‘I Could Have Worshiped the Abased and Mutilated Remnant of the Temple’: A Masked Jew in Rome1

In this posthumously published article, originally drafted in response to a colloquium held in Rome in 2010 to discuss Freud's ‘Rome neurosis’, John Forrester elaborates a profound reflection on the dualities, ironies and sublimations in Freud's attempt to negotiate his competing commitments: to Rome and to Jerusalem; to Jewishness but also to post-Renaissance intellect; against Christianity, but for Western cultural transcendence. In particular Forrester calls to mind Freud's re-narrativizations of Jewish identity, and of the Western humanist Enlightenment subject, via his attentions to the figure of Moses – both the ‘Moses’ of Michelangelo, and the Moses of his late work on monotheism. At the heart of this article is Forrester's own attempt to navigate Freud's wrestling with the meaning of Jewish, exilic diaspora, versus the claims – in the 1930s – of Zionism's ‘return to origins’, which Freud can both not ignore at a time of resurgent antisemitism, and yet which goes against the grain of his strongest inclinations: to worship the remnant of the Temple of Minerva in Rome, but to summon no sympathy for ‘the misguided piety which renders a piece of Herod's wall a national relic’.