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Perhaps the most revolutionary Jewish thinker of the 20th century was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who created psychoanalysis and explored the human unconscious. Convinced that neurosis resulted from repressed impulses and sexual drives, Freud drew on medicine, myth and dreams to explain how the mind works. Freudian terms such as Elie ego, the pleasure principle, paranoia. guilt feelings, subconscious, peer pressure and regression are repeatedly used and misused in everyday English conversation.
PSYCHOLOGY AND THEORY Sigmund Freud was not a practising Jew and his books Thieni and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion spoke of religion as the antithesis of reason and experience. None the less he
Below I-Jailed as tl,e/tl:er of modern anthropology. [:ri,iZ Boos studied people in their physical en i'iron,nent.
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accepted that faith was part of the human psyche. All his psychologist colleagues bar Karl Jung were Jewish. Sigmund's daughter, Anna, became a pioneer in child psychology.
Freud influenced other thinkers, including Jews such as Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Claude Lév-Strauss (1908-2009) the founder Of structural anthropology While Lévi-Snau.ss analysed 'primitive' societies, Raymond Aron (1905-83) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) cast their gaze at modern civilization.The Parisian-born Aron asked how ordinary people nude sense of industrial progress and political competition.
SOCIOLOGISTS
Walter Benjamin killed himself while trying to escape Nazis on the Franco-Spanish border. Even more than Freud, this translator, essayist and philosopher wrestled with his Jess ish ideimry. He individualistically applied the ideas of Goethe, Marx, Brecht and Jewish mysticism to i urrent literature and aesthetics, and his prescient posthumous works IllulflifIflhlOiiS and Arcades considered the shopping mall and street life as epitomizing contemporary society. One of his last books. Theses on the Philosophy of History, addressed the Jewish quest for a niessiah and humanity's clash with nihilism.
Another Jewish-origin pioneer of the link between words and ideas was the Austrian-born Cambridge philosopher and former 'logical positivist'. Ludwig \Vittgenstein. He .ind other Jewish thinkers such as Benjamin, Levi-Strauss and Theodor Adorno laid the basis for a post-war
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Above 1-Jerinanu Co/tess. German ,u-o-Kantian philosophers wrestled i'ithJcu'ishs topics in his sunny book's.
school called structuralism. Its most celebrated figure was Jacques Derrida (1930-2007). Derrida pioneered 'deconstruction', a method of minutely interrogating texts for signs of true meaning obscured by written convention, which has been profoundly influential.
Below 'Philosophers have interpreted time world; the point, lsois'cver, is to change it'— Karl Marx, 1875.
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JEWISH PHILOSOPHERS AND POLITICIANS
EVEN IN REJECTING ASPECTS OP rRADITI0NAL J UI)AISM, Till NKERS SUCH As FREUD AND DERRIDA SHOWED SIGNS OF ENGAGING WITH JUDAIC CONCEPTS, THUS REVEALING A SFIAREI)JEWISH IDENTITY.
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PIONEERS IN ECONOMICS New thinking in econoniics,jok-ingly called 'the dismal science', also owes much to Jews. Born into an English Sephardi family in 1772, David Ricardo became one of the most influential political economists. Monetarist Milton Friedman inspired Thatcherism in 1970s Britain and President Reagan's supply-side economics in America. Academic devcloprueu it economist Jeffrey Sachs draws on Jewish philosophy, not least Maiunonides' theory of facilitating self-help as the highest form of charity. He has advised many Latin American and post-communist States.
Finally, George Soros of Hungary has turned his billions gained in speculation to promoting 'open societies' worldwide. Soros' ideas come from Jewish philosopher Karl Popper, who championed transparency as the ultimate tool against authoritarian systems.
Interestingly, many Jews in the Marxist camp veered from narrower economic analysis to investigating social change.
NEW THINKING IN JUDAISM Thousands of believing 19th-century Jews sought a middle path, one that married Jewish heritage with modern realities. Exposure to
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Western academic methods led to radical new outlooks. From the 1950s onwards French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) popularized Thiniudic methods to a new generation of secular scholars. More mainstream OrthodoxJews responded to the Haskalah spirit and Hassidic fervour by promoting the Mussar movement of contemplation and ethical introspection started by Ray Israel Salanter (1810-83). Salanter was inspired by the writings of Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707-46, an Italian kabbalist and rabbi.
THE NON-JEWISH JEW AND DIASPORA POLITICIANS
And yet the question remains, is there anything specifically Jewish about thinkers on general matters who just happen to be Jewish? To Isaac Deutscher (1907-67), the Polish-born British historian, Marxist activist and biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, it was possible, indeed almost inevitable, to be a 'non-Jewish Jew'. Though an atheist and foe ofJewish nationalism, he felt himself a 'Jew by force of myunconditional solidarity with the persecuted, because I feel the pulse of Jewish history.'
Germany's Chancellor from 1909 to 1917 was Theobald von Bethmann Holiweg, a descendant of a prominent Frankfurt Jewish banking family; while in Italy two Jews, Sydney Sonnino and Luigi Luzzacri, became prime ministers in 1909-10 and 1910-I1 respectively. France has had five Jewish-origin prime ministers in the last century, most notably Leon Blum before World War 11 and Pierre Mendes-France after, both from the left. For 12 years Bruno Kreisky was Austria's Chancellor, and Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, rose to become possibly Washington's most influential Secretary of State during 1973-77. Perhaps most powerful of all was Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only British Prime Minister of Jewish origin in 1868 and 1874-80; he spoke proudly of his people's heritage, though he was converted to Anglicanism aged 13.
