Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts
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Deeper Motives for Anti-semitism Deeper Motives for Anti-semitism
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A Kristevan Cartography of the Abject A Kristevan Cartography of the Abject
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Returning to Freud Returning to Freud
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4 The Sources of Anti-semitism: Circumcision, Abjection, and the Uncanny Mother
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Published:03 December 2001
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Abstract
The chapter examines Freud's comments on the entanglement of anti-Semitism with misogyny. Freud's description of castration anxiety and circumcision as central to both the fear of the Jew and the fear of the mother leads to a set of speculations on the “abject” as the source of both xenophobia and misogyny. Freud's explanation of anti-Semitism in terms of an association of circumcision and castration seems relatively self-evident: it follows the metonymic logic of pars pro toto. Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse (1982: 17). Anti-Semitism is precisely a contemporary mask for abjection. By locating the origins of anti-Semitism and misogyny in castration anxiety, Freud developed a theory in which the practice of circumcision is central to the hostility toward Jews.
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