ON THEODOR HERZL

...Because of his initial hubris, he saw some of the issues of the new Jewish history from a specious perspective...

...The violent incursion of this awareness into Herzl's life came about because his wealthy, selfdeluded, Jewishly attenuated surroundings had left him ill-prepared for it...

...And the mystery remains— how could such a dream come in the first place to a child so innocent of the depths of his Jewishness...

...On another level, however, he was a child of the Emancipation and especially the Enlightenment which proclaimed Utopian possibilities within human reach...

...It would appear that such a dream by pre-adolescent Herzl conveyed a profound yearning for Jewish leadership...

...While all leaders harbor resentment against their often recalcitrant followers, there is yet a special residue of anger and contempt in " T h e fact is — which I conceal from everybody — I have only an army of schnorrers...

...15 Amos Elon's " H e r z l " poses the issue—and the mystery—of the return of the marginal Jew...

...His power impulse would be consummated, perversely, in making possible and presiding over the people's elimination...

...By the same process, Herzl concluded that the times were propitious for the will of the Jewish people to overwhelm history's obstructions...

...some say it is Persian transliterated in Hebrew...

...I am at the head of boys, beggars, and schmucks...

...It was the convergence of defeat and reawakened memory of the promise of power as an instrument of Jewish redemption which projected Herzl, finally, into his Zionist passion...

...reason and human will had prompted German Reform rabbis to eliminate Jewish nationalism by fiat, on the faith that the new age had reduced Jewish statehood, but no other, to obsolescence...

...Above them is the saying: "God, Guardian of Israel (Psalm 121:4...

...We should form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism...

...In his later dealings with European leaders, Herzl justified Zionism as a way of helping rid Europe of its hated Jews, thereby lending validity to the principle that Jews are themselves the cause and the source of anti-Semitism...

...Everything tends to one and the same conclusion, which is expressed in the classic Berlin cry...

...What was the moment at which Herzl lost the lust for power and was seized by its higher manifestation, the p e o p l e ' s redemption...

...Such a prospect was conceivable only for one who, already consumed by the people's troubles, accepted its demise in a Uganda of physical and spiritual obliteration...

...He was a failed head of a family whose utter ruin culminated in suicide and apostasy...

...Perhaps this linkage to a Europe whose imperial permanence was a tenet of the age, and the presumptuous confrontation of "civilization gainst barbarism," were to cause Zionism its greatest distress...

...The transformation of society by Herzl was a failed writer, a failed playwright, a failed amateur gentile, in search of a Kingdom...

...All this notwithstanding, Herzl did sense the fires of Auschwitz, and therein lies his prophetic authenticity...

...It is easy enough to understand how the outsider drifts inexorably further and further away...

...This haunted him from the time his Jewish consciousness became more than a personal mortification...

...Such an explanation can tell us how Herzl was driven by unfulfilled and neurotic conditions to the threshold of Jewish leadership...

...He is the author of ETERNAL DISSENT, and of a forthcoming book of essays on Zionism entitled ISRAEL — PEOPLE AND NATION...

...mastery of his subject that he does not presume to theorize about Herzl's conversion...

...For the purpose of our discussion, it is not relevant whether or not Zionism has been validated, whether or not Reform Judaism or Jewish socialism have reversed their original, classical positions...

...thus, his flight back with wounded urgency, and his eruptive self-assertiveness as a Jew...

...it may have been hung on a wall...

...The second mystery is the writing on the base of the menorah, the platform for the two larger lions...

...ON THE COVER The plate on our cover comes from Persia and was probably a kind of amulet or protection in the home...

...It is psychologically true that the search for power, which is what the euphemism " c a u s e " often b e s p e a k s , was transmuted into a spiritual obsession which shattered egocentric drives and dissolved them into a union where the self became the instrument, not the wielder, of power, the instrument of power which obliterates prior and lesser perceptions of it...

...What is germane is that the t'shuvah by the alienated Jew is not the inevitable product of deterministic forces...

...and "Moses commanded us to keep the Torah...

...The Twelve Tribes of Israel gird the upper rim of the plate...

...The Sh'ma appears on the lower right rim and praises to God (Psalm 71:8) appear on the lower left...

...The aspirant to a kingdom became prisoner to his vision and to his intractable people...

...33:4...

...The 67th Psalm, woven through the branches of the menorah, was often used to guard the household...

...The classical syndrome is there — an assimilated family, condescension and contempt for the vestiges of Judaism in which the protagonist is still enveloped, tropism toward the hostile world...

...Elon draws to the surface complex psychological factors which played a dominant role, at least until Herzl was truly possessed by the Zionist vision...

...There was no other outlet either for inner gratificat i on or power (which is often a pathological compensation for the absence of gratification) save for the renewal of a twelve-year-old's dream...

...ON THEODOR HERZL David POlish HERZL, by AMOS ELON, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1975...

...The power which he sought, essentially as a deJudaized Jew, continued to elude him...

...The Stars of David, encircling the Islamic symbol of the crescent, are typical of Judaica from the Near East...

...At a convulsive moment in his Zionist life, Herzl, who had finally come upon his long elusive power, became swept up in the whirlwind of Jewish existence and was emptied of the need or the appetite for power...

...It is a goodly inheritance for the Congregation of Jacob" (Deut...

...The dream of power, frustrated and directed in successive endeavors until Herzl was left defeated and anguish-ridden, surfaced in Herzl's ultimate defeat, his inability to make his way as an alienated one...

...Two mysteries remain...

...There is psychological, if not historical validity to the thesis that Moses was an outsider in search of a cause whose hapless instrument, the people of Israel, was all that was available to him...

...There is no denying the latency of the messianic nature of the dream, but Herzl succeeded in repressing it until it erupted in later life...

...While Herzl was infuriated by Eugen Diihring's anti-Semitic book, The Jewish Question as a Racial, Ethical and Cultural Question, it also served to confirm some of his own antipathy toward J e w s . " H e r z l partially endorsed Diihring's criticism of the 'crookedness of Jewish morality.' The lack of 'ethical seriousness in many Jews is m e r c i l e s s l y exposed and characterized,' Herzl noted...

...Nothing in the odyssey of the alienated Jew requires that he return, and while pre-State Zionism can point to Herzl and the movement which he created, it was not the only alternative available to many Jews, and in fact exercised by them...

...some say it is coded Hebrew gematria...

...It cannot adequately explain his transformation into the possessed, not the possessor of the Zionist movement...

...In certain respects, a paradigm of the Return by the Ba'al T'shuvah is presented, a paradigm which is replicated in the lives of others like Pinsker, Hess, Einstein, possibly even Freud...

...But this alone does not explain other options to which Jews have resorted and continue to resort — faithful persistence in the assimilatory process, ignoring of anti-Semitism, suicide of the spirit and even of the body...

...T h e world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness...

...Political Zionism is predicated on the hypothesis that anti-Semitism makes Jews of us all...

...Only when he became subject to the grueling process of political mendicancy among Jewish and non-Jewish potentates, was his sense of explosive transformation arrested...

...Dialectically, one could offer the facile thesis that Herzl was flung from self-rejection to expulsion from the world he craved, and found shelter in a new world of his own making...

...Herzl was a failed writer, a failed playwright, a failed amateur gentile, in search of a Kingdom...

...To young Herzl he said, " G o announce to the Jews that I shall soon come and perform great wondrous deeds for my people and for all mankind...

...The power which he sought, essentially as a de-Judaized Jew, continued to elude him...

...The perceived solutions to the Jewish question were presented in absolutist and illusory terms...

...The essence of messianism is the attempted exploit of annihilating history, and Herzl, the secular messiah, found that it would not succumb to his power...

...It is conceivable that the most painstaking concern for the rights of Arabs in Palestine might not have mitigated their resistance to Jewish immigration...

...On one level of perception, Herzl and his followers rightly understood the Emancipation as enemy, not friend, of the Jewish people as a national entity...

...Yet it would be facile and untrue to what Herzl became to content ourselves with this "explanation" of his Zionist metamorphosis...

...Perhaps no s i n g l e episode, but a gradual metamorphosis, the need passing through upward stages, beginning with affronts to his person and ending with the realization that not he alone, but the people was the messiah, that no other destiny awaited him but to become spent in the service of the people...

...But the reverse drift is beyond explanation, and it is part of Elon's David Polish is past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis...

...Below them, on the right and left, are two sayings found in Deuteronomy: "This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Children of Israel...

...Perhaps full awareness of the problem might even have int i m i d a t e d the Z i o n i s t s . Perhaps Herzl's genius lay precisely in his euphoric and ecstatic visions, always plausible and realizable, which stirred the frenzied imagination of the Jewish people...

...to Herzl's left: his mother...

...Other components, as they were catalyzed in Herzl, intrude...

...At the age of twelve he had a dream in which the "King-Messiah" appeared to him and "carried me off . . . to h e a v e n . " The Messiah called to M o s e s , " F o r this child I have prayed...

...In an earlier, preZionist period, he had visualized the dissolution of the Jewish problem by planning to lead the Viennese Jews of childbearing age into the embrace of the Catholic Church...

...Perhaps the metamorphosis was consummated when Herzl surrendered to the anti-Ugandists, and acquiesced to the doctrine of Zionism as the liberation of Judaism as well as of the Jewish People...

...This grim option was also part of the Moses syndrome, and responding to it, Herzl finally shrank from the prospect...

...We could undertake the complete management of the finances of Turkey...

...Herzl was not only a failed careerist...

...Emancipation, with its stress on the liberation of the individual Jew through the demolition of Jewish national consciousness, presented certain opportunities which were considered viable...

...4:44...

...Yet in light of his life until the time of his Zionist revelation, the Jewish content of the dream was suppressed, while the exultation and elevation theme, the vision of lordship and power governed his life...

...However, some say it is Aramaic...

...It is a time of black illumination, during which the discovery is made that the inner door of the coveted world is bolted...

...It begins: "God be gracious unto us and bless us . . ." Above the menorah are the Ten Commandments, flanked by the Lions of Judah, symbolic guardians of the faith...

...There was only the anguish and the desolation of leadership, only the consigning of the self to the people...

...found it wanting, great numbers of Jews did not...

...But ultimately, the neurotic, power-driven, desperately unhappy, alienated Jew became transfigured into a self-abnegating secular messiah, devoid of hope for personal enhancement...

...Our experts agree the text is not Hebrew...

...The ordeal of Jewish leadership also purged Herzl of any pretensions of overcoming history in a single redemptive act...

...The date of the plate is one—experts we consulted placed it in a three hundred year range, somewhere within the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries...

...His is a formidable work of revealing the eruption of a longsupressed childhood dream when the time was ripe...

...Juden ' r a u s . ' " Elon has given the Jewish people and Jewish history a Herzl who passed through all the improbable psychological stages which disqualify for Jewish leadership, into the realm of Jewish authenticity...

...The colors, especially the brilliant blue, are characteristic of Persian art...

...Thus, with grand disregard for the Moslem population of Palestine, Herzl wrote, " T he holy places of Christendom could be placed under some form of exterritoria l i t y " — a s if there were no Islam, and as if Zionism's only concern with the indigenous population need be some "holy p l a c e s . " And oddly, Herzl the secularized, the former outsider, the target of Reform hostility, indulged in the idiom of those who saw the Jewish people as " a light to the nations...

...Once we begin to execute the p l a n , " he wrote in The Jewish State, "anti-Semitism will cease at once and e v e r y w h e r e ." Whatever the ultimate consequences of Jewish Statehood may be, Zionism and Israel have the spuriousness of such eschatological certainty...

...Equally illusory was " L e t sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe adequate to meet our rightful national requirements...

...Hess had his adventure with communism, and though he Theodor Herzl in center...

...We are constantly drawn to a consideration of what might be called the Moses syndrome, to which Freud called attention...

...Aided by Herzl's own compulsive need to write and preserve the record of his inner l i f e , Elon sets forth a clinical documentation of how the estranged one makes his way from the periphery to the center...

...Early in his Zionist conversion, his exuberance and confidence in his power were boundless...

...to Herzl's right: Israel Zangwill...

...Like Wiesel's madwoman in the doomed box-car headed for extermination, he saw the flames...

...we will attend to the r e s t . " Perhaps the most costly fallacy was the inability to perceive the Arab issue...

...One wonders not only how such a person could ever come to seek, then actually find his way into the Jewish world, but even more, how he could become a dominant leader of the Jews...

...This very extravagance had traumatic consequences when the Jewish people at last came up against reality...

...Another component which makes H e r z l ' s emergence into selfimmolation in the Zionist cause perplexing is the pronounced element of hostility toward Jews...

...We hope our readers can shed some more definitive light on these mysteries and we welcome their comments...

...Reform Judaism of the German and early American variety was e s s e n t i a l l y an alternativ e to Jewish national consciousness, and the legitimate heir of the Emancipation and the Napoleonic assault on Jewish nationality...