Lerner 285 f MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 51 number 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. THE SUBVERSIVE OBEDIENCE OF PROUST AND FREUD L. Scott Lerner By his own confession, Sigmund Freud was "ignorant of the language of Holy Writ," "completely estranged from the religion of his fathers," and unable "to take a share in nationalist ideals." He insisted, however, that he had "never repudiated his people" and that he was "in his essential nature a Jew . . . [with] no desire to alter that nature." If someone were to ask, "Since you have aban- doned all these common characteristics of your compatriots, what is left to you that is Jewish?" he would answer, "A very great deal and probably its very essence" (Preface). As a person for whom "Juda- ism" was thus "terminated" but whose "Jewishness" remained "in- terminable" (Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses 90), Freud had much in com- mon with another great modernist: Marcel Proust. To understand a critical dimension of this commonality, it may not be enough to ex- amine the published works and sources. It is also necessary to con- sult the archives. Yosef Yerushalmi tells the story of his discovery, in the Freud Archives in Washington DC, of the family Bible that Freud's father Jakob first inscribed, in Hebrew, on the occasion of Sigmund Freud's circumcision. Thirty-five years later, the elder Freud had the volume re-bound in leather, and he added a dedication to his son, by hand and in Hebrew, composed as a melitzah—a traditional genre in He- brew letters consisting of an arrangement of textual bits drawn from the Bible and other Jewish sources. Yerushalmi appears to believe— though he does not insist—that this dedication offers strong evi-