Response,” 217.
19. Zohar Weiman-Kelman, “Touching Time: Poetry, History, and the Erotics of Yiddish,” Criticism 59, no. 1 (2017): 116.
20. Karl Kraus, “On Psychoanalysis and Psychology,” in Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psycho-analysis and Psychiatry, by Thomas Szasz (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 103, see also 117. Quoted in John M. Efron, Medicine and the German Jews: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 151. I thank John Efron for this reference. On Freud, the Neue Freie Presse, and Kraus’s attacks on psychoanalysis, see Leo A. Lensing, “The Neue Freie Presse Neurosis: Freud, Karl Kraus, and Newspaper as Daily Devotional,” in The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity, ed. Arnold D. Richards (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 51–65.
21. Freud, “Wild Psychoanalysis,” SE 11: 219–27.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 8.
23. Jacob Meitlis, “The Last Days of Sigmund Freud,” Jewish Frontier 18 (September 1951): 21.
24. See J. Keith Davies and Gerhard Fichtner, Freud’s Library: A Comprehensive Catalogue (London: Freud Museum; and Tübingen: edition discord, 2004). According to the “Introduction,” 3, Freud selected only a small part of his Vienna library to bring to London, making the presence of these translations that he could not read in his London collection all the more meaningful.
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