On most Friday afternoons, a Chassidic man stands on a street corner in Manhattan, searching the crowd for people who look as if they might be Jewish. As soon as he spots a potential Jew, he approaches and says, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” If he gets a “yes,” he tells the person that the Sabbath is about to begin. Does the person know how to light the candles? How to say the blessings? If there is any hesitancy, he tries to help by offering a pair of Sabbath candles and a brochure with the blessings printed in Hebrew and...

From the first page ofMoses and Monotheism, Freud insists that he is writing a work of history. Yet the story he narrates stretches even the most elastic of novelistic imaginations. Using the Biblical text as his evidence, he works like a detective, building a case for his version of the events. Pointing to the Egyptian etymology of Moses’ name and the traces of other suppressed narratives, Freud argues that Moses was not an Israelite but rather an Egyptian follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic cult of the sun god, Aten. After the death of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century...

Freud’s insistence on the historical truth of his version of the Moses story may seem strange, but what is perhaps more perplexing is his insistence on the idea that the memory-traces of these events have been biologically inherited by Jewish individuals. From our own perspective in the twenty-first century, the inheritance of memory may sound not only scientifically outmoded but also regressively racist. Yet both judgments would be hasty: If we consider Freud’s position in the context of political and scientific debates of the time period, we discover the limitations of our own definitions of both science and racism.

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Freud was well aware that there was ample evidence to suggest that acquired characteristics are not inherited. Indeed, the most paradigmatic mark of Jewishness—circumcision—would seem to be proof that acquired characteristics are not inherited since the rite must be performed in every generation for its (physical) effects to be transmitted. Not surprisingly, the subject of Jewish circumcision—and the Jewish Question more generally—often appeared in the footnotes of treatises on evolution and heredity in the late nineteenth century.¹ As Freud began to engage with the ongoing debates about race, culture, and evolution, he also began to refer...

The relationship between Freud and his younger colleagues was structured like an analysis: Freud was the father-analyst, and Carl Gustav Jung and Sandor Ferenczi were his “sons.” Though he had explored the notion of transference [Übertragung] as early as 1905 in the postscript to the case of “Dora,” in 1909–11 he saw that the situation was alarmingly repeating itself. What was most worrisome about these repetitions was that it was not only the patients who were slipping and falling into transferential patterns, but Freud’s star disciples. Where the patient (Dora) had fallen in love with the analyst (Breuer), now...

In the last twenty years, an extensive discussion of the concept of memory has emerged across the disciplines. Historians, literary theorists, and psychologists have demonstrated that memory is malleable, utterly open to creative reconstruction, never pure, never absolute.¹ Ironically, while individuals and nations consistently call upon memory in their attempts to construct a stable sense of identity, the reason they turn to memory is that it is just as plastic as identity. And yet, across a diverse set of historical and geographical contexts, people seem to fantasize about memory as if it were something stable—something more concrete and indestructible...

On most Friday afternoons, a Chassidic man stands on a street corner. He searches the crowd, hoping to find individuals who know they are Jewish and who can easily trace their matrilineage to women whom he immediately (magically?) recognizes as Jewish. But in asking the question, he disseminates it, strewing its effects throughout the crowd. Each person of whom he asks the question is touched by the process. Yet it is not only the Chassid who poses the question. The burdens of Jewishness are transferred to anyone who has ever considered whether she is Jewish (or why she is not...