THE MODERN, CATALYTIC EVENTS BEHIND THEODOR HERZL’S IDEAS OF FORMING A JEWISH STATE

Upon this background of history just discussed, there are more events, closer to our time, which catalytically, and more directly, contributed to Theodor Herzl’s devising of a plan for the modern, political creation of a Jewish State. Such events as the 12th and 13th century persecutions of Jewish villages by Christian crusaders as they moved through Europe on their way to the Holy Land to kill the “heathen Saracens” (Muslims), and the ghettoizing of European Jews beginning in 1570, were the results of ignorant Christian religious hatred based upon myth and superstition, not politics. With the development, in the 18th century, of a rationalist period of thought known as the ‘European Enlightenment’, Jews in Europe finally gained their long overdue, full rights as citizens and emerged out of the ghetto conditions of the late Middle Ages. This new atmosphere of European rationalism, however, was not a universal condition – old religious prejudices die hard, and are easily exploited by rulers and politicians – and in the 1880s, the Jews of Russia were subjected to religio-political persecutions by Czar Nicholas II and his family’s supporters. The word “pogrom” is Russian for “devastation,” and these pogroms against the Jews were encouraged by Czarist policy, but carried out, or supported, by local authorities. In 1881, in Kiev and other Russian cities, a general persecution was carried out because of false rumors spread about possible Jewish involvement in an assassination attempt on Czar Nicholas II. Over the next twenty years, from 1882 to 1902, Russian government attacks on Jews were limited and few in number, but in 1903 forty-five Jews were murdered, and fifteen hundred Jewish homes were looted in the city of Kishinev in Moldova. After a failed Russian revolution in 1905, thousands of Jews were killed in Odessa as “fifth columnists” who plotted revolution against the Czar, and in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), thousands of Jews were murdered by the White Guard in the Ukraine.(29) Again, we find the suffering of the Jewish masses stemming from a minority’s involvement with militant political activity against a large superpower. To be fair and complete, however, we must add that the Romonov Dynasty to which Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II, belonged, were brutal tyrants, and both of Russia’s revolutions (1905 and 1917) were waged against the hated Romonovs by the Russian people, not just the Jews of Odessa. Jewish participation in the revolutions, however, was most probably used as an excuse by Russian imperial elites and their goon squads to exercise some good old-fashioned religious hatred under the guise of a convenient political persecution.

On top of these more recent layers of European history, the catalytic event which was to be the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” for a young Hungarian journalist in Paris named Theodor Herzl, was what became known at the time as the Dreyfus Affair. On December 22, 1894, a Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who had been accused of passing French military secrets to the Germans, was convicted of treason. The anti-Semitic factions of the French press had throughout the trial proclaimed his guilt and called for Dreyfus to be exiled to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean. Two years later, however, in 1896, a Lieutenant Colonel in the French army discovered that Dreyfus had been framed by a Major. This whistle-blowing Lieutenant Colonel was dismissed, the Major who framed Dreyfus was acquitted, and Parisian intellectuals accused the army of a cover-up. The Catholic nationalists still believed Dreyfus guilty, while the French socialists considered the whole affair a huge miscarriage of justice. In 1898 – two years after Theodor Herzl had published his Zionist manifesto “Der Judenstaat,” (“The Jewish State”), and a year after his newly formed World Zionist Congress held its very first meeting in Basle, Switzerland – another French army officer, Major Henry, committed suicide after admitting that he had forged most of the “evidence” used in the Dreyfus trial. Captain Dreyfus in 1899 was given a full presidential pardon and was officially cleared of all charges in 1906.(30)

With all the events spanning the historical periods we have looked at herein, and the final straw of the Dreyfus Affair as backdrop, a Hungarian Jew, born into a liberal, secular, or “progressive” family in Budapest in 1860; trained as a lawyer in Vienna, but who worked as a journalist in Paris; a man who wanted to be a modern, secular, Moses to his people; this man in his mid-thirties, Theodor Herzl, sat down to devise an immediate political solution to what he called “the Jewish Question.” His plan is found in a book written in German called “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”). It was first published in 1896 and has now gone through eighty editions in eighteen languages. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto” was to the ideology of Communism, so the manifesto of Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” is to the ideology of Zionism – an ideology which brought about the creation of the modern state of Israel and all the events which have occurred in its aftermath, and as a reaction to its establishment. To understand these events, it is necessary to understand what modern “Zionism” is, as opposed to what the Faith of “Judaism” is, and with that in mind, in Part Two B of this piece – to be published next Friday October 12th here at WTCD – we shall turn our attention to the foundational manifesto of this “hot topic,” socio-political ideology – Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” and we will look at what the Rabbis of the time had to say about his ideas, and what Jewish and Christian scientists have had to say about the mythical notions of a “Jewish race.”