Soc (2009) 46:543–545 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9252-3

BOOK REVIEW

Philip Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity. Edited by Arnold M. Eisen and Gideon Lewis-Kraus University of Virginia Press, 2008, 217 pp, $34.95. ISBN-10: 0813927064; ISBN-12: 978-0-8139-2706-0 Stephen J. Whitfield

Published online: 1 September 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Imagine this: A volume devoted to the subject of the impact of Jews not only on Western culture but also on the very idea of culture opens with an incident, occurring in 1942, at the faculty club of Columbia University. Professor Franz Boas is having lunch, but suffers a fatal heart attack, and collapses into the arms of another anthropologist, a young refugee intellectual named Claude Lévi-Strauss. Could any episode, could any pairing of academicians, be more likely to stimulate reflections on a topic like “the Jew of culture”? Boas had immigrated to the USA because of the illiberalism and antisemitism of the Second Reich in which he had been raised; no anthropologist was more decisive in flattening and destroying the very idea of race. Having measured the physical characteristics of other newcomers and their progeny in America, he emphasized the importance of environment rather than the genetic transmission of presumably essential traits, and as an activist challenged the white racism that pervaded his adopted land. The grandson of a rabbi, Lévi-Strauss published Race et histoire under UNESCO’s auspices in 1952. The unsavory idea to which the Third Reich had dedicated itself, race was the reason that forced him to find refuge in New York during the Second World War. Boas and Lévi-Strauss were pivotal in exploring the richness, diversity and complexity of culture, and in suggesting how societies outside of Christendom cast a strange light on the rationality and secularism of the West. That neither Boas nor Lévi-Strauss cultivated much curiosity about the Jewish experience made them highly representative of the Diasporic intelligentsia whose faith in civic inclusiveness and republican progress would be so S. J. Whitfield (*) Department of American Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA e-mail: [email protected]

severely tested in the Holocaust and its aftermath. In their aptitude for the demands of theory, in their commitment to the procedures of social science, in their acumen in looking at the West from the outside, and in their own distance from Judaism and its communal adherents, Boas and LéviStrauss were representative men. Now consider this: A volume of eight essays ostensibly profiling “the Jew of culture” includes one chapter on a professing Anglican named Benjamin Disraeli, and has another on an Irish Protestant named Oscar Wilde. There is a chapter on Franz Rosenzweig, but it takes up all of two pages and makes no mention of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus that he founded in the effort to invigorate Jewish culture in Weimar Germany. One seven-page essay in this volume on Freud refers to him as “a psychological Jew,” but not as a “Jew of culture”; the distinction is not explained. Three of the chapters offer general, often gnomic ruminations on contemporary values, but little if any depiction of the status of Jews within modern culture. Another chapter is a reprint from the author’s first and probably still most famous book, an indispensable interpretation of the project of psychoanalysis and its founder. The aura of padding that hovers over this publishing venture is therefore unavoidable, an impression that is reinforced by the editors’ decision to recycle in The Jew of Culture three pieces that had already been reprinted in an important anthology of Philip Rieff’s essays, The Feeling Intellect, which Jonathan B. Imber edited in 1990. Rieff died 2 years before the publication of The Jew of Culture, and is recalled as having demanded that no student in his classroom at the University of Pennsylvania use any terms that could not be defended. Yet nowhere in this book is the phrase that serves as its title defined, much less explained. But even if there isn’t an ideal type, perhaps there is an exemplar? The only one whom Rieff cites as a

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“leading American Jew of culture” (and “superior teacher”) was Lionel Trilling (p. 137). Perhaps no one would have tried harder to wriggle out of such an honor than this particular recipient, who by his own admission could not “discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing,” he wrote in 1944. “I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it,” Trilling added, “if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish.” Nor is the confusion that Rieff’s term ought to generate dispelled in the introduction to The Jew of Culture. There co-editor Arnold M. Eisen, a former student of Rieff’s, refers to the intellectual and moral vocation of “all Jews of culture, Jewish or gentile” (p. xv), which is a puzzling echo of the iconic ad for Levy’s rye bread. If you don’t have to be Jewish to be a “Jew of culture,” what gives? The answer cannot be a want of intelligence, because Rieff’s was formidable. Nor could the explanation lie in a failure to have been inducted into the procedures of scholarship. A sociologist, he happened to have at his finger-tips a great deal of the Western intellectual patrimony. As the general editor of the Freud collected edition, Rieff was thoroughly conversant with his subject. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), published 3 years after the centennial of the birth of Rieff’s subject, was conceived in an era when the legacy of psychoanalysis was stimulating instances of strikingly radical rethinking (from Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown in particular). Rieff countered with a “conservative” interpretation, by insisting that Freud expected us to show forbearance under the weight of our unhappiness rather than dare to release our repressed energies. To substantiate that theme, Rieff managed to deploy on virtually every page dazzling insights, expressed with aphoristic concision. There cannot be a model of intellectual biography superior to Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Its sequel 7 years later exhibited the same distinctive talent for intellectual portraiture, combined with powers of generalization, which the title of his second book signaled, in marking the transition from religious authority to psychological authority. The Triumph of the Therapeutic argued that in a remissive culture the psychiatrist, however influential, refuses to be Dr. No; and the consequence has been, or might be, the abyss. Rieff was unmatched, according to historian Jerry Z. Muller, in tracing “the inner dynamic” and in plotting the “perils” of the therapeutic ethos. But in the shadow of Freud, Rieff’s second book dealt with somewhat lesser figures (D. H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Gustav Jung), and perhaps for that reason did not elicit quite the same consistent brilliance of inquiry. Compared to Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, the 1966 volume is less pithy and a little more apodictic; and its tone is that of an embattled

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and austere foe of the transgressive, anarchic impulses that came to define the 1960s. From then on, the author cultivated a persona of idiosyncrasy and a prose style of obscurity, as though proud of being out of sync (though he expressed no nostalgia for any other era). Think of Rieff as an analog figure in an increasingly digital age, a throwback to an era when intellectuals were supposed to take a detached long view rather than immerse themselves in the frenzy of the Zeitgeist. His career consisted of a descent into a willed eccentricity. The academy, the society and the culture had let him down. Though he acknowledged his own disappointment that Fellow Teachers (1973) had failed to reach a wider audience, greater critical or popular success would have sabotaged the very premise of the book. Like Henry Adams, Rieff could have interpreted insularity—the failure to find a wide and serious readership—as confirmation of his own pessimistic rightness about the sentimental pieties of psychological man. Each of Rieff’s books proved to be less lucid, less engaging, and therefore less important than the previous one. A posthumous work like The Jew of Culture, it is sad to report, does not reverse this pattern, and does little credit to the memory of so unusual a figure in the field of social science and cultural criticism. Which is not to say that this volume lacks merit. Even if Disraeli was an Anglican by faith (at least formally), Rieff’s 1952 portrait is richly suggestive, especially in underscoring the connection between theatricality and Jewishness in the self-fashioning of the most deliberately exotic of English prime ministers. Yet Disraeli remains a peculiar choice of a poster-boy for an ethno-religious group that Rieff characterized by its tenacity and its moralism. Disraeli “played at being a Jew far more seriously than Heine played at not being a Jew” (p. 1). But Rieff’s sentence happens to be equally valid when the two names are reversed. Indeed, in a huge and massive monograph, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (1983), S. S. Prawer demonstrated the extent to which Heine did not play at not being a Jew. An equivalent tome on the Jewish characters and scenes in Disraeli’s novels could not be written. Moralism was one trait that Disraeli, a romantic imperialist but also a Realpolitiker, found objectionable in his great (but stuffy) rival, Gladstone. The word “Jew” is absent from “The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet,” published over a quarter of a century ago in Salmagundi. The conundrum that Rieff identifies is intriguing, even when transposed to the wrong book. How can culture sustain itself, he asks, when so much of modernity entails the subversive and the transgressive? How can authority be effectively exercised in an era of individuality, when the quest for personal fulfillment is so frequently endorsed, and let-it-all-hang-out expressiveness is so often recommended? He asserts that “it is

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culture, deeply installed as authority, that generates depth of character” (p. 149). But other than in the “primitive” societies that Boas and Lévi-Strauss studied, social systems are commonly suspended between the institutions of stability and the requirements of change, between the need for order and the yearning for autonomy. When too much authority is asserted (as in the USA in the 1950s, when expectations of conformity were so pronounced), the blowback can come with a sense of near-inevitability: the 1960s. Even Rieff lamented that Victorian England allowed legal authority to penetrate too deeply into the realm of privacy (victimizing Wilde himself). But “The Impossible Culture” shows no recognition of the concept of privacy as itself posing a fundamental challenge to the ideal of authority that Rieff valued so highly. He insisted that “whatever makes authority incarnate in our culture is no longer available to it. No creed, no ramifying symbolic of militant truths, is installed deeply enough now to help men constrain their capacity for expressing everything” (p. 161). Rieff was driven to lament the loss of absolutes, “the absence of a supreme interdictory figure, another Moses” (p. 134), who could so powerfully convey all those thou-shalt-not’s that are supposed to keep in check the aggressive and libidinal desires so inherent in our species. (The most resourceful recent reader of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, is the only scholar to whom Rieff pays any attention in The Jew of Culture.) In a secular and positivist age like our own, however, only “a godless Jew” could be taken seriously,

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which helps explain why the figure whom Rieff admired more than any other was, of course, Freud. His “greatness of character” was incontestable (p. 26). “The greatness of the man is beyond question, complementing the greatness of his mind,” Rieff added (p. 32). However, as he so succinctly put it in his first book, the moralism of Freud was bereft of a message (unlike the commandments from Mount Sinai, presumably). The tragic stoicism that Rieff emphasized in Freud’s version of psychoanalysis may not have amounted to an explicit or full-scale message, and in that sense could not compete either historically or ideologically with those inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that Jefferson first proclaimed, in offering a rationale for rebellion. What made American society and culture so attractive to the talented and the industrious from abroad, as well as to so many millions of the native-born, was the absence of authority. Subjugation to it would not have been very appealing. What is missing in Rieff’s work is an appreciation of the opportunity to push the envelope, to live a more fulfilling life than one’s ancestors, to be emancipated from the terrible limitations of hierarchy and tradition. What is valuable in his thought, however, is the resistance that it offers to dominant national impulses, and thus his legacy can be enlisted in the effort to achieve a proper balance between authority and liberty. Stephen J. Whitfield is Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and is the author of In Search of American Jewish Culture (University Press of New England, 1999, 2001).