A History of Zionism (74 page)

While the liberal rabbis were on the whole moderate in their attacks on Zionism, admitting for instance that it had done a great deal to reawaken active interest in Judaism and the Hebrew language, some laymen went much further in their opposition. Professor Ludwig Geiger, the son of one of the founders of liberal Judaism, and one of its representatives on the executive of the Berlin Jewish community, suggested, as Magnus did in Britain, that Zionists should be deprived of their civic rights, and denounced the ‘blasphemous prayers’ in the Jewish ritual which reminded the faithful of Zion. ‘Zionism is as dangerous to the German spirit as are social democracy and ultramontanism,’ he wrote on another occasion.
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The future of the German nation must remain the only one on which German Jews based their hopes. Any desire to form, together with their co-religionists, a people outside Germany was sheer ingratitude to the nation in whose midst they were living. For German Jews were Germans in their national peculiarities, and Zion for them was the land of the past, not of the future.

Zionists in Germany and the United States complained that their supporters were being systematically discriminated against, that Jewish communities were refusing to employ Zionists as rabbis, teachers, or even librarians. The anti-Zionists argued on the other hand that who ever criticised Zionism was immediately attacked in the most abusive terms and his personal motives invariably made to appear suspect. The Central Association of German citizens of the Jewish faith (
Zentralverein
), the main body of non-orthodox German Jewry, was in two minds about how to deal with the Zionists. On various occasions resolutions were adopted according to which a Zionist could be a member only if his Zionism implied helping to find a new home for the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe or enhancing the pride of his co-religionists in their history and religion. But there was no place for those who denied a German consciousness, who felt themselves merely guests in their native country. These declarations caused great indignation among Zionists. But for the extreme adversaries, who believed that Zionism was the greatest misfortune of German Jewry, since it played into the hands of antisemites, they were by no means far-reaching enough. They repeatedly accused the leadership of the Association of being ‘soft on Zionism’ for opportunist reasons.
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After the First World War, opposition to Zionism on the whole decreased, with the exception of the shrill denunciations of a small group of ultra-nationalist German Jews. But even if the polemics diminished, the attitude of the
Zentralverein
towards the Palestinian venture remained sceptical and it continued to combat Zionism in so far as it regarded the German Jew as living in an alien land.
†

In the debate with assimilationists, Zionist spokesmen did not find it difficult to score points against those advocates of liberal Judaism who based their argument on the messianic mission of the Jews, maintaining that a state had been a historical necessity two thousand years earlier but was no longer needed because Judaism was so deeply anchored in the hearts of its adherents. Such a claim was not borne out by the facts, for obviously there had been more apostasy from Judaism in recent decades than in past ages. Putting it more bluntly, the Zionists maintained that the talk about the Jewish spiritual world mission was just a pretext: in the modern world they had no such mission. If German, French and British Jews nevertheless chose to stay in their respective countries, it was because they longed for the fleshpots rather than the messiah. The Zionists were in a position of strength because it was already obvious before the First World War that the tide was running against liberalism. Mankind was not becoming more civilised, cosmopolitanism was not making striking advances, all over Europe nationalism and anti-liberal ideas were winning new adherents. But the anti-liberal tide was at the same time a mixed blessing. It strengthened the Zionist thesis about the precarious situation of European Jewry, but it also put Zionism into undesirable ideological proximity with right-wing and reactionary movements and ideas.

Nationalism and religion, and the relationship between these two concepts remained ticklish ideological issues for the Zionists. Many of them were not at all religious, and some did not in principle exclude the possibility of having members who did not belong to the Jewish religion. Zionist organisations coped with this problem in different ways: The Dutch Zionists decided at one stage not to accept members with non-Jewish spouses. Nordau, for instance, would not have qualified. On the other hand, Lewis (later Sir Lewis) Namier, the eminent British historian, who acted for several years as political secretary of the Jewish Agency in London, had been baptised. Some early German Zionists took race theory too seriously, others drew their inspiration from the writings of the ideologists of German nationalism such as Fichte and even Lagarde. This made it easy for their opponents in western Europe before and during the First World War to attack Zionism as a movement dominated by Germany and serving German interests. ‘The
Judenstaat
is a time bomb invented by the German national genius to destroy the world of Abraham; the state of Israel is Germany’, wrote a French-Jewish author in 1969.
*
This was, to put it mildly, a distortion, for the ideas of Herder and Fichte served as the ideological basis of nationalism not just in Germany but in many other countries as well. However, in the light of the subsequent development of German nationalism, essays that were innocent enough when written appeared several decades later in a sinister light, with Martin Buber as an early protagonist of
Blut und Boden
and other Zionist ideologists as advocates of the
voelkische
idea. Torn out of their historical context they now make embarrassing reading and the critics of Zionism have not failed to make the most of them.

But the real weakness of the Zionist position was a practical one.
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Having destroyed as it were the liberal position, having shown the inconsistency and falseness of assimilationism, what alternative could it offer in exchange? Emigration to Palestine before 1914 was rare. A few daring spirits visited Palestine as tourists but not more than a handful of German Zionists, and even fewer from Austria, decided to settle there. Even after 1918 the number of Jewish immigrants from central Europe was counted in hundreds, not thousands, and virtually no one came from western Europe or the United States. This was so despite all the solemn undertakings and promises, such as the resolution passed at the German Zionist Conference in Posen, that it was the duty of every Zionist to prepare himself for a life in Palestine. What, then, did it actually mean to be a Zionist in these circumstances? In most cases it implied no more than giving money to the national funds, reading Zionist literature, talking about Palestine, engaging in various political activities, and perhaps learning Hebrew. But 99 per cent of west and east European Zionists, both the rank and file and the leaders, while stressing that they were a people on the move, continued to live more or less happily in the countries of the diaspora, to practise medicine and the law, to engage in trade and industry, to publish books and articles. The anti-Zionists, charged by their opponents with ‘living a lie’, could easily counter by pointing to the far more flagrant discrepancy between Zionist theory and practice.

A convincing case could be made from the Zionist point of view for insisting on full civic rights in their country of origin, despite the fact that their allegiance was to another nation. It was far more difficult to justify the active participation of Zionists in German, British or French politics. They were to be found in senior positions in the civil service in these countries as well as in the British and French parliaments and even as leaders of political parties. This was a contradiction that could not easily be resolved: either the Zionism of a public figure of this kind was not very deep or he was facing a permanent conflict of loyalties.

Nor was it easy to dismiss the assimilationist critics of the Zionist position in the cultural field. They maintained that Zionism was by no means a revival of Jewish tradition but had been inspired by the general nationalist trend in Europe. Those who stood for a national-cultural revival could not point without great difficulty to specific Jewish values outside religion. Having lived for so many centuries in the diaspora, what did the Jews still have of their own cultural substance? The religious holidays had been taken from other peoples, the languages of the Jewish masses both in Europe (Yiddish) and the Mediterranean area (Ladino) had been borrowed from German and Spanish respectively. There was no Jewish school of painting or music, of philosophy or history. There were many Jewish writers but no Jewish literature. Everywhere the Jews had entered into a cultural symbiosis with the host nations. Zionists might claim that the resulting ‘cultural chaos’ was sterile and undignified, but in the last resort they could not point to any clear alternative. Their songs and drawings, created with great gusto during the early years of the national revival, hardly amounted to the beginnings of a new culture. Most Zionists admitted that a cultural revival could take place only in Palestine, but this was tantamount to admitting that there was no specific Jewish life in the diaspora. If this was so, then diaspora Zionism was no more than a mood, a vague longing, a feeling of nostalgia. Orthodox Jews still had their traditional beliefs, but those advocating a secular nationalism had little to offer their followers. This was a source of concern to many western Zionists; in eastern Europe, where a Jewish folk culture still existed, the situation was quite different.

Elsewhere in western Europe opposition to Zionism was no less strong or vociferous than in Germany and Austria. The Lovers of Zion had a few sympathisers in England even before Herzl, and Weizmann in later years found friends who were a source of strength at the time of decision. But the representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry, above all the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, regarded Zionism not merely as irrelevant but positively harmful, believing that it jeopardised the legal rights won by the Jews over many decades, and that Jewish patriotism was incompatible with their loyalties as British subjects. The main figure in the anti-Zionist campaign was Lucien Wolf, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. Herzl’s ideas, he wrote, were worse than satire, they were treason: ‘Dr Herzl and those who think with him are traitors to the history of the Jews, which they misread and misinterpret.’ The Zionists were provoking antisemitism, their scheme was foredoomed to failure, they had commercialised a spiritual idea, traded on the resources of prophecy. With ingenious effrontery, Herzl had represented his scheme of evading the mission of the exiles and their duty to the lands of the dispersion as a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy. Quoting another contemporary critic of Herzl, Wolf said that the Zionist programme was the most contemptible, if not the most grotesque, species of idealism ever laid before the remnant of the descendants of a great nation.
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There was a Jewish problem, but Jews in each country had to fight for emancipation and religious liberty.

Even where persecuted, as in Rumania at the time he was writing, they were in duty bound to remain in order to help that country to become a civilised state. ‘This is the mission of Israel in exile, the mission that British Israel has fulfilled.’
†
In the comparatively few years since their emancipation the Jews of Britain had identified themselves with the nation to which they belonged. There was no specific Jewish interest differentiating them from the rest of the king’s subjects. Zionism could not be realised, for this ‘travesty of Judaism’ depended on the goodwill of a Mohammedan prince. The western governments, Wolf predicted, would not show the least disposition to invite an outburst of antisemitism by acknowledging their Jews as strangers, nor did they want to complicate the eastern question by planting another weak state in the uneasy and troublesome Near East. These views were shared by most leaders of Anglo-Jewry up to the First World War, and though after the Balfour Declaration they no longer argued that Zionism was utopian, they continued to regard Palestine as at best a refuge for their unfortunate co-religionists from eastern Europe. After the war the thesis of the civilising mission of east European Jewry became untenable. But as assimilation in Britain did not suffer any major setback, and antisemitism was relatively mild, the lack of enthusiasm for Zionism was not surprising.

In Vienna, Prague and Berlin Zionism had a few intellectual supporters, whereas in France and Britain, before Hitler, there were almost none. Whatever backing there was came from other sections of the Jewish community, usually recent arrivals from eastern Europe. In France one of the few exceptions was Bernard Lazare, another was Edmond Fleg, but neither of these for a moment, considered settling in Palestine. After attending a Zionist congress, Fleg wrote that he felt himself very Jewish among all those strange faces, but also very French: the Jewish homeland was only for those who had no other.
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Leon Blum, another distant sympathiser, expressed the same view in a message to a Zionist meeting: The Jewish homeland was a wonderful thing for all those who, unlike himself, did not have the good fortune to be free and equal citizens in their countries of birth.
†
Other French intellectuals were far less sympathetic and condemned Zionist ‘racism’. Herzl had become a Zionist as a result of the Dreyfus affair but most French Jews reacted differently. The small groups of east European Jews in Paris who advocated Zionism were regarded with a certain
méfiance
; Zionist dreams were likened to the excitations of Communism and nihilism.
‡
Julien Benda derided the ‘
adorateurs de leur sang
’ who wanted to establish a semitic nationalism.
§