On first glance — maybe even second or third — Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy hardly seems to fit into the category of “Jewish masterpiece.” Masterpiece, sure: Ever since it was first published in short-story form in the 1940s and as novels a decade later, it’s been firmly lodged at or near the top of every list of the best science fiction of all time. But Jewish?
And in case you haven’t read it — or haven’t since you were 12, or know it only from the current Apple TV adaptation — a look back at the original material won’t provide an easy answer, either. The novels portray a galactic empire decaying from the periphery inward and heading toward a millennia-spanning dark age. It’s too late to stave off the darkness. But the depth of misery can be curtailed by a few individuals of goodwill who can save civilization by establishing the eponymous Foundation to ride out the chaos that’s soon to follow. They will be guided by the tenets of “psychohistory” — a mathematically precise prediction, at least in the aggregate, of future human affairs, presided over by the hologrammatic ghost of the projection’s prime expositor, Hari Seldon.
If you look for overtly Jewish characters in the trilogy, you won’t find them. Born Jewish, Asimov was an avowed atheist. So how to proceed, at least in an intellectually responsible fashion? Perhaps by taking a page from the tenets that Asimov articulates in the Foundation trilogy itself: suggesting, à la his psychohistory, that the Jewish currents that moved and shaped him operated in ways that were deeply, even subconsciously, formative.
Isaac Asimov’s first short story was called “Ad Astra,” or “To the Stars” — as classic an exposition of aspiration as ever there was. And Asimov’s use of that Latin tag, from early on, indicated a very specific kind of aspiration: an immigrant’s drive to acculturate and assimilate. That aspiration was at home in the hothouse Jewish-immigrant milieu of the man with a deeply Jewish first name and an obviously Eastern European surname. If the goal of many early- and mid-20th-century Jews was to make their way into mass culture, one can easily see Asimov’s project, beginning with “Ad Astra,” in that same vein of pop acculturation: a young man trying to show the goyim he could play on their field.
You can see this in so many American Jewish masterpieces of the day, from Superman to Tin Pan Alley to Your Show of Shows: Jewishness not only was effaced, it had to be. That was part of not just the bargain but the dream: to make other kinds of affiliations and connections, to move beyond the shtetl to the American social stratosphere. The aspiration was to be accepted in broader American culture, even if it meant leaving one’s community behind. The scientists of Asimov’s Foundation are stand-ins for the people he was trying to reach, modeled as they were on the science-fiction enthusiasts of his day: a small, intellectually superior, highly evolved, and socially marginalized group. If you’d asked Asimov which writers he admired, he’d have given you Gentile names such as Robert Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt, not Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel. The historian on his mind as he composed the Foundation stories was Edward Gibbon, not Heinrich Graetz. He wanted to change history by writing about the future.
But the model for Hari Seldon, the prime mover of Asimov’s three-part Foundation story, was certainly modeled on a Viennese Jew who had tried, and one could say succeeded more than anyone, to assimilate: Sigmund Freud. It’s not too much to say that Freudian traces are everywhere in Asimov’s work, but it requires a bit of processing to uncover them all.
First, Asimov’s narrative conceit in the Foundation trilogy has more than a little to do with Jewishness, in that it involves a fetishization of intellectual activity intended to secure the future. This isn’t to say that the famously secular Asimov was a fan of Jewish text study. His father, though Orthodox, made no effort to teach his son Jewish prayers, as Asimov later recalled in his memoir, and there’s no sign that Asimov was ever interested in picking up that thread. In the trilogy, the scientists of the Foundation publicly clothe their scientific achievements in “priestly” (as Asimov puts it) mumbo jumbo, conjuring a ruse of religious ritual in order to conceal the real scientific work of psychohistory.
And yet in private these Foundation scientists continue to hold Seldon in a worshipful light, which seems not quite suitable for a man merely of science. Could he be something more? When, as an old man’s ghost, Seldon appears in the holoscreen during moments of crisis, he sure looks like an old-time prophet, and even the Foundation’s own members — expostulating with phrases such as “By Seldon!” — tend to treat him as one. Modeled on Freud, Seldon also has a note of the psychohistorical prophet in him.
Moreover, Asimov repeatedly insists that it’s impossible to understand the math that psychohistory relies on, making it an esoteric text reminiscent of Kabbalah. It is literally kept hidden away and appears as a kind of glowing almost-tablet-type object called the Prime Radiant. This is the kind of thing that would have us paging Dr. Freud — except, of course, that he already appears (figuratively) over and over again, throughout the work. It’s as though Asimov simply could not get away from the Jewish subconscious.
And we can go further: Seldon’s (and Asimov’s) dream of predicting history — the essence of the Foundation — is a staple of many religious faiths, and Jewish history is no exception to the rule. Science fiction, it is often argued, is a literature of ideas. It’s less frequently referred to as a literature of theories of history, though it can be. And Asimov’s theory of history — psychohistory, that is, the one that guides the trilogy’s creation — is reminiscent of the one that the great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi would posit decades later. Yerushalmi famously referred to history as “the faith of fallen Jews,” and there is a way in which Asimov, that atheistic Jew who canonizes Freud in his fiction, takes that dictum to the next level.
How so? Yerushalmi explains that, in real life, humans have a complex and complementary relationship between history and memory, and Jews more so than most. Memory, one can say, is a story that we tell, and the way Asimov balances history and memory in the Foundation trilogy is entirely in line with Yerushalmi’s Jewish story of that balance. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells a story to the Children of Israel about their destitute past and divine redemption, and he tells them to tell that story to their own children after them. Check: This is precisely what Seldon, who knows he cannot get to the Promised Land, does, and the story is repeated over and over again, in tones of myth and memory, by Foundation descendants.
Then came Freud — a central figure in Yerushalmi’s story as well as Asimov’s — who wrote a book about Moses and developed a “talking cure” that requires telling, listening, and interpretation. Check again. The Foundation trilogy doesn’t really focus on whether or not the galaxy will be saved. What it does, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish textual practice did before it, is focus on how the past can best be mined to solve the problems that spring up in the present. Both methods prize talk and debate. Tellingly, most of Asimov’s heroes are not men of action, in contrast to, say, those heroes of Asimov’s non-Jewish peer Heinlein, whose heroes (like Heinlein himself) have more than a whiff of the military about them. Asimov’s priests are men of intellect who talk and puzzle and debate over questions and explanations and theories and counter theories and false leads and red herrings much the same way students in a yeshiva talk and puzzle and debate.
And more than even that. Yerushalmi, the historian, cast Freud’s writing (particularly his writing about Moses) as a history of the Jewish psyche after a lifetime of attempted Austro-German assimilation. Yerushalmi could have written history the way he did only after digesting the events Asimov was living through as he wrote the bulk of the Foundation stories: World War II and the Shoah. For many iconic American Jewish cultural creators, including Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, fighting Hitler was an aspiration they embraced in every aspect of their American and Jewish identity. And the Foundation trilogy’s most, and indeed only, memorable villain, the Mule — a mutant with an uncanny, mind-controlling charisma — isn’t exactly Adolf Hitler, but there are more than a few correspondences. Asimov certainly understood, and made clear in the Foundation trilogy, that he was chronicling nothing less than a civilizational battle and that his chosen people, whether they were Jews, Americans, or galactic priests, stood for civilization. And their victory — recounted to us in Asimov’s final, postwar version of the trilogy, which inserts excerpts from Encyclopedia Galactica, written long after the Foundation’s triumph — means nothing less than realizing the dream of a promised land.
Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is, indeed, about reaching for the stars. But what matters more than that is the way the stars, the fallen worlds of the past, come back, constantly, to us.
