Season 2: Episode 22 - One of the People

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It is a fundamental characteristic of the Jews, says Ahad Ha'am, that they do not readily compromise and have no love for half measures, when once they have recognized the truth of particular conception, they give themselves wholly to it. Now, I'd like to believe that I'm a little bit stubborn myself, and I'm wholly given to telling you this story, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 22, One of the People. I want you to picture a ballroom in the late 19th century. Parquet floors, painted walls, high ceilings, chandeliers of crystal, strung from one end to the other. I mean, they don't call it the age of decadence for nothing. Gentlemen and ladies fill the room, the men in topcoats and tails, women wearing the finest evening gowns.

Now we're in Basel, Switzerland, but the truth is, at first glance, there's nothing unique about this gathering. We could be anywhere that the cosmopolitan elite of Europe might gather. There's laughter and mingling, political talk, flirtation in multiple languages. But our pretty picture falls apart. When the beginning of the festivities is signaled, a hush falls over the crowd. But there's no band that strikes the waltz to announce the dancing. and it's not a poet or literary infant terrible that takes the podium. Instead, it's a tall man with a thick, sculpted beard, and he stands there looking out at the assembly with burning eyes and announces that today they have gathered together to lay the cornerstone of the edifice, which is to one day house the Jewish nation.

And the audience listens spellbound as Herzl went on with his opening speech, sketching out for them his dream of the political rebirth of their people. One of the delegates, Mordecai ben Ami, afterwards described the reaction of the crowd at the end of this opening address. For a few moments, the hall shook from the shouts of joy, he says, the applause, the cheers, and the feet stomping. It felt as if the great dream of our nation, of 2,000 years, was now solved, and in front of us stood Mashiach ben David, the Messiah himself. These were the opening moments of the first Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, on Sunday, August 29, 1897. It was in Basel, incidentally, and not Munich. The much more impressive capital has been originally planned because of the overwhelming opposition of German Jewry to what they considered Herzl's mad scheme.

And as he himself noted, the very power of Zionism was evident in its ability to unite the secular and the orthodox, whether it was in sport of or opposition to. And you know, the truth is, he was correct. If you had looked around that room, the Congress consisted of every type of European Jew. Orthodox in reform, assimilationists, nationalists, East and West. Almost 200 delegates representing 17 countries. Nearly half had come on behalf of some pre-existing Zionist society, and the remainder were individual enthusiasts who'd come in answer to Herzl's call. There were 26 members of the press in attendance to ensure that the whole world would be well informed of the proceedings. And proceedings there were.

We're talking about three days of keynotes, committee meetings, passionate debate, documents and discussion. The acculturated Jews of Germany and France discussed Hebrew literature with the Maskelim from the Pala Settlement. Can you imagine it? Orthodox Jews preached to atheists about redemption, and nationalists spoke to cosmopolitans about the virtues of pride. The Basel Conference was three days. Three days that welded the popular movement of Zionism into an organization. And one, by the way, that still exists today. A president, a committee, a council, there was a national bank on the way. Practical diplomatic proposals were discussed. Now, me, what amazes me is trying to imagine getting such a diverse group of Jews to agree on anything.

Herzl himself described it at one point as trying to play 32 games of chess all at once. But he succeeded. And what emerged from the efforts of Herzl and his closest allies that helped him organize this entire conference in the first place is known as the Basel Platform. Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine. Now you have to remember that since the Romans, that's been the name of the land of Israel. And the Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end. 1. The promotion by appropriate means of the settlement in Eretz Israel of Jewish farmers, artisans, and manufacturers. 2. The organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international, in accordance with the laws of each country.

3. The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness. and number four, preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments where necessary in order to reach the goals of Zionism. It's an incredibly bold platform and also incredibly broad, which is not a surprise from such a diverse group of delegates. But as broad as you might want to make your platform, since there's only so much time in the day, so many activists to go around, and so many ways you can slice the pie of money, Most of the coming episode is actually devoted to the tension between the last two points as practical goals. Will the Jews reach Zion by fostering national consciousness? Or will the focus on a political strategy for obtaining the consent of governments be the best way?

To Herzl the answer was clear, and he spent the remaining seven years of his life pursuing that consent. because the Bezo Conference and the annual congresses that followed were the first very large step toward creating the society of Jews that he'd envisioned in Der Judenstadt, in his work, The Jewish State, published only about a year and a half before. This was the new voice of the Jewish nation on the political stage, and he had suddenly been rocketed into a position of international standing. I mean, it's incredible, but almost overnight, Herzl found himself engaged in what we today call shuttle diplomacy. He stood before the Kaiser of Germany. He spoke with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He began to negotiate with the Russian foreign minister and eventually ended up trading offers back and forth with British colonial officers.

And everywhere he went, Herzl projected a princely persona. Even his detractors had to admit that he looked the part of the King of the Jews. And the crazy thing is, he was received as their leader. Now there are whole books devoted to analyzing the question of how on earth Herzl went from being a mildly popular Vienna journalist to the international representative of the Jewish nation. And the answers range from messianic to psychoanalytic to downright cynical. But that's not my issue right now. What matters for our story is that Herzl succeeded in awakening the imagination of the Jewish people. And we saw this from the simultaneous incredible support that poured out for him and the massive opposition.

And though he was painted by many in his day as a charlatan, dreamer, or downright madman, his belief in his own vision drove him to accomplishments that astounded the entire Jewish world. And as he himself wrote in his journal only a few days after the Basel Congress, were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word, it would be this, at Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I say this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in 50, everyone will know it. And of course, 50 years after he wrote those words, the modern state of Israel was born. Now, Israel Sangwa was a delegate at Basel, a British author, leading advocate of what would soon be labeled cultural Zionism.

He had his own journey, eventually turned his back on the idea of the land of Israel as a necessary component. But for now, he was overwhelmed with enthusiasm. And reflecting on the atmosphere of the First Zionist Congress, he remarked, On the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. On the river of Basil we now sit and resolve, we will weep no more. And he was not alone in his desire to celebrate. By all accounts, the conference ended with an after-party that shook the roof. The delegates danced into the night celebrating the pledge they'd all taken that morning. If I forget the old Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. But in the midst of this universal rejoicing, there was one voice that struck a discordant note.

And for three days he'd been, in his own words, like a mourner at a wedding feast. Because in this person's eyes, political Zionism's focus on physical salvation was a failed venture from the word go. and Herzl was a false messiah who'd managed to enchant the Jews with his fake vision, just as Shabtai Tzvi had done only 200 years ago. Listen to his words in his essay, The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem, written in the wake of the Basel Conference. Only a fantasy bordering on madness can believe that so soon as the Jewish state is established, millions of Jews will flock to it, and the land will afford them adequate sustenance. But it wasn't just a practical challenge that drove this voice. In his eyes, land acquisition was a distraction.

A national bank was financial pettiness. The consent of the nations was irrelevant. In his eyes, tangible goals were not what built a nation. And throwing stones at the ideas of others was not a new posture for Achad Ha'am, leading Hebrew author, profound national thinker, and founder only a year before of the Hebrew monthly Hashiloach, a periodical that would go on to become the leading Hebrew literary journal of the 20th century. Ahadam had an entirely different vision of what it took to build a nation than the one which Herzl expressed at Bezel. And, as he was after all the self-styled iconoclast of the Jewish national awakening, He saw that even in its infancy, political Zionism was an idol ripe for the breaking.

Asher Svi Hersh Ginsburg was born in 1856 in a small town near Kiev to parents who were pious and well-to-do, Chesedim. And in a story that should at this point sound quite familiar, the boy was a precocious genius. And though he attended Haydar until age 12, he branched out quickly from the classic religious texts. Already at age 8, he taught himself to read Russian. And his father, of course, could afford to provide him with private tutors, and they helped him master French, English, and German as well, all of which opened to him the doors of 19th century thought. What followed in its wake is also a well-known pattern. He lost faith in the traditional Hasidic perspective and lifestyle, while he was still an adolescent.

and he declared his allegiance to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that was then thriving in Russian Jewish life. In his early 30s, Ginsburg caught the nationalist bug. He moved to Odessa and became deeply involved in the growing Chibat Zion movement, the Lovers of Zion. If you recall, in the early 1880s, Leon Pinsker had written a pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation, where he diagnosed the causes of Judeophobia. and that pamphlet threw him to the head of this scattered movement of the Chibat Zion and in 1884 he called a conference of all of its members in Katowice, Poland. Asher C. Ginsburg went to that conference but he didn't go as a starry-eyed follower of Pinskrist's notion that the solution to the Jewish problem was territorial because this young author-to-be already had his own ideas about the proper way to love Zion and the idea that the solution to the Jewish question depended on some piece of the planet, no matter how sacred, seemed completely insufficient to young Asher Tzvi.

He didn't believe that the Jews could be saved piecemeal through immigration or even wholesale by mass colonization, even if it was of their ancient homeland in Israel. And by the way Pinsker himself favored the Midwest as he makes clear in his writing if right now you somewhere between the Ohio and I don know Colorado Rockies listening to me, drop me a line, please, and tell me what you think it would have been like if Israel had been founded somewhere along the banks of Mississippi. Now, Asher Tzvi was a true chibat zion, a chovev zion, a true lover of Zion. And he may have left the tradition of his fathers behind, but his Hasidic heart knew that the solution to the Jewish question didn't lie in America, or even in the agricultural colonization of Ottoman Palestine.

So long as the love of Zion sought its outlets in agriculture or building refuges from hatred and destruction, it would never be able to provide an answer to the Jewish question. And Ginsburg believed that the focus of the Chibat Zion movement should therefore be first and foremost on preparing the hearts of the people for its own nationality, and not on getting a piece of the geographic pie. Now what the Jewish nation needed was a cultural awakening, he said. The national spirit had to be stirred to a Hebrew renaissance, as he calls it, before the national body could even dream of renewing its ancient kingdom. And so at this Katoist conference, Ashur Tzvi began a battle against political Zionism that he would wage until his dying day.

But he wasn't yet officially Ahad Ha'am, one of the people, as that means. Ginsburg continued to work with the Chibat Zion movement, pushing his vision of a cultural return to Zion in meetings and recruiting, of course, like-minded souls. And by 1888, he had gathered a small group of loyal supporters, who, though few in number, felt themselves powerful enough to serve as a new ideological foundation for the Jewish people. And so, they established within Chibat Zion the secret order of Bnei Moshe, the sons of Moshe. Now, I know it might seem crazy that a handful of young Russian Jews would start meeting in secret in order to propagate their vision of national spiritual awakening among the masses and think that they would bring redemption?

Secular, though it might be. But just listen for a moment to some of the leading names of the 19th century Jewish literature and life that were at those meetings. Chaim Nachbialek, Joshua Revnitzky, Chaim Weizman, Mayor Disengoff. And today, almost every one of them has a street name for them in the modern state. Who's crazy now? So the B'nai Moshe as a movement was kind of short and unsuccessful. It could have been the victim of its success, actually. The goal of national, cultural, and spiritual awakening attracted everyone. on maskilim, chasidim, mitnagdim, and the movement might have just been overwhelmed by ideological diversity. Or according to some scholars, it just fell prey to the personal intrigues in politics that plague any secret society.

But it doesn't matter, because the principles which the B'nai Moshe espouse were given their first public form by its leader in 1889 in an essay entitled, This Is Not the Way. And that was the work that transformed Asher Tzvi Ginzburg enlightened son of a Hasidic estate manager into Ahad Ha'am, one of the people master of the Hebrew pen and founding father of spiritual or cultural Zionism. Now Ahad Ha'am, despite his name as one of the people, was an elite thinker posing as the voice of the people. And the essay focuses on the flaw in Hivat Zion's goal of Palestine as a destination for the Jewish masses. For many centuries, he says, the Jewish people sunk in poverty and degradation has been sustained by faith and hope in the divine mercy.

The present generation has seen the birth of a new and far-reaching idea, which promises to bring down our faith and hope from heaven and transform both into living and active forces, making our land the goal of hope and our people the anchor of faith. Now, Hadam was not opposed to the idea of a national home and air at Israel, God forbid. He was just worried about the time frame and what such a vision in the immediacy required. He claimed that in their haste to catch the wave of immigrants now fleeing Europe for America, the lovers of Zion were selling a false dream. In the place of a national rebirth, they were offering basically a colonial dream of profitable homesteads, lucrative business opportunities, thriving Jewish villages.

And not only was this dream unrealistic in the eyes of a Hadam, and he would make two fact-finding trips to Palestine himself over the next four years to gather proof for its hasty foolishness. It wasn't just the unrealism of it, it was an essentially flawed ideal because it was appealing to an individual well-being as a motivation for building what was ultimately destined to be a national home. Because he knew that until the Jews awoke to themselves as a nation, their individual efforts would accomplish nothing of lasting worth. As he says, ahead to Ahad Ha'am is not immediate cultivation of the soil in the land of Israel, but rather a cultivation of the national soul within the people of Israel.

We ought to have made it our first object, he says, to bring about a revival, to inspire men with a deeper attachment to the national life and a more ardent desire for the national well-being. By these means, we should have aroused the necessary determination and we should have obtained devoted adherence. and at the end of the essay Achada Am threw down the gauntlet and declared the entire practical program of the Chibat Zion and by implication the coming Zionist movement a big mistake this then he says is the wrong way the heart of the people that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated and the people is broken into fragments and he closes with a quote I shall see it but not now I shall behold it, but not nigh.

El'enu v'lo'ata, ashurenu v'lo'karov. It's from Numbers from B'mibar 24, 17. And I want you to hear that last line as a desperate call for patience. I'll see it, but not now. Behold it, but not nigh. Achad Am knew that you can't rush an evolutionary process. And on a visceral level, it seems to me that this is what triggered his opposition to both Pinsker's vision and Herzl's when it came. But don't miss the second half of this verse he's quoting, because his was also a messianic vision. The rest of the verse is a star has gone forth from Jacob, and a staff will arise from Israel. And what evolution and messianism share is the weight of an inevitable process. They are both a promise in their own way that not only must, but will be fulfilled.

Or at least messianism and social Darwinism. Achad Am had read and absorbed the social Darwinist theories of his day, and this notion of culture developing in an inexorable evolutionary process is the hallmark of Herbert Spencer's thought in particular. Spencer saw human societies as a type of organism, the product of slow, mostly unconscious development, through which their component parts grow more complex and mutually well-adapted, provided they struggle to survive and be the fittest. Now, every society, in his eyes, is an interlocking system of these parts, none of which could be altered without affecting all the others, as is true in most biological systems, and therefore, each of which offer a lever for shifting the society as a whole.

Remember, a lot of the social reformers of the late 19th century were social Darwinists. But in Ahana Am's mind, the keystone component of culture is language. No matter how heterogeneous a society, if they share a language, then they share a commonality of concepts and values that can draw them together as one. He wrote that language functions by processing experience on an unconscious level and making it available on a conscious one. And then that this happens on the personal and on the national scale. He wrote, that it cannot develop new ones. A people can give birth to new words, fresh ways of speaking that express undiscovered potential. And changes in language, a new word, altered grammatical form, are comparable to biological mutation in evolution.

And therefore the present form of any language is the sum total of successful mutations. Furthermore, because Ahad Aam believed in the essential nature of a nation that found expression through this evolutionary process, every language becomes not only a record of its development in the past, but is a repository, an expression of its national spirit. And a people that ceases to use its language for an everyday collective engagement with the world doesn't necessarily lose its literature. I mean, the classics can always be translated. In his understanding, what it loses is the living nerve cells of its memory, that unique ability to connect the past with the present in a way that can give voice to a vision of the future.

As his disciple, the national poet of Israel, Chaim Nachmul Alec, would write in his 1913 essay, Language Pains, a truly living language is produced by life and life's literature. It does not detain its offspring in the womb, rather it is fruitful and multiplies constantly and of itself, releasing creative power in its due season. A truly dead language has nothing but the writing on the tombstones, work done by the stonecutter at a time of dire need. Not so our language, a pseudo-living language that gives birth to very little and leaves much tucked in her womb. And it is our role to induce the birth. so as I said Ahad Ham's vision was an awakening the national Jewish spirit by means of reviving its culture only then would a national home be a desirable or even viable aspiration and that fundamental difference in goal is an essential distinction between cultural and political Zionism and it's important to note that beneath that difference between culture and politics lays an even deeper difference in how they define the Jewish question to begin with Remember, I asserted that the political Zionists saw the Jewish question as posed by anti-Semitism.

What are we going to do with the Jews? Their physical safety is the most pressing issue in their mind, and therefore the primary answer that they offered was a physical refuge. But to Ha'ad Am and the cultural Zionists, that was not the issue. They were less moved by the question of what to do about the Jews than by the question of what to do about Jewishness. In their eyes, the primary threat to the Jewish people wasn't anti-Semitism, it was actually assimilation. And remember, assimilation is always at its most severe, where anti-Semitism is at its weakest. And in an increasingly secular age, they saw Judaism losing its hold on the Jews with nothing to replace it. Now, Ha-D'Am knew well the life of the Jews of Eastern Europe, among whom he lived, who suffered under civil restrictions, religious persecution, and terrible programs to come of the medieval sort that we'll talk about.

But he really despised the life of the assimilated Western Jews who seemed to have been emancipated As he wrote in his 1891 essay Slavery in Freedom Today while I am still alive I try to give my weary eyes a rest from the scene of ignorance, degradation, and unutterable poverty that confronts me here in Russia, and find comfort by looking yonder, across the border, where there are Jewish professors, Jewish members of academies, Jewish officers, and the army Jewish civil servants. And when I see there, behind the glory and the grandeur of it all, a two-fold spiritual slavery, moral slavery, and intellectual slavery, and I ask myself, do I envy these fellow Jews of mine, their emancipation? I answer in all truth and sincerity, no, a thousand times no.

The privileges are not worth the price. I may not be emancipated, but at least I've not sold my soul for emancipation. I at least can proclaim from the housetops that my kith and kin are dear to me wherever they are. And to the chadam, remember assimilation included the reduction of peoplehood into religion of the Jews, into Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion, no matter how orthodox they might be. What was needed was a Hebrew renaissance, one that could counteract what he called the fragmentation of the Jewish people into Jewish Frenchmen, Jewish Germans or Americans. A physical ingathering of the Jews in the land was not an answer unto itself. Kibbutz Galiot, the ingathering of the exiles, might be a messianic ideal, but it was not a practical project.

The way ahead was to shape a common language, one that would become a medium for the articulation of a national spirit. And so, considering that, it should come as no surprise that the primary tool he envisioned for awakening the national spirit was the revival of the Hebrew language. I want you to try and imagine for a moment the pain of a mute and illiterate poet. Now try to picture a whole generation of them. The modern revival of the Hebrew language has been a long time in coming, and the growth of its literature might be traced all the way back to Moses Mendelsohn's failed periodical, Kohelet Musar. Or at the very least, we could say, with the Dor Hame Asfim, that generation of Hebrew intellectuals that gathered around Yitzhak Eichel's groundbreaking publication, Hama'a Seif, go back to episode 15 in this season to hear the story.

And there have certainly been works of journalism, poetry, and prose all along the way. But the language is treading water, and its poets are chafing at their limitations. Just hear this cry from Shaul Trenakoski, foundational Hebrew poet who strived to meld Jewish and world culture in his art. and I, a mute person, will stand and listen. What is for me? Who is for me? A foreigner, a stranger in their world, a foreigner, only narrowly plotting my path. He's a foreigner with a narrow path available, not only because of the anti-Semitic realities of life that hem him in, but because he lacks a rich national language through which to claim the world as his own. Now, make no mistake, the early Hebrew poets were the inheritors of a rich national heritage.

But the Hebrew, with which they developed the ornate Melitza style, this sort of Baroque language of the early Maskelin, could describe a complex angelology, and it could detail the sacred architecture of the temple in ancient Jerusalem. But it had no words for the trees that surrounded Chernikovsky in the Russian forest, or the mushrooms he saw sprouting at his feet, or for the national and philosophical ideas moving Ahad Ha'am. So as a tool of national revival, the reawakening of the Hebrew language as the speech of everyday life will have unparalleled power. Later on, we'll see the role that it plays in the overarching Zionist project of creating a new Jew. But unlike the more radical approaches that emerge among the first political Zionists who wanted to make a total break with their past, By definition, the new Jew, which is shaped by the modern Hebrew literature, will be in conversation with the past, even if it's a conversation filled with a lot of shouting and criticism.

Listen to this, once again from Chaim Nachman Bialik, Should an Angel Ask? From dead letters, songs of life gush forth, shocking the famous dead upon the shelves. For they were different songs, of small bright clouds, of golden beams of sun and shining tears. And if we're going to speak about the resurrection of the modern Hebrew language, then we have to give credit where credit is due, and to start with its most famous architect, Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, a.k.a. Eliezer ben Yehuda. So Eliezer was born in 1858 in Belarus, to a Hasidisha family much like Asher Tzvi Grinsberg. His initial education was heavily in the world of tradition. He absorbed Torah, Mishnahh, and Talmud in the chedah of his small town.

But unlike Ginzburg, he was then sent off to Yeshiva in Polotsk. And it was here, in another familiar pattern, that held true really for most of the leading lights of the Russian Haskalah, he first encountered the thought of the Enlightenment. In fact, his Rosh Yeshiva was a secret maskil, and he was the one who first introduced young Eliezer to the pleasure and power of secular studies. He quickly found a young woman to teach him Russian. And soon, he'd not only married his tutor, but had mastered her lessons so well that he could enter a Russian high school from which he graduated in 1877. Now this was a time of tremendous upheaval in the Russian Empire. The Russo-Turkish War had just broken out, largely triggered by the rise of nationalist movements in the Balkans.

Nationalism was the intoxicating philosophy of its day, offering romantic young intellectuals like Eliezer Perlman the dream of a life of purpose, agency, and self-realization. In addition to his secular studies, Eliezer quickly became an avid reader of the emerging Hebrew literature of his day. Now, not long before he graduated high school, in 1868, the first edition of HaShachar, The Dawn, had appeared in Vienna. It was a Hebrew periodical founded and edited by Peretz Molenskin, and its express mission was to broadcast the message that the Jews are a nation and that as a nation, they're worthy of national independence. Now note the date of 1868. This is well before Pinsker, Herzl, or Echad Ha'am.

Moshe Hesse's Rome and Jerusalem had been written but it was a lonely cry in the wilderness at this point. But more than Smoletsk's message, nationalism, which had already excited young Eliezer, it was his medium that moved him, the Hebrew language. And in the preface to his great life work, the first modern Hebrew dictionary that actually was published after his death by the Academy of Hebrew Language, which he helped to found, there Ben Eliezer describes an experience triggered by reading Hashachar. It's a type of experience that we saw in Herzl, and one which will repeat itself over and over amongst the first generation of Zionists. I'd call it somewhere between a conversion and a revelation. It was as if, he says, the heavens had suddenly opened, and a clear incandescent light flashed before my eyes, and a mighty inner voice sounded in my ears.

The renaissance of Israel on its ancestral soil. The more the nationalist concept grew in me, the more I realized what a common language is to a nation. So the young Moschel became a linguistic nationalist overnight, resolved in his heart to move to the land of Israel, and therefore he immediately moved to Paris to study medicine as a means of supporting himself in the Holy Land. And it was in Paris in 1879 that young Eliezer Perlman wrote his first article, one that articulated his vision of national rebirth. The original title was The Burning Question, but the editor, Peretz Molenskin, softened it a bit by renaming it The Wavy Question before publishing it in Hashachar. But no matter what the title, the question was that of the times.

In the middle of the last century, political science gave birth to a new child, which was destined to change the form of many governments and the fates of various peoples, with the power of life and death at its command. That child is the concept of nationalism. And the rest of the essay is a passionate description of the natural and desirable role of nationalism as a liberator in the world. and it deals with the tension between the national and cosmopolitan ideals that we've been speaking of and unsurprisingly comes down on the side of a world made up of a polity of nations, not citizens of the world. Now, language isn't the central focus of the essay, but the role in which it's presented is key to understanding where young Eliezer was headed.

He conceives of language as both the means of bringing about national revival, we Hebrews, he says, indeed have an advantage in that we possess a language in which even now we can write anything we care to, and which is also in our power to speak, if we only wish. And if many of us spurn Hebrew, if many of our people cannot even read Hebrew, who is to blame? In vain, he continues, will be all the effort of our writers to revive the language if the entire people remain scattered in different lands, among nations, speaking different tongues. It's the means, but also the end goal. As he says, the land of Israel will become the center for the entire people, and even those who live in the diaspora will know that their people dwells in its land, that its language and its literature are there.

Herein lies our people's salvation and our nation's happiness. And that last quote makes Eliezer Perlman the true originator of the concept of the land of Israel as a cultural spiritual center, an idea which became central to Aharaam's program of cultural Zionism. And only two years later, in 1881, Eliezer Perlman decided to put his ideals into action and immigrated to Ottoman Palestine. At a time, by the way, when that such a thing was crushingly difficult. And once he set foot in the land of Israel, he changed his name to Eliezer Ben Yehuda, moved to the holy city of Jerusalem and swore together with his wife never to speak anything other than Hebrew in their home. You know, their son, Ben Zion Ben Yehuda, grew up in what we could call the first modern Hebrew-speaking home, which makes him the first modern Hebrew-speaking child.

And not so simple either. Because Ben Yehuda was consumed by his vision. He grew out his beard and payout, not because he was religious, but in order to blend in with the ultra-Orthodox, who were the majority of Jews in Jerusalem, and in an attempt to recruit them to the nationalist cause. People saw quickly through his disguise. And at one point, a ban of excommunication was even declared against this underground enlightener. But nevertheless, he became a Jerusalem phenomenon, and he could be seen running from Beit Midrash to synagogue, gathering Hebrew words, asking rabbis, scholars, and men on the street. His home was his only laboratory at the beginning for the Hebrew experiment, so he tried to prevent his son from playing with other children even.

He didn't want him to hear other languages spoken. Once, so goes the story, he even yelled at his wife for singing a Russian lullaby to a baby. Like I said, he became a Jerusalem personality, a well-known madman who worked 18 hours a day seeking out lost terminology and developing new words and writing articles. By 1910, Ben Yehuda had begun publication of his dictionary, but the full 17-volume set of the complete dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew wouldn't be completed until well after his death. In the meantime, toward the end of his life, he co-founded the Va'ad Halashon, the Language Council, which eventually became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, that adopted Ben Yehuda's rules and took upon itself his life's work.

That academy still today sits at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and continues to approve new Hebrew words to meet the needs of present-day Israeli society. Now, Eliezer Ben Yehuda didn't live to see the creation of the State of Israel. He died at the end of 1922, only one month after the British authorities declared Hebrew to be the official language of the Jews of Palestine. And we talk at some point in the future about how it was that the British gained the authority to do such a thing But for now we have to mark with awe the success of Ben Yehuda nationalist dream Israel in its land and in its language. It's a misstatement to say that before Ben Yehuda, the Hebrew language was dead. As he himself testified already, it was the discovery that Jewish communities from different countries were already using Hebrew to communicate with one another that first awoke his national vision.

But Ben Yehuda was the first to draw a connection between the return of the Jews to their land and the transformation of a language of international Jewish discourse into one of daily speech, scientific inquiry, and literary production. As one professional later remarked, it's fortunate for Hebrew that Ben Yehuda was not a linguist because only an amateur would be foolhardy or oblivious enough to launch into such an adventure. But fortunately, he may have been an amateur, but he was no fool. He was a dreamer, a dreamer who knew that if you willed it, it is no dream. And in pursuing his passion for the national rebirth, he helped found the Republic of Hebrew Culture, of which Ahad Ha'am had dreamed.

In the third paragraph of his keynote speech at the Basel Congress, Herzl declared, we have returned home, as it were. Zionism is a return to Jewishness even before there is a return to the Jewish land. You know, there were many who were surprised that day at his words and remained so down to this day. As we discussed in the last episode, Herzl's persona as an assimilated Viennese Jew, as a European so cosmopolitan in his culture that he was unashamed of his love for the operas of Richard Wagner, that notorious anti-Semite, that persona is critical to a certain vision of what the state of Israel is meant to be, meaning a state of the Jews, an ingathering of Jews from all around the world in order to form a secular, civil nation-state, one which will allow the Jews to finally become a nation just like any other.

Except, since the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, our state will be the most cosmopolitan of them all. Now, some saw Herzl's declaration of a need to return to Jewishness simply as cold political calculus, aimed at reassuring the Orthodox and traditional delegates that made up the bulk of Eastern European Jewry that not to judge him by his looks. Others were just cynical when they looked at Herzl's outward cosmopolitan style and compared them with his words. Such was Echad HaAam's attitude in his essay The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem. Dr. Herzl, he says, it is true, said in his speech, that Zionism demands a return to Judaism before the return to the Jewish state. But these nice-sounding words are so much at variance with his deeds that we're forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they're nothing but a well-turned phrase.

Now, there were more Zionist congresses to come after Basil I every year, but Ahad Am did not attend any of them. His followers, however, did, and they created an informal opposition to Herzl that became known as the Democratic Faction. One of its leaders was the young Chaim Weizman, future first president of Israel. And we'll speak more about the incipient split in the political organization in a later episode when we address what's called the Uganda crisis, and we learn about the life of Zev Jabotinsky. But for now, the democratic faction pushed Ahara Am's vision from within the Zionist Congress, advocating that to the land of Israel would come first Jewishness, and then Jews. until, in the words of Aharam, after several generations it will have achieved its goal, the creation in the land of Israel of a national spiritual center for Jewishness that is loved by the entire Jewish people and binds it together, a center of knowledge, of Torah study, of the Hebrew language and its literature, of the purest of bodies and souls, a true miniature of the Jewish people as it should be.

Herzl's declaration of a return to Jewishness that preceded a return to the land should have resonated with the cultural Zionists. But they mistrusted him. They saw him as a utopian messiness and suspected at the same time that he was really just a cosmopolitan European in Jews' clothing. And then in 1902, Herzl published his novel Alt Neuland, The Old New Land. It's a title that borrows from the famous synagogue of Prague, the Alt Neu Shul, the Old New Shul. This was the Jewish novel that had been brewing in Herzl's subconscious since way back in 1894 when he wrote his despairing play, The New Ghetto. But now, the despairing end had been replaced by a belief in redemption. Alt Neuland is a literary portrait of the vision of Zionism achieved.

And though he poured his heart into such a vision, Herzl knew it would not be well received. In the epilogue, he addresses the book itself with these parting words. Now, dear book, after three years of labor, we must part, and your sufferings will begin. You'll have to make your way through enmity and misrepresentation as through a dark forest. When, however, you come among friendly folk, give them greeting from your father. Perhaps Herzl feared for its reception, because at first glance the picture which Alt-Neuland presented was that of an ideal European society transplanted to the Middle East. Its cultural elite wore white gloves to the opera. They spoke German and French and prided themselves on their technological and socially progressive society.

At the same time, the rebuilt temple sits at the center of this society. The Jubilee year is the basis for its economy, and its characters in the narrative celebrate the Passover Seder in impressive detail. Now, Ahad Ha'am certainly belonged to the camp of critics. The cat is out of the bag, he wrote in his review of Alt-Noiland in Hashiloach. the Zionist leader has finally revealed his conception of the Messianic Age that is around the corner. In his eyes, Herzl's Jewish utopia had nothing Jewish about it. Any seemingly Jewish content was nothing more than window dressing, meant to conceal the truth that the new Zion was simply a replica of Europe at its best, in a new location. To Echad Ha'am, Herzl was aping the culture of his oppressors that had become his emancipators.

as he characterized Western European Jews as a whole to Chanaam Herzl was a mental and spiritual slave I'll leave it to you to read Alt Neuland and decide for yourself whether it's talking about a Jewish state or just the state of the Jews but I'll tell you this Herzl was deeply wounded by Chanaam's criticism it seems to me from his point of view he'd made no small effort to stress Alt Neuland's Jewish character and if the literary lion of Am Yisrael thought his words empty window dressing, he didn't understand why. And that itself might begin to answer our question. Is it simply that Herzl made the book as Jewish as he possibly could, but that he employed the concept and cultural forms that were available to him, which Ahad Ha'am saw as intrinsically false?

Either way, fearing the damage that such a review in Shiloch might inflict on the Young Zionist movement, But reluctant to be dragged into an undignified literary fistfight, Herzl turned to his earliest Zionist convert and close confidant, Max Nordau, and asked him to answer for him. Now, I'll tell you Nordau's story in full in a time to come. But for now, you just need to know that, like Herzl himself, he was a deeply acculturated German-speaking Jew. But he had achieved a literary fame far above Herzl's. Nordau was known throughout Europe as a cultural critic with a sharp tongue, a sharp pen, and a conservative frame of mind. And Nordau was happy to comply with Herzl's request. He liked nothing better than a literary brawl.

He began with a point-by-point rebuttal of the Chara Am's review, published in the Zionist Weekly Die Welt in March 1903. And then he really let loose. Achara Am feared Herzl's cosmopolitan vision because he was unable to shake off the chains of the ghetto. He saw Herzl as a mental slave because the only freedom Achara Am knew was that of the ghetto. Finally, Aharam was a nationalist fanatic. He thought toleration of non-Jews was unbecoming for a Jewish state. He mocked Herzl for taking opera houses and white gloves from Europe because all he himself wished to take was the Inquisition. In short, Aharam was quote, no Zionist. He is the opposite of one. It's a cheap trick to attack political Zionism as if there were some other mysterious kind of Zionism.

His own to believe in. Zionism must be political. A Zionism that isn't political and doesn't strive to create a homeland for that part of the Jewish people that won't or can't adjust to life in the diaspora is not Zionism at all. And, as a final damning conclusion, he said that though Aharaam thought Zionism should proceed slowly, there was nothing slow about the spread of anti-Semitism. And what it would ultimately lead to if Jews did nothing about it? Any fool can guess. Well, now the floodgates opened. A-Khada'am, the supporter, rallied to his side. But Nordau had just as many defenders. His article was an assault on freedom of thought. A-Khada'am was a habitual fault finder who, face to face with Achilles, would see only his heel.

There was an element in this of a clash between East and Western European Jewry in their fight. How much Western insolence there is in Nordau's lies, wrote one defender of A-Khada'am. Insolence toward the Jews of the East, and insolence toward Hebrew literature, its authors and readers alike. Now this is more than just a tempest in a teacup. As we'll see, within a few years, the competing Zionist visions of Herzl and Achada Am would come close to splitting the Zionist movement as a whole. And the ideologies of cultural and political Zionism, as embodied by their advocates, would play out the nationalist cosmopolitan struggle for another two generations in strange and complex ways. You know, Achada Am and his followers despised the ghetto from which they emerged.

and the parochialism of traditional Jewish society that embodied. But, despite their claims to a desire for universalist vision, they actually longed for a particularist Jewish identity. Meanwhile, Herzl, Nordheim, and Chabotinsky all grew up in a cosmopolitan European society, but they rejected the universalism which it espoused. They wanted nationalism, Jewishness, but one that was defined by the cosmopolitan values and tastes with which they had grown up. and the battle rages on today. Read it in the news. Is this a Jewish state or a state of the Jews? And even if you advocate for a Jewish state, how exactly do you define what Jewish is? And to the inheritance of political and cultural Zionism, the high ground to be seized in this battle is the memory of Herzl.

Everyone wants to claim to be the legitimate interpreter of his vision. But instead of weighing in on what I think Herzl really meant, I'm going to give the Chada'am the last word, or words, from his essay, Moses. No historical great man has not had his spiritual portrait painted by his people's imagination differently from reality. And it is this imaginary composition, the work of a folk pursuing its needs and propensities, rather than some actual person whose brief life was not at all what it was taken to be by others, that constitutes the true great man who has continued to make himself felt sometimes for thousands of years. You know, we're nearing the end of the season. I want to invite you to send me some questions.

You write me whatever you want to think about in the past, present, or future, robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can send them to my Facebook page, robmikefoyer at Facebook. And I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the folks that give their hard-earned money to make this show happen and keep it widely spread and freely available. and I want to invite you to join them. You can go right now to robmike.com and in the upper right corner you'll see a be a patron button and you can click on through to give a little bit per podcast support. I 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 dot org dot i-l for building an institution that allows me to teach such tremendous students.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer and this is The Jewish Story. .