History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Autoemancipation (1882),

assimilation was dismissed as ultimately impossible, since from every viewpoint the Jew c...

The growing mood of despair among assimilated Jews was reinforced by the anti-Semitic penetration of politics. In the 1870s anti-Semitism was fuelled by the financial crisis and scandals; in the 1880s by the arrival of masses of Ostjuden, fleeing from Russian territories; by the 1890s it was a parliamentary presence, threatening anti-Jewish laws.

In 1895 Herzl was not to foresee the victory of the Dreyfusards. Looking back from the perspective of a century, we can now identify the 1890s as the culminating point in a wave of European anti-Semitism, provoked by the flood of refugees from the Russian horrors, which was less irresistible than it seemed at the time. But Herzl had not that advantage. The anti-Semites then seemed to be winning. In May 1895 Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. To devise an alternative refuge for the Jews, who might soon be expelled from all over Europe, seemed an urgent necessity. The Jews must have a country of their own!

Der Judenstaat

Herzl began by assuming that a Jewish state would be created in the way things had always been done throughout the Exile: by wealthy Jews at the top deciding what was the best solution for the rest of Jewry, and imposing it. But he found this impossible. Everywhere in civilized Europe the Jewish establishments were against his idea. Orthodox rabbis denounced or ignored him. To Reform Jews, his abandonment of assimilation as hopeless represented the denial of everything they stood for. The rich were dismissive or actively hostile.

the intellectuals dismissed Herzl too,

Max Nordau

drew up much of the practical programme of early Zionism.

what Herzl quickly discovered was that the dynamic of Judaism would come not from the westernized elites but from the poor, huddled masses of the Ostjuden, a people of whom he knew nothing when he began his campaign.

Unlike the sophisticated, middle-class Jews of the West, the eastern Jews could not toy with alternatives, and see themselves as Russians, or even as Poles. They knew they were Jews and nothing but Jews–their Russian masters never let them forget it–and what Herzl now seemed to be offering was their only chance of becoming a real citizen anywhere.

High-level diplomacy at a personal level was essential to make it respectable, to get it taken seriously. Moreover, he was very good at it.

was my mistake I began too late…. If you knew how I suffer at the thought of the lost years.’187 In fact by the time Herzl died, Zionism was a solidly established movement, with a powerful friend in Britain. By starting it in 1895 he gave Zionism a lead of nearly twenty years over its Arab nationalist equivalent, and that was to prove absolutely decisive in the event. Thus the conviction of Dreyfus, which set it in motion then rather than later, can be seen as the hand of providence too–like the fearful events of 1648 and of 1881.

All the same, at the time of Herzl’s death Zionism was still only a minority current in the great religious and secular rivers of Jewish development. Its principal opponent was sheer indifference. But it also had active enemies. Until the First World War, the vast majorities of rabbis everywhere, Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. In the West, they agreed with secular, assimilated Jews who saw it as a threat to their established position, raising doubts about their loyalties as citizens. But in the East, not least in Russia, where most Zionist supporters were to be found, religious opposition was strong and even fanatical. It was to have important consequences for the eventual Israeli state. The founders of Zionism, for the most part, were not merely Westerners, they were (in the eyes of the Orthodox) atheists.

Most of them saw secular Zionism as open to all the objections raised against the enlightenment plus the mighty additional one that it was a blasphemous perversion of one of the central and most sacred Judaic beliefs. The notion that religious and secular Zionism were two heads of the same coin is quite false. To religious Jews the return to Zion was a stage in the divine plan to use the Jews as a pilot-scheme for all humanity. It had nothing to do with Zionism, which was the solution of a human problem (Jewish unacceptability and homelessness) by human means (the creation of a secular state).

This wide, though by no means universal, opposition of pious Jews to the Zionist programme inevitably tended to push it more firmly into the hands of the secular radicals.

Yet for the great majority of secular Jews, too, Zionism offered no attraction, and for some of them it was an enemy.

among enlightened European Jewry, the panic stirred by the anti-Semitic wave of the 1890s began to subside.

Jews felt at home in Germany.

a strong link between the Jewish rationalizing spirit and the liberalizing aims of modern Germany, attempting patiently to devise and apply rational solutions to all social problems.

could not the Jews play a notable, perhaps even a paramount, role in helping the Germans to make good this challenge to all-comers? Was not this the true, modern and secular meaning of the ancient injunction to the Jews to be ‘a light to the gentiles’?

Walther Rathenau

in the gentile world

They saw the Jews, and Jewishness, as everywhere and always identified with modernism in its most extreme form.

the emancipation of the European Jews and their emergence from the ghetto into the intellectual and artistic mainstream greatly accelerated changes which were coming anyway.

natural icono...

Jewish composers and performers

Between 1860 and 1914, public resistance to innovation grew, particularly in centres like Vienna,

There was fury in Vienna when Mahler was made head of the court opera in 1897,

Arnold Schönberg

It was the Jew-as-Iconoclast which aroused the really deep rage.

It received a further twist when innovation was accompanied by eroticism.

Leon Bakst (1866-1924)

Ballets Russes, which was primarily a Je...

Jewish painters went to Paris,

they passed into the vanguard of artistic adventure.

the characteristic Jewish impulse to push forward ruthlessly into new cultural territory.

It was not that Jews had any general tendency to embrace modernism as such. There was no Jewish world-outlook, let alone a plan to impose modernism on the world.

If Freud transformed the way we see ourselves, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) changed the way we see the universe.

The quest was peculiarly Jewish, in that it was impelled by an overwhelming need for an enveloping truth-law about the universe, a scientific Torah. The alternative to a general theory was indeterminacy, a concept especially abhorrent to the Jewish mind, since it seems to make impossible all ethics, or certainty in history, politics and law.

In the general mind, however, it introduced not a great new simplicity but a great new complexity, for relativity was confused with relativism, and especially with moral relativism.

The arrival of relativity theory was the point at which a great many educated and intelligent men gave up trying to keep abreast of scientific discovery.

Hence the net result of this furious intellectual activity and cultural innovation at the turn of the century, an activity in which Jews were perceived to be taking a leading part, was to produce not merely an arms race between progressives and conservatives but a widespread feeling of bewilderment and anxiety.

the more perceptive realized the immense significance of the British decision to carve up the Ottoman rump. One was Chaim Weizmann,

the Balfour Declaration was the key piece in the jigsaw,

the Jews got in just in time.

If the Arabs as a whole had been properly organized diplomatically during the war–if the Palestine Arabs had been organized at all–there is not the slightest doubt that the Declaration would never have been issued. Even twelve months later it would not have been possible. As it was, Weizmann pulled the Zionists through a brief window of opportunity, fated never to open again. Thanks to Tancred and Daniel Deronda he successfully appealed to the romantic instincts of the British ruling class, and thus received perhaps the last ex gratia gift of a great power, which went clean against the arithmetical spirit of the age.

the Arabs were developing a nationalist spirit just like the Jews. The chief difference was that they started to organize themselves two decades later. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, was part of the European nationalist movement, which was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The Arabs, by contrast, were part of the Afro-Asian nationalism of the twentieth century.

This appointment to what was regarded as a minor post in an unimportant British protectorate turned into one of the most tragic and decisive errors of the century. It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haji Amin became Grand Mufti.

Samuel compounded his initial misjudgment by promoting the formation of a Supreme Moslem Council, which the mufti and his associates promptly captured and turned into a tyrannical instrument of terror. Still worse, he encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to make contact with their neighbours and promote pan-Arabism. Hence the mufti was able to infect the pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism. He was a soft-spoken killer and organizer of killers. The great majority of his victims were fellow Arabs. His prime purpose was to silence moderation in Arab Palestine, and he succeeded completely. He became Britain’s outstanding opponent in the Middle East, and in due course he made common cause with the Nazis and strongly supported Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. But the principal victims of his unbalanced personality were the ordinary people of Arab Palestine.