The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age by Steven Weitzman

Author:Steven Weitzman [Weitzman, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780691174600
Google: nxWTvgAACAAJ
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2017-07-15T19:35:07+00:00

Slayers of Moses

Even though many historians would dismiss psychohistory, it might still be premature to give up on it as a way to explore the origin of the Jews. Since science is open-ended, there is always the chance that the recent effort to integrate psychoanalysis with neuroscience will lead to an advance we cannot anticipate right now. Indeed, recent research has managed to give the seemingly preposterous idea of “psycho-Lamarckism” a second life through the “new epigenetics,” a kind of research that explores the impact of the environment and other nongenetic factors on what offspring inherit biologically from their parents. Such research has even suggested that Freud might not have been completely off base in his idea that the effects of trauma can be transmitted to children biologically.

Rachel Yehuda, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, is one of the scholars at the forefront of his kind of research, and in one of her best-known studies, she and her colleagues have offered evidence that traumatic stress may have altered the physiology and emotional response of survivors of the Holocaust in a way that was passed on to their descendants. To be more specific, Yehuda and her colleagues found that the children of Holocaust survivors, having inherited an altered way of circulating stress hormones from their parents, were more likely to respond differently to a car accident than the children of those who did not suffer through the Holocaust. The new epigenetics cannot take us back to primordial events: it can study the effects of only recent traumatic events like the Holocaust and 9/11. But as Yehuda acknowledges, it does represent a revival of a Lamarckian perspective by showing that the effects of trauma can be inherited in a biological way not that different from what Freud intuited but was not able to demonstrate.

But since it seems unlikely that research will speak to our question anytime soon, there is in the meantime another way that the afterlife of Freud’s theory can help us to advance our quest. After reviewing the many efforts to integrate history and psychology, the historian Joan Scott has recently concluded that the two fields are incommensurate, that her fellow historians had never really figured out how to use psychology as a historical tool in a way that bridges between the two kinds of research. From her vantage point, however, the discovery that psychology does not work in the way historians want it to can be productive in another way: engaging psychology gives historians a chance to think about how they themselves think. If we engage Freud from this angle, perhaps there is something to glean not about the origin of the Jews but about how scholars think about that origin.

One aspect of Freud I find especially intriguing is the way his account of the origin of the Jews brings together different approaches toward origin. In the chapter on genealogy, I introduced three distinct approaches to origin that

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