Born in town of Tysmenytsia in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (now in Ukraine),[2] and from a Hasidic background though himself an enlightened Jew of the Haskalah,[3] he mainly earned his living as a wool merchant.
[citation needed] Jacob's eldest son from his first marriage became a father a year before Sigmund - the first son of Jacob's third marriage - was born; so that Sigmund was an uncle at birth, with his nephew John a constant (and older) playmate in his early years.
[7] By all accounts, Jacob Freud was a genial, unassuming character with a "Micawberish" streak of optimism:[8] Sigmund would write warmly of "his characteristic mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic lightheartedness".
[9] Yet Jacob's meekness in the face of anti-Semitic bullying also disturbed Sigmund profoundly.
[10] Much of the latter's ambition, his combativeness, and his subsequent quest for powerful father figures such as Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke and Josef Breuer,[11] may be traced back to his ambivalence about his own yielding and 'vague' father.