ABSTRACT
The Jewish experience in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century played a central role in engendering three of the twentieth century's great intellectual movements: socialism, Zionism, and psychoanalysis. Yet, only one of them, psychoanalysis, remained at the turn of the twentieth century, faithful to European universalism. Sigmund Freud's explorations of the "true identity" of Moses, leader of the Jewish nation, address this very conundrum. Identity, Freud told us, whether historical or psychological, of an individual or nation, is the product of mixture and borrowing, and always includes splits and repressions. Freud's fractured Jewish identity could thus serve, if not as an example, and then at least as a metaphor for the yawning abyss separating the ideal of pure identity that nurtured the Zionist project and the psychoanalytic project, born in the Diaspora. Being a Freudian became much more complicated than it had been when the theory of the libido had been the bond that held Freudians together.
