Bible and Sword (39 page)

A “curious excitement” began to seize him; a sense of things coming clear, of being on the edge of revelation, of the answer being within his grasp. He felt himself destined to be the instrument. For the next two years he grappled with it, he poured out schemes in his diaries, buttonholed friends and Jewish leaders, argued passionately, wrote letters to the Rothschilds, to Bismarck, to his editor, confronted Baron de Hirsch with a plan for a “Jewish national loan” to finance a mass emigration. But it must be emigration to a land under Jewish sovereignty: otherwise, he foresaw, the immigration could be stopped at any time—as was proved by the future experience under the British Mandate. Ideas raced through his mind, tumbled out upon
scraps of paper wherever he was, “walking, standing, lying down, in the street, at table, in the night … more than once I was afraid I was going out of my mind.”

In five days he wrote a sixty-five-page pamphlet originally called
Address to the Rothschilds
, outlining a state complete from political independence to territorial integrity, with flags, parliament, army, laws, courts, “where we can live at least as free men on our own soil.” A friend, finding him sleepless and disheveled, was forced to listen while Herzl read the
Address
from beginning to end. The friend decided that it was the product of an overstrained mind and advised Herzl to rest and see a doctor. Herzl shook him off and went to work on a memorandum to be transmitted through a diplomatic acquaintance to the Kaiser. He entered into negotiations with the new Austrian prime minister, Count Badeni. He read the pamphlet to another friend, Güdemann, the chief Reform rabbi of Vienna, sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Munich. Dazed, the Rabbi wondered if perhaps he had seen Moses reborn. He offered timid encouragement. Others told Herzl that he was mad or “impractical.” The Rothschilds were silent, de Hirsch disapproving. His own editor refused to print a word on the subject. A visit to London brought encouragement. He was invited to address the Maccabaean Society, won adherents, and was asked to contribute an article to the
Jewish Chronicle
. In England this paper became, prophetically enough, the first to publish, in condensed form, the material later to appear as the
Judenstaat
. A month afterwards, under that title, a revised version of the pamphlet was published in Vienna.

This remarkable document and its extraordinary author, between them, accomplished what no one had been able to do so far: the political organization of a body of Jews for the purpose of regulating their own fate under their own authority. The banner was unfurled in the opening sentence: “The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is a restoration of the Jewish
State.” There follows a discussion of anti-Semitism as the “propelling force.” The rest is a blueprint for building the state down to the last specification: creation of a governing society (the future Congress), financing, political planning, acquisition of land and a charter, gathering of emigrants, reception and organization “over there.”

Herzl hardly envisaged any difficulty in acquiring title to Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. He airily assumed that the Sultan would be open to a deal under which the Jews would “undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey.” Then, once the funding corporation was established, all plans “systematically settled beforehand,” provinces delimited, town sites chosen, streets laid out, the mass migration could begin. The first settlers, disposed and directed by the governing agency like a body of troops, would build roads, till the land, irrigate, build homes; gradually more would come, industries would be established, trade attracted, and through trade more settlers, and so on and on and up and up until there would arise “a State founded in a manner as yet unknown to history and with possibilities of success such as never occurred before.”

Der Judenstaat
is full of flights of grandeur on wings of wishful thinking. Herzl was spectacularly wrong about the society, or future Congress, when he pictured it as a homogeneous body composed entirely of people in agreement with each other, with “no voting necessary.” He was even more mistaken in his analysis of anti-Semitism, which he naively believed would assist the emigration. “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want,” he wrote. Perhaps it is unfair to subject Herzl’s first thoughts to the unkind glare of hindsight. It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.

But Herzl made the one great necessary contribution:
the intransigent insistence on land, sovereignty, and statehood. He insisted that the Jews come out in the open as a nation, that they act as a nation to obtain for themselves the legal rights that go with nationhood. Hitherto they had attempted to make gains by infiltration, by not arousing opposition, by being rewarded for good behavior. Emancipation was essentially a handout and as such, as Herzl realized, revocable. He activated the movement toward autonomy, compelled the Jews to abandon dependence on philanthropy and to organize according to modern recognized political rules for the management of their own destiny. “The basis,” he told the first Congress, “can only be that of recognized right and not of sufferance. We have had our fill of toleration. Our movement … aims at a publicly recognized, legal guarantee.”

Herzl expected antagonism and debate, but hardly the fury that the
Judenstaat
aroused. Generally speaking, the emancipated Jews felt themselves threatened by this wild man who would dispel the illusion of ultimate assimilation. They raged and stormed, called Herzl a madman, his state a chimera, his proposals, in the words of Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, founder of Reform Judaism in the United States, “the momentary inebriation of morbid minds.” At one moment Rabbi Güdemann, who could never resist Herzl’s spell, almost seemed won over.

“You have me completely on your side,” he said, as recorded in Herzl’s diary.

“ ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then speak in your Temple about it.’

“ ‘Excuse me!’ he cried out, terrified. ‘That won’t do. The people just don’t want to hear about it.’ “

Even the Chovevé Zion, wedded to modest piecemeal colonization, were surly and critical. They were the pioneers; who was this elegant frock-coated Dr. Herzl of Vienna, who knew nothing of Palestine and did not even write in Hebrew, to come along and tell them how to do it better? He had never even read Hess or Pinsker. (Astonishingly, this was true: Herzl confessed later that if he had
read the
Auto-Emancipation
first, he would never have written the
Judenstaat
.) The disciples of Ahad-ha-Am’s “cultural Zionism,” who believed that the soul of Judaism had to be revived before the body and that the Jews must learn to feel themselves a nation before they could act as one, were aghast at Herzl’s plunging program. It went too fast, it skipped the soul, it would not work.

Yet the more the debate raged the more widely known the tract became. Inevitably its basic appeal—the appeal to dignity, to self-help, to stand up like a man—took hold. This was the quality in Herzl’s own personality that impressed itself the most on others and reached out to something basic in Jewry, the conviction of superiority; the factor that, though hidden beneath centuries of humiliation, accounts for the unique phenomenon of their survival. In Herzl it was not hidden at all. Rather he insisted on it, as when, during an interview at the Vatican, he refused to kiss the Pope’s hand, or when he ruled that delegates to the first Zionist Congress must appear in frock coats and white ties. This gesture, although it irritated many, was deliberately planned to impress on the delegates themselves the dignity of their role as founders of a nation.

In Herzl himself the quality was hard to resist. It pushed him into leadership of the movement, brought him lieutenants, rallied followers to his banner. On his way to and from Constantinople, to which he went in the summer of 1896 to open negotiations with the Sultan, masses crowded the railroad platforms to see him, hailed him as Messiah and King, shouted the age-old cry “Next year in Jerusalem!” Already the rays of legend began to gather around him. By the time the Congress met at Basle enthusiasm, tension, and expectation, mounting over the last months, focused on him alone. “Everyone sat breathless as if in the presence of a miracle,” wrote an observer. When the magnificent figure, black-bearded like an Assyrian king, walked to the dais for the opening address, there was a
burst of wild applause. His dark splendor, his spell-binding eyes were well known; but at that moment there was something more—an aura of royalty, as if the long-awaited scion of King David had appeared.

Here it is not necessary to go into the internal history of Zionism. Its goal was stated by the first Congress under a four-point declaration of principles known thereafter as the Basle Program. “The aim of Zionism,” it proclaimed, “is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.”

Meanwhile it became evident from Herzl’s experience at Constantinople that the Sultan was hardly prepared simply to hand over the sovereignty of Palestine to an emissary who, for all his dignity and aplomb, had not two farthings of grand dukes’ gold to jingle in Turkish ears. It was obviously necessary to gird every effort for another attempt to bring in the rich and influential Jews. Until the shares of the proposed Bank or Colonial Trust were subscribed there would clearly be no co-operation from the Sultan. Herzl would have “sold his soul to the devil” for success in floating the loan, he privately recorded. In London, where he believed the financial key was to be found, leaders of the Jewish community, who had begun to have an uneasy feeling that Herzl might possibly be on the right track, were earnest with advice but timid with funds. They would go no farther than an offer to come in if he could first get Baron de Rothschild on the governing board and a check for ten million pounds from the I.C.A. The Baron, whom Herzl tried to persuade to take over active leadership of the movement on condition that he give up piecemeal colonization in favor of the principle of a national state into which Jews could immigrate by right, backed away. “He was a nationalist with a distrust of the nationalist movement and of the people,” Weizmann once said of the Baron. “He wanted everything to be done quietly.”

The hesitancy of the great only served to convince Herzl that his earlier sense of destiny was correct and that he
himself was the inevitable leader. “I always feel posterity glancing over my shoulder,” he noted in his diary. And he was learning fast. He began to realize that Zionism had to become “a movement of the poor” and find its support in the unemancipated Eastern Jews who “were not tortured by the idea of assimilation.” He neither knew nor understood them, but he recognized that if he were to lead it would have to be at the head of an army of “beggars and cranks.”

Yet he could not get over his fondness for the “portals of royalty” or the belief that he could somehow bring down the state as a gift from above through frock-coated interviews with diplomats, bankers, and prime ministers. A fictional portrait that almost seems to have anticipated Herzl is the exuberant Pinchas in Zangwill’s
Children of the Ghetto
.

Herzl did sometimes tend to “see things like Napoleon.” He was concentrating now on the Kaiser, whose forthcoming visit to the Holy Land was the talk of the hour. Could the Kaiser be brought to use his influence with the Sultan,
title to Palestine, or at least a charter for colonization, could be won at a stroke. Herzl, whose mind leapt to short cuts, was convinced that he could carry it off. Through the Grand Duke of Baden, uncle of the Kaiser and a fervent, prophecy-minded advocate of the cause, he was lifted to feverish hopes by the report that the Kaiser was favorably inclined to become protector of a Jewish emigration to Palestine and had consented to receive Herzl at the head of a Zionist delegation in Jerusalem. “The Kaiser has informed himself thoroughly on the matter and is full of enthusiasm.… He believes the Sultan will accept his advice,” the Grand Duke told Herzl. An hour’s interview with the Kaiser himself at Constantinople confirmed the Imperial interest, despite the frowns of von Bülow, the foreign minister. Next, in Palestine at a prearranged meeting outside the Mikveh Israel colony, the Kaiser rode up, guarded by Turkish outriders, reined in his horse, shook hands with Herzl to the awe of the crowd, remarked on the heat, pronounced Palestine a land with a future, “but it needs water, plenty of water,” shook hands again, and rode off. Finally came the culminating moment of the formal meeting at Jerusalem (where a special entrance had been broken through the Jaffa gate so that the Kaiser could enter the Holy City without dismounting). The interview took place, but the Kaiser was vague, offhand. Herzl’s written address had been blue-penciled in advance and all mention of the charter deleted.

Herzl had pinned all his hopes upon the Imperial communiqué, which he had envisaged as a public espousal of his cause by the most powerful man in Europe. Instead it omitted any mention of Zionism, merely referred lightly to a “Jewish deputation” and expressed nothing more than His Majesty’s “benevolent interest” in general agricultural improvements in Palestine “as long as these were conducted in complete respect for the sovereignty of the Sultan.” For Herzl it meant a total fiasco. But with that gift for seeing double that kept him going after each defeat, he wrote in
the midst of his black despair that the Jewish people in the long run would have had to pay “the most usurious interest” for a German protectorate.