According to Eliza Slavet, the symptoms of racial fever include the following:

She continues:

An analysis of this powerful and all-too-common ailment is at the heart of Slavet's compelling new book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. Not only does the book diagnose this problem, but it also offers a sustained account of its origins and persistence.

In Racial Fever, Slavet looks to Freud to help explain and unravel this tale of collective memory and genealogy. By offering a sustained account of Freud's efforts to engage these questions as they culminate in his final work, Moses and Monotheism, Slavet makes clear that the Jewish question is at the heart of Freud's thinking about these issues. She demonstrates that in Moses and Monotheism Freud suggests that not only are individuals burdened with memories of our own early lives but those of their ancestors as well. As Slavet argues, “It was not until his final book that Freud specifies what he meant by ‘our’ ancestors and explicitly explored the Jewish Question” (6). She suggests that Moses and Monotheism is the culmination of this project. It is where Freud most fully explores what Jewishness is, “how it is transmitted, and how it continues to survive” (7). According to Slavet, Freud's theory of Jewishness here is an account of inherited traumatic memory that is at once biological or racial and “psychic, experiential, and cultural.” As she explains:

Slavet argues, “Freud's theory of Jewishness is a racial theory of memory” (7). Slavet is unflinching. She is neither an apologist for psychoanalysis or Freud, nor is she willing to turn away from what have become, at least since the Holocaust, strong taboos around discussing Jewishness and race.

I begin this review of Slavet's brilliant book with this highly citational account of what she means by “racial fever” and how she reads Freud because of both the novelty of her argument and the degree of resistance I suspect most readers will bring to this material. The overt taboos around considering Jewishness in racial terms remain fierce. Yet, at the same time, in common parlance, we are regularly confronted by the desire to pin down Jewish difference, to concretize it in precisely these terms. We see this in contemporary discussions of Jewish genes and even Jewish blood as constituting a kind of Jewish essence. These desires are part of what Slavet identifies as racial fever and they drive her argument.

At the heart of her book is a resolute account of the persistence of these desires as well as some of the dangers connected to them. In this respect, Slavet uses Freud to help us see ourselves differently. By showing us carefully and systematically how Freud engaged with the idea of biological or racial memory, she forces us to confront the continuities between these ideas and some of our own. Despite our embarrassment, race haunts many of our own theories of Jewishness in the present. Slavet's book traces these desires through Freud's engagement with the Jewish Question.

Racial Fever is organized into five substantial chapters that move more or less chronologically through Freud's writing. The first chapter, “Moses and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” shows why Freud was so committed to the historical reality of his narrative of Moses the Egyptian. It traces his concern back to two key moments in the history of psychoanalysis: the establishment of psychoanalysis as a theory and practice in the 1890s and Freud's reassessment of his theory through his engagement with Jung between 1907 and 1914. Slavet demonstrates that in these two past moments, and then and again more fully in his final book, “Freud attempts to establish psychoanalysis as a hybrid science—both medical and historical, both particular and universal” (27). Throughout this first chapter, Slavet makes it clear that Moses and Monotheism serves “as a case history of both Freud and Moses and of their creations, psychoanalysis and monotheism” (27).

The next two chapters move from the question of history to science and biology. Here Slavet raises epistemological questions about science and society. In Chapter 2, she focuses on the uncomfortable similarities between the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited and Freud's own ideas. Addressing the complicated politics around Lamarckianism at the time and after, Slavet looks at the ways that left and right political movements—Bolshevik and Nazi—deployed these ideas to support their positions. She also shows how the Cold War politics of the 1950s continue to haunt even contemporary accounts of Freud's relationship to this theory.

In Chapter 3, Slavet discusses the question of circumcision and makes several important arguments by exploring the intersection between race and culture as they meet in this religious ritual of Jewish identification. Slavet argues that “the question of circumcision compelled Freud to re-think some of the foundational ideas of psychoanalysis, in particular the question as to whether or not an individual's archaic memory extended further back than childhood” (28).

Chapter 4, my favorite, entitled “Secret Inclinations beyond Direct Communication,” focuses on Freud's notion of memory. Here Slavet builds on the work of Derrida, Yerushalmi, and others to present and enact a more ghostly vision. Through the sediment and echoes of these other readings, Slavet considers how Freud's notion of intergenerational transmission works. And she does this by concentrating on his understanding of transference as a kind of telepathy.

Chapter 5 builds on this notion of haunting to get at the “special case” of Jewish tradition and Freud's argument for the biological inheritance of a geistig Jewish inheritance that is both spiritual and intellectual. In this way, Slavet returns to where she began: the relationship between psychoanalysis and Jewishness, or the legacies of Freud and Moses. And what begins as science or positivist history gives way to a critique of these same methods in Freud's final work and, in a sense in Slavet's text as well.

Slavet concludes her book by returning to contemporary definitions of Jews and Jewishness, the ways in which the haunting presence of race continues to shape these discussions. By insisting that we not turn away from but instead look more closely at these contemporary symptoms and see them in relationship to Freud, Slavet offers a kind of remedy for the malady with which she is concerned. Racial Fever shows that although there are dangers connected with using racial language when considering the question of Jewish difference, ignoring them is even more dangerous. It only makes those appeals more powerful and keeps the fever burning.