“JERUSALEM REBUILT”: the TEMPLE in the FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ZIONIST IMAGINATION Jess Olson Yeshiva University As Zionism Emerged A

“JERUSALEM REBUILT”: THE TEMPLE IN THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ZIONIST IMAGINATION Jess Olson Yeshiva University As Zionism emerged as the dominant expression of Jewish national- ism at the turn of the twentieth century, the Temple of Jerusalem became a powerful symbol in the movement’s developing aesthetic. This ancient structure, the repository of the hope and expectations of Diaspora Jewry since the Exile, emerged in the hands of Zionist cultural figures adorned in a fascinating new framework. While still viewed as the ancestral heart of the Jewish people, the Temple in the imagination of fin-de-siècle Zionist artists, intellectuals and writers developed into a symbol of the dynamism of Jewish national renewal. It became a base from which the universal expectations of the new Jewish state would grow. It is the novel Altneuland, the most ambitious literary production of Theodor Herzl, though often disparaged, and frequently ignored, that represents one of the most potent elaborations of this theme. In fact, Altneuland offers its readers one of the earliest and most explicit expositions of the Temple re-imagined with modern Jewish nationalist eyes. On April 30, 1902, Theodor Herzl made only one note in his diary: “Today I finished my novel Altneuland.”1 His entry is surprisingly terse given the importance that Herzl assigned to the work in the develop- ment of Zionism. His largest single published literary effort, Altneu- land was also, from its earliest inception as an idea in Herzl’s diaries years earlier, a culmination of his all-encompassing vision of the future Jewish state. When the novel appeared, it differed from almost anything that had come before it in Zionist-themed literature produced in a European language. Although it shared a literary pedigree with other utopian novels (Herzl himself pays homage to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, written a decade and a half earlier, both in his diaries 1 Theodor Herzl, Diaries, 30 April 1902 (Raphael Patai, ed., Harry Zohn, trans.) (New York: The Herzl Press, 1960), 1274. 330 jess olson and in the novel itself), it was a new work.2 It was unique in its concep- tion as a Zionist novel—as a coherent work conceived of, in aesthetic rather than programmatic terms, as a piece of fiction, albeit with a clear relationship to the larger political program of its author. More than anything, though, its newness—its novelty—lay in the fact that it imagined, in terms more complete and detailed than anything that had come before it, a new Jewish state as a real entity and a fait accompli. But as Herzl made clear, the central goal of the novel was aesthetic rather than programmatic, seeking to give the Zionist project its first literary classic, replete with a protagonist, a hero, a literary structure and a narrative that emphasized an image of the world not as it was, or even could be, but how it should be, realized through the return of the Jewish nation to Ottoman Palestine. “I am now hard at work on Altneuland.” and “My life now is no novel, and so the novel has become my life.”3 His own words show that, rather than being a dalliance, an odd departure from his more “serious” Zionist project, he viewed the novel as his major intellectual and artistic contribution to the future Zionist state. Once the novel was finished, at least insofar as his diaries are concerned, Herzl had very little of substance to say about his masterpiece, and seemed certain that its impact and importance would be obvious.4 In the sense of causing a sensation within the Zionist movement, he was correct, but in a very different way than he intended. However much he may have thought the novel required no explanation, it was not well received when published, nor did it ever achieve the central- ity to the Zionist literary canon that Herzl imagined it would. Now read mostly as a curiosity by historians of Zionism, interpretation of 2 In Old New Land, Herzl pays homage to Bellamy’s influence directly: “Take the famous [case] of the American, Edward Bellamy, who outlined a noble communistic society in his Looking Backward. In that Utopia, all may eat as much as they please from the common platter.” Theodor Herzl, Old New Land (Lotta Levensohn, trans.) (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Press, 2000) 145. Interestingly, in his review of Altneuland, Ahad Ha’am mentions another utopian Zionist writing (that he rates as preferable to Herzl’s), “Journey to Erets Israel in the Year 2040,” published in 1893 by Elhanan Leib Levinsky. 3 Herzl, Diaries, 14 March 1901. Cited in Ernst Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Biography of Theodor Herzl (New York: Macmillan 1992), 438. 4 Indeed, the only references to the novel made in the diaries after the April 30 entry are on the instances when he presented copies to prominent figures in the course of his lobbying efforts on behalf of the Zionist movement—yet another indication of the importance he assigned to the work..

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