A History of Zionism (24 page)

Authors: Walter Laqueur

Tags: #History, #Israel, #Jewish Studies, #Social History, #20th Century, #Sociology & Anthropology: Professional, #c 1700 to c 1800, #Middle East, #Nationalism, #Sociology, #Jewish, #Palestine, #History of specific racial & ethnic groups, #Political Science, #Social Science, #c 1800 to c 1900, #Zionism, #Political Ideologies, #Social & cultural history

BOOK: A History of Zionism

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Herzl had a burning ambition to achieve fame as a writer and dramatist, yet in these fields he had no outstanding talent. He was very much taken by the bearing and the way of life of the non-Jewish aristocracy. He despised journalists and mediocre Jewish intellectuals, though he was himself very much one of them. Fame but not success came to him as a man of action during the last years of his life. There was a strong narcissistic streak in him; he was totally singleminded and demanded from his followers blind obedience. The psychological pattern must be seen in the light of the devotion which was lavished on him, their only son, by his parents, their boundless indulgence, their immense admiration (especially his mother’s), which hampered his maturing and crippled his judgment both of the world and of himself.
*
He was closely attached to his mother, who had the highest ambitions for him. As far as the origins of political Zionism are concerned, such explanations are of course quite irrelevant. Nor is it very helpful to interpret Herzl’s ideological development in terms of the general breakdown of liberalism which he witnessed during his Paris years. Herzl was not an original political thinker. His analysis of the Jewish question did not go any deeper than Pinsker’s, written two decades earlier. True, he despaired of liberalism inasmuch as the solution of the Jewish question was concerned. This has induced some to see him as part of the same tradition which gave rise to nationalist movements all over Europe towards the end of the century. He realised that assimilation did not work, and he sensed that the Jews faced great dangers in eastern and central Europe.
†
But in all other respects he was very much a son of the liberal age; certainly he was not a narrow-minded nationalist. His desire to find some solution to the Jewish question preceded his wish to see a Jewish state established in Palestine.

There was, as Herzl’s east European critics often pointed out, very little that was specifically Jewish in Herzl. This emerges perhaps most clearly in his vision of the Jewish state,
Altneuland
, a novel published in 1902. Half political fantasy, half early science fiction
à la
Jules Verne, it describes the visit of the two narrators to Palestine which by 1923 has become a modern Jewish state. The exodus of European Jewry having been accomplished, Palestine has flourished and with the help of modern technology and modern methods of irrigation has become a prosperous and modern country. A new, progressive society has come into being based on cooperative effort, not Socialist in the orthodox Marxist sense but located somewhere between individualist capitalism and collectivism. Land does not belong to individuals. The open air factories are models of their kind. Women are fully emancipated, education is free, criminals are not punished but re-educated. There is a clear division between religion and state and full freedom of conscience. Tolerance is the supreme principle on which the new state is based. ‘The stranger must feel at home with us’ are the last words of the dying president of the state, who is modelled on Professor Mandelstam, the veteran Russian Zionist. The Arab problem has been solved without any difficulty: Reshid Bey, one of the closest friends of the hero, asks: ‘Why should we have anything against the Jews? They have enriched us, they live with us like brothers.’

Herzl’s vision of the future state is that of a typical liberal, permeated with optimism and enlightened ideals, a model society on a progressive pattern.
Altneuland
thus refutes any attempt to regard the breakdown of liberalism as the key to Herzl’s political thought. He had despaired of Jews finding a place in European society, but his vision of the future state was in fact so tolerant and cosmopolitan that it was bound to provoke resentment among cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha’am. What was specifically Jewish in the new state, Ahad Ha’am asked. The very name Zion did not once appear, its inhabitants did not speak Hebrew, and there was little if any mention of Jewish culture. It was just another modern, secular state, and Ahad Ha’am resented what he regarded as one more manifestation of assimilationism. If African Negroes managed one day to build a state of their own, he argued, it might well be very similar in character to Herzl’s vision. Such criticism was justified inasmuch as Herzl envisaged a modern, technologically advanced and enlightened state inhabited by Jews, not a specifically Jewish state. Ahad Ha’am looked in vain for some specific Jewish qualities in Herzl’s vision, or, as Nordau put it, maliciously and somewhat crudely but not altogether without justification, he could not or would not leave his ghetto.

Herzl’s vision and his policies have been criticised on many counts. His ideas on social policy were primitive and he underrated the importance of the Socialist movement. Nor did he foresee the clash with the Arabs, but those who criticise him in this respect tend to forget that the total number of Arabs in Palestine at the time was little over half a million and a Palestinian Arab national movement did not yet exist. In his negotiations in the world’s capitals he used questionable arguments and methods, but then being a general without an army, he was not exactly negotiating from strength. His autocratic style and his fondness for secret diplomacy were justly criticised on occasion, but no other form of diplomacy would have yielded results, and no one but an autocrat could have brought a minimum of discipline into that unruly band of followers, each of whom was a politician in his own right. Herzl was in some respects astonishingly blind, but this may well be a prerequisite for the man of action. Only total singlemindedness was likely to make any impact on friend and foe alike. Mass movements are not created by men who fail to exude confidence, who are not utterly sure of themselves. In his innermost heart Herzl may have lacked the conviction that he would ever attain his aim. Certainly there were many moments of despair. But this did not for a moment affect his outward behaviour, proud, utterly sure of himself and the success of his cause. He never relaxed his efforts, knowing only too well that without some tangible results in the not too distant future, the movement he was leading would disintegrate and the hopes he had raised would give way to despair.

When Herzl died there was no longer any real hope that the Zionist movement would gain a firm foothold in Palestine before the disintegration of the Ottoman empire. The political Zionism which he had preached seemed bankrupt, and a few years after his death the leadership of the movement passed more or less by default into the hands of the ‘practical Zionists’, those who had claimed all along that there would be no sudden miracle, that only as a result of steady and necessarily slow colonisation would the bases be created in Palestine for political action at some future date. And yet Herzl’s work was not in vain. But for him Zionism would have remained a movement of fairly narrow appeal, aiming at a cultural renaissance which incidentally also engaged in philanthropic-colonising activities. Herzl transformed a mood into a political movement and put it on the European map as one of the national movements aspiring to what in a later age was to be called ‘national liberation’. Through his efforts a tremendous uplift was given to the self-confidence of hundreds of thousands of Jews in eastern Europe who could not be integrated into their countries of origin, and to many in the west who acutely felt the problematic, marginal character of their whole existence in a non-Jewish society. Lastly, Herzl laid the foundations for the subsequent achievements of the Zionist movement, and he can be called with some justification the architect of the Balfour Declaration.

A detailed study of Herzl’s motives, his mental and emotional make-up, lies beyond the scope of this history of the Zionist movement. For his friends and followers he was a messianic figure selflessly working for the redemption of his people, for whom in the end, saint-like, he sacrificed himself. Later historians, outside the spell of his political ideas and his personal magnetism, have stressed the complicated character of his personality, the deeper reasons of his conversion to Zionism, the sources of his behaviour.
*

That men and women enter politics for a great many reasons, usually involved and complicated ones, goes without saying: vanity, the search for self-fulfilment, a sense of mission, must all play a part, as well as a great many other factors. To disentangle them is a fascinating but usually not very rewarding task, for on the substance of the subject’s ideas it throws little light. It would not be difficult to point to many similarities in the characters and thoughts of Herzl and Lassalle: their dreams about leading the Jews out of servitude, the romantic elements in their thought, their fascination with the aristocratic tradition, showmanship and duels, their unsuccessful literary ambitions, and so on. They were about equally estranged from Judaism, but the one despaired altogether of the Jews whereas the other made a Jewish national revival the central idea of his life.

As far as history is concerned all that matters is that in the 1890s a Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl expressed in a famous pamphlet the mood of a growing number of his contemporaries, and that subsequently he provided leadership for the movement that developed among them. His inspiration was basically romantic, his ideas inconsistent and often muddleheaded. He compares unfavourably with the more sophisticated political thinkers of his age. Yet on one issue, the central one in his life, he was right: he sensed the anomaly of Jewish life in Europe and the dangers that would face the Jews during the years to come, and he was looking desperately for a solution before it was too late. Perhaps those of his critics were right who argued that antisemitism was a transient phenomenon and not even a very important one
sub specie aeternitatis.
But these critics were concerned with mankind in general not with the fate of the Jews: Herzl felt – and in this respect the
fin-de-siècle
Austro-Hungarian background is of importance – that the Jews could simply not wait. He was a prophet in a hurry.

*
M. Lowenthal (ed.),
The Diaries of Theodor Herzl
, New York, 1956, pp. 96-7.

*
Der Judenstaat
, quoted here from the translation in Arthur Hertzberg,
The Zionist Idea
, New York, 1959, p. 209, which is based on the first English translation by Sylvie d’Avigdor.

*
R. Patai (ed.),
The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl
, vol. 1, New York, 1960, p. 299.

†
Alex Bein,
Theodor Herzl
, Philadelphia, 1945, p. 50.

*
Complete Diaries
, vol. 4, p. 1283.

*
A Jewish State
, London, 1896 (first English translation), p. 3.

†
Nordau, his colleague, likewise rejected the possibility of a holocaust. In a speech at one of the first Zionist congresses he said that he did not believe the dreadful persecution of the past would recur, though recent events had shown that the murder of a whole people was possible even in modern times. It was unlikely that tens of thousands of Jews would be killed and the rest expelled from a country. ‘There is now a European conscience, a world conscience which (even if it is not yet broad enough) prescribes certain outward forms and does not easily tolerate mass crimes’ (Max Nordau,
Zionistische Schriften
, p. 83). But he added: ‘On the other hand I am convinced that our ice age will still last a long time. … People are knifed and die at the stake, but he who freezes to death is also no longer alive.’ It should be noted that earlier Russian Zionists like Lilienblum and Smolenskin had on occasion been more pessimistic and had not ruled out the physical destruction of the Jews in the diaspora.

*
See G. Kressel (ed.),
Hisione Medina
, Tel Aviv, 1954, p. 64
et seq.
It also predicted an attack by its neighbours on Jehuda (as the new state was to be called) from which the Jewish state would emerge victorious.