1
Theodor Herzl
1860–1904
PATHFINDER
On August 29, 1897, in the city of Basel in Switzerland, Theodor Herzl announced to the delegates at the first World Zionist Congress that “we are here to lay the cornerstone of the edifice that is to house the Jewish nation.” Tall, with majestic bearing, framed by a prophet’s black beard, Herzl conveyed a mystical presence on the dais. The cheering delegates responded “Long Live the King.” Herzl did not call for Jewish statehood at Basel, but in his diary a few days later, he predicted that “perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty,” the Jewish state will exist.
Herzl’s words have long been recalled for their prescience—and for the confidence they expressed in himself and in the Zionist organization that he founded in Basel. But, if they appeared to suggest smooth sailing to statehood, they were misleading. Despite his indefatigable personal efforts, success painfully eluded Herzl in his lifetime. The gestation of the state was a long and tumultuous process. Even today, two-thirds of a century after the establishment of Israel, debate rages over whether the Jews possess the wisdom to safeguard Herzl’s heritage.
Herzl, in The Jewish State, had only recently introduced Zionism as a movement into the lexicon of international politics. It is true that Jewish thinkers before him had alluded to Zionism, and that the vision of returning home had been kept alive in prayer for nearly two thousand years of Exile. “Next year in Jerusalem” was a promise repeated every day, though Jews did very little to realize it. “Zionism” at first referred to the sentiment of Jewish nationalism. Herzl, in devising a strategy and founding in Basel an organization to create a state, gave the word a specific, grander meaning.
Herzl was thirty-seven and at the peak of his powers when, on his own initiative, he convened the Zionist Congress. As an outsider, it took audacity to invite Jews to assemble for what was still his personal project. Even more daring was the vision itself. Rabbinic tradition held that only God, through the Messiah, His agent, had the power to bring His people home. In that sense, Herzl’s summons at Basel was a challenge to Judaism, but it was also an echo of the rising drumbeat of the secular nationalism spreading across Europe.
At the start of his journey, Herzl himself did not understand its revolutionary nature. A man of letters, raised as an assimilated Jew, he had been only barely interested in politics, much less Jewish politics. He was recognized as, at best, a minor literary talent yearning for public recognition. He had revealed no intrinsic disposition to lead. Nor did he anguish over Europe’s rising anti-Semitism. Herzl loved Vienna, his home city, not for its vibrant Jewish life but for its sophisticated German culture. Before embracing Zionism, Herzl, like many other Enlightenment Jews, had at times even considered conversion to Christianity.
* * *
Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 in Budapest, then a provincial capital of the Hapsburg Empire. Alluding to Zionism’s conflict with religion, he later described the house in which he was raised as “next to the synagogue where lately the rabbi denounced me from the pulpit in very sharp terms.” His parents, Enlightenment Jews, were among the first to accept Emancipation’s invitation to relocate their home outside the ghetto. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy merchant and banker; his mother, Jeanette, was the family’s literary intellectual. They did not deny their Jewishness, but rarely attended synagogue, and took for granted their ultimate acceptance as Jews into the larger German world.
Theodor’s parents enrolled him in a prominent Jewish day school, and, on his thirteenth birthday, invited friends to his bar mitzvah, which in their social circle was called a “confirmation.” In secondary school, Theodor was attracted to engineering, but he received poor marks in his technical studies. Private tutors supplemented his schoolwork and also instructed him in good manners and foreign languages.
As an adolescent, Herzl already showed a taste for literature, writing essays, poems, and stories in both German and Hungarian, often with nationalist or antireligious themes. None were on Jewish topics. At fifteen, he transferred to an esteemed Protestant academy, where he showed as much indifference to Christianity as to Judaism. At eighteen, his sister Pauline, a year older than he, died of typhoid fever, a tragedy that left him the unique object of family love and attention. With only final exams remaining until his graduation from the academy, the Herzls decided to move to Vienna, so Theodor could enroll in the fall semester in the imperial university, a center of Germanic learning.
Anti-Semitism was sharply on the rise when the Herzls arrived in Vienna. The Papacy’s recent loss of its historic rule over Rome to Italy’s democratic Risorgimento had inspired it to counterattack against secular liberalism, with which Jews were identified. The impact was particularly strong in Vienna, a Catholic city to which Jews had in recent years migrated in large numbers. Successful in commerce, finance, and the professions, the Jews had provoked laments among disaffected Viennese over the city’s “Judaization.” Though Emperor Franz Joseph was protective of Jews, political parties found anti-Semitism useful in appealing for the votes of both the working classes and the affluent non-Jewish bourgeoisie.
If young Herzl noticed anti-Semitism around him, it had little impact. Obviously, he did not give it much thought. He lived with his parents in a comfortable apartment in a fine quarter. He happily explored the city’s cafés and theaters and, when he returned to Budapest to sit for his final exams, he found his native city unbearably backward. At the university, he enrolled in the law school, but it was a practical move, since his real love was literature. He certainly did not perceive that the ethnic tolerance for which Vienna was known had diminished to a thin veneer.
At the university, about a fourth of the students were Jews, but it was not to them that Herzl turned in search of friends. On the contrary, he sought out the company of German nationalists, who thought of themselves as the student elite. Being Jewish and Hungarian, he was twice an outsider, required to demonstrate his credentials with an extra measure of intensity. The university and its student body, like Vienna itself, were at a tipping point. Though German nationalism still possessed traces of the Enlightenment’s liberal ideals, it was moving steadily toward a hostility to everything Jewish.
Herzl signed on to the practices of the young nationalists, who mimicked Prussia’s aristocracy. He joined Albia, a dueling fraternity, took lessons in fencing, and fought at least one ceremonial duel. He dressed elegantly and carried an ebony-handled walking stick. He embraced the swords, beer mugs, and caps that accompanied the university’s fraternity life.
Biographers have questioned whether Herzl’s student antics concealed a secret bond he felt to his Jewishness. Albia required a nom de combat, and Herzl chose Tancred, a figure from a novel by England’s Benjamin Disraeli, the celebrated writer-politician who was a Jewish convert to Christianity. Tancred, in the novel, promoted a vague Zionism. Herzl never spoke of any hidden allegiance but, much later, having been left with a sour memory of his student years, he mocked his attachment to the “stupid farces” of Christian university life.
Clearly insecure, Herzl was also very moody. Albia had brought him no real friends. Nor did he have romances. A notebook he kept—more intimate than his later diaries—reveals a discomfort with women, even a prudishness, which would reappear in his early published writing. Bored with his law studies, he spent much of his time reading novels in cafes. A friend described him as permanently enshrouded in melancholy, and among Herzl’s diary notes was the observation: “I can only be happy when I am absolutely miserable.”
Oddly, a book that made a major impact on him was Eugen Dühring’s The Jewish Question as a Problem of Race, Morals and Civilization.1 It was one of the works then fashionable among intellectuals across Europe. Inspired by Darwin’s genetic research, these works claimed a scientific basis for anti-Semitism. Dühring went beyond the standard religious and social origins of the anti-Jewish phobia to assert the Jews’ racial depravity. In Vienna, the book was a bestseller.
Dühring, from his seat at the University of Berlin, argued that the assimilation of Jews was poisoning German culture. Being inbred, the faults of the Jews had no prospect of fading away. He called Emancipation a terrible mistake and urged that Jews be re-confined to the ghettos. The backing of intellectuals of both right and left—and most notably the outspoken nationalism of the much admired composer Richard Wagner—added to the power of his argument.
Herzl, now twenty-two, was shaken by Dühring’s analysis, though comments he inscribed in his notes suggest he was more confused than angry. Parts of the book, he wrote, were “so informative that every Jew ought to read them.” The feeling conveyed by his words was that Dühring asserted some uncomfortable truths. Herzl surely was not alone among Jews of his time who asked themselves whether the scorn directed at them was justified.
Even years later, Herzl described the book as being “as full of hate as it is brilliant. The effect of Dühring’s book upon me was as if I had suddenly been hit over the head. I suppose this has been the experience of many a Western Jew who had already completely forgotten his national identity: the anti-Semites reawakened it in him.” As he grew older, he often cited Dühring as the real source of his immersion in the “Jewish Question.”
After reading Dühring, Herzl drifted away from his companions at Albia, who had grown increasingly hostile to him. In 1883, Albia organized a mourning ceremony for the recently deceased Wagner, sponsored by the Union of German Students. Herzl did not attend, but the press reported that the ceremony degenerated into anti-Semitic rioting. Herzl responded with a letter of resignation from the fraternity, which he signed “Tancred.” Albia’s board accepted the resignation on the condition that Herzl return his fraternity paraphernalia, including his beloved cap, sword, and drinking mug, which he did.
Even then, Herzl was not ready to abandon his Teutonic infatuations. He snubbed Kadima, a student society recently founded by Jewish students from Eastern Europe to combat anti-Semitism at the university. He also overlooked the appearance of Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and the young organization called Hibbat Zion. Instead, he spent his final years at the university testing his prospects as a playwright. One of the plays, titled The Disillusioned, dwelled on his personal anguish, while again skirting the Jewish Question. None of these plays was produced or published.
Depressed about his future as graduation approached, Herzl embarked, at his parents expense, on a tour of Europe. Over the years, family-sponsored tourism became a form of relief to tame his personal demons. Herzl spent much of his life, in fact, on trains speeding to distant places across Europe. These early journeys, from which he mailed back observations for publication, promoted his literary career. In time, the journeys served the cause of Zionism. But they also provided comfort to his troubled psyche.
Herzl finished his university studies in 1884, passed the exam for admission to the Vienna bar, and accepted a position as a lawyer in the Austrian court system. Among his postings was picturesque Salzburg, an experience he called “one of the happiest of my life.” But he understood the strict limits faced by Jews in the legal profession and, unlike other Jewish lawyers, he was not prepared to convert. More significantly, he disliked practicing law, so after a year in the courts, he resigned to seek fame and fortune as a writer.
The years that followed were the most rewarding of Herzl’s literary career. He wrote plays, stories, and, most notably, feuilletons, lighthearted sketches, an art form popular in the press of the day. Many were based on travels he undertook to persuade theater managers to produce his plays. He specialized in comedies, and a few that were produced received positive notices. They brought him a reputation as a sharp-eyed and witty social observer, as well as a sound craftsman, comfortable with a range of topics. But even the most sympathetic critics did not treat Herzl as a serious artist.
Though a recognizable celebrity in Vienna’s intellectual circles before he was thirty, Herzl suffered from an internal problem in being a Jew. In one of his letters to his parents about a reception he attended in Berlin, he sneered at “thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses, not a very refreshing sight.” From Rome, he once submitted a journal article describing the ancient ghetto, without once mentioning the Jews who lived there. Another time he admitted his irritation at having an anti-Semitic slur directed at him in a Mainz beer hall. Still, he did not once publicly acknowledge that he was Jewish.
Throughout these post-university years, Herzl continued to live with his parents. He grew the beard that complemented his dark, melancholy eyes and deep voice—and which came to serve as the flag of his identity. He seems to have had a few flings with women, one of whom may briefly have been a mistress. He was a familiar presence in theaters and literary salons, and he issued challenges to duels in response to slights, though nothing much came of them. He privately published two books of his works and, when they failed to produce an audience, he told a friend he was ready to give up his ambition of becoming a major writer.
In 1886, when he may have calculated that he ought to have a wife, Herzl met Julie Naschauer, an eighteen-year-old beauty from a socially prominent Jewish family. A tumultuous courtship ensued, during which the two did not see each other for months at a time. But three years later they married, and children soon arrived, one being a son, Hans, whom he did not have circumcised. Julie, however, was no substitute for his mother. The marriage, in which the partners conveyed little mutual ardor, or much else in common, was marred by recurring separations.
After the marriage, Herzl’s reputation as a playwright diminished sharply, and to regain a sense of well-being he again went traveling. The Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s most distinguished paper, agreed to publish his feuilletons from France. The paper, like many in the Emancipation era, was Jewish-owned and liberal, and had a wide readership, mainly among Jews, throughout German-speaking Europe. So favorably did Herzl’s articles impress his editors that in October 1891, they sent him a surprise offer of employment as their Paris correspondent. Herzl accepted it at once, changing the course of his life.
* * *
For a year he lived alone in a Paris hotel, seeing Julie and his family only on occasional visits to Vienna. Later he rented a spacious apartment and asked Julie to join him, neglecting to tell her he had also invited his parents to share it. The arrangement aggravated the marital discord, a condition Herzl seemed willing to ignore.
Herzl’s preoccupation was mastering the duties of a foreign correspondent, working conscientiously on matters that never before concerned him. He wrote on parliamentary elections and party politics, budgets and the stock exchange. He produced strong articles on the social conditions in fin-de-siècle France, where the rich lived in glittering excess while the working class suffered in poverty. “Paris got hold of me and shook me through and through,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. He also acquired an awareness of the impact that anti-Semitism had within France’s bubbling cauldron of political instability and social disorder.2
It is often said that the anti-Semitism which Herzl found in France made him a Zionist, but that is an oversimplification. France, if anything, forced on him a new sensitivity to anti-Semitism at home. In Vienna, Herzl had once noted in his diary, “the Jewish Question naturally lurked for me around every turn and corner. I sighed over it and made fun of it; I felt unhappy, but still it never really took hold.” It was his overall experience in France that primed him for a transformation.
In France, Herzl noted, Jews were blamed for all sorts of offenses. One of his newspaper articles covered street crowds shouting “Down with the Jews” during a scandal they had nothing to do with. He submitted a report of an elaborate military funeral, with full military honors, of a young Jewish officer who was killed in a duel with a notorious anti-Semite. The funeral showed, he wrote, that France’s anti-Semites, in acknowledging the humanity of Jews, had more decency, “one could almost say courtesy,” than Austria’s.
At first, he even spoke well of the intellectuals among France’s anti-Semites, who reminded him of Dühring, the racist scholar. He admired their wit and style, he said, and even urged his readers to confront their research for what it revealed about Jewish flaws. Ultimately, however, Paris led him beyond such evenhanded judgment, to a conclusion that Jewish patience would not undo the damage of anti-Semitism. In private letters, he now wrote of Western Europe as “enemy territory.”
The Jewish Question had captured Herzl at last. In a series of uncharacteristic delusional musings in his diary in June of 1895, he wrote of fighting duels in Vienna against famous anti-Semites and, if indicted, of defending his honor in show trials. He imagined standing for election to Austria’s parliament to serve as champion of the Jews. Most flamboyantly, he envisaged signing a peace treaty with the Pope, solemnized in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in which Austria’s Jews would agree to convert to Catholicism in return for the Vatican’s pledge to bring anti-Semitism to an end.
Yet, even as he dreamed of playing a role in their rescue, Herzl expressed doubts about whether the Jews had the capacity to unite into a viable community. “If the Jews ever ‘returned home’ one day,” he wrote in his diary, “they would discover on the next that they do not belong together. For centuries they have been rooted in diverse nationalisms; they differ from each other, group by group. The only thing they have in common is the pressure holding them together.” Having recently learned about Hibbat Zion, he contemplated making an inspection tour to take the measure of its Palestinian colonies.
On one occasion, Herzl’s musings on Palestine made a clear and harsh reference to the Arabs. “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border, securing employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country.… The removal of the poor,” he wrote, “must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Anti-Zionists have since pointed to these lines as evidence that even before The Jewish State appeared, Herzl intended to expel the Arabs. His defenders reply these were diary jottings drawn from delusional reveries. The idea of expulsion, like the idea of his fighting duels in Vienna, never appeared as formal proposals. To be sure, Arab expulsion—later called “population transfer”—in time entered into Zionist thinking, but there is no evidence it did so at Herzl’s behest. In fact, it probably did not need Herzl’s help.
These reveries came at what was for Herzl a psychological low point. During a holiday with a male friend at an Austrian spa, Herzl seemed especially gloomy about his future. The holiday began badly when a passerby shouted “dirty Jew” at him. In talks with his companion, he complained that Emancipation had created modern anti-Semitism by offering rights to Jews that Europe never intended to grant. Jews, as a result, behaved as “men who have served long prison sentences unjustly,” while being judged for their “anti-social qualities.”
This was Herzl’s theme in a play he wrote later that year called The New Ghetto, his first literary excursion into the Jewish Question. In it, he showed an unfamiliar concern for the Jews’ burdens, but he nonetheless came down harder on Jews than on Christian bigots. Modeling its hero on himself, he depicted a high-minded lawyer, son of generous parents and husband of a spoiled wife. His villain was a Jewish speculator for whose shady deals “the victims blame (all) Jews.” Herzl’s ambivalence at being a Jew clearly reemerged in the last act, which argued that Jews, in being wedded to the sins that perpetuate anti-Semitism, contribute to bringing its ills upon themselves.
On finishing the play, Herzl wrote to a friend, “I don’t want to be a sentimental, pathetic poet.… I want to unburden my heart.… There is a whole springtide still within me, and some day it may break into bloom.” Though these words possess a romantic, even self-pitying, ring, they hint at a recognition that he must give up his mystical self-image, in which he makes a deal with the Pope and fights duels to rescue Jews, in favor of a more practical course.
In 1894, soon after writing The New Ghetto, Herzl was assigned to cover the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain charged with treason as a spy. Like Herzl, Dreyfus belonged to a family of bourgeois, secular Jews who had prospered since Emancipation. Born within months of each other, both he and Dreyfus took their respective patriotisms for granted. Herzl grieved that anti-Semitism had cast a shadow over their feelings. As popular suspicions grew that the charges against Dreyfus were bogus, Herzl identified increasingly with the beleaguered French captain.
“A Jew who, as an officer on the general staff, has before him an honorable career,” he wrote in his newspaper, “cannot commit such a crime.” Herzl soon expressed his belief openly that Dreyfus had been framed.
As the trial dragged on, rabid mobs screamed anti-Semitic slogans daily on Paris streets. With France torn asunder, Dreyfus was found guilty and imprisoned. But four years later, the discovery of falsified documents within the general staff proved his innocence, and he was pardoned. In time, Dreyfus was fully exonerated and his military rank restored.
The case, however, revealed to Herzl that anti-Semitism—as Leo Pinsker once wrote—was an incurable European plague. The recognition seemed to relieve him of his ambivalence at being Jewish. The trial, he wrote, “embodies the desire of the vast majority of the French to condemn a Jew, and to condemn all Jews in this one Jew.” Dreyfus’s ultimate exoneration may have saved France’s integrity, he wrote, but the French Declaration of the Rights of Man had lost its meaning.
Herzl now embarked on devising a plan to carry out his mission to rescue the Jews. His plays were going nowhere; The New Ghetto had not even been staged. His editors in Vienna considered his Jewish concerns a distraction from his duties. He was thinking of making a study of the Jews in the Hapsburg Empire when a friend pointed out that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had made a huge impact in pre–Civil War America, and he shifted his aim to a novel. Finally Herzl admitted to himself that he had to go beyond his pen to save his people.
Yet, Herzl was unsure of how much of himself he was willing to give to the cause. A visit to Vienna, where he witnessed crowds cheering for a slate of anti-Semites campaigning for local offices, apparently made up his mind. “Out of the realm of the unconscious came the urge to go beyond words,” he wrote. Since reading Dühring, “it took at least thirteen years to conceive this simple idea” of direct action. “Only now do I realize how often I went past it.”
Copyright © 2015 by Milton Viorst
