A History of Zionism (16 page)

The
Verein
existed ‘outside time and space’. It had no connection with German Jewry; only a few young students such as Heinrich Loewe were to attend its meetings and become converts. The gap between these Russian students and German Jewry seemed unbridgeable, but Loewe was not easily discouraged. He helped to establish a student’s association with a Jewish national orientation. In his little magazine
Zion
he reported on his study trip to Palestine in 1896, and the handful of Zionists were greatly encouraged by the fact that in the same year Berlin Jews were given their first taste of Rishon wine. Still, all these activities were on a small scale and quite ineffectual. In 1896 no one but half a dozen rabbis, a few young people in Berlin and Cologne, and some older intellectuals and businessmen hailing from Russia, even knew about the idea of Zionism.
*

The religious-national longing for Zion in eastern Europe had deep emotional roots and constituted a great potential reservoir for a political movement. But no mass movement had arisen during the fifteen years since the publication of Pinsker’s
Autoemanzipation.
Only a few Lovers of Zion groups engaged in cultural and philanthropic work, and some small newspapers kept alive the visions and dreams of a national revival and a return to the homeland. The twenty-odd colonies founded in Palestine since 1881 had survived, but as the century drew to its close it was only too clear that they could not serve as a base for mass immigration. The old mythical and messianic Zionism was a source of edification, but it had proved incapable of inspiring a political mass movement. If its history had ended in 1897 it would now be remembered as one of the less important sectarian-Utopian movements which sprouted during the second half of the nineteenth century, an unsuccessful attempt at a Jewish
risorgimento
, trying to graft the ideas of the Enlightenment on to the Jewish-religious tradition.

Zionism, in brief, was comatose when in 1896 Theodor Herzl appeared. Within a few years he was to transform it into a mass movement and a political force.

*
For a full discussion of the earliest uses of the term Zionism
(Zionismus, Zionisten)
, see Alex Bein, ‘Von der Zionssehnsucht, etc.’, in
Robert Weltsch zum 70. Geburstag
, Tel Aviv, 1961, p. 33
et seq.

*
Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums
, 1840, p. 542
et seq.

†
Neujudäa. Entwurf zum Wiederaufbau eines selbständigen jüdischen Staates von C.C.C.
New edition by Heinrich Löwe, Berlin, 1903.

*
Orient
, 27 June 1840. The discussion triggered off by this project is reviewed in Gelber,
Vorgeschichte des Zionismus
, Vienna, 1927, chapter XI.

*
Quoted from A. Hertzberg,
The Zionist Idea
, New York, 1959, based on an earlier translation by Meyer Waxman.

*
Edmund Silberner,
Moses Hess. Die Geschichte seines Lebens
, Leiden, 1966, pp. 23-4.

†
Quoted in Theodor Zlocisti,
Moses Hess
, Berlin, 1921, p. 257.

‡
Laharanne, a young non-Jewish official in the French government, thought highly of the Jews and their historical mission: ‘Yours is a mighty genius. You were strong in the days of antiquity, and strong in the Middle Ages. You have paid a heavy tax of eighteen centuries of persecution.’ But those who remained were still strong enough to erect anew the gates of Jerusalem. Joseph Salvador, a philosopher of Jewish origin on his father’s side, who belonged to a famous Sefardi family in the south of France, was preoccupied with the idea of Judaism, with its enduring elements rather than with its present difficulties. His philosophy, developed in a series of books beginning with
Loi de Moïse et du peuple hébreu
, was that the basic ideas of Judaism were, on the one hand, the unity of the human race, its equality and fraternity, and, on the other, a new and higher messianism, called upon to establish a new order replacing Caesars and Popes. To that end he advocated the establishment of a new state between orient and occident, on the coast of Galilee and Canaan. According to Salvador, there were only two races in Asia Minor capable of civilisation and progress, the Greeks and the Jews, and notwithstanding their deep degradation the Jews were still capable of infusing new life into the mountains of Judea. Salvador’s writings, permeated with deep belief in the future of the Jewish nation, were very much in the tradition of mid-nineteenth-century speculative philosophy of history, concerned with the destiny of the European nations, Russia and America.

*
Quoted in Hertzberg,
The Zionist Idea
, p. 121.

*
Laharanne, it should be added in parenthesis, also envisaged the emergence of a big Arab state which would include Syria and Mesopotamia as well as Anatolia. The sultan was to be left only with his European possessions to prevent their falling into Russian hands. As for the inhabitants of the New Judea, a great calling was reserved for them: they would be the bearers of civilisation to peoples as yet inexperienced, the mediators between Europe and Asia. They would come to the land of their fathers wearing the crown of age-long martyrdom, and there at last would be healed of their ills.

*
Das Jahrhundert
, 1857, p. 363, quoted in Silberner,
Moses Hess
, p. 420.

†
Tagebücher
, Berlin, 1923, vol. 2, p. 599.

*
Kitve Rabbi Yehuda Alkalay
, Jerusalem, 1954, vol. 1.

*
A. Herzen,
Byloe i Dumy
, vol. 1, p. 189.

†
Reports of the commissioners of immigration upon the causes which incite immigration to the United States
, Washington, 1892.

*
Harold Frederic,
The New Exodus
, London, 1892, pp. 79-80.

†
Ibid.
, p. 32.

*
Quoted in Jacob S. Raisin,
The Haskalah Movement in Russia
, New York, 1913, pp. 231-2.

*
Am Haruach
(The Nation of the Spirit);
Et Lata’at
(It Is Time to Plant);
Et La’assot
(It Is Time for Action).

*
Nemushot
and
Erakhim
, 1899,
passim
(Berdichevsky).

†
Hashiloach
, VII, 1904 (Hurwitz).

‡
Revivim
, v, Jerusalem, 1914, p. III, quoted in A. Hertzberg,
The Zionist Idea
, New York, 1959, p. 307.

*
Die jüdische Frage in der orientalischen Frage
, Vienna, 1877. The pamphlet was for a long time thought to have been written by Disraeli. More recently historians have come to attribute it to Yalag. See Alkoshi, in
Kiryat Sefer
, Jerusalem, 1959.

†
Rassvet
, 1881, pp. 41-2.

‡
King Alfons XII had offered asylum to some of the victims of the Russian riots.

*
On Lilienblum’s writings after the riots of 1881, see
Baderekh Teshuva
, Warsaw, 1889,
passim.

†
See the summary of the discussions in Israel Klausner,
Behitorer Am
, Jerusalem, 1962, pp. 104-17.

*
The scene was described years later by M. Lilienblum, in
Voskhod
, 6, 1902.

†
Autoemanzipation, ein Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden
, Berlin, 1882.

*
Bernard Lazare,
Antisemitism. Its History and Causes
, New York, 1903, pp. 373-5.

*
Later on Jellinek came to take a more positive view of Pinsker’s ideas.

*
M. Gelber (ed.),
Die Kattowitzer Konferenz
1884.
Protokolle
, Vienna, 1919, p. 24.

*
Author of
Land of Gilead
, 1879; Oliphant settled in Haifa.

*
See, for instance, ‘Die Jüdische Moderne’, in Nathan Birnbaum’s
Ausgewählte Schriften
, Czernowitz, 1910.

*
Leon Simon,
Ahad Ha’am
, Philadelphia, 1960, p. 81.

†
Chaim Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, New York, 1966, p. 37.

*
Richard Lichtheim,
Die Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus
, Jerusalem, 1954, p. 122.

3
THEODOR HERZL

In mid-February 1896 Breitenstein, the Viennese booksellers, offered in their display window a small new booklet entitled
Der Judenstaat
(
The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question
in English translation). Its author was a journalist and playwright well known in the Austrian capital, Theodor Herzl. An entry in Herzl’s diary dated 14 February reads: ‘My five hundred copies came this evening. When I had the bundle carted to my room, I was terribly shaken. This package of pamphlets constitutes the decision in tangible form. My life may now take a new turn.’ And on the following day: ‘Meanwhile, the pamphlet has appeared in the bookshops. For me, the die is cast.’
*
When the pamphlet appeared Herzl was thirty-six years old. He had published a dozen plays and innumerable essays, had been a foreign correspondent for many years, and was a man with a considerable reputation in his field. His fears and expectations were not those of a novice for whom the publication of his first book is an event of world-shaking importance. This new book was very different in character from those he had previously written, and Herzl was not far off the mark when he expressed the view that the ideas he had formulated in his little book could bring about a change in the history of the Jewish people. Modern political Zionism begins with the publication of
Der Judenstaat.

Herzl disclaimed having made any sensational new discovery. On the contrary, as he said in the very first sentence: ‘The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is an ancient one. It is the restoration of the Jewish state. … I have discovered neither the Jewish situation as it has crystallised in history, nor the means to remedy it.’ The
Judenstaat
came as a surprise and shock to Herzl’s friends and colleagues, who knew him as an able journalist and gifted essayist capable of providing at short notice interesting travelogues on London, Breslau, or a Spanish village, a man who could write with equal ease about Anatole France and
TheJungle Book
, a coffee-house litterateur
par excellence
- but hardly an ideologist. His new book did not just deal with a topic he had not touched before; it was in a totally different style, as if written by another man, in short, clear, powerful sentences wholly unlike the involved, elegant, tired, and half-ironical style of the fashionable essayist. The following examples convey the flavour: ‘In this pamphlet I will offer no defence of the Jews. It would be useless. Everything that reason and everything that sentiment can possibly say in their defence already has been said.’ Or, about antisemitism:

The Jewish question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. It is a misplaced piece of medievalism which civilised nations do not seem able to shake off, try as they will. … The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in by Jewish immigrants. … I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question.

What scandalised most of Herzl’s contemporaries in this pamphlet was his flat assertion that assimilation had not worked. How could an assimilated Jew make such a patently absurd claim? Herzl was after all an editor of the
Neue Freie Presse
, one of Europe’s leading newspapers. He was living in Vienna, not in one of the ghettoes of the east. Yet Herzl, in this merciless analysis of the situation of the Jews in Europe, found that the dilemma facing them was basically everywhere the same:

We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted to us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native land in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country. The majority decides who the ‘alien’ is; this, and all else in the relations between peoples, is a matter of power. … In the world as it now is and will probably remain, for an indefinite period, might takes precedence over right. It is without avail, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots, who were forced to emigrate. If we were left in peace. … But I think we shall not be left in peace.
*

Such fears had been voiced by other writers before, but of this Herzl was quite unaware when he was writing. According to an entry in his diary dated 1O February 1896, he had just been reading Pinsker’s
Autoemanzipation
, and discovered an ‘astounding correspondence’ in the critical part: ‘A pity I did not read this work before my own pamphlet was printed. On the other hand, it is a good thing that I didn’t know it – or perhaps I would have abandoned my own undertaking.’
*

Theodor (Benjamin Ze’ev) Herzl was born in Budapest in 1860. His father was in the clothing business. There was still a certain amount of Jewish religious tradition in the family, but culturally it was fully assimilated, as were most Jews of similar social and cultural background. Young Herzl received a conventional education at a local high school. He was interested in literature and, needless to say, in the ‘last questions’ concerning the purpose of life. His student years in Vienna were uneventful. He enrolled in 1878 in the faculty of law, specialised in Roman Law, and in 1884 received his doctorate and was admitted to the Vienna bar. He read a great deal during those years, and wrote several short plays and many essays. Most of his friends were Jews. He witnessed the emergence of the antisemitic movement in the Austrian capital, and in 1883 resigned from Albia, the student fraternity to which he belonged, because it was about to embrace antisemitism. But these events did not constitute a turning-point in his life. The Jewish question was not Herzl’s main preoccupation at the time. His great ambition was to be accepted as a German writer and playwright. His friends thought of him as a gifted young man, of great literary promise, but they were not unaware of his shortcomings. Heinrich Kana, his closest friend, wrote that Herzl was ‘intolerant, inhumane in his judgment of people, domineering and hyper-egoistic’.
†

After a not too enthusiastic start in law Herzl turned to writing, first freelancing for a leading Berlin newspaper, and from 1887 on a more permanent basis for Viennese journals. Though widely acclaimed as a feuilletonist, he did not fare too well in the theatre. His comedies were neither better nor worse than most of the run-of-the-mill productions of those years. They were trivial and not really very funny, and this at a time when the burning social and philosophical questions of the day were beginning to dominate literature and the stage. Herzl’s plays were in the tradition and style of a bygone period. Of this he was quite unaware. He remained genuinely convinced that his real gifts were literary and that he had been misjudged and ignored. Years later, when his name had already become a legend, when he was (in his own words) an ageing and celebrated man, he noted in his diary that he had become world famous in a sphere where he had accomplished ‘next to nothing intellectually’, but had merely displayed a mediocre political skill: ‘But as an author, particularly as a playwright, I am held to be nothing, less than nothing. … And yet I feel, I know, that I am by instinct a great writer, or was one, who failed to yield his full harvest only because he became nauseated and discouraged.’
*

In October 1891 the
Neue Freie Presse
appointed him its correspondent in Paris. He was to stay there for a number of years and these turned out to be the decisive period in his life. Paris was then the centre of the civilised world, the focus of all new political and cultural movements. The Paris years gave him an insight into the workings of French affairs and European politics, and he came to know many of the leading spirits of the age, acquiring a new sophistication and self-confidence. It was in Paris, too, that he was again confronted with the Jewish question. For these were the years of the Panama scandal and the beginning of the Dreyfus affair. Jews were prominently implicated and there was a resurgence of antisemitism in France as well as in other European countries. Jewish topics began to preoccupy Herzl and appeared more and more frequently in his writings. He did not claim that the charges of the antisemites were altogether unjust: the ghetto, which had not been of their making, had bred in them certain asocial qualities; the Jews had come to embody the characteristics of men who had served long prison terms unjustly. Emancipation had been based on the illusion that men are made free when their rights are guaranteed on paper. The Jews had been liberated from the ghetto but basically, in their mental make-up, they had remained ghetto Jews. What then was the answer to the Jewish question? Perhaps the radical dissolution of world Jewry, as he said in conversation with the editor of his paper? On one occasion, in 1893, he suggested that half a dozen duels would do a great deal to improve the situation of Jews in society. Herzl was always inclined to think in terms of radical solutions; there was a strong romantic element in his ideas and also a belief in the virtues of grand gestures, demonstrations and showmanship. At one stage, again in 1893, he envisaged the general baptism of Jewish children, because the Jews must submerge themselves in the people. He wanted to appeal to the Pope: help us against antisemitism and I in return will lead a great movement amongst the Jews for voluntary and honourable conversion to Christianity. He envisaged a solemn festive procession to St Stephen’s Cathedral at noon on a Sunday, accompanied by the ringing of bells. The adult leaders of the community would be at the head of the procession, and would proceed to the threshold of the church. Though the leaders would stay outside, the others would embrace Christianity. These were just fantasies. It was pointed out to Herzl that, all other considerations apart, the Pope would never receive him.

He abandoned the plan, but the Jewish problem continued to preoccupy him. Then, within a few months, he suddenly came up with a new solution, apparently no less Utopian: ‘It bears the aspect of a mighty dream’, he wrote in the very first entry in his Zionist diary. He decided to approach Baron von Hirsch, one of the leading Jewish philanthropists of the age, and in a meeting in June 1895 he developed his new plan. He already saw himself as the leader of the Jews: ‘You are the great money Jew, I am the Jew of the spirit’. In the conversation Herzl sharply criticised the methods used by the baron to help the Jews. Philanthropy was of no use. On the contrary, it could only do harm because it debased the character of the people. ‘You breed beggars,’ he told the astonished baron. What of Herzl’s own solution? Some of his proposals might seem too simple, he said, others too fantastic, ‘but it is the simple and fantastic which leads men’. At this point the baron grew impatient and began to doubt the sanity of his visitor. Where would he get the money for his fantastically ambitious schemes? Rothschild would probably donate five hundred francs. For the rich Jews, Hirsch said, were bad; they took no interest in the sufferings of the poor.

Herzl sadly concluded that the baron clearly did not understand what fantasy meant, or grasp the importance of imponderabilia floating high in the air. On the same day, following this conversation, Herzl wrote to the baron that he would launch a Jewish national loan to finance migration to the Promised Land. It would be a national, not a philanthropic movement: a flag, his interlocutor might ask mockingly, what was a flag? A stick with a rag at the end of it. No, Herzl replied, a flag was a great deal more. ‘With a flag people are led – perhaps even to the Promised Land. For a flag men live and die.’ But although the attempt to win over the baron was clearly a failure, Herzl did not give up. If the conversation had not been a success it had helped Herzl to clarify his own ideas. Within the next three weeks he wrote a long memorandum which contained all the basic ideas subsequently developed in
Der Judenstaat.
He wanted to address the family council of the Rothschilds; Herzl had still not given up the idea of winning over the ‘money Jews’.

These were for Herzl weeks of profound emotional tension. ‘During these weeks I was more than once afraid that I was going out of my mind’, he wrote in his diary. He no longer doubted the greatness of his mission; he would be named among the great benefactors of mankind. Perhaps he was solving not just the Jewish question, but a general social problem as well? His move from Vienna to Paris was a ‘historical necessity’. The Jewish state was a world need: ‘I believe for me life has ended and world history begun.’ Then again doubts: would the Jews be able to appreciate his mission? Would those timid, helpless creatures understand the call to freedom and manhood? One day he would feel sanguine about his mission, the next day depressed. ‘I have given up the whole thing. There is no helping the Jews for the time being. If someone were to show them the way out of their misery they would treat him with contempt. They are disintegrated ghetto natures.’ But Herzl persevered. The despair, the black moods were confided only to his diary. To the outside world he radiated assurance and confidence. Years later, when Zionist fortunes had reached a low ebb, he was to tell his closest friends: ‘I am not better nor more clever than any of you. But I remain undaunted and that is why the leadership belongs to me.’