Herzl: Pariah, Parvenu, Political Zionist

...Individual Jews would carry their foibles not as individual weaknesses, but as representative of "Jewish traits...

...Jewish moral corruption had come about through the cruelty of history...

...Jacob, the hero of The New Ghetto, is secretly grateful at being befriended by a Christian...

...The "Jewish Question" began to afflict him when he read, in early February 1882, Eugen Diihring's recently published anti-Semitic tract, The Jewish Question as a Problem of Racial Character and Its Damage to the Existence of Peoples, Morals and Culture...

...In an age of stern law and order, Tsarist complicity in the pogroms shocked European opinion...

...Later, in his novel Altneuland, Herzl was to depict a circle of Viennese Jews engaged in vicious and demeaning mutual ridicule...

...On his route to Zionism, Herzl, the alien as parvenu, linked his search for personal authenticity to a new definition of the Jewish collective...

...More than that, Herzl's frenetic drive for fame and success—"I need success, I thrive only on success," he wrote in his diary in 1883—was a psychological strategem aimed at overcoming the taint of Jewishness...

...The screams grew more and more desperate...

...Suddenly he heard cries for succor in the night...

...Jews had been, before their dispersion, "proud and magnificent...

...The first was self-hate, and the feeling of inferiority—the nagging sense of being tainted, deformed by "Jewish traits...

...The historian Peter Gay has argued that Jewish self-hate in 19th century central Europe was a pathological phenomenon, afflicting only a few...

...Moreover, as Herzl later observed: "Strong nations are judged by their best sons...

...When it was suggested that as an up-and-coming writer he would do well to adopt a non-Jewish pen name, Herzl refused...

...Herzl considered his play The New Ghetto, written in the autumn of 1894, well before The Jewish State, his first major political contribution to a solution of the Jewish Question...

...Jacob, the idealistic lawyer, wishes to join in a struggle for the liberation of the exploited proletariat...

...In retrospect, as he then realized, the idea of a Jewish State had germinated 13 years earlier...

...view of Diihring's work, committed to his diaries, brimmed not only with rage, but also with grudging admiration...

...Accordingly, every deed by a Jew implicated—and sometimes compromised—all Jews...

...Jews are now inwardly free to apply universal standards to other Jews...

...What infuriated him was that Duhring believed these traits were fixed and determined...

...Jewish parvenus like Herzl, fearful of being branded cowards, could not...

...Government complicity in the pogroms and the May Decrees killed the promise of Russia's halting semi-liberalization during the 1860s and 1870s...

...Jews would always be perceived by others, and by themselves, as Jews first, as human beings second...

...Nevertheless, the inner tensions that wracked Herzl afflicted many Jews and, characteristically, those who made the-early transition to Zionism...

...The outline for the play came to him suddenly while he was sitting for his bust at the studio of the sculptor Samuel Beer...

...The Ghetto had rendered Jews "ugly" and "anti-social...

...Jews, in their own eyes, were not worth much...

...Typical of the passion for assimilation and acceptance, Herzl as a playwright became a guardian of the German language, master of a supple, sparkling German prose...

...Herzl observed that anti-Semitism had moved from the streets to the respectable halls of learning...

...As Stefan Zweig wrote of his youth in Vienna: "Unconsciously, Jews sought to escape the morally dubious, the unsavory, the shabby and unspiritual [stigma] that clung to business, to all that was mere commerce, . . . as though wanting to redeem themselves and their whole race from the curse of money...

...the weak, by their worst...

...The Tsarist May Decrees of 1882 sealed off all the roads from the crowded poverty-stricken cities of the Pale to the countryside and to the Russian interior...

...In a book review he committed to his diary in February 1882, Herzl observed that Jews had "a strange, alas, even a despised physiognomy...

...the British Parliament and the U.S...

...The historian Ismar Schorsch has shown that for many, German-Jewish identity co-existed in an easy harmony...

...Such attitudes intensified with the stock market crash of 1873, which led to a long economic depression lasting to the end of the decade...

...For Herzl, acceptance of the norms of the European world, involved, too, escaping the taint of Jewishness...

...Herzl believed that Jewish civic emancipation in Europe was irrevocable...

...In 19th century central Europe, in the first stages of industrialization, capitalism and its instruments—the stock exchange, investment banks—were judged ethically problematic...

...his great ambition was to have his plays performed at Vienna's Burgtheater...

...In conversation with this fellow Jewish artist, Herzl concluded, heatedly and excitedly, "It does a Jew no good to become an artist and free himself from the taint of money...

...Herzl's views were shared by the advocates of Jewish emancipation...

...Running like a thread through the play is the theme from a medieval Jewish chronicle, recounted by a rabbi, the story of Moses of Mainz: Just prior to the expulsion of Jews in the Rhineland during the 14th century, "There were signs and portents of trouble in Mainz...

...Recently, the German scholar Hans Dieter Hellige has insisted that self-hate was a generational problem, harrying Jews growing to adulthood in the 1870s and 1880s...

...Germans had a special term for the Jewish rendition of the German language, Mauschelsprache, which we can translate as "kike lingo...

...On perhaps a higher plane of analysis, Herzl emphasized the fatal unbalance in the relationship between a minority, formerly alien and suddenly emancipated, now seeking acceptance and integration, and the host majority...

...In The New Ghetto, Herzl depicted Jews, former pariahs, now become parvenus, as caught in a psychological trap, dominated inwardly by a majority whose acceptance they craved...

...As Duhring saw it, money-hungry materialism, lack of ethical scruple, servile and sycophantic imitation, were the dominant Jewish traits...

...Nehru in India, many of the fathers of the new African nations, were marginal men, just as Herzl was...

...Moreover, Jews had neither the political power nor social legitimacy to protect their position...

...Moreover, theater in Vienna was a national institution...

...As he wrote in 1895 after visiting the central synagogue in Paris at the Rue de la Victoire, "I took a look at the Paris Jews and saw a family likeness in their faces: bold, misshapen noses...

...Panic flight ensued, as thousands of Russian Jews crossed the Empire's western border, crowding into Brody on the Austrian frontier...

...In those decades, the sons of Jewish parvenus, raised in a society denigrating the commercial virtues and the gamut of "Jewish traits," sought to overcome their Jewish origins...

...But Diihring's racial theory left no room for Jewish improvement...

...theatrical talent brought glittering fame...

...Herzl followed a career path typical of his generation...

...Wracked by these ambivalences, Herzl, during his Paris years, reached for a freer, more detached understanding of the Jewish condition...

...While the generation of Herzl's parents still lived in a largely Jewish world of family, social and business connections, those born after were far more vulnerable and exposed psychologically, for they sought careers, status and self-respect in the non-Jewish world...

...Once offered full access to civil society, the Jewish character would improve...

...Become a majority sheltered by political sovereignty, the psychological dynamics of the "guest-host" relation would no longer plague Jews...

...Only in a society of their own could Jews escape the special Jewish condition...

...Arson and pillage on an unprecedented scale rendered tens of thousands of Jews homeless, and brought economic ruin to hundreds of thousands...

...In the Promised Land, Herzl observed in his Diary: "hooked noses . . . and bandy legs" might abound...

...Even after he wrote The Jewish State, he still conjured with the extravagant image of a mighty, parasitical and anti-social Jewish financial plutocracy...

...As a result, many Jews possessed the entreprenurial skills and talents to rise high, particularly in industrialization's early stages...

...His call for new civil disabilities and occupational restrictions would instead restore the pariah status of the Jews...

...Moses was moved in his heart and left the house...

...Jacob was, of course, the modern Moses of Mainz, cut off by the anomalies of the Jewish condition from human solidarities with the exploited...

...Jews shared the norms of their society, and sought to escape the "taint of trade...

...Such types were assimilated to a dominant foreign culture at the inner price of a self-denial that clashed with their consciousness of—and pride in—their origins...

...Clearly, many assimilated Jews were not tormented by their Jewish origins...

...Pogroms began in April 1881 and continued, sporadically, for three years...

...We cannot get out of the Ghetto...

...German culture and thought were at their zenith...

...they would no longer be a despised physiognomy, no longer the external marks of Jewish furtiveness...

...the sounds came from outside the ghetto...

...They would always be—and perceive themselves to be—on trial...

...It was not, however, the events in Russia that made Herzl feel, as he later recalled, "as if I had suddenly been hit over the head...

...Finally, in The New Ghetto, Herzl insisted that the special Jewish condition prevented Jews from joining ranks with the rest of humanity in a common struggle for social and political progress...

...Ahad Ha'am, the Russian Zionist maskil, could condemn duels as barbarically unJewish...

...The next morning Moses was found stabbed to death just outside the open gate of the ghetto...

...minorities let themselves be defined by others...

...One summer evening he sat studying the ancient books of our sages...

...In the new Jewish society Herzl depicted in his novel Altneuland, the Jewish scientist Steineck takes no offense at the Prussian Junker Kingscourt's criticism of other Jews, the society's "riff-raff"— "Fops, upstarts, bejeweled women...

...It was to just such figures that the masses flocked for leadership...

...By 1882, 23,000 had arrived, distraught and penniless, importuning European Jewish charities to pay their passage to America...

...Self-emancipation, through a Jewish State, was to consummate the project of emancipation and assimilation that was blocked in Europe...

...During the great creative flowering of the late 18th century, the German language had become the instrument of masters, such as Goethe and Schiller...

...He had internalized majority physical norms and stereotypes...

...furtive and cunning eyes...

...Anti-Semites, he observed in 1895, were "fully within their rights...

...Herzl's perceptions were not unique...

...Herzl had no quarrel with this characterization...

...Majorities outfitted themselves with virtues...

...Jews were, therefore, politically vulnerable and exposed...

...To Jews with a worldly education, Jewish culture was a benighted backwater...

...Mother, I hear someone cry for help,' he said and vanished into the dark...

...He had not been delivered of his Jewishness...

...The Germans were "a nation of poets and thinkers," because they had produced Goethe, Schiller and Kant...

...he considered Diihring's observations subtle and perceptive...

...Though now a star journalist for a liberal newspaper, Herzl was in a profession where Jews abounded, writing for a newspaper the anti-Semites called a "Jew paper...

...The proletariat lose their champion...

...Hence Jews could not rely on any host society for emancipation...

...Many, like Duhring, inveighed against "materialism," carried by the "Jewish spirit...

...All his hopes, talents and energies were directed to his career as a playwright...

...Pinsker's brochure was entitled Auto-Emancipation...

...More significant, Herzl's long reJacques Romberg teaches in the Department of History at the University of Toronto...

...Dogged by an overcompensating need to wipe out the taint of his Jewish origins, Jacob dies a tragic, wasted death...

...As Hannah Arendt observed, the prospect of acceptance into a cosmopolitan international society that celebrated talent over the accidents of birth was a powerful spur to the passion for fame so marked among Jewish "outsiders...

...Capitalism seemed a mysterious force, alien and hostile, set into motion by greed and cunning...

...The pogroms were widely reported in the Western press...

...The years 1881-82 were a turning point in Russian Jewish history, marking the beginning of the mass exodus to America, and the birth of Hovevei Zion, the Russian Zionist movement...

...In 1882, Herzl anticipated that intermarriage would eventually improve the Jewish physiognomy...

...Aliens in the Middle Ages, restricted to commercial pursuits, Jews were emancipated in an era of burgeoning industrialization...

...Jews lacked self-assurance, and, as a result, see-sawed between arrogance and servility, alternately stammering with happiness when accepted by non-Jews, and reverting to their old tribalistic sense of chosen-ness and superiority...

...In Europe Jews would be judged and judge themselves by special standards...

...Jews had become reactive, hollowed out...

...This insight marked the start of "three blessed weeks of ardor and labor...

...Enjoying success in the dominant culture, they seemed to have in their grasp the levers of power sought by the oppressed...

...But if Herzl had felt only Jewish self-hate, he would not have been burdened by the painful psychological ambivalences which he strained to resolve, and which ultimately brought him to Zionism...

...Congress discussed the Russian atrocities...

...Moreover, identification with the non-Jewish majority was laced with fury at the Christian oppressor, who had penned up Jews in ghettoes, barred all occupations to them except those most corrupting, and who refused to acknowledge responsibility for the botched end-product of their deeds...

...Balked, they rejoined their people in order to realize the project of assimilation through a campaign of collective self-emancipation...

...The Jews were viewed as "hagglers and crooks," because some Jews practised usury and financial speculation...

...Protest meetings were called...

...Herzl's parents had moved from Budapest, his birthplace, to Vienna in 1878, when he was 18...

...Later, Arthur Schnitzler was to recall how as students, they had watched the new Burgtheater being built...

...they had become avaricious because Christians blocked their access to all other occupations...

...When Leo Pinsker wrote Auto-Emancipation in 1881, it was Berlin as well as Kiev that assaulted his consciousness...

...In the image of the Jew, to which he assented, physical clumsiness, soft and round shoulders, the large nose and furtive eyes, were the palpable signs of Jewish surreptitious-ness...

...Herzl was to arrive at the same view in 1895...

...pouikal zionist One hundred years later, a look at the man who became obsessed with the "Jewish Question" jacques kornberg In June 1895, working from dawn to dusk on his political treatise, The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl recalled that he had first become preoccupied with the "Jewish Question" in 1882...

...But the economic success of former pariahs was deeply resented, for it threatened the old status order...

...Moreover, the rewards of assimilation eluded them, and they abided in a shadowy realm, half-accepted, half-scorned...

...His mother stopped him and asked him where he was going so late at night...

...The curse still clings...

...As usurers, Jews were veritable leeches in the Middle Ages, and, so Herzl admitted, remained so in modern times...

...Jewish sons whose fathers had established themselves in trade and commerce flowed into the arts and liberal professions...

...Majorities defined themselves...

...On another plane, Jews measured their self-esteem by the degree to which Christians accepted them...

...Only in a Jewish society could Jews become human beings first, and Jews second...

...Herzl sought the normalization of the Jews...

...In 1881 he joined the German nationalist dueling fraternity, Albia, and fought a duel in May of that year...

...The West was now no safety valve...

...For the next decade, until 1891 and his years as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, Herzl was disengaged from politics...

...Jewish nationalism—just as other nationalisms—recruited its first great statesman from the avant-garde of assimilation...

...Diihring's tract was a work of high intellect, rendered in masterly prose...

...Only a Jewish State and society could effect Jewish emancipation...

...The behavior of Jews would be imputed to their "Jewishness...

...Later, in Altneuland, when depicting Jews living in a Jewish society, Herzl singled out their modesty, born of self-confidence...

...Precisely for that reason, tensions would increase as Jews entered civil society...

...Dominion took its toll on several psychological levels...

...Herzl's well-known wish to have been born a Prussian Junker instead of a "Jew-boy" from Budapest co-existed explosively with the accumulated weight of his Jewish fury at 2,000 years of Christian maltreatment...

...despised traits were externalized, projected onto minorities...

...Politically secure and psychologically emancipated, Jews would be liberated from the vicious cycle of inner servility and arrogance, from the defensive loyalties of a besieged minority, and from their forced disengagement from universalistic solidarities...

...Punctuating the self-hate was a fierce Jewish pride in this Jewish people that had "held out through a century and a half of inhuman oppression...

...Perhaps resignation to his failed career as a playwright contributed to his detachment...

...Herzl sensed the vulnerability of the Jewish position in Europe...

...One case was that of Moses Ben Abraham, a worthy youth, son of a merchant, who wanted to be a scholar...

...Herzl was drawn to those pursuits that promised deliverance from "Jewish traits...

...Herzl's generation marked the transition among Jews from pariah to parvenu...

...For Herzl, Jews were not inclined to usury because of their innate avarice...

...Anti-Semitic stereotypes—the expressions of Herzl's Jewish self-hate—abound in his writings...

...Since then, he insisted, the problem had, "bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me...

...In some of his writings, he inveighed against cynical and rootless "Jewish cleverness...

...However, haunted by the (wholly unjustified) thought that he is a coward and lacks a sense of honor, he first must prove himself in a duel...

...You said," he reminded Herzl, "with a modestly conquering look at the walls rising up, 'I'll be in there one day.' " A youth from the Hungarian hinterland of the Dual Monarchy, Herzl was dazzled by Vienna's rich and sophisticated high culture...

...But anti-Semitism in post-emancipation Berlin, Vienna and Paris seemed to defeat the project of emancipation and assimilation even in the enlightened West...

...Indeed, the German-Jewish symbiosis spurred a Jewish creative flowering in the 19th century, producing the scholarly enterprise of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Neo-Orthodoxy, and Conservative and Liberal Judaism...