Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 1: The Untold Story of Herzl's Journey to Zionism

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

It’s hard for a modern Jew to grasp the depth of marginalization and ostracism that even the most assimilated of Austrian Jews experienced in the 1890s. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, began his journey as a passionate assimilationist, a deep believer in European modernity and Germanic culture. It was only when these hopes were dashed that he turned, as a drowning man to a life raft, to political Zionism.Here is the untold story of how Herzl found Zionism. (Spoiler: It wasn’t the Dreyfus Affair.)Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode one of Ask Khaliv Anything. Our first question is a fascinating one about one of my heroes, Theodore Herzl. The most important single founder of modern political Zionism, the man who set the movement on political footing, the man who built out the institutions that would go on 50 years later or so to become the state of Israel. We're going to ask a really fundamental question that we have an easy answer to, and so we fall back on it, but in fact, I'm going to suggest to you, I'm going to try and prove to you that that easy answer is incorrect. What made Herzl a Zionist? Something transforms him between about 1892 and 1895, and he talks about it as this ray of light, this shining vision, this thing that suddenly, transcendently just changed everything, changed everything for him, and then changed everything.

for the rest to the Jews. What was that thing? Now, those of you who are listening to this, who were raised in Jewish education, went to Jewish day school or Jewish Hebrew school, have already yelled out the answer, surprising the people walking on the street next to you, and the answer you yelled out was the Dreyfus affair. This terrible trial, this miscarriage of justice against a French Jewish army captain, artillery captain, Alfred Dreyfus, that begins in 1894, a saga the last 12 years of just horrible injustice to the man, and that would divide French politics profoundly between the pro-dryphus and the anti-dryphus. He was framed. Evidence against him was literally forged, and anti-Semitic riots broke out throughout France over the course of this trial

against those intellectuals who sought who knew he was framed and took the government and the army to task. It was a huge moment, and the classic story goes that In 1895, in January of 1895, when the convicted Alfred Dreyfus is having his so-called degradation ceremony, that's the ceremony in which he is in the Ecole Militaire, the military school, across from the Eiffel Tower in central Paris. He is walking in a circle around a group of his colleagues and fellow officers, and they are yelling shameful things at him, and they rip off his rank from his uniform, and they break his sword. And then he would be sent off to Devil's Island

in French Guyana in South America for four years, living in terrible squalid conditions that ruined his health. Herzl is standing outside the Accolmililetal that day during the degradation ceremony in January 1895. And as the legend goes, he heard screams of the mob, screaming death to the traitor,

death to the Jew. And Herzl starts wondering, according to this story. And this is a story that I have. believed and I taught. He starts saying, well, you know, diagnostically, why do they care that he's a Jew, right? He is a German spy. Folks were 25 years out of 1870, the Franco-German War, the Franco-Prussian war, in which the new German Empire conquers Paris and occupies it for three years, in which Victor Hugo says, never forget, revenge, in which the French and the Germans are each other's

worst mortal enemies. And we are 20 years before World War I when that mutual hatred is going to spark the worst war in the history of the world up to that time. To be a German spy seems much worse than to be a Jew. Who cares if he's a Jew? He's a German spy. What could be worse than a German spy in 1894 Paris. And the answer was a Jew. And that in this story, in the classic sort of vision, said Herzl's wheels spinning and he starts thinking and he realizes, you couldn't be a more assimilated Jew than Alfred Dreyfus. Assimulation wasn't the answer. It wouldn't work. The anti-Semitism ran too deep. It was too fundamental to the societies in which Jews were wanted to assimilate into, and not just too fundamental, it was part of the undercurrent, it was part of

the superstructure of European Christian civilization. And so Jews, as these new mass societies, these new nationalisms are born, Jews would have to leave. That's the story of Herzl. I'll give you a spoiler. One of the reasons we think that Herzl was profoundly affected by the Dreyfus case in real time is that five years later, Herzl would write that. In other words, Herzl told us that that's what happened to him. But it's not true. There's just no evidence of it. He even explains to his readers why there's reason to think that Dreyfus might have been guilty at the time, in real time.

He did not suspect Jewishness had anything to do with the verdict. He didn't think the evidence was forged. He had a lot. He did give Dreyfus's own side of the story quite well. He had concerns by the fact that it was in a military court. rather he thought it should be in a civil court. But he simply showed no evidence of that. We're going to see that.

We're going to go through what the Dreyfus affair was, where Herzl was, what Herzl said at the time, and what Hurtzl would say years later about it. And then when I have demonstrated to you that, in fact, the Dreyfus affair did not make him a Zionist. Once he was already a Zionist leader and president of Zionist Congresses, he explained, he taught the Dreyfus affair to people as a great pivot, as a great moment, because people could understand it, because by then, that's what the Dreyfus affair was in the public life of Europe.

But it wasn't what actually drove him, the man himself, who would become the Theodore Herzl we know, whose picture is in almost every classroom in Israel. So what did it? That's what we're going to learn today. This episode is sponsored by Joe and Shira Lieberman, in honor of the memory of those we lost on October 7. the lebermans have sponsored several episodes and i thank them for that but i especially thank them for the fact that they have asked that in each episode we learn something about someone we lost i can't imagine a more beautiful way to launch this podcast and to launch this community so thank you for this today we remember one particular hero of october seven a hero of the jewish people major aria zering alye was twenty-seven when he died on october seven he was an officer in the idios okitz unit he saw the news of the massacre he heard of the massacre unfolding that day and he was in his home town of ranana and he rushed south he didn't wait to be called he basically gathered together an ad hoc group of soldiers he picked up along the way and rushed into the battle he died defending the kibbutzim outside of gaza on october seven and was buried three days later back in his home hometown of Rannana. He's the first name I want to remember, in part because his parents, Debbie

and Mark, who made Alia from New York, are friends of my wife's family, of my in-laws. And he and his siblings would spend summers in America. They grew up in Rannana, but they would spend summers in America climbing the mountains of Maine with my wife's siblings. We all know somebody. The connections to October 7 for Israelis are not distant, and they are not theoretical and they're not abstract. So thank you also for the chance to remember him and tell his story. So friends, how did Herzl become a Zionist? On October 13, 1894, a Jewish army captain in the French military, who only barely felt himself a Jew in any sense utterly and deeply assimilated, his family was deeply assimilated, a man who loved the French army

deeply identified with France, but a man whose utter loyalty to France would be proven in ways that few Frenchmen had ever needed to prove it. He was arrested on charges of passing military secrets to the Germans after a piece of paper had been found in a garbage bin by a French spy in the German embassy. He was jailed in a military prison. He was interrogated in ways that are illegal under French law at the time. He had no lawyer that was shown no evidence, whether or not his hands. handwriting was on that piece of paper was the big concern and all kinds of quacks were brought in to say yes. He was denied all communication with his family. He spent weeks in isolation and he was finally tried and convicted, all within the month of December, 1894, and he was convicted of high treason.

On January 5, 1895, his degradation ceremony was held at the Accord Militaine. journalists, soldiers, dignitaries were all there. They watched as his ranks were ripped off, as his sword was broken. And outside the gates, the mob allegedly yelled death to the Jews. There were witnesses who heard it, who heard screaming, and different witnesses say different things. But there certainly was a screaming mob outside. In March, 1895, he was shipped off to Devil's Island,

a prison island off the coast of French Guiana, as I said, and he would spend the next four years there in profoundly inhumane conditions. And while he was at Devil's Island, in 1896, the following year, the year after he was shipped off, the head of counter-espionage on the French general staff, a guy named Lieutenant Colonel George Picard, he became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. That's exactly, by the way, the guy you want to be convinced you're innocent, right? The head of counterintelligence. And he opened an investigation into the case, and he was very very very,

strangely ordered by his higher-ups to close the investigation into the case. But he nevertheless investigated the case. He actually found the real spy. It was a guy, a major in the army named Ferdinand Estra Hezzi. Picard's claim were suppressed. He persisted to the point where he found himself in prison for hurting the army's dignity. Esther Hezzi, by the way, was never in prison. He fought for his good name, or rather his bad name, and he eventually would later confess and flee to England and lived out his days in England. In 1898, two years later,

Dreyfus is still rotting on Devil's Island. Emil Zola, the great journalist and intellectual, wrote jacuz, I accuse, in the Loror newspaper in Paris. And the fight between the Dreyfussar and the anti-Drefussar, the pro-and-ante-Dreyfus, fact. commenced. On Dreyfus's side, you had a handful of writers and intellectuals like Zola, Anatol France, George Clemenceau, who would become president of France. The anti-Drefussars were the conservative, Catholic, anti-Republican factions. They invented the word intellectual,

interesting little side bit to mock the pro-Dreyfus people. In other words, you are not the people, you are intellectuals, right? You are people thinking, just stuck in your brains and elites, right? And so we don't have to pay attention to your argument that Dreyfus was intentionally sent away to prison and falsely accused by the great French army. The campaign for Dreyfus, Zola's campaign and the campaign that it sparked, sparked a violent backlash against Jews in January to February 1898.

After jacuz, there were riots against Jews in all over France. they would return the following year between June and September. There were waves of anti-Semitic riots. And the trial, I would put it like this, the trial had actually become a face-off between the two fundamentally opposed factions in French politics.

In other words, it very quickly was no longer about Dreyfus and about his case and about whether justice had been done or it was a miscarriage of justice. It became about Catholic-leaning nationalists, basically, versus secularist Republicans. And so it was a battle for the soul of France in which Dreyfus himself was just the vocabulary. Dreyfus was gone, but his case never died,

and the evidence really was clearly those who really dove into it, fraudulent, and the army brass covered for it, and slowly one writer after another, one journalist, one politician after another, people started coming around, and eventually the outcry, the sense that there really need to be answers, if only to kill the thing, drove the High Command to return Dreyfus to Paris for retrial in 1890. He is put on a boat, brought back for a retrial, still treated like a traitor and a prisoner, even though if you're coming back for a retrial, you are innocent until proven guilty. But again, the retrial was in a military court, and that military court was now under unofficial orders, essentially, not to shame the army. And so the military court in 1890 in September,

did something very, very strange. It convicted him again. It convicted him again of treason on September 9. But it was a vote of five to two, which is a very close vote because three was enough to exonerate. It was a vote of five to two, and then the court did that very strange thing, which was the sentencing.

It cited extenuating circumstances. Apparently you can have extenuating circumstances in a treason trial with two convictions, and because of those extenuating circumstances, it decided that he would only be given 10 years in prison, and immediately after the conviction, he actually received a pardon from the French president. Here's the thing.

The first trial you could argue Dreyfus was terribly mistreated, it was a terrible error, but the judges probably believed he was actually guilty. There was this evidence, some of it was apparently forged. It was really a bad trial, but maybe it was an honest mistake. The second trial in which he is reconvicted of treason,

but his reconviction for treason didn't actually lead to his aid getting off, and also he didn't get punished, was so clearly an attempt to cover. You can't convict of treason and then immediately pardoned, and it was a trick. It was so clearly purposeful cover-up that it drove the Dreyfussars even angrier. By this point Dreyfus himself just took the conviction and pardon and walked went home.

He hadn't seen his family in years. He was exhausted. He was sick. He kept saying that he was innocent, but he didn't see any way to prove it. What would be the chance once he had a pardon of another retrial? It would be seven more years until 1906 before he actually got his exoneration. rather than a pardon for something he allegedly had done that everyone involved knew he never did. By the way, Dreyfus would then rejoin the French army. He fought in World War I, he served the entirety of World War I, and passed away in 1935.

Still, as far as we know, a French patriot. But the Dreyfussards in 1890 were horrified, and the world press that covered that trial were horrified. The new conviction followed up by no punishment? served as an admission to the whole world by the French state that it could not give justice. The first trial was a mistake. The second was explicitly and admittedly a cover-up. And that's how it was covered.

And that brings us to Theodore Herzl. In 1899, Theodore Hertzl covers the Dreyfus affair. He starts talking about it as the trigger for his Zionism. A week after Dreyfus' second conviction, on September 15, I think it was, in 1899, in the Die Welt newspaper, Herzl wrote an op-ed, and the op-ed was titled Five to Two, the Vote of the Judges at the Court-Marshal. I want to read you pieces from that op-ed.

It's a bit long. I'm going to read you much, much shortened pieces of it. First of all, because I want to tell you how Herzl framed the trial, how he framed the Dreyfus Affair, which by now was just known all over the world and said, it's on fire. But also because I want to give you a sense of Herzl's writing. He was a journalist, all his life. that's one of the secrets to his charisma and power he actually could write lyrically and beautifully.

Herzl writes in 1890 and five to two in the devout newspaper. In the evening hours of Saturday, September 9, 1890, a strange discovery was made, which did not fail to cause a great stir in all those parts of the world that are provided with telegraph wires. It was discovered that a Jew can be denied justice for no other, reason than that he is a Jew. It was discovered that a Jew can be tortured as though he were not a human being. It was discovered that a Jew can be sentenced to infamous punishment, even though he is innocent. The whole point, by this point, was that he was a Jew. This kind of miscarriage and the

obviousness of the miscarriage, nobody would have dared to even attend if it wasn't about a Jew. And then he says, Poor Dreyfus. He no longer exists as a person, but only as an example. Dreyfus is an abstraction now. He is the Jew in modern society, who is trying to adapt to his environment, who speaks its language, thinks its thoughts,

soes its insignia on his tunic. And then has these strips ripped off him by force. Dreyfus represents a position which has been fought for, which is still being fought for. and which let us not delude ourselves has been lost you want to know what dryfus means herzell says there's no chance for assimilation that's what dryphus means but but he says this in eighteen ninety nine here's the problem herzell didn't show any evidence of feeling this way in the first actual trial during his supposed eureka moment of coming to zionism when the trial was under way in december eighteen ninety four when dryfus was sent to devil's island in eighteen ninety five herzels wrote from paris to neuropres in vienna totally dispassionately he wrote about the strong likelihood of his guilt he had urged a civil trial he thought that a military trial behind closed doors was a mistake was inappropriate but he also notes that the seven military judges had agreed unanimously about dreyfus's guilt that's a pretty sure sign of guilt i'm going to bring into this conversation

professor jacques cornberg the late professor jac kornberg of the university of toronto a great scholar of german philosophy a great scholar of zionism a great scholar of herzell he wrote a book called theodore herzell from assimilation to zionism when he talks about herzels's coverage of dryfus he writes herzell calmly reported that captain dryfus had access to defense secrets that he was believed to be a gambler which by the way was not true but was leaked about him by the people trying to defame him. And that it was said he had become infatuated with a woman who was an Italian espionage agent. Again, no actual evidence, but it was part of the defamation campaign. And Herzl covered it. The case reminded him of those of other French officers convicted of treason. He did report that the authenticity of the evidence had been questioned as well. In other words, he was also covering the other side. And Dreyfus had acted with a composure and dignity of someone convinced of his innocence. Herzl was covering the Dreyfus trial like a journalist.

That's what these guys say, that's what those guys say. But it's fundamentally a treason trial. There is literally no evidence in Herzl's coverage of the trial that he thought of it in real time as he would come to think of it later. Nothing in his dispatches thought that he saw it as some kind of high point in French anti-Semitism. He didn't think Dreyfus was innocent. He didn't accept the guilty verdict without any reservations. He didn't like the closed-door military trial, but he doesn't even hint.

than he thought Dreyfus was framed because he was a Jew. And even that famous story of him standing outside the Ecole Militaire and hearing the crowd shout death to the Jews, Herzl never tells that story. He never mentions those shouts in his dispatches or writings. Other people mention that shouting. Other biographers of Herzl put together those two events. Here I read that there was this shouting,

and Herzl went and became an 18909-told us he had become a Zionist back in 1895. but Herzl at the time never wrote that. So what made him write in an article in 1890, quote, what made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial, which I witnessed in 1894. Herzl wants us to teach the Dreyfus story as his own kongtazianism moment. He would years later say that was my come to Zionism moment, even though all the evidence says otherwise. I'm going to take a methodological approach here from my monitor.

from Rambam, the 12th century Cairo rabbi, who's maybe one of the great rabbis and philosophers of the Jewish bookshelf. In The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides' great philosophical work, he teaches that in the context of discussions about philosophy and logic, he teaches that there are multiple different kinds of lies, and he categorizes the different kinds of lies. Most of them are very bad, and you should not, you know, you should not practice them. But there's one sort of lie that he doesn't think is so bad. This kind of lie, is a kind of lie, is essentially the pedagogical lie, the teaching lie. The lie you tell a child or a student because that's what you think they can handle, because that's what you think will be useful to them,

because that's what you think they need to learn, rather than conveying the whole stark truth. Think about having the birds and the bees conversation with your nine-year-old child. Think about the cherry tree and George Washington. A lot of myths, myths in the literary sense, not myth as in lies, but myth as in foundational story. A lot of foundational stories are these,

pedagogic lies. You're supposed to learn something about your community's sense of self from the story, and then you grow up and you learn that the story is either very simplified or totally fanciful and invented, and then you grow up even more and learn that there's usefulness to these stories, but we should not necessarily believe them. And this whole arc is an arc of education. The pedagogic lie is the story you tell people that you think they need, not the diagnostic self-critical version of reality that you actually know. That's Herzl's use of the Dreyfus story. It was an injustice that set French politics on fire.

It drove mass anti-Semitic rioting and deep within Republican France. It was France's own civil war about its own character. Was laid up top of this question of this one miscarriage of justice. It radicalized the Republicans. It radicalized the anti-Republicans. And all of it, in the minds of many many jews at the time seemed to them attest of whether even french republicanism whose heart and soul was egalite equality could actually offer true justice to a jew so it fit perfectly the zionist story herzell wanted to tell in nine i'll say more than that from what herzell knew of the dryfus affair in eighteen ninety nine it was a reasonable argument to say look at dryfus you'll understand my argument but he didn't say that the eighteen ninety nine trial that-the nine

The 1899, the second trial, the trial that was clearly and obviously a miscarriage of justice to people at the time, had strengthened his resolve about Zionism. He said that he first came to Zionism from that first trial, and we simply have no evidence of it in his writing. So if Dreyfus wasn't the Eureka moment, what was, your professor, Cornberg, is a marvelous guide. Because the answer, he argued, to my mind profoundly convincingly, doesn't lie in Paris.

it lies in Vienna. And now we're going to take a very quick dive into Herzl's life, into Herzl's soul, into Herzl's culture, into the torment that drove him professionally, personally, psychologically,

and into the great redemptive vision as he experienced this discovery that was to him, as he described it, both agony and bliss at once. It was an experience of sudden calling of purpose, and it coalesced

into what came to be this great redemptive vision for the Jews. Herzl was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Budapest in 1860. His family moved to Vienna when he was a teenager. His German was wonderful.

He actually went to college in Vienna. He wanted to study law. And he was deeply invested in German letters in the world, in the German language intellectual world. of Austria, the German-language intellectual world of the new German Empire. He tried to join a German nationalist fraternity named Albia in college, and then very quickly left in disgust. Herzl grows up, personally, intellectually, professionally, in an Austrian empire and an Austro-Hungarian empire in the 1880s,

in which anti-Semitism is politically unpalatable, it's marginal, people mock it. If you're screaming against Jews in the parliament in the Reichstadt in Vienna, there's something disreputable about you. It's considered low-brow. Antisemitism exists. Official and raging and angry and bitter

in public, but it's politically marginal and Jews don't really deal with it on a moment to moment day-to-day basis. There's a term called Yuddin Frasel, which is someone who is so upset at Jews all day long that

they lose their appetite, they can't eat. But Udenfres, calling somebody that is a pejorative at the time in Vienna. And most importantly, anti-Semitism is something that the state, the empire, the emperor on down, and the imperial bureaucracy,

are dead set against. So it comes from certain conservative groups, Catholic conservative political factions, the pan-Germans, and the artisan guilds. It comes from the Petit Bourgeoisie, right, the, what we would maybe call today the lower middle class or the artisans or craftsman kind of middle class. And there's a reason that anti-Semitism rises there. And it's a reason that Herzl talks about and a great many

talked about. These are the pre-capitalist social strata. In other words, that's what Professor Cornburt calls them, the groups, the institutions, whether it's the church, whether it's the guilds, that over the course of the reforms instituted over the 19th century, over the course of the 1800s, opened the doors to Jews, also opened the doors to competition. petition, opened the doors to other minorities. And those who had had privileges in certain professions, who had had privileges in certain social, you know, classes were horrified and bitter and angry. The Jews could now theoretically join their professions, theoretically join their classes. And so it really felt anti-Semitism like a sensibility that belonged to the

underclasses, to the poor, to the angry, to the uneducated, not to the noble and elite. 1782, Emperor Joseph II passes the patent of toleration, it was called, which allows Jews to join professions. It allows them to schools and universities. It's, by the way, at the time, opposed by guilds and opposed by the Catholic Church, who didn't want Jews in universities. Universities in Europe begin as religious institutions connected with the church. It allows them into the trades between 1849 and 1860, the empire at the emperor's urging. and backing. And passed tremendous numbers of legal and political changes that allow for Jewish integration,

Jewish land ownership, Jewish residential freedom, in other words, living wherever they want to live. The Industrial Code of 1859 abolishes Guild regulations. All trade and all commerce is opened up to everybody, and that's again done by the empire. And then in 1867, the Constitution is something put down from the government downward, not from the people upward. And so Jews have all the doors open to them over the course of the 19th century. And Herzl knows in the 1880s

as he's growing up in Vienna that he has these freedoms officially. Acculturation happened. The Jews turned Germanic. They spoke German. They deeply abandoned purposefully. The religion, the culture of Eastern Europe from which their great-grandparents had come.

and they had been politically liberated. But they were never socially liberated. Intermarriage was incredibly low throughout the 19th century. No matter how much Jews became a big part of the population of Vienna, they only married other Jews. They only socialized, almost only socialized, with other Jews. And what few Jews entered the higher strata of Viennese society, they could socialize professionally with non-Jews,

but not personally, not at home, not in interpersonal friendship. and over the course of the 1890s, everything changed. A blowback came. Anti-Semitism overwhelmed the body politic in Vienna, in the empire. And what friends Jews had found in university, in the army, in the professions, turned their backs on them time and time again. And this was a fascinating moment. It was a fascinating experience because it was unexpected.

And the Jews knew that the arc of history was headed in one direction. They knew that they had been freed, yes, by imperial decree, but imperial decree in the 1880s feels like much more stable than popular will. Imperial decree is the main architect of history, is the driving force in history, everything is empires. That's the power in the world. That's the stable thing. That's the thing that's been around centuries.

That's the thing that decides how to mold society. That's the thing that emancipated the Jews. allowed them to live where they want, work how they want, do whatever they want. And it was headed their way. And then something terrible happened, something disastrous, something that for the Jews was the beginning of the end of the Jews of Europe. And it is something that is almost exactly the opposite of what we would expect to be the cause of that.

That something was democratization. Up until 1885, the vote suffrage to the Reichsrat, to the Imperial Council, the bicameral legislature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Up until 1885, it was very narrow.

Maybe 6% of adult males could actually vote to Parliament. And then, in part to deal with a new populist sensibility and politics and phenomenal changes and literacy

and industrialization and urbanization and all these profound changes. is happening in European society that were deeply destabilizing, and the imperial administration had to pivot and change to try to keep up, and in the end they would fail and collapse in World War I. But as part of that attempt to survive, they expanded the vote. Massively, suffrage expanded slowly between 1885 and 1907. By 1907, suffrage was granted to all men, and after the war, when it was no longer an empire, Austria would grant it also to women. That expansion of suffrage changed everything, for the worst,

because the anti-Semitic political forces that were relegated to the periphery weren't actually small. They were just not represented. And when they were represented, they exploded onto the scene. In 1897, the same year that Theodore Herzl convenes the first Zionist Congress at Basel, the infamously anti-Semitic Karl Lugar, head of the Christian Social Party, that had agitated against Jews for years, sometimes had been suppressed,

rather intensively by the imperial government. Luger was elected mayor of Vienna. He would serve as mayor until his death in 1910. Thirteen years. He was a great modernizer. He was a voice of the lower and middle classes. He reformed the water system. He introduced public transportation to Vienna.

He was popular. and Hitler describes him with great fondness and admiration in Mind Kampf. The point isn't Lugar, who hated Jews, ran against Jews, talked about Jews. Historians debate whether he genuinely hated Jews or just pretended to hate Jews because that's what got you elected in the Christian Social Party. So the point isn't Lugar himself. The point is popular politics. Herzl would write in the Jewish state,

in the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails, It does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews. Antisemitism was not a function of angry, bitter elites in their deep hatred for the Jews. It was the people. It was popular. It was because the Jews were competitors. It was because in the great changes happening,

the opening of old guilds and old infrastructures and old ways of doing things to competition, the allowing of the underclasses, the people crushed and bent and stepped on, allowing them suddenly to be equals, made everybody else feel that they were less. And so new structures had to be found, new hatreds, new ostracization, new marginalization, new ways of removing and marginalizing. These people who had once been marginalized by law, by laws involving where they can live,

you could look at them, see them, know that they're less than you. And then suddenly they're equal to you? Well, then you have to hate them more. and ostracized them more in unofficial ways, in non-legal ways. And so the emancipation, Herzl argues, drove the anti-Semitic rage, the anti-Semitic explosion, the anti-Semitic backlash. It was popular, and it was angry,

and it was part of the revolutionary spirit against the imperial administration. The equal rights of Jews before the law, Herzl writes, cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded. the very impossibility of getting at the jews therefore nourishes an embitter's hatred of the jews anti-semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations herzell writes in eighteen ninety five it is bound to increase because the causes of its growth continue to exist and cannot be removed popularism liberalism opening of the vote to democratization of the vote of suffrage caused the great anti-semitic backlash and this fact this anti-semitic surge of the eighteen ninety's once the voice of the people could actually be heard cast all of emancipation the whole idea of emancipation into doubt suddenly it became very clear to everyone to herzell to everybody suddenly that you couldn't not notice that ever every single step in the path of emancipation was topped down, was an imperial decision imposed

from above. As Cornberg would write, it was the interventionist bureaucratic state that had advanced the integration of the Jews, often in the teeth of public opinion. And as the voice of the people became more prominent in the politics of Europe, the Jews found themselves more deeply hated and more deeply marginalized. I just want to interject, and by the way, let you know, this is a thing we're going to see again when we get to the Russian Empire and the pogroms, beginning in the 1880s, that would send millions of Jews fleeing

and spark the founding of Zionism in the east, a different kind of Zionism. The great problem the Jews had with the pogroms was that they were mistaken in believing as Jews do to this day that the Tsar instigated them, that the imperial regime caused the hatred and violence against the Jews. actually, even though they were as anti-Semitic as the pogromists, we were trying to quell the pogroms. They saw the pogroms as a threat, as chaos, as a threat to the regime's own rule. The problem with the pogroms was that they were popular. But that's something we're going to see down the road. The Jews of Central Europe did not face that. Not yet, not in the 1890s.

They faced something else, something extraordinarily painful, even though it wasn't as physically threatening. They faced a massive campaign of psychological torment, ostracization, shame, contempt. And it led, Herzl wrote in the Jewish state and in many articles, it led to self-contempt. When the world you hunger to be part of the world of German letters, the world of philosophy, hates you, you develop a hatred of the thing in you you think they hate to deflect it from you. And when Herzl describes that process, he's describing his own life. In 1882, Herzl is exhausted, horrified, tormented by this sudden shocking pivot to mass popular anti-Semitism that begins with the expansion of suffrage in 1885.

And he starts looking for dramatic ways to fix it. And the first way he decides to think about fixing it is mass Jewish conversion to Catholicism, which is the Christianity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What if the Jews all one day in a big, he describes it as a parade, a festival in the streets, they come to the Great Square and they all convert en masse? Will that solve the problem of anti-Semitism? Herzl has no interest in religion. He doesn't think Christianity is a great religion.

He doesn't think Judaism is a great religion. He thinks science and secularism and modernity and that's the future and that's what he feels he connects to. That's, by the way, one of the great things he loves about Germanic culture, in how he sees Germanic culture in his time. So what if the Jews mass convert? What have we lost? We've lost a religion that's this petty little Talmudic discoursing, off in the east in these yeshivas, that's anti-modern, that's anti-scientific. The Jews were not producing the cutting-edge science of our age. They were stuck in the past. It's a disdain for that Jewishness. Well, of course they don't like the Jews. Look at the Jews, says this Jew, who hungers for that modern Germanness. that's where his story begins in 1892 his journey to Zionism and it's a projection of his own experience onto Jewish history

because he would then write well that's always been the Jews they always wanted to belong and they were never allowed to belong they always had to be kept down they always had to be oppressed the rest of Europe always knew it was great because it could step on the Jew that's how it made itself feel important and good and the Jews response writes Herzl was self-hatred Once you had the ghetto, and the ghetto was a powerful protection,

Herzl writes, because you could retreat to the ghetto, be surrounded by your brothers and sisters, and say bad things about the non-Jew outside. But then they took away our ghetto, they emancipated us, they put us in middle-class housing in Vienna, they taught us German, and now I don't even have the ghetto to retreat to. Emancipation, not only created, the anti-Semitism, but robbed me of all my protections against it, robbed me of my ability to retreat back behind the Jewish line. And so I need a new solution.

We need to assimilate. We need to become them, and then we disappear, and then we're okay. We need to convert. We need to... And then he concludes that even that's not possible. Even that's not a solution to Jewish self-hatred. He writes, The Jews have thus always fallen lower.

as much by their own fault as by the fault of others. Elend, which means misery. Gallus, meaning exile in Hebrew, or Yiddish. Geto. These are words in different languages for the same basic thing, being despised, and finally despising yourself. And that's when, beginning in 1894, and really reaching a kind of apotheosis in the spring of 1895,

again not because of Dreyfus who he still doesn't sure at all had anything to do with his Jewishness that's when he begins to have these shocking insights into Zionism as a way to overcome the old Jewish way that was no longer viable the intolerable sort of vulnerability of that Jewish life life under the anti-Semite's gaze doesn't matter if the anti-Semite is the emperor of the peasant was no way to live it was no life and in the end you will come to believe the gaze of the haters. You will come to believe the gaze of those who look at you and despise you.

And what's the answer? The answer is not to turn into one of them, he writes. The answer is a stronger, more confident form of us. Zionism for Herzl is a simulation. But it's not assimilation into Germanness. It's not seeking to be embraced by them as compatriots. It's assimilation deep into a version of us,

of ourselves, into Jewish. that has all the strengths of a Germanness, the creative strengths, the modernizing strengths, the assertiveness, the ability to live in the world naturally and freely and with self-control and self-realization and self-determination. Zionism flows from assimilationism. Assimilation won't work. They won't let us.

And they'll hate us because they define themselves by them being better than us. So we must find our own path. We must be ourselves so much so that we shape our own world. That's the fundamental impulse of Zionism. Folks, everyone comes to Zionism differently. That's the fundamental impulse of Herzl's Zionism. Russian Empire Jews sought literal safety from immediate, widespread oppression and physical threats. German-speaking Jews in Central Europe wanted refuge from this never-ending hatred and the psychological pressure of social ostracism that shaped them as a society, as a culture, in the 1880s and 90s.

American Jewish Zionists, who came to Zionism after the 48-war or the 67 War, talked about how they wanted a reprieve from the guilt they felt. over their own powerlessness during the Holocaust. The discourse of powerlessness, the inability to get America to do something for the Jews, the millions of Jews who sit in America but cannot rescue the Jews as they go through the 20th century, was a foundational shaping, identity-shaping experience

for American Jews that would create a different kind of Zionism. They use the same word, but they mean very different things by, not a Zionism that moves to the land of Israel, a Zionism that rushes to the defense of, of every Jew, everywhere, no matter where they are and what's happening to them. That becomes a fundamental American Jewish impulse. And the word Zionism often is a label for that. There were intellectuals who saw Zionism essentially as an intellectual culture-creating project. There were socialists who saw it as a class liberation project. Many Jews had many different opinions, and some

of them overlap and had multiple of these opinions. Herzl's Zionism, his personal drive, His original impulse was an escape hatch from the profound and inescapable marginalization that he experienced in a cultural world he loved and hungered to belong to. And he wanted to invest his Zionism, this he did in Alt-Noyland, Old New Land, the utopian novel he writes toward the end of his life, about this new Jewish state. He invests it with all the strengths and all the things he admired about the German-speaking world of his age. Including, by the way, the opera in the new Jewish state.

It was a marginalization based on hatred. It was a marginalization based on his Jewishness. He was no fan of his Jewishness because he felt that marginalization and that disdain that culture he wanted to belong to felt for his own Jewishness. But he had no avenue to solve that problem, and so his great pivot, his great realization, the sun shining out from behind the clouds. was the idea that he could turn his jewishness into the very thing he'd yearn to find in other people's cultures and stories if germanness didn't belong to him jewishness did and it would be as great and as grand as all the rest what would herzl make of israeli high tech what would herzl make of israeli hebrew he didn't want the jewish state to speak hebrew

because he was afraid that was a withdrawal into the past, into the ghetto. He wanted the Jewish state to burst out into the world as a great and powerful and creative force, and deeply modern force. Well, Hebrew ended up doing that. What would he make of it today? Folks, when the Zionist Congress gathered at Basel the first one, the delegates were instructed by Herzl to wear fancy suits,

and they met in a grand hall. this was going to be a noble Jewishness, a Jewishness that looked and sounded and felt like the exact opposite of the dehumanizing stereotype of the Jew, under whose gaze Herzl lived so much of his life and shaped so much of his psychology. Folks, just some food for thought to end on. I've been asked many, many times why, from the very founding of Zionism, the founding of the state, certainly. Israelis just can't seem to get it together to tell their story, to make their argument to the world. Why mostly diaspora Jews find themselves having to do it? Why Israelis insist on speaking as if the only people listening to them is themselves? They don't quite seem able to understand that the world is watching and listening,

and they need to have a strategy for public relations, a strategy for getting their message out for making their argument. What is it about Israelis that makes it so hard? is it arrogance? Stupidity? The Israeli marketing department of any Israeli beverage company knows how to sell beverages. They know how to hack the human brainstem with all the tools of modern marketing. Why are Israelis seemingly culturally incapable of making their argument to the world? Welcome to Exhibit A.

This is true. We're going to see this again and again. It's true in many different aspects of Zionism from many different directions. one of the main pillars of that foundational ethos is the simple point that Jews no longer live in the gaze of the anti-Semite. Zionism, as part of its most foundational and innermost intellectual core, is a rebellion against that very idea. It feels to Israelis when they stand up in front of the world on CNN or on TikTok and they have to explain themselves, it feels like justifying zionism is freedom from justifying yourself because through forcing the jew to justify themselves through demanding that the jew explain and moralize and stand aside from separate themselves from the jews who are not okay who i don't like who represent something bad in my world it was asking the jew to stand in judgment And Herzl's psychological revolution, which is part of the political revolution of Zionism,

is the refusal to ever again stand in judgment. So Israelis are bad at PR. And I submit to you that that's one of the most beautiful things about them, whether they're doing good things or bad things, and if they're doing bad things, you should critique it. That they have trouble, genuinely struggle culturally, to stand before the world and be. judged. They reject the premise is one of their great strengths.

Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you at the next episode.