History of the Jews (71 page)

In 1895 Herzl was not to foresee the victory of the Dreyfusards. Looking back from the perspective of a century, we can now identify the 1890s as the culminating point in a wave of European anti-Semitism, provoked by the flood of refugees from the Russian horrors, which was less irresistible than it seemed at the time. But Herzl had not that advantage. The anti-Semites then seemed to be winning. In May 1895 Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. To devise an alternative refuge for the Jews, who might soon be expelled from all over Europe, seemed an urgent necessity. The Jews must have a country of their own!

Herzl completed the text of his book,
Der Judenstaat
, outlining his aims, in the winter of 1895-6. The first extracts were published in the London
Jewish Chronicle
, 17 January 1896. The book was not long, eighty-six pages, and its appeal was simple.

 

We are a
people, one
people. We have everywhere tried honestly to integrate with the national communities surrounding us and to retain only our faith. We are not permitted to do so…. In vain do we exert ourselves to increase the glory of our fatherlands by achievements in art and in science and their wealth by our contributions to commerce…. We are denounced as strangers…. If only they would leave us in peace…. But I do not think they will.

 

So Herzl proposed that sovereignty be conceded to the Jews over a tract of land large enough to accommodate their people. It did not matter where. It could be in Argentina, where the millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-96) had set up 6,000 Jews in a series of agricultural colonies. Or it could be Palestine, where similar Rothschild-financed colonies were in being. What mattered was the sanction of Jewish public opinion; and they would take what was offered. The work first came out in book form in Vienna, February 1896. It later went into eighty editions in eighteen languages.
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With
Der Judenstaat
, Daniel Deronda left the pages of fiction and strode on to the stage of history. Stage is the right word. Herzl could never play the role of cautious, sober Jewish statesman, the
Maimonides type, changing events through quiet words of wisdom. He brought to Jewish world politics the art of show business, the only one he really cared for. He was the actor-manager in a forthcoming production, the return of Israel to a promised land, and though his outline plan was direct and simple, all kinds of glorious details crowded his mind and were jotted down in his notes. There would be a tremendous ‘expedition’ to ‘take possession of the land’. There would be an aristocratic constitution, based on Venice. The first, elected doge would be a Rothschild, with Hirsch perhaps as vice-president. There would be sumptuous squares, like the Piazza San Marco or the Palais Royal. He devised the coronation ceremony, even down to a regiment of life-guards named after himself, the Herzl-Cuirassiers. Entire historic Jewish quarters would be transported and rebuilt. There would be international theatres, circuses, café-concerts, a glittering avenue like the Champs-Élysées, above all a state opera house: ‘The gentlemen in full tails, the ladies dressed as lavishly as possible…. I shall also cultivate majestic processions on great festive occasions.’ Much of his inspiration came from, of all people, Wagner, whose works Herzl constantly attended at this time. ‘Only on the nights when no Wagner was performed did I have doubts about the correctness of my idea.’ The next exodus to the Promised Land, he boasted, ‘compares to that of Moses as a Shrove Tuesday play to a Wagner Opera!’
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There was a touch of Disraelian fantasy about all this, indeed times when Herzl had something of the huckstering showmanship of a Mordecai Noah.

Some of Herzl’s histrionic traits remained with him to the end. He insisted, for instance, that all public Zionist meetings be ceremonious and formal, with delegates wearing full evening dress even if it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. He dressed fastidiously, carefully brushed top hat, white gloves, impeccable frock-coat, when making an official call as Zionist representative. He insisted that all Jews who accompanied him must do the same. It was part of his effort to destroy the old image of the pathetic, shuffling, gaberdine-wearing ghetto Jew. He always organized his meetings and conferences with aplomb and precision. But his theatrical exuberance died as the immensities of the task before him became apparent. The strain of tragedy in his life and features became more apparent.

Herzl began by assuming that a Jewish state would be created in the way things had always been done throughout the Exile: by wealthy Jews at the top deciding what was the best solution for the rest of Jewry, and imposing it. But he found this impossible. Everywhere in civilized Europe the Jewish establishments were against his idea.
Orthodox rabbis denounced or ignored him. To Reform Jews, his abandonment of assimilation as hopeless represented the denial of everything they stood for. The rich were dismissive or actively hostile. Lord Rothschild, the most important man in world Jewry, refused to see him at all and, worse, made his refusal public. In Paris, Edmund de Rothschild, who ran the existing nine small colonies in Palestine, received him (19 July 1896) but made it plain that in his view Herzl’s grandiose plans were not only quite unrealizable but would jeopardize what solid progress had already been made. He kept repeating: ‘One mustn’t have eyes bigger than one’s stomach.’ Baron Hirsch saw him too but dismissed him as an ignorant theorist. He told Herzl that what Jewish colonization schemes needed were good agricultural workers: ‘All our miseries come from Jews who want to climb too high. We have too many intellectuals!’ But the intellectuals dismissed Herzl too, especially in the prophet’s home town, Vienna. The joke was: ‘We Jews have waited 2,000 years for the Jewish state, and it had to happen to me?’ Herzl’s own paper, the
Neue Freie Presse
, was particularly hostile. Moritz Benedikt (1849-1920), the financial power there, warned angrily: ‘No individual has the right to take upon himself the tremendous moral responsibility of setting this avalanche in motion. We shall lose our present country before we get a Jewish state.’
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There were exceptions: Nathan Birnbaum, for instance, the leader of the Viennese Jewish students, who had actually coined the word ‘Zionism’ in 1893. There was the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, who compared Herzl to Deronda (Herzl had not then read the book), or the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Gudemann, who was sceptical of the idea but said to Herzl: ‘Perhaps you are the one called of God.’ Most important there was Max Nordau (1849-1923), the philosopher, who had achieved a sensational success in 1892 with his book
Entartung
(translated as
Degeneration
, London 1895), diagnosing the malady of the age. He saw anti-Semitism as one of its symptoms and said to Herzl: ‘If you are insane, we are insane together—count on me!’
¹⁷⁹
It was Nordau who pointed out that, to avoid antagonizing the Turks, the term
Judenstaat
should be replaced by
Heimstätte
(homestead), eventually rendered in English as ‘national home’—an important distinction, in terms of winning acceptance. It was Nordau who drew up much of the practical programme of early Zionism.

Nevertheless, what Herzl quickly discovered was that the dynamic of Judaism would come not from the westernized elites but from the poor, huddled masses of the
Ostjuden
, a people of whom he knew nothing when he began his campaign. He discovered this first when he
addressed an audience of poor Jews, of refugee stock, in the East End of London. They called him ‘the man of the little people’, and ‘As I sat on the platform…I experienced strange sensations. I saw and heard my legend being born.’ In eastern Europe, he quickly became a myth-like figure among the poor. David Ben Gurion (1886-1973) recalled that, as a ten-year-old boy in Russian Poland, he heard a rumour: ‘The Messiah had arrived, a tall, handsome man, a learned man of Vienna, a doctor no less.’ Unlike the sophisticated, middle-class Jews of the West, the eastern Jews could not toy with alternatives, and see themselves as Russians, or even as Poles. They knew they were Jews and nothing but Jews—their Russian masters never let them forget it—and what Herzl now seemed to be offering was their only chance of becoming a real citizen anywhere. To Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), then a second-year student in Berlin, Herzl’s proposals ‘came like a bolt from the blue’. In Sofia, the Chief Rabbi actually proclaimed him the Messiah. As the news got around, Herzl found himself visited by shabby, excitable Jews from distant parts, to the dismay of his fashionable wife, who grew to detest the very word Zionism. Yet these were the men who became the foot soldiers, indeed the
NCO
s and officers, in the Zionist legion; Herzl called them his ‘army of
schnorrers
’.

The ‘army’ met publicly for the first time on 29 August 1897 in the great hall of the Basel Municipal Casino.
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It called itself the First Zionist Congress and included delegates from sixteen countries. They were mostly poor men. Herzl had to finance the congress from his own pocket. But he made them dress up: ‘Black formal clothes and white ties must be worn at the festival opening session.’ Thus attired, they greeted him with the ancient Jewish cry, ‘
Yechi Hamelech!
’ (‘Long live the King!’) Many powerful Jews had attempted to play down the meeting—the
Neue Freie Presse
refused to report it at all, giving prominence instead to a convention of Jewish tailors in Oxford deliberating on the proper wear for lady-cyclists. But Herzl knew what he was doing: for his first congress he attracted special correspondents from twenty-six papers. By the time the second met in 1898, opening to the rousing strains of Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
overture, it was already an established institution. He was getting able lieutenants too, in addition to his mainstay Nordau, who wrote the policy documents. There was a timber merchant from Cologne, Daniel Wolffsohn, who was to succeed him as head of the organization. From the 1898 congress there was Weizmann too. These men, unlike Herzl, knew eastern Jewry well. Wolffsohn picked blue and white for the Zionist flag, ‘the colour of our prayer-shawls’. They understood the religious
and political currents within the Jewish masses. Weizmann was already fighting off furious assaults from socialist opponents within the Jewish student movement, remarking: ‘Monsieur Plekhanov, you are not the Tsar.’
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Their idea was to keep Herzl high above the rough waters of internal Jewish faction. ‘He does not know the first thing about Jews,’ wrote the Russian Zionist Menachem Ussishkin. ‘Therefore he believes there are only external obstacles to Zionism, no internal ones. We should not open his eyes to the facts of life, so that his faith remains potent.’
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The professional politicians and organizers, who inevitably took over the movement, laughed at Herzl’s brand of what they called ‘frock-coat Zionism’. But it was a key piece in the jigsaw. Zionism could so easily become, as Herzl realized, yet another grubby international cause, of which there were thousands at the turn of the century. High-level diplomacy at a personal level was essential to make it respectable, to get it taken seriously. Moreover, he was very good at it. Gradually he got admission to everyone in Europe who mattered. He cultivated the great in Turkey, Austria, Germany, Russia. His diaries, which he kept assiduously, record these encounters in fascinating detail.
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Even anti-Semites could be useful, because they would often help to set up a Zionist project simply to get rid of ‘their’ Jews. Wenzel von Plehve, the viciously hostile Russian Interior Minister, responsible for organizing pogroms, told him: ‘You are preaching to a convert…we would very much like to see the creation of an independent Jewish state capable of absorbing several million Jews. Of course we would not like to lose
all
our Jews. We should like to keep the very intelligent ones, those of which you, Dr Herzl, are the best example. But we should like to rid ourselves of the weak-minded and those with little property.’
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The Kaiser, too, supported another Exodus: ‘I am all in favour of the kikes going to Palestine. The sooner they take off the better.’ Wilhelm
II
argued Herzl’s case for him in Constantinople with the sultan, and later gave him countenance by meeting him officially in Jerusalem itself. It was an important occasion for Herzl: he insisted his delegation wear full evening dress in the midday heat and carefully inspected their boots, cravats, shirts, gloves, suits and hats—one was made to change his top hat for a better, Wolffsohn to replace dirty shirt-cuffs. But if the Kaiser enhanced Herzl’s international standing, the Turks could not be persuaded to grant a national home to Zion, and the Germans, now pursuing an active Turkish alliance, dropped the idea.

That left Britain. Herzl rightly called it ‘the Archimedean point’ on which to rest the lever of Zionism. There was considerable goodwill
among the political elite. A lot had read
Tancred
; even more
Daniel Deronda
. Moreover, there had been a vast influx of Russian Jewish refugees into Britain, raising fears of anti-Semitism and threats of immigrant quotas. A Royal Commission on Alien Immigration was appointed (1902), with Lord Rothschild one of its members. Herzl was asked to give evidence, and Rothschild now at last agreed to see him, privately, a few days before, to ensure Herzl said nothing which would strengthen the cry for Jewish refugees to be refused entry. Rothschild’s change from active hostility to friendly neutrality was an important victory for Herzl and he was happy, in exchange, to tell the Commission (7 July 1902) that further Jewish immigration to Britain should be accepted but that the ultimate solution to the refugee problem was ‘the recognition of the Jews as a people and the finding by them of a legally recognized home’.
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