Herzl's Road to Zionism

BY SHLOMO AVINERI

A HEODOR HERZL'S MOST QUOTED statement, surrounded by an

almost prophetic aura, is undoubtedly the entry in his diary written after
the conclusion of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, "In Basel I
have founded the Jewish state." To this he added wistfully: "Were I to state
this loudly today, the response would be universal derision. Perhaps in
five years, certainly in fifty years, all will admit it." Fifty-one years later,
in 1948, Israel gained its independence under the leadership of David
Ben-Gurion.
For all its almost mystical bravura, the famous statement conceals
more than it reveals: Herzl's first choice was not Basel, nor did he initially
intend to convene a public congress. As his diaries clearly show, his orig-
inal policy options were quite different, and only a combination of fail-
ures, contingencies, and sheer serendipity—those inscrutable building-
blocks of so much of history's tortured process—led him to Basel and
to what eventually became a winning strategy of Zionist politics and
diplomacy.
First, as to the venue: When Herzl became aware that only a public—
and well-publicized—world gathering of Jews might grant him the break-
through he was seeking for his ideas, his first choice was Munich, a major
metropolis in powerful Germany, not a mid-size provincial town in
Switzerland. At that time, Munich boasted a vibrant artistic, intellectual,
and architectural life, and was also conveniently located for easy railway
access to most areas in Central and Eastern Europe, from where most of
the delegates were to come. It also had a sizeable Jewish community.
Ironically, however, it was the rabbis and leaders of the Jewish Kultus-
gemeinde of Munich who foiled Herzl's attempt to inscribe the name of
Munich in the annals of Jewish history. But for their refusal to have the
congress meet in their city, Herzl's statement would probably have been:
"In Munich I have founded the Jewish state."
The reason the worthies of the Jewish community of Munich recoiled
in horror from being involved in any way in Herzl's project can well be
understood. Wealthy and prosperous, viewing themselves as proud Jews
as well as ardent German subjects, the Jewish community leaders of Mu-
nich found it offensive and imprudent to be even indirectly associated
with the outlandish idea of a political movement calling for the return of
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Jews to Zion—it might cast aspersions on their German patriotism and

their loyalty to the recently unified German Reich; it could even raise the
disturbing specter of double loyalty. It is to these considerations that the
Zionist movement owes its luck of not being associated with a city that
would have its own symbolic resonance in other, far darker chapters of
modern European and Jewish history.
Having been singed by this rebuttal, Herzl lowered his sights and, rather
than looking for an alternative major metropolitan center in a major
country, began looking for a less visible venue. Switzerland presented it-
self as a viable alternative—again, due to its centrality regarding train
connections, but also due to its political marginality. By this time Herzl
was already treading carefully, and, as his correspondence and diary sug-
gest, he passed over the obvious choice, Zurich, fearing a similar rejec-
tion from the leaders of what was then—as it is now—the major Jewish
community in Switzerland.
There was, however, another reason. Zurich, with its cosmopolitan at-
mosphere, had over decades been the magnet for revolutionaries from
around the world, who found its atmosphere congenial as a place of
refuge and asylum (Lenin was to spend some time there later); it thus be-
came known as a hotbed of anarchism and sedition. Herzl was adamant
in presenting his nascent movement as eminently respectable and un-
threatening to the powers-that-be, unconnected in any way with the seedy
political refugees, suspicious-looking revolutionaries, and bomb-throwers
associated with the emigre culture of Zurich. Hence the choice of laid-
back Basel. Even its Jewish community, one of Herzl's correspondents
wrote him, was insignificant: "It cannot help us much— but neither can
it hurt us," wrote the Zurich lawyer David Farbstein, one of Herzl's ear-
liest supporters.
Herzl was also satisfied that, despite its small Jewish population, Basel
did possess a kosher restaurant, which would make it possible to draw
observing Orthodox Jews to the congress. While himself wholly nonob-
servant (during the congress itself he complained about having to eat the
unpalatable kosher food offered in what was obviously an indifferent eat-
ing house), Herzl was respectful of the symbolic meaning of religious tra-
ditions and understood that in order to succeed, the Zionist movement
would need at least some support from Orthodox quarters. How impor-
tant this symbolism was to Herzl is also evident from his decision to go
to the synagogue in Basel on the Sabbath preceding the opening of the
congress. He was honored with an aliyah to the Torah, and though never
a synagogue-goer, he did confide to his diary that the occasion moved him
deeply—even more than his own speech at the opening of the congress
the next day.
Having become the venue for the first Zionist Congress through a se-
 H E R Z L ' S ROAD TO Z I O N I S M / 5

ries of unlikely causes, Basel eventually developed into the virtual capi-
tal of the Zionist movement in its first phrase. Out of the eleven Zionist
congresses that met before the outbreak of World War I, seven met in
Basel; at one point Herzl even contemplated asking one of his associates,
the well-known architect Oscar Marmorek, to draw up plans for a "Con-
gress Hall" in Basel, but the idea never materialized.
Yet convening a congress was not, in the first instance, the way Herzl
imagined promoting and achieving his ideas. When Herzl set himself the
task, in the summer of 1895, of addressing "the Jewish Question," he was
at first utterly at a loss how to go about it. As the evidence of his diaries
suggests, he initially played with the idea of writing a popular novel
about the plight of the Jews and their deliverance in a Jewish state. He
started collecting material and making notes for it, hoping to reach a wide
audience through a literary medium. (Eventually, Herzl carried out an-
other version of this idea in his Utopian novel Altneuland ["Old-New
Land"], but by then the Zionist movement had already been launched.)
Basically Herzl thought that he would achieve his goal of creating a Jew-
ish commonwealth by attracting to his vision the European Jewish mon-
eyed aristocracy. These were the heads of the Jewish merchant banking
houses whose influence and financial power stood at that time at their
pinnacle, even as they evoked (and Herzl was well aware of this) the kind
of anti-Semitism which claimed that, through their money, the Jews ruled
the world.
Herzl had in mind primarily two banking magnates: Baron de Hirsch,
known for extending to the Ottoman Empire the credit that made, among
other things, the building of railways there possible, and who was already
involved in Jewish philanthropy, mainly by supporting the establishment
of Jewish agricultural settlements in Argentina; and the Paris Rothschilds,
who were already known for their support of some of the first Jewish vil-
lages in Palestine, which they had rescued from bankruptcy.
Herzl's initial plan was to present himself before these financiers and
convince them that he held the only key to the solution of the Jewish prob-
lem: the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth, preferably in Pales-
tine (though at that time, mainly in deference to Hirsch's philanthropic
projects in Argentina, he did not rule out South America as an option).
As these ideas were being formed in Herzl's mind in 1895, he was about
to return to Vienna after a few years' stay in Paris as the correspondent
for the prestigious Viennese liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse. He was
also known as a playwright, some of whose plays had been performed,
to modest acclaim, in Vienna. Yet he was not a public figure, had as yet
no organization or financial support behind him, and was basically speak-
ing for himself. The idea that he could just walk into Hirsch's or Roth-
schild's gilded chambers and charm them into following his plans was
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totally unrealistic, even ridiculous, and was obviously doomed to fail. Nor
did Herzl, for all his political acumen, realize that the last people likely
to get involved in such a revolutionary scheme were Jewish financiers, pil-
lars of the economic and political international order, who would do
nothing to upset it or their role in it. They might contribute handsomely
to Jewish philanthropies, as they did; but the last thing they would dare
to get involved in was Jewish independent politics.
Yet Herzl failed to perceive this. He thought that his idea could be
launched if a significant number of Jewish bankers would form a "Soci-
ety of Jews" to finance the enterprise, or if a Jewish Council of Notables
could be convened. He did gain access to Baron de Hirsch in his Paris
mansion, but the outcome was embarrassing. Herzl had prepared a
lengthy oration, and the baron, who probably expected another Jewish
petitioner for another Jewish philanthropic cause, was taken aback and
cut him off virtually in mid-sentence; Herzl was politely shown the door.
He continued to bombard Hirsch with memoranda, but never got another
chance to present his case.
For a proposed meeting with the Rothschilds he prepared himself in a
more organized way. Herzl hoped to be able to address the whole House
of Rothschild at one of their estates, but his attempts to arrange an au-
dience never succeeded. However, out of the careful notes he prepared as
the basis for his "Address to the House of Rothschild," he put together
most of the material he would use in his brochure Der Judenstaat ["The
Jewish State"], which he published the following year and which became
the founding manifesto of the Zionist movement.
When the attempt to gain the attention and support of Jewish merchant
bankers failed—as did a similar attempt to enlist the support of Vi-
enna's chief rabbi—Herzl moved to an equally unsuccessful attempt to
gain the support of major world leaders. His diaries for 1895-96 abound
in feverish correspondence with a host of personalities, Jewish and non-
Jewish, some eminently respectable, others less so, aimed at getting him
access to the major courts and chancelleries of Europe and the Ottoman
Empire. All these attempts failed, as they were doomed to. What serious
statesman or king would deign to listen to a little-known journalist and
playwright who thought that he and he alone knew how to solve one of
Europe's most vexing problems, the so-called Jewish question? As many
entries in his diaries attest, Herzl was aware that many of his interlocu-
tors may well have considered him a crackpot, if not a confidence man;
nonetheless, he tried again and again—in vain.
It was only after he had failed to get access to the powers-that-be that
he decided to go public and try to build up a popular movement. Herzl's
failures with Jewish bankers and world leaders convinced him that as a
purely private person he was powerless and destined to remain so. Being
 H E R Z L ' S ROAD TO Z I O N I S M / 7

a journalist and a chronicler of European political life, Herzl eventually

realized that he needed public support—an organization, a funding
source (until then all his efforts had been financed by his own and his fa-
ther's limited resources). He had to speak for a movement, for an orga-
nization, for masses of people; only then would he be taken seriously and
be listened to. Thus the idea of convening a congress came into being.
It is also significant that in the course of his frantic and futile attempts
to reach Jewish magnates and world leaders, Herzl's own network of
friends, supporters, and useful contacts constantly widened. To his own
surprise, he learned that he was not the first to invent the Zionist wheel,
that in Eastern Europe there already existed a network, albeit small yet
with some resonance, called Hovevei Zion ("The Lovers of Zion"), that
was supporting the few Jewish agricultural settlements already estab-
lished in Palestine. He now also became aware for the first time of the
Hebrew Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) in Eastern Europe and
the literary revival of the Hebrew language among some members of the
Jewish intelligentsia in Galicia, Lithuania, and southern Russia.
Thus the Zionist Congress was born, and the idea became flesh. Herzl
himself commented ruefully that if the rich Jews would not follow him,
the masses would. Strictly speaking, the masses never did flock to Herzl's
movement. However, out of the failure of his attempt to enlist the rich
and the powerful, there grew the Zionist movement as we know it —
based on voluntary membership, developing representative and elected
institutions and fund-raising structures, engaging in education, propa-
ganda, and political lobbying—in short, "the state in the making" (ha-
medinah ba-derekh) that was to become the World Zionist Organization
and as such the underpinning of the eventual structure of the State of Is-
rael. In this sense the statement "In Basel I have founded the Jewish
State" transcends its boastful bravura intent. The entity created in
Basel—paradoxically owing its genesis to the failures of Herzl's initial
strategies—did indeed become the foundation of the very institutional
structures that made possible the emergence of the Jewish state and de-
termined to a large extent the contours of the representative, democra-
tic, liberal, consensus-seeking, and coalition-building nature of Zionist
and eventually Israeli politics.
The first Zionist Congress was not an elected body but a gathering of
individuals who came in response to Herzl's invitation. Although he was
still merely a private person, Herzl's name had become moderately known
in Jewish circles due to the publication of The Jewish State in 1896. But
the lawyers, doctors, writers, journalists, poets, and intellectuals who met
in the staid and stuffy bourgeois atmosphere of the Basel Civic Union,
known as the Stadt-Casino, felt that, even though they were not elected,
they were doing something quite revolutionary and representative of the
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Zeitgeist: they were reconstituting Jewish political life. The members of

the congress saw themselves—and Herzl's diary entries attest to this
repeatedly—as a Constituent or National Assembly, creating, by its very
existence, something that Jews had not possessed for a long time, a Jew-
ish political will institutionalized. The painting by Menachem Okin of the
opening of the congress, melodramatic and stylized in the way it pictures
Herzl in front of the delegates, clearly suggests an Assemblee Nationale,
a Reichstag — the rebirth of a nation.
With this in mind, the delegates set out to create both the infrastruc-
ture and the legitimacy of the movement they called into being by their
very meeting. The next congress was already elected on the basis of a vol-
untary membership fee, the symbolic shekel, evoking memories of the
contributions made by Jews all over the Roman Empire to the coffers of
the Temple in Jerusalem during the Second Commonwealth. This form
of payment became both the initial financial basis for the organization
as well as a symbol of its legitimacy and a mark of participation and
membership in the newly created national enterprise. Every Jewish per-
son paying the shekel—whose cost was computed in every country in its
own currency — was entitled to vote in elections for delegates to the con-
gress, which was to meet annually. At the Second Congress, meeting once
again in Basel in 1898, an overwhelming majority decided that women
who paid the shekel would have equal rights to vote and be elected to the
congress — this at a time when women did not yet enjoy the suffrage in
any European country or in the United States.
The organization of the congress and the nascent Zionist movement fol-
lowed in the best traditions of European parliamentary life. Congress de-
bates were public, and verbatim reports of the debates of each congress
were published soon after its adjournment; in addition to plenary ses-
sions, committees (on finance, education, membership, etc.) were estab-
lished; between annual congresses an elected executive ran the affairs of
the organization. Herzl himself was elected president of the congress
and of the movement. Early on, factions emerged, first informally and
later in a more structured form, giving rise to the eventual political par-
ties that contested elections for congress—"general" (i.e., liberal) Zion-
ists, socialist Zionists of various stripes, religious Zionists (Mizrachi), and
so forth. The politics of coalition-building and inclusion gave rise to the
need for political compromise, especially on issues like religion, with the
Zionist movement—basically secular and nonobservant—nonetheless
expressing respect for religious sentiments and traditions. Last but not
least, as recently shown in Michael Berkowitz's perceptive study, this
amalgam of modernity and tradition gave rise to the grammar of a mod-
ern Jewish national culture, encompassing literature, festivals, symbols,
ceremonies, visual arts, and political procedures and activity. The line
 H E R Z L ' S ROAD TO Z I O N I S M / 9

from Basel to the present achievements and tribulations of Israeli polit-

ical life and culture is clear.

The Roots of Herzl's Zionism

Any assessment of Herzl's historical stature must, of course, try to re-
spond to a fundamental question regarding the very core of his intellec-
tual odyssey: what made Herzl, a successfully integrated cultural figure
in fin de siecle Vienna, move from his initial liberal-integrationist posi-
tion—one shared with so many other acculturated, comfortable Jewish
intellectuals of his generation in the German-speaking world—to what
at the time surely looked bizarre, advocacy for a Jewish state? In fact, this
trajectory had already been followed before Herzl, but with hardly more
than a ripple effect on the course of history, by such disparate people as
Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker. Yet the specifics are always intriguing, in
the case of Herzl even more so than most people are aware of, including
those versed in Zionist history and myth.
The conventional wisdom is that what triggered Herzl's Zionist trajec-
tory was the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl was present in Paris as a correspon-
dent for his Viennese newspaper during the first phase of the protracted
affair. He reported, with indignation and obvious pain, on the travesty
of justice visited upon the hapless captain; he was present and reported
again, with barely suppressed anger, on the public degradation of Drey-
fus, when he was deprived of his commission after his first guilty
sentence—his epaulets removed, his sword symbolically broken—all in
a public military ceremony intended specifically to humiliate and de-
grade. Yet, on the evidence of Herzl's own diaries and correspondence,
it would be wrong to see the Dreyfus Affair as responsible for his quest
for a national solution to the plight of the Jews and for his despair over
the fate of the European liberal dream.
The picture is more complicated, and the reasons for Herzl's change of
heart are multiple. Though Herzl did report frequently about the first
phase of the Dreyfus Affair (the later and politically much more stormy
stages occurred when he was already back in Vienna and after he had
launched the first Zionist Congress), there is hardly any reference in his
reports and dispatches to the Jewish angle of the matter. What Herzl
stressed in his reports (which he later also published in the collection of
his articles from the Paris period in the volume Palais Bourbon) was the
general xenophobia and chauvinism characterizing French public life; its
rabid anti-German revanchism (for many French nationalists Dreyfus
was primarily an Alsatian, with a suspect sympathy for Germany, which
had annexed Alsace-Lorraine in the wake of France's defeat in 1870 - 71);
the venality of the French press; the corruption of French parliamentary
10 / A M E R I C A N JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1 9 9 8

life; the unholy alliance among politicians, churchmen, and generals; the
travesty of military justice; the vulgar populist outpourings of French
politicians; and the masses' quest for a sacrificial lamb. Dreyfus's Jew-
ishness is hardly mentioned by Herzl.
Moreover, the perusal of Herzl's diaries, covering hundreds of pages
for the period 1895-1904, fails to come up with more than a couple of
mentions of Dreyfus's name. His release from Devil's Island hardly mer-
ited more than half a sentence in the diaries, and even this was tucked
away in a passage about a conversation with an Austrian politician.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with 1890s Vi-
enna, or to any sensitive reader of Herzl's diaries. The sources of Herzl's
skepticism about the failure of European liberalism and its internal
fragility are deeply engraved in his own biography. The diaries reveal
how much it was the development of politics and culture in his native
Austro-Hungarian ambience, rather than French affairs, that left an in-
delible mark on his assessment of European politics and the future of the
Jews. Incidentally, the number of Jews in France at that time was around
100,000, while more than two million Jews lived in the lands of the Habs-
burg Empire, encompassing not only Austria and Hungary proper, but
also such centers of Jewish population as Bohemia, Slovakia, Galicia,
Transylvania, and Bukovina.
After all, it was in his student days at the Law Faculty of Vienna Uni-
versity that Herzl found himself, like many other Jewish students, ex-
cluded from the local student fraternities (the Burschenschaften), because
the Austrian fraternities, under the influence of anti-Semitic politicians
and writers like Schoenerer and his Pan-German movement, were the first
to exclude "non-Aryans" from their midst. It was the Vienna of the 1890s
that also saw the emergence of a populist-nationalist movement, the
Christian Social Party, led by Dr. Karl Lueger, whose xenophobic and
anti-Semitic politics catapulted him, by popular choice and against the
express wishes of the liberal government of Emperor Franz Joseph, to
the post of mayor of Vienna—the first time an avowedly anti-Semitic
politician was elected to public office in open, free elections anywhere in
19th-century Europe. It was in Vienna, not in Paris, that Herzl saw the
collapse of the liberal, integrationist dream under the pressure of pop-
ulist rabble-rousers, using the vote and the representative system to trans-
fer political power from liberal to conservative politicians.
Herzl acknowledged this over and over in his diaries and correspon-
dence: "I will fight anti-Semitism in the place it originated—in Germany
and in Austria," he said in one letter. He identified the genealogy of mod-
ern, racist anti-Semitism in the writings of the German social scientist
Dr. Eugen Duehring in the 1890s; it was here, in the intellectual dis-
course of the German-speaking lands, to which the names of Dr. Wil-
 HERZL'S ROAD TO ZIONISM / 11

helm Marr and Prof. Heinrich Treitschke have to be added, that Herzl saw
the seeds of the destruction of European culture. It was not thugs com-
ing out of the gutter or effluvia of social marginality, but stars in the in-
tellectual firmament of German and Austrian spiritual and social life who
were responsible for introducing, for the first time, racial criteria into
modern intellectual, scholarly, and political discourse.
To this Herzl's diaries add an awareness of the brittleness and vulner-
ability of what appeared to many liberals—and primarily Jewish liber-
als—as the best political guarantee against bigotry and intolerance: the
multinational Habsburg Empire, in whose lands Jews enjoyed equal
rights, religious tolerance, unprecedented economic prosperity, and so-
cial mobility and protection under the law, all presided over by the pa-
triarchal yet liberal symbolism of the Old Emperor.
Herzl devoted innumerable entries in his diaries to evidence suggesting
that this benign, liberal empire was about to unravel, due to the combined
pressures of competing social and national movements. It was these eth-
nic hatreds, coupled with a populist social radicalism, that were, accord-
ing to Herzl, about to overcome the benevolent attempts at compromise
and tolerance identified with the politics of the Habsburgs.
Lueger's victory in Vienna and the restructuring of the student frater-
nities along "Aryan" lines were only two examples: Herzl's diaries con-
tain descriptions of the ethnic tensions (now totally forgotten except by
experts and the descendants of those involved) between ethnic Germans
and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, as well as in the Parliament in Vi-
enna. Herzl followed the development of these tensions, which were
reaching their climax around the turn of the century and were beginning
to undermine the stability of the government in Vienna, as parliamen-
tary life was becoming increasingly overshadowed by the extreme bick-
erings between nationalist German and Czech deputies in the Imperial
Diet in Vienna. Herzl followed the intense struggle over questions of lan-
guage in schools in Bohemia, and on many occasions reported listening
to the laments of Austrian ministers (many of liberal Polish and Czech
background) about the systemic crisis enveloping political life in the em-
pire and eroding its stability. He reported similar developments from
Galicia and Hungary, where ethnic and linguistic strife between Poles and
Germans, and among Hungarians, Croats, and Slovaks, was endanger-
ing the survival of the tolerant, multi-ethnic empire.
To Herzl, all this had a specific Jewish angle: in Bohemia, for example,
most Jews, especially in the capital, Prague, historically gravitated toward
an identification with the German-speaking population, since emanci-
pation and integration meant for them integration into the dominant
German-language culture. When ethnic German parties and organiza-
tions adopted an "Aryans only" policy in the 1890s, many Jewish intel-
12 / A M E R I C A N J E W I S H Y E A R BOOK., 1 9 9 8

lectuals and professionals found themselves excluded from what they

considered their spiritual home; Herzl mentioned a number of personal
tragedies ensuing from this development. When some of these Jews, now
excluded from German-speaking associations, turned toward Czech
groups, some Czech leaders loudly hooted them out, rightly pointing out
that it was only German anti-Jewish attitudes that made those Jews em-
brace Czechdom. As a consequence, many Jews found themselves ex-
cluded from both German and Czech identity, thrown, so to speak, out
of modern society and thrown back, sometimes against their own will,
on their Jewish identity. Herzl enumerated additional instances from
other regions of the Habsburg Empire.
There is a surprising amount of material in Herzl's diaries dealing with
the political ascendancy of exclusivist ethnic nationalism in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Herzl maintained close contacts with Austrian lib-
eral politicians who tried to stem the tide of emerging nationalism, and
on one occasion even prepared a draft for a compromise on school lan-
guage policy at the request of the Austrian prime minister, Count Badeni
(himself a Polish aristocrat from Galicia, with whom Herzl had numer-
ous meetings dealing with, among other matters, the national and social
plight of Jews in that province). Yet all was to no avail, and Herzl fol-
lowed with a sinking sensation the gradual disintegration of the policies
of tolerance and the ascendancy of the shrill calls for an ethnocentric pol-
itics marked by intolerance and xenophobia.
It was this awareness on Herzl's part that the era of the Good Old Em-
peror was drawing to a close in Mitteleuropa that propelled him to the
realization that Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe was in danger
of being swept into the vortex of conflicting ethnic hatreds—with the
Jews in the cross fire, with nowhere to escape to. That Jewish masses were
suffering in Czarist Russia or Romania was common knowledge, but now
that Herzl began to feel the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself beginning
to unravel, he saw the Jewish tragedy moving to Central Europe, to the
lands in which liberalism and tolerance were supposed to guarantee a safe
Jewish existence and allow the Jews to lead decent lives and to prosper.
Herzl was one of the first to realize that this was about to happen, at
a time when most commentators still believed in the longevity of the Cen-
tral European equivalent of Victorian liberalism and in its capacity to sur-
vive and reform. His frantic search for a way out for the Jews ("out of
the quarrels and battles of Old Europe," as he put it) was an outcome of
this realization.
Herzl's road to Zionism was thus premised not on an emotional re-
sponse to an individual tragedy in the West, emblematic as it might be,
but on a structural analysis of the malaise of European politics in gen-
 H E R Z L ' S ROAD TO Z I O N I S M / 13

eral at the turn of the century—with anti-Semitism only one ingredient

in a new grammar of politics which Herzl discerned and correctly iden-
tified as being, alas, the wave of the future. In this cultural ambience of
Central and Eastern Europe lay the seeds of the collapse of the European
19th-century balance of power and its accompanying liberalism, leading
to the cataclysms of World War I and eventually to World War II. It was
in Vienna, after all, only ten years later, as ethnic clashes intensified, that
a young and not too successful painter was swept into the eye of the storm
of these hatreds, out of which he wove together his own destructive brand
of racism and anti-Semitism. Yet well before Hitler ever heard the names
of Schoenerer and Lueger, Herzl's political sensibilities and understand-
ing alerted him to the rumblings of the coming earthquake.
The Holocaust was only one—the most murderous—consequence of
the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the demise of a dream
of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and tolerant Central Europe. The so-
cial and economic tensions in the Russian Empire, of which Herzl became
gradually aware once he was launched on his Zionist politics, similarly
alerted him to the collapse of the traditional mode of Jewish existence
even in the less hospitable lands of the czars. Because of the Russian gov-
ernment's exclusionary politics, Jews were constantly pushed toward rev-
olutionary activity, and the Jewish salience among revolutionaries further
ignited anti-Semitism and xenophobic politics.
Herzl's Zionism, combining the best traditions of European liberalism
and a modern, basically secular interpretation of the Judaic heritage, was
at its root a critique of the failure of European culture, an awareness of
the coming crisis in European politics, and an almost uncanny decipher-
ing of the writing on the wall that exploded into the terrible European
series of wars and massacres starting in 1914 in Sarajevo. That this dark
chapter of European history has not been totally exorcised became dra-
matically evident with the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Sre-
brenica in the 1990s.
Few followed Herzl's call; not many were ready to internalize the cul-
tural pessimism that informed Herzl's liberal and humanitarian vision of
a Jewish state based on the principles of equality and justice. Yet Herzl's
tragic achievement in successfully deciphering the hieroglyph of history
is emblazoned on the world's map by the existence of a Jewish state in
the Land of Israel—a state encompassing almost 5 million Jews, home
to a vital, if contentious, modern Jewish culture, based on a not always
easy combination of Judaic tradition, modern Hebrew language, and
modern science and technology. The tragedy is that so few followed his
prescient clarion call. Had many more Jews listened to his dramatic and
tragic reading of modern history, it might have been otherwise.
14 / A M E R I C A N J E W I S H Y E A R B O O K , 1 9 9 8

Contemporary Echoes
Paradoxically, some of Herzl's analysis regained relevance almost a
hundred years later, when Israel did already exist, with the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the onset of a set of civil wars in the Horn of Africa.
One of the reasons why hundreds of thousands of former Soviet Jews
chose to leave for Israel was that, with the collapse of the Soviet regime
and the emergence of new nation-states from the ruins of the former
USSR, questions of nationalism and ethnic identity again came to the
fore. Jews who had earlier viewed themselves under the Soviet system as
homo Sovieticus faced a novel challenge as new identities linked to his-
torical ethnic and religious ties came to dominate much of public dis-
course. In newly independent Ukraine, for example, many Jews who his-
torically identified with Russian rather than Ukrainian culture, and who
were more conversant with the Russian than with the Ukrainian lan-
guage, found themselves having to adopt a new identity, and in many cases
learn a new language. Having to relate to Ukrainian historical memories
was for many of them not only an alien but also a painful experience,
given the complexity of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
Similar challenges were faced in the Muslim Central Asian republics
as well as in the Baltic states, where most Jews were Russian speakers and
identified with a Soviet rather than with a local identity. In some cases,
as in Estonia and Latvia, many Jews were denied citizenship rights by the
newly emergent legislatures, as they were lumped together with other
Russian-speakers as "aliens" and even "colonizers." It is not an accident
that immigration to Israel today from the former Soviet Union comes
primarily from these areas—to which Moldova and Belarus could also
be added—where Jews are often caught in the cross fire of ethnic, na-
tional, and religious clashes over identity and sovereignty.
A similar fate befell the small remnant of the Jewish community in
Sarajevo, itself one of the components of the historical multi-ethnic and
multi-religious mix that has characterized Bosnia for generations. Despite
its small numbers, this community also constituted an important ingre-
dient in the Titoist construction of Bosnia. With the demise of Yu-
goslavia, it found itself stranded on the alien sea of ethnic and religious
warfare among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, and most Jews left the coun-
try, going mainly to Israel. The handful of Jews in Grozny, the capital of
Chechnya, were similarly evacuated to Israel during the bloody Russian
attack on the independence-seeking Chechen region.
The massive exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel occurred under some-
what analogous circumstances reminiscent of the Herzlian thesis re-
garding Jewish survival under conditions of ethnic strife. The civil war
in Ethiopia toppled not only the Communist regime of Mengistu, but also
 H E R Z L ' S ROAD TO Z I O N I S M / 15

the Amharic hegemony inherited from the Ethiopian imperial heritage of

Haile Selassie. The overthrow of Communism in Ethiopia was also an
ethnic conflict over hegemony in multi-ethnic Ethiopia, and it was this
that made the tenuous position of the Beta Israel communities even more
precarious. While focusing primarily on East-Central European Jewry,
Herzl was aware, incidentally, of the existence of black Jews, and this sub-
ject even came up in his meeting with the king of Italy, which at that time
annexed neighboring Eritrea.
When viewed in this perspective, Zionism appears historically as one
of the Jewish responses to the challenge of modernization and to the var-
ious transformations it caused in the uneasy equilibrium that made Jew-
ish life in Europe possible, if not always easy. The emergence of modern
Arab nationalism in the 20th century similarly threatened Jewish life in
the Arab lands. Herzl's awareness of the dangers inherent in some aspects
of modernity—and especially the consequences of the emergence of
contending nationalist movements within the multi-ethnic area stretch-
ing from the Baltic to the Black Sea—makes his analysis a powerful wit-
ness to a malaise in Europe and in world history which is, alas, still with
us. By focusing on the plight of the Jews in these changing circumstances,
Herzl brought his humanist and universal vision to bear on one specific
aspect of modernity and its discontents, thus making Zionism an insep-
arable part of modern and contemporary history.