Herzl-knight Errant of Jewry

(Jacob de Haas, intimate friend and disciple of the great Herzl, his biographer and chronicler has probably a greater personal knowledge of the genius of the Zionist movement than any other man alive today. In the following article, written at the request of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mr. de Haas gives illuminating glimpses into the inner qualities of the man whom he calls “the Knight errant of Jewry.”

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Herzl’s death.—Editor’s Note.)

The ancient rabbis, it has been pointed out, did not discuss the anti-Semitism of their day. I do not believe that any Jewish seminary gives a course in the subject, and I am not venturing the judgment that if such a course were given that it would overcome the prejudice that exists in all Jewish circles, in all the countries I have ever visited, at coming to grips with reality.

UNAWARE OF JEWISH PROBLEM

In 1890, as a professional journalist, the Jewish position swam within my field of observation. I had neither opinion nor pre-conceived notion on the subject. It would perhaps be more honest to say that I did not know there was a Jewish problem. I did know Jews were oppressed in East European lands. But then to a Londoner Eastern Europe was the heart of European barbarism, and Jewish trouble was merely part of a general condition of tyranny and oppression and autocracy. In an evil hour in June, 1990, I was asked to do a piece of journalistic hackwork, to compile a register of all the events of the year of any importance to Jews throughout the world, for publication in the Rosh Hashanah edition of the London Jewish World.

That necessitated a careful scrutiny of the files of the Jewish press throughout the world. So I discovered the world-embracing character of persecution, attack, insult, etc., and the nature of the great illusion which had been set up by all Jewish leaders, unconsciously no doubt, as a defense mechanism.

BECOMES JEWISH NATIONALIST

I prepared those annals year after year, for a decade. By 1892 I had become a Jewish nationalist, in 1896 I was ripe for understanding a man who intuitively had grasped the sum total of Jewish experience and who in the simplest language, by the most direct action, propounded the solution. Often in these dark days I think back on these early associations with Herzl, because it was, if memory serves me, in Berlin in 1898 that Herzl confronted the late Prof. {SPAN}##oritz{/SPAN} Lazarus, the author of “Jewish Ethics,” with the observation: “You want to be a German, I understand that, but as a matter of ethics I hold that you are dependent on the other fellow’s willingness to accept you as a German. If he refuses your company you cannot force yourself upon him.”

There was not then the slightest indication that the Germans would accept the Jews, and there never has been any such indication since. It has to some extent been Herzl’s misfortune that though his memory is reversed beyond that of any Jew who lived in the 19th century no little of the glamor is the composition of those who never agreed with him, or pained their minds to the point of trying to understand his thinking-it-through attitude. The masses of the Jews who leapt at his challenging phrase “Jewish State,” and who became his followers had no fears or qualms on the solution.

UNDERSTOOD JEWRY

That he understood the heart of Jewry, as no man before or since, is attested by the monster petitions which greeted the first Zionist Congress, by the flood of messages that came to him and his associates, and by the sudden outburst of mysticism which that Congress aroused. Someday a group of men will analyze all the material of 1896-7 and produce a volume that will amaze a generation of readers. But the men who conceived themselves to be the spokesmen of these untutored and emotional masses were wedded to their own ideologies, and they pinned them on Zionism, and have pinned them on the aura of Herzl himself.

Herzl was a forthright man. He was as candid in his likes as in his dislikes—his unabridged diary is a testimonial to his intellectual honesty, and his perspicacity. He in no way resembled the standardized picture of a diplomat or even a statesman. He knew nothing about wheedling or the coining of mysterious sentences, he attempted no profundities, he detested all backstairs gossip as well as backstairs intrigues.

SOLUTIONS ASTOUND

He shocked both Baron de Hirsch and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, he amazed Chief Rabbis Gudeman of Vienna and Adler of London, and probably struck terror in not a few souls, by speaking his mind both as to the problem he envisaged and the solution he propounded. If there was a duality in his make-up it was this. His daily column in the “Neue Freie Presse” expressed those yearnings, those soft emotional phrases, and those little touches of sentimentalism beloved of the Viennese, and which are presumed to relate to the springs of culture and refinement. The value he put on all his literary ability was that he had the whole record of his writings expunged from the German “Literary Yearbook,” and left a solitary sentence “Judenstaat, 1896.” And in the Jewish field, which became his whole field, he stressed and dealt with the categorical imperative of Jewish need.

A GRIM PROPHET

Atavism gave him both knowledge and understanding of the world Jewish experience. I write this in no vague sense, for I still not know how with his limited experience of Jewish life, his narrow association with the Jews in 1895 he could have foreseen, with such grim accuracy not merely the general currents of Jewish life, but the particular definite difficulty that would arise for the Jews everywhere as the consequence of their economic positions, and interest in the class war. It is true that by 1895 Liberalism had been deflated in Europe, and the Jews had everywhere in Central Europe been very badly mauled in the debacle, but there was not a Liberal leader who regarded it as otherwise than a temporary check, and I know of no Jew other than Herzl who realized that the Jews of the whole Diaspora would pay the price of some of them being skirmishers in the capitalistic, socialistic and communist ranks. In that respect as in others he was a thinker apart.

MOVED BY IMPATIENCE

Equally definite and clear, and much more painful even now, was his pronouncement of the bankruptcy of Jewish institutionalism. He was willing to fight for power in such an organization as the Vienna Alliance Israelite, because it controlled a phase of the problem that interested him keenly, the treatment of refugees, but he had no interest in that or any other institution. The pages of the “Welt” from 1897 to 1904 are eloquent as to his attitude on this and all internal Jewish problems. It can be summed up in a phrase, how to make the Diaspora and any and all of its manifestations serve the Jewish state idea. A vast impatience moved him, the immediacy of the problem was always before him. So at the very beginning of our intimate relations he warned me that I might sit for a decade at the meetings of the Chevevi Zion and make no real progress.

KNIGHT-ERRANT OF JEWRY

He became the knight-errant of Jewry because he was the most sensitive Jew alive. It was not merely that he felt his responsibility as Zionist leader. Somehow in that “brainstorm” which forced him to write the “Jewish State” there had come upon him a sense of overwhelming shame at the existence of anti-Semitism. It mortified him. Life under that slur was not to be tolerated. He could not speak of the “yoke of the Galuth,” and shrug his shoulders in acceptance. Both the yoke and the Galuth must disappear. Of the Galuth only its graves were worth preserving.

I am not writing of a mood. Read his celebrated article on the Kishineff massacre,—the impact of commingled horror and shame is crystal clear. Nor can I forget the pain with which he related the scene on Wilna railroad station when in 1903 he left that town for Vienna, or his description of horror at having to traffic with von Plehwe. These were to him indecencies which had to be blotted out. Somewhere out of the recesses of time he had been dowered with a vast Jewish pride, an ennoblingly kingly dignity of full manhood. He himself expressed his understanding of it in that entry in his diary in which describes his audience of the Pope in 1914: “He was Rome, and I was Jerusalem.”