Herzl, Theodor

(1860–1904)



Austrian journalist who launched Zionism as a political movement and forecast a correct date for the creation of the Republic of Israel.
Herzl was a fully assimilated Jew who at first believed that all Jews could be assimilated. His belief was shaken by the Dreyfus affair in France, when a Jewish army officer was imprisoned—wrongfully, as it turned out—for espionage, and the dispute over his guilt or innocence unleashed a torrent of anti-Semitism. Though disillusioned, Herzl did not fly to the opposite extreme: there could perfectly well be “Jewish Frenchmen,” as he put it, but the long-drawn-out affair, plus reports of pogroms in Russia, convinced him that anti-Semitism went deep and assimilation could never be completely successful. His reflections led him to a more drastic solution.
He did not initiate the return to the Promised Land. “Practical” Zionism, as it has been called, had begun during the 1880s with an unobtrusive Jewish resettlement in Palestine. Most of the settlers came from Russia. They judged that assimilation would never be possible under the czarist regime, and, in any case, rejected it, because the ancestral vision of the return could not be given up. Twenty-five farming communities came quietly into being. It was some time before Herzl heard of these, and when he did, he was contemptuous, saying that the

sponsors—notably Baron Edmond de Rothschild—were virtually “paying people to go.” Nothing would meet the situation but a serious movement of political nationalism. In that conviction, he wrote a manifesto, The Jewish State, and assembled a World Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897.
What followed was a remarkable illustration of the power of prophecy. Herzl conceived Zionism purely in terms of solving a problem. He could not avoid acknowledging the Palestinian hope, but he saw it only as a motive force to be harnessed. If it did open the door to the Promised Land, well and good; but if an opportunity came to found the Jewish state somewhere else—in South America, perhaps—it would be proper to divert Jewish energies in that direction. It would also be proper for prosperous Jews in Europe and the United States to stay where they were, and, with Gentile aid, organize the haven for the less fortunate.
This version of Zionism was manipulative and, it must be admitted, patronizing. The propellant was not to be patriotism or religion or culture but the misery of the victims of anti-Semitism. Herzl, however, was a commanding personality, a powerful speaker, and an indispensable leader. After the first Zionist Congress he began going from country to country and from government to government, trying to get official support for a Jewish homeland. He tackled the German kaiser and the Turkish sultan. But in 1903, he clashed fatally with the prophetic hope. The British government actually offered him territory in Uganda, then a British colony. To his bewilderment, many of the rank-and-file Ziooists were against acceptance. Moreover, the main opposition came from the Russians, the very people he thought he was rescuing. They preferred living in Russia, pogroms and all, to the abandonment of the Promised Land and the betrayal of all the generations that had cherished the vision. Recriminations followed, and Herzl died prematurely. Henceforth nearly all Zionists were agreed that Palestine was the only possible goal.
In the outcome, against every rational expectation, prophecy won. For ages it had been insisting on the return. It had foreshadowed a state of affairs, not humanly foreseeable, never approximated in more than 1,000 years, yet realized in the twentieth century. Against incredible odds, the prophecy was fulfilled with the founding of the state of Israel.
While Herzl failed to understand his own movement, he made, as its leader, one of the best political forecasts on record. In 1897, he predicted that the Jewish state would come into existence in fifty years. This was a pure inspiration. Intelligent anticipation is out of the question. He did not foresee—no one could have foreseen—the long, tortuous, and

agonized process that ensued. Yet, in the end, he was vindicated. The vote of the United Nations that approved the creation of the Republic of Israel was held in 1947, fifty years almost to the month after he made the prediction. Obviously, that can be explained as a lucky guess. But extremely few such forecasts have, in practice, been equally good, and the occurrence of this one in this context has, understandably, been remarked upon.