The Jewish State - ByTheodor Herzl (1896 )

The Jewish State: MidEastWeb Preface
Theodore Herzl's pamphlet Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in
1896. It heralded the coming of age of Zionism. Several articles and books
advocating the Zionist idea had appeared beginning in the 1840s, and small
Zionist groups such as Hovevei Tsion (Lovers of Zion) had begun recruiting
immigrants to Palestine, but no group had a coherent plan or modern ideology.
Herzl's plan for creating a Jewish State, arrived at after contemplating other
solutions as well, provided the practical program of Zionism, and led to the first
Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland, in August, 1897.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 2, 1860, Herzl was educated in the spirit of
the German-Jewish "Enlightenment." His family moved to Vienna in 1878 after
the death of his sister. He became a doctor of law in 1884 and worked for a short
while in courts in Vienna and Salzburg. However, he soon left law and devoted
himself to writing.
In 1891 Herzl became Paris correspondent for the liberal Vienna newspaper New
Free Press. Herzl was in Paris when a wave of anti-Semitism broke out over the
court martial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer. Dreyfus, falsely accused of
espionage and banished to an island prison, was divested of his rank in a
humiliating public ceremony in January 1895, as a mob shouted "Death to the
Jews.
The Dreyfus case motivated Herzl to devote thought and effort to the Jewish
problem. He formalized the concept of emergence from the Diaspora (the
dispersion of the Jews) and return to Zion in The Jewish State. In The Jewish
State, he proposed, for the first time, a program for immediate political action.
Herzl appealed in vain to wealthy Jews such as Baron Hirsch and Baron
Rothschild, to join the national Zionist movement. He found allies however, in
impoverished Eastern European socialists and Zionists who had already formed
Zionist groups. The result was the First Zionist Congress in Basle, which
established the World Zionist Organization and adopted the program of attaining
a Jewish State to be provided by "public law." Herzl convened six Zionist
Congresses between 1897 and 1902. The Congresses created the instruments of
Zionist action for implementing the settlement plan, including The Jewish Colonial
Trust, the Jewish National Fund and the movement's newspaper Die Welt.
After the first Basle Congress, Herzl wrote in his diary, “Were I to sum up the
Basle Congress in a word- which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly- it
would be this: ‘At Basle, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I
would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, certainly in 50,
everyone will know it.’”
Herzl attempted to gain a Charter from the Sultan of Turkey for the establishment
of a Jewish state in Palestine, then ruled by the Ottoman Empire. To this end he
met in 1898 with the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in Istanbul and Palestine, as well
as the Sultan, but these meetings did not bear fruit.
In 1902, he published a utopian novel about the Jewish state, Altneuland (old-
new land) a vision complete with monorails and modern industry. The novel
concludes, "If you will, it is no legend."
Herzl then negotiated with the British regarding the possibility of settling the
Jews on the island of Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, the El Arish region and
Uganda. After the Kishinev pogroms, Herzl visited Russia in July 1903. He tried
unsuccessfully to persuade the Russian government to help the Zionist
Movement transfer Jews from Russia to Palestine. At the Sixth Zionist Congress
Herzl proposed settlement in Uganda, on offer from the British, as a temporary
"night refuge." The idea met with sharp opposition, especially from the same
Russian Jews that Herzl had thought to help. Though the Congress passed the
plan as a gesture of esteem for Herzl, it was not pursued seriously, and the
initiative died after the plan was withdrawn. Herzl met with the king of Italy, who
was encouraging, and with the Pope, who expressed opposition.
Herzl died in 1904 and was buried in Vienna. After the establishment of the State
of Israel his remains were reburied on Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem in the summer of
1949.
The title "Der Judenstaat" was probably meant as an ironic play on words, since it
literally means "The Jews'-State," a derogatory construction like the
"Judenstrasse" (Jews' Street) of the medieval ghetto. In The Jewish State, Herzl
proposed a modern solution to the Jewish question. He believed that attempts at
assimilation of Jews into European society were in vain, as the majority in each
country decided who was a native and who an alien. The persistence of anti-
Semitism determined that the Jew would always be an outsider and only the
creation of a Jewish state, a matter of interest to both Jews and non-Jews would
put an end to the Jewish problem.
The Jewish State proposed that diplomacy would be the primary way of attaining
the Jewish State. Herzl called for the organized transfer of Jewish communities to
the new state. Of the location of the state, Herzl said, "We shall take what is
given us, and what is selected by public opinion."
Herzl's The Jewish State included social innovations such as the seven-hour
working day. He was interested in an economy where free enterprise and state
involvement went hand-in-hand. It was to be a modern, sophisticated and
technologically advanced and Europeanized society.
The Jewish State established Herzl as the leader of Zionism, and the "father of
the Zionist Idea." Zionist also provoked considerable opposition, in particular from
the assimilationist Jews of Central and Western Europe. The book became
required reading for all Zionists and was taken as the basic platform of political
Zionism.In the Jewish State, Herzl anticipated some of the antagonism that the Zionist
idea would provoke:
" To the first class of objections belongs the remark that the Jews are not the only
people in the world who are in a condition of distress. Here I would reply that we
may as well begin by removing a little of this misery, even if it should at first be no
more than our own.
It might further be said that we ought not to create new distinctions between
people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old
disappear. But men who think in this way are amiable visionaries; and the idea of
a native land will still flourish when the dust of their bones will have vanished
tracelessly in the winds. Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream."
In conclusion, he wrote:
" And what glory awaits those who fight unselfishly for the cause!
Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence.
The Maccabeans will rise again.
Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who wish for a State will
have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our
own homes.
The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our
greatness.
And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react
powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity. "
(The Jewish State, Chapter 6).
Herzl largely ignored the presence of Arabs or other minorities in the prospective
Jewish State. He wrote in his diary however, that the natives of whatever land
was allotted to the Jews would be gently persuaded to move to other countries.
Der Judenstaat and Altneuland were visions of a Jewish state to be populated by
European Jewry, who in 1900 were far more numerous than the tiny remnant of
oriental and Sephardic Jews in Muslim lands and the Balkans. However, the
Jewish State of Israel was only established after the Holocaust had resulted in
the murder of about 40% of European Jewry, For most of the first fifty years of its
existence, Israel had an oriental, Sephardic majority. Nonetheless, Herzl's vision
dominated many aspects of the Zionist program for better or worse. Like Herzl,
Zionists ignored the presence of Arabs in Palestine. Like Herzl, they became
committed to the premise that Jews must return to performing productive work.
As in Herzl's utopian vision, Israel evolved, through conscious effort to an
advanced technological society. Herzl's vision of a secular, liberal democracy
inspired the Israeli Declaration of Independence, but the more enlightened
aspects of his program have not as yet found full expression in Israeli society.
Israel continues to discriminate against Arab citizens, and is increasingly
dominated by religious and chauvinistic tendencies.

I n t r o d u c t i o n
__________
It is astonishing how little insight into the science of economics many of the men who move in
the midst of active life possess. Hence it is that even Jews faithfully repeat the cry of the Anti-
Semites: "We depend for sustenance on the nations who are our hosts, and if we had no
hosts to support us we should die of starvation." This is a point that shows how unjust
accusations may weaken our self-knowledge. But what are the true grounds for this statement
concerning the nations that act as "hosts"? Where it is not based on limited physiocratic views
it is founded on the childish error that commodities pass from hand to hand in continuous
rotation. We need not wake from long slumber, like Rip van Winkle, to realize that the world is
considerably altered by the production of new commodities. The technical progress made
during this wonderful era enables even a man of most limited intelligence to note with his
short-sighted eyes the appearance of new commodities all around him. The spirit of
enterprise has created them.
Labor without enterprise is the stationary labor of ancient days; and typical of it is the work of
the husbandman, who stands now just where his progenitors stood a thousand years ago. All
our material welfare has been brought about by men of enterprise. I feel almost ashamed of
writing down so trite a remark. Even if we were a nation of entrepreneurs--such as absurdly
exaggerated accounts make us out to be--we should not require another nation to live on. We
do not depend on the circulation of old commodities, because we produce new ones.
The world possesses slaves of extraordinary capacity for work, whose appearance has been
fatal to the production of handmade goods: these slaves are the machines. It is true that
workmen are required to set machinery in motion; but for this we have men in plenty, in
super-abundance. Only those who are ignorant of the conditions of Jews in many countries of
Eastern Europe would venture to assert that Jews are either unfit or unwilling to perform
manual labor.
But I do not wish to take up the cudgels for the Jews in this pamphlet. It would be useless.
Everything rational and everything sentimental that can possibly be said in their defense has
been said already. If one's hearers are incapable of comprehending them; one is a preacher
in a desert. And if one's hearers are broad and high-minded enough to have grasped them
already, then the sermon Is superfluous. I believe in the ascent of man to higher and yet
higher grades of civilization; but I consider this ascent to be desperately slow. Were we to
wait till aver age humanity 'had become as charitably inclined as was Lessing when he wrote
"Nathan the Wise," we should wait beyond our day, beyond the days of our children, of our
grandchildren, and of our great-grandchildren. But the world's spirit comes to our aid in
another way.
This century has given the world a wonderful renaissance by means of its technical
achievements; but at the same time its miraculous improvements have not been employed in
the service of humanity. Distance has ceased to be an obstacle, vet we complain of
insufficient space. Our great steamships carry us swiftly and surely over hitherto unvisited
seas. Our railways carry us safely into a mountain-world hitherto tremblingly scaled on foot.
Events occurring in countries undiscovered when Europe confined the Jews in Ghettos are
known to us in the course of an hour. Hence the misery of the Jews is an anachronism -- not
because there was a period of enlightenment one hundred years ago, for that enlightenment
reached in reality only the choicest spirits.