Edward Said on Freud, Zionism, and Vienna

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Sat Mar 17 09:45:29 PST 2001


There is little to add to Edward Said's eloquent statement, except to comment on the following:


> (Incidentally, it should be noted that Freud was an early
> anti-Zionist but later modified his view when Nazi persecutions of
> European Jews made a Jewish state seem like a possible solution to
> widespread and lethal anti-Semitism. But I believe that his position
> vis-à-vis Zionism was always an ambivalent one.)

In the thirties Freud corresponded with the German Jewish writer Arnold Zweig, who had gone to Palestine and become a Zionist. Zweig wrote and solicited his view on Zionism, which Freud said he had come to support, as a result of the rise of Nazism. But he said that Zionism was supportable because it was an essentially secular movement. Clearly Freud would have opposed the present reality of a supposedly "modern" state accepting as normal the participation in governance of an openly racist religious tendency.

Interestingly, Zweig himself became disillusioned with Israel. In the fifties he left and became a citizen and significant cultural figure in the German Democratic Republic.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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