But he knew what the Shaftesbury enthusiasts never asked: that his people were far from ready. The Jewish masses were still locked behind rabbinical shutters that must be broken open from within; the “progressive” Jews were hiding behind vain hopes that would only be shattered “by a blow from without, one which world events are already preparing.” It was clear that “the main problem of the Jewish national movement is … how to awaken the patriotic sentiment in the hearts of our progressive Jews and how to liberate the Jewish masses by means of this patriotism from a spirit-deadening formalism.” Only when this is achieved will “the restoration of the Jewish state find us ready for it.”
Hess went on from there to outline plans for colonizing Palestine. He hoped for the support of the powers in purchasing the Holy Land from the bankrupt Porte; but it was France in particular, where he was then living and where Louis Napoleon was already hungering after dominion in Syria, that he thought of as the intermediary power. With French support he foresaw colonies “extending from Egypt to Jerusalem and from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.”
While Hess was working out his solution a very different type of Jew was coming to the same point independently. Rabbi Hirsch Kalischer of Thorn in Prussia, an admired scholar of the old school, suddenly announced from the pinnacle of his Talmudic authority the doctrine of self-help. “Let no one imagine,” he wrote in 1860, “that the Redemption of Israel and the Messiah will suddenly appear from heaven and that amid miracles and wonders he will gather the Israelites of the Diaspora to their ancient inheritance. The beginning of the Redemption will take place in a natural way by the desire of the Jews to settle in Palestine and the willingness of the nations to help them in their work.”
In the same year he assembled a conference of rabbis and community leaders at Thorn to promote revival work in Palestine. Although little physical progress was made, Kalischer’s Quest of Zion, like yeast in a lump of dough, began to take effect. Other orthodox rabbis joined in the new attitude toward the Return, and through his disciples and associates Kalischer’s ideas began to penetrate the shadowy life inside the Pale. Only the Jews’ own efforts on the desiccated soil of Palestine, he taught, would make possible the final Redemption. He wanted Jewish soldiers to guard Jewish settlers. He had no great belief in the benevolence of the Western powers. He preferred help from his own kind. He wrote letters to Montefiore and the Rothschilds urging them to finance colonization societies, to buy land, transport immigrants, settle those who knew farming on free tracts of land, employ teachers to train the others, make loans until the settlements became self-supporting, establish a police system, a military guard, an agricultural training institute.
A beginning on this pattern was made by the Alliance Universelle Israelite, founded that same year, 1860, in Paris. It was the first of the welfare and protective societies subsequently formed in the other Western capitals. Their philosophy was paternalistic, not patriotic in the sense that Hess and later Herzl demanded. Patriotism was a new idea—or at least one so long dead that it was hard to revive—and it took a long time to catch hold; but philanthropy or, more exactly, community responsibility for the needy had been a continuing tradition of Israel as old as the tribe. It now began to work in the direction of Palestine. Montefiore, working alone, had already made three trips there before the days of railroad and steamship and was to make seven altogether before he died, the last at the age of ninety. Whenever and wherever misfortune or persecution fell upon a Jewish community the old “Prince of Israel” would set off, to Constantinople at the age of seventy-nine, to Morocco and Spain at eighty, to Rumania at eighty-three, to Moscow at eighty-eight. Neither distance nor plague nor rioting mobs dismayed him, neither snows nor desert. But no matter how grand the gesture or how revered the person, by himself he could accomplish little of lasting effect. Damascus, however, and similar instances repeated elsewhere, had by now awakened the collective conscience of the emancipated Jews of the West. As far as Palestine was concerned their object was as limited as possible: to provide a refuge for the persecuted Jews, not for themselves.
The Alliance established an agricultural training school near Jaffa in 1870. And meanwhile a trickle of colonists was beginning to come out from Russia, where colonization societies were springing up under the influence of writers inspired by the ideas of Hess and Kalischer. In Vienna a periodical, Ha Shahar (The Dawn), was the organ of these new voices. Its editor, Perez Smolenskin, published a book in 1873, The Eternal People, that had great effect among the Eastern Jews. It ridiculed the pet theory of the assimilationists that Israel survived only as a religion and insisted that the Jews were a living people. Its text, taken from Ecclesiastes, “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” has since been used over and over to express the cleavage between nationalists and assimilationists. In the same year Moses Lilienblum, another contributor to Ha Shahar, wrote his Rebirth of the Jewish People in the Land of its Ancestors; and other voices in Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy picked up the theme. Books, articles, and periodicals in Hebrew sprouted in Eastern Europe in the seventies. They indulged the Jewish passion for controversy, but they were dedicated in the main to the colonization of Palestine as a basis for the regeneration of Judaism.
They set people to thinking, but not yet to moving. The baying of the hound did that. Now it burst into the shrill chorus of yelps that precedes the kill. In Germany in the late seventies polemical anti-Semitism had been raging in party politics and the press, indulging the pseudoscientific theories in which the German mentality delights to wallow. Bismarck showed how it could be used to political advantage. In Easter week of 1881 in Russia the lesson was put into practice, and there began the modern era of political anti-Semitism in the form of conscious national policy instigated and fostered by the state. Within three days all of Western Russia from the Black Sea to the Baltic was smoking with the ruins of Jewish homes (to use the graphic words of Lucien Wolf). From Warsaw to Kiev to Odessa, through one hundred and sixty small villages, a mass savagery on a scale and to a degree of brutality unknown since the Middle Ages exploded upon the Jews and echoed around the world through the horrified reports of foreign envoys and journalists. Hitler added the concentration camp and the gas chamber, but otherwise he invented nothing. It had all been done before in Czarist Russia. Even the Nürnberg Laws had their prototype in the May Laws of 1882, which deliberately intended to make the Jews’ lives untenable, snatched homes and livelihood away, set whole villages to wandering, destroyed their already precarious economy, and constituted under the name of “Temporary Orders” a permanent pogrom.
The reasoning behind the outbreaks was the same as the Nazis’: to use the Jews in the classic role of scapegoat, to create a diversion from oncoming disaster, to draw off mass discontent from the governing class.
In the course of two years, 1881–82, the great majority of Jews in Russia learned what it took the Jews of Western Europe nearly a hundred years to learn: that emancipation would be illusory as long as it did not have the dignity of statehood to back it up. They came more quickly to nationalism because, not having won emancipation or committed themselves to assimilation, they had no cherished illusion that they could not bear to give up. They were not haunted by the specter of “double loyalty”: after the massacres and edicts and the mobs, what loyalty to Russia was left?
As Damascus called forth Hess, the 1881 pogroms called forth the famous pamphlet Auto-Emancipation by the Odessa physician Doctor Leo Pinsker. He sounded his call in the words of Rabbi Hillel, Judaism’s last great teacher before the fall of the Temple: “If I am not for myself who will be for me?” The Jews must emancipate themselves, Pinsker proclaimed. “We must re-establish ourselves as a living nation.” For long the Jews have lacked the desire to become a nation as a sick man lacks appetite, but the desire must be created. Without it they will remain a ghost people, ghosts of a dead nation walking alive among the living. The Jew is the eternal foreigner. Other foreigners always have a co
untry somewhere that claims their patriotism. Only the Jews have not, and without it they remain aliens everywhere. “What a contemptible role for a people that once had its Maccabees!” There is no use complaining of anti-Semitism; it will go on as long as the Jew remains a ghost and an alien. “There is something unnatural about a people without a territory just as there is about a man without a shadow.”
Pinsker urged that the existing Jewish societies call a national congress that should form a stock company to purchase land and organize the emigration and resettlement. He believed that the leaders of the movement must come from among the Western Jews who had the power, the money, the knowledge of affairs, although he did not expect them to join in the emigration. They were comfortable where they were and would stay there. Mass support would come from Russia and Poland, but no leaders: the environment could not produce them.
The leaders Pinsker hoped for were not yet ready, but the rank and file were stirring, and among them his efforts took effect. He called a conference at Kattowitz, near Cracow in Poland, and it convened on Montefiore’s hundredth birthday in 1884. It failed to produce a national congress, but something less was formed, an association for colonization in Palestine, of which Pinsker was named president. Later known from its headquarters as the Odessa Committee, it began the real work of gathering recruits for the Return. The workers called themselves Chovevé Zion (Lovers of Zion). Their meetings, proscribed by the police, were held by candlelight in little villages throughout the Pale. Students tramped the muddy roads distributing leaflets. At last the uprooting and the trek began. Little groups of settlers who had never cleared a field or ploughed a furrow were given the terrible labor of beginning the revival of a long-dead nation on the half-dead soil of Palestine.
As yet it was not a national movement. Herzl was still in his twenties, a dandy of the Viennese salons, writing graceful feuilletons and toying with the theater. He never read Pinsker. Others among the emancipated Jews who did read him resented and resisted the idea of a nation and a country. “It is a joke … you are feverish, you need a medicine,” said Dr. Adolf Jellinek, a famous Jewish scholar of Vienna when Pinsker went to see him. Jellinek recorded the conversation:
“I don’t see any other solution,” said Pinsker.
“But progress, civilization! Russia cannot forever remain as reactionary as it is!” Jellinek pleaded.
That was what they wanted to believe: that anti-Semitism was a phase. Progress would banish it in the end. Take care of its victims in the meanwhile. No radical solution was necessary.
Help from the West came, but no leadership. The grand dukes of Jewry would finance anything except political action. Baron de Hirsch tried to direct a mass emigration to the Argentine. Baron Edmond de Rothschild, almost alone among the Westerners, helped the infant settlements in Palestine. That they were able to gain a toehold at all and hold on to it was due to his support. He was regarded, for his pains, as an eccentric if not worse. The revival of Palestine at that time aroused no enthusiasm in the emancipated community. “With one alone it was a passion,” President Weizmann wrote later in his autobiography, “and that was Baron Edmond of Paris. A dozen men of his stamp and his capacity to help would have changed the history of Palestine and would have overcome completely the handicap of the anti-Zionist Jews and the hesitancies and oppositions in the non-Jewish world. We did not get them.”
For the moment we must stop in the eighties, for the real launching of the Zionist movement belongs to another era, and meanwhile England was slowly developing toward the future role of intermediary power. Emancipation had been a reciprocal process, acquainting the Jews with the culture of the West and beginning to make the West acquainted with the modern representatives of “God’s ancient people.” Lessing’s Nathan der Weise was modeled on his friend Mendelssohn. Byron’s Hebrew Melodies fix on the fatal lack of country half a century before Hess:
The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,
Mankind their country — Israel but the grave!
Byron, who died in the fight for Greek independence, was the champion of the generation that rebelled against tyranny of the Holy Alliance. He plucked the spirit of nationalism from the air and put it into verse. Mazzini in jail had three books with him, Tacitus, the Bible, and Byron. Nowhere else does the bell of liberty, the knell of the tyrant ring so loud and clear as in “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” best-known of the Hebrew Melodies. Nor was it merely a poetic rendering of heroic moments from the Old Testament. Byron seems somehow to have caught the still living spirit of Judaism, the pride that Disraeli was to express, the scorn of the gentile: “Live on in thy faith, but in mine I will die.”
There is the same spirit in Tom Moore’s lines:
Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea!
Jehovah hath triumphed! His people are free!
And Scott put it into Rebecca, who runs away with Ivanhoe though Rowena gets the man.* How Rebecca thrilled the avid public of the Waverley novels when she jumped to the parapet and defied the villainous Bois-Guilbert to take another step! And when she laments her people’s submission to their fate and regrets that “the sound of the trumpet wakes Judah no longer” she is expressing the nationalism of Scott’s and Byron’s generation, which was to reach the modern Jews several decades later.
When it did reach them it found an echo again in Victorian England as on the Continent. In France Dumas fils, the most popular playwright of his time, turned from love and consumption among the demimonde in La Dame aux camélias to, of all things, Jewish nationalism in La Femme du Claude. “The fixed territorial fatherland is again necessary to us,” announces the hero of this play written in 1873. In England a year later George Eliot turned to the “latest national question,” as Hess had called it, for the theme of one half of her peculiarly schizoid novel Daniel Deronda (1876). Its hero has hardly discovered his Jewish ancestry before he becomes overnight an ardent advocate of nationhood. “The idea that I am possessed with,” he says, “is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre.” Like all the productions of non-Jewish enthusiasts for the Return, Daniel never hesitates a moment over the problems that so harassed actual Jews—assimilation, anti-Semitism, Judaism as religion or as nationality, living dog or dead lion. The problem of reviving the desire for nationality never occurs to them, any more than the economics of the business—the actual physical process of getting to Palestine, of acquiring land, of making a living. They skip over all that to plunge at one stride into Palestine, where a revived Israel will emerge full grown like Athena. “Revive the organic centre,” exhorts Mordecai, Daniel’s inspirer, “look toward a land and a policy … a national life which has a voice among the peoples.… Redeem the soil, set up a standard … the world will gain as Israel gains … a new Judea poised between East and West, a covenant of reconciliation.”
George Eliot, like Shaftesbury and his followers, was taken with the idea, which seems so ironic today, that the new state would be a pacifying factor in the Middle East; as Mordecai says in the novel, “a neutral ground for the enmities of the East as Belgium is for the West.” In fact, her debt to Shaftesbury, though unacknowledged, must be considered. Her early years were hotly evangelical, and the favorite cause of the evangelical leaders can hardly have escaped her notice. Direct inspiration of the novel, however, came from her husband, George Lewes, who during a residence in Paris had been an intimate friend of Moses Hess.
Daniel Deronda, unlike Rebecca, conspicuously fails to run away with the novel. He is a wooden creature, far too noble and good for human nature’s daily food. George Eliot’s readers were much more interested in the marital adventures of the gorgeous Gwendolyn, whom Daniel ultimately rejects in favor of the Holy Land. On the whole the book did not impress the critics. Sir Leslie Stephen for one considered Daniel’s goal of restoring nationality to his people as “chimerical,” and the author’s choice of theme struck him as “showing a defe
ctive sense of humor.” If the book fails to come off by literary standards, it nevertheless had immense effect on the Jewish national movement. Lucien Wolf probably overrates its effect when he says that the book gave the movement “the strongest stimulus it had experienced since the appearance of Sabbatai Zevi.” Yet the American poet Emma Lazarus, when she adopted the cause of Jewish nationalism in 1883, referred to it as “the idea formulated by George Eliot,” as if it had originated with her.
Though Daniel and the consumptive Mordecai remain mock figures, George Eliot was in earnest. She developed the idea that was to play a role in Balfour’s thinking,* of the necessity of requiting a moral debt owed to the Jews. She was disgusted, she wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, to find educated people who “hardly know that Christ was a Jew” or who suppose that he spoke Greek. “A whole Christian is three-quarters a Jew,” she says in the novel. But she finds little recognition of the debt among average Englishmen, who regard Judaism as “a sort of eccentric fossilized form … something (no matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise.” She deliberately chose the theme of Daniel Deronda in a conscientious effort to improve the status of Jews vis-à-vis the English; and in a later article, “The Modern Hep Hep,” she hits upon the essential fact that only nationhood will solve the problem of the dispersion. The world needs “Some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will know how to use all favoring outward conditions, how to triumph over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of their foes and will steadfastly set their faces toward making their people once more one among nations.”
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