Introductory Remarks on Georg Langer’s “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll” from 1928

Abstract

Batsheva Goldman-Ida, art historian and museum curator, introduces the article by Jiří Mordechai Georgo Langer (1894, Prague–1943, Tel Aviv): “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll,” presented for the first time in English translation, and originally written for the Freud journal Imago in 1928. Langer, a Hebrew poet and teacher of Jewish studies was a friend of Franz Kafka. Langer joined the Belz Hasidism from 1913–16 and was one of the people who introduced Kafka to Hasidism. Langer suggests an explanatory model for Jewish religious artifacts such as the Mezuzah and Phylacteries in the context of compulsion neuroses, referencing the rites of indigenous people and totem theory. The introduction provides background material on the author and details of his other books and endeavors, as well as a framework to better appreciate his poetry and scholarly work. Langer sought a revival of “comrade love” whose homerotic bias is of interest today. His essay on the Mezuzah opens up a range of questions on Jewish artifacts, psychoanalysis, and the origins of Jewish rites. Long left unnoticed, it challenges the current field of Jewish scholarship to rethink its methodology.