THEODOR HERZL, A LEGENDARY FIGURE:
MAY 2, 1860-MAY 2, 2010
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of Malca, z''l
The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth,
magnified by our greatness.-Theodor Herzl The Jewish State.
Benyamin Zev Herzl, the founder of the Zionist dream-"if you will it, it is no dream"-was born in Budapest on May 2, 1860.
Herzl, the author of The Jewish State, stirred the world of Eastern and Western European Jewry. The Jewish State reflects ideas that had slowly evolved in Herzl's mind during the period 1882-1896. Not only did Herzl declare the Jews to be a people, but he also emphasized that the Jews are one people. Herzl's nationalistic appeal to the Jewish people was heightened by its Messianic overtone. Herzl stimulated the old religious dream of a return to the Promised Land. Through his writing, The Jewish State, Herzl revealed an awareness of the power of nationalism. The rise of a Jewish state, Herzl was convinced, would put an end to antisemitism. A state, Herzl further stressed, is created by a nation's struggle for existence. In 1897 the World Zionist Congress became a reality due to Herzl's initiative.
Herzl greatly feared that many people would consider The Jewish State utopian. In many ways The Jewish State represented a complete break with the utopian tradition. The idea of The Jewish State was greeted with enthusiastic support by Jewish groups throughout Europe. Jewish students began to rally around Herzl, and soon he found himself the leader of a viable nationalist movement. In August 29-31, 1897, the First Zionist Congress was the first gathering of on a national basis. The congress adopted the program of the Zionist movement and established the World Zionist Organization as a political organization of the Jewish people! Herzl's place in Jewish history is on top of the mountain of Jewish pride and dreams.
Herzl transformed disparate Jewish masses into a proud unified people. He expressed the rebirth of the Jewish people as a sovereign nation, which was for him the condition for a solution to the "Jewish Problem." It was Herzl who initiated a new chapter in the history of the Jewish people: the State of Israel.
Herzl envisioned a Jewish State-he expressed himself often on this point-which was to be a land that blossomed brilliantly, loved liberty, was at peace with its neighbours, and a full member of the family of nations. The unity of the Jewish people stood as the focal point for Herzl's conception of Zionism; the Jewish State would exert a unifying power over Jews wherever they might be. In our days, the truth of this insight of Herzl's must be the only credo of the Jewish people.
At the Third Zionist Congress, Herzl declared: "The existing condition of the Jews can lead in any one of three directions: one is to continue dumbly to suffer insult and distress. The second is to rebel against hate in society about us. Our way is the third: We want to raise ourselves to a higher standard of life, to spread well-being, to build new highways for communications among peoples, and to find new expression for social justice, to create progress for mankind, which we serve." (Alex Bein. Theodor Herzl: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Zionism, Maurice Samuel, trans. (Meridian Books and the Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962.))
Am Israel Chai!
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute
for Jewish Research.)
THOROUGHLY MODERN THEODOR
Amnon Rubinstein
Forward, April 21, 2010
It is easy to mock Theodor Herzl and his vision of orchestras playing Viennese waltzes aboard ocean liners carrying Jewish immigrants to the Promised Land. After all, the father of modern Zionism failed to anticipate the rise of Arab nationalism, and the model Jewish state that he imagined in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-New Land) hardly resembles today's conflict-ridden Israel.
Yet Herzl's ideas are anything but archaic. Even as we mark the 150th anniversary of Herzl's birth, his vision of a Jewish state still seems-Viennese waltzes notwithstanding-surprisingly modern. It is a vision that has informed what is best about today's Israel, and that should serve as an inspiration as the Jewish state charts its future.
Of course, even before Herzl, there had been expressions of the desire to return to Zion, but these were mainly the domain of religious Jews. Indeed, world Jewry in the late 19th century was riven by ethnic, geographic, political and religious divisions. There were assimilationists and traditionalists, Western religious reformers and Eastern European socialists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim-all pulling in different directions. The non-Orthodox movements of Western and Central Europe did not speak to the traditional and Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. And by its own self-definition, the powerful Bundist movement, which emphasized Yiddish as the main manifestation of a Jewish cultural nationality, did not apply to non-Yiddish-speaking Jews.
Amid this cacophony, Herzl declared emphatically that the Jews were a people. Today, this may seem like a banal statement, but at the time, his insistence that the sophisticated Jews of Berlin shared a common destiny with the tribal Jews of Yemen was nothing less than revolutionary.
Herzl, however, was not content with mere declarations. One of his main achievements was developing the institutions of a worldwide national Jewish movement-annual congresses, an executive committee and financial arms. These were democratically governed, with men and women participating in electing representatives. (Herzl gave women voting rights in 1897, when no European country permitted women's suffrage in national elections.)
As Hebrew University historian Alexander Yakobson has noted, the Zionist idea was, from its very inception, a multicultural one. The First Zionist Congress, which opened in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, was a great multiethnic, multilingual spectacle-unique in Jewish history. Beside Max Nordau, Herzl's atheistic deputy, sat bearded Orthodox rabbis. Nordic faces mingled with Middle Eastern visages. Different tongues could be heard in the corridors, while in the plenum a German of sorts-dubbed "Congress Deutsch"-was the language of business. There were men and women, Jews and non-Jews, Orthodox and reformed rabbis, and even frocked ministers; the founder of the International Red Cross rubbed shoulders with pioneers from the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine.
When the Second Zionist Congress opened in 1898, pieces of Wagner's "Tannhäuser" were played in tribute to Herzl's fascination with the opera. In their quarters, Eastern European delegates sang the Yiddish songs they knew from their shtetl days. This was a taste of things to come-a portent of present-day Israel, with its diverse components. Herzl himself was well aware of the multiethnic nature of the Jewish people. As he wrote in an 1895 diary entry: "we are a historical entity, a nation made up of diverse anthropological elements. This also suffices for the Jewish state. No nation has uniformity of race."
Herzl did not speak of a single, uniform, all-encompassing identity for Jews, instead advocating a composite, multi-faceted one. In Altneuland, the Jewish state is made up of individuals with varied identities, and sometimes clashing visions. In the end, however, the political faction that emerges triumphant is a liberal, Western-oriented party that supports granting equal rights to all-Jews and non-Jews alike.
Herzl also affirmed the enduring reality of the Jewish Diaspora. To him, Jews were not necessarily all potential olim; those who did not wish to immigrate to Zion would remain in their host countries, full participants in the surrounding non-Jewish societies in which they live, but more secure for also having a nation-state of their own.
Finally, Herzl believed in the separation of religion and state: Rabbis should be confined to their synagogues in the same way as army officers are confined to their barracks. In the Jewish state, religious freedom and freedom from religion are both ensured.
Yet the Jewish state, as it exists in Altneuland, is not, as political theorist Shlomo Avineri has pointed out, a secular society: It rests on the pillars of Jewish tradition. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to a traditional Seder, replete with quotes from the Haggadah in Hebrew (as well as the presence of a Franciscan monk and a Russian priest as guests). Emigration from Europe to Zion is equated with the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from the Egyptian house of bondage.
Herzl's unique vision-simultaneously grounded in Jewish tradition and looking outward to engage with the wider world-finds perhaps its most striking expression in the two edifices he imagines co-existing in the Jerusalem of Altneuland. The first is the Palace of Peace, which celebrates universal values of peace, knowledge and equality under a Latin inscription stating that "nothing human is alien to me." This palace is a harbinger of both the United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice. The second structure is a rebuilt Jewish Temple. Joining the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock (not replacing it), this reconstruction of King Solomon's Temple is actually a grand synagogue. Its separate gallery for women reflects Orthodox practice, yet music is played there on Friday nights.
This is Herzl's Judaism: an inclusive religious tradition separated from the state, imbued with Western liberal values and combining the old with the new-offering inspiration, once again, to the world. Herzl imagines a Friday night in Jerusalem as follows: "throngs of worshippers made their way to the Temple and to the many synagogues.... there to pray to the God whose banner Israel had borne throughout the world for thousands of years."
Needless to say, history did not entirely follow Herzl's road map. Israel, from the moment of its creation, has not had one day of the peace that Herzl foresaw. (Contrary to Herzl's expectation, our Arab neighbors have not appreciated the economic advantages that the Jewish state brought to the region.) And it is an understatement to say that the liberal ideas espoused in Herzl's The Jewish State and Altneuland have not always emerged victorious in Israel. Nor, of course, have Israel's rabbis confined themselves to their synagogues (though neither is Israel a theocratic state of the sort that Herzl feared).
Still, Herzl's dream of a multi-cultural Jewish people, living in its ancestral homeland and sharing a democratic state-flawed as it may be-has indeed become reality. That alone is cause for celebration. And while other aspects of his dream have yet to be achieved, it's important to keep in mind that Herzl was ahead of his time-and, in many respects, of ours as well.
(Amnon Rubinstein, a law professor at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, has served as Israel's minister for education, science, energy and communications.)
