History of the Jews (72 page)

This appearance brought Herzl into contact with senior members of the government, especially Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, and the Marquess of Lansdowne, Foreign Secretary. Both were favourable to a Jewish home in principle. But where? Cyprus was discussed, then El Arish on the Egyptian border. Herzl thought it could be ‘a rallying-point for the Jewish people in the vicinity of Palestine’ and he wrote a paper for the British cabinet bringing up, for the first time, a powerful if dangerous argument: ‘At one stroke England will get ten million secret but loyal subjects active in all walks of life all over the world.’ But the Egyptians objected and a survey proved unsatisfactory. Then Chamberlain, back from East Africa, had a new idea, Uganda. ‘When I saw it’, he said, ‘I thought, “That is a land for Dr Herzl. But of course he is sentimental and wants to go to Palestine or thereabouts.” ’ In fact Herzl was so alarmed by the new and far more bloody pogroms now taking place in Russia that he would have settled for Uganda. So Lansdowne produced a letter: ‘If a site can be found which the [Jewish Colonial] Trust and His Majesty’s Commission consider suitable and which commends itself to
HM
Government, Lord Lansdowne will be prepared to entertain favourable proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony of settlement, on conditions which will enable the members to observe their national customs.’ This was a breakthrough. It amounted to diplomatic recognition for a proto-Zionist state. In a shrewd move, Herzl aroused the interest of the rising young Liberal politician, David Lloyd George, by getting his firm of solicitors to draft a proposed charter for the colony. He read Lansdowne’s letter to the Sixth Zionist Congress, where it aroused ‘amazement…[at] the magnanimity of the British offer’. But many delegates saw it as a betrayal of Zionism; the Russians walked out.
Herzl concluded: ‘Palestine is the only land where our people can come to rest.’
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At the Seventh Congress (1905), Uganda was formally rejected.

By that time Herzl was dead, aged forty-four. His was a personal tale of exceptional pathos. His heroic efforts over ten crowded years destroyed his body. They killed his marriage too. His family legacy was pitiful. His wife Julia survived him only three years. His daughter Pauline became a heroin addict and died in 1930 of an overdose. His son Hans, under treatment by Freud, committed suicide a little later. His other daughter Trude was starved to death in a Nazi camp, and her son Stephan too killed himself in 1946, wiping out the family. Yet Zionism was his progeny. He told Stefan Zweig in his last months, ‘It was my mistake I began too late…. If you knew how I suffer at the thought of the lost years.’
¹⁸⁷
In fact by the time Herzl died, Zionism was a solidly established movement, with a powerful friend in Britain. By starting it in 1895 he gave Zionism a lead of nearly twenty years over its Arab nationalist equivalent, and that was to prove absolutely decisive in the event. Thus the conviction of Dreyfus, which set it in motion then rather than later, can be seen as the hand of providence too—like the fearful events of 1648 and of 1881.

All the same, at the time of Herzl’s death Zionism was still only a minority current in the great religious and secular rivers of Jewish development. Its principal opponent was sheer indifference. But it also had active enemies. Until the First World War, the vast majorities of rabbis everywhere, Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. In the West, they agreed with secular, assimilated Jews who saw it as a threat to their established position, raising doubts about their loyalties as citizens. But in the East, not least in Russia, where most Zionist supporters were to be found, religious opposition was strong and even fanatical. It was to have important consequences for the eventual Israeli state. The founders of Zionism, for the most part, were not merely Westerners, they were (in the eyes of the Orthodox) atheists. When Herzl and Nordau went together to the Sabbath service on the eve of the First Zionist Congress, it was the first time either had done so since childhood—they had to be coached about the benedictions.
¹⁸⁸
The Orthodox knew all this. Most of them saw secular Zionism as open to all the objections raised against the enlightenment plus the mighty additional one that it was a blasphemous perversion of one of the central and most sacred Judaic beliefs. The notion that religious and secular Zionism were two heads of the same coin is quite false. To religious Jews the return to Zion was a stage in the divine plan to use the Jews as a pilot-scheme for all
humanity. It had nothing to do with Zionism, which was the solution of a human problem (Jewish unacceptability and homelessness) by human means (the creation of a secular state).

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were three distinct traditions among the religious Jews of central and eastern Europe. There was the hasidic strain of Ba’al Shem Tov. There was the strain of
musar
or Moralism, based on the writings of the Orthodox Lithuanian sages, reinvigorated by Israel Salanter (1810-83) and spread by the
yeshivoth
. Then there was the strain of Samson Hirsch, ‘Torah with Civilization’, which attacked secularization with its own weapons of modern learning and (in Hirsch’s words) worked for the kind of reform which ‘elevated the age to the level of the Torah, not degraded the Torah to the level of the age’. Hirsch’s sons and grandsons demonstrated that secular education could be acquired without loss of faith and helped to organize the Agudath Yisra’el movement. This sought to create a universal Torah organization to co-ordinate Judaic religious forces against secularization and was inspired by the way the relief funds for Russian pogrom victims had fallen into secular hands and were being used to discriminate against pious Jews. But all three of these ways were strongly opposed to Zionism and in particular to its growing claim to speak for all Jewry.
¹⁸⁹

The sages of eastern Europe were passionately opposed to any gesture from which Zionists might profit, even a visit to Erez Israel. One of them, Zadok of Lublin (1823-1900), wrote, characteristically:

 

Jerusalem is the loftiest of summits to which the hearts of Israel are directed…. But I fear lest my departure and ascent to Jerusalem might seem like a gesture of approval of Zionist activity. I hope unto the Lord, my soul hopes for His word, that the Day of the Redemption will come. I wait and remain watchful for the feet of His anointed. Yet though three hundred scourges of iron afflict me, I will not move from my place. I will not ascend for the sake of the Zionists.
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The Orthodox argued that Satan, having despaired of seducing Israel by persecution, had been given permission to try it by even more subtle methods, involving the Holy Land in his wicked and idolatrous scheme, as well as all the evils of the enlightenment. Zionism was thus infinitely worse than a false messiah—it was an entire false, Satanic religion. Others added that the secular state would conjure up the godless spirit of the
demos
and was contrary to God’s command to Moses to follow the path of oligarchy: ‘Go and collect the elders of Israel’ (Genesis 3); ‘Heaven forbid’, wrote two Kovno sages, ‘that the masses and the women should chatter about meetings or opinions
concerning the general needs of the public.’
¹⁹¹
In Katowice on 11 May 1912 the Orthodox sages founded the Agudist movement to co-ordinate opposition to Zionist claims. It is true that some Orthodox Jews believed Zionism could be exploited for religious purposes. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) argued that the new ‘national spirit of Israel’ could be used to appeal to Jews on patriotic grounds to observe and preach the Torah. With Zionist support he was eventually made Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. But most of the religious Jews already in Erez Israel heard of Zionism with horror. ‘There is great dismay in the Holy Land’, wrote Rabbi Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld (1848-1932), ‘that these evil men who deny the Unique One of the world and his Holy Torah have proclaimed with so much publicity that it is in their power to hasten redemption for the people of Israel and gather the dispersed from all the ends of the earth.’ When Herzl entered the Holy Land, he added, ‘evil entered with him, and we do not yet know what we have to do against the destroyers of the totality of Israel, may the Lord have mercy’.
¹⁹²
This wide, though by no means universal, opposition of pious Jews to the Zionist programme inevitably tended to push it more firmly into the hands of the secular radicals.

Yet for the great majority of secular Jews, too, Zionism offered no attraction, and for some of them it was an enemy. In Russia, persecution continued, indeed increased in savagery, the desire of Jews to escape mounted, and whether they were Orthodox or secular, Zionists or not, Palestine was one place to escape to. But among enlightened European Jewry, the panic stirred by the anti-Semitic wave of the 1890s began to subside. The outright victory in France of the Dreyfusards reaffirmed the view that there, at least, the Jews could find not only security but opportunity and a growing measure of political and cultural power. In Germany, too, the anti-Semitic ferment died down, at least in appearance, and it again became the overwhelming consensus of educated Jews that assimilation could be made to work. Indeed it was in this final period before the First World War that German Jews were most insistent in asserting their loyalty to ‘the fatherland’ and that German and Jewish cultural affinities were most pronounced.

The truth is that, despite Germany’s long tradition of vicious anti-Jewish feeling-despite, as it were, the
Judensau
—Jews felt at home in Germany. It was a society which honoured and revered its professoriat, and in some respects its values were those of the Jewish cathedocracy. A Jew could slip naturally from a
yeshivah
into one of Germany’s universities, now in their golden period of effort and
achievement. He relished the opportunities which slowly opened to him in a country where intellectual achievement was justly measured and treated with awesome respect. German Jews worked fanatically hard. They soon began to carry off the new Nobel prizes: two in physiology and medicine, four in chemistry, two in physics, all for work done before the First World War.
¹⁹³
Ferdinand Julius Cohn founded bacteriology. Paul Ehrlich produced the first practical form of chemotherapy. Franz Boas founded the science of cultural anthropology. German Jews were workaholics, hurrying men. Eduard Devrient wrote of his friend Felix Mendelssohn: ‘The habit of constant occupation, instilled by his mother, made rest intolerable to him’; he kept looking at his watch.
¹⁹⁴
Gustav Mahler used to run from his apartment to his office at the Opera House in Vienna; on his return, to save time, he would announce his arrival by whistling the opening bars of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, as a signal for lunch to be served.

But it was not merely intellectual habits Jews shared with the Germans: there was intellectual substance too. Many German Jews felt at one with the politician Gabriel Riesser (1806-63) when he insisted, ‘If we are not Germans then we have no homeland.’ Jews entering public life, whether socialists like Lassalle or Liberal leaders like Eduard Lasker (1829-84) and Ludwig Bamberger (1823-99), felt there was a strong link between the Jewish rationalizing spirit and the liberalizing aims of modern Germany, attempting patiently to devise and apply rational solutions to all social problems. There were few able German Jews who did not draw nourishment and delight from kant and Hegel.

This applied, not least, to Jewish religious thinkers. Wilhelmine Germany was on the eve of a great revival in Christian theology, and Jewish writers were affected by the same deep impulses. Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Professor of Philosophy at Marburg, who might be termed the last follower of Maimonides, argued forcefully that Judaism was the first religion in which the essential insights of what he called ‘the religion of reason’ were discovered, but that it had no monopoly of the formula. Once a nation reached a certain level of intellectual development, it was ready to receive ‘the religion of reason’. Of all the modern nations, he argued, Germany was the one where reason and religious feeling were easiest to reconcile, precisely because Germany, with its philosophical idealism, its reverence for pure religion and its ethical humanism, had been, as it were, anticipated by Jewish history. He rejected the supposed conflict between German culture and Jewish cosmopolitanism as ignorant nonsense. He refuted Professor Treitschke’s arguments contrasting
Jew and German point by point, and dismissed his notorious catchphrase, ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, as the reverse of the truth. In fact the German spirit was infused with Jewish ideals. They were behind the victory of the Protestant Reformation. The new type of modern religious man, whether Christian Protestant or liberal Jew, ultimately sprang from the religious ideals and energy of the Jewish Bible. Hence, contrary to the views of the anti-clerical rationalists—the detestable French spirit of the secular enlightenment—the German-Jewish ethical interpretation of the Bible made it an instrument of human improvement, not a barrier to it.
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Cohen’s lectures, indeed, helped to rekindle the Judaism of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who had earlier come close to conversion, and turn him into one of the greatest of modern Jewish theologians. Rosenzweig conducted a passionate literary debate on the question of conversion with a cousin and contemporary, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who did cross over into Protestantism. Their ‘Letters on Judaism and Christianity’, written in the years just before the First World War, indicated how closely one strain of Jewish and one strain of Protestant thought could be brought together, and how easily Jews could move within the assumptions of German philosophy.
¹⁹⁶
Even German-Jewish thinkers who attacked Christianity, and stressed its differences with Judaism, like Leo Baeck (1873-1956), did so within German terms of reference. In 1905 Baeck published a brilliant reply,
The Essence of Judaism
, to the Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack’s
The Essence of Christianity
(1900), arguing that Judaism was the religion of reason, Christianity of romantic irrationalism. St Paul had been the original villain; but had not Luther, too, written: ‘In all who have faith in Christ, reason shall be killed; else faith does not govern them; for reason fights against faith’? Yet this critique of Christianity had distinguished roots and allies in German scepticism, and Nietzsche had already provided guidelines for the attack on St Paul (a favourite target, incidentally, for generations of German anti-Semites). The theological debate, indeed, illustrated how comfortably yet how freely Jews could range within the German mental world, and what a spacious theatre of mind they found it.