The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Thus was Der Judenstaat brought into the world. Though the title is habitually known in English as The Jewish State, Jacques Kornberg is right to point out that this is, in fact, a mistranslation of what Herzl actually had in mind, which was much more like ‘The State of the Jews’. The difference was, and is, important. A Jewish state presupposes the political realisation of either Torah Judaism or some less straightforwardly religious notion of Jewish ethos. That, indeed, was very much the ideal of Alkalai, and later ‘cultural Zionists’ like Ahad Ha’am. It was suffused through the centuries with the ancient tradition of messianic redemption. But though his name would, in eastern Europe and Russia, come to be spoken of in that way, Herzl, for all his self-regarding obsession with charismatic leadership, repudiated any such pretensions. His state for the Jewish nation was to be a more worldly, matter-of-fact entity, a place where, at last, Jews could live whichever way they wanted, speak whichever language came naturally to them (though he would prefer it be German), a country where the heterogeneity of the Jews, not their uniformity, could be protected and celebrated.