I've been reading Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) because he's the most important political Jew of the last century or so, giving his short life to a heroic, "tragic" cause (his word) that he never saw come to life, a cause I likely would have joined were I a European of the early 1900s. Herzl is also an amazing character: grandiose and literary, with a desolate personal life, he reinvented himself from being a newspaper feature writer to become the king of the Jews in the space of a couple of years, alienating his professional community and beginning a hellbent and unending tour of European and Asian courts, using baksheesh and journalistic connections to try and win anti-Semitic princes to Zionism.
My interest in this character is shared by playwright David Zellnik. Herzl animates Zellnik's (magnificent) play Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams about Theodor Herzl, which I saw in workshop a couple of years back and keep waiting to see performed. I sent Zellnik an email about Herzl to begin a dialogue. He wrote:
Yes, Herzl is a huge figure, one of the most relevant to understanding the current Middle East. I don’t know why his story is so under-known, under-dramatized. There is a lot to wrestle with and a lot to admire – I have great respect for anyone trying to save lives, which he surely tried to do and surely did. And whatever his flaws, you have to give it to him: he saw very clearly that Europe’s Jews were in grave danger.
My play is, on the whole, sympathetic to him… although the other major character in it is Ariel Sharon, and the play acts as a dialogue between the two – exploring their great differences but also their connection at opposite ends of the Zionist trajectory. And in doing so perhaps confuses some of the audience’s sympathy for Herzl (more on this later).
Herzl is commonly thought of a self-hating Jew/successful journalist who transformed himself into a Zionist prophet – who in the final 9 years of his life created a movement that would lead to the founding of Israel. My play respects this but does 2 things: it shows him as he often thought of himself – as an overlooked playwright – and also argues that his youthful self-hatred was never abandoned, merely reframed.
Herzl the Dramatist
OK, he was a lousy playwright. But the supreme irony is that while his actual plays tended to be shallow bedroom farces, he understood deeply the theatrical nature of politics. For instance, the First Zionist Congress: he made sure the Delegates wore black-tie formal wear, he “set-dressed” the casino it was held in for better press photos… and he dressed himself to look like a major leader. He knew he was operating without any firm support and so aimed to create an illusion of momentum in order to secure a state.
On a deep level he had a playwright’s desire to recast Jews from supporting players into the leads. Look at this quote from the Zionist journal:
“At bottom I am still the dramatist in all this I am taking ragged beggars off the streets, dressing them in magnificent costumes, and having them perform in a glorious pageant designed by me." [Herzl, Zionist Journal, 1895 p67]
Many of Herzl’s flaws arise as flip sides of this: his pompousness, his fastidiousness, his back-channel statecraft/stagecraft. Like you, I find his narcissism somewhat endearing – even a necessary trait for any great leader. But it leads me to a darker aspect of Herzl:
Herzl the Self-Hating Jew
Here’s where my play gets more controversial, and where your and my thoughts about Herzl might diverge. I think Herzl never abandoned his complicated self-hatred. Allow me to explain, since “Self-hating Jew” is an epithet that regularly gets thrown at Jews who question Israel. Here is a letter Herzl wrote at age 25:
“Yesterday at grand soiree at Treitel’s. Some thirty-forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. Not a very edifying sight.”
[Herzl, Letter to parents, 11/25/85]
Yes, he was young then…and one should remember the great cultural divide between established German/Hungarian Jewish communities and Russian so-called “Shtetl Jews” then flooding the cities of Central Europe. But now look at what he wrote at age 35, on his path towards Zionism:
What is to be done? Whether the Jews emigrate or stay put, the race must be improved right on the spot. It must be made warlike, eager to work. And virtuous.
[Herzl, Zionist Journal, 1895 p19-22]
Still he bought the anti-Semites’ arguments that Jews are an inferior race (we aren’t “very eager to work” or “virtuous”).
As I see it, Herzl’s Zionism was really 2 projects: the humanitarian in him wanted a safe haven for persecuted Jews, but the part of him ashamed of being Jewish, of being connected to “ghetto Jews” wanted to remake Jews.
Zionism’s (self-)hatred of Diaspora Jewry is foundational. Look at this open letter he wrote in his own Zionist newspaper. He calls non-Zionists the same names our enemies did, with language to rival any anti-Semite:
“A kike is anti-Zionist…just merely to look at him, let alone approach or heaven forbid, touch him was enough to make us feel sick…
We sought extenuating, historical explanations for his being so crooked, sleazy, shabby a specimen… But who is this kike anyway, this Yid? A type, my dear friends, a figure that pops up time and again, the dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have always mistaken one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any other, no better, no worse…. The kike, on the other hand, is a hideous distortion of the human character., something unspeakably low and repulsive.
[Herzl, Open letter in “Die Welt,” his Zionist paper, Oct 15, 1897]
Here Herzl directly creates two classes of Jews – the ghetto Jews he still loathes and the good Jews who will naturally become Zionists. Along with Max Nordau, the Zionist movement’s second-in-command, Herzl subscribed to the idea that races can “degenerate” and Jews – without a leader and a country – had done just that.
This 19th Century idea of national character was widespread, not Herzl’s invention… and it has been discarded by almost every other Western country. Yet I would contend it still informs Zionist thinking: both in the idea that the Jewish People are redeemed by becoming citizens of a Jewish State (aliyah – immigrating to Israel – means “ascent”)… and in a worldview that can casually ascribe a national character to The Arabs (usually negative– okay always negative.)
To be fair, after Herzl saw Eastern European Jewish communities, he modified some of his views on the Jews there. But the idea of male weakness, of unmanliness, never left Herzl’s thinking; racial degeneration was intimately tied up with an idea of debased masculinity. Please note, the problem wasn’t just in his mind: Herzl was operating in a culture that often treated Jewish men as less than men, both in polite society (Jews are just good with their minds, Jews aren’t worthy of being soldiers) to more primal, shocking anti-Semitism (a belief that Jewish men menstruated). Clearly, the humiliation of Jewish men was real and needed to be addressed.
And yet has this project yielded only renewed self-esteem?
Unfortunately, I believe one can hear the language of Herzlian self-hatred/manly redemption in many of Israel’s worst actions and in Zionists’ defense of them. (Do you remember during the Gaza War the principle “the boss has gone mad?”)
I hear it in Zionists’ historical hostility/erasure of the mamaloshen – the “feminine” Yiddish language, in the political power of military leaders and veterans in Israel, even in the ur-moment of the ur-text of American Zionism: when Sal Mineo in Exodus, in order to join the Jewish underground in pre-state Palestine, finally confesses what happened to him in the Camps – “they used me as a woman!” – before being given a rifle and allowed to fight.
I’m all for men feeling good about themselves as men. But Jews do seem to act differently in Israel, jazzed on the power of having guns and not being a minority for once. Women too: the woman who called the Prime Minister “Benjamin Yahoo” in (Max Blumenthal's) “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” seems just as hopped on masculine power.
So. Does Herzl’s plea for empowerment and dignity lead necessarily to the disempowerment and humiliation of others? Philosophically no. But in practice, when settling an already populated land, surrounded by neighbors who remember what you did to clear the land… yes, it seems Jewish empowerment has played out as an ugly zero sum game.
Herzl the Success/Herzl the Failure:
Finally, we need to be talking about Herzl because he was so damn successful. He created all the major organs of the Zionist movement: the manifesto “The Jewish State”, the Colonial Bank for settlement of Palestine, the little blue charity boxes for the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, and the Congress that would become the Israeli Knesset in 1948.
(Ironically, one of the most laudable successes of Zionism – the rebirth of Hebrew as a living language – was not planned or anticipated by Herzl.)
But Herzl was also unsuccessful. He thought Zionism would end Anti-Semitism, that Zionism would allow Jews to overcome their internalized sense of victimhood. Instead, European style Anti-Semitism (i.e. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) has taken root among large swaths of the 1.5 billion-strong Muslim world where it did not previously exist, and while remembering the Holocaust is essential, for Israelis it is always 1938, we are always on the edge of annihilation, every opponent is always Hitler.
Herzl failed in his belief that there could be an easy resolution to the question of the indigenous Arab majority of Palestine. His inability to see Arabs as a people worthy of respect is a great sin, not easily forgiven, but those who actually formulated Zionism’s Arab policy and carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine deserve – in my opinion – more of the blame than the dreamer who in his naïvete assumed something fair could be worked out… who died only a few years into planning for where the Jewish state should be, and who was willing to go to Uganda, or anywhere, where Jews could be safe.
Lastly, on a personal note, I resent Herzl’s casual disregard for Diaspora achievement, as though Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, I could go on of course, were somehow unfortunate side effects of “exile” rather than the main game, the beauty and measure of Jewish achievement. If one were to test Herzl’s belief that a Jewish State would unleash Jewish creativity against the actual intellectual and cultural history of Israeli vs. American Jews over the past 61 years… I think Herzl would be judged wrong on that too.
Okay, I’ve written a lot without yet getting to the reason my play has not been done, which has less to do with Herzl than it does with my portrait of Ariel Sharon – with the audacity of portraying a contemporary figure in a less than flattering light.
My play asks whether Sharon is the ultimate strong man to arise from Herzl’s desire for manly strength, for a new kind of Jew. I believe Herzl’s Zionism – whether he consciously articulated it or not – needed men comfortable with the kind of policies Sharon championed.
I wonder if you agree, since you are a fan of Herzl’s. Do you think Israeli militarism is grounded somehow in Herzl’s thinking? Or can you imagine a different road for Herzl’s Zionism in Palestine than what actually happened?
Weiss: Good questions. I'll respond by email to Zellnik, and then publish that dialogue. (One quick point, off topic. Isn't it astonishing that Zellnik is citing Blumenthal's video, Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem, and you can't view it online? Truly one of the most important statements about Israel today, and who Israel is calling to, and it's been depublished.)
Related posts:
- Playwright David Zellnik on ‘Post-Zionist’ Jewish Identity
- A Thrilling and Upsetting Play: “Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl”
- Herzl quotation of the day. Anticipated the Balfour Declaration as result of ‘money-givers’
- Working on the screenplay for our heroic/tragic biopic… ‘Herzl’
- Herzl had a Christmas tree
{ 54 comments }
If one were to test Herzl’s belief that a Jewish State would unleash Jewish creativity against the actual intellectual and cultural history of Israeli vs. American Jews over the past 61 years… I think Herzl would be judged wrong on that too. ____ Of this there can be no doubt. Also looking at major Israeli scientists and intellectuals my impression is that they are products Eurpean culture. As that resource dissappears it is likely that the number of important Israeli thinkers will decline. They are not building a vibrant intellectual culture. The most stiking piece of evidence for this decline is to see the relative ranking (based on standardized tests) of Israeli high school students is today 27 in the world and dropping.____
continued. One can only speculate on the reasons for this decline in Israeli intellecutual life compared to life enjoyed by Eurpeapn and American Jews but I would offer a couple. One is the large numbers of Haredi that waste their brain energy memorizing passages from bronze age texts. More importantly, many of the more talented and ambitious people are attracted to the military whose institutions, from whatever country, encourage conformity and acceptance of authority — two behaviors that are death to creative intellectual pursuits. Among the secular Israelis, after high school they must spend 3 years in the military, instead of studying in universities as do their western counter parts. This important group though not as badly damaged as the career military still have lost some of their most productive years in an environment that discourages creativity. Finally, I think emigration of the better educated and enlightened people is a real brain drain that Israel can barely afford. Certainly any humanist must be appaled at racism and rightward shift of population and the temptation to flee must be huge. Quite frankly, I can think of very few creative people that share these reactionary views.____
My comments on Herzl are influenced by the creeping assumption that Zionism would've saved a lot more Jews from the Nazis if it just worked better somehow. The fact of subverting itself to imperial interests assured it would always play second fiddle to the imperial state's dictation. Then came the White Paper and the yearly 15,000 persons quota on immigration. The same thing that allowed Zionism to triumph in Palestine at all, dividing the Arab world into fractious states, each one basically subservient to the current or former Allied occupier, was the same thing that prevented Zionism from saving many Jews during the war.
(cont'd) That said, Herzl did some pretty ridiculous things illuminated in 'Zionism and the Age of Dictators', like courting the king of Italy to intervene in Turkey's war over Crete, even to provide Jewish colonists for Libya. Probably the worst thing he did, though it came to nothing, was try to persuade an Armenian resistance leader to surrender. His self-hating translated into opportunism. There's no better illustration of this than how he told von Plehve an exodus of Jews would help the Russians fight socialism. There had to be something, anything else the Zionist leaders could've done to save Jews if they were bent on an exodus from Europe. That's assuming saving Jews that way was the wisest move.
It's rejecting the rest…
Absolutely fascinating! I very much appreciate these insights into Herzl.
Well of course Herzl didn't envisage Modern 'Hebrew': all civilised people speak German; – thus that was the only possible language in his Altneuland. And Herzl's 'solution' to the 'Arab problem' has many things in common with what eventually happened; in the words of L.M.C. van der Hoeven Leonhard (my emphasis):
Indeed, I think Herzl's vision becomes the most clear in the following passage from Altneuland, in which the protagonists meet the members of Herzl's New Society (summarised by Gabriel Piterberg):
let's hear more from this guy.
i agree this puzzle gets easier to figure out the more pieces you have
I think the wonderul thing about Herzl was that he took his life into his own hands. He was alienated as a pretty-good author, dramatist, journalist, but felt that he was basically wasting his life, that he wasn't living for good, for a coherent life-mission. He picked one area to work for, and shifted from what he was opposing, to what he was committed to, even as he could not dictate to a hopefully popular movement, with bedfellows that were different than his intended. As Phil and David referred, he was hoping for an enlightened intelligentsia to drop their prior concerns, and join in the constructing of a new Jewish society. That didn't happen. The desparate, the unemployed, joined his movement. A couple capable and savvy people joined, but the movement itself looked different than what he imagined. People are busy. Their money is tied up. They don't participate in a better mousetrap, even when obvioiusly a perfect idea. Social change is very tough.
I told you so.
"Instead, European style Anti-Semitism (i.e. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) has taken root among large swaths of the 1.5 billion-strong Muslim world where it did not previously exist" I know this is said more or less in passing, but it's absolutely wrong. The central feature of old European-style anti-semitism is that is was a hatred of jews inspired by absolutely nothing that jews had done or were doing to 1900s Germans, Austrians etc. But organised jewish politics has in fact done a great deal of wrong to contemporary Muslims, including supported and euphemised apartheid colonialism. There's no connection at all, and there's a trace here of the same error of thought that likes to say that the Palestinians demand for decolonisation is trying to obtain a judenrein</> West Bank.
end italics.
From Churchill's "Zionism verses Bolshevism" – ILLUSTRAGED SUNDAY HERALD, FEB. 8, 1920" Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project, backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement. Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire" – Note the last line. I don't think the answer for the Jews is in an *ism* http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/...
"…a hatred of jews inspired by absolutely nothing that jews had done or were doing to 1900s Germans, Austrians etc." – untrue according to Churchill: "This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." This quote would suggest that antisemitism is a reaction to not a cause of Jewish behavior.
Your impressions are wrong as always. I do business there all the time and their high tech industry is distinctively Israeli. It is the most vibrant and competitive high tech culture in the world. Every major US high tech firm has a facility there. According to your thesis of test scores, Finland would have the most vibrant intellectual culture.
I agree with David Zellnik that there is a highly sexualized discourse surrounding Israel. Or admittedly I was puzzled by this feature in the discourse between pro-Israel hawks and critics. But, yes the racist discourse is always present even in writers were you don't expect it. It obviously must have been so dominating that you couldn't completely escape from it. But it is also important to notice it is completely missing in the writings of "anti-Zionists" during that time. At least that is my limited impression. But concerning the citation from Die Welt, I am admittedly wondering what the exact context is. It must be a bit more complicated, after all Herzl realizes that mainly poorer Jews need the help and for them is his vision, so I admittedly suspect it may be taken out of context. Here is a online database of all Zionist papers that also contains the edition David cites. No open letter on first sight. I don't think it can be searched, and yes apart from the fact that it is in German it is the old German writing style. http://www.compactmemory.de/ http://www.compactmemory.de/
19th Century Zionist thinkers absorbed German romantic nationalism; they imagined a parallel "New Jew" equal to the emerging Aryan ideal. Handsome sun-burnt heroes, salt of the earth, manly men who worked honestly with their hands, the blood and soil medicine to stave off degeneracy of the race, a volkish community brimming with Gemutlishkeit. It's no accident that Bibi tried to press the German high diplomat's German guilt button over the Holocaust by asserting the Palestinians were trying to ethically cleanse the occupying Jews, make the OT judenfrei (sic?). The diplomat could do nothing but nod? I'm surprised Bibi didn't add a small lecture on how Truman had been the Second Cyrus The Great of Persia after such a meek response. I guess he was saving that one for Merkel. Anyway, in keeping with Bibi's upside-down usage of the Nazi term judenfrei, here's a lesson for Bibi called Deutsch 2.0: http://ehrens.wordpress.com/2009/07/
Well, not so distinctively–the Chinese are also notorious for ignoring intellectual property rights and reverse-engineering high tech inventions, however the Chinese usually don't claim they created those inventions. BTW too, Finland is high up on any list of quality of life and domestic civil rights, as are all the Scandinavian nations.
That's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Social Democrat, the future SPD chancellor candidate, the mind behind Schroeder, I am told, and at the moment Foreign Minister in the Merkel administration. I am no fan of Steinmeier, but then not many to my liking made it there after Willy Brand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank-Walter_Steinme... But I haven't found the quotation yet, that's more interesting for me at the moment.
I can't correct this anymore. I would prefer non-Zionist to anti-Zionist on second thought. I somehow have problems with the term anti-Zionist. There is obviously a fight going on between Herzl's Zionist paper and a German paper fighting antisemitism that is allegedly aligned with the Social Democrats. "Die Welt" criticizes them as a party voice.
I have no idea what Willy Brand's true character was, he might have been a very good man, I am quite sure that no German politician after WWII got anywhere without a nod from the CIA. Pgs. 25, 26, 174,175 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke and this is an interesting fellow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke – and CIA pressure in 1960 on Life magazine to delete references to Globke from its recently obtained Eichmann memoirs.[5] [6]
"Herzl, Open letter in Die Welt, his Zionist paper, Oct 15, 1897" Not Herzl, and not an open letter but: Benjamin Seff, Mauschel, Die Welt, no. 20, Oct. 15, 1897, page 1. Mauschel is a portrait of the anti-Zionist, the image of the enemy. Ok, I found it. It is not an open letter by Herzl, but a strange article by Benjamin Seff, title: Mauschel. Mauschel from jiddisch or German "mauscheln" obviously is the characterization of an anti-Zionist, a specific Jewish character that has to assume all the traits antisemites give to Jewish people. He only thinks of his advantage, cooperates with people who are against the state, but is such a coward to that he then is afraid of the overthrow thus turns around and acts as an informer. Mauschel clearly is a scapegoat. A foil to all the good Jewish Zionists, but it is not a Herzl text. He starts the text with the idea that Mauschel has been along for quite a while but so far the nausea to have to meet him or even to get into contact with him has been slightly diminished by the feeling that one also needs to feel sorry for him. That seems to be over.
I've been reading a bit about herzl in "jerusalem 1913" . He accomplished alot for his movment for sure but I like the other guy better, antebi
Hi – David Zellnik here. Benjamen Seff IS Herzl- it was one of his pen names from his jewish name Binyamin Ze'ev!
This is mandatory in every post on Herzl, isn't it.
LOL! "Distinctively Israeli" – what in hell does that even mean?
"…the large numbers of Haredi that waste their brain energy memorizing passages from bronze age texts. " Now THAT is disctinctively Israeli.
Great link Citizen, /tip/ for that.
I know Globke, that is part of the story that made me mad when I was younger. Willy Brand was part of the resistance. He went to Sweden, at one point Germany was too dangerous for him.
Don't the American Christian fundamentalists, especially the Evangelical Zionists, come close?
Wouldn't a non-Zionist be both anti-Zionist and and anti-anti-Zionist? Would that be a la Pilate? If not, why not? If so, why so? What would you have done in Pilate's place, LeaNder22? Now, compare the current power configuration. And?
Why did the early Zionists caricature the Jews that did not agree with them with the same paint and paint brush as Nazi propaganda later did? I see no difference between Mein Kampf's memory of the young Hitler in Vienna and Herzl's observations.
Finland only became an independent nation around 1919, and the first novel in written Finnish was published in 1870. Considering the population, the literary output and production of leading classical musicians within this small nation is extraordinary. Israel has a very vibrant culture, but I don't know of any Israeli equivalent to the Kalevala or the works of Sibelius.
No, definitely not! Christians have nothing comparable to the Talmud, and the innumerable successive commentaries upon commentaries upon commentaries. The people who master this stuff are extraordinarily brilliant and learned…the problem is that they think in exactly the same way as the Talmudists who lived in sixteenth century Eastern European ghettos.
Thanks for providing that link. Gabriel Ash sums up Herzl's contributions pretty well when he says, "Herzl was ashamed of being Jewish for all the wrong reasons. His "success" is that one hundred years later we can finally be ashamed of being Jewish for all the right reasons."
You make my case. Their high tech industry is an American import. Translating US patents into Hebrew does make it 'distinctively Israeli'.
Thanks David. I didn't know. But I surely should have known. They all used pen names. I discovered a German Zionist that used several publishing under his own name in "Die Welt". But still not an open letter but an article, a portrait of the anti-Zionist who is given the name: Mauschel.
Herzl's acolytes made it clear they weren't interested in saving any Jews except those who were willing to emigrate to Palestine, sorry for the honesty.
If anyone is still reading this thread here is another example of Israeli creativity: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1098066.html
Interesting to see someone cite Nesta Webster, the conspiracy theorist, as if she was a sage and not a nutcase.
Citizen, when Fichte addressed the German nation there wasn't yet such a thing as a unified Germany. Are you aware of that? http://www.hoeckmann.de/deutschland/index.htm
Otto, during my studies of Nazi feature films, I found quite a bit of evidence that the films were illegally sold in the ME. There was an incident in the library of Alexandria not too long ago, were they exhibited an edition of the Protocols next to Jewish scriptures as if it was part of Judaism. It is not as easy as you wish it to be.
Citizen I do not like the straight lines from Christian scriptures to today. Religiously the context was complex at the time the NT came into existence. I find it actually quite interesting to consider the different gospels mirror conflicts between Judeo-Christians and heathen Christians. Sounds realistic but I am no theologian.
My point is that Germany is not a sovereign state. The U.S. military presence there was obviously not only to keep the Soviets out of Europe but also to keep Germany under control (not to forget the economic control), if not why didn't we leave when the U.S.S.R. dissolved? We did the same to Japan. Interesting that Brand was able to flee to Sweden where he was safe and then to come back and rise to power all this from a lad who was born out of wed lock, so obviously no social connects that would help.
Never be sorry for honesty.
Pre warning people about my blunt style, Laurie ;) Dismantling the founding myths of the Jewish state would be just another wall that needs to be demolished..
Amen
good point. "open letter" is totally off and I should correct that.
Am I to believe that if the enlightened intelligentsia had only been able to build their own houses, grow their own food, lay their own infrastructure and do all the other things that a functioning society needs, then Zionism would have been successful in building a new Jewish society? Who is John Galtsteen?
re: 'bronze age texts'- syvanen, do you think The Iliad is a waste of grey matter? How about the traditional diet of other works predating the Talmud that formed the basis of Western classical education for the entire period in which Europe could have been conceivably called culturally and intellectually ascendant, and which gave the Islamic world a considerable edge over the Christian competitors for much of the same period and several centuries prior to it? I'm not trying to reify the Greek vs Jew debate here- I think Daniel Boyarin, for one, did a good job of showing up the meaninglessness of that particular binary, as much as I like the way Joyce used it as a literary conceit- and my handle shows that frum I'm not, but I do think that, for all the wonder that was Rome et cetera, the classical Greco-Roman canon contains a lot that contains far less intellectual nourishment than the body of Mishnah, Gemarah, Talmud, and- point of overlap here- the Torah proper; even Herodotus might have profited from a little more 'Talmud reasoning' when viewed as a historian proper and not, say, a folklorist. As someone who does value systems of knowledge for their own sake and sees no reason why their inherent value should be placed lower for being attached to a subaltern group, though, the massive body of engagement with those old texts that forms that golden thread up to the present is a pretty impressive accomplishment on its own merits, even if, by nature of standing apart from what's defined as the stuff of legitimate cultural literacy, it can be hard to relate to or make use of from outside the tradition. And, might I point out, one of the things that marked the very Jews Herzl derided as ghetto scum to be set apart from the more legitimately European and therefore civilised body of assimilated, acculturated, modernised Ashkenazim of Western and Central Europe, was their very use of time and intellectual energy on those Bronze-Age texts instead of the dominant Western secular canon. You may consider said texts full of ideas incompatible with 21st Century humanism, and I won't argue with you; but to put them down as a waste of intellectual capacities just because they're old and full of outdated knowledge and cultural chauvinism, and then claim the mantle of humanism, which is a concept derived from a particularly classically-oriented group of Europeans, is just, well, chauvinistic. Particularly if you have any familiarity at all with those classical texts, which are quite full of primitive notions and nastiness themselves. And who's to say that the material is what makes the study intellectually unproductive? The tradition of argument and rhetoric that's tied to that study was unbelievably intellectually productive in the 19th Century- when married to concepts and ideas that were of interest outside the yeshivas, and to language (in all senses) comprehensible outside the community of religiously-educated Jewish men. The problem with the khareydim is that the fruit of the study (even assuming that Torah study is pleasing to a hypothetical all-powerful entity) is mostly of interest to other khareydim and not to outsiders; it's a culture that's oriented towards itself, at least when those who constitute it don't turn the energies onto other enterprises that are targeted outside the community- which happens often enough, and fruitfully (whether in a positive or negative sense) enough, that it shouldn't be discounted. The existence of stupendously esoteric disciplines within academia, and the fact that, for all their apparent irrelevance, they often produce texts and ideas that have considerable impact outside the obvious sphere of influence (queer theory, for a very obvious-to-me example- there's a fabulous essay on Herzl and Eliot's Daniel Deronda and gendered Jewish nationalisms in the anthology Novel Gazing that talks about Herzl's rather queer adoration of Wagnerian-Teutonic warrior-males and his fantasies of being overpowered by them; if you like, substitute subaltern studies, say, or neurolinguistics, or even classicism), makes the idea that the object of study is what determines the worth of the work seem a little ludicrous; what matters is what you do with it. If what you do with years of study of Jewish jurisprudence is go out and make a wild success out of ventures that end in grotesque violence against the prior settlers of the land you now claim as your own, well, that's another story… Magnificent post, by the way- really looking forward to seeing the follow-up…
Well, there's the continuity between Zionism and other varieties of European secular nationalism circulating around the same time or prior- as a couple of comments above point out, Zionism was part of the same intellectual tradition as German nationalism, and Herzl himself was a product of the warrior-male-oriented student dueling clubs of Austro-Hungary, which had their own discursive relationship with said ideas and with National Socialist ideology later (probable points of disjunction aside, I'm thinking of the proliferation of nationalist ideologies within the empire and also of Theleweit). Ze'ev Sternhell did a good job of unpacking the line of continuity between even Labor Zionism and European nationalism, to mention just one writer on the subject; which makes sense: most of the early Zionists were products of a broad intellectual climate in which these ideas were being formed and subject to a good deal of debate, and, even if this general tendency weren't the inspiration, it was an obvious and natural source of material to build the project of the new Jewish nation upon. Aside from that, you *could* trace it back to the old loathing of 'Ostjuden' that formed such a part of German (-speaking- naturally Austro-Hungary, and the yekke communities throughout the non-German-speaking world, included here) Jewish culture from after emancipation and the Haskalah, for one thing. Read Sholem Asch's East River or Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky for mild but pretty clear tastes of the lingering antagonism; or just go talk to someone of yekke ancestry, particularly if old, very consciously German, and set at odds with an Eastern-European branch of the family, about the way their family saw other Jews; or compare the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side. I'll leave it to a more astute scholar of sociology to link this historical game of Jew vs Jew to more contemporary versions; suffice to say, for some sectors of assimilated German Jewish society, the coarse, unmasculine, 'Oriental' perception of Eastern Ashkenazi society was a useful tool in defining the limits of the community and cementing a sense of worth and belonging within the Christian dominant culture that had long excluded Jews and used lack of fluency in high culture and dominant language as grounds for that exclusion. Not particularly surprising how the stereotype got picked up and expanded by Jews attempting to negotiate modernity/a place within German society on equal terms with gentiles, nor really surprising that the folks who couldn't see much of a distinction between one sort of Jew and any other were quite happy to make use of the tactic for their own evil ends. 'Mauscheln' is a verb in Yiddish -and, if the above posts and Hannah Arendt's introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations serve me right, German that refers to a way of speaking German that's heavily larded with Yiddishisms, or vice versa. In either case, it carries a sense of crassness and outsider status with it- being on the outside of Yiddish(ist?) culture and speaking an uppity form of zhargon, or being too much a shtetl-dweller at base, too blatantly and offensively Jewish in an alien manner, to be a real German; the 'au' is pronounced as 'oy' in Standard High German, setting the Moisheles apart from the Siegfrieds and Wilhelms who constituted decent Jewish society. This is particularly relevant to Herzl's conception of healthy Jewishness cured of the ills of diaspora: if your context is Hungary and then Vienna- a region in which Jews with full mastery of German and all the trappings of Western modernity, and a significant role in producing high dominant culture and modernity itself, were fairly prone to running into uncanny and unwelcome members of the same social category from the East carrying all kinds of derided cultural baggage with them- and your ideal is Germanic warrior heroes with sword in hand, it's particularly useful to separate oneself from the country cousins whose presence is a reminder of the unshakeable stigma one suffers under in a society in which membership is defined on terms which are, and yet emphatically are not, one's own.
Laurie, for whatever reason, I never had big problems concerning the presence of the allied groups. To be quite honest, I enjoyed speaking French (Southern parts) or English or learn about Vietnam from both deserters and returning people. Strictly I would have preferred no rearmament, and a purely defensive army. And yes I didn't like the idea of nuclear warheads on German ground, Pershing and Cruise Missles. As I didn't like the "Cold War" and its hysterias, it buried matters I considered more important. But taken together American influence is a mixed package. I can see positive influences too, the closer I look. That Brand could rise to power here from major of Berlin to chancellor is one such influence. The de-Nazification (Entnazifizierung) process was no doubt complicated with the occasional help networks and influence on lawyers and the more lenient treatment of scientists like von Braun (most people killed in Buchenwald died as forced laborers in Dora, were he was activen, under his leadership) or other networks the US initially considered helpful for their own intelligence. As they surely knew about the continuity between Nazi police networks that established the Federal Police (BKA). Economic control? I have no idea what basis the more exiting narratives e.g. alleged economic espionage have in reality. But I think we see more cooperation in rather dubious patterns, like Cross Border Leasing. And this cooperation across the Atlantic didn't start at Zero, it had existed before on a minor level.
You could meet people that called Brand: traitor of the fatherland (Vaterlandsverräter).
Comments on this entry are closed.