A Durable Peace (5 page)

Such was the brilliance and power of Herzl’s idea that within a
few years many of the best Jewish writers, scholars, and artists in Europe had dedicated themselves to the cause—winning sympathizers
in every civilized nation and in every humane government, founding the institutions of the Jewish national government, and
inspiring the mass resettlement of the barren and broken Jewish homeland.

Initially, Herzl found greater receptiveness among non-Jews than among his own people. He succeeded, for example, in obtaining
an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. (It would perhaps be easier today for a private person from an unimportant
country to get an audience with the leader of China than it was for a young Jewish journalist to receive an audience with
the Kaiser a hundred years ago.) Herzl’s secret was that he was the first Jew in modern times to rediscover the art of politics
and the idea of cohering interests. To the Kaiser he described Zionism as a plan that would not only divert the energy of
some of Germany’s young radicals but create a Jewish protectorate allied with Germany at the crossroads of the Middle East,
thus opening a pathway to the East for the Kaiser. (Herzl made the case for German sponsorship of Zionism on the basis of
political gain for Germany, but the Kaiser was also interested in ridding his realm of some of its “radicals.”) Appealing
again to self-interest, Herzl was able to secure another unimaginable audience with a world potentate of the day, this time
with the Ottoman sultan, in Constantinople in May 1901. Invoking the story of Androcles, who removed the incapacitating thorn
from the lion’s paw, Herzl told the bankrupt sultan: “His Majesty is the lion, perhaps I am Androcles, and perhaps there is
a thorn that needs pulling out. The thorn, as I see it, is your public debt.” And this thorn Herzl proposed to remove with
the help of the great Jewish financiers.
³

The remarkable speed with which world leaders hastened to give a hearing to Herzl’s unfamiliar, fledgling cause demonstrates
the success of his approach and the power of his personality. By October 1898, only a year after Zionism had made its debut
at the First Zionist Congress, he had met with the Kaiser three times.

The receptivity that the great courts of the day accorded him in no way blinded Herzl to the primacy of winning Jewish adherents
to Zionism. After Nordau, his greatest conquest among Jewish intellectuals was the celebrated English writer Israel Zangwill,
who used his talents and influence to spread the creed of Zionism in Britain, which at the time was the foremost world power.
Yet his most fervent support came not from the comfortable Jewish salons of Central and Western Europe but from the multitudes
of impoverished Jews in the East—in Poland and Russia. There he found an emerging Jewish intelligentsia that embraced Zionism
with the enthusiasm of youth, rebelling as they were against the cloistered ghettos in which most of their people still lived.

Herzl began his public campaign when he was thirty-six years old. He died only eight years later, at the age of forty-four.
But in those brief eight years he wrought a revolution without parallel in the history of nations. Indeed, Herzl’s clairvoyance
was anything but mad. Within five decades, both the horror and the triumph of his stunning vision had come to pass. The separate
anti-Semitic fires were collected into one vast conflagration that destroyed the millennia-old Jewish communities of Europe.
At the same time the Jewish people, again precisely as Herzl foresaw, stood on the threshold of the creation of the State
of Israel.

Why was international opinion so ready to receive Herzl’s ideas? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the widespread
support for Zionism in the leading countries of the world was grounded in a view of the Jews that had developed in the wake
of the European Enlightenment two centuries earlier, a movement that stressed the natural rights and liberties of all mankind.
Many, though by no means all, of the Enlightenment’s leading thinkers (Voltaire being a conspicuous exception) believed that
the Jews had been unjustly condemned to suffer an unparalleled deprivation of these rights, with all the misery that this
deprivation entailed; hence the Jewish people were entitled to be reinstated to a position of dignity and equality among the
nations.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of so many of the
most powerful ideas of the Enlightenment, who put his finger on the uniqueness of the Jewish situation:

The Jews present us with an outstanding spectacle: the laws of Numa, Lycurgus, and Solon are dead; the far more ancient ones
of Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta and Rome have perished and their people have vanished from the earth; though destroyed,
Zion has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not lost among them; they no longer have their leaders,
yet they are still a nation; they no longer have a country, and yet they are still citizens.
⁴

The solution to the problem of the Jews initially seemed obvious. The Jews would be granted civic and religious equality in
the societies in which they lived. In America, where a new society was being created according to the principles of Enlightenment,
Thomas Jefferson wrote with considerable satisfaction that he was “happy in the restoration of the Jews to their social rights.”
⁵
Similar advances were being made in Europe. The Jewish problem was well on the way to being solved.

Or was it? Rousseau, at once arch-revolutionary and arch-skeptic, also sounded one of the earliest chords of skepticism. After
the legacy of “tyranny practiced against them,” he was not at all sure the Jews would be allowed or able to partake of the
new liberties envisioned in the new society, including the most basic one, freedom of speech:

I shall never believe I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities
[of their own], where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say.
⁶

In this, Rousseau was among the first to condition personal freedom on national freedom. Although in our century of dictatorships,
many have wrongly believed that national freedom can
happily exist without individual freedom,
⁷
Rousseau was hinting here at a contrary idea: that the Jews could never be truly free as individuals unless they possessed
a free state of their own.

This idea was later developed and modified by the Zionists, who said that the Jews would never be equal unless their persecuted
members came to live in a state of their own, and that even those who were left behind as fully enfranchised minorities would
suffer from a sense of inferiority unless they too had somewhere a sovereign homeland that would bolster their sense of identity
and to which they could choose to go—much as the Irish in America had Ireland, the Italians had Italy, the Chinese had China.

But the fact was, and it was plainly evident to the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, that the Jews did
not
have such a homeland to which they could return. As Byron evocatively captured it in his “Hebrew Melodies”:

The wild dove hath her nest

The fox his cave

Mankind their country

Israel but the grave.
⁸

Slowly at first, then with great rapidity, the idea began to take hold that civic equality was necessary but insufficient
as a remedy for the Jewish problem. Only a Jewish national restoration in the Jewish homeland would produce a satisfactory
solution. It would restore the Jews to a condition of normalcy not only as a nation but as individuals as well, much as Rousseau
had intimated. As U.S. President John Adams put it, “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation, for as I
believe… once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted, they would soon wear away some of the asperities
and peculiarities of their character.”
⁹
The need of the Jews to be reinstated in Israel was recognized by Napoleon, who apparently understood that extension of citizenship
to the Jews of France could not substitute for Jewish national restoration. In 1799, when his army was
twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, he proclaimed: “Israelites arise! Now is the moment… to claim your political existence as
a nation among nations!”
¹⁰

The stream of sympathy for the Jews grew progressively stronger in the nineteenth century. The increasing frequency of Western
travel to the Holy Land, the emergence of a small but growing movement for Jewish immigration, and the appearance of concrete
plans for large-scale Jewish settlement of Palestine all contributed to the rapid growth of non-Jewish support for Jewish
national restoration. Just as the romance of renascent Greek nationalism elicited enthusiastic support from Byron, and just
as the Italian national revival excited many of the greatest minds in Europe, the prospect of the rebirth of Jewish nationhood
had a similar effect. British, American, and French writers, journalists, artists, and statesmen all became ardent proponents
of facilitating the return of the Jews to their desolate homeland.

There was, for example, Lord Shaftesbury, who wrote in 1838 that he was

anxious about the hopes and destinies of the Jewish people. Everything [is] ripe for their return to Palestine…. the inherent
vitality of the Hebrew race reasserts itself with amazing persistence… but the great revival can take place only in the Holy
Land.
¹¹

In 1840 the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, offered protection to the Jews in Palestine and undertook to convince
the Ottoman sultan that it would be to his advantage if “the Jews who are scattered throughout other countries in Europe and
Africa should be induced to go and settle in Palestine.”
¹²
Lord Lindsay, too, wrote in 1847 that the “Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national
existence open to them, may once more obtain possession of their native land.”
¹³
And in 1845, Sir George Gawler, a governor of southern Australia and the founder of the Palestine Colonization Fund, urged:
“Replenish
the farms and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affection are rooted in the soil.”
¹⁴
British statesmen who declared their support for Jewish national restoration were a “who’s who” of prime ministers and elder
statesmen, including not only Palmerston and Shaftesbury but Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Manchester. In the United
States, successive presidents made declarations of sympathy for Zionism, including William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and
William Howard Taft.
¹⁵

From the nineteenth century on, modern Zionism thus enjoyed long, intimate, and ultimately successful support from powerful
forces working within the non-Jewish world, support that expressed itself in the literature of the day in passages that are
hauntingly prophetic of the ideals that would later be espoused by the Zionist movement. In 1876 the great English author
George Eliot foresaw in these terms the rebirth of Israel in her influential novel of Zionism,
Daniel Deronda:

There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there
is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more
than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East…. For there will be a community in the van of the East
which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom.
¹⁶

With this humanist stream converged another important current that became ascendant in the last century—that of Christian
Zionism, a movement that promoted the belief that the spiritual redemption of mankind could occur only if it were preceded
by the ingathering of the Jewish exiles, as foretold in the Bible. After all, to both Christians and Jews, Zionism was the
fulfillment of ancient prophecy. “[He] will assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judea from
the four corners of
the earth,” said Isaiah. “He that scattered Israel will gather him,” promised Jeremiah. “For I will take you from among the
nations and gather you out of all countries and will bring you into your own land,” Ezekiel foretold.
¹⁷

Christian clergymen’s application of these verses antedates the modern Zionist movement by at least half a century. As early
as 1814, a New York pastor named John MacDonald published a famous sermon demonstrating the central role that Isaiah had envisioned
for the new American state in restoring the Jews to their land. “Rise, American ambassadors,” called the pastor, “and prepare
to carry the tidings of joy and salvation to your Savior’s kinsmen in disgrace…. send their sons and employ their substance
in his heaven-planned expedition.” In 1821, the missionary Levi Parsons averred: “There exists in the breast of every Jew
an unconquerable desire to inhabit the land which was given to their Fathers…. Destroy, then, the Ottoman Empire, and nothing
but a miracle would prevent their immediate return from the four winds of heaven.” And as Jewish settlement of Jerusalem,
Safed, and Hebron increased, and international interest grew, so the unfolding prophecy became increasingly clear. By 1841,
a full half-century before the First Zionist Congress, the Mormon leader Orson Hyde could declare: “The idea of the Jews being
restored to Palestine is gaining ground…. The great wheel is unquestionably in motion, and the word of the Almighty has declared
that it shall roll.”
¹⁸

Just in case it did not, some were ready to push the wheel along. In 1844, Warder Cresson became the American consul in Jerusalem
and hoped to be able to missionize among Palestine’s Jews. Instead, he helped establish a Jewish settlement in Jerusalem’s
Valley of Refaim, supported by a joint Jewish-Christian society in England. Half a century later, Christian Zionism had gathered
considerable force. In 1891, after pogroms in Eastern Europe had led to mass Jewish emigration, the American evangelist William
Eugene Blackstone was able to muster the support of over four hundred prominent Americans—including John D. Rockefeller,
J. R. Morgan, and leading congressmen, jurists, and newspaper editors—for a petition to President Benjamin Harrison to work
for the reinstatement of the Jewish people in their land. “For over seventeen centuries they have patiently waited for such
a privileged opportunity,” wrote Blackstone. “Let us now restore to them the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled.”
¹⁹
So committed was Blackstone to the idea of the return of the Jews to their land that when the possibility of a Jewish national
home in Africa was being discussed, he sent Herzl a copy of the Old Testament—with the prophetic references to the Jewish
return to the Land of Israel clearly marked.