by Ian Buruma
The Protestant romance with Zion confirmed all manner of anti-Semitic paranoia on the Continent, especially in French anti-Dreyfusard circles. The title of one particularly unpleasant tract, published in Paris in 1895, sums it up nicely: Is the Englishman a Jew? (L’Anglais est-il un Juif?). The question mark is actually superfluous, for the author, Louis Martin, believes that the Englishman is Jewish by nature, as are the Huguenots, the Americans, and the Freemasons. Martin can see only one distinction between the Englishman and the Jew: “The Jews are excellent musicians; the English are terrible musicians.” For the rest, they are the same: treacherous, parasitic, greedy, mercantile, devilishly clever at getting other people to fight for Anglo/Jewish interests, and bent on taking over the world.
The book would not be worth quoting if it weren’t for the remarkably Disraelian echoes in some of Martin’s conclusions. The earl of Beaconsfield expressed himself with more polish and wit, and his ideas, though strange enough, were not quite as demented as Martin’s. Disraeli would surely have been surprised to hear that Jews and Englishmen were plotting to establish a United States of Europe in order to break up ancient nations, such as France, and rule the Continent. He might also have quibbled with Martin’s proposal that Jews slipped into the British Isles in ancient times disguised as Anglo-Saxons. After all, says Martin, isn’t “Saxon” really a corruption of “Isaacson”? But the idea of Jews and Anglo-Saxon Protestants having a common destiny was shared by Disraeli. So was the notion of England’s God-given task to run much of the world. America “is intensely Semitic, and has prospered accordingly.” Disraeli said that, not Martin, and he wasn’t referring to Jewish immigrants.
Herzl, however, would never have said such a thing. Whatever he might have had in common with Disraeli, he had no time for race theories. The first person he saw in London in the winter of 1895 was a writer named Israel Zangwill, whose stories about poor Jewish immigrants were well received in England. They appealed to the English love of the picturesque. He was in fact an important member of the Jewish community. But Zangwill was not the kind of man who naturally appealed to Herzl. Nor was his dingy house in Kilburn to Herzl’s taste. And they could communicate only in French, which Zangwill spoke badly. Herzl describes Zangwill as an ill-dressed figure, sitting by the fireplace of a messy room full of books: “a long-nosed Negroid type with very woolly black hair parted in the middle.” But Zangwill was all in favor of territorial independence for the Jews, and that was the main thing. When he stated his racial views, however, Herzl had to take issue. Zangwill talked about the Jews as a race. Herzl noted that you only needed to look at Zangwill’s Negroid face, and then at his own sallow but nonetheless patrician features, to see how wrong this was. The Jews were “a historical unit,” he said, “but a nation of anthropological diversity. That will suffice for the Jewish state too. No state has racial unity.”
Nor would the future state be based on one religion. Herzl hardly mentions religion in his Zionist diary notes made after that night of Tannhäuser in Paris. His only suggestions are to make the Wonder Rabbi of Sadagora (a Hasidic rabbi who worked miracles) into a provincial “archbishop” and to dress high priests up in splendid robes. There are no references to biblical lands, let alone a divine right to their ownership. It was not so very difficult for him, therefore, to take seriously Joseph Chamberlain’s offer of Uganda (actually a part of Kenya) as a Jewish homeland. It wasn’t hard for the ultra-Orthodox either, by the way. Zion to them was not a place in this world.
The first person to suggest Uganda as an option was not the British colonial secretary, but Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild, in 1902. After bragging about the high distinctions he had won from the Austrian and Prussian courts, Rothschild enraged Herzl with the remark that Palestine sounded “too Jewish.” He feared it would put people off. Rothschild thought Uganda might be more suitable. Herzl rejected the idea out of hand. Then Chamberlain visited Uganda in 1903 and thought it might suit Herzl’s plans very well. In fact, Herzl preferred Palestine as the final destination. But after a particularly nasty pogrom in Bessarabia, Herzl began to see the attraction of Uganda as at least a temporary refuge—“a night shelter”—for desperate eastern Jews. It was those same eastern Jews, however, desperate as they were, who called Herzl a traitor for even suggesting such a thing. So the plan was dropped.
The Ugandan episode showed the peculiar nature of Herzl’s enterprise. Most of his followers, and many of his British supporters, took a romantic and biblical view of nationhood. Palestine should once again be the Jewish homeland, not only because Jews of the diaspora were oppressed but because of ancient ties to the soil. Daniel Deronda, the Anglo-Jewish hero in George Eliot’s novel of that title, feels bound to return to Palestine because it is his ancestral land. Yet Herzl himself was much less interested in ancestral ties than in rescuing Jews from persecution and turning the “people of stockbrokers” into a Kulturvolk. As an Anglophile, Herzl admired historical continuity, tradition, nobility, and all that. But as a Zionist he was a nation builder, a Utopian architect of a New Society. He was fascinated by the idea of, as it were, building Jerusalem from scratch. Creating the Jewish Utopia would not be an act of ancestor worship, but of will. It was meant, after all, to be a refuge from the Old World.
In 1898, Herzl traveled to England through Holland, to catch a steamer from Vlissingen to Queenborough. Gazing at the redbrick houses and churches erected on the flat Dutch earth, he saw proof that cities were constructed by human will. He noted, in a flash of imaginative hubris: “When I point my finger at a spot and say, here we will have a city, then a city will emerge. The whole of Holland proves what man can pull from the most thankless soil.” Herzl, then, unlike Disraeli, was a rationalist in this respect. He would plant Voltaire’s coconut trees in the desert of Palestine.
Disraeli had used his romantic imagination to fit the world’s most “ancient aristocracy,” the Jews, into an organic English nation. Herzl would create the world’s newest aristocracy, based not on history, or birth, or “heritage,” but merit. The New Society would not be burdened by the past in any way. To avoid unequal opportunity, there would be no private education. Because all land would belong to the state, there would be no landowning class. There would be complete religious freedom, and the Jewish state would be open to all people, Jews and gentiles. Mosques and synagogues and churches would stand side by side. Industry would be organized in huge cooperatives. There would be welfare for all who needed it.
Parts of Altneuland read like a mixture of Jules Verne and communist propaganda: a nineteenth-century dream of Progress. The descriptions of thundering hydroelectric turbines, driving the power of half a million horses through the Dead Sea, could have come straight from China Reconstructs. Herzl’s new Jerusalem, with its elevated electric tram, wide boulevards, science institutes, department stores, and its gigantic Peace Palace, the center for all the peace-loving people of the world, is a modernist Utopia. The most telling details of Herzl’s vision are not about skyscrapers or electric power, however, but about social pride, which brings us straight back to Herzl’s preoccupation with the English upper class.
In 1891, traveling in Spain, Herzl asked a Viennese friend for an introduction to the Austrian embassy in Madrid. He wrote that he wanted to be “well received, and that is not so simple when one is not a Herr von. Were I an English gentleman, the mere mention of my name would suffice. This is quite humiliating for us all, but one bears what one cannot change.” In Altneuland, such humiliations no longer existed. In the New Society every Jew could be just like an English gentleman. A key scene in the novel takes place in the Jerusalem studio of the master painter Isaacs. When Friedrich Löwenberg and his wife Mirjam (who can sing Wagner beautifully) visit the painter, he is working on a portrait of Lady Lillian, wife of Lord Sudbury. Friedrich, who started life, as did Herzl, as an anguished Viennese intellectual, notes how Isaacs talks to the English lord and his wife with such assurance, such lightness, indeed quite as an equal. “And yet,
” Friedrich thinks to himself, Isaacs too “was once a poor Jewboy, whose talent alone elevated him to his high worldly status.” This is not the end of this touching scene, however. Lady Lillian whispers something to Mirjam. Observing them standing side by side, Friedrich is filled with pride: “Mirjam, dark-haired, dressed simply and somewhat smaller in build, really did not look at all bad in comparison with the towering, English blonde …”
This, then, is the crucial difference between Herzl and Disraeli. The Viennese intellectual did not invent an ancient ancestry so Jews could talk to lords and ladies as equals: he invented a Jewish state. This explains his resentful attitude to Anglo-Jewish grandees. Herzl understood the sweet pull of assimilation. As he said, he would have been a jingo too. But he knew it was not an option. He was not born in England. Nor were most other Jews. And few of them had enough Bildung anyway. So when Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild told him he didn’t believe in Zionism because he wanted to be an Englishman, Herzl reacted with scorn. That was all very well for a rich British lord to say, but what about the millions of oppressed Jews in the east? The best thing, in Herzl’s opinion, was to found a Jewish colony on British territory.
When Herzl accepted the Ugandan idea, faute de mieux, he used an interesting phrase. He would, he said, create a “miniature England in reverse.” By this he meant that he would start with a colony and work toward a metropole. Again, a comparison with Disraeli is instructive. Disraeli believed fervently in the British Empire. It was he who presented Queen Victoria with the imperial crown of India—after she had pressed him for it, to be sure. Dizzy was as fascinated by the Oriental razzle-dazzle of Delhi durbars as his queen-empress. There was even the suggestion, in Tancred, that to save England from national decline, the imperial throne should be shifted to Delhi. Empire appealed to Dizzy’s sense of theater, to his Orientalist romance, with the Jews cast as the superior race, and to his idea of England carrying on the civilizing work of ancient Jewish tradition. His enemies often chose to see this romance in a sinister light. They saw Disraeli’s imperialism as a cunning strategy to promote messianic Jewish interests. In fact, he was thinking only of England.
One can see why enlightened empires would appeal to Jews, or indeed members of any ethnic or religious minority. Empires may be dominated by one nation but always include other nationalities. Queen Victoria, like God, was said to have loved all her subjects equally. Many Jews felt safer, at first, in the Soviet Union than in Russia. Jews were among the biggest supporters of the Habsburg monarchy. Herzl always admired the kaiser. And yet, when Disraeli thought of Empire, it was chiefly as a way of tying the British (he would have said English) nation together more tightly. Empire gave the British people a common mission, and a common source of pride. Like his beloved monarchy, or the Anglican Church, Empire was one more quasi-mystical force to combat the rationalist erosion of nationhood.
The most grandiose gesture in defense of British imperialism actually concerned a Jewish subject. In 1850, a mob in Athens burnt down the house of a Portuguese Jew, born in Gibralter, named David Pacifico. Don Pacifico had never lived in England but was by birth a British citizen, and he appealed to the British government for help in pressing for compensation from the Greeks. When the Greeks refused to pay up, Palmerston sent gunboats with orders to bombard Athens. He told Parliament that “as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.” Threatening to bomb Athens for the sake of one Jewish merchant might sound a bit over the top. Disraeli certainly thought so. But I think Herzl would have approved.
Herzl admired the British Empire. In a speech he gave in Vienna in 1900, Herzl described Zionism as a colonial policy in the British imperial style. He had hoped Cecil Rhodes would take a fatherly interest in the project. But Rhodes answered that Englishmen couldn’t rule the entire world. Another one of Herzl’s ideas was to found the Jewish state as a British colony in the Sinai Peninsula, which would be developed by the Jewish Company (always identified by its English name, copied from the East India Company). As he said to Joseph Chamberlain, whose monocle dropped when he heard it, the British Empire would gain ten million grateful Jews. While negotiating these and other plans, Herzl was impressed by the “coolness and calm” of the Foreign Office mandarins. “We must learn to adopt this coolness and calm. It is the key to greatness.”
The technological symbol of British empire-building, indeed perhaps the prime symbol of the entire British mission civilisatrice, was the railway network constructed in India. Railways, as Thomas Hughes already lamented in Tom Brown’s School Days, took men away from the snug frontiers of their native soil, even as they shrank the world. Railways freed people all over the empire by giving them a chance to move. They also transported British goods for them to buy. Indian nationalists were hostile to the “imperialist” railways. Not Herzl. Altneuland was to be the hub of a worldwide railway system, stretching from the Cape to London. A character in the novel named Professor Steineck, president of the Jewish Academy, has the charming idea of celebrating the centenary anniversary of the world’s first steam railway line, from Stockton to Darlington, by having every train give three toots on the whistle.
Herzl’s Utopia, then, was less a miniature England than a miniature British Empire, with its own civilizing mission, which went beyond feats of engineering. His description of British imperialism in Egypt is as rhapsodic as his writing about the poet laureate’s dinner table in Kent. Herzl traveled there in 1903 and wrote a series of feuilletons. Never, he said, had the Egyptians been ruled by such splendid foreign masters. Here was a despot who, “far from exploiting or oppressing the people, wanted to elevate and improve them. This extraordinary invader spreads light, restores order, and brings hygiene, justice and health.” And these wonderful things are done with the lightest of touches. Local customs, arts, and languages are always respected. Freedom of religion and speech is guaranteed. That is why, says Herzl, “a people lucky enough to be subdued by England, has more freedom than was ever dreamed of before.”
Like the British Empire, Altneuland is a universal model of progress and freedom and offers protection to all peoples of the world. Just as the British brought light, justice, order, and electricity to the Egyptians, so the Jewish Kulturvolk elevates all the peoples of the holy land. A German-American traveler in Altneuland is astounded by all the wonders of technology and the extraordinary level of Kultur. But he wonders about the fate of the Arabs. Hadn’t Jewish immigration displaced them? Weren’t they resentful? (This was written in 1902.) So he asks a Palestinian Arab, named Reshid Bey. “What a question,” answers the Arab, “for us it has been a blessing.”
It is the classic defense of colonialism: the blessings bestowed by a superior civilization. In Herzl’s case, his wishful dream might have included an element of messianic zeal: the Chosen People as the liberators of mankind. But as usual with Herzl, there was a more practical side to his dreaming. He believed that by making the Jewish state a model of freedom and tolerance, Jews would be treated with more tolerance everywhere. His aim was to ensure that Jews in all countries could feel as much at home as Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild did in England. His mission was to civilize the world by creating a model Jewish homeland. It was madly ambitious and wholly admirable. If he entertained doubts, it was mostly about the Jews themselves. He was never fully convinced they would live up to his dreams. British doubts about their burden were different: they were never convinced that foreigners could follow the British example. And when foreigners tried, in literary societies in Calcutta or grand hotels in Cairo, they were laughed at and called monkeys.
Herzl was perceptive about the dilemma of enlightened imperialism—at least as far as the British were concerned. On that same visit to Egypt in 1903, Herzl attended a lecture by an authority on irrigation named Sir William Wilcox. The lectu
re is “hellishly boring,” and Herzl’s eyes wander round the hall. He notes the presence of many intelligent-looking young Egyptians. Here, surely, are the future rulers of Egypt, and the British don’t seem to realize it. The British are doing a grand job, he writes in his diary. “But with liberty and progress they are teaching the natives to rebel. I believe that the English school in the colonies will either destroy British colonial rule—or establish British rule of the world. One would like to return in fifty years and see the outcome.”
A year later Herzl was dead, aged forty-four. His weak heart could no longer stand the strain of his mission. Thousands of Jews traveled to Vienna to be at his funeral. Among the mourners were Hermann Bahr, his fraternity brother who turned against the Jews after the death of Richard Wagner, and William Hechler, the English vicar. His son Hans, destined to become the doge of the Jewish aristocratic republic, read the kaddish. He was educated in England, analyzed by Freud, became a Baptist, Catholic, Quaker, Unitarian, Lutheran, and finally a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London. He killed himself in 1930.
We now know what happened in the century after Herzl’s death. His worst fears for the Jews were as nothing compared to what lay in store. But Herzl’s state was born, as a child of the British Empire, even as the Empire itself was dying. There was to be no titled upper class, either of Sephardic Jews, as Disraeli had hoped, or German-speaking Ashkenazim, as Herzl had expected. Israeli boys do not play cricket, nor is Jerusalem filled with English gardens. Dueling never caught on. German is not the national language, and neither is English. But Jewish settlement did bring economic progress, as well as a parliamentary system, both of which Herzl’s British supporters would have recognized and saluted. Yet it wasn’t counted as a blessing by the colonized. Two things in particular were inherited by the “miniature England” from the British Empire: a more or less permanent anti-colonial war on its borders, and a permanent tension in the metropole between Herzl’s open, constitutional idea of nationhood and the wail of tribal voices.
