by Ian Buruma
A month later, Herzl was kept waiting in his hotel room in Berlin for another audience with the grand duke, this time at the imperial palace in Potsdam. He fretted about what to wear. He had brought a black redingote, shirt, cravat, shoes, hat. But he remembered how he had prepared the same outfit for the empress’s funeral in Vienna and waited for an invitation in vain. He decided to keep his lacquered boots on, to save time when “the order” to leave for the palace should come. He waited, and waited. Hours stretched to a day. And he mused about the strange roads of fate: “Zionism will enable the Jews to love this Germany again, this nation which, despite everything, remains closest to our hearts.” Finally, he was summoned to Potsdam for breakfast the next day. And he was told by the grand duke that the kaiser was most enthusiastic about Herzl’s ideas. Indeed, he was “in fire and flames.”
The kaiser’s imagination was as flowery as Herzl’s, even though he lacked the latter’s wit and his enthusiasms were far shorter-lived. The idea of himself as a Crusader king, restoring Jerusalem from Turkish rule to the Jews, who in turn would inject German Kultur in the Orient, was irresistible. Besides, he would be glad, as he put it, to let “the kikes” go to Palestine: “The sooner they take off the better.” Establishing a German protectorate between Europe and India would also be a poke in the eyes of the British. The sultan in Constantinople would surely do as the kaiser told him.
Alas, the sultan did not. And the kaiser quickly lost interest. When Herzl and his companions, sweating in their starched shirts and heavy suits, met him in the desert outside Jerusalem, the kaiser, wearing a spiked helmet, had nothing more to say to them and complained about the heat. Herzl answered that his people would provide water to the desert land. It would cost billions, but it could be done. The kaiser slapped his boot with his whip and barked that the Jews didn’t lack for money. Hah! They had “more money than any of us!” And so, in the Orientalist splendor of the kaiser’s tent, decorated with Persian carpets and mother-of-pearl furniture, the dream of a Jewish homeland under German imperial protection came to an end. Herzl now had to look more seriously toward England.
HERZL’S FIRST VISIT to England was in 1895. His initial impressions, written up for his Viennese paper, are not of the tweedy, horsey, aristocratic world one might have expected. Instead, his report reads more like a twentieth-century European sketch of America. The speed and comfort of the train ride from Dover to Charing Cross immediately impressed him: the electric lamps, the stuffed leather seats, the passengers reading the metropolitan papers while being served tea. Everything was so clean, so fast, so efficient. Emerging into the damp London fog at Charing Cross, he sees omnibuses and cabs and people rushing hither and thither. Then his eyes are drawn to the sandwich-men, sloshing through the rain in worn-out shoes, miserable wretches with advertisements for expensive places of entertainment hanging from their necks, and Herzl wonders to himself whether the English even notice the rawness of this contrast between those who have money and those who have not.
In the same dispatch, he makes another observation more often heard about America. He has lunch at a branch of a large eating and drinking establishment named Spiers and Pond. Again, he admires the speed, efficiency, and sheer scale of the enterprise. These are “department stores for hunger and thirst.” The people are free to choose and their huge number keeps the prices low, the turnover fast, and the products fresh. This, Herzl remarks, is a collective effort taking place in complete freedom. He compares Spiers and Pond to a joint-stock company. “The idea of feeding the masses cheaply is socialist—the method is capitalist.” This splendid combination of socialism and free enterprise found its way into Herzl’s fictional blueprint of the ideal Jewish state, Altneuland, published in 1902.
And yet England wasn’t America. It was in some ways one of the most hidebound, conservative countries of the Old World. Herzl enjoyed that side of English society too, the apparent stability of its traditions and institutions, the many marks of historical continuity, and so on. He was touched by the way he was always greeted in the same polite, diffident manner, by the same staff of the same comfortable hotel he frequented in London. He could stay there for days, months, even years, safe in the knowledge that nothing would change. The doorman would always be at his post, standing on exactly the same spot, for ever and ever. Herzl makes a wistful note of this: “A perfect form of life has been found, and one wishes to stick to it. Conservatism needs no further explanation.”
England, in Herzl’s view, had remained, in spite of all the white heat of modernity, rather like his London hotel: perfectly civilized. Even the wretched unemployed marching down the Strand strike him as being remarkably orderly, gentle, and well mannered. Why, even the beggars beg with a quiet dignity. English society, he feels, is like an English lawn: endlessly mowed, endlessly cultivated, until the surface is as smooth as glass. Like every Anglomane since Voltaire, Herzl uses the rolling, well-tended, natural but “civilised” English landscape as a metaphor for the gentle yet spontaneous manners of the English people. Given his background, with its worship of Bildung, and his dream of grooming the Jews as a Kulturvolk, this vision of manicured lawns and landscaped gardens had a special appeal. It represented to him the combination of order and freedom that he found ideal.
Herzl’s English rhapsodies would be absurd if they were not redeemed by his acid Viennese eye. One of his hosts in England was Alfred Austin, a poet laureate of minor talent but undoubted patriotism. Herzl visited Austin in the hope of getting an introduction to the Conservative prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury. The ambiance, always important to Herzl, could not have been finer: the “delicious garden,” the beautiful old manor house, the gentle Kentish landscape, the logs crackling in the fire, the host’s tweed plus fours, the hostess’s kindly smile. He did notice, however, that Austin was a tiny man compared to his wife, or indeed to Herzl himself, and that he tried to compensate for this by habitually patting his wife on the shoulder.
The conversation in the laureate’s drawing room took a peculiar turn. When Herzl explained that Zionism was the only solution to anti-Semitism, the Austins assured him there was no anti-Semitism in England and never would be. After that they spoke only about war, a topic for which both the poet and his wife showed great enthusiasm. England didn’t want to fight, but by jingo, and so forth. Herzl suggested that Britain and Germany should form an alliance. The kaiser would be a splendid English agent with the German people, and he, Herzl, would approach the kaiser personally to suggest it. Herzl and Austin dressed for the evening. The roast meat was succulent, the candlelit table superb. Herzl thought to himself—and wrote in his diary (half in French)—that he could understand the English Jews only too well: “If I lived in England, perhaps I would be a jingo too.”
From the sound of it, Austin was a bore. His view of British foreign policy, compared to that of Germany, was that the former was “organic” and the latter “mechanical.” Herzl noted this without comment. He was more impressed by their manners than by anything the Austins actually said. Courtesy was extremely important to Herzl. He often made a point of mentioning that the grand duke of this or the marquess of that had helped him into his coat or showed him to his coach. These were points of honor that made him feel accepted. Mrs. Austin accompanied him to the station. Herzl remarked in his diary on the stylishness of the coachman. And he said: “The ridiculous revolutionaries sneer at old forms and superficialities. But the spruce table, the well-kept house, and the well-mannered coachman mean something too.”
Herzl found the English upper-class life aesthetically pleasing. But there was more to it than that. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the alliance between a small number of wealthy Jews and liberal aristocrats made sense, especially in Prussia and Austria. The nobility may have been snobbish and exclusive, but it liked to think of itself as something that existed above nationality. The eighteenth-century aristocratic ideal was free-thinking, cosmopolitan, and cultured. Its authority was based
on hierarchy, tradition, and land. And some Jews had a place in that hierarchy, as money-lenders, financial advisers, or, especially in Berlin, hostesses of literary salons. Aggressive nationalism of the revolutionary, Wagnerian kind was mainly, though certainly not exclusively, a bourgeois phenomenon. And as the feudal hierarchy gradually made way for a more competitive, meritocratic, capitalist society, Jews became the targets of prejudice, because some already had considerable financial clout. What began as an outcast’s special role in the old order became a dangerous source of resentment in a more open society. This led to an odd ambivalence among Jews like Herzl: a liberal enthusiasm for meritocracy coupled with nostalgia for the trappings of the old aristocracy. The only country in which both cravings could be satisfied was England.
Austro-Hungarian monarchs continued to offer Jews a degree of protection, to be sure, but in the end their power was limited. Austrian Jews were loyal to the emperor because he gave them status without demanding nationalism. In the words of Carl Schorske, the Jews were “the supra-national people of the multi-national state, the one folk, which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy.” When the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna in 1895, Emperor Franz Josef refused to confirm his appointment. To celebrate his monarch’s good sense, Sigmund Freud allowed himself an extra cigar that day. Herzl, however, was shrewd enough to see that such gestures would only strengthen popular prejudice against the Jews. He was right. In any event Lueger soon received the imperial imprimatur.
Herzl was never a democrat Like Taine and other conservative Anglophiles, he believed in liberal government by cultured gentlemen. Toward the end of the century, Prussian Junkers, Austrian nobles, and Hungarian landlords were no longer a viable model, being neither liberal, nor politically responsible, nor, indeed, in many cases, particularly cultured. Venice with its splendid doges belonged to the past. The only ancien régime that had been flexible enough to continue being attractive to liberal conservatives such as Herzl was the British one. Britain’s constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, free press, and rule of law, as well as all the titles, orders, flags, processions, and feudal flimflam one could want, constituted just the kind of society Herzl, and indeed most bourgeois Viennese Jews, would have voted for.
THE STOUTEST DEFENDER, and indeed part inventor of the quasi-ancient mystique of England, had been born a Jew. Of all Herzl’s heroes, Disraeli was one of the oddest. Charles Stewart Parnell, the champion of Irish Home Rule, you could understand. But Dizzy, that reactionary dreamer? Herzl and Dizzy had a great deal in common, to be sure, far more than, say, Herzl had with Bismarck, another role model. Neither was a religious Jew—Disraeli was an Anglican, Herzl an agnostic. Both were dandies, steeped in romantic literature, especially Byron. Both were artists who turned their imaginative powers to politics. And both reacted to their precarious social status as Jews by dreaming of barons and dukes.
Disraeli invented a fanciful family background for himself of Spanish grandees and prosperous Venetians, whereas in fact his grandfather was a humble immigrant from Cento, near Ferrara. He liked to boast that his ancestors were at least as grand as those of any English noble family, since they “were probably on intimate terms with the Queen of Sheba.” Indeed, he said, the Jews were the world’s most ancient aristocracy, who passed on their laws and religion to the Anglo-Saxon race. As a boy, Disraeli dreamt of rescuing blond English knights in distress. He continued to express highly colored variations of this dream in his novels. One of the early ones was entitled The Young Duke, which elicited from his father, Isaac, the not unreasonable question: “But what does Ben know about dukes?” Quite a lot, actually. Dizzy would spend a lifetime with dukes, and his politics were devoted to saving them, or at least their grip on political power.
Both Herzl and Disraeli entertained aristocratic fantasies. But whereas Dizzy was a romantic, projecting Jewish nobility onto the ancient past, Herzl saw visions of grandeur in the future. Disraeli was not so much a nationalist as a racialist. One of his most famous phrases, quoted with approval by Hitler in 1941, was “all is race; there is no other truth.” It came from one of Disraeli’s novels, Coningsby, but he repeated this credo at various times, always with conviction. In fact, some people who knew him considered him a bit of a bore on the subject of race. In common with many Continental reactionaries, Disraeli was terrified of revolution, not just the Revolution of 1789, but also the bourgeois revolutions of 1848. He blamed secularism and free-thinking for turning people’s heads. He distrusted rationalism as a basis for politics. The belief in progress he held to be absurd. “Progress to what, and from where?” Cosmopolitanism and social equality were noxious ideas. Only stable communities, rooted in blood, soil, a social hierarchy, and a common faith would ensure the continuity of happiness and civilization.
These may sound like odd thoughts for a man who, despite his belief in the Church of England, remained self-consciously a Jew. His views matched those of European anti-Semites all too well. Yet there was a twisted logic there, entirely concocted by himself. Disraeli hated the notion of Jews as a “people of stockbrokers” as much as Herzl did. But he lacked Karl Marx’s desire to annihilate his own or anybody else’s Jewishness. So he reinvented the idea of Jews, at the same time reinventing the idea of the English. The Jews would find their place in the hierarchy of English society as the ur-aristocrats and as the guardians, or indeed inventors, of Anglo-Saxon traditions.
The English, in Disraeli’s view, had been protected against European upheavals by their insular position. After the terrible disorders of 1789 and 1848, only the English had been able to conserve a government “by traditionary influences.” That is, the English had held on to an ancien régime that governed by consent, not force. This popular consent was due to irrational but vital forces, such as obedience to ancient customs, deference to noble families, and faith in a national church. Such a view was of course radically opposed to Voltaire’s Enlightenment Anglophilia. It was far more in tune with Herder’s ideas. The national community had to be defended at all costs against rootless cosmopolitans, shallow rationalists, and grasping businessmen, who would tear it apart in their selfish greed. Normally, of course, these are coded phrases used by anti-Semites for Jews. Disraeli simply stood the stereotype on its head.
“The Jews,” he wrote in Lord George Bentinck, “are the trustees of tradition, and the conservators of the religious element. They are a living and the most striking element of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man.” He had already pointed out in Coningsby and other novels that the Jews “are the most ancient, if not the only, unmixed blood that dwells in cities.” Proud of this fact, the Jews were by nature against the doctrine of the equality of man. Besides, they were blessed with the gift of accumulating wealth. That is why the Jews were natural conservatives. “Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy.” So not only were Jews natural conservatives, they were natural English Conservatives. Indeed, the Saxons and the Celts should “daily acknowledge on their knees, with reverent gratitude” that the Hebrews were the fathers of the Christian faith, and it should never be forgotten that it was “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon” that “won the boasted liberties of England.”
This was certainly one way of tackling the problem of Jewish emancipation, or indeed assimilation. It also served as a clever justification for Disraeli’s leadership of the Tory party. His propaganda for property and noble privilege perfectly suited the toffs and squires whose interests he sought to represent. But all his talk of race had unforeseen consequences. Not only did Disraeli’s racial views blend in with European anti-Semitism, but they were thrown back in his own face. That he was regarded by some members of his own party as a Jewish charlatan, who cloaked the interests of his own “race” in the Union Jack, was malicious and certainly unjust. But Disraeli had contributed at least as much as Charles Maurras, and other stirrers of that poisonous European brew, to th
e racial rather than constitutional definition of nationhood.
Disraeli’s view of the Jews as proto-Christians, and of Christianity as “completed Judaism,” also fell on fertile ground in England. Since the sixteenth century, Protestants had taken up the idea of England as the nation chosen by God to purify the faith from popery. They read the Old Testament, adopted Hebrew names, looked for Lost Tribes, prayed for Christ’s Second Coming, and petitioned (in 1649) for the return to Britain of the people of Israel. William Hechler, the eccentric vicar who introduced Herzl to the grand duke of Baden, was a man of this kind. There were many like him. Upper-class British Protestants were much more sympathetic to Herzl’s cause than upper-class British Jews. When he was told about a British bishop who prayed for God’s assistance in the Zionist project, Herzl concluded that “these simple Christian souls are much better than our Jewish clerics, who only think of their wedding fees from rich Jews.”
BY THE TIME of his visit in 1901, Herzl had become something of a celebrity in London society. “I am awfully dinnered,” he noted in English in his diary. Society, he wrote on June 15, “is curious about me. I am now a curiosity, a dish on the dinner table, one comes to meet Dr. Herzl.” He mentions such glittering names as Princess Löwenstein, Lady Jane Taylor (useful for an introduction to the king), and Gilbert Fargher, “both a Lord and an actor.” He ends this entry with a sigh, however: “Only the Jews of the Upper Tens have no interest in me at all.”
