ABSTRACT
Many of the better-known psychoanalytic studies on anti-Semitism were written in circumstances marked by involuntary emigration and first-hand experience of the persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime. Without exception, the authors were themselves Jewish. One response to the imminent dangers spawned by anti-Semitism was an attempt to fathom the specific characteristics of Jewish identity from a psychoanalytic vantage point (Beland, 1992). These studies investigated traditional and Christian hostility to Jews, as well as the racist variety that had developed into a barbaric, exterminatory anti-Semitism in Germany. The psychoanalysts who wrote them sought to comprehend the destructive hatred with which Jews were persecuted, a hatred that for all of them had turned into a trauma and a severe threat to their very lives. These studies date from the 1930s and 1940s. Sigmund Freud’s monograph Moses and Monotheism first appeared in 1939. In 1938, Otto Fenichel had produced the first version of his essay on anti-Semitism, written in exile in Prague. Rudolf Loewenstein began his study on anti-Semitism and the 154cultural comparison between Christianity and Judaism in France in 1941. In 1944, Ernst Simmel presented his analysis of anti-Semitism as a form of mass psychopathology at a symposium he had organized in San Francisco. Other prominent speakers at this famous symposium on anti-Semitism were Max Horkheimer, Otto Fenichel, Bernhard Berliner, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Theodor Adorno (Simmel, 1946). 1950 saw the publication of The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford (1950b) that was based largely on psychoanalytic concepts. Another study that appeared at the time was Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (1950), by Ackerman and Jahoda.
