When Yahweh Became Christ

Reading from and responding to Our God Is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us: Essays on Jewish Power, by Laurent Guyénot.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

(Art by Michelle Horsley)

Freud’s Revenge Mission

From chapter nine, “The Freudian Complex: Sigmund Freud, Sexual Abuse, and Cover Up”:

At the core, Jewishness is the conviction, deeply internalized from the earliest age, of the superiority of Jews over non-Jews—“chosenness.” Anything contradicting this superiority creates a cognitive dissonance which is overcome by denial. . . . According to Wilhelm Reich, anti-Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration and could be cured by sexual liberation (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1934)—an improvement from Leo Pinsker’s theory that Judeophobia was a “hereditary” and “incurable” “disease transmitted for two thousand years” (p. 177).

There is potentially a lot more to get into here, regarding the idea that “the primary target of psychoanalysis was Christianity.”1 From Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Psychotherapy:

One of Freud’s most powerful motives in life was the desire to inflict vengeance on Christianity for its traditional anti-Semitism. . . . Freud had identified himself, and privately thought of himself, as a Jewish warrior, fighting against the hostile Christian world (p. 146, 149).

Szasz compared Freud to the Count of Monte Cristo,

the humiliated but morally superior victim escapes from dependence on his morally inferior victimizers; he hides, schemes, and grows powerful; he returns to the scene of his defeat, and there remorselessly humiliates and subjugates his erstwhile victimizers as they had humiliated and subjugated him (p. 147).

Isaac Complex

Instead of wading into this swampland, Guyénot moves on to discuss “the Isaac complex,” as the flip side of the Oedipus complex. Allowing that “The son’s repressed wish to murder his father is perhaps Freud’s most fertile intuition,” he then designates it an “abusive generalization. Only a neurotic son of a destructive and manipulative father has a repressed wish to “‘kill the father’” (p. 181).

Having found this impulse in himself, Guyénot argues, Freud “projected it on all of mankind” (ibid). Freud’s Jewish disciples then found they had the same impulse, and Freudianism became widely accepted by Jews. For Guyénot,

Freud’s generalization . . . suffered from the tendency of Jewish intellectuals to project Jewish issues on all humankind. The child’s repressed wish to kill his father is not universally human, but may be characteristically Jewish. The Jewish father is the guardian of Jewishness and the representative of the Jewish god (ibid).

Guyénot is once again putting the Jewish patriarchal energy of Yahweh in a wholly negative light; but clearly, licentiousness is no antidote—as amply proven by the sexual liberation goals of Freudianity (Jewish revenge plot against Christianity or not).

To support his argument for the pathology of Jewish character, Guyénot quotes from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia:

“The Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which they dwell.” Research done by sociologists Leo Ceroli in 1962 showed that the rate of neuroses and character disorders among Jews was about three times as high as among Catholics and Protestants (p. 185).

(What would Wilhelm Reich have made of that, I wonder?)

I cannot comment on the statistics, but Guyénot does seem to be on safer ground here. As the primary indoctrinatory basis for development, the Tanakh, the Torah, and the Talmud (when combined with infant genital mutilation and unavoidable parental neuroses) seem likely to have some detrimental effects on a child’s temperament and character (moral or otherwise).

This raises the question as to the degree to which any alleged “innate” characteristics of Jewishness (such as a superiority complex) are cultural rather than genetic, nurture over nature, the result of indoctrination rather than insemination. Take the child at eight days, and you can be reasonably sure of making the man.

The essential point, however, is one I don’t think Guyénot ever makes explicit: whatever efficacy Judaism once had, it was used up roughly two thousand years ago. The primary problem with Judaic belief and Jewish tribal identity (as Rudolf Steiner suggested over a century ago) is that it had more than served its purpose by the time of Christ.

Marx & Bauer on Jewish Emancipation from Judaism

In chapter ten, “The Marxian Covenant: Karl Marx in Yahweh’s Plan for Mankind,” Guyénot cites Marx’s essays on the Jewish question, which took the form of critical reviews of two works by Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a leading figure among young Hegelians, and his book was titled Die Judenfrage, with a follow-up article, “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free.”

For Bauer also, it was the religious and not the racial aspect of Judaism that was the problem. Jews could never be emancipated politically, he argued, without being emancipated religiously. Since being chosen by God was the essence of their religion, their resistance to assimilation came from the Torah and not only kept them perennially separate from other peoples, but also prevented them from respecting other peoples.

“Jews as such cannot amalgamate with peoples and associate their fate with theirs. As Jews, they must wait for a particular future allotted to them alone, the chosen people, and assuring them the dominion of the world” (p. 193). Because of this, Bauer argued, the only way for a Jew to be free was by ceasing to be a Jew, since his sense of alienation and of superiority were both symptoms of Jewish identity.

(One could say this about any kind of collective identification, whether of race, religion, or nation, it is only that the Jewish identity is a more extreme and obvious case of this—most manifestly with the nation-state of Israel.)