History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Gide then voiced his objections to what he saw as a Jewish takeover of French culture; why could not Jews write in another language—why did they have to write in French?

  there is today in France a Jewish literature that is not French literature…. For what does it matter to me that the literature of my country should be enriched if it is so at the expense of its significance? It would be far better, whenever the Frenchman comes to lack sufficient strength, for him to disappear rather than to let an uncouth person play his part in his stead and in his name.165

  This was exactly the line of argument which Herzl was beginning to fear. In fact, concern at the resistance the Jews were building up against themselves by their massive and highly successful entrance into European culture was the force edging Herzl towards Zionism even before he watched Dreyfus degraded on that bitter January morning in 1895. For in Vienna, his home city, the Jewish ‘invasion’ of local culture was even more impressive than in France, and far more bitterly resented. He himself was part of it.

  Herzl is one of the most complex characters in Jewish history. Like Disraeli’s, his flashy theatrical manner concealed tragic depths. The documentation on him is enormous, as he saved every bit of paper he ever wrote on, down to bills and tickets.166 He was born in Budapest in 1860: his father, a near-millionaire banker, lost everything in the big 1873 crash; his mother, a German humanist and nationalist, was the hard one, ‘the Mother of the Gracchi’ as she was called. The family claimed to be Sephardi, in a country where Ostjuden was the worst term of abuse; but of course they were Ashkenazi (from Silesia) like nearly everyone else. His Jewish education was scrappy. He never knew Hebrew or Yiddish. His bar-mitzvah was termed ‘confirmation’. He grew up aspiring to total assimilation. His aim in life was to be a successful playwright. His marriage to the daughter of an oil millionaire, Julie Naschauer, who brought him a huge dowry, set him up as a man of leisure and letters. He was always superbly dressed. He sported a luxurious, jet-black Assyrian-type beard; his black eyes glittered romantically. Walking past the Vienna Burgtheatre with the young Arthur Schnitzler, he boasted: ‘One day I’ll get in there.’ But he did not look like an Austrian playwright; he looked like a nasi, a Prince of Judah. His countenance, wrote Martin Buber, ‘was lit by the glance of the Messiah’. It was, said the atheist Max Nordau, ‘the work of Providence’. Franz Rosenzweig said it ‘proved that Moses was a real person’; Freud claimed he had dreamed of this remarkable man before he ever met him.167 Others were less flattering. His cousin Raoul Auernheimer said he looked ‘like an insulted Arab sheikh’.

  Herzl tried to compensate for his looks by cracking anti-Semitic jokes. From Ostend he wrote to his parents: ‘Many Viennese and Budapest Jews on the beach. The rest of the holidaymakers very pleasant.’ ‘Yesterday grande soirée at the Treitels,’ he wrote from Berlin. ‘Thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. No consoling sight.’ Viennese Jews specialized in gallows humour and anti-Semitic sneers. When the Austrian Prime Minister, Eduard Taafe, asked the Galician MP Joseph Bloch if the Prince-Archbishop of Olmutz, Dr Theodor Cohen, had converted, he was told: ‘Don’t worry, Prime Minister, if he were still a Jew he would no longer be called Cohen.’ They joked: ‘Anti-Semitism didn’t begin to succeed until the Jews began to push it.’168 Some Jews deliberately refrained from having children, so as not to ‘hand on the problem’. Others, like Herzl himself, considered having them baptized. ‘I myself would never convert,’ he wrote,

  yet I am in favour of conversion. For me the matter is closed but it bothers me greatly for my son Hans. I ask myself if I have the right to sour and blacken his life as mine has been soured and blackened…. Therefore one must baptize Jewish boys before they must account for themselves, before they are able to act against it and before conversion can be construed as weakness on their part. They must disappear into the crowd.169

  But could a Jew disappear into the crowd? In the Germanic world, anti-Semitism still had a ferocious religious base, particularly in the south; at the popular level it was still symbolized by the Judensau. But the further you went up the social scale, the more secular, cultural and racial it became; so baptism did not work. In the nineteenth century, German hatred of the Jews acquired a völkisch basis. It started with the nationalist rising against Napoleon. Its first significant event was a mass meeting of the German Burschenschaften (fraternity movement) at the Wartburg Castle in 1817 to burn ‘foreign’ books said to be ‘poisoning the Volk culture’.170 This ideology, which slowly became predominant in Germany and Austria during the nineteenth century, drew a crucial distinction between ‘culture’ (benign, organic, natural) and ‘civilization’ (corrupt, artificial, sterile). Every culture had a soul; and the soul was determined by the local landscape. German culture, then, was in perpetual enmity with civilization, which was cosmopolitan and alien. Who represented the civilization principle? Why, the one race which had no country, no landscape, no culture of their own: the Jews! The argument was typical of those which caught the Jews whatever they did. If they clung to ghetto Judaism, they were alien for that reason; if they secularized and ‘enlightened’ themselves, they became part of alien civilization. This völkisch rejection of the Jews took many forms. It created a Youth Movement, which wandered through the German landscape, strummed guitars, sang songs by the campfire, and rejected Jews, who had to form a youth movement of their own. It took over the student class, an increasingly important element in German society; they turned the Jews out of their clubs—Herzl was ‘cashiered’ from his before he could resign—and refused even to fight duels with them, on the grounds that Jews had no ‘honour’ to lose. It formed a conservationist movement, ancestor of the Greens, which rejected industry and high finance (the Rothschilds) and especially the ever expanding big cities, breeding grounds of the cosmopolitan Jews: Berlin and Vienna were particularly detested among the Volk, as ‘Jew cities’. Their Bible was Land und Leute (‘Place and People’) by Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a Munich university professor and museum curator, who wanted to restore the medieval-type small town and get rid of the ‘rootless’ (his favourite term of abuse) proletariat, especially migratory workers and, above all, Jews, who had created the big cities, ‘the tomb of Germanism’.

  Volk-style anti-Semitism was hydra-headed, contradictory, unco-ordinated, ubiquitous. It included many novels dealing with peasant life, such as Wilhelm von Polenz’s Der Büttnerbauer (1895) and Hermann Lons’ Der Werwolf (1910), in which Jews were depicted as unscrupulous middlemen and dealers, who cheated the peasants and stole their land; the German Farmer’s Union was strongly anti-Semitic. It included a whole school of historians, led by Heinrich von Treitschke, who accused the Jews of an alien and destructive intrusion on Germany’s ‘natural’ historical development, and who first made anti-Semitism respectable in academic circles. It included the scientists and pseudo-scientists who misapplied Charles Darwin’s work and created ‘social Darwinism’, in which races struggled with each other to determine the ‘survival of the fittest’; Alfred Krupp sponsored an essay prize on the application of social Darwinism to state policy, winning entries advocating stern policies to preserve the Volk, such as sending Jews and other ‘degenerate’ types to the front as cannon-fodder. It included a new element of German neo-paganism. Thus Paul de Lagarde rejected Christianity, which had been corruptly invented by the Jew, St Paul, and wished it replaced by a specifically German Volk religion, which would conduct a crusade to drive the Jews, with their international materialist conspiracy, from the sacred German soil: he predicted a German-Jew armageddon. Then, too, the circle which gathered round Richard Wagner, which dominated much of the German musical scene from the 1870s, absorbed the race teachings of Gobineau and, later, of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and drew a powerful artistic contrast between the ‘purity’ of German-pagan folk culture and the Judaic-infected corruption of the cosmopolitan idea.

  The violence with which these views were presented was horrifying. De Lagarde, whose original name was Böttic
her, demanded a physical campaign against Jewish ‘vermin’: ‘with trichinae and bacilli one does not negotiate, nor are trichinae and bacilli subject to education. They are exterminated as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.’ Wagner also advocated the Untergang (downfall) of the Jews. ‘I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it; it is certain we Germans will go under before them, and perhaps I am the last German who knows how to stand up as an art-loving man against the Judaism that is already getting control of everything.’ He wrote this in Religion and Art (1881), published the year the great Russian pogroms were driving a new wave of Ostjuden refugees into central Europe. Wagner was particularly influential in intensifying anti-Semitism, especially among the middle and upper classes, not only because of his personal standing but because he repeatedly advanced the argument—with innumerable examples—that the Jews were progressively ‘taking over’ the citadel of German culture, especially its music. Even their so-called ‘geniuses’, he insisted—men like Giacomo Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn or Heine himself—were not truly creative, and meanwhile a host of Jewish middlemen were taking over the critical press, publishing, theatres and operas, art galleries and agencies. It was Wagner’s writings which provoked the furious outpourings of Eugen Dühring, who throughout the 1880s published a succession of widely read racial attacks on the Jews: the ‘Jewish question’, he declared, should be ‘solved’ by ‘killing and extirpation’.

  The attack came from all sides: from the left, from the right; from aristocrats and populists; from industry, from the farms; from the academy and from the gutter; from music and literature and, not least, from science. What were the Jews to do? Was Jewishness, as Heine bitterly remarked, an incurable disease defying all treatment? Jews were attacked whether they were active or passive. ‘You had the choice’, wrote Arthur Schnitzler, ‘of being insensitive, obtuse or cheeky, or of being oversensitive, timid and suffering from feelings of persecution.’171 In the light of the great Russian pogroms of 1881-2, a Russian Jew, Leon Pinsker, produced a book called Autoemancipation (1882), in which assimilation was dismissed as ultimately impossible, since from every viewpoint the Jew could be, and was, attacked: ‘for the living, the Jew is a dead man; for the natives, an alien and a vagrant; for property holders, a beggar; for the poor, an exploiter and a millionaire; for the patriot, a man without a country; for all classes, a hated rival’.172 Viennese Jews knew this better than anyone else. As Jakob Wassermann was to put it so eloquently, the Jews had no real answer to anti-Semitism in its protean form:

  Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping into hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them and offer them one’s hand. They say: why does he take such liberties with his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a comrade-in-arms or a fellow citizen. They say: he is a Proteus, he can assume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of slavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counteract the poison.173

  The growing mood of despair among assimilated Jews was reinforced by the anti-Semitic penetration of politics. In the 1870s anti-Semitism was fuelled by the financial crisis and scandals; in the 1880s by the arrival of masses of Ostjuden, fleeing from Russian territories; by the 1890s it was a parliamentary presence, threatening anti-Jewish laws. In 1879 the Hamburg anarchist pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr introduced the term ‘anti-Semitism’ into the political vocabulary by founding the Anti-Semitic League. The same year the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoeker persuaded his small Christian Socialist Workers’ Party to adopt an anti-Semitic platform. The first International Anti-Jewish Congress met at Dresden in 1882; there were other such gatherings at Kassel (1886) and Bochum (1889). At the same time the Christian socialist and radical Karl Lueger was building up a formidable anti-Semitic movement in and around Vienna. In 1886 Germany elected its first official Anti-Semitic deputy; by 1890 there were four; by 1893 sixteen. By 1895 the anti-Semites were virtually in a majority in the lower diet and in Vienna Lueger had fifty-six seats against seventy-one Liberals. From many German-speaking cities there were reports of physical assaults on Jews and of anti-Semitic students preventing Jewish scholars from lecturing.

  It was against this threatening background that Herzl began to abandon his assimilationist position. He had previously considered all kinds of wild ideas to get the Jews accepted. One was a huge programme of social re-education for Jews, to endow them with what he termed ‘a delicate, extremely sensitive feeling for honour and the like’. Another was a pact with the Pope, whereby he would lead a campaign against anti-Semitism in return for ‘a great mass movement for the free and honourable conversion of all Jews to Christianity’.174 But all these schemes soon seemed hopeless in face of the relentless rise of anti-Semitic hatred. Herzl began to write a play, The New Ghetto, showing how the new walls of prejudice surrounding the Jew had replaced the old ones of stone. His stay in France completed the process of disillusionment. Like other educated German Jews, Herzl had always seen France as the citadel of tolerance. In practice he found it riddled with anti-Semitism, and his Paris dispatches reflected his rising anxiety.175 Then came that fearful scene in the École Militaire. Herzl always saw things, good or bad, in highly dramatic terms: it was the horrific drama of Dreyfus’ degradation, and his solitary voice hopelessly intoning his innocence, which finally made up Herzl’s mind. Was not Dreyfus the archetypal sufferer in the new ghetto? If even France turned against the Jew, where in Europe could he look for acceptance? As if to reinforce the point, the French Chamber of Deputies only narrowly rejected (268-208) an anti-Semitic motion banning Jews from the public service.

  In 1895 Herzl was not to foresee the victory of the Dreyfusards. Looking back from the perspective of a century, we can now identify the 1890s as the culminating point in a wave of European anti-Semitism, provoked by the flood of refugees from the Russian horrors, which was less irresistible than it seemed at the time. But Herzl had not that advantage. The anti-Semites then seemed to be winning. In May 1895 Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. To devise an alternative refuge for the Jews, who might soon be expelled from all over Europe, seemed an urgent necessity. The Jews must have a country of their own!

  Herzl completed the text of his book, Der Judenstaat, outlining his aims, in the winter of 1895-6. The first extracts were published in the London Jewish Chronicle, 17 January 1896. The book was not long, eighty-six pages, and its appeal was simple.

  We are a people, one people. We have everywhere tried honestly to integrate with the national communities surrounding us and to retain only our faith. We are not permitted to do so…. In vain do we exert ourselves to increase the glory of our fatherlands by achievements in art and in science and their wealth by our contributions to commerce…. We are denounced as strangers…. If only they would leave us in peace…. But I do not think they will.

  So Herzl proposed that sovereignty be conceded to the Jews over a tract of land large enough to accommodate their people. It did not matter where. It could be in Argentina, where the millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-96) had set up 6,000 Jews in a series of agricultural colonies. Or it could be Palestine, where similar Rothschild-financed colonies were in being. What mattered was the sanction of Jewish public opinion; and they would take what was offered. The work first came out in book form in Vienna, February 1896. It later went into eighty editions in eighteen languages.176

  With Der Judenstaat, Daniel Deronda left the pages of fiction and strode on to the stage of history. Stage is the right word. Herzl could never play the role of cautious, sober Jewish statesman, the Maimonides type, changing events through quiet words of wisdom. He brought to Jewish world politics the art of show business, the only one he really cared for. He was the actor-manager in a forthcoming production, the return of Israel to a promised land, and though his outline plan was direct and simple, all kinds of glorious details crowded his mind and were jotted down in his notes. There would be a tremendous ‘expedition’
to ‘take possession of the land’. There would be an aristocratic constitution, based on Venice. The first, elected doge would be a Rothschild, with Hirsch perhaps as vice-president. There would be sumptuous squares, like the Piazza San Marco or the Palais Royal. He devised the coronation ceremony, even down to a regiment of life-guards named after himself, the Herzl-Cuirassiers. Entire historic Jewish quarters would be transported and rebuilt. There would be international theatres, circuses, café-concerts, a glittering avenue like the Champs-Élysées, above all a state opera house: ‘The gentlemen in full tails, the ladies dressed as lavishly as possible…. I shall also cultivate majestic processions on great festive occasions.’ Much of his inspiration came from, of all people, Wagner, whose works Herzl constantly attended at this time. ‘Only on the nights when no Wagner was performed did I have doubts about the correctness of my idea.’ The next exodus to the Promised Land, he boasted, ‘compares to that of Moses as a Shrove Tuesday play to a Wagner Opera!’177 There was a touch of Disraelian fantasy about all this, indeed times when Herzl had something of the huckstering showmanship of a Mordecai Noah.

  Some of Herzl’s histrionic traits remained with him to the end. He insisted, for instance, that all public Zionist meetings be ceremonious and formal, with delegates wearing full evening dress even if it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. He dressed fastidiously, carefully brushed top hat, white gloves, impeccable frock-coat, when making an official call as Zionist representative. He insisted that all Jews who accompanied him must do the same. It was part of his effort to destroy the old image of the pathetic, shuffling, gaberdine-wearing ghetto Jew. He always organized his meetings and conferences with aplomb and precision. But his theatrical exuberance died as the immensities of the task before him became apparent. The strain of tragedy in his life and features became more apparent.