Theodor Herzl's Conversion to Author(s): Henry J. Cohn Source: Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), pp. 101-110 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4466575 Accessed: 17-12-2018 13:36 UTC

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This content downloaded from 138.37.66.217 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:36:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 's Conversion to Zionism

by Henry J. Cohn

On January 5, 1895 Theodor Herzl witnessed the military degradation of Alfred Dreyfus. On May 14, 1895 the city council of chose as its mayor Karl Lueger, leader of the antisemitic party of United Christians; was plunged into political crisis for over a year, while confirmation of this appointment by the Emperor remained in the balance. About the beginning of May 1895, Herzl was seized by the idea which led him early in June to begin composing his book, The Jewish State, in which he proposed the organized exodus of Jews to an auton- omous territory of their own, not necessarily Palestine. Standard accounts of his sudden conversion to this Zionist solution for the Jewish problem stress the im- mediate shock of the trial and condemnation of Dreyfus, but underestimate the background of virulent in Herzl's adopted home town, Vienna. This article seeks to reverse the emphasis in evaluating the tangled skein of motives influencing the founder of Zionism. With very few exceptions, almost any recent book or article which alludes to Herzl's conversion to Zionism, whether it is about Jewish, French, or Austrian history, and whether written by a Jew or a non-Jew, ascribes a leading role to the Dreyfus Affair. All are agreed on its paramount influence; variations occur only in assessing the directness of that influence. Despite the time lag of three months between the degradation of Dreyfus and the beginning of May, when Herzl first drafted a letter seeking an interview with the philanthropist Baron Hirsch for the purpose of outlining the ideas later amplified in The Jewish State, many authors have seen that work as an instant response to Herzl's experience of the Paris crowd baying for the blood of Dreyfus.' Others, while not mentioning the Paris mob, ascribe an immediacy to the impact made on Herzl by the trial of Dreyfus which amounts to a quite similar interpretation.2

1 See, for example, Hannah Arendt, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today," in Essays on Antisemitism, ed. by Koppel S. Pinson (2d ed.; New York 1946), p. 213; Josef Patai, Star over Jordan: The Life of Theodor Herzl (New York 1946), p. 56; Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Reader (New York 1959), p. 202; Norman Bentwich, The Jews in our Time (London 1960), p. 44; James Parkes, A History of the Jewish People (London 1964), p. 184; Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914 (London 1966), p. 184. 2 See, for example, Adolf Boehm, Die Zionistische Bewegung (2 vols.; 2d ed.; Vienna 1935), vol. i, p. 157; Max Grunwald, Vienna (Philadelphia 1936), p. 451; Cecil Roth, A Short History of the Jewish People (3d ed; London 1948), p. 410; Robert F. Byres, Antisemitism in Modern France, vol. i: The Prologue to the Dreyfus Af,air (New Jersey, 1950), p. 99; Malcolm 101

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Very few scholars have made qualifications to, or expressed doubts about, this point of view, and their arguments have undeservedly been submerged in the continuing flood of contrary opinions. Alex Bein, author of the standard biography of Herzl, was much more cautious in his formulation than many other writers who afterwards relied on his book; for Bein it is only true in a limited sense that "Herzl could say later that the Dreyfus affair had made him a Zionist": it had caused him to become more deeply conscious of his Jewishness, but the question remained of how he should express that reaction.3 At the time of the first Dreyfus case, Herzl

. . . telegraphed long despatches on the events when they occurred, but no word about Dreyfus appears in his account of how he came to the Zionist idea, when he sought to analyze the process in his diaries only four months after the degradation scene. In truth there was no Dreyfus Affair to impress him in 1895; there was only the arrest and condemnation of an officer who chanced to be a Jew. Observers, Herzl among them, were quick to suspect that Dreyfus was innocent and that nevertheless "the Jew must be burnt." But not until 1896, well after the Jewish State had been written, did evidence of foul play begin to come to light and the anti-Semitic implications unfold. Even though Herzl expressly stated in 1899 that the Dreyfus case had made him a Zionist, it was at best an appropriate myth, a dramatic foreshortening of the facts.4

Such arguments must have even greater force now that Herzl's diaries have for the first time been published in full, in an English translation which contains hundreds

Hay, Europe and the Jews (Boston 1960), originally published under the title The Foot of Pride (Boston 1950), pp. 209-10; Ludwig Lewisohn, ed., Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for this Age (Cleveland 1955), p. 52-53; Cohen, Theodor Herzl: Founder of Political Zionism (New York and London 1959), pp. 65-67; The Standard Jewish Encyclopaedia (1959), p. 893; Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York 1962), p. 397; Leslie Derfler, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Tragedy of Errors? (Boston 1963), p. ix; Andre Chouraqui, L'Alliance Israelite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860-1960 (Paris 1965), p. 141; Barnet Litvinoff, The Road to (London 1965), p. 65; Arthur J. May, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, Mass. 1965), p. 181; Douglas Johnson, France and the Dreyfus Affair (London 1966), p. 224; Friedrich Heer, Gottes erste Liebe: 2000 Jahre Juden- tum und Christentum. Genesis des osterreichischen Katholiken Adolf Hitler (Munich 1967), pp. 202, 231-32; Frank Field, The Last Days of Mankind: Karl Kraus and his Vienna (London 1968), pp. 45, 64; Martin Gilbert, Jewish History Atlas (London 1969), map 60, no. 5. 3 Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl: Biographie (Vienna 1934), p. 190; idem, Theodor Herzl: A Biography, abridged trans. by Maurice Samuel (Philadelphia 1941), pp. 116-17. Josef Fraenkel, "Simon Dubnow and the History of Political Zionism," in Simon Dubnow: The Man and his Work, ed. by Aaron Steinberg (Paris 1963) argued more specifically that "Herzl's statement: 'The Dreyfus affair in Paris, which I witnessed in 1894, turned me into a Zionist' ... really meant . . . that the Dreyfus affair had been, so to speak, the final link in the chain of events. . . . Herzl's ideas were not suddenly conceived and formulated; they took years to evolve and ripen like fruit on a tree" (pp. 153-54). This statement may also be found in Josef Fraenkel, Dubnow, Herzl and Ahad Ha-am: Political and Cultural Zionism (London 1963), pp. 18-19. See also idem, Theodor Herzl: A Biography (2d ed.; London 1948), pp. 44, 52; Abram L. Sachar, A History of the Jews (4th ed.; New York 1960), p. 353; Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (London 1958), p. 270. Carl E. Schorske, "Politics in a New Key: an Austrian Triptych," Journal of Modern History, vol. xxxix (1967), pp. 374-77, stresses the importance of the elections in Vienna for Herzl's change of mind, but also assigns considerable weight to the Dreyfus Affair. 4 Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York 1956), p. xix; cf. Alex Bein, "Herzl und der Dreyfus-Prozess," Die Stimme (Vienna), Oct. 5, 1934, p. 7.

This content downloaded from 138.37.66.217 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:36:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Herzl's Conversion to Zionism 103 of passages, some of them several pages long, which were omitted from the original German edition of 1922-23.5 The starting point for any discussion of the connection between the Dreyfus Affair and Herzl's conversion to Zionism is the frequently cited article on Zionism which he is generally presumed to have published in the North American Review in 1899, although in fact it never appeared in that periodical; the original manu- script has disappeared and a German version was first published in 1920.6 There Herzl wrote:

I was turned into a Zionist by the Dreyfus Case. Not the present one in Rennes [August 7 - September 19, 1899], but the original one in Paris, of which I was a witness in 1894.... For the Jews there is no other help and salvation than to return to their own nationhood and settle in their own land and territory. That is what I wrote in my book The Jewish State in 1895 under the shattering impression of the first Dreyfus Case.7

It was understandable for Herzl to write in such terms about the first Dreyfus case while attending the retrial at Rennes; the Dreyfus Affair had meanwhile become a raging political issue and had induced many other Jews to adopt Herzl's Zionist ideals. At the beginning of the previous year, however, in a short biographical sketch in the Jewish Chronicle, Herzl had given a brief account of his four years in Paris and his composition of The Jewish State without ever mentioning Dreyfus.8 The diary which he began to keep in the first days of June 1895 opens with a detailed discussion of his interest in the Jewish problem since 1881 or 1882, an interest which culminated in a sudden realization of the Zionist solution: "It took at least thirteen years for me to conceive this simple idea. Only now do I realize how often I went right past it."9 His stay in Paris since 1891 is described not as a period of heightened emotions or of reactions to the Dreyfus case (which is not

5 Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries, ed. by Raphael Patai and trans. by Harry Zohn (5 vols.; New York and London 1960). Hereafter cited as Diaries. 6 Dr. Alex Bein, Director of the Zionist Central Archives in Jerusalem, has kindly supplied the following information to me in a letter of Dec. 10, 1967: "According to the correspondence of Herzl with Professor Richard Gottheil, the President of the Federation of American Zionists, Herzl sent the manuscript to Gottheil in September 1899. It should have been published in December 1899; later the publication date was postponed until February 1900. In the meantime the North American Review passed into the hands of new owners, and it seems that eventually the article was not published in the North American Review. When Leon Kellner first published the article (in German) in Herzl's Zionistische Schriften, he appears to have had before him a manuscript from which he could conclude that the article had been written by Herzl for publication in the North American Review. This manuscript is, however, not in the Herzl archives which are preserved by us. Kellner obviously did not know that the article was not published in the North American Review in 1899." Jacob de Haas, Secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, could write in 1904: "Herzl has not confessed to what particular incident the publication of his 'Jewish State' in the winter of 1895 [sic] was due. He was in Paris at the time and no doubt moved by the Dreyfus Affair." See his 'Theodor Herzl," The Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. vi, p. 370. 7 Theodor Herzl, Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, ed. by Leon Kellner (3 vols., 3d ed.; Berlin 1934), vol. i, pp. 374, 376. My translation. 8 Theodor Herzl, "An Autobiography," Jewish Chronicle, Jan. 14, 1898, pp. 20-21. A German version is found in Herzl, Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, vol. i, pp. 13-14. Cf. Bein, "Herzl und der Dreyfus-Prozess." 9 Diaries, vol. i, p. 40 (June 7, 1895).

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discussed at all), but as one of reflection, of taking a more historical view of anti- semitism, of putting into perspective the emotional responses to antisemitism which he had previously experienced:

In Paris... I reached a higher, more disinterested view of anti-Semitism, from which at least I did not have to suffer directly. In Austria or in Germany I must constantly fear that someone will shout "Hep, hep!" after me. But here I pass through the crowd unrecognized.10

He described how his feelings became stronger during a short visit to Vienna in the summer and autumn of 1894. During that autumn-in Vienna-he first con- ceived the plan of writing on "The Situation of the Jews" and wanted to visit east European and, later, western countries where they had suffered, and Palestine too, though as yet he had no Zionist intentions: "All my faithful reports were to bring out the misfortune of the Jews and to show that they were human beings whom people revile without knowing them."l A few weeks before beginning the diaries, however, "I proceeded from the idea of writing a novel to a practical program... ,12 This may have been the moment of conscious conversion, about the beginning of May, although it occurred after a long period of gestation. In any case, it was by two distinct stages that Herzl abandoned his position of successively recommending assimilation, socialism, and baptism as solutions to the Jewish problem. First he spurned his earlier nostrums by turning to favor open discussion of the question, placing the Jewish problem for the first time in the forefront of his interests; and only later did he adopt a Zionist program. The first stage is marked by his play The New Ghetto, which depicted antisemitism in the aristocracy and the business world. The idea for it came to him in Paris ten days before the arrest of Dreyfus became public knowledge. On October 19, 1894 Herzl was having his bust made by the Viennese sculptor Samuel Friedrich Beer. When the conversation turned to the Jewish question and the growth of antisemitism in their native Vienna, Herzl became very excited and left the studio; on the way home he had the inspiration for his play.13 Six months later he described this episode in a letter to Heinrich Teweles:

[In Paris] I gained a freer and higher attitude towards the anti-Semitism of my faraway homeland. And once I was at the sculptor Beer who made my bust. During one of the sessions I described to him the modem Jew and his conditions. And in do- ing so I became engulfed in the white heat of great eruptions. When I left, the whole play shot upwards in me like a granite pillar; I began to write it the next day and finished within three weeks ... 14

The antisemitism of Europe in general and of Austria in particular, seen all the more clearly from the distance and relative calm of Paris, prompted the composition

10 Ibid., vol. i, p. 5. 11 Ibid., vol. i, p. 12. 12 Ibid., vol. i, p. 13. 13 Leon Kellner, Theodor Herzls Lehrjahre (1860-1895) (Vienna and Berlin 1920), pp. 148-49; Bein, Herzl, p. 174 (1934 edition); pp. 101-102 (1941 edition). 14 Herzl to Teweles, May 19, 1895, cited in Alex Bein, "Some Early Herzl Letters," Herzl Yearbook, vol. i, (1958), p. 304. The original German letter may be found in Kellner, Herzls Lehrjahre, p. 153.

This content downloaded from 138.37.66.217 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:36:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Herzl's Conversion to Zionism 105 of The Ghetto. All the evidence suggests that The Jewish State had its genesis in the same setting. The second stage of Herzl's development towards Zionism opened at an indeterminate date several weeks before, on June 5, 1895 at the latest, when he began making notes preparatory to writing The lewish State. The diary entries for the next few months contain not only a flood of ideas pre-figuring those later to appear in his book, but also Herzl's impressions of contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. The number and nature of these entries are the best available in- dication of his thoughts on the condition of the Jews during the weeks after he had accepted the Zionist solution. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Herzl's accept- ance of that solution had been influenced by the same preoccupations which re- mained with him for a period of months shortly afterwards. He makes several re- ferences to the ubiquity and seriousness of antisemitism throughout Europe (an aspect of his consciousness which previous commentators have frequently noticed):

Things cannot improve, but are bound to get worse-to the point of massacres. Governments can't prevent it any longer, even if they want to. Also, there is so- cialism behind it.15

Six days later Herzl expected a social revolution in one European country, probably France, at the expense of bankers and Jews, the expropriation of Jewish property in Russia, and emergency laws directed against them in Germany.16 On June 28 he explained to Albert Rothschild that he was approaching the Kaiser because "I am simply trying to get at anti-Semitism where it originated and still has its center: in Germany."l7 Early in July he noted reports of antisemitism in Prussia and Hungary, and the calamities which had befallen the Jews of Rumania; "every day I pay close attention to the sufferings of our brethren in all countries."18 While writing The Jewish State Herzl was concerned above all with the serious- ness and pervasiveness of antisemitism. The question remains whether this awareness was triggered off or heightened more by the Dreyfus Affair than by Herzl's personal experience and knowledge of antisemitism in Vienna. The diaries at this time, while not mentioning Dreyfus, are more preoccupied with antisemitism in Vienna and Austria than in all other European countries put together.l9

In the evening I dined with the Schiffs. Their in-laws from Vienna were visiting them. Well-to-do, educated, depressed people. They moaned softly about anti- Semitism, to which I continually steered the conversation. The husband expects a new St. Bartholomew's Night. The wife believes conditions could hardly get any worse. They argued about whether it was good or bad that Lueger's election as mayor of Vienna had not been ratified.20

Three days later he wrote asking the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Dr. Moritz Giidemann, "to draw up an accurate report of everything that you know about the present moral

15 Diaries, vol. i, p. 38 (June 7, 1895). 18 Ibid., vol. i, p. 131. 17 Ibid., vol. i, p. 190. is Ibid., vol. i, pp. 195-96, 202, 207, 205-206. 19 Cf. with Hugo Gold, Geschichte der Juden in Wien: Ein Gedenkbuch (Tel Aviv 1966): "Unabhangig vom Wiener Antisemitismus ... schrieb Theodor Herzl den 'Judenstaat' " (p. 40). 20 Diaries, vol. i, p. 46 (June 8, 1895).

This content downloaded from 138.37.66.217 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:36:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 106 JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES and political situation of the Jews, not only in Vienna and Austria-Hungary, but also in Germany, Russia, Rumania, etc."21 Herzl was especially interested in

. . vital statistics of the Jews in the above-mentioned countries (births, marriages, deaths, listed by occupation); observable trends in change of residence (e.g., from Galicia to Lower Austria); whether and to what extent these changes of locality were caused or impeded by anti-Semitism; a brief survey of typical major and minor persecutions of Jews that have come to your attention (persecution in par- liaments, newspapers, at rallies, on the street); signs of the increase or decrease of anti-Semitism, and in what proportion; official and unofficial anti-Semitism; hostil- ity towards Jews in schools, offices, closed and open professions.22

Giidemann refused to comply with Herzl's request; in his memoirs written in 1913 he reminisced that at the time he had "never for a moment interpreted Herzl's in- tention to help the Jews as anything more than a kindly journalistic gesture in defence of the Jews of Vienna, who were at that time suffering from rising Antisemitism."23 Of course, as Joseph Fraenkel remarks,24 Herzl intended action on behalf of the whole Jewish people, not just the Jews of Vienna, but it remains significant that his correspondent was so impressed with Herzl's specific concern for the Jews of Vienna as to draw such a false conclusion from it. On June 14 Herzl noted further complaints of antisemitism by a Viennese Jew25 and six days later "things were getting worse and worse" in Vienna;26 back on June 13 he had expressed the fear that "In Austria people will let themselves be intimidated by the Viennese rabble and deliver up the Jews."2 Further news of Austrian antisemitism prompted the comment on July 8: "And this sort of thing is repeated in a thousand places every day-yet people fail to draw any conclusions from it."28 One of Herzl's many letters to Rabbi Giidemann explained: The reason I am writing you today is the recent anti-Semitic riots in Vienna. I am very closely following the movement in Austria as well as elsewhere. These are but trifles. Things are going to get worse and more out of control ... in the midst of this bleak situation in which the Austrian Jews find themselves I should like to hold out to you hope for some relief....29 In September the city council elections in Vienna were a complete victory for the antisemitic cause.

The movement is not really a noisy one. For me, who am used to the clamor of popular agitation in Paris, things are even much too quiet. I find this calm more sinister.30

21 Ibid., vol. i, p. 76. 22 Ibid., vol. i, p. 77. 23 Josef Fraenkel, "The Chief Rabbi and the Visionary," in The Jews of Vienna, ed. by Josef Fraenkel (London 1967), p. 121. 24 Ibid. 25 Diaries, vol. i, p. 101. 26 Ibid., vol. i, p. 125. 27 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 131-32. 28 Ibid., vol. i, p. 197. 29 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 201-202 (July 15, 1895). Later that month he called Linz "a capital of anti-Semitism" and was alarmed by the appearance of antisemitic inscriptions at Zell-am-See. See ibid., vol. i, pp. 215, 220. 30 Ibid., vol. i, p. 243 (Sept. 20, 1895).

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When a passer-by called Lueger "our Fiihrer," "... these words showed me more than all the declamation and abuse how deeply anti-Semitism is rooted in the hearts of these people."31 Two monts later Herzl believed that the refusal of the Austrian government to confirm Lueger's election as mayor of Vienna was a grave mistake likely to lead to even more virulent antisemitism.32 Herzl's alarm was by no means without foundation. After a period of un- certainty in the 1880's, the Austrian antisemitic parties achieved their greatest political triumphs in the 1890's, at a time when, as a result of immigration from eastern Europe, the number of Jews in the capital had risen from about 6,000 in 1860 to well over 100,000.33 Antisemitism, instead of being merely a widespread popular prejudice and a set of ideas propagated by a few litterateurs, had become one of the main planks in the program of political parties riding the crest of en- thusiastic popular support. Dr. Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian-Social Party, had gathered the various antisemitic groups into the "United Christians." This al- liance carried him with increasing majorities through a series of elections and eventually, in 1897, into office as mayor of Vienna, the most important elective office in Austria. Whereas Lueger enjoyed the support of the lower clergy of the Catholic Church in Austria, its bishops actually sought a papal injunction against his party. Since it was papal policy after the first Vatican Council to weaken the episcopate and bind it to Rome by upholding the Catholic "people" against the bishops and theologians, Leo XIII gave Lueger and his party the papal blessing and his warm approval in February 1895.34 Shortly afterwards, on April 1, the municipal elections in Vienna came to an end with a majority for Lueger's supporters on the city council; six weeks later the council's hotly contested election of Lueger as deputy mayor was followed by the resignation of the Liberal mayor and Lueger's succession, though he failed as yet to obtain imperial confirmation as mayor. The crisis had been building up during the period when Herzl became convinced that the Zionist solution for the Jewish problem was justified. He had actually been in Vienna on a short visit towards the end of March, during the course of the elections.35 Considerable additional contemporary evidence points to the association in Herzl's mind of the political antisemitic movement in Vienna with his formulation and early propagation of the Zionist idea. On November 26, 1895 he expounded his views to the "Maccabeans" in London at a meeting attended by Asher Myers, editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Myers asked Herzl for a resume of his argument, which appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on January 17, 1896. In his editorial

31 Ibid., vol. i, p. 244. 32 Ibid., vol. i, p. 269 (Nov. 10, 1895). Similarly in the next year, "Yesterdays election to the Vienna City Council again proves me right. Since September the anti-Semitic vote has again increased enormously." See ibid., vol. i, p. 307 (Feb. 28, 1896). 33 Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York 1964), pp. 10, 128, 171-88; see also the brief accounts by Oskar Karbach, "Die politi- schen Grundlagen des deutsch-bsterreichischen Antisemitismus," Zeitschrift fur die Geschichte der Juden, vol. i (1964), pp. 1-8, 103-16, 169-78; Gold, op. cit., pp. 34-40. 34 Pulzer, op. cit., pp. 181-84; Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiositdt (Munich 1968), pp. 84-85. 35 Bein, op. cit., pp. 117-18. (1941 edition).

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Myers significantly commented that "the present phase of Austrian anti-Semitism must be grave indeed if such heroic remedies suggest themselves as not only advisable but also as practicable."36 Herzl noted in his article that persecution will exist even in the most highly civilized countries, "... France itself is no exception . ..,"7 but this was hardly to place the emphasis on French antisemitism. The Jewish State, completed in manuscript by mid-January and first published on February 14, 1896, did not mention the Dreyfus case and described antisemitism in France as no more than a social irritant. Although Herzl belittled the value of distinguishing between different degrees of antisemitism, he nevertheless placed its Austrian manifestation in the foreground of the European persecutions:

The forms of persecution vary . . . according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, Anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are travelling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs.38

Herz's diaries for the next years, 1,630 printed pages in the full edition, mention Captain Dreyfus only eleven times. Seven of these are merely passing allusions, and the three fullest references to the Dreyfus case all bear out in various ways the interpretation advanced in this article. On November 17, 1895 Herzl recorded a conversation he had had with French Jews who rejected his ideas for a Jewish state. When one of them, the vice-president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,

... emphasized his French nationality, I said: 'What? Don't you and I belong to the same nation? Why did you wince when Lueger was elected? Why did I suffer when Captain Dreyfus was accused of high treason?'39

This passage implies that Lueger's election was the calamity which struck Herzl to the heart, although he suffered also at the accusation against Dreyfus, which was the more cruel blow for Monsieur Leven. Two years later in Vienna, Herzl commented on "the Dreyfus affair which, strangely enough, is active again at this particular time-just as it was three years ago, at the time when I was writing The New Ghetto."40 Here surely was a time when one would have expected Herzl to describe the Dreyfus Affair as the catalyst which had induced him to write The Jewish State, but instead he associated it with a play for which, as we have seen, he had developed the central theme before there was a Dreyfus case. Perhaps Herzl's recollections were already becoming blurred under the impact of intervening develop- ments in both the Zionist movement and the Dreyfus Affair. In the following year, Friedrich Schiff of Paris came to him after holding out for three years against the idea of a Jewish State, but Schiff was now converted as a result of the baiting of

36 "Herzl's First Publication in the Jewish Cause," Herzl Yearbook, vol. iii, (1960), p. 91. 37 Ibid., p. 95. 38 Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, ed. by Louis Lipsky (New York 1946), p. 85. Cf. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Losung der Judenfrage (3d ed.; Leipzig and Vienna 1896), p. 21. s9 Diaries, vol. i, p. 273. 40 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 601.

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Dreyfus;41 the Dreyfus case in its earlier stages had not produced such an effect on him. In this context it is worth remarking that Max Nordau was another early Zionist who, like Herzl, later confused the reasons which had inspired his first Zionist enthusiasms by superimposing on them his subsequent concern for Dreyfus. His memoirs, written by his wife, affirmed that "was die zionistische Uberzeugung am tiefsten im Herzen Max Nordaus verankerte, war sicherlich der erste Dreyfuspro- zess," but immediately went on to discuss at length his reactions not to the first Dreyfus case, but to the progress of the Affair after 1896 and especially in the years 1898-99.42 In 1902 there appeared the first extensive article on Zionism in a distinguished international encyclopaedia, Lucien Wolf's contribution to the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica. It was the work of a former collaborator of Herzl's who had become cool towards Zionism, but the Zionist press, although occasionally critical, was on the whole satisfied with its accuracy.43 Wolf was perfectly clear in his mind about what had prompted Herzl to make his stand:

The electoral successes of the antisemites in Vienna and Lower Austria in 1895 had impressed him with the belief that the Jews were unassimilable in Europe and that the time was not far distant when they would be once more submitted to civil and political disabilities.44

Not very different from this analysis by an English non-Zionist historian who was soon to become an anti-Zionist, was that of the Semitic scholar and President of the Federation of American Zionists, Professor Richard Gottheil, writing for The Jewish Encyclopaedia three years later:

It was at this time [the rise and extension of anti-Semitism throughout Europe] that Theodor Herzl, brooding over the strong rise of anti-Semitism in his own Austrian home and in Paris, in which city he was then living, wrote his "Judenstaat."45 The opinions of contemporaries personally acquainted with Herzl support the evidence of his own published works and diaries. Although it would be impossible to trace every nuance in his thinking,46 it seems reasonable to assume beyond much doubt that when, in the course of time, he became more deeply aware of the strength and the indelible nature of antisemitism throughout Europe, this realization was brought home most forcefully and transmuted into the Zionist idea by his personal

41 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 649 (Aug. 11, 1898). In his interview with the Kaiser in October 1898 Herzl merely referred to details of the Dreyfus case. See ibid., vol. ii, pp. 730-31. 42 Max Nordau, Erinnerungen, ed. by Anna Nordau (Leipzig and Vienna 1928), pp. 198- 216. Cf. Anna Nordau and Maxa Nordau Max Nordau: A Biography (New York 1943), pp. 118-19; Meir Ben-Horin, Max Nordau: Philosopher of Human Solidarity (London 1956), pp. 173-81,242-44. 43 Josef Fraenkel, Lucien Wolf and Theodor Herzl (London 1960), pp. 18-19. 44 Lucien Wolf, "Zionism," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed., vol. xxxiii (1902), p. 929. This passage appeared unaltered in the more readily accessible 11th ed., vol. xxviii (1911), p. 988. 45 Richard J. H. Gottheil, "Zionism," The Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. xii (1905), p. 671. Compare this with what the Secretary of the Federation of American Zionists wrote in the same source, quoted in n. 6 supra. 46 The change in his political ideas also coincided with the "hollowing out of his personal life" regarding his unhappy marriage. See Schorske, "Austrian Triptych," p. 375.

This content downloaded from 138.37.66.217 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:36:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 110 JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES knowledge of, and passionate interest in, the growth of political antisemitism in Vienna. His stay in Paris-for all the deep rumblings of antisemitism that were to be heard there as well-gave him a sense of detachment which made the situation of the Jews in the rest of Europe appear even more alarming, but it also allowed the opportunity for contemplation which bore fruit in the Zionist idea. As yet the Dreyfus case had not become the Dreyfus Affair. The earlier sensational activities of the antisemitic journalist Edouard Drumont47 and the notorious Panama scandals of 1892 had been if anything more disturbing symptoms of antisemitism than the Dreyfus case-until, however, the controversy over it flared up in 1897. Not Paris, but Vienna, as seen from Paris, provided the antisemitism which in 1895 injected urgency into the development of Herzl's thoughts on the Jewish problem. That very same city of Vienna provided the journalistic milieu in which Herzl had cultivated the propagandistic talents later to be so essential for launching his Zionist campaign, and by the end of 1896 it harbored the first of the Zionist societies in the Herzlian mold. If Vienna was the cradle of moder political antisemitism, in many respects it was also the cradle of moder political Zionism.

47 On June 12, 1895 Herzl wrote: "I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist": by depicting the antisemitic view of the Jewish problem as a totality, Drumont had helped Herzl to arrive at a clear solution. See Diaries, vol. i, p. 99; Bein, Herzl, p. 82 (1941 edition).

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