How the Jews became who they are and how they maintained their uniqueness through the centuries until today is the question that concerns Freud in this book. It is, after all, his last book and simultaneously the most significant.

It was published in the year of his death, 1939, one year before the actual outbreak of the Second World War, which, along with the other evils it brought upon humanity, specifically brought the Holocaust for the Jews as punishment for that very uniqueness, the roots of which Freud seeks in their past.

Freud achieves the reconstruction of the Jewish people's past with a bold mixture of history, ethnology, mythology, and religious studies, while he attempts to interpret diversity with an even bolder application of individual psychology onto mass psychology, not just any mass, as he did ten years earlier in his other work, 'The Psychology of Crowds and the Analysis of the Ego', but of a specific people, with all the complications that such an interpretation may entail when that people is Jewish.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]