A History of Zionism (21 page)

The minutes still reported long applause and stormy ovations when Herzl appeared at the congress, but he was no longer a figure beyond reproach. Motzkin criticised him at the third congress for having promised too much, arousing false hopes. The Zionist students from Russia organised a ‘democratic fraction’ which appeared as a pressure group at the congresses. Under the leadership of Syrkin and others there also emerged, much to Herzl’s dismay, a Socialist-Zionist party demanding the establishment of a Socialist state in Palestine and the neighbouring territories. Syrkin bitterly attacked the domination of the Zionist movement by the bourgeois and religious-orthodox elements, as well as the ‘rotten intellectuals’ who wanted the movement to dissociate itself from the high ideals of progressive mankind. Such heretical views pained not only Herzl, who had never shown much interest or sympathy for the Socialist movement; they were even more strongly resented by young Weizmann, who in his Russian environment had acquired a fairly close knowledge of it. Commenting on one of the early Zionist-Socialist pamphlets, he wrote to his future wife: ‘A red cap with a blue and white ribbon, a national group hailing internationalism with childish yells, dancing around great names; self-worship and Jewish impudence. What an outrageous mixture of meaningless phrases and sheer stupidity.’ Weizmann was to become more friendly towards Socialist Zionism in later years, but at this time he clearly regarded it as a ‘kind of pestilence’.
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Herzl was disappointed by the lack of progress and aggrieved by the attacks on him. By 1899 he had spent the larger part of his fortune and that of his wife on the movement, which made him more than ever dependent on his journalistic activities. On his forty-first birthday he wrote in his diary that it was almost six years since he had started on this movement, six years which had made him old, tired and poor. What sacrifices had been made by the penniless young Zionists from the east who were always so quick to criticise him at the congresses? He was equally dissatisfied with his close collaborators. Herzl was not a good judge of character, and utterly lacked business experience, and he quarrelled with his nearest and most devoted friends such as Wolffsohn. They in turn reproached him for his inability to suffer around him men with opinions of their own and to delegate authority.

Spells of dejection were followed by bouts of hyperactivity. In February 1901 the new Turkish restrictions on immigration came into force, which in some ways hit Herzl less hard than the Russian Zionists, for unlike them he had always believed in a charter, not in ‘infiltration’. Shortly after, in May 1901, Vambery informed him that the sultan would at last receive him, not as a Zionist but ‘as a chief of the Jews and an influential journalist’. Vambery warned him: ‘You mustn’t talk to him about Zionism. That is a phantasmagoria. Jersalem is as holy to him as Mecca. Nevertheless Zionism is good [as far as the sultan is concerned] against Christianity. I want to keep Zionism alive and that is why I have secured the audience for you as otherwise you would not be able to face your congress. You must gain time and carry on Zionism somehow.’
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It is interesting that Herzl’s Turkish advisers had also advocated the strategy of indirect approach: ‘There are questions which must not be tackled head-on,’ Nuri had told him years earlier. ‘Take Aleppo, buy land around Beirut and then keep spreading out. When the time comes that things go badly [in Turkey] and your services are needed, you step forward and ask for Palestine.’

On 17 June, Herzl was called to an audience in the royal palace. He was made to sit in the shade (a rare favour) and watched the long procession of soldiers, eunuchs, pashas, diplomats and other dignitaries. An official suddenly appeared to offer him the Order of the Medjidie, second class. After politely refusing it, the Grand Cordon of the same order was bestowed on him. Then the formal audience began. Herzl described the sultan as a small, thin man with a great hooked nose, full, dyed beard and a weak, quavering voice; he was sitting on a divan with his sword between his knees. He introduced himself as a constant reader of Herzl’s newspaper, the
Neue Freie Presse
, a somewhat surprising statement since he knew no German. Herzl began with his favourite analogy, that of Androcles and the lion: the Jews would help Turkey to repay its foreign debt, the thorn in its side, so that it would be able to gather fresh strength. The great powers wanted to keep Turkey weak, to prevent its recovery, but Herzl could enlist the help of world Jewry and promote the country’s industrialisation. And unlike the Europeans, the Jews would not enrich themselves quickly and then hurry away with their spoils. Palestine was not mentioned, but the sultan stressed that he was a great friend of the Jews, that he would make a public pro-Jewish announcement and give them lasting protection if they sought refuge in his lands.

The negotiations with the sultan’s aides continued for a few more days. Herzl had made a good impression on Abdul Hamid: ‘That Herzl looks like a prophet, like a leader of his people’, the sultan told Vambery a few years later. Herzl received a present, a diamond scarf pin, but this was, as he sadly noted in his diary, about all he had achieved that day. He had distributed some fifty thousand francs among the various agents who maintained that they had been instrumental in arranging the audience, and there was no one who did not stake such a claim. Even Vambery was no exception, although when he first met Herzl he had said that he was a rich man, with a quarter of a million to his name.

The sultan’s advisers formulated a number of conditions which were altogether unacceptable to Herzl: the Jews would establish a syndicate with £30 million to help liquidate the Turkish debt; they would be permitted to settle in Turkey, but would have to become Turkish citizens; above all there could be no concentrated mass immigration but only scattered settlement – five families here and five there. Herzl countered by proposing the establishment of a land company to take over uncultivated Turkish property in Palestine. Before his departure he was given to understand that the sultan expected definite financial proposals within a month. Herzl left Constantinople in a cautiously optimistic mood. He had been received by the sultan and had talked to him for almost two hours, something of which few ambassadors could boast. He had been impressed by the sultan as a ‘weak, craven, but thoroughly good-natured man’ surrounded by a criminal gang.
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He had kept the dialogue going and had actually entered upon negotiations for the charter, something which Vambery had thought quite impossible. Herzl realised that he had not yet achieved anything tangible, but he felt confident that it now needed ‘only luck, skill and money, to put through everything I had planned’. For years to come he was to claim that he could have got Palestine for the Jews on that occasion if only the money had been available. At the same time he was not unaware that the Turks were merely using him as a pawn to get a loan from a more substantial financial consortium headed by the Frenchman Rouvier. Herzl’s attempts to win the support of the moneyed Jews whom he invoked so often in his negotiations were quite unsuccessful, but he continued to act as if it was within his powers to relieve the sultan of the Turkish debt, estimated at a nominal £85 million, and that as a result he would at last receive his charter.

In February 1902 the sultan (who had been given the code name Cohn in Herzl’s private correspondence), again called him to the Turkish capital. He complained that nothing concrete had so far emerged from the talks. Herzl had made a few friendly declarations in public, but that was all. The sultan was prepared to open his empire to Jewish refugees on condition that they would become Ottoman subjects and that they could establish themselves in all provinces except – at first – Palestine. He suggested that in return Herzl was to form a syndicate for the consolidation of the Ottoman public debt and he was also to take over the concession for the exploitation of all mines in Turkey. This was a charter at long last, but since it excluded Palestine and unlimited immigration it was unacceptable. When Herzl continued to insist on Palestine, his Turkish interlocutors explained that the sultan could not agree to sponsor a scheme which would be so unpopular among his subjects. Cohn, as Herzl wrote Vambery, offered far too little and demanded too much.

Negotiations did not however break down. In July 1902 Herzl was again summoned to Constantinople to what was to be the final showdown. Again the old, by now familiar picture: ‘Dirt, dust, noise, red fezzes, blue waters’; the baksheesh snatchers at the palace entrance greet Herzl with their familiar grin. He suggested that his friends could greatly improve on the rival French scheme if the charter for colonisation in Mesopotamia offered to him a few months before were to include the Haifa region. He pointed out that the Jews likely to immigrate were neither a dangerous nor a troublesome element, but on the contrary sober, industrious and loyal, ‘bound to the Moslems by racial kinship and religious affinity’.
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Yet it was all to no avail. The Turkish officials were like sea foam, Herzl noted in his diary. Only their expressions were serious, not their intentions. He indicated that he would always remain a friend of Turkey and its pro-Jewish sultan, but the misery of the Jewish people in eastern Europe was such that he could not wait any longer. He would have to ask the British, with whom contact had already been established, for a Jewish colony in Africa.

This was to all intents and purposes the break, the end of a chapter in Zionist diplomacy. Yet even then Herzl did not despair altogether. They had grown accustomed in Constantinople to look upon him as someone interested in the vilayet of Beirut. One day perhaps, when reduced to beggary, they would send for him and throw the thing in his lap. But these were distant hopes. Having returned from Turkey empty-handed it was pointless to make any further advances, and Herzl knew he had to concentrate his efforts on London with, perhaps, some manœuvring in Rome and Berlin.

Herzl’s negotiations in Constantinople had been an educational experience but the price paid was high. ‘So here I am, escaped again from the murderers’ den and the robbers’ country’, he wrote after his final visit. He had been compelled to sweat for hours in anterooms, to distribute a small fortune among lackeys, to put a great many dignitaries on his payroll, to ‘die of boredom listening to the childish claptrap of the various ministers’. He had had to eat with exclamations of delight countless ‘loathsome meals of those innumerable barbaric dishes – veritable snake food’. He had had to praise the lofty wisdom of the sultan and to stress his own unalterable devotion in countless epistles, all in the end to no purpose. Worse still, he had had to intimate time and time again that he could be of help to the sultan against his enemies, which had been understood as a proposal to make the
Neue Freie Presse
a channel for Turkish propaganda. But the editors of the paper would not have cooperated, nor had Herzl had the slightest intention of prostituting his pen (though proud and independent as he was, his attitude on some issues he considered marginal was not above suspicion; he was ready to use his influence to play down the anti-Armenian persecutions which provoked the ire of some of his collaborators, among them Bernard Lazare).

Herzl with his restless and inventive mind had made constant suggestions and offers to the sultan to ingratiate himself and to show that his movement could be of great help. It was embarrassing, even degrading, but had there been any other way to attain his aim? In May 1902, for instance, he had suggested the establishment of a Jewish university in Jerusalem. To make it more palatable to the sultan he had explained that such an enterprise would be of the greatest service to the Ottoman empire. It would help to eradicate any ‘unhealthy spirit’; the Turks would no longer have to send their young people abroad for higher education where they became infected by dangerous, revolutionary ideas.

Herzl had been forced to adapt himself to the Byzantine atmosphere, the mendacity and duplicity prevailing in Yildiz Kiosk. His diary is full of anecdotes revealing his horror at the kind of people with whom he had to associate. He was carried away more than once into making suggestions and proposals of whose full implications he was probably not aware. Fortunately for him and for his place in history they were not taken up. His intimates were aware only of a small part of his activities, but even what they knew stirred deep misgivings among them. What was the point of all this secret diplomacy? Would it not deeply compromise the Zionist movement? Herzl in this respect was unscrupulous. He was firmly convinced (as he told his nearest confidants) that there was simply no other way by means of which a small, impecunious group of intellectuals, with no political or military backing at their disposal, could attain their aims. This attitude was in line with his views about propaganda and public relations. At the very outset of his Zionist career one of his friends had expressed doubts about the wisdom and efficacy of making so much noise. Noise, Herzl replied in anger, was everything. World history was nothing but noise – noise of arms and advancing ideas: ‘Men must put noise to use – and still despise it.’
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And this precisely was his attitude towards secret diplomacy.

In 1902, after the failure of his Turkish ventures, the centre of Zionist diplomatic activities shifted to London. Although, as noted earlier, Lord Salisbury showed no interest, there was one issue which came to the fore. Public opinion in Britain was becoming concerned about Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, and the consequent growing threat of cheap labour. A royal commission was appointed to investigate the question and this gave Herzl an opportunity to propagate his schemes in the British capital. The British Zionists managed to have him invited as a witness, much to the dismay of Nathaniel Meyer Lord Rothschild, who was a member of the commission. Despite his early disappointments, Herzl had not given up hope of gaining the support of the Rothschild family, and while in London it was again impressed on him that he would find it very difficult to make any headway with the British government without at least their tacit support. So yet another attempt was made to win over the leading Jewish family. The ‘Lord of Banking Hosts’ told Herzl that he did not believe in Zionism, that the Jews would never get Palestine, and that in contrast to France there would never be appreciable antisemitism in England. Herzl’s appearance before the commission, Rothschild argued, could only have two effects: the antisemites would be able to say that Dr Herzl, the expert, maintained that a Jew could never become an Englishman; and if Herzl harped on the bad situation of the Jews in eastern Europe and their need to emigrate this would lead to restrictive legislation.