Ultimate secret of Judaism III

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The issue of incest is a nagging one in the literary and cinematic production of Judaism. In my Psychanalyse du judaïsme [“ Psychoanalysis of Judaism”] (2006), we saw that “the Torah” offers many examples of incestuous relations. [Ed. -- The Torah consists of the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which the Germans call “the five books of Moses.”]

Of course, incest is forbidden among the Jews, as stipulated in the Torah (Leviticus 18), and the Babylonian Talmud (Yebamot, 2a). Gerard Haddad explains this in his book entitled Les Sources talmudiques de la psychanalyse1[“{“The Talmudic Sources of Psychoanalysis”]—but not without ambiguity. For everything is ambiguous in Judaism, and it must be noted that Jews can find loopholes in biblical texts. In his book Jewish Messianism, Gershom Scholem [b. Berlin 1892, d. Jerusalem 1982], who is one of the leading specialists in the Jewish Kabbalah, explains that Hassidic Jews too know how to interpret the law to their own advantage, and he reminds us that Jews belonging to the heretic Sabbatean sect adopted as a line of conduct the systematic violation of all prohibitions of the Torah–in particular those of incest, which they declared repealed.

Gershom Scholem

That which is given an ambiguous interpretion by Talmudic Jews is expressed more clearly by Hassidic Jews [Ed.--a major sect of Judaism emphasizing joy, dance and song over learning], and is quite explicit in Sabbatean Jews. We will refer here to our previous work. The American researcher of Jewish origin David Bakan confirms that such practices are common in Jewish communities. In his book entitled Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, he ponders “the role of incest in Jewish history” in an attempt to understand “the repeated references made to it by Freud.”

Quote:

David Bakan confirms that [incest is] common in Jewish communities. In his book entitled Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, he ponders “the role of incest in Jewish history” in an attempt to understand “the repeated references made to it by Freud.”

David Bakan

“Because of their endogamy,” writes Bakan, the problem of incest arose in a manner characteristic of the Jews, and the role of Jewish [i.e. Hassidic] mysticism, was partly to provide the means to cope with intense feelings of guilt associated with incestuous desires. “The Jews, actually, especially in Eastern Europe, usually lived in small communities,” so the choice there of a spouse was extremely limited, and it was of course forbidden to marry a goy. The traditional arrangement of marriages by elders of the Jewish community was due in part to the fact “that elders were holders of essential information on the degrees of kinship.”

Shtetl life in Old Poland and Russia; Jews were forbidden to leave their areas after a Jew killed Tsar Alexander II, who had fought ironically for their emancipation. Jews made money off selling liquor and lending money to peasants, then foreclosing on them.

We know also that Jews–Sephardic and Ashkenazi–married off their children at a very young age, as young as 12 or 13. “The custom of early marriages, writes David Bakan, “drew its justification, perhaps, not only from a realistic attitude concerning the sexual impulses that existed generally among Jews, but also from the need to overcome existing incestuous tendencies.”

And he concludes:

Quote:

“The incestuous temptations that are perhaps, as Freud suggests, universally prevalent [sic], were particularly marked among Jews

– requiring therefore intense countermeasures and, as a consequence, [infliction of] an excessive sense of guilt.”

The mores of Jews are undoubtedly quite remote from European customs. We have seen in Psychoanalysis of Judaism that the Talmud was very explicit on this subject. The reading of texts being tedious, let us merely keep in mind these extracts from the Treaty of the Sanhedrin, 55a-55b:

The issue of incest is, however, mentioned relatively seldom in the literary production of Judaism. We know that the Jewish people like to maintain their mystery and secretiveness — and

Nevertheless, it appears here and there in anecdotal form in the works of some novelists. In the study devoted to Romain Gary in the Cahiers de l’Herne [Ed.--“Notebooks of Herne” a French literary magazine dedicated to unknown or ostracized yet deserving authors] we learn that his work reflects, in many places, the neuroses of Judaism:

“The incestuous fantasies unfold in all their ambivalence. With young women he encounters, Momo, [the hero of one of his novels], hesitates between amorous flirtation and the quest for maternal love. Under the guise of a universal love, Jean sleeps with a woman who could easily be his mother.” Sexual ambiguity is also of course present: “The difference between the sexes becomes uncertain: Lola, born a man, chose a female identity and we no longer know if the aged Rosa is still a woman.”(La Vie devant soi) [“Your Life Still Before You”]).

Observe also what Elie Wiesel writes in Talmudic Celebration [?] [the French version, from 1991, is entitled Célébration talmudique], when choosing an example at random to explain the Talmud:

Elie Wiesel. “Wiesel” in Yiddish means . . . . “weasel.” He has been widely denounced as a fraud by other Jews — but is still useful for snowjobs on goyeem. His Auschwitz memoir Night bizarrely never mentions gas chambers; it is so full of absurdities that it was eventually re-released as a novel – as fiction.!

“Sometimes a Talmudic saying requires ten lines, sometimes a few are enough to tell a story,” he writes.

“An example? A woman wanted to submit a serious problem to Rabbi Éliezer, but he refused to help. She then went to Rabbi Yehoshua who proved more accomodating. What was the problem? Here:

Quote:

‘B’ni hakatan mibni hagadol,’ she said, ‘my eldest son is the father of my youngest son.’”

On the subject of this incestuous woman seized by remorse and wanting to confess, would Dostoyevsky not have been capable of writing six hundred pages?”

Elie Wiesel quotes in his book the case of Rabbi Elisha, who lived in the second century, at the time of Emperor Hadrian and the war [between Rome and] Judea. He is, says Wiesel, the “symbol of repudiation and treachery… He had pockets full of anti-Jewish pamphlets … Worse: he began to campaign for forced assimilation… He sympathized with the [Roman] occupier, and became a collaborator and finally an accomplice of the Roman army.” The rabbi Elisha was akher; he represented the dark forces in the Jew, the forces of evil in man… He is first called Rabbi Elisha, then Elisha ben Abuya, then bin Abuya, and finally Akher. “What could be the origin of this unacceptable deviance?”

“The first assumption,” Wiesel wrote, “lays the blame—of course—on. . . his mother. Jewish mothers are always guilty of whatever happens to their cherished son. “And Wiesel expresses himself here, elliptically:

Quote:

“As a good Jewish son, he loved his mother–a little too much.”

(end of part three)