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Readers familiar with the Israeli writer Batya Gur's mystery novel, Saturday Morning Murder, will recognize the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute as the building donated by Max Eitingon's wife after his death. Gur opened a door to psychoanalytic intrigue that might be tagged as one aspect of Freud in Zion, Eran Rolnik's history of psychoanalysis and the Yishuv, the Jewish communities in Palestine in the pre-State era. Drawing on previously unpublished documents from a range of archives, Rolnik places psychoanalytic thought amid the diverse currents that shaped Jewish culture in early-twentieth-century Palestine and, later, in Israel. This richly textured history, published originally in Hebrew in 2007, opens with the concept of the “new Jewish man” at the turn of the twentieth century and moves on to consider the integration of psychoanalytic ideas into the Zionist program for a new society, exploring the impact of Max Eitingon's move from Berlin to Jerusalem. Rolnik concludes with some poignant reflections on current psychoanalytic thought in Israel.
Freud in Zion, Berlin in Jerusalem: This history of the Yishuv belongs to a broader terrain marked by fertile exchanges across national and disciplinary boundaries. The processes of modernization and assimilation that shaped Jewish life in this period rendered geographical and political boundaries permeable, opening them to new forms of expression and inquiry.
Rolnik gives us a vivid sense of the excitement of turn-of-the-century thinkers who sought large-scale remedies for the ailments of individuals and groups. While noting the tension between the Zionist emphasis on the collective and the psychoanalytic focus on the individual, he shows us how influential psychoanalytic thinking was, nonetheless, in the shaping