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Unheroic Conduct

University of California Press

Long live war. Long live love. Let sorrow be banished from the Earth.
Giuseppe Verdi, The Sicilian Vespers

I begin with a story, indeed one of the initiatory stories of modernity. In The Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud reports the following event from his early childhood:

At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. "When I was a young man," he said, "I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap and shouted: 'Jew! get off the pavement!'" "And what did you do?" I asked. "I went into the roadway and picked up my cap," was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.1

With all that has been written about this text connecting it with Freud's individual psychology, I think it has not been sufficiently em-

Freud, Interpretation , 197.

phasized how emblematic the story is of a historical moment, the parallel shift of Jews from "traditional" to "modern" and "eastern" to "western," and the ways that both are intimately implicated in questions of male gender. Freud's anecdote is, accordingly, not merely autobiographical but historiographical, and it will serve as the specimen text for this disquisition.

The historical shifts are, with Freud's characteristic rhetorical brilliance, indicated with deft and subtle strokes in the text. First of all, there is the signal that a historical shift is at stake in the father's declaration that he is about to tell a story that will indicate how much "better things are now." Second, there is the indication of the shift in space. The incident took place in "the streets of Freud's birthplace," that is, in the eastern place from which the Freuds had come to Vienna. Third, there is the indication that Freud's father had been, at that time, a very traditional Jew. He was wearing the shtreimel , the Sabbath fur hat of the East European Hasid, an emblem in Freud's world of the unreconstructed primitive Ostjude , the eastern or, particularly, Polish Jew2 (see Plate 2). All of these cultural forces are explicitly concatenated with issues of masculinity within the text. Freud's father, "a big, strong man," behaves in a way that Freud experiences as shameful, and Freud seems to know, although he does not explicitly say, that this "passivity" had to do with his father's Jewishness. The specificities of the incident reported by Freud are highly significant as well. The hat was certainly for him a symbol of the phallus. In at least two places in The Interpretation of Dreams , in which this story is reported, Freud writes as much explicitly.3 Thus, whether or not it is "true" that the hat symbolizes male genitalia, for Freud it was certainly the case. He would have interpreted this incident, then, as sexually as well as politically emasculatingcastratingfor his father, the paradigmatic traditional Jewish male.4

In fact, as Martin Bergmann has noted, the "feminine" response of Freud's father in this incident was not "unheroic" but antiheroic and indeed traditionally Jewish: "A Jew was expected to be able to control his anger, not to be provoked; his feelings of inner dignity were sustained by a belief in his own spiritual superiority which a ruffian and a

This point had been earlier remarked by Ernst Simon and otherwise ignored (and obscured by Freud himself) in the quite voluminous literature on this moment in Freud's texts (Simon, "Sigmund," 271).

Freud, Interpretation , 35556, 36062.

McGrath, Freud's , 64.

Plate 2.
Jew Wearing the Traditional Fur Hat. Selbstbildnis , 1920, by Lazar Krestin.
(Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.)

'Goy' can in no way touch."5 For traditional Jewry there were both alternative civilities, Edelkayt , and alternative paradigms of "manliness" that could be summed up in the relatively modern term mentsh .6 Edelkayt , which means "nobility," was a counter-ideal to many of the markers of the noble in romantic culture, in that its primary determinants within the culture were delicacy and gentleness, not bravery and courtliness.7

The behavior of Freud's father in the hat incident is the quintessence of Edelkayt . Marc Kaminsky has isolated two aspects in the construction of the mentsh . These two aspects, which to a certain extent pull in different directions, are both nevertheless significant and need equal attention:

Mentsh , as cultural ideal, proposes an ideal of person that is purportedly genderless, a norm to which both genders have to adhere. Now, we are accustomed to thinking of such ideals as erasures of difference, in which women were subordinated. No doubt this is an important line of analysis to follow and work through. But to let this monological concept monopolize interpretation would be a mistake. There are two points to be made. Within a certain ongoingness of tradition, exalted gender-free ideals are a starting point upon which conventional notions of the differences between genders are set to work in a scale of values that subordinates women. But the second point is more important for your project. The concept of mentsh in modern

Bergmann, "Moses," 12.

Marc Kaminsky argues that this term functions as a secularization and universalization of the traditional termJew ("Discourse," 29899)! For a relatively early usage of the term in a religious context, one could cite the following statement of the late nineteenth-century Lithuanian Rabbi Israel Salanter: "The Maharal of Prague, of blessed memory, created a golem. It is a great wonder, but it is far more wondrous to transmute the nature of the materiality of Man and to make out of it a mentsh " (Goldberg, Israel , 210). (Throughout this book, I shall be using Yiddishistic transcriptions of Yiddish words, such as mentsh , not Mentsch; Edelkayt , not Edelkeit , etc.) In a book that appeared too late to be integrated in any serious way into the present work, George L. Mosse has discussed the peculiar development of the "manliness" ideal since the first half of the eighteenth century, that is, the development that was ultimately to put so much pressure on the ideal of Edelkayt (Mosse, Image ).

At the same time, I should emphasize (following remarks to me by Marc Kaminsky) that this sermiotics, while reversing the definition of noble masculinity current in the European culture, nevertheless, maintains the class coding of the term. In other words what this culture takes to be noble may have shifted, but there is still a hierarchy whereby a privileged class gets to embody the cultural ideal. Furthermore,...