The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (4 page)

His family members were not practicing Jews. Despite a fascination and respect for Jewish history and the character of his people, Freud was never observant. Yet he refused to convert, finding in his Jewish roots a strength to be different.

When he entered the University of Vienna, Freud was shocked to encounter the anti-Semitism of both students and faculty. Their racial hatred, sometimes muted, sometimes overt, both sensitized and energized him. He recalled later with some bitterness a story his father told him when he was ten. The young Jakob Freud was once walking well-dressed through the streets of Vienna, and suddenly his new fur cap was knocked off his head by a Christian thug shouting, “Jew! Get off the pavement.” Jakob walked quietly into the street, picked up his hat, and went away without protest. Sigmund was outraged by his father’s humiliation, referring to the story in traumatic terms. Freud’s rage over the incident fueled his desire to fight for his beliefs.

A top student, Freud studied medicine with a particular fascination for the physical sciences. Not sure what he wanted to do, other than somehow study the human condition, he worked first as a researcher at a physiological institute, then, desperate to earn a better living, joined the staff of Vienna General Hospital. While working in the clinics of the hospital, Freud continued to conduct research. During this period he tinkered with the use of narcotics such as cocaine, becoming addicted, then suffering withdrawal. With his career sullied by rumors of his addiction, Freud left the hospital for studies with Jean Charcot, a prominent French neurologist in Paris. During this period he wrote over twenty articles on the nervous system.

When he returned to Vienna, reacting to the need to support his new wife, Martha Bernays, Freud set up a private practice as a neuropathologist. He began to work with another Jewish doctor, Josef Breuer, fourteen years his senior, who was conducting experiments in the treatment of hysteria through hypnosis. Together they attempted to treat a young woman by trying to purge her of her worst memories. In their classic text
Studies in Hysteria,
published in 1895, Breuer and Freud dubbed her “Anna O.” (Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim, and she would later do much to establish early German social welfare organizations.) Their cathartic method was a primitive precursor of later psychoanalytic techniques, but they attempted to show “Anna O.” that her repression of feelings and hysterical state were the result of a defense mechanism hiding the truth from herself.

Working from Breuer’s lead, Freud began to develop theories of sexuality that the older physician could not accept. Their friendship ended bitterly. This was to be the first of several important friendships Freud would enjoy, then angrily end over philosophical disagreements (Wilhelm Fliess, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, to name the three most famous). Freud acted like a biblical prophet when his ideas were questioned, surrounding himself with followers like a Hasidic rebbe uttering Talmudic wisdom to disciples hanging on every word.

In 1900 Freud published arguably his greatest book, certainly his most influential.
The Interpretation of Dreams
revealed that people act without being fully conscious of their desires. By analyzing dreams, unconscious thoughts hidden from awareness can be uncovered and deciphered. Freud proposed new theories about what causes the way people feel and act. Regression, repression, displacement, transfers of emotional reactions, were all psychological states he first acknowledged. Freud made us think differently about the way we view ourselves and the words we use to describe those thoughts.

With Sigmund Freud, a whole new vocabulary entered common language. Slips of the tongue (“Freudian slips”), infantile sexuality, sexual drive, reaction formations, the id, the ego, the superego, libido, Oedipus complex, inhibitions, phallic symbols, death wish, pleasure-pain principle, gratification, reality principle, attraction and repulsion, sublimation, anxiety avoidance, behavior modification, metapsychology—are all terms he coined in a treasury of psychological writings.

He often used the lives of great men to prove his psychoanalytic theories. In particular, Freud was fascinated with the lives of Moses, Leonardo da Vinci, and William Shakespeare. Freud posited the theory that Moses was really an Egyptian and the true founder of Judaism (not Abraham). According to Freud, Moses took an Egyptian theory of monotheism and preached it to Jewish slaves. In a great confusion the Jews murdered Moses, carrying with them to this day an unconscious, never-ending guilt. Jews and non-Jews vilified Freud for his Moses tale, ignoring its implications for humanity.

Freud was not only a path-breaking scientist, but also a great literary stylist. A revolutionary thinker, he was quite conservative in his artistic tastes, his personal habits rigid (strict schedules caring for patients, conducting research, walking, meeting with his beloved B’nai B’rith) and comfortably middle-class. Assimilated though he was, Freud was a proud and defiant Jew, never capitulating to the Nazis after the Anschluss. On exiting Vienna in 1938 for London, in great pain from the jaw cancer that would kill him a year later and forced to make a positive public statement about his treatment by the Nazis, Freud wrote,
“Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen”
(“I can highly recommend the Gestapo to all”). Freud’s own life proved the dual nature of the psychological man.

F
ather of three great Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ancestor of the Hebrew and Arabic peoples, seminal prophet, model of holy obedience, believer in and recipient of a personal, eternal covenant with his single, eternal God, Abraham is surely one of the most influential men in the history of the world.

Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most people assumed that he really existed. The stories of the Bible were accepted with faith, no questions asked. Then philosophers such as Georg Hegel began to rationalize the lives of the Patriarchs, imposing contemporary concepts on age-old tales. Later, archaeological digs at Abraham’s birthplace, the city of Ur on the banks of the Euphrates River near the Persian Gulf, and the discovery in recent years of ancient tablets corroborating many of the names of his relatives, friends, and enemies, appeared to confirm his history. Time worn ruins exposed to light after thousands of years confirm that Abraham lived in a sophisticated society, not with primitive Middle Bronze Age men. Cities were ruled by monarchs tied to other rulers for trade and security. Never out of sight from a city’s gates were its planting fields, the lives of its inhabitants nurtured by the fruits of the soil. God’s gift of the Promised Land to his people has a special meaning when one remembers how close to the earth Abraham and his brethren truly were.

He was a leader or sheik of a group of nomads or outcasts called the Habiru (later the Hebrews). The Habiru, a group of non—city dwellers, wandered from place to place, settling for short periods, yanking up their roots to move on when it suited their purpose. Not a part of settled society, the Habiru were viewed with distrust, but also with a hard-won respect. Unlike the more pastoral Bedouin, whose movement was tied to the grazing of their animals and their agriculture, the Habiru served as mercenaries and traders. Their wanderlust did not lead them to build cities, but wherever they roamed, they kept their language, literature, and beliefs. Their religion was portable—thus Abraham, the first wandering Jew.

Indeed, the Bible records his remarkable moving around the Middle East, from his birthplace near the Persian Gulf, through the land of Canaan, past drought, to the harvests of Egypt and back. Along the way Abraham negotiated treaties with local kings, acted as a hired soldier, and purchased burial plots from the Hittites, noting carefully that he was a stranger and sojourner among them.

As the pilgrim Abraham made his progress across deserts and mountains, he did not immediately become the great prophet of legend. His wanderings exposed him to personal danger and hardship. As a kind of early Moses, his mettle was tested. First called Abram (probably an Amorite name), he was transformed by his experiences and faith into a new man, Abraham. While the Canaanites prayed to their old god El for a plentiful harvest and long life, Abraham expanded such worship into a special new relationship. The concept of a land promised forever to one people, a special covenant with the children of Abraham, was novel, and is unique to the Jewish religion. Yet this covenant may be revoked if God’s laws are not carefully followed. Heavenly grace and favor are won only after an anxious existence. Abraham’s tale first made plain the delicate nature of Jewish life through the ages.

The patriarch’s deepest faith was challenged when he was instructed to carry his son Isaac (delivered from the womb of his elderly and barren wife, Sarah, long after her child-rearing years) to the top of a mountain to sacrifice. Isaac too, in his passive acceptance of his fate, is an ideal symbol. God can take back all that has been given, the covenant as a lease, not a perpetual gift. When Abraham was restrained from sacrificing his son, an essential lesson was taught mankind: human life is sacred and adored by God. Indeed, recent archaeological digs in Israel have uncovered jars from Abraham’s time containing remains of little children who apparently were killed by the Canaanites in ghastly ancient rituals. The story of Abraham and Isaac showed humanity how to believe and to trust.

Illustration by Jan Van der Straet,
Abraham and Isaac.

To the Jews, Abraham is their ancestor, the father of Isaac, whose son Jacob was also called Israel. Descended from Shem, Noah’s son, Abraham was a S(h)emite and that rare model of strict obedience to divine law. He exhibits pity and concern for the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah, bargaining with God over how many good men still remain in those decadent towns. His faith in God is unshakeable. He is willing to sacrifice his Isaac at his Lord’s direction. Abraham receives God’s promise of a Promised Land and a people infinitely numbered.

For the Christians, the promises given by God to Abraham are fulfilled in Jesus. Abraham and Jesus both possessed a simple faith, which motivated their actions. The renunciation of the “Son of God” by the “Father” is analogous to the “sacrifice” of Isaac by Abraham. Both Abraham and Jesus were transformed absolutely by their absolute faith. While Abraham received the covenant for his people, Jesus was said to have transmitted God’s love for all to share.

Muslims share the same devotion to Abraham as Jews and Christians. As the actual father of Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, Abraham establishes Mecca as the one true sanctuary of God. Abraham’s flight from Ur is also an archetype for the Prophet’s flight from Mecca. Abraham is a prime example of Islamic virtue, the man who lives by God’s laws, is righteous and pleasing to his Supreme Judge; his receipt from God of the original unveiling of divine truth is best expressed for Muslims in the blessed Koran without what they have viewed as the distortions of Judaism and Christianity.

Abraham’s central place as the father of the three great Semitic religions, the source of monotheism throughout the world, demands that his descendants try finally to make peace with one another. All three religions share the same early language, the same belief in the one God of Abraham and the prophecy that there is a purpose under Heaven to what happens in the world, and that without ethical behavior man is bereft of his divine origin.