Season 2: Episode 21 - The Awakening

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Give me a firm spot on which to stand, says Archimedes, and I shall move the world. Now I have the great merit of standing here in the land of Israel as I'm speaking to you, and I'm definitely looking to move you wherever you are, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 21, The Awakening. So things are starting to happen. A people whose national consciousness has been sleeping is beginning to shake and stir. I don't want to fall too far into the classic Zionist rhetoric that negates any sense whatsoever of nationhood amongst the Jews before the first Zionist conference in 1897. But nevertheless, the spirit of the Maccabees begins to awake now in our story. that strange and powerful notion that Am Yisrael must have sovereignty over particular geography in order to fulfill our destiny.

And this awakening in Am Yisrael, slow process, though it will be as we see in the coming episodes, begins in the context of a much larger coming to consciousness of the entire globe. Because the late 19th century can honestly be labeled as the opening phase of awareness of a global world. Now, I'll give you an example. It may sound a little strange, but it's quite demonstrative. There are some who claim that the explosion of Mount Krakatoa in 1883, a massive volcano in the Sundance Strait, was actually the first global event. Now, aside from the fact that it was the loudest sound ever heard, just imagine an explosion in New Jersey that you could hear in California. And the fantastic sunsets, which resulted from the dust thrown up in the atmosphere by the explosion noted in countries across the world.

The pressure wave was recorded by amateur meteorologists on barometers around the globe. World temperatures dropped by more than a degree Celsius for over a year. And perhaps most significantly, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas were already tied together by telegraph lines when Krakatoa blew up, which meant that the explosion of a volcanic island off the tip of Indonesia, or the Dutch East Indies as they were known, became breakfast reading for people on four continents within days of it happening. So, aside from the exciting nature of the story, and I have to admit, I find it fascinating, go look it up, it's that geology background in me, Krakatoa demonstrates how, by the 1880s, the world is progressively being tied together in an unprecedented fashion by transportation and communication technology.

It's a global consciousness that's awakening. Or at least a consciousness that we all live on the same globe. Because the liberal, humanist, environmental connotations that I associate with global consciousness in our day are not exactly part of the 19th century discourse. This is the period of the new imperialism. You know, the 1880s see what we call the scramble for Africa. Between 1870 and 1914, the European powers will conquer and colonize nearly 90% of the continent. And that's not even to speak of what they've already taken in Asia and the Americas. So world empire is no longer just a grandiose phase. And the 19th century will create a global socioeconomic and political system with the nation state at its heart and war and conquest at its edges.

We call it colonialism. And furthermore, the nationalist cosmopolitan tension that we've identified within Am Yisrael and is really reflective of the world as a whole is not going to disappear, certainly not on the European continent, whatever the armies may be doing overseas. And in fact, a hallmark of this new imperialism is its civilizing mission. Because aside from the desire for wealth and wanderlust, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests that we touched on in early modernity were driven by a Christianizing mission. They were looking to conquer the world for the glory of the Church. In our century, the European powers will see this Christian message through a social Darwinist lens. They see themselves as the bearers of more evolved civilizations whose right and duty is to bring order to the world, no matter what cost the world has to bear in the process.

And, of course, on the side, make a ton of money. So nations, peoples, and individuals are all racing in this century to stake their claim to a piece of the pie, with various justifications. And, as a result, the sense that we live on the edge of something vast, in the geographic sense, is being progressively reduced by the mapping of the world, and, as I said, it's tying together through transportation and communication. And driven by a social Darwinian quest for supremacy, the brutal means of conquest and colonization are exposing ever new depths in the human darkness. And lo and behold, at the same time that this darkness is rising, but science seems like it might finally destroy mystery from the map, a Viennese Jew awakens the world to a whole new mystery.

Now I'm not speaking about Theodore Herzl, though we'll come to him. Rather, I'm referring to his one-time Vienna neighbor, Sigmund Freud. You know, in another context, I can make an argument that the physics, the metaphysics, and the psychology of the world in which we live were shaped by three Jews. That would be Einstein, Marx, and Freud. But for now, I can certainly say that Freud was one of the most influential Jews of modern Western culture. Perhaps one of the most influential people, because he helped birth the unconsciousness into our awareness. And this is going to be another critical piece of the global context for the Zionist awakening. Now, Freud's life tracks Herzl's in certain ways. Aside from their choice of neighborhoods, they were both modern success stories for the Jews.

Without abandoning their Judaism through conversion, like so many of their contemporaries did, Freud and Herzl lived the life of Viennese intellectual elite almost completely acculturated to European norms. The difference was, as we'll see, Herzl still maintains somewhere in his heart a sense that the nation was the fundamental unit of human society, whereas Freud is the quintessential cosmopolitan, at least insofar as his society will allow a Jew to be. So what is the unconscious that awakened under the work of Freud? Well, in a nutshell, he proposed that the conscious life of every individual takes place on the edge of something very vast. That should sound familiar. That our conscious life is made up of thought processes, memories, interests, motivations, which are simply not available for the active introspection of our conscious mind.

And Freud developed tools, tools like the analysis of dreams, free association, as well as theoretical constructs, which you may be familiar with, like the id, ego, super-ego model, in order to explore and map this new territory. Now, it's a fascinating subject, right up there with Krakatoa for me, and deeply related, more so than volcanoes, to the development of Jewish consciousness. But this is not the time to delve into the nature of psychoanalysis, or even its impact on Western culture. Nor will I ask you to tell me about your mother. But, for our story now, I just want to note that a primary assertion that underlies all of Freud's insights is that we're often moved by a level of consciousness of which we are unaware.

That, in fact, there's a scale of knowing and experience, of desire and motivation, in short, a scale of life, that serves as the topography on which our conscious life operates. And, as Freud points out, this topography can often be more definitive than the behavior we think we're choosing, and will pop up in astonishing ways. Now, in the fall of 1902, Freud mailed a copy of his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, to one Theodor Herzl. Nominally, the purpose was that he should review it for the New Free Press, the Viennese newspaper, where he was a literary critic at that time. But at the end of the letter he sent along with the book, Freud took the time to express his personal regard for Herzl.

But, in any event, I ask you to keep the book as a token of the high esteem with which I, like so many others, have for many years regarded the poet and fighter for the human rights of our people. Now this was 1902, already six years after the first Zionist conference, which made Herzl a world figure, and which we will discuss, if not in this episode, then in the next. But Freud was no simple nationalist. What was it that caused him to admire Herzl so? You know, in 1894, Freud saw a production of Herzl's play, The New Ghetto, and it must have struck a chord in his Jewish heart, because in the interpretation of dreams, he actually relates a dream of his own that was instigated by the play. The dream was constructed, he says, on a tangle of thoughts provoked by a play which I had seen called Das Neu Ghetto, the New Ghetto.

The Jewish problem, concern about the future of one's children to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers. You hear the little bit of cosmopolitan and national struggling in his unconscious? A country of their own. Move freely across borders. And by the way, The father of psychoanalysis had at least one downright messianic dream about the father of Zionism that he recorded. He saw, quote, a majestic figure with pale, dark-toned face framed by a beautiful raven-black beard with infinitely sad eyes. The apparition strove to explain to him the necessity of immediate action if the Jewish people was to be saved. Now, last and certainly not least, in a letter from Freud to Herzl's son, Hans, Written many years after Herzl's death, Freud said to him, Your father is one of those men who've transformed dreams into reality.

People of this sort, Garibaldi's, Herzl's, are very rare and dangerous. Now it's worth noting that Herzl's play, which first touched Freud, was written according to his own account in a fevered state, one which he believed was an expression of his unconscious. and Herzl relates the story that in 1894 right before he wrote the play on his way home from a meeting in which he'd actually tried to explain to the all-powerful art critic of the new free press the rational basis for anti-Semitism he was accosted by two young men who called him Sao Yudhi, Dirty Jew or just Jew Pig and in his journal Herzl relates that this disturbing incident brought his thoughts to a boil and after three weeks of work in a state of feverish exaltation, as he called it, the new ghetto was written.

It was a heart's cry against the ignoble nature of Jewish life in Western Europe. The Jews, says Herzl, have emerged from the physical walls of the ghetto only to be trapped in the perception that they're an alien, unwelcome element in European society, which will never be free. As a journalist for a leading European newspaper, Hursle was also uniquely positioned to watch as anti-Semitism burst onto the scene as a leading force in European politics and culture. And in 1894, he was clearly already struggling with some unformed notions of a solution to the Jewish problem presented by this hatred and rejection. But any potential solutions aside, the original version of the new ghetto ends in total despair.

The protagonist, young Jewish lawyer Jacob Samuel, lies dying on the stage, wounded in a duel which he provoked in an attempt to save his honor as a Jew. And he cries out to the audience, O Jews, my brethren, they won't let you live again until you learn how to die. I want to get out. Out of the ghetto. And then he dies. This was Herzl's cry at the end of 1894. He wants to get out, but he doesn't know where to go. However, something is about to change. Something which had been boiling under the surface of his mind for his entire life Or perhaps as he claimed something that had actually been waiting at the edge of the Jewish unconscious for almost 2 years waiting for someone to give it voice. So young Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 through a German-speaking family living in the Jewish quarter of Pest, the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary, right next to the Doheny Street Synagogue.

His grandfather, which was true of many of his contemporaries, was an Orthodox Jew, and he happened to be from the town of Semund, whereas the Shamash, the beetle, in the Ashkenazi shul, he became close to Rev. Yehuda Alkali, as we mentioned in the last episode. But, despite the synagogue next door and his grandfather, Herzl was raised in a profoundly acculturated home. Now, I say acculturated rather than assimilated, because it's less of a trigger word, because it carries far less baggage. What does assimilation mean anyway? You know, in his provocative essay, The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History, historian and former chancellor of JTS, that's the Jewish Theological Seminary, for those of you who aren't in the know, anyway, the former chancellor and historian Gershon D.

Cohen defined assimilation as the acceptance on the part of the Jews of non-Jewish cultures, languages, and ways of life. and he goes on to assert that it's been a largely positive element of Jewish life from antiquity to the present day. Now before you start getting worked up about whether I'm promoting assimilation, just remember for a minute, mastery of local and world cultures is what's allowed the Jews to survive and thrive from Egypt to Brooklyn. Remember, on one perspective, the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so. and even in our idealized past at the height of the unified biblical kingdom we knew how to put foreign culture to right use after all, it was a Phoenician architect who built Solomon's temple and remember for a moment the definition of Am Yisrael that I offered in the last interlude Am Levadad Yishkon a nation that dwells alone if that was meant to be taken literally that we were really meant to be separate from the world and cultural isolation was our destiny, why, oh why, would God promise us the crossroads of the world, ancient and modern, as our homeland?

Cohen's point, really, was that the intra-Jewish war, which is about to erupt in the Jewish story around the emergence of Zionism in the late 19th century, has obscured any real meaning or honest usage of the word assimilation. Zionism will be far from popular for the first 40 or so years after Herzl's appearance on the world stage. And its rejection by mainstream communal leadership, and the bulk of Jews, frankly, the total opposition to the nationalist product will cause the Zionists to accuse Jews of every stripe, reform, conservative, orthodox, of being assimilated because they've given up on their national identity and are committed to being French, Germans, and Dutch of the Jewish faith. As Chaim Weizman, future first president of the State of Israel, and we'll discuss him in his context in a coming episode, as he records about his religious education, the head of the school was a Dr.

Barness, a man who in his own way was even more bewildering to me than the German Gentiles. He was pious in the extreme of the old Frankfurt Jewish type of orthodoxy. But Dr. Barness was completely assimilated and described himself as a German of the Mosaic Persuasion. Just imagine that, calling someone who was pious in the extreme of orthodoxy, nevertheless assimilated because he was a German of the Mosaic Persuasion. Now, the religious in their turn will point the assimilationist finger at the secular and sometimes anti-religious Zionists, claiming that their goal was not to fulfill Jewish destiny, but rather to create a state of Hebrew-speaking Goyim. Now, we'll see plenty of that as we move on.

But for now, just know that by the time the 20th century gets underway, the word assimilation has become a stick that we could hit each other with. And an assimilated Jew basically boils down to anyone whose version of Jewishness you don't like. You can follow that argument to this very day. So I'm not going to weigh in on whether Herzl was the assimilated Jew so many historians claim that he was. He certainly wasn't Orthodox. He was a proud, free-thinking son of a proud, free-thinking father. And his native tongue was German. When he considered Hebrew as the language of his national product, he scoffed that no one he knew could even order a railroad ticket in that language. And it's clear from his writings that he deeply identified with both the culture and the language of Germany.

But Herzl was bound to his people. That's what matters to me, and bound by two things. First was the social fabric that had been created by family and education. By his own account, he did sometimes attend the temple next door with his father on Friday nights. And he even celebrated his Bar Mitzvah there, where, as his cousin later recalled, he read the Haftorah in the traditional tune in a strong voice. The family sent young Theodore to a Jewish primary school from age 6 to 10. But he then moved on to the Rilschul, a high school considered innovative because it placed the emphasis of its studies on modern subjects rather than classics. And his diploma from his high school records a grade of excellent in only two subjects, German and religious doctrine, which for Herzl and the other Jewish students meant Jewish studies.

It was at the Rilschul that Herzl records his first experience of the other force which bound him to his people, whether he liked it or not. anti-Semitism. One of our teachers, he says, explained the meaning of the word heathens today by saying, among these are the idolaters, the Mohammedans, and the Jews. Now, Herzl's experience of identity and anti-Semitism only became stronger as he moved further up the ladder of higher education to the University of Vienna. There he joined the Albia, a fraternity associated with the Nationalist League of German Students. If you want to understand, their motto says it all. Honor, freedom, fatherland. His brothers gave him the somewhat mocking name of Tancred, who was the crusader hero that conquered Jerusalem.

And as he was studying law and delving into the student life of his fellow German speakers, Herzl encountered Eugene Dering's book, The Jewish Problem, as a problem of race, morals, and culture. Now, I hope you recall from episode 20, Durring was that German philosopher and professor at the University of Berlin who called the Jews the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race and came to the conclusion that the solution to the Jewish problem was the elimination of the false idea of tolerance of the Jews. And in his diary, Herzl recorded his horror that such ideas had gained legitimacy amongst the intellectual elite. When such infamous stupidities are presented in so direct a fashion, he says, when a cultivated and penetrating mind like Durings, with his encyclopedic knowledge, can produce such rubbish, what can one expect from the unlettered masses?

This observation is part of a much larger sense which will come to underlie Herzl's thinking. And as he moves closer to his own solution to the Jewish question, Herzl will become progressively convinced that a catastrophe is brewing for the Jews of Europe. And though most of his contemporaries, even those who shared his passionate belief in the Zionist project, mocked the notion of an impending doom for European Jewry, trusting in the enlightened advance of European society to protect them from this medieval-style violence, we who know how the next 50 years will play out in Europe need to keep in mind this pressing question that seemed so clear to Herzl. How is it that Western European thinking on the Jewish question moved from emancipation to elimination in less than 100 years?

So in 1883, at the university, the conflict between these two elements of Herzl's identity, European intellectual and Jew, came into minor crisis. His fraternity held an evening in memory of the recently deceased and vehemently anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner. And one of the leaders of the fraternity took the opportunity of the crowd to speak out violently against the Jews, and the entire evening became an anti-Semitic rally, something that was becoming increasingly common amongst the German-speaking student nationalists. Now, not only did Herzl fail to attend the night, the next day when he heard of what had happened, he resigned the fraternity in protest, he alone, even amongst the other Jewish members.

But Theodor did not give up on the German culture or the states that embodied it. After graduating with his law degree, he sought employment in public service in Vienna and Salzburg. But it became quickly clear that the career path in public service was very limited for a Jew, and so he turned to journalism. And as a reflection of his talents, Herzl managed to land a job with the prestigious Vienna newspaper, the New Free Press, and soon worked his way up to their Paris correspondent. He was a competent journalist, but any fame he gained was as the author of short literary pieces, sketches on art and culture, and really anything which was the talk of a town. And it was as the Paris correspondent for the new free press that Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial.

So the standard myth is, Theodore Herzl was an assimilated Viennese Jew of the complete kind. someone lacking in any awareness of his Jewish identity much less any knowledge of what it meant. And as Paris correspondent for the new Free Press eventually as literary critic he had reached the summit of acculturation I mean after all he was writing German language cultural commentary and gaining popularity for it. And then came the Dreyfus Affair which fell on him like a bolt from the blue. The story goes that the upwelling of anti-Semitism he witnessed at the heart of the first country you will call to grant the Jews citizenship, so shook Herzl that he awakened to the Jewish problem and through it to his own identity as a Jew.

And this story, from assimilationist to nationalist, has become a linchpin of Zionist historiography. It's critical in many minds to set up Herzl as having no Jewish identity, no knowledge, no connection to or even care for Jewish tradition before the Dreyfus trial. And that's because Herzl's persona as a secular cosmopolitan plays an important role today in the battle over the nature of the state of Israel. Is it a Jewish state or simply a state of the Jews? Now more about that later on. But for now, we've already seen that the portrayal of Herzl as completely secular and happily assimilated, lacking any Jewish identity before 1894, is just patently false. Not only did Herzl have a personal connection to the rhythm of Jewish rituals through his grandfather and his primary education, we saw an action of real consciousness and identification in his resignation from his fraternity over its anti-Semitism, something, remember, that his Jewish compatriots did not feel compelled to do.

and the new ghetto. Herzl's play, that cry of despair over the impossibility of European Jews ever really being free in Europe, was unknowingly begun on the very day that Dreyfus was arrested, an act, by the way, that the army kept secret for 10 days, and he finished it two weeks before the end of his trial. There's no way to attribute that to the Dreyfus trial. So what was the trial, in case you don't know? In essence, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a young French officer of Jewish descent in the general staff, who in 1894 was convicted of spying on the behalf of the Germans, the capital sin of European politics. Now, he was initially condemned to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, but his conviction began a saga.

There were false accusations, parallel trials of other accused people, a reconviction and ultimately an exoneration in 1906. I mean, he went on to fight for the French in World War I. And for many reasons that lie beyond the scope of our story, Dreyfus trial became so sweepingly public that it transformed from being a trial to an affair the Dreyfus affair And perhaps the best known event in that process was when the writer and journalist Emile Zola published his angry open letter in a Paris newspaper detailing the whole case, fact and fiction alike by the way, the famous j'accuse, I accuse. And it's no exaggeration to say that for a decade, France was split between liberal Dreyfusards, who maintained his innocence, and conservative and reactionary anti-Dreyfusards, who not only maintained his guilt as a spy and traitor, but many of them hated him because he was a lying Jew.

The streets rang with the cries of down with the Jews after his conviction. And from the day Dreyfus' arrest became public, Edouard Drummond, publisher of the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, led the charge against the Jews. Which, of course, came as no surprise to anyone. After all, his two-volume work, Jewish France, had been published less than ten years before and had sold 100,000 copies. And this was not a history of the Jews of France. It was a prolonged analysis on how the Jews were ruining the country. And in it, Drummond gave a three-part formulation to his accusation against the Jews, which basically sums up much of European hatred toward the Jews. One was racial. Like Wilhelm Marr and Eugen Doring, Drummond proposed an opposition between non-Jewish Aryans and Jewish Semites.

Sound familiar? The second was financial. Drummond argued that the finance and capitalism were controlled by the Jews and that they were sucking Europe dry. And third was good old-fashioned religious hatred. He blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus. There's something there for everyone. It's really quite touching. But already two years before the Dreyfus trial, Herzl had published a piece on the anti-Semitic demonstrations in France entitled The Anti-Semitic French. And there he described the willingness of the citizens of the most enlightened nation in Europe to openly declare themselves in the streets as haters of the Jews. of course with biting wit. In 1894, however, Herzl's initial dispatch for the new free press didn't even question Dreyfus' guilt.

It was only in the coming months when the complexity of the affair started to emerge that Herzl's thinking began to shift. And when, in January of 1895, he witnessed Dreyfus' public disgrace, Herzl was moved by the captain's dignified bearing. As he wrote in his dispatch, A Jew, an officer of the general staff, headed for an honorable career, would not commit such a crime. So as we saw from some of Herzl's early life, the Dreyfus Fair cannot be labeled as the beginning of his Jewish awakening. But what seems clear to me, and as Herzl himself maintained later in his life, it was a deep turning point in his unconscious thinking about the Jewish question. But what would be his answer? The idea of the Jews returning to the land of Israel, or of gradually colonizing Palestine, as it was called in the late 19th century, was hardly born with Herzl.

In the last episode, we saw that religious thinkers from the Vilna Gaon all the way through Rav Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer had been advocating a process of natural redemption, a process where the Jews would begin by working the land and God would respond by sending the Messiah. Let it be soon, let it be now. Rav Kalashar was even instrumental in convincing the Alliance Israelite Universal to create the Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School in the Land of Israel as we saw. And in 1882, the banking magnate Edmond de Rothschild began to buy up land in Ottoman Palestine as much as he could. Following the publication of Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation that we spoke about, the various groups dedicated to the resettlement of the land had coalesced into the Chovei Tzion movement, the lovers of Zion.

Now these fearless settlers, most of whom were religious, actually created the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement in almost 2,000 years in the land of Israel. It was in 1878, Petach Tikva. And they founded Rishon L'tzion, where Petach Tikva means an opening of hope. and they found a Rishon Litzion, first to Zion, a few years later in 1882. Now they drew on the support of wealthy Jews, like Rothschild and Wissowski. And their model was a model of the colonial model. If they could work the land themselves, fine. If they could hire native labor, even better. And at their height, just before the first Zionist conference in 1897, the Chove of Eitzion, the lovers of Zion, counted over 4,000 members.

Now Herzl didn't even invent the word Zionism He only populized it That honor belongs to Nathan Birnbaum He coined the term in his student days in the 1890s We'll come back to Birnbaum And his journey from cultural Zionist To exile nationalists To orthodox anti-Zionists Maybe another time So why then is Herzl looked to As the founder of Zionism What made the vision he articulated In the Jewish state Different from those that came before it You know, it's clear from his journals that the sense of unconscious disturbance and tremendous pressure that had driven Herzl to write The New Ghetto was not relieved by the play, and that his experience of the Dreifels affair had only fanned the flames of his inner fire.

He was living the good life of the European elite, but the Jewish question would not let him rest. As he says in his journal, dated June 1895, As the years went on, the Jewish question bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me, and made me miserable. I have, he says, no time to lose. You know, it's fascinating to me how so many people can see a problem and pretend that it's not there. It doesn't impinge on their conscious mind, and they don't even allow their unconscious interaction with it to influence their behavior. And yet others, at a certain point, they simply can't shy away. So Herzl's first intention was to write a novel. He was, after all, an author and not a politician. Now, maybe the new ghetto he thought simply hadn't been a big enough effort.

But when he sat down to put pen to paper, what came out was a letter to Baron Maurice Hirsch, a well-known Jewish philanthropist, requesting an interview. This letter was such a surprise to Herzl himself, that he waited for two weeks before sending it. And he describes in letters to his friends his frenzied and anxious state as he did. He had a sense that he was in the grip of a vision far larger than himself. Am I working it out, he says in his journal? No, it's working itself out in me. It would be an obsession if I were not so rational from beginning to end. An earlier term for such a condition was inspiration. And as he says in a letter written just before the first Zionist conference, you ask me, how did I become a Zionist?

God alone knows. Apparently the idea developed unconsciously. So what was the idea? How did Herzl become the father of Zionism? Well, you know, it's all in the name. And the name of the pamphlet he eventually wrote was Der Judenstadt, the Jewish state. What made Herzl unique amongst the early Zionist thinkers was that he was the first to express the Jewish question as an international problem whose solution could only be found on the national scale. Herzl dismissed the piecemeal approach to solving the Jewish problem. Over the previous decade, he'd considered and rejected every solution he knew, ranging from mass conversion to Christianity to slow colonization of Palestine. And finally, in France, he'd witnessed the futility of trying to combat anti-Semitism on its native soil.

Therefore, he came to what he saw as the obvious, oldest, and really only conclusion. It was time for the Jews to go home. And to go home not as a trickle, sneaking in under the wire, but en masse. It was to be, as he himself described it, a new exodus. Except this time, we would leave Europe rather than Egypt. He first formulated his idea as an address to the Rothschilds, whom he hoped to convince to abandon their gradualist colonization approach, and by the way, they were also colonizing Argentina at the time, and to fund his grand ideal. And on February 14, 1896, Der Judenstadt, the Jewish State, was published. The original title was actually A Proposal for a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question.

And what Herzl saw as the modern approach was really quite clear. no more infiltration through colonization no more gradual purchase of an acre here and a dunam there the Jewish people must form a unified organization which could speak to each other and then speak on their behalf to the world powers and negotiate the return of their stolen patrimony just hear the opening line the idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one It is the restoration of the Jewish state. And the plan, as he says, in its essence is perfectly simple. Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation. The rest we shall manage for ourselves.

He looked to the nations of the world to return our sovereignty. And Herzl goes on to point out that the creation of a new state is hardly a ridiculous or impossible notion in his day. It was happening, frankly, all over. As we noted in the introduction, this is an era where the whole world is being divided up, and it's significant to note that many of the colonies that were conquered and divided up during the scramble for Africa and the conquest of Asia received their independence as nation-states following World War II. But why, if this was such an old ideal, did Herzl think the time was ripe now for its realization? Well, he gives a pretty blunt answer just a few lines later. Every idea depends on its propelling force.

And what is that force for us? The misery of the Jews. You know, the pamphlet goes on at length to describe that misery and the anti-Semitism behind it. now antisemitism plays an important and often disturbing role in the Jewish state because Herzl sees it not just as a force propelling the Jews to flee their countries but as a reason that the states of the world would support his proposal because true antisemites would rally around the notion of getting rid of the Jews once and for all now I cannot recommend enough it's worth reading the whole of the Jewish state yourself It's not so long. But for now, it's critical to me that you understand. This is not a utopian manifesto. Herzl goes out of his way to try to fight that notion.

This is the first draft of an action plan. And when you read it, you'll be gripped by the excitement of its author. And you will also be struck at how the individual is subsumed to the vision and needs of society. Remember, so much of nationalism was underpinned by a philosophy that believed that the individual will found its full realization by being subsumed into the nation. And by the by, it's worth it to note his negative view of democracy. So from its inception, the Jewish state, the Zionism that it embodied, was condemned by many religious voices as a false messianism. They saw it as a secular rebirth of the Sabbatean heresy that had so threatened the fabric of Jewish life in Europe. only about 100, 200 years ago.

It was deemed so threatening, in fact, that it was the first thing which succeeded in uniting the Reform and Orthodox in nearly 100 years. Now that's something that needs to be contemplated. Both pro and con, Zionism is the ultimate act of Jewish intersectionality. Jews of every type can find their home there. As the leader, or find their home in its opposition, because as the leader of Orthodox Jewry in Hungary said, With regard to our position on the Zionist movement, we are entirely in agreement with the progressive Jews. We are opposed to this vicious movement. Hungarians of the Jewish faith look for their happiness in Hungary They do not even think about establishing a state in the land of Israel But Herzl was under no illusion that he was the Messiah ready to bring about a secular redemption He was simply consumed by an idea that had been birthed in his unconscious No human being, he says, is wealthy or powerful enough to transplant the nation from one habitation to another.

An idea alone could achieve that, and this idea of a state may have the requisite power to do so. Next year in Jerusalem is our old phrase. It's now a question of showing that the dream can be converted into reality. And Herzl was well aware that his simple solution to the Jewish question would not be well received. And he understood why. I'm fully aware, he says, that reason alone will not suffice. Old prisoners do not willingly leave their cells. We shall see whether the youth whom we need are at our command. The youth who irresistibly draw on the old, carry them forward on strong arms, and transform rational motives into enthusiasm. If you've been listening to the Jewish story for a while, hear in that Arnold Toynbee's assertion that living civilizations are those that worship their future, not their past.

But the truth is, he was right. every element of established Jewish society expressed shock and horror at his absurd idea, his mad notion. Some feared that it would give fuel to the anti-Semitic accusations against the Jews. He was putting tools in the hands of those that wanted to eliminate us. Others believed that a state as a goal was a pipe dream which would distract from the gradual approach, the ground-based approach of colonization. Still others claimed that cultural or religious awakening must precede any national rebirth. And finally, there was even a scientific demographic opposition to the Jewish state. Simon Dubnow, famed historian, and ultimately advocate of a national autonomy for the Jews within the Russian Empire, as a solution to the Jewish question, put it this way, even if a thousand Jews a year moved to Palestine, a number that he felt was absurdly high, the number would only reach half a million by the year 2000.

That would leave the problems of the vast majority of world Jewry unaddressed, he says, and therefore make Zionism itself an immoral solution to the Jewish question. Oh, how wrong he was. And it's worth noting, by the way, that there was a professor of statistics at the Hebrew University who made the exact same argument to Ben-Gurion when arguing against the Declaration of Independence in 1948. We're pushing 7 million now, only 70 years later. After all, if you will it, it is no dream. So we'll touch more on these conflicts in coming episodes, because they will make up the substance of the Zionist movement. For now, just know that Herzl changed the scale on which the Jewish question would be considered, and the very opposition he evoked is an indication of the power of that shift.

And we're going to follow his globetrotting pursuit of international support in the coming episode. But let's give him this moment. It depends on the Jews themselves whether this political pamphlet remains for the present a political romance. If the present generation is too dull to understand it rightly, a future, finer and better generation will arise to understand it. The Jews who wish for a state shall have it, and they will deserve to have it. You know, it's a bit of a cliche to say that the line between genius and madness, and prophecy, is notoriously thin. And Herzl was really seen as all three. Friedrich Schiff, fellow journalist and Herzl's close friend, was actually the first person to whom Herzl read the draft of what eventually became the Jewish state.

And this is how he described his experience. While he read, I watched his drawn face and noted his trembling voice and the strange ideas he was expounding. From this I concluded without hesitation, he is ill, he has lost his mind. But as I said in the introduction, one of Freud's major insights was that we only think we know the motivations that move us. In reality, there are always deeper drivers and wills than those that are found in the conscious mind. And I want to take a minute in the closing to speak a little bit about the processes unfolding that will find their voice in Herzl's movement. Now, the Romantic movement that drove European nationalism was enamored of the idea of being moved by the spirit, be that spirit aesthetic or downright mystical.

That's because the cold analytical calculus of the Enlightenment's quest for truth and meaning had been an elitist affair. The intellectual development of abstract conceptions on which it relied were basically inaccessible to most people. And even to those it was accessible, it failed to move the masses. It's too cold. After all, it's a rare person that's moved by abstract ideas. Now, Jewish tradition teaches that the ruach, the spirit, is that which mediates between the neshama and the nefesh, between the level of pure intellect through which the highest soul finds expression, and the level of fully embodied existence of the soul as the vital force of life. And the ruach, the spirit, is also considered the seed of will.

Will lies on that line between emotion and thought, which is the source of all true motivation. In the arc of intellectual history, The turning away from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Inception was also driven by a sense that meaning was in danger of being lost in a purely intellectualized world. After all, it's important to remember that the post-modern challenge is already present in the modern world. We talked a lot, long ago, about how the modern world was all about freeing knowledge from ignorance and superstition by uncoupling it from tradition and demanding that we dare to know what is rather than cling to a belief about what things are or ought to be. But the first people who broke the chains, who shattered all the illusions, who dared to know, didn't realize that the very act of overturning how you once knew the world and of asserting a new enlightened understanding, at least implies that your brave new conception can be subject to the same deconstruction.

And that doesn't stop. Furthermore, the dialectic element of modernity's unceasing intellectual analysis easily spirals out of control into the ability to claim that there are always an infinite number of ways of looking at everything, and therefore that you can't prove to me one is intrinsically more right than the other. And in the Pardes structure of history that I spoke about, out last episode, this post-modern problem is basically a coming to fruition within Western culture of the age of Sod, of the secret, which really began in the Jewish story back at the expulsion, when the identity model of us and them began to break down. Go listen to the epilogue of the season one. Sod has many elements, but in text study, remember, where the basis of this structure lies, it's the level of meaning which is experienced but not communicated.

And in culture, it can find expression in the breakdown of any hope for a unified truth into the narrative of personal truths. And lo and behold, as this fourth level of consciousness begins to find expression in Am Yisrael, it draws after it a recapitulation of everything which preceded it. It's critical that you understand this about the system that I'm working on here, because now all four levels of this pardes structure can be expressed together, and each in the light of one another. Watch it go back down. So as we're going to see going forward in our story, the astonishing breadth of Zionist thought will draw from all of the intellectual conceptions which Jews and non-Jews alike have to offer.

The depth of enlightenment political thought, the breadth of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements, the power of the economic thinking that emerged out of the 19th century. But those thoughts won't be enough. It's going to be specifically the romantic turn of the spirit, among those whose intellectual pursuits had long turned away from Torah, that evokes the passion to make a movement out of those ideas. and that turn toward ruach, toward the spirit produces the depths of will Am Yisrael always needs if it wants to seek re-embodiment think back to the spirit of the Maccabees they're the expression of remez of meaning in its embodied sense they're seeking sovereignty over embodied territory to achieve destiny and that destiny in a sense became theology in the hands of the rabbinic mind and that shift allowed the intellectual based neshama and all the abstractions it could provide to keep tapping the will of spirit in order to survive an exile but we've come to the end of that process and it's no surprise that the Maccabees will become the heroes of the Zionist movement followed closely, by the way, by Bar Kokhba, as we'll discuss when we get to the story of Max Nordau.

And so it's not a surprise either that Herzl himself identified his awakening with these victors over the ancient Greeks. Four months after the close of the First Zionist Congress, less than two years after he published The Jewish State, Herzl wrote a short story entitled The Menorah. That's the Hanukkah Kanda Alvra. It's the story about an artist who survives an existential crisis and discovers his Jewish identity while lighting the Hanukkah candles. A little bit of context, just before the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl was surprised by the chief rabbi of Vienna who had come to visit him while he was lighting a Christmas tree. Just imagine his embarrassment. But now, only two years later, he's writing a story about a man who, deep in his soul, felt the need to be a Jew.

And in the culminating scene of the story, the artist sits before the fully lit menorah, with the eight candles and the shamash that's used to light them. For our friend, Herzl says, the occasion became a parable through the enkindling of a whole nation. First one candle. It's still dark, and the solitary light looks gloomy. Then it finds a companion. Then another. Then another. The darkness must retreat. when all the candles are ablaze everyone must stop in amazement at what has been wrought and no office is more blessed than that of a shamash the servant of the light and once the will is strong enough it must move toward embodiment and for Am Yisrael that means moving toward the promised land the nefesh Yehudi that vital soul force of the living people will find expression and it will live.

As Herzl says, the Jewish state is essential to the world and it will therefore be created. I want to invite you to send me your questions. Season 3 is on the horizon and I want to know questions about the past, questions about the present, questions about the future even. You can send them to robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can message them to me on my Rav Mike Foyer Facebook page. And I also want to thank some people. I want to thank the folks who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen, to keep it free and widely available. I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to rovmike.com, and in the upper right-hand corner you'll see a Be a Patron button. You can click on that and follow through to add a little bit of per-podcast support.

I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network, that's thelandofisrael.com, for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S.org, for building an institution that allows me to teach so many amazing Jews. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Ralph Mike Boyer, and this is The Jewish Story.