The Odessa Committee, headquarters of the Chovevé Zion, whose zeal far outran its funds, was amazed at the sums required merely to keep the first pioneers alive. Desperate delegates pleading in the capitals of Europe could collect no more than a few francs. Could Palestine ever be restored to fertility? Comfortably placed Jews, though they did not lack the desire to help their brethren caught under the hammer of the Russian pogroms, declined to put their money on so risky a proposition. Basically they were afraid of Palestine and of the prospects that it stirred up of a restored Jewish nationhood which would endanger the dream of assimilation into Western societies. They preferred Baron de Hirsch’s scheme of resettlement in Argentina to Baron Edmond’s passion for Palestine.
Among the grand dukes only Rothschild (after the death of Montefiore) had faith in Palestine. “The only salvation of the Jewish people is in bringing them back to the Holy Land,” he said. The family scoffed. They called his Palestine colonies “la fantaisie du Baron.” They wished that he would stick to his art collection, the only other passionate interest of his life, since he refused to concern himself with business affairs in the bank on the Rue Laffitte. Instead Baron Edmond listened to the thinkers and workers of the rising Jewish nationalism—to Pinsker, the author of Auto-Emancipation, to Netter of the Alliance, to Rabbi Mohilever, hard-working delegate of the Chovevé Zion, to Ahad-ha-Am, Socrates of the movement and the most influential voice speaking for the revival of Judaism as a living culture and a living religion.
So, in the ‘80’s, the return to Palestine began hesitantly, minutely, and without benefit of intermediary power. The movement was self-started by Jews, pushed at last to the realization that they must give up waiting for a miracle and take their fate into their own hands or perish. The pioneers acted on their own. There was as yet no second Cyrus to open the way, to say “Go back, resume your homeland.” The Sultan, it is true, had considered Cyrus’ role on the mistaken theory that Jewish wealth might be used to rescue his empire from its recurring fits of bankruptcy. Even the Kaiser, in a brief visionary moment when he granted an audience to Herzl in Palestine, toyed with the idea; but he quickly let it drop. English attention was absorbed elsewhere.
The Jews were stirring — talking, writing, persuading themselves. But so far the power, influence, and money required to build homes in Palestine was not behind them. A single Rothschild does not make a summer. It was easier for the average family seeking escape from the Pale to head for city life in New York or London. To stake a family’s future on belief in the future of Palestine and the future of the Jews as a nation required a heroic effort that few were prepared to make. Conditions were ready for an Exodus, but the Exodus was not ready for Palestine. Mobilization of a mass movement toward the old land had to wait for pressure in Europe to grow worse and for the emergence of a leader.
It did not have to wait long.
CHAPTER XVI
HERZL AND CHAMBERLAIN:
The First Territorial Offer
Suddenly, explosively, in the year 1896, a voice cracked out like a pistol shot: “I shall now put the question in the briefest possible form: Are we to ‘get out’ and where to?
“Or may we yet remain? And how long?”
Theodore Herzl, a Viennese journalist, quickly supplied the answer to his own rhetorical question. He stated that the Jews were a nation, must organize and behave as a nation, and must acquire the physical attributes of a nation: land and sovereignty. He cut through fifty years of verbiage in one word: statehood. His pamphlet was entitled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). A vast hedge of polemics known as the Jewish Question had in the preceding decades risen around the actual sufferers from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. Herzl crashed through the hedge on his opening page: “Everything depends on our propelling force. And what is that force? The misery of the Jews.” And he announced the remedy: “The Jewish state is essential to the world. It will therefore be created.… Let sovereignty be granted to us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”
Within eighteen months of the publication of Der Judenstaat Herzl, unknown till then in the Jewish world, had organized and convened the first Zionist Congress. Meeting biennially thereafter, it was to act as the organ of the state until statehood was accomplished fifty years later. With Herzl as president the first Congress of two hundred delegates from fifteen countries met at Basle in 1897 and launched, as was said, “the vessel of the Jewish state upon its way.”
Herzl was thirty-six when he wrote the Judenstaat. In eight years he was dead, burned out by the superhuman effort to wrest his people out of subjection into freedom. Though warned of a weak heart, he could not rest. The baying hound was running down its victims. A terrible sense of urgency raged in him against the frustrations, the obstructionism, the endless passion for controversy that he met inside Jewry and the delays, disappointments, and defeats that he met from the outside world. Moses survived the same difficulties over forty years and at last brought his nation to the frontier of the Promised Land, but Moses had the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night. When his enemies were upon him the Lord opened the Red Sea; when his people muttered and rebelled the Lord thundered and scolded; when they starved He sent down manna in the wilderness. But there was no extra-human assistance available when the Jews set out to recover the Promised Land at the end of the nineteenth century. Herzl emerged as a leader without benefit of burning bush. There were more profound thinkers than he in the movement, wiser men and steadier men and many, before and after him, equally devoted to the goal. But Herzl had that extra endowment that makes a leader, the sense of personal mission and destiny. Napoleon was born with it; Herzl acquired it when he discovered his goal. Moses, slow, reluctant, self-deprecating, lacked it until the Lord appeared to him, talked to him, propelled him. Herzl was no Moses in the sense of being a formative influence on mankind. He was, so to speak, half a Moses—the Exodus half, not the Ten Commandments half.
Neither he nor Moses came from the ranks of the sufferers to lead them out of bondage. Moses was brought up at the court of Pharaoh, Herzl in the comparatively comfortable circle of the emancipated and enlightened Jews of Vienna. Perhaps that was why they were able to lead. It was often said of Herzl that if he had known the Jews better he would never have had the courage for the task he set himself. Ussishkin, an opponent, once said that Herzl was fitted to lead Zionism because he knew neither the Jews, Palestine, nor Turkey, and added: “His eyes must not be opened; then his faith will be great.” Herzl’s eyes did open; his faith did lessen, but not his determination. No obstacle could daunt him. He never slackened, never stopped until his life stopped. His name and personality so dominate the scene that it is difficult to realize that he was active in the movement less than nine years, whereas Weizmann, for one, the future president of Israel, was active for sixty.
Herzl saw only the beginning. Moses had been shaken into action by the sight of an Egyptian beating an Israelite. For Herzl the blow of the Egyptian was Dühring’s brutal book summoning Western Europe to cancel the Jews’ civil rights and turn them back into the ghettos. He read it when he was twenty-two, and for twelve years thereafter he struggled with the “Jewish question” in his mind. It haunted his thoughts, intruded itself into the themes of projected novels and plays, pricked the joy of his success as the most admired writer on the staff of the most admired paper in Central Europe, the Neue Freie Presse. He had believed in the credo of nineteenth-century optimism, that progress would dispel prejudice, that gradually people would become too civilized to be anti-Semitic. But he read Gobineau, he read Dumont’s La France Juive. He experienced the anti-Semitic agitation in Austria and Germany. Progress was unaccountably going backward. Slowly the hope shriveled, revealed itself as an empty illusion. In 1890 a Russian edict enforcing the May laws prohibited Jews from residing in rural districts, owning or farming land, entering the universities, practicing the profession
s, or holding government jobs. But it was not the slow choking of the ghetto Jews that affected Herzl so much as the attacks on the position of the emancipated Jew in Austria-Hungary, in Germany, and even, bitterest disillusion of all, in France, the capital of reason.
Herzl was Paris correspondent for his paper when the Chamber rocked with the violence of the debates on the Panama scandal, in which Jewish figures were involved. Then came the Dreyfus Affair. It grew and grew like a Sahara sandstorm till all France was twisted by its violence. “A mort! A mort les Juifs!” howled the mob as Captain Dreyfus was led to trial in December 1894. Herzl, who was covering the trial, heard it then and for the rest of his life. “Where?” he wrote later in retrospect. “In France. In republican, modern, civilized France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.… Until that time most of us believed that the solution of the Jewish question was to be patiently waited for as part of the general development of mankind. But when a people, which in every other respect is so progressive and so highly civilized, can take such a turn, what are we to expect from other peoples, which have not even attained the level France attained a hundred years ago?”
A “curious excitement” began to seize him; a sense of things coming clear, of being on the edge of revelation, of the answer being within his grasp. He felt himself destined to be the instrument. For the next two years he grappled with it, he poured out schemes in his diaries, buttonholed friends and Jewish leaders, argued passionately, wrote letters to the Rothschilds, to Bismarck, to his editor, confronted Baron de Hirsch with a plan for a “Jewish national loan” to finance a mass emigration. But it must be emigration to a land under Jewish sovereignty: otherwise, he foresaw, the immigration could be stopped at any time—as was proved by the future experience under the British Mandate. Ideas raced through his mind, tumbled out upon scraps of paper wherever he was, “walking, standing, lying down, in the street, at table, in the night … more than once I was afraid I was going out of my mind.”
In five days he wrote a sixty-five-page pamphlet originally called Address to the Rothschilds, outlining a state complete from political independence to territorial integrity, with flags, parliament, army, laws, courts, “where we can live at least as free men on our own soil.” A friend, finding him sleepless and disheveled, was forced to listen while Herzl read the Address from beginning to end. The friend decided that it was the product of an overstrained mind and advised Herzl to rest and see a doctor. Herzl shook him off and went to work on a memorandum to be transmitted through a diplomatic acquaintance to the Kaiser. He entered into negotiations with the new Austrian prime minister, Count Badeni. He read the pamphlet to another friend, Güdemann, the chief Reform rabbi of Vienna, sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Munich. Dazed, the Rabbi wondered if perhaps he had seen Moses reborn. He offered timid encouragement. Others told Herzl that he was mad or “impractical.” The Rothschilds were silent, de Hirsch disapproving. His own editor refused to print a word on the subject. A visit to London brought encouragement. He was invited to address the Maccabaean Society, won adherents, and was asked to contribute an article to the Jewish Chronicle. In England this paper became, prophetically enough, the first to publish, in condensed form, the material later to appear as the Judenstaat. A month afterwards, under that title, a revised version of the pamphlet was published in Vienna.
This remarkable document and its extraordinary author, between them, accomplished what no one had been able to do so far: the political organization of a body of Jews for the purpose of regulating their own fate under their own authority. The banner was unfurled in the opening sentence: “The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is a restoration of the Jewish State.” There follows a discussion of anti-Semitism as the “propelling force.” The rest is a blueprint for building the state down to the last specification: creation of a governing society (the future Congress), financing, political planning, acquisition of land and a charter, gathering of emigrants, reception and organization “over there.”
Herzl hardly envisaged any difficulty in acquiring title to Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. He airily assumed that the Sultan would be open to a deal under which the Jews would “undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey.” Then, once the funding corporation was established, all plans “systematically settled beforehand,” provinces delimited, town sites chosen, streets laid out, the mass migration could begin. The first settlers, disposed and directed by the governing agency like a body of troops, would build roads, till the land, irrigate, build homes; gradually more would come, industries would be established, trade attracted, and through trade more settlers, and so on and on and up and up until there would arise “a State founded in a manner as yet unknown to history and with possibilities of success such as never occurred before.”
Der Judenstaat is full of flights of grandeur on wings of wishful thinking. Herzl was spectacularly wrong about the society, or future Congress, when he pictured it as a homogeneous body composed entirely of people in agreement with each other, with “no voting necessary.” He was even more mistaken in his analysis of anti-Semitism, which he naively believed would assist the emigration. “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want,” he wrote. Perhaps it is unfair to subject Herzl’s first thoughts to the unkind glare of hindsight. It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.
But Herzl made the one great necessary contribution: the intransigent insistence on land, sovereignty, and statehood. He insisted that the Jews come out in the open as a nation, that they act as a nation to obtain for themselves the legal rights that go with nationhood. Hitherto they had attempted to make gains by infiltration, by not arousing opposition, by being rewarded for good behavior. Emancipation was essentially a handout and as such, as Herzl realized, revocable. He activated the movement toward autonomy, compelled the Jews to abandon dependence on philanthropy and to organize according to modern recognized political rules for the management of their own destiny. “The basis,” he told the first Congress, “can only be that of recognized right and not of sufferance. We have had our fill of toleration. Our movement … aims at a publicly recognized, legal guarantee.”
Herzl expected antagonism and debate, but hardly the fury that the Judenstaat aroused. Generally speaking, the emancipated Jews felt themselves threatened by this wild man who would dispel the illusion of ultimate assimilation. They raged and stormed, called Herzl a madman, his state a chimera, his proposals, in the words of Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, founder of Reform Judaism in the United States, “the momentary inebriation of morbid minds.” At one moment Rabbi Güdemann, who could never resist Herzl’s spell, almost seemed won over.
“You have me completely on your side,” he said, as recorded in Herzl’s diary.
“ ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then speak in your Temple about it.’
“ ‘Excuse me!’ he cried out, terrified. ‘That won’t do. The people just don’t want to hear about it.’ “
Even the Chovevé Zion, wedded to modest piecemeal colonization, were surly and critical. They were the pioneers; who was this elegant frock-coated Dr. Herzl of Vienna, who knew nothing of Palestine and did not even write in Hebrew, to come along and tell them how to do it better? He had never even read Hess or Pinsker. (Astonishingly, this was true: Herzl confessed later that if he had read the Auto-Emancipation first, he would never have written the Judenstaat.) The disciples of Ahad-ha-Am’s “cultural Zionism,” who believed that the soul of Judaism had to be revived before the body and that the Jews must learn to feel themselves a nation before they could act as one, were aghast at Herzl’s plunging program. It went too fast, it skipped the soul, it would not work.
Yet the more the debate raged the more widely known the tract became. Inevitably its basic appeal—the appeal to dignity, to self-help, to stand up like a man—took ho
ld. This was the quality in Herzl’s own personality that impressed itself the most on others and reached out to something basic in Jewry, the conviction of superiority; the factor that, though hidden beneath centuries of humiliation, accounts for the unique phenomenon of their survival. In Herzl it was not hidden at all. Rather he insisted on it, as when, during an interview at the Vatican, he refused to kiss the Pope’s hand, or when he ruled that delegates to the first Zionist Congress must appear in frock coats and white ties. This gesture, although it irritated many, was deliberately planned to impress on the delegates themselves the dignity of their role as founders of a nation.
In Herzl himself the quality was hard to resist. It pushed him into leadership of the movement, brought him lieutenants, rallied followers to his banner. On his way to and from Constantinople, to which he went in the summer of 1896 to open negotiations with the Sultan, masses crowded the railroad platforms to see him, hailed him as Messiah and King, shouted the age-old cry “Next year in Jerusalem!” Already the rays of legend began to gather around him. By the time the Congress met at Basle enthusiasm, tension, and expectation, mounting over the last months, focused on him alone. “Everyone sat breathless as if in the presence of a miracle,” wrote an observer. When the magnificent figure, black-bearded like an Assyrian king, walked to the dais for the opening address, there was a burst of wild applause. His dark splendor, his spell-binding eyes were well known; but at that moment there was something more—an aura of royalty, as if the long-awaited scion of King David had appeared.