Freud’s Jewish Closet
On Naomi Seidman’s Translating the Jewish Freud
Evan Goldstein
Writing from Israel in the first week of October 1961, James Baldwin reflected on home and its discontents. He was “a guest of the government,” with an assignment from The New Yorker to write a series of articles on Africa in a decolonizing age and plans to travel from Jerusalem to Dakar. But something about his “prologue” in Israel left him unable to continue on to Africa. “The fact that Israel is a homeland for so many Jews (there are great faces here; in a way the whole world is here) causes me,” Baldwin wrote, “to feel my own homelessness more keenly than ever.” Left “helplessly and painfully—most painfully—ambivalent” by the fantasy of home paired with the reality of dispossession, Baldwin changed course (“Baldwin, too,” writes biographer David Leeming, “felt he must get away”). His letter dated October 20th began, “in great haste, far from my own desk,” not in Africa, but in Turkey, where he would spend several months completing the aptly-titled novel Another Country before returning to Switzerland. Ever “a kind of bastard of the West,” Baldwin always seems to have wished for home, but remained wary of this wish’s fulfillment. “It would be nice,” he had written a few weeks before his arrival in Turkey, “to be able to dream about Africa, but once I have been there, I will not be able to dream anymore.”
Situated at some distance from the political geographies Baldwin inhabited at that moment, Naomi Seidman’s Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish is a conceptually rich account of the many networks that join and disjoin Sigmund Freud from Jewish identity. Yet despite apparent differences from Baldwin’s concerns, Seidman’s study returns to the tense overlap of home and homelands, dreaming and language, probing Jewish modernity by way of Freud and his Jewish legacies. The genius of Seidman’s study lies in her steadfast refusal to forget the traces of loss and rupture that suffuse the Jewish encounter with European modernity. The book’s chief limitation lies in her relative inattention to the imperial political contours of this psychosocial condition. “There is something unutterably painful,” Baldwin wrote from Israel, “about the end of oppression.” As we witness, every day, the absolute brutality required to secure the fantasy of a Jewish home from both the erosion of the past and even the whisper of precarity in the present, Seidman’s willingness to linger with this pain, this something, is urgent.
Seidman’s inquiry into the Jewish Freud revolves around the fraught nexus of Jewish languages—an imperfect term referring here almost exclusively to Hebrew and Yiddish—and the desire for a unifying Jewish home. Seidman’s question is not whether Freud knew Jewish languages, let alone how we might uncover anything like Freud’s Jewish identity, but rather why that very project has been so compelling and enduring. “What I am studying,” Seidman writes, “is thus not so much Freud’s Jewishness as the persistent desire to discover and engage with Freud’s Jewishness.” Translating psychoanalysis into Jewish languages was an essential mechanism for uncovering Freud’s Jewishness, an important part of twentieth-century attempts to formulate distinctively modern Jewish identities. Both preservation and loss, translation proves an especially useful framework for exploring the desire to uncover Freud’s buried Jewishness. After all, as Seidman reminds us, psychoanalysis is arguably the science of translation.
One of the foremost scholars of modern Judaism, Seidman traces the persistence and generative force of this desire for modern Jewish identity in twentieth-century Jewish culture with characteristic lucidity. Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud not only asserted Freud’s contested Jewishness, she claims, they sought to use the cultural capital of psychoanalysis to elevate their obscure and purportedly unenlightened projects. Packed with figures familiar to readers of Freud, the book’s nine chapters also include many individuals unlikely to be known beyond specialists in Jewish Studies. Canonical writers like Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Jacques Derrida share space with the Yiddishist Max Weinreich and his inquiry into the Jewish fear of dogs, the persistent difficulties posed by the psychoanalytic lexicon for Hebrew translators, and, my favorite, a “Freudian Lullaby Contest” that ran in the English supplement to the Yiddish daily Forverts in 1930.
Across this capacious archive, Seidman shows how the many attempts at “translating the Jewish Freud” sought to repair a perceived gap between Jewish traditions and modern idioms of thought. For Yiddishists, translating Freud lent scientific respectability to a language seen as a backwards, feminized jargon—claiming modernity by staging the interplay of what Seidman calls “high culture and its bawdy disruption.” For Hebrew translators, translating Freud formed part of a broader nationalist project of returning “straying sons” to Jewish linguistic borders, styling Jews as a modern nation unified by the Hebrew language. Both traditions inherit what analyst Patrick Mahony calls “a lexical heritage of broken signs,” so these translators wanted to bring Freud home to Jewish languages in order to bring Jews into scientific and political modernity.
“The book’s chief limitation lies in her relative inattention to the imperial political contours of this psychosocial condition.”
By probing Freud’s own knowledge of Jewish languages, scholars seek to reveal an unbroken substrate of Jewish authenticity that the pressures of modernity cannot fully assimilate. In this regard, Jewish Studies is as saturated in the melancholic denial of negativity and loss as the figures it studies. With singular acuity, Seidman’s scholarship demonstrates that modern European Jewish history is a story of acculturation sought and refused, traditions fragmented and revived—ruins of a lingering past. As Torah and mitzvot became a religion of ethical monotheism and children of Israel became Jews of Germany, France, and America—albeit uneasily, as Westerners of the Mosaic confession—European Jewish communities lived out psychosocial and political contradictions: Christendom’s primordial foreigner, aspiring to the role of Western Man. In a late essay on the messianic idea in Zionism, Yosef Yerushalmi noted that both fin-de-siecle Zionists and nineteenth-century Jewish liberals were driven by “a passionate desire to finally be and feel at home in the world . . . in the here-and-now,” in the West. Seidman challenges us to begin from the recognition that this desire can never be satisfied, and thus to linger in an untimely condition of Galut (exile), which thwarts every attempt to translate brokenness into a shared coherence.
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Accounting for the simultaneity of cultural survival and loss, empowerment at once offered and foreclosed, requires attunement to the inarticulate specters that populate the historical archive. “We have to attend,” writes Seidman, “not only to persistent Jewish cultural patterns, but also to their post-traditional fragmentation and loss.” Seidman’s study ranges over the different motifs through which Freud’s Jewishness has been scrutinized, seeking less to write a history of Freud’s Jewish translation than to devise an idiom through which such a history of fragmentation and loss can be studied. This involves not simply revising the conclusions of earlier scholarship on the Jewish Freud, but also reevaluating the hermeneutics by which Freud’s Jewishness, and by extension modern Jewish life more generally, has been translated from ambiguous tangle into neat narrative. For example, Seidman details the correspondence between Freud and the writer A. A. Roback, whose 1929 book Jewish Influence in Modern Thought was among the earliest attempts to situate psychoanalysis within a longer history of Jewish thought. Roback initiated the correspondence by sending Freud a copy of the book with a Yiddish inscription. Seidman plausibly suggests that the sight of what Freud called “Hebrew characters” (Yiddish, like many other Jewish dialects, is conventionally written in the Hebrew alphabet) may have been part of what motivated Freud to respond. Freud explained to Roback that he disregarded his typical policy of not responding to critics, because the text had struck “a chord of Jewishness” in him—one that was inseparable from the presence, whether readable or not, of Jewish language in Hebrew script. Yet there were limits to the connection that this resonant chord enabled, since, Freud claimed, “I had such a non-Jewish upbringing that today I am not even able to read your dedication, which is evidently in Hebrew characters.” When Roback persisted in asking whether Freud could read or understand Yiddish, Freud answered unambiguously: “Yiddish—I have never learned or spoken.” The Hebrew script serves as a medium of both connection and disjunction, prompting Freud’s interest even as, and perhaps because, the meaning is lost on him.
Roback seems to have begrudgingly accepted this conclusion, but later readers of the Jewish Freud have been more suspicious. In his book Freud’s Moses, Yerushalmi devotes extensive attention to a Hebrew-German edition of the Bible that Freud received as a birthday gift from his father in 1891. Yerushalmi is particularly interested in the inscription composed by Jakob Freud in melitzah, an elaborate style of Hebrew writing interweaving citations from biblical and rabbinic texts that has a long history as a high-cultural mode in medieval and modern Jewish writing. For Yerushalmi, the inscription is not only a call for the son to return to the Jewish fold, but a sign that, in a sense, he already had: “We may safely assume,” Yerushalmi declares, “that [Jakob] taught the child Sigmund to read the Hebrew text.” Freud’s concealed familiarity with Hebrew, for Yerushalmi, secures his Jewish belonging. Freud himself understood that his study of Moses as an Egyptian appeared "to deprive a people of the man in whom they take pride as the greatest of their sons”; Yerushalmi, like other translators of the Jewish Freud, uncover dispersed ruins of Jewish languages in order to reverse the process.
But what is reading? As most American Jews who have been to synagogue can tell you, a word’s shape and sound can, through repetition, prove meaningful even if you’ve never properly learned or spoken the language from which it is drawn. Seidman insists that we take Freud at his word, not only regarding his knowledge or ignorance of Jewish languages, but also in understanding that it was the materiality of Hebrew script—more than any putative transmissible meaning—that struck “a chord of Jewishness.” She thus asks us to divest ourselves from the archaeological figure of truth buried under accreted layers of distortion, and instead attend to how scripts and surfaces enable connections even as they withhold the fantasy of identity seamlessly preserved across time. “We can hardly escape the lure of the buried self, the monument that promises to unlock the secrets of the past” Seidman writes, yet we need tools for surviving the absence and opacity that persists within our desire for these secrets to live unburied.
“Familiarity here does not eliminate foreignness; nothing is owned without the complicating traces of loss and memory.”
In the translation of psychoanalysis into Hebrew and Yiddish, and the scoping out of Jewish languages in Freud, Freud’s buried Jewishness becomes a monument for the possibility of a revitalization of the Jewish collective as a whole. “It would please me,” Roback wrote to Freud, “to know that you speak, read, or at least understand Yiddish. Personally, I think the nation cannot exist without its own language, and besides, the treasures of our fine literature are worth preserving.” Yet the archives of Jewish modernity illustrate with particular vividness how no language is ever one’s “own,” how no treasures can be preserved wholly intact. How, then, are we to orient itself towards this impossibility?
Across the vast array of sources she considers, only some of which I have mentioned here, Seidman shows Freud to be both an especially intensive site of the desire Roback voices and its most generative theorist. Importantly, she implicates her own interest in Freud in this psychic sweep: Seidman openly avows that the Hebrew letters of her prized translations of Freud energize her interest in them. Having grown up in an ultra-Orthodox household, Seidman wonders whether Freud functions as a mechanism for her to claim modernity, and a hopeful sign that one can do so while remaining tied to Jewishness. Her capacity in Hebrew and Yiddish, which she speculates fuels an aggressive satisfaction at having something that Freud himself lacked, draws her to psychoanalysis in translation. However, it also makes her feel like she remains an outsider. Translation thus serves as “an unexpected and neglected corridor” into psychoanalysis for her, but this corridor does not efface the disjunction between Freud and Seidman, nor the ambivalences of Jewishness for each. “If Freud was moved at his own words in a foreign-but-familiar tongue,” Seidman writes, “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.” Note that familiarity here does not eliminate foreignness; nothing is owned without the complicating traces of loss and memory. Beyond offering a history of psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish, then, Seidman theorizes how translation reveals the limits of collective fantasies of home, avowing her entanglement in the very condition she studies:
“My own book is no Totem and Taboo, but its launching is yet another turn in these still spiraling, often interrupted, pendulum swings and daisy chains of words and hands and languages and dreams, which traveled and continue to travel across oceans and historical chasms, between Vienna and Vilna and Jerusalem and Toronto and Berkeley, where this book began without my realizing it was already under way.”
Celebrating the disjunctions that persist in the Jewish connections that translation affords is the book’s essential contribution.
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This dimension of Seidman’s project comes through most clearly in the book’s introduction and conclusion, where she moves from fantasmatic home(lands) to her Berkeley house, from Freud’s Jewish closet to a particular room she calls her own “Freud closet.” The Freud closet is a cramped side room that houses her vast collection of Freudian kitsch. Before readers meet Weinreich, Yerushalmi, or even the author of The Interpretation of Dreams himself, Freud appears in the text as “a subgenre of tchotchke,” collected in the closet where Seidman worked on the book. Freud-themed refrigerator magnets, slippers—not to mention physical volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud’s texts—these tchotchkes reflect Seidman’s preference for the material surfaces and residues of Freud’s connection to Jewishness over the paranoid drive to unearth a supposedly latent truth.
Invoking Walter Benjamin, the storied collector, Seidman wonders whether the book emerged belatedly as a justification for the collection—just one part of the collection. Or, since she tells us that her Freud closet has regressed into a dusty storage space for vacuums and other detritus, the book may be more the collection’s supplemental remnant: containing the whole but set apart and out of place, like a bad translation. Like every book, Seidman’s book outlines the ghost of a certain attachment, animated by a lost Jewish lineage and its broken signifying chains, which can be neither renounced nor recovered. The Freud closet materializes what Freud called the naval of the dream, “an ‘unplumbable’ point of contact” that exceeds any exhaustive translation into manifest meaning or argument.
None of this demeans or diminishes Seidman’s accomplishment as scholarship: “Collecting,” as Benjamin wrote, “is a primal phenomenon of study. The student collects knowledge.” Seidman undertakes a practice of collecting Freudian kitsch to trace the connections, unplumbable yet undeniably there, that emerge when the transmission of identity and tradition breaks down. These objects attest to the presences that persist when, as it invariably does, something lost proves impossible to retrieve. But Benjamin suggests that shoring up ruins through collecting has epistemological value and political potential. “We construct here,” he writes in his unfinished Arcades Project, “an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly.’” To gather the refuse of past promises, Benjamin suggests, is to refashion the present through a collective of what has been forcibly left out of it. At a moment when Jewish loss is once more translated into triumphant calamity, it is hard not to ask: does Seidman’s ephemeral Freud closet disrupt the logic of home in which Freud’s Jewishness has been implicated? What, in other words, does Seidman teach us about the political drives and disavowals of Jewish modernity?
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With the exception of a brief narration of her attendance at a Black Lives Matter march in 2020, Seidman avoids substantive political claims. She certainly details Freud’s own ambivalent relationship to Zionism—he expressed pride at the founding of the Hebrew University, and once expressed a hope that a friend’s baby boy would become “a stalwart Zionist.” On the other hand, while Freud was “delighted with our settlement’s prosperity,” he was skeptical of the effort to found a Jewish state. Declining an invitation to the Hebrew University from its president, Judah Magnes, in 1933, he remarked that “a trip to Jerusalem is possible from a physical point of view . . . but not from a psychological one.” For the most part, however, when it comes to politics, Seidman reverts to her expert practice of cultural history, leaving to the side the metacritical intervention her book otherwise so boldly makes. Nonetheless, in a moment driven by the compulsive translation of loss into violent self-assertion, I view Seidman’s willingness—and even desire—to linger with incommunicable brokenness, her pleasure in collecting tchotchkes that manifestly fail to instantiate an articulate presence, as a disruption of the sovereign spectacle of redeemed losses that dominates modern Jewish politics. Although Jewish politics remain a topic of largely historical interest in Seidman’s narrative, her departure from the conventional epistemology of Jewish Studies is suggestive for how we might contest its politics.
“This unhoused, dependent character is a general condition of psychosocial life, marking an ineradicable alterity—one that insists equally for minoritized and besieged populations as for militarized nation states who, unable to abide this condition, target these populations for elimination.”
Seidman conclucdes the book by arguing that a precursor for her mode of study can be found in the Yiddishist Max Weinreich’s appeal to psychoanalysis for the study of Jewish assimilation in the 1930s. Unlike later readers of Freud in Jewish Studies, for whom a discovered Yiddish word exhumes a pristine Jewish unconscious, Weinreich treats yidishkayt (Jewishness/Yiddishness) as a mark of traumatic alterity. For Weinreich as for Seidman, psychoanalysis becomes a resource for chronicling the psychic toll of assimilation, with Yiddish as its archive. Against the desire of Hebrew translators for a nationalist repair to modernity’s rupture, Yiddish enables, for Weinreich, an inhabitation of the break that entails both collective persistence and irretrievable loss. “Along with an endlessly generative treasure trove of folklore,” Seidman concludes her book, “and rich food and collectivity and a nurturing past, yidishkayt was also an enigmatic message, the symptom and name for the split self, the blow you didn’t see coming.” Seidman’s portrait of a Yiddishist practice that lingers with, rather than redresses, cultural loss is provocative in its reorientation of the melancholic recovery imperative, animating what scholars call post-vernacular Yiddish culture. Her reclamation of Weinreich as a psychoanalytic theorist of the fractured continuity of Jewish identity hints at a Yiddishist critique of Zionism (especially given Weinreich’s own ambivalence, somewhat parallel to Freud’s, about the prospect of Yiddish studies in the nascent State of Israel). Yet she does not explicitly connect the traumatic alterity of yidishkayt with any particular politics. To do so would be less a matter of endorsing an ideology than of asking how the rupture and loss that psychoanalysis insists upon surfacing deforms every drive towards ideological or identitarian recruitment. In other words, a matter of translating differently, translating Freud away from the fantasy of a Jewish home, towards other boundaries, other exiles, other catastrophes.
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Seidman engages only briefly with Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European, portraying it as part of the broader emphasis on alterity and multiplicity in late twentieth-century readings of Moses and Monotheism. It is an odd brevity, since Said’s attentiveness to the wounds of Jewish modernity hews so closely to Seidman’s interest in fragmentation and loss. With this elision, Seidman missed a crucial opportunity to translate the Jewish Freud beyond the guarded borders of the Jewish historical archive—a place where she could have linked her surface reading of Freud’s Jewish languages to the psychosocial account of Jewish politics that Said suggests. In Freud and the Non-European, Said does not, as Seidman suggests, simply elucidate an “Egyptian Freud” to counter Zionist appropriations of the founder of psychoanalysis. He develops a powerful account of the traces of absence and wounds that Zionism is compelled to obliterate. Taking seriously Freud’s insistence upon Moses’s Egyptianness, Said argues that Jewishness in Freud unfolds in inextricable relation with non-European forms of alterity. Jewishness, Said argues, “cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was an Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, even triumphed.”
Zionism’s passionate drive to be at home, which Said thematizes through Yerushalmi’s reading of Freud and Nadia Abu el-Haj’s account of Israeli colonial archaeology, depends upon the constant repudiation of the “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character” of Jewish identity—this dependence on the non-Jewish other. This unhoused, dependent character is a general condition of psychosocial life, marking an ineradicable alterity—one that insists equally for minoritized and besieged populations as for militarized nation states who, unable to abide this condition, target these populations for elimination. This originary break wounds the singularity of the sovereign subjects who claim to redress it. Rather than exemplifying the distinctiveness of the Jewish condition, Freud’s Moses marks the entanglement of likeness without identity—and of Jewish history with other histories of diaspora and dispossession. Said translates the Jewish Freud without the interest of bringing him home—with the hope, instead, to make life together in exile possible—since exile, however stridently disavowed, is inevitably our condition.
Said closes with questions of writing. “Can so utterly indecisive and so deeply undetermined a history ever be written?” he wonders. “In what language, and with what sort of vocabulary?” He was hopeful that a Freudian writing of the wound could “aspire to the condition of a politics of diaspora life.” Seidman’s study offers an implicit answer, writing towards Freud in language that teems with loss. Seidman’s affection for the tchotchkes of her ephemeral Freud closet, in the final analysis, is not in itself political. But her studied attunement to the connections found only through the break of translation—the connection between herself, Freud, and the shattered shards of Jewishness that haunt the closets of modernity—dissents powerfully from the underlying drive of much modern Jewish politics and its study. Yet, paradoxically, by collecting so vast an archive of dreams whereby translating Freud will heal the breach between Jews and modernity, Seidman innovates a space—and an idiom of study—for lingering with that dream’s failure. There is no future without translation; there is no translation without loss. In demonstrating how translating the Jewish Freud has underwritten fantasies of a Jewish home, Seidman models a practice where collected ruins of Jewish connection can live on, commingling with others, broken and unhoused.
Baldwin’s time in the Jewish homeland led him to a more explicit articulation of what such study demands. “Just because my homelessness is so inescapably brought home to me,” he writes from Israel, “it begins, in some odd way, not only to be bearable, but to be a positive opportunity.” Or, as Fred Moten put it in a recent keynote, “whether it’s Zionism or Garveyism, fuck every impulse to return home.” To realize this generative negativity requires more than “evenly suspended attention.” It demands struggle and study, for which neither Jewish communal projects nor scholarly protocols of interpretation are sufficient. Nonetheless, by assembling Freud and his kitsch into a collection, Seidman delivers a rousing translation and infuses vitality into the troubling wound of twentieth-century Jewish history. In her deviation from the historiographical conventions of Jewish Studies—and the psychic demand for an archival home that it shares with other Jewish political projects—Seidman also makes homelessness not only palpable but desirable. We should, then, learn from, with, and beyond her. The ineradicable experience of homelessness—that Freud both indexes and theorizes—might be translated into a collection of the wounded, dreaming of an end to brutality that doesn’t masquerade as an end to exile. “It must be,” Baldwin writes, “it must be made to be.”