ABSTRACT
The wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1929 and 1939, called, in Zionist historiography, the Fifth Aliyah, increased the population of the Yishuv from 175,000 to 475,000. Although only twenty per cent of the new arrivals were German Jews, the Germans' influence on the Jewish community in Palestine was striking. Although, like previous streams of immigration, the newcomers mostly came from Eastern Europe, the migrants also included some 90,000 German-speaking Jews who fled Central Europe following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933 and Germany's annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. As members of a subculture within the intellectual emigration from central Europe, the psychoanalysts were confronted with circumstances offering them very limited room for manoeuvre. In a letter to Freud, written shortly after his immigration, Eitingon displayed a determination not to let historical and societal circumstances interfere excessively with working to entrench psychoanalysis in Palestine.
