Bible and Sword (38 page)

Lord Salisbury’s somber eyes saw the truth. The unhappy Sultan saw his empire eroding at both ends: while Egypt was being swallowed by England, the Balkans were slipping away in the north. Consequently he was determined to hold like grim death onto Syria, including Palestine and especially Jerusalem. The Holy City, because of its prestige value, was absolutely vital, for already, as Lord Salisbury had seen, the Sultan’s Moslem sovereignty was beginning to fray at the edges and his position as caliph to come into question. Foreign influence had penetrated Syria too far already. More and more “visitors” were flooding the Holy Land. There was a curious accretion of Russian pilgrims; formerly numbered annually in the hundreds, they now began to appear in thousands and to acquire land in Jerusalem on the basis of the old claim as Orthodox protectors of the Holy Places. French Jesuits, English Protestants, American missionaries spreading dangerous
liberal ideas through their schools, were increasing in numbers every year. Jewish colonists were buying land. And turning up everywhere with their surveyors’ rods and tripods were little bands of British army engineers plotting the lay of the land.

Abdul Hamid tried to stem the tide. In 1887 he detached the
sanjak
of Jerusalem from the provincial governorship of Syria and made it directly dependent on the Palace. In 1885 the Porte announced that it would not permit formation of another Jewish colony and would enforce the edict against aliens’ holding or acquiring real estate. But the Sultan was by now a prisoner of the system of government-by-bribe that had corrupted his empire. His edicts stood little chance of enforcement by the venal corps of viziers and governors supposed to administer them and were, in fact, easily circumvented.

The early Jewish colonies founded by the Chovevé Zion societies, small, scattered, and feeble though they were, had gained a toehold in the Jaffa area. In spite of the Sultan’s edict they had acquired by 1889 a total of 76,000 acres scattered over twenty-two separate settlements with a population of about 5,000. The figures on paper appear more imposing than the true facts. Actually these Zionists beginnings were precarious and primitive in the extreme. Twenty families in 1882 established Rishon-le-Zion (“First in Zion”) on the sand dunes south of Jaffa to begin reclamation of the ancient homeland. Another colony was settled some sixty miles up the coast and a third, Rosh Pinah, far to the north in the mountains above Galilee. Within a year they were floundering close to ruin. The little vanguard from the Russian Pale, fired by an ideal and a hope two thousand years old, had gone out with hardly a thought for the local conditions that they would meet and with little more than their railroad tickets provided. There was hardly a dirt farmer among them. They scratched into the wasted soil of Palestine the same corn and wheat crops that they had seen growing in the rich black earth of the
Ukraine. The crops withered. Malaria forced the abandonment of a colony started by Jerusalem Jews at Petah Tikvah. The other colonies were on the verge of abandonment; some of the settlers had returned, the rest were starving.

A finger of rescue reached out in the form of a gift of 30,000 francs to Rishon-le-Zion from Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris. The finger grew to a hand. He sent further funds to the other colonies and helped to establish newcomers on lands that he acquired. So began the effort that was to keep going the little outposts of Jewish resettlement until, at the close of the century, the Zionist movement was mobilized.

But the difficulties that beset the attempt to revive a half-dead nation on the soil of a half-dead country were enormous and all but overwhelming. Quite apart from the external problems of climate and soil, the colonists’ own inexperience and above all the internal dissension that has been the curse of Jewish movements nearly ended Palestine’s resettlement then and there. While they were starving they were arguing whether they should keep the commandment of a Sabbatical year during which no work on the fields or among the livestock could be done. If this seems incredible, it is none the less literally true. The controversy reached furious proportions and consumed oceans of ink in every Jewish journal throughout Europe. It was actually provoked and encouraged by the rabbinical clique of Jerusalem, who were unalterably opposed to the whole restoration ideal of the Chovevé Zion and hoped to see the colonization scheme fail. Those of the colonists who resented dependence on Rothschild’s bounty (though they would unquestionably have starved to death without it) took up the Sabbatical issue as a flag of rebellion against Rothschild’s administrators. Constant quarrels only slightly less fantastic embittered the early years.

The Odessa Committee, headquarters of the Chovevé Zion, whose zeal far outran its funds, was amazed at the sums required merely to keep the first pioneers alive. Desperate
delegates pleading in the capitals of Europe could collect no more than a few francs. Could Palestine ever be restored to fertility? Comfortably placed Jews, though they did not lack the desire to help their brethren caught under the hammer of the Russian pogroms, declined to put their money on so risky a proposition. Basically they were afraid of Palestine and of the prospects that it stirred up of a restored Jewish nationhood which would endanger the dream of assimilation into Western societies. They preferred Baron de Hirsch’s scheme of resettlement in Argentina to Baron Edmond’s passion for Palestine.

Among the grand dukes only Rothschild (after the death of Montefiore) had faith in Palestine. “The only salvation of the Jewish people is in bringing them back to the Holy Land,” he said. The family scoffed. They called his Palestine colonies
“la fantaisie du Baron.”
They wished that he would stick to his art collection, the only other passionate interest of his life, since he refused to concern himself with business affairs in the bank on the Rue Laffitte. Instead Baron Edmond listened to the thinkers and workers of the rising Jewish nationalism—to Pinsker, the author of
Auto-Emancipation
, to Netter of the
Alliance
, to Rabbi Mohilever, hard-working delegate of the Chovevé Zion, to Ahad-ha-Am, Socrates of the movement and the most influential voice speaking for the revival of Judaism as a living culture and a living religion.

So, in the ‘80’s, the return to Palestine began hesitantly, minutely, and without benefit of intermediary power. The movement was self-started by Jews, pushed at last to the realization that they must give up waiting for a miracle and take their fate into their own hands or perish. The pioneers acted on their own. There was as yet no second Cyrus to open the way, to say “Go back, resume your homeland.” The Sultan, it is true, had considered Cyrus’ role on the mistaken theory that Jewish wealth might be used to rescue his empire from its recurring fits of bankruptcy. Even the Kaiser, in a brief visionary moment when he granted
an audience to Herzl in Palestine, toyed with the idea; but he quickly let it drop. English attention was absorbed elsewhere.

The Jews were stirring — talking, writing, persuading themselves. But so far the power, influence, and money required to build homes in Palestine was not behind them. A single Rothschild does not make a summer. It was easier for the average family seeking escape from the Pale to head for city life in New York or London. To stake a family’s future on belief in the future of Palestine and the future of the Jews as a nation required a heroic effort that few were prepared to make. Conditions were ready for an Exodus, but the Exodus was not ready for Palestine. Mobilization of a mass movement toward the old land had to wait for pressure in Europe to grow worse and for the emergence of a leader.

It did not have to wait long.

Suddenly, explosively, in the year 1896, a voice cracked out like a pistol shot: “I shall now put the question in the briefest possible form: Are we to ‘get out’ and where to?

“Or may we yet remain? And how long?”

Theodore Herzl, a Viennese journalist, quickly supplied the answer to his own rhetorical question. He stated that the Jews were a nation, must organize and behave as a nation, and must acquire the physical attributes of a nation: land and sovereignty. He cut through fifty years of verbiage in one word: statehood. His pamphlet was entitled
Der Judenstaat
(The Jewish State). A vast hedge of polemics known as the Jewish Question had in the preceding decades risen around the actual sufferers from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. Herzl crashed through the hedge on his opening page: “Everything depends on our propelling force. And what is that force? The misery of the Jews.” And he announced the remedy: “The Jewish state is essential to the world. It will therefore be created.… Let sovereignty be granted to us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”

Within eighteen months of the publication of
Der Judenstaat
Herzl, unknown till then in the Jewish world, had organized and convened the first Zionist Congress. Meeting
biennially thereafter, it was to act as the organ of the state until statehood was accomplished fifty years later. With Herzl as president the first Congress of two hundred delegates from fifteen countries met at Basle in 1897 and launched, as was said, “the vessel of the Jewish state upon its way.”

Herzl was thirty-six when he wrote the
Judenstaat
. In eight years he was dead, burned out by the superhuman effort to wrest his people out of subjection into freedom. Though warned of a weak heart, he could not rest. The baying hound was running down its victims. A terrible sense of urgency raged in him against the frustrations, the obstructionism, the endless passion for controversy that he met inside Jewry and the delays, disappointments, and defeats that he met from the outside world. Moses survived the same difficulties over forty years and at last brought his nation to the frontier of the Promised Land, but Moses had the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night. When his enemies were upon him the Lord opened the Red Sea; when his people muttered and rebelled the Lord thundered and scolded; when they starved He sent down manna in the wilderness. But there was no extra-human assistance available when the Jews set out to recover the Promised Land at the end of the nineteenth century. Herzl emerged as a leader without benefit of burning bush. There were more profound thinkers than he in the movement, wiser men and steadier men and many, before and after him, equally devoted to the goal. But Herzl had that extra endowment that makes a leader, the sense of personal mission and destiny. Napoleon was born with it; Herzl acquired it when he discovered his goal. Moses, slow, reluctant, self-deprecating, lacked it until the Lord appeared to him, talked to him, propelled him. Herzl was no Moses in the sense of being a formative influence on mankind. He was, so to speak, half a Moses—the Exodus half, not the Ten Commandments half.

Neither he nor Moses came from the ranks of the sufferers
to lead them out of bondage. Moses was brought up at the court of Pharaoh, Herzl in the comparatively comfortable circle of the emancipated and enlightened Jews of Vienna. Perhaps that was why they were able to lead. It was often said of Herzl that if he had known the Jews better he would never have had the courage for the task he set himself. Ussishkin, an opponent, once said that Herzl was fitted to lead Zionism because he knew neither the Jews, Palestine, nor Turkey, and added: “His eyes must not be opened; then his faith will be great.” Herzl’s eyes did open; his faith did lessen, but not his determination. No obstacle could daunt him. He never slackened, never stopped until his life stopped. His name and personality so dominate the scene that it is difficult to realize that he was active in the movement less than nine years, whereas Weizmann, for one, the future president of Israel, was active for sixty.

Herzl saw only the beginning. Moses had been shaken into action by the sight of an Egyptian beating an Israelite. For Herzl the blow of the Egyptian was Dühring’s brutal book summoning Western Europe to cancel the Jews’ civil rights and turn them back into the ghettos. He read it when he was twenty-two, and for twelve years thereafter he struggled with the “Jewish question” in his mind. It haunted his thoughts, intruded itself into the themes of projected novels and plays, pricked the joy of his success as the most admired writer on the staff of the most admired paper in Central Europe, the
Neue Freie Presse
. He had believed in the credo of nineteenth-century optimism, that progress would dispel prejudice, that gradually people would become too civilized to be anti-Semitic. But he read Gobineau, he read Dumont’s
La France Juive
. He experienced the anti-Semitic agitation in Austria and Germany. Progress was unaccountably going backward. Slowly the hope shriveled, revealed itself as an empty illusion. In 1890 a Russian edict enforcing the May laws prohibited Jews from residing in rural districts, owning or farming
land, entering the universities, practicing the professions, or holding government jobs. But it was not the slow choking of the ghetto Jews that affected Herzl so much as the attacks on the position of the emancipated Jew in Austria-Hungary, in Germany, and even, bitterest disillusion of all, in France, the capital of reason.

Herzl was Paris correspondent for his paper when the Chamber rocked with the violence of the debates on the Panama scandal, in which Jewish figures were involved. Then came the Dreyfus Affair. It grew and grew like a Sahara sandstorm till all France was twisted by its violence. “A
mort! A mort les Juifs!
” howled the mob as Captain Dreyfus was led to trial in December 1894. Herzl, who was covering the trial, heard it then and for the rest of his life. “Where?” he wrote later in retrospect. “In France. In republican, modern, civilized France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.… Until that time most of us believed that the solution of the Jewish question was to be patiently waited for as part of the general development of mankind. But when a people, which in every other respect is so progressive and so highly civilized, can take such a turn, what are we to expect from other peoples, which have not even attained the level France attained a hundred years ago?”