To the Editor:

Reading David Aberbach’s “Freud’s Jewish Problem” [June], I thought of what I had always considered Freud’s most revealing statement about his Jewishness, but could not recall where I had read it. The letters published in the September issue prompted me to intensify the search. . . . The statement appears in Freud’s preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, published in 1913:

No reader of the Hebrew version of this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of the author who is ignorant of the language of the Holy Writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot share in nationalistic ideas, but who has never repudiated his people, who feels in his essential nature a Jew, and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: “Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left that is Jewish?” he would reply: “A great deal, and probably its very essence,” though he could not express that essence clearly in words.

Benno Weiser Varon
Brookline, Massachusetts