Henry Ebel:
The Psychohistory of an Enduring National Identity

If there is a single core lesson to be learned from psychoanalysis and psychohistory, it is probably the one that runs as follows:

That which is so obvious as to be beneath discussion is that which most demands discussion.

To be conventionally “hostile” to some point of view – indignantly or persistently “opposed” to it – is only one of the defensive strategies available to the human mind.

Another is what the analysts call scotomization – the trick of not seeing it at all, that is, remaining entirely oblivious to the existence of that which cannot be integrated, accepted or acknowledged by a particular human mind.

Still another defensive strategy, and one particularly used by those committed to intellectualization, is to say that the point of view or argument being put forward is “obvious,” that is, already known and therefore unworthy of prolonged or even brief discussion. Synonyms for “obvious” may include recherché and déja vu, which, being in a foreign language, carry even more authority.

That the human race has always been divided up into groups is an “obvious” fact of this kind, one that is accepted unquestioningly by most of those who read the daily papers and watch the evening news on TV. We find the idea of a world without groups – ethnic, national and political – as inconceivable as our forefathers found a number of eternal verities that have since turned out to be entirely mutable.

Like other psychological artifacts, the existence of something called “groups” is regarded as “obvious” or “beyond question” at the same time that it is obsessively discussed, portrayed, and speculated upon – the obsession clearly contradicting the blasé dismissal implied by “obvious.” If we now move to the point where we acknowledge the quantity at discussion about “groups”, the amount of space taken up in the daily newspaper, for example, by articles about “community,” “conflict between two communities,” “the sense of neighborhood,” etcetera – then obsession may turn out to be a relatively pallid way of describing something that might more accurately be designated as monomania.

To this can be added everything implied by such contemporary concerns as “the search for roots, ” “the new interest in genealogy,” “the rediscovery by the young [Armenian, Jewish, Italian, Greek, etcetera] of the tradition of the grandparents,” “return to the Old Country” – as well as all litigation that attempts to establish territorial or proprietorial claims on a communal basis, for example that concerning the deportation of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, Jewish historical documents carried from Europe to America in the same period, and large stretches of the North American continent claimed by “Native American” groups because their ancestors inhabited them on an exclusive basis down to the 17th or 18 centuries.

The Jewish example

But the challenge posed to our intelligence and our sensibilities by the phenomenon of “groups” becomes particularly intense when the subject under discussion is the “group” commonly known as “Jews.” Indeed, even the quotation marks used in the previous sentence are likely to be perceived as offensive or challenging as a way or getting the discussion in this particular paper started.

Here are some of the reasons why this is the case:

 (1) Ever since the establishment of the religion called “Christianity” as the official faith of Western nations and/or ethnic groups, the denial of the legitimate existence of a religion called “Judaism” has often led to the expropriation, physical abuse, individual murder, and group massacre of those who believed themselves to belong to the Jewish group.

(2) The worst of these massacres having taken place less than two generations ago, and the rage or guilt engendered by that fact being still in the air, it is often regarded as inconceivable that the existence of a Jewish group can be discussed, today, in dispassionate terms.

(3) In the United States in particular, one of the primary reactions to the destruction of European Jews has been the birth, under the auspices of American Jewish organizations, of a political vision of “pluralism and group identity” that is explicitly committed to the notion of the intrinsic health and positive merits of “belonging” to some kind of ethnic “group.” The successful promulgation of this idea has made all speculation about the phenomenon of group identity taboo, because if we question the legitimacy or eternal verity of any “group” (Latin gens) we might appear to be preparing the ground for yet another group massacre (genocide) of the type perpetuated by the Nazis.

(4) Moreover, the institutionalization of the term Holocaust as a description of the acts perpetrated against Jews by the Nazis has placed this entire subject within a religious or pseudo‑religious framework that explicitly debars the use of reasoned prose with respect to the subject of Jewish group‑identity as opposed to passionate prose‑poetry.

 Thus, there are substantial obstacles that stand in the way of the successful completion of the literary project implied by the title page of this paper. For that reason, I am going to begin by contemplating a document that has been widely praised and generally acknowledged for the quality of its scholarship and a certain ruthlessly dispassionate tone: Raul Hilberg’s book The Destruction of the European Jews.

A psychohistory in disguise – with no explanations

As those who have read it – or read in it – can testify, the most remarkable thing about Hilberg’s book[1] is its length, as well as the fact that this length is justified by its contents. The standard edition is 790 pages long – printed in double‑column format. The density of Hilberg’s scholarship has made this book into an enduring encyclopedia on its subject – and like all encyclopedias, this one is in danger of becoming a monument to be ritually acknowledged rather than a book that requires actual reading.

Hilberg’s work, however, has had an unusual destiny in one particular respect. Its remorselessness in presenting “chapter and verse” on the destruction of the European Jews – which implies a philosophical perspective of a certain kind – made it the prime source for a much briefer text by Richard Rubenstein entitled The Cunning of History. In turn, Rubenstein’s meditation on the subject of the destruction of the European Jews and the philosophical implications of that event – including his widely noted conclusion that nothing the Nazis did can be characterized, in all honesty, as “illegal” – came to the attention of the novelist William Styron.

Styron, besides writing a high‑praise introduction to the paperback edition of Rubenstein’s book,[2] was strongly influenced by it in the composition of his novel Sophie’s Choice – indeed, the book is mentioned in the novel itself – and so, Rubenstein can be said to have influenced the quite faithful film eventually made of the novel.

All told, therefore, Hilberg, Rubenstein and Styron would appear to have been remarkably successful in bringing the full weight of their ideas before the American and world public. Those who return to Hilberg’s text, however, will find that there is one vein of his reasoning that has still been avoided by most if not all of his disciples and commentators.

As befits an argument of such depth, Hilberg begins his book with a historical sketch entitled “Precedents.” He gives a rapid and in certain respects questionable summary of the rise of Christian anti‑Semitism in the West, including the prolonged attempts to convert some, many or most Jews to one or another form of Christianity. He takes Martin Luther’s diatribe in Von den Jüden und Ihren Lügen (1543) as marking an end to the conversionist delusion, with its “sympathetic” tone toward those who insist on regarding themselves as Jews.

“Since the fourth century after Christ,” Hilberg writes, “there have been three anti‑Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion and annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third emerged as an alternative to the second” (p.3).

What now follows, however, is Hilberg’s assertion “that most of what happened in those twelve years [from 1933 to 1945] had already happened before” (p.3). The Nazis, Hilberg writes, “did not begin a development; they completed it” (p.4). In moving so swiftly and efficiently toward the annihilation of the Jews of Europe, “the German bureaucrats could dip into a vast reservoir of administrative experience, a reservoir which church and state had filled in fifteen hundred years of destructive activity” (p.4).

Hilberg then draws parallels between the anti‑Jewish actions that were common in the Middle Ages and afterward, and those committed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, including those specified by the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor (1935) and a variety of previous and subsequent decrees (p.5).

Hilberg acknowledges that the Nazi program went beyond that of earlier ages in its annihilatory intent, and to that extent, he writes, “the Nazi administrators became improvisers and innovators” (p.8). Nevertheless, he continues, the Nazi image of “the Jew” and the negative characteristics of “the Jew” fell on fertile soil, and regenerated the latent demonism of Luther and the anti‑Semites who began to flourish in Germany and Austria toward the end of the 19th century (pp. 8‑13).

Now Hilberg turns his attention in a different direction, and declares:

In this book we shall deal mainly with the perpetrators, with the administrative and psychological determinants which made possible the annihilation of five million people. The success of that destruction process depended, however, not only on its perpetrators but also on its victims. (p. 14)

 Hilberg goes on to note that “whether the Jews resisted or submitted was a matter of considerable importance to German agencies which were engaged in anti‑Jewish action” (p. 14). What the Nazis encountered was a “Jewish reaction pattern” that was, in fact, “older than the precedents which we have just discussed” (p. 14). Hilberg goes on:

The Jews have responded to force in a typical fashion for almost two thousand years. (”Jews,” in this context, refers only to the “exiled,” “dispersed,” or “ghetto” Jews, not the Palestine or Israel Jews.) It is significant that in the first century after Christ, when the Jews of Palestine were fighting their war against the Roman conquerors, the Jewish colony in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which was under Roman domination, had already unlearned the art of revolt. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the European Jews surrendered to their fate only a few years before Palestine Jewry hurled back Arab invaders by force of arms. Therefore the “Jewish reaction pattern” is confined to the pattern which formed in exile, by the Diaspora, in the ghetto. (p. 14)

That pattern, Hilberg summarizes, consisted from the first century A.D. down to the Nazi period – of a sequence of strategies beginning with the attempt at alleviation of anti‑Jewish decrees and actions, followed (once this had failed) by evasion, paralysis and compliance (pp. 14‑15).

While this archetypal reaction pattern “assured the survival of Jewry during the Church’s massive conversion drive,” Hilberg writes, the result of bringing it into play once again, in the period 1933‑1945,

was catastrophic. The German bureaucracy was not slowed by Jewish pleading; it was not stopped by Jewish indispensability. Without regard to cost, the bureaucratic machine, operating with accelerating speed and ever‑widening destructive effect, proceeded to annihilate the European Jews. The Jewish community, unable to switch to resistance, increased its cooperation with the tempo of the German measures, thus hastening its own destruction. (p. 17)

Hilberg concludes with the observation: “We see, therefore, that both perpetrators and victims drew upon their age‑old experience in dealing with each other. The Germans did it with success. The Jews did it with disaster.” (p.17)

The two faces of Judaism

I have quoted Hilberg’s opening pages at such length in order to establish beyond doubt the importance that this line of reasoning has for the remainder of his argument. At many points in his subsequent pages, Hilberg alludes to this opening section and to the reaction pattern it describes. Though he is sufficiently merciful not to call attention to the fact, the whole gist of his argument is one long refutation of the idea, offered in many popular works published in the past few decades, that “resistance” was a norm among those whom the Nazis had condemned to annihilation.

In a characteristic passage, Hilberg notes, with respect to the battle fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, that

the losses to the Germans and their collaborators consisted of sixteen dead and eighty‑five wounded. (p. 326)

Hilberg, of course, is scrupulous in not confusing armed resistance with evasion, the latter being only one of the steps that, he argues, moved the Jews inexorably toward annihilation.

What is so striking about the major theme in Hilberg’s book is that it offers us something very close to a comprehensive psychohistory of “the Jews” – that is, of all of those who have voluntarily considered themselves, over a period of at least two thousand years, as belonging to a specifically Jewish ”group.” Even more dramatically, he has divided this group into two dialectically‑linked segments:

 (1) All of those living on Palestinian soil, whether they were living there in 66 A.D., 132 A.D., or 1948 A.D., these being Jews capable of significant and even ferocious levels of “resistance.”

(2) All of those living in the so-called Diaspora, whether they were living outside of Palestine in the first century A.D., or the 15th, or the 20th – these being Jews just as congenitally incapable of resistance.

In the closing pages of his book, Hilberg reaffirms this “psychograph” of the Jewish people by observing, with respect to those who live in the Diaspora, that

there has been no radical change in the Jewish position. The Jewish leadership has been retained. Its thinking has been perpetuated. In all the post‑war Jewish activities we can see only an intensification of Jewry’s two traditional reactions, the appeal and the tendency to flight. (p. 763)

The fact that flight is likely, now, to be flight to Israel does not, in Hilberg’s opinion, change the essential nature of his dialectical portrait of Jewish group‑identity.

I have suggested that Hilberg is giving a psychohistorical portrait of the ”group” that identifies itself as Jewish because of the very nature of the task that he has set himself in The Destruction of the European Jews. He is talking about people who define themselves not within the ordinary context of daily human life but, by definition, within a life‑and‑death drama. For a minority living in a continuously hostile Christian environment, being “Jewish” and the possibility of premature death were synonymous. What Hilberg appears to be saying is that Diaspora Jews defined themselves as people incapable of offering resistance to persecution, and based the very essence of their “national existence” around the principles of evasion and accommodation – continuous group-masochism in the service of physical survival.

At the other extreme, according to Hilberg, are the Jews on Palestinian soil who willingly took up arms against the entire Roman Empire not once but twice in the opening centuries A.D.: in 66‑70 A.D. (to which must be added the fall of Masada in 73), and again under Bar‑Kosiba (Bar‑Kochba) in 132‑135 A.D.

The Diaspora Jews have in common, and transmit to their progeny, the defining trait of being unable to express their hatred of oppression in an overt form.

Those who took up arms against the Romans, however – opponents of rather different magnitude, let it be noted that they defeated the Arabs in 1948 – would not permit the certainty of defeat to affect their desire to “resist.”

One of the questions I would like to pose, on the basis of this presentation of Hilberg’s views, is whether those views make any kind of sense. Are there in fact two “Jewish peoples”? If so, how is it that one of them disappeared after 135 A.D. and reappeared only as the middle of the 20th century approached? If not, how can we account for the simultaneous existence, under the rubric of “Jew,” of passive cringers and active supermen?

The issue of “historical guilt”

Psychohistory and theology make strange bedfellows, but so, of course, do many spouses and lovers. A marriage between the two is possible if we keep in mind the irreducible psychohistorical principle that no quality or set of qualities shared by a “group” can be transmitted – and “endure through the ages” – if it does not pass through the funnel that runs from one set of parents to one particular child. The microcosm of the cradle and the nursery is the factory within which all “group” characteristics move from generation to generation.

In that sense, of course, the defining psychological characteristics of Jews have always been those that Freud and his successors identified with the superego. What needs to be emphasized more strongly is that this superego – bred in individuals and then shared as a defining “group” characteristic – is annihilatory in its intensity, and at the same time is capable of almost infinite kinds of metamorphoses.

Judaism as it became defined in the first five centuries A.D. – essentially, Pharisaic Judaism that developed into Rabbinic Judaism – is based on the observance of a code of law consisting of more than 600 specific commandments. Violation of any one of those commandments is explicitly stated to be a violation of God’s will and worthy of divine punishment. It is therefore connected with feelings of guilt.

In turn, the accumulation of very significant quantities of guilt accounts for the fact that the most single important holiday in the Jewish ritual calendar is that of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which consists, to a great extent, of a group confession of sinfulness. On Yom Kippur, Jews enter synagogues throughout the world in the early hours of the morning, and recite prayers that do not end until dusk – prayers that involve a penitential beating of the fist upon the chest and the chant that “we have lied, we have stolen, and we have committed” a variety of forbidden acts.

Since it is an anthropological and psychological truism that the evolution of the human mind has moved toward steadily heightened levels of individuation, ego and “personal conscience,” the fact that Yom Kippur is centered around a confession of group culpability is sufficiently remarkable. That fact becomes even more striking when we consider that anti‑Semitism is based, by definition, on the assertion of Jewish group culpability. This is only one example of a phenomenon to which I have called attention elsewhere: the intricate parallelism, amounting to a symbiosis, between anti‑Semitic charges and Jewish self‑images.[3]

There is therefore a world of differences between the ultimate impact of such a group confession of sinfulness and the practice of individual confession as institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church. The common critique of the Catholic confessional – the one offered, for example, by many Protestants – is that it represents a mechanical form of absolution, whose case may actually encourage future acts of sin. Protestants, historically, do not want to be let off so lightly.

On the other hand, it can be argued that a confession of sinfulness that blurs the lines between oneself and all the other members of one’s national group may have the effect of infinitely prolonging guilt, In the breadth of its generalization, it can fail to have any individual meaning at all – thereby prolonging the sense of severe culpability at both the individual and the collective levels.

That Yom Kippur may represent an unconscious strategy for continuing rather than terminating guilt is also suggested by several of its exterior details. It is possible to contrast, for example, the practice of penitence in the pages of the Old Testament with the ways in which contemporary Jews atone for their sins on this holiest of holy days.

When individuals in the Old Testament are seized with contrition, then, in the expressive manner of the Middle East, they put on crude, rough garments (sackcloth), commit a variety of unhygienic acts (cease to bathe, pour ashes on their heads, seat themselves on dunghills), and in various other ways regress to a condition that says, in effect: “I am shit. I exist in a fetal squalor of passivity and disintegration – as close as I can possibly come to being dead. Only outside intervention can restore me to the fullness of life.”

Yom Kippur, on the other hand, falls conspicuously short of this cathartic level of intensity. Though one of the sins repeatedly confessed to is theft, the seats in the synagogue must be purchased for sums of money substantial enough to have generated a whole genre of Jewish jokes. (A Jew tries to get into the synagogue for nothing, but has to get past the Irish cop at the door. Having no ticket, he invents a story about only needing to stop in for one moment in order to speak to his business partner. The policeman finally agrees but warns: “Don’t let me catch you praying!”)

In addition, Yom Kippur is an occasion for “dressing up” in one’s most expensive clothing, including jewelry, and for putting on particularly resplendent ritual garments.

In all of these ways, Yom Kippur shares the wider paradox – which extends well beyond the bounds of Judaism – of institutionalized religion. The members of all the major Christian sects, for example, also gather in houses of worship dressed in their best suits – to commemorate the man who said no one could be a follower of his who did not give up all of his possessions. The resulting tension among Christians may help to account for the role they historically assigned to Jews: that of a group devoted to money and devoid of faith whose religion was an obvious fraud.

In the present context, however, our concern is with those aspects of religious practice – and resulting self‑image – that unconsciously prepare Jews to conform to the role assigned to them in their world-historical drama. Given the fact that Yom Kippur is the day for a reaffirmation of Jewish identity by even those Jews who have substantially secularized themselves, the possibility that it prolongs and intensifies the sense of individual and group culpability is one that must be considered in a spirit of great seriousness.

In this connection, it may be worth noting that one of the ceremonies incorporated into Yom Kippur is the Yizkor prayer for deceased parents. For Jews who enter the synagogue only on Yom Kippur, this prayer is often identified as “the one I dare not miss.”

The origins of Judaism

 If Judaism does represent a self‑sustaining system of unresolvable guilt and unquenchable superego, psychohistorical considerations would require that we trace this enduring national pattern back to some shared form of child‑rearing which, once it has had its individual impacts, makes the adult forms of religious practice seem “natural” and “obvious” to those who maintain them.

I will have a good deal to say on this subject later in the present paper. For the moment, however, what I would like to establish is the continuity between the notion of group culpability as it is articulated on Yom Kippur and the actual origins, so carefully chronicled in the Old Testament, of the Jewish group itself.

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether the Jews living in the first and second millennia A.D. are in fact the legitimate inheritors of the Hebrews or Israelites who lived in Canaan/Israel/Palestine in the second and first millennia B.C. This question has been raised by the very nature of Christianity as an “anti‑Judaism,” and in particular by the early Church fathers who developed the idea that Christians are the “true Israel” – the legitimate spiritual inheritors of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph, Moses and David – while Jews (as represented by the “blind Synagogue”) have no legitimate existence at all, and are the very embodiment of the principle of Error.

Leaving this theological controversy momentarily aside, however, and focusing only on the transmission of the sense of group culpability, we will find it rather easy to see the connection between Yom Kippur as a contemporary Jewish holiday and the world, five hundred years B.C., in which specific prophets and priests laid the basis for the subsequent survival – the perpetuation through the ages – of Jews and Judaism.

The “great divide” in Jewish history was the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth and the first Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. This posed in very stark terms the question of how God could have allowed such a catastrophe to occur. The answer given by the nation’s most influential religious leaders – those later perceived as the most influential – was that the catastrophe could be seen as an appropriate punishment for a collective moral and theological failure. In all probability, it was at this time that the Old Testament was codified into a history in which backsliding of any kind – the worship of “other gods” or the commission of forbidden acts – was inevitably punished with disaster, while virtuous and law-abiding behavior was the key to a long and successful individual and collective life.

The significance of this cognitive leap can scarcely be overstated. Because it offered a key to the meaning of human history, it encouraged the codification of the Hebrew Scriptures into the volume that we call the Old Testament. Because it asserted that the triumph of complete goodness was the ultimate purpose of God acting in history, it gave birth to the messianic and utopian sensibility that subsequently flourished, with such mixed results, in Western nations.

At the same time, it assured the survival of the group called Jews, because it provided an “ideological blank check” that could be used to rationalize any collective disaster. Indeed, the Isaianic concept of the “saving remnant” – the small group left behind after the larger group has been eradicated by a historical catastrophe – meant that no disaster, no matter how great in scale, could in fact be considered as final. The inclusion in the text of the Book of Genesis of the story of Noah, whose origins go so far back into pre‑Israelite (Mesopotamian) history, can no doubt be explained by its conformity with this radical point of view.

It is important to remember, however, that this particular interpretation of history can by no means be considered the “final word” of either the Old Testament or the New Testament on the subject of personal or collective disaster. The entire point of the Book of Job, for example, is that trying to understand the reasoning of God, and holding God accountable by human standards of justice, is an exercise in futility. Why the good should suffer and the bad go apparently unpunished is not for mere humans to decide.

Similarly, the Synoptic Gospels include a number of passages that controvert the idea of a direct relationship between earthly “good behavior” and earthly rewards. Luke 13:13 provides a good example:

At that very time there were some people present who told [Jesus] about the Galilaeans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. He answered them: “Do you imagine that, because these Galilaeans suffered this fate, they must have been greater sinners than anyone else in Galilee? I tell you they were not; but unless you repent, you will all of you come to the same end. Or the eighteen people who were killed when the tower fell on them at Siloam – do you imagine that they were more guilty than all the other people living in Jerusalem? I tell you they were not; but unless you repent, you will all of you come to the same end.[4]

A religion of disaster 

What is important for our subject, however, is that this decisive turn in theological history became the normative basis for Judaism as a disaster-oriented religion. Over and above what has already been said about Yom Kippur as the most significant of all the Jewish holidays, there is also the important fast day of Tisha b’Av, which commemorates the day on which the Jerusalem Temple, built by Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians – and the day, many centuries later, when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Whether both of these destructions actually took place on the same day of the year has been a matter of dispute. The fact that the destructions were imaginatively condensed into a single event is a fact of considerable significance.

This is not to say, of course, that every festival in the Jewish liturgical calendar commemorates a disaster – but even some of those with a more positive emphasis are not free of threatening overtones. The ostensibly joyful holiday of Passover, for example, is celebrated at a table laden with objects that send out contrary overtones: the bitter herbs; the charoseth which, however sweet, is meant to commemorate the mortar used by the Israelites as they labored in slavery; and the scorched bone that reminds us of the Passover lamb, which in turn recalls the slaughter of the Egyptian first-born. With respect to the lamb, Exodus 12:6-9 observes:

You must have it in safe keeping until the fourteenth day of this month, and then all the assembled community of Israel shall slaughter the victim between dusk and dark. They must take some of the blood and smear it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of every house in which they eat the lamb [to commemorate the sign that told the Angel of Death to pass by]. On that night they shall eat the flesh roast on the fire; they shall eat it with unleavened cakes and bitter herbs.

In much the same way, the holiday of Sukkoth records the pitifully exposed and limited accommodations forced on the Israelites during their march through the desert, while even Purim suggests that the averting of group catastrophe from the Jews required extraordinary luck and near miracle.

But even these individualized inclinations toward a “disaster view of the world” acquired their full pungency when Jewish history in the group sense became a cause of bitterness to those who continued to identify themselves as Jews. A full understanding of this point requires a glance back to the prophetic books of the Old Testament, with their assurance of the cosmic destiny that God had allotted to his chosen people. They were to become a light to all of the Gentiles, and a people whom even the kings and princes among the nations of the world would rush to serve. In the words of Isaiah 60:10-17:

Foreigners shall rebuild your walls
and their kings shall be your servants;
for though in my wrath I struck you down,
now I have shown you pity and favor.
Your gates shall be open continually,
they shall never be shut day or night,
that through them may be brought the wealth of nations
and their kings under escort.
For the nation or kingdom which refuses to serve you
shall perish, and wide regions shall be laid utterly waste.
The wealth of Lebanon shall come to you,
Pine, fir and boxwood, all together,
to bring glory to my holy sanctuary,
to honor the place where my feet rest.
The sons of your oppressors shall come forward to do homage,
all who reviled you shall bow low at your feet;
they shall call you the City of the Lord,
the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Instead, the Temple was laid waste a second time. The capture of the sacred candelabrum and the other objects housed in the Inner Sanctuary was commemorated on a finely sculptured arch that stands in Rome to this day. Following the defeat of the Bar-Kosiba rebellion, the very name of Jerusalem was replaced by Aelia Capitolina, and Jews forbidden to set foot within their former capital. The attempt to rebuild the Temple in the time of Julian the Apostate was unsuccessful. The rule of Byzantium codified the system of anti-Semitism as an official part of Roman law, to be revived in the West toward the end of the Middle Ages. Jews became, to an increasing extent, non-citizens, barely tolerated by “Christian charity,” and finally subjected to a series of institutionalized affronts, insults and limitations – which could still be considered superior to actual murder, frequent as the latter proved to be.

It was the distance between messianic promises and the actual degradation that crystallized the disaster orientation of Judaism, and sub-sequent series of disasters – expulsion from England, France and Spain; the massacres that began with the First Crusade in 1096 and culminated in the proto-Hitlerian killings carried out by Bogdan Chmelnitzky’s Cossacks in the 17th century; and climactically, the Nazi killings of only half a century ago – made this disaster orientation seem like a perfectly logical response to history, even though its origins pre-dated its eventual “rationale.”

Worshipping the superego

As psychohistory has taught us, however, no “cultural essence” of this kind can be treated merely as a response to a historical event or series of events. Just as the patient in an individual psychoanalysis comes to see his or her life-pattern as substantially self-imposed – neurosis as a kind of voluntary (though unconscious) self-imprisonment – so the search for the origins of the Jewish self-definition must take account of the role of parents in imposing their own group roles on the psyches of their children.

Here we tread on difficult and even speculative ground, but can make some educated guesses. A good point to begin with is an obvious fact: that a disaster orientation, and actual disaster, is only half of the remarkable tale of Jewish history. The other half is a tale of repeated accomplishment that is staggering in its scope and perseverance.

In Roman times, Jews were already sufficiently prominent to draw down upon themselves the vicious tirades and venomous epigrams of several major writers, not to mention the critiques of a professional anti-Semite named Apion. Their role as traders in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages is well-known. The “Golden Age” of Spanish Jewry enabled them to distinguish themselves in a wide variety of fields. The names of Spinoza, Marx, Freud and Einstein are synonymous with the transition to modernity. And the ultimate compliment to Jewish capacities for self-resurrection and triumph was paid by none other than Adolf Hitler. As Joachim Fest writes in his biography of Hitler:

 And finally – again the object of reluctant wonder as well as of unnameable anxieties [Hitler] admired the Jews. Their racial exclusiveness and purity seemed to him no less admirable than their sense of being a chosen people, their implacability and intelligence. Basically, he regarded them as something akin to negative supermen. Even Germanic nations of relatively pure racial strains were, he declared in his table talk, inferior to the Jews: if 5000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions.[5]

That the very essence of Judaism should be a focus on past, present and anticipated disaster, and that those professing Jewish national identification should be high achievers capable of regenerating their efforts even after the most cataclysmic persecutions and annihilations, represents no problem or paradox to those that have thought through, and felt through, the actual meaning of the idea of the superego. It is one of those terms that has become shopworn through familiarity, and suffers additionally, in English, from its high-falutin latinate overtones, as compared to the colloquial German of Freud’s Über-ich.

Persecutory, relentless, all-scrutinizing, the superego is God himself in the ways that Jews and their Christian successors have conceived of God. The superego is an all-seeing eye and an ever-pointing finger. It makes Sherlock Holmes look like an arrant bungler and a master of mere approximation. It is the voice that knows exactly where Adam is hiding in the Garden and exactly what Cain has done. It points the finger at King David himself and says, through the mouth of its prophet: “Thou art the man” – the adulterous beast who has committed murder in order to freely indulge in his lust.

The pointing finger, the all-seeing eye, the Tyrant of Jehovah whom the Gnostics of Roman times (followed by their British Romantic echoes) so avidly denounced: Blake’s Nobodaddy and the divinity whom Shelley had in mind when he declared that “some Evil spirit has dominion over this imperfect world.”

That is the God whom the Jews invented and internalized – a cause for ultimate anxiety, for apotropaic sacrifice without cease, and for perfectly useless attempts at supplication and atonement.

If God is the superego and the superego is God, then accomplishments must rise ever higher in a vain attempt to ward him off, for it is the very nature of the superego that it cannot be shut up by being given what it demands. Each new accomplishment is greeted by its cackle of derision. Tormented by a djinn of such fantastic proportions, what a relief the soul must feel at the sight and sound of a genuine external persecutor who can in fact be temporarily bought off.[6]

Hilberg’s “Two Nations” revisited

Now we are in a position to answer the question posed earlier in this paper, with respect to Hilberg’s contrast between the fiercely resistant Jews living between Dan and Beersheba and those who, by virtue of their removal from the soil of the motherland, are transformed into people whom even direct physical threats cannot shake out of compliance and accommodation.

Once we have acknowledged the essential continuity of Jewish history, and have seen the extent to which it is based on a shared and persecutory superego, there is no need whatsoever to postulate the existence of two antithetical Jewish nations. Still less is this the case in view of the theme increasingly explored by psychohistorians in recent years; that groups (including nations and subsets within nations) play delegated roles for each other.

In Roman times, two suicidal wars were fought on Judaean soil against the armed might of the Empire: one of them initiated in 66 A.D. by the so-called Zealots (the Sicarii of Josephus), the second begun in 132 A.D. by the followers of Bar-Kosiba. Hilberg notes repeatedly that at that time arms were not taken up by the millions of Jews living in such metropolitan centers as Alexandria, Antioch and Rome.

That nearly two thousand years elapsed before this same constellation of contrasts reappeared – with Palestinian Jews actively resisting the Arabs, while Diaspora Jews offered only moral and financial support – is enough to cast doubt on the terms of Hilberg’s argument while still raising the question of causation. This question is made superficially more complex by the fact that the rebellions of Roman times had no chance whatsoever of succeeding – were in fact suicidal – while the war fought by the Jews of Israel between 1947 and 1949 was a successful defense against an exterminatory threat.

In order to understand the common basis in the behavior of world Jewry at such widely different points in history, we need to approach from a slightly altered perspective the two faces of the superego-ridden personality. On the one hand, such a personality may require an objectively persecutory situation in order to minimize the cognitive dissonance between the inner and outer worlds. At the same time, a persecutory superego will encourage its victim to simultaneously engage in some form of aggressive behavior, however sublimated, directed toward the external environment.

The superego, in other words, is the operative element in a sadomasochistic pattern that can easily conjoin submissive and dominant behaviors – as well as the sharing out of such behaviors, through delegation, within a single group.

In this sense, there is no paradox at all in the fact that certain subgroups within the world’s Jewish population should be engaged in acts of intellectual analysis and argumentation, while others are taking part in actual physical combat. Nor would it be considered miraculous, from a psychoanalytic or psychohistorical perspective, if the first of these groups were physically submissive while the second had a tendency to distrust all “mere intellectualization.”

To put the matter in yet another way, there is an obvious kinship between the “Type A” Jewish overachiever living in an environment like New York City – where phallic and sadistic impulses sublimated into “earning one’s living” alternate with helpless submission to muggers, the subway system, and the other aspects of life labelled “out of control” – and the heroic kibbutznick flinging himself on Syrian, Jordanian or Egyptian barbed wire so that his comrades can rush forward to yet another victory.

What Jews and Israelis may be seen in retrospect as having had profoundly in common – and the two versions of which they have delegated to each other – is a profound difficulty in pulling loose from a cycle that follows prohibited victories with unbearable pain. A bind of that sort is as good a basis for nationhood as any other, and corresponds with the national fantasy-cycle of the United States as described at length in the recent work of Lloyd deMause.[7]

Indeed, we might be tempted to suggest that the fascination with Jews and Israel currently being engaged in by so much of the Western world may have its basis in the allegorically-perceived alternation between the “passive Jew” of the Diaspora (victim, concentration camp inmate, object of sadism, subliminator of aggression) and the “active Israeli” of the Middle East (Blitzkrieg specialist, macho personality, non-intellectualizer, a failure at economics). Like all other groups, but in an exaggeratedly intense way, Jews describe a cycle between the brief triumph of id and the retribution exacted by resurgent superego.[8]

That all of the world’s Jews should be seen as projections of this kind – those incinerated at Auschwitz and those who have repeatedly visited the Suez Canal in their tanks and half-tracks – is the consummate, but by no means unique, irony of a century that continues to debate the validity of Freud’s thinking.

Conclusion

 Like other story-tellers trained in the Jewish tradition, I would like to begin my conclusion with an anecdote.

Recently, I was invited to a synagogue in central Connecticut to deliver a talk on the history of anti-Semitism, much of it covering the subjects that I have also touched on in the present essay. My listeners found it surprisingly easy to understand and accept the idea that the very ideas of “Christianity” and “Judaism” have been, for two millennia, in a state of extraordinary symbiosis such as is offered by no other historical or contemporary religious phenomenon.

That Rabbinic Judasim should be based on the Talmud, which for Christians is theologically a non-book, while Christianity is based on the New Testament, which for Jews is neither new nor a testament – that the texts of the latter book or non-book should chronicle the behaviors of a Jewish prophet (or fraud) – all of this seemed to my audience, when stated in calm and reasonable terms, to be both enlightening and remarkable.

But it turned out afterward that their strongest reaction was prompted when, discussing Jews as a superego-ridden group who define themselves by that shared oppression, I told what I assumed to be the hoariest of Jewish jokes: a Jewish boy comes home from school and proudly tells his mother that he got 98 on a test. She responds: “Who got the other 2 points?”

So instantaneously recognizable was the circumstance described by this joke that it, rather than my wisdom on the history of anti-Semitism, circulated like wildfire among the members of the synagogue in the weeks that followed my presentation. Psychohistorical perspectives leave us with no choice but to conclude that the extraordinary Jewish vision of a single omnipotent and omniscient God, who witnesses not only our every act but our every thought and fantasy, must have been made possible by some variant pattern of childhood experience such as is alluded to by this easily understood contemporary joke.

In this case, psychohistorical principles are paralleled by what the texts of the Old Testament confirm: that the sense of group transgression is the very basis for the survival of Judaism, because it makes possible the regeneration of the Jewish group after each successive wave of near-extermination. Hence the shared Jewish conviction that “good times” are the interlude between massacres, that massacres are somehow the retribution for collective sins – in historical Christian terms, for being a collectivity that is a sin – and that warding massacres off is like holding back the sea forever, which cannot be done yet must eternally, vainly, be attempted.

Guilt wholeheartedly assumed cannot be shaken off. When it becomes the basis of a group’s self-definition – as affirmed and denied on that group’s most sacred and self-defining day – and when it is further defended by a taboo against thinking about groups, then guilt becomes one of those clever knots that only tightens as we try to disentangle it.

"The Psychohistory of an Enduring National Identity" was originally published in the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Spring 1985 and is an excerpt from Henry Ebel: Jews, Germans and Other Disasters, Bias Bok, 2004.

Buy the book | Henry Ebel | Your comment