History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  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.’178

  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 NCOs 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.180 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.’181 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.’182

  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.183 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.’184 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’.185

  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.’186 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.190

  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 prea
ch 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.