A History of Zionism (73 page)

Nordau always returned to this theme of the rootless western Jew and his problems in a gentile society. In his address at the first Zionist congress he drew a sombre picture of Jewish spiritual misery in western Europe, more painful than physical suffering because it affected men of high station, men who were proud and sensitive. The western Jew was still allowed to vote, but he was excluded with varying degrees of politeness from the clubs and gatherings of his Christian fellow countrymen. He was allowed to go wherever he pleased, but everywhere he encountered the sign: No Jews admitted. He had abandoned his specifically Jewish character, yet the nations did not accept him as part of their national communities. He fled from his Jewish fellows, because antisemitism had taught him to be contemptuous of them, but his gentile compatriots repulsed him. He had lost his home in the ghetto yet the land of his birth was denied to him as his home. He had no ground under his feet, no community to which he belonged. He was insecure in his relations with his fellow man, timid with strangers, and suspicious even of the secret feelings of his friends. His best powers were dissipated in suppressing and destroying or at least concealing his true character and identity. He had become a cripple within and a counterfeit person without, ridiculous and hateful, like everything unreal, to all men of high standards. He was a new Marrano who no longer had a faith to sustain him. He had left Judaism in rage and bitterness, but in his innermost heart, even if he himself did not acknowledge it, he carried with him into Christianity his personal humiliation, his dishonesty, and whatever compelled him to live a lie.
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The theme of the uprooted cosmopolitan, the wanderer between two worlds with no home in either, appeared in many Zionist writings and speeches. It was a universal problem but no one was likely to feel it more acutely than the Jewish intellectuals. They were at one and the same time part of the intellectual establishment and yet in some vital respects total outsiders. In Germany they had made an enormous contribution to cultural life, felt confident of their place in society, and then suddenly were given to understand that, after all, they did not belong. Jakob Klatzkin sketched a sharp portrait of the ‘typical’ Jewish intellectual who seemed almost totally assimilated and yet found it so difficult to be accepted by the host people, precisely because he hailed from a spiritual aristocracy with its own specific and unassimilable features. He was highly developed intellectually, rich in creative and destructive faculties, dynamic, too active in his desire to be assimilated, and hence ultimately a nuisance. His strengths were ridicule and irony, barren intellectualism. He acted as mediator between various national cultures, but all too often he barely touched the surface of things, and had no real feeling for the deeper roots of the national genius. He tried to mix things that were incompatible, being at home everywhere and nowhere. He was attempting to reinterpret the German spirit, discovering in it ideas of tolerance, justice, and even messianism, until it became half German, half Jewish. These intellectuals had a strong inclination towards radicalism, negation and destruction. Intellectual proletarians, they found no rest, since they had lost their own moorings in history. Lacking roots themselves, they were compelled to try to change the world, to preach the overthrow of the existing order.
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It was not a flattering picture, and it exaggerated certain features common to a relatively small group of Literaten. The great majority of the German Jewish intelligentsia was liberal – but not too liberal – in its politics; it was deeply rooted in German culture, and fairly content with its lot; it wanted change but certainly not anarchy and revolution. The soul-searching of the Jewish literary intelligentsia attracted so much attention because it affected the most vocal section of the community, the one most exposed to the limelight. Which is not to say that their problems were not real or significant.

The issues involved emerged most clearly when Moritz Goldstein published an article in March 1913 entitled ‘German-Jewish Parnassus’,
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creating something of a minor scandal. It provoked some ninety letters to the editor and was discussed for years in the German press. Briefly, Goldstein argued that the Jews were dominating the culture of a people which denied them both the right and the capacity to do so. The newspapers in the capital were about to become a Jewish monopoly. Almost all directors of the Berlin theatres were Jews, as were many of the actors. German musical life without the Jews was almost unthinkable, and the study of German literature was also to a large extent in Jewish hands. Everyone knew it, only the Jews pretended it was not worthy of notice. For what mattered, they claimed, were their achievements, their cultural and humanistic activities. This, said Goldstein, was a dangerous fallacy, for ‘the others do not feel that we are Germans’. They could show these others that they were not inferior, but was it not naïve to assume that this would in any way diminish their dislike and antipathy? There was a basic anomaly in the Jewish situation. The liberal Jewish intellectuals were good Europeans, but they were also split personalities, divorced from the people amidst whom they were living. They could make a great contribution to science, for science knew no national borders. But in literature and the arts (and he might have added in political life) any major initiative had to be rooted in a popular and national framework. From Homer to Tolstoy all the really great works had their origins in the native soil, the homeland, the people. And this ‘rootedness’ the Jews lacked, despite all their intellectual and emotional efforts.

Among those who answered Goldstein was the poet Ernst Lissauer, who during the First World War achieved notoriety in connection with his ‘Hate England’ song. He bitterly opposed any attempt to restore a ghetto on German soil or a ‘Palestinian enclave’. On the contrary, he felt that the process of assimilation must be carried to its successful conclusion. If so many Jewish intellectuals were radicals, and still had no feeling for the German national spirit, this was no doubt because they were still discriminated against in so many ways. But once these barriers had fallen, they too would be fully integrated into the mainstream of German life.

Lissauer’s optimism seems almost incredibly naïve in retrospect, but it is not at all impossible that but for the First World War and its repercussions his predictions might have come true. Antisemitism did not at the time succeed in halting the progress of the Jews in central Europe. Paradoxical as it may sound after the Hitler period (Nahum Goldmann wrote), the history of the Jews in Germany from 1870 to 1930 represents the most spectacular advance any branch of Jewry has ever achieved.
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The great majority of central European Jews did not write books or plays, did not own newspapers or manage theatres. There were strains and stresses and conflicts threatening their status in society. But these were regarded as the inevitable concomitants of the process of assimilation. The fact that assimilation was more difficult than anticipated did not mean that it was bound to fail. Zionism in western Europe was the reaction to these difficulties. All Jews were compelled to confront this challenge but only a few were impelled to embrace the new creed. The only ones who did not react at all were those who had already broken with Judaism. They had either left the Jewish community or were about to do so, and did not therefore bother to reflect about their special position as Jews. No ties bound them to the Jewish religion or any other form of national solidarity. They no longer felt Jewish and consequently the whole dispute between Zionism and its adversaries did not concern them. They would comment on Zionism as they did on other political or cultural curiosities: ‘This time the Jews will not arrive dry shod in the promised land; another Red Sea, social democracy, will bar their way’.
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But more often they would simply ignore Zionism. The real debate was between the Zionists and the great majority which had not opted out of Judaism but interpreted it in a different way.

Central Europe, Germany and Austria in particular, had been the birthplace of modern Zionism. It was also the birthplace of liberal anti-Zionism. But the reaction in England, the United States and other western countries was not, as will be shown presently, essentially different. Herzl had invested much effort in winning over Moritz Guedemann, the Viennese chief rabbi, but without any lasting success. Herzl’s
Judenstaat
was followed by Guedemann’s
Nationaljudentum
, an outspoken anti-Zionist tract. Guedemann explained Zionism as a reaction to the rise of antisemitism, which had provoked indignation and defiance among many Jews. They had picked up the gauntlet: ‘If they regard us as aliens, we ought to accept the challenge.’ But this psychologically understandable reaction did not make Jewish nationalism any more acceptable in Guedemann’s eyes; it was contrary to the essence of the Jewish religion. Quoting Grillparzer, the Austrian national writer (‘from humanity through nationality to bestiality’), the rabbi concluded that Jews had to fight for their rights rather than give up the struggle.
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Similar views were aired by the executive of German rabbis soon after Herzl had issued his summons to the first Zionist congress. The declaration of the ‘protest rabbis’ (as the Zionists contemptuously called them) stated that the aspirations of the ‘so-called Zionists, to establish a Jewish national state’, contradicted the messianic promise of the Bible and the other sources of the Jewish religion. Judaism made it obligatory for those professing it to serve the country to which they belonged and wholeheartedly to promote its national interests. The ‘protest rabbis’ emphasised that their opposition was directed against political Zionism. They were not against Jewish agricultural settlement as such in Palestine, because these ‘noble aspirations are not aimed at the foundation of a national state’.
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Vogelstein, one of the most outspoken opponents of Zionism, rejected the new movement very much in the same spirit as Gabriel Riesser, the great advocate of Jewish emancipation in Germany: Germany is our fatherland; we have and need no other. The German Jews for whom Vogelstein spoke were tied to Germany by many links. Ever since the emancipation they had been German patriots, and over the generations had developed a distinctly German national consciousness. A national revival in the Zionist sense was not compatible with the aims of Judaism as they envisaged it. According to the liberal version a nation-state might have been needed in ancient times to achieve and preserve pure monotheism. But once this had been attained, once these beliefs had been absorbed by the Israelites, a territorial centre was no longer needed. On the contrary, divine providence had sent the Jews into the dispersion to serve as witnesses everywhere to the omnipotence of the idea of God. Liberal Judaism agreed with the religious orthodoxy that it was Israel’s mission to promote the realisation of the prophetic ideal in the diaspora.
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There were no substantial differences in approach between the advocates of liberal Judaism in the various countries of the west. According to Joseph Reinach, the leading French-Jewish politician, Zionism was a trap set by the antisemites for the naïve or thoughtless. If Dr Vogelstein stressed the attachment of the German Jews to Germany, his liberal contemporaries in London emphasised that since Judaism was a religion, British Jews could completely identify with the British. Isaac Wise, a leading American rabbi, speaking at the close of the first Zionist congress, said ‘we denounce the whole question of a Jewish state as foreign to the spirit of the modern Jew of this land, who looks upon America as his Palestine and whose interests are centred here’.
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‘Liberal Jews do not wish or pray for the restoration of Jews to Palestine’, wrote Claude Montefiore, the spokesman of liberal Judaism in Britain. The establishment of a Jewish state would refurbish the anachronism of a Jewish God. Judaism was not a national religion; one part of it was universalist, for all mankind, the other specific. But there was nothing in the national part to prevent the Jews being perfect Englishmen. Abstention from the flesh of hares and rabbits did not, after all make them less English.
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According to a like-minded contemporary, Laurie Magnus, the Zionists were partly responsible for the antisemitism which they proposed to destroy. He advocated their exclusion from parliament and public office since they wanted to change the status of Jews to that of foreign visitors. Magnus did not deny Jewish nationality altogether, but this, as an unkind critic paraphrased his views, was something so sublime that it could be realised only by being abandoned.
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If the American and British liberals were above all concerned with the political implications of Zionism, the Germans took it more seriously, trying to analyse and refute its philosophical roots. Felix Goldmann, an anti-Zionist rabbi, regarded Jewish nationalism as a child of the general chauvinist movement which had poisoned recent history but which would be swept away in the new era of universalism. Zionism wanted to sacrifice religion in order to establish some petty state.
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The Zionists, few in number but aggressive and sure of their cause, answered every liberal argument and moved to the offensive whenever possible. Between 1900 and the end of the First World War the debate never ceased, about Zionism and religion, about liberalism as a halfway house between Judaism and total apostasy, about dual loyalties.
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Since there was a limited number of arguments and counterarguments, this literature is highly repetitive. Even the debate between Hermann Cohen, the neo-Kantian philosopher, and Martin Buber, less than half his age, was more significant as a reading of two personal documents than for any new philosophical insight. According to Cohen, Zionism rejected the messianic idea, but without this there was no Jewish religion. He and others of his generation had found in German thought the spirit of humanism and the real
Weltbuergertum
which was in full harmony with Jewish messianic religiosity: ‘I do not read Faust just as a beautiful poem; I love it as a revelation of the German spirit. I feel in a similar way even about Luther, about Mozart and Beethoven, Stein and Bismarck.’
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Cohen argued that the Zionists were muddled about the national issue. The Jews were members of the German nation even if they belonged to a different nationality. When he wrote that a nation was created by a state he was thinking no doubt of the Jews and the absence of a Jewish state. But this was a dubious assertion, which prompted the Zionists to ask the obvious question: Had the German nation been nonexistent before 1870?