Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the foundation of the Jewish state

When Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, died in 1904 he was just 44 years old. Had he lived to see the establishment of the State of Israel 44 years later, he would most likely have been elected its first president. He would then still have been younger than the current incumbent, Shimon Peres, now aged 90 and said to be the world’s oldest head of state.

On the other hand, at the moment of his death in 1904, Herzl’s political fortunes had fallen so low that, had he survived, he might have sunk back into the relative obscurity of the Viennese literary-theatrical-journalistic world from which he had risen. He had just suffered a severe political body blow when his fellow-Zionists resisted the scheme for Jewish settlement in East Africa (known to history as the “Uganda plan”, though, in fact, its proposed location was in what is now Kenya). This was the brainchild of the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who had initiated it after a visit to the empire’s latest territorial acquisition.

Deeply affected by the grievous condition of the Jewish masses in the Russian Empire in the wake of the notorious Kishinev pogrom in 1903, Herzl had backed the idea of a semi-autonomous Jewish colony in East Africa, at least as a Nachtasyl (“night shelter”), so long as the Turkish rulers of Palestine refused to permit Zionist development in the land of Israel. Yet Russian Zionists were the strongest objectors.

Herzl was mortified. His efforts to secure backing from European statesmen had come to nothing. The Zionist project that he had launched with a resounding bang at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 appeared to have reached a dead end.

Over the next 10 years the movement languished. It revived only as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the establishment after the First World War of a Jewish national home under a mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.

Partly because of his early death, Herzl became, for the Zionists, a quasi-mythical figure. His portrait hung on the wall behind David Ben Gurion when he declared the independence of the Jewish state in the Tel Aviv Museum on 14 May 1948. Herzl’s bearded visage appeared on postage stamps and bank-notes and his remains were flown to Israel to be interred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

The founding father of the Jewish state has been the subject of several biographies, including an outdated, quasi-official life by Alex Bein, first state archivist of Israel, and more recent works by the late Amos Elon and Jacques Kornberg. Shlomo Avineri, an emeritus professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, promises “to transform the canonical image of a larger-than-life person – ‘the Visionary of the State’ in common Israeli parlance – into a real, living  human being and thus extricate him from the mythological qualities connected with his name.”

Relying heavily on Herzl’s fascinating and revealing diaries, which he sees as a Bildungsroman, Avineri focuses on his subject’s diplomatic activities, in particular his attempts to gain support for the Zionist enterprise from crowned heads and potentates throughout Europe. Avineri, who served briefly as director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, understands the game of nations: he excels in passages that narrate the roller-coaster fortunes of his hero in the rough and tumble of international affairs.

“His hero” – because although Avineri tries conscientiously to preserve a certain distance from his subject, he, like so many others who have written about Herzl, soon succumbs to his magic. This Herzl remains a charismatic figure whose story is a romance. And so, in some measure, it should be, because that is how Herzl functioned and why he succeeded. He combined Disraeli’s charm and political genius, Marx’s analytical insight, and the towering authority of his people’s lawgiver, Moses.

Instead of bringing Herzl down to earth, Avineri has produced another panegyric. True, he shows us Herzl’s moments of psychological weakness and discouragement. But these merely highlight his extraordinary capacity to imprint his ideas and his personality on the Zionist movement. Avineri defends Herzl vigorously against one charge sometimes made against him: that he was inspired by racism and colonialism. “I cannot accept that we are a race,” Herzl wrote. “We are an historical entity … No nation has uniformity of race.” Herzl expressed disgust at British colonial attitudes in Egypt and foresaw that these would give rise to a nationalist reaction.

“Undoubtedly,” writes Avineri, “Herzl can be criticised today for his naive liberalism and for not anticipating the birth of a Palestinian Arab national consciousness.” But he reminds us that in Herzl’s day no such movement existed. Herzl, Avineri stresses, “did not regard the existing population of Palestine only as objects to be used for and by the Jews; he viewed them as equals, partners in citizenship”. He advocated “real equality, not colonial domination”. This is important today as Israel faces a decision (or rather continues to face a decision she has ducked for too long) of fateful significance over withdrawal from areas that she has occupied since 1967. Some Israelis who resist such territorial retraction claim to shelter under Herzl’s ideological mantle. This book should disabuse them of such misconceptions.

Avineri refutes the still widely prevalent notion that Herzl was moved to write his momentous pamphlet “The Jewish State” by the Dreyfus Affair in France, on which he reported as a correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. Here Avineri is quite correct, though others have pointed this out, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper as long ago as 1963 and, in greater depth, Henry J. Cohn in 1970. In fact, as they (and now too Avineri) show, Herzl was primarily moved by the rise of political anti-Semitism in Vienna, which, with some insight, he saw as prefiguring a broader movement that would require a political response by Jews.

While he writes lucidly and with considerable historical insight, Avineri does not quite fulfil his promise to bring his subject down to earth. In a rapidly moving series of historical cameos, he reburnishes the heroic image. “Herzl”, he declares, “was, in Hegel’s terms, a ‘world-historical individual’.” This is Herzl in his time, if not altogether for our time.