3
As theodor herzl grew up in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the only thing that would have seemed less probable to him and his family than a Jewish return to Palestine would be that young Theodor would help start it. At the time of his birth in 1860, his father, Jacob, was a successful timber merchant and businessman.[1] In 1878, Jacob moved the family from Budapest to the larger and more imposing city of Vienna. In Vienna, Theodor studied the law, as his father wished.[2] Like many Jewish fathers across the German-speaking world, Jacob was determined to see his son enter the professions.
The Herzl family was more successful than many, but the path they followed was well trodden. Liberated from the ghettos, a steady stream of young and eager Jews poured out into the wider world in search of more adventure and success than they could ever hope to acquire within the narrow confines of the Jewish community. In the 1860s and 1870s, their future seemed bright. Across Europe, new generations of Jews were making their mark in culture, business, and the arts. Even in politics, Benjamin Disraeli (whose father had him baptized as an Anglican)[3] led Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, and dominated the European leaders at the Congress of Berlin.[4]
Like so many of the other changes that transformed European life in the nineteenth century, the emancipation of the Jews had its roots in the French Revolution. In the optimistic era of the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the oppression of the Jews, their confinement to ghettos in some countries, restrictions on their participation in business and civic life, and the popular prejudice against them that for centuries had broken out in murderous riots all looked like remnants of the medieval superstitions that the sun of reason was clearing away. The ideas of brotherhood and equality at the heart of the French Revolution—universal freedom—surely meant freedom for the children of Israel.[5]
In 1791 the National Assembly gave French Jews their full legal rights.[6] They responded for the most part enthusiastically, and the emancipation of the Jews followed French power across Europe. While these changes never took hold in the vast Russian Empire, and while some of the most conservative European governments reestablished the restrictions on Jews following Napoleon’s defeat, in much of Western Europe Jewish freedom was too important a change to be reversed, and for the first time in 1,500 years, significant numbers of European Jews lived under governments that recognized their equality under the law.[7]
Meanwhile, the Enlightenment that was challenging the old order of church and state among Europe’s Christians was also felt among the Jews. While some Jews continued to observe the old laws and traditions, many others took a new look at the old ways. Viewed through the critical lenses of the Enlightenment, rituals and ancient dietary restrictions looked more like superstitions than acts of rational piety. As historians and scholars questioned the historicity of the Bible, and as theologians challenged traditional rabbinical interpretations, many western Jews discarded the practices that had once marked their ancestors as a people apart. The essence of Judaism, they now believed, lay more in the universal ethical principles that it taught than in rituals and dress codes. More and more Jews dressed like their neighbors, discarded kosher laws, embraced new political ideas, fell in love with European culture, interpreted the ancient religion in the light of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and took pride in the history and culture of the nations among whom they lived.
This was the world the young Theodor Herzl enthusiastically joined. As a university student he fell in love with the arts and wanted to become a playwright, leaving his legal studies behind. While some of his plays were eventually performed, they never received either the critical acclaim or the popular success that he wanted for them.[8] His real talent turned out to be for a form of writing he did not much like—his feature pieces and feuilleton essays for newspapers, which were much admired and widely read. In the end, the editors of the Neue Freie Presse, the most influential liberal newspaper in Vienna, were so impressed with his journalistic abilities that they offered him one of the most prestigious posts in the field: he became their Paris correspondent.[9] Austria-Hungary was one of the European great powers; France was another. The Neue Freie Presse was closely read by Austrian statesmen and diplomats; it also circulated widely among informed readers throughout German-speaking Europe and beyond.
Herzl now moved freely in the highest political circles in Vienna. With a solid salary, support from his new wife’s wealthy family,[10] and a handsome expense allowance from his newspaper, Herzl had the kind of social and professional stature that no Jew could have hoped to achieve in his grandfather’s day. He attended sessions of the French National Assembly, consorted with cabinet ministers, dined with dukes, and regularly attended the plays and operas that made the City of Light the most glittering capital in Europe. As Herzl looked at his own life, it must have seemed as if the Jews of Europe were moving toward full integration, and that, even though his deepest literary ambitions remained unfulfilled, Theodor Herzl was living the dream.[11]
Herzl’s Jewish roots seemed of less importance every year. When his son was born in 1891, Theodor gave him the very German name of Hans and refused to have the boy circumcised.[12] The Herzl family never darkened the synagogue doors but they decorated a Christmas tree every year. In the modern age opening up, Herzl was sure the quaint Jewish folkways of the past were fated to disappear.
Yet even as Herzl went from success to success, a wave of antisemitic reaction swept across Europe. In Russia, the assassination of the liberal Alexander II had ended a period of relative toleration and openness. His son, the bigoted Alexander III, embarked on a series of antisemitic measures, excluding Jews from universities, closing professions to Jewish applicants, imposing economic discrimination against Jewish businesses, forcing Jews to move from restricted areas, and, ultimately, failing to protect Russian Jews as the Orthodox clergy and nationalist agitators fomented violent, anti-Jewish mob action.[13] Asked how Russia intended to solve its “Jewish problem,” Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, an advisor to Alexander III and a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is said to have replied that “a third of Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger.”[14]
While most enlightened Europeans regarded this fanaticism and occasional violence as typical products of Russian backwardness and brutality, hostility toward the growing Jewish presence in the professions and the business world was not confined to the Empire of the Tsars. Indeed, as first tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of Jews fled the Russian Empire, the Jewish population surged in Austria, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, fueling a rise of antisemitism in these countries as well.[15] In Germany, a new generation of Pan-German nationalists took their inspiration from the vitriolic antisemitism of composer Richard Wagner. As these ideas spread through universities and into the officer corps, Jewish students and cadets found themselves increasingly isolated. Herzl resigned angrily from his old student fraternity when it signed an antisemitic declaration.
The new antisemitism was not simply a resurgence of the religious antagonism of past generations. Jews had been subjected to persecution in the Middle Ages because they refused to conform to the standards of the Christian world around them. In the late nineteenth century, Jews were accused of embracing the opportunities and customs of the Christian world too eagerly. The antisemites of the 1890s were less angry at the bearded Orthodox believers clinging to the old ways than at the elegantly mannered and impeccably dressed professional Jews who were making their way in gentile society.[16]
Little by little, Herzl found himself thinking about the problems of the Jewish people in a Europe that seemed to be rejecting them. In 1894 he wrote his first play on a specifically Jewish topic: The New Ghetto, an analysis of the difficulties facing assimilationist Jews.
In October of that year, Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish background, was arrested and charged with treason for passing military secrets to the Germans.[17] Early on Herzl, like most observers, assumed Dreyfus’s guilt; it was hard to believe that France’s highest military authorities were engaged in a systematic program of perjury and deceit with the aim of convicting a blameless man. But circumstances surrounding the case were suspicious enough that by the time Herzl witnessed the ceremony in which the convicted Dreyfus was degraded and stripped of his rank and honors, the journalist was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence. With crowds shouting “Mort aux Juifs!” (“Death to the Jews!”) in the street, and both the Catholic Church and the French army joining in the anti-Dreyfus campaign, it was clear that something more than a miscarriage of justice was at work. A series of financial scandals in which some prominent Jews had conspicuously figured made banking and Jewish financiers objects of popular distrust and hate; antisemitic newspapers fanned the flames, and it began to look as if the country that had launched the emancipation of the Jews had come to regret its decision.
If events in France were disturbing, developments in Vienna brought the threat home to Herzl. Not only in aristocratic and court circles, but among the ordinary workers and citizens as well, a spirit of fanatical hatred was beginning to grow. In the 1895 municipal elections, two thirds of the seats went to the “United Christians” party grouping, making the vociferous antisemite Karl Lueger mayor. Lueger, whom Hitler would hail as an inspiration in Mein Kampf, went on to dominate Viennese politics until his death in 1910.[18] As Lueger denounced Jewish influence and Jewish dishonesty, drawing cheers when he denounced the Hungarian capital as “Judapest” due to its supposed domination by Jews, Herzl was overwhelmed by premonitions of a dark and terrible fate awaiting Europe’s Jews.
The golden dream of assimilation and acceptance had been, Herzl concluded, an illusion. His always active and theatrical imagination perceived a wave of hate slowly building in Europe, and the distinguished and dapper journalist was seized by the conviction that unless the Jews could somehow escape, they faced mass murder and persecution on an unprecedented scale. Finding a way to avoid this fate became the dominant passion of the remaining nine years of his short life; Herzl would transform himself into the leader of the national movement of the Jewish people.
After much hesitation and agony of spirit, Herzl experienced what felt like a revelation, and wrote down his vision in a pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Written in a frenzy of inspiration, it appeared on the streets of Vienna in February of 1896.[19] Lucid and penetrating in its analysis of the problems facing European Jews and of the options they faced, it skipped lightly over the problems that establishing a new state on territory currently inhabited by Arabs would cause. Several years later, when in 1902 Herzl fleshed out his vision of the Jewish commonwealth he hoped to build in the short novel Altneuland, he still assumed that the old inhabitants of Palestine would welcome their new, Jewish neighbors. When a European visitor asks an Arab citizen of the new Jewish state why the Muslims don’t resent the Jewish intruders, he replies, “Christian, you speak very strangely. Would you consider him a robber who takes nothing from you, but gives you something? The Jews have made us rich. Why should we scorn them? They live with us as brothers. Why should we not love them?”[20]
Even at the time, Herzl should have seen how unlikely it was that the Arabs of Palestine would react to mass Jewish immigration in this calmly philosophical way. After all, the Jews of Europe were enriching rather than impoverishing their neighbors. Jewish doctors were curing the sick; Jewish bankers were making investments that promoted the well-being of all; Jewish scientists were making discoveries that led to new technologies; Jewish artists were enriching European culture: how much love had these contributions earned Europe’s Jews from their gentile neighbors? If Jewish wealth creation and Jewish benevolence had failed to win acceptance for long-established Jewish communities in Austria and France, why would those same qualities make them beloved as immigrants in the Middle East?
If Herzl failed to understand the impact that his project would have on the Arab world, his analysis of the Jewish Question in Europe and his vision for how to proceed made him one of the most consequential figures of his time. Within a few months of the publication of The Jewish State Herzl’s idea was being seriously discussed by crowned heads; before his death, Herzl would hold face-to-face meetings with the Kaiser of Germany, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Pope Pius X, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, the colonial secretary of the British Empire, and many of the other leading statesmen of the day. Twenty-one years after the pamphlet appeared, Great Britain would issue the Balfour Declaration committing itself to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in the Palestinian territories wrested from the Ottoman Empire. France and the United States also endorsed the project, and a solemn commitment to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was enacted by the newly established League of Nations. Thirty-one years after the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish state declared its independence in May of 1948. The United States recognized the new State of Israel almost before the ink on the declaration was dry, and the Soviet Union, the other great power of the day, quickly followed suit. In just fifty-two years, the apparently impossible vision of a Jewish state had become a reality.
For many observers, the rapid rise of the Zionist movement and its success among non-Jewish elites was all the proof they needed to demonstrate that clever and powerful Jews in finance and the media pulled the strings of world politics. How else could such a development be possible? They saw every step in this process, from Herzl’s meetings with emperors and kings to Harry Truman’s recognition of Israeli independence as evidence that “the Jews” rule the world from invisible thrones.
But the antisemites were wrong. It was not the backing of Jewish financiers that opened the doors of the chancelleries of Europe; Herzl never had their support, funding his work out of his own pocket and from the contributions of the relatively poor and powerless Jews who came to make up the bulk of the membership of the Zionist Organization Herzl founded. Nor was it the power of Jewish press lords that induced these leaders to listen to him; the great Jewish newspapers of the day were almost uniformly anti-Zionist. Herzl’s own newspaper refused to use the word “Zionism” during Herzl’s lifetime.[21]
It was the powerful idea of Zionism, not the power of the Jews, that brought Herzl to the attention of Europe’s crowned heads. In country after country, case after case, Zionism intrigued, interested, and ultimately drew the support of powerful gentile leaders, even as Jewish leaders often wanted nothing to do with it.
The core insight of The Jewish State was not that the world’s Jews were so powerful that they could achieve anything they wanted if they would only unite. On the contrary, Herzl believed that the world’s Jews, even with the help of western liberals, were too weak to make assimilation work. Herzl was a loyal, loving son of the Enlightenment who believed that the Enlightenment would fail. Even as he watched western gentiles fight the injustice of the Dreyfus affair, Herzl believed that these efforts would ultimately fall short. Émile Zola and Georges Clemenceau might rescue Captain Dreyfus from his unjust imprisonment on Devil’s Island, but the tolerance and secularism that they represented would not save the French Jews as a whole.
So powerful was the wave of antisemitism, Herzl believed, that to save both themselves and the European Enlightenment the great mass of the Jewish population needed to leave Europe en masse. Outside Europe, the Jews could build an enlightened republic in their ancestral homeland. With the irritant of the Jews removed, Europe’s descent into the abyss of barbarism and hate might end, and the peoples of Europe, including the small minority of Jews who did not join the Zionist emigration, could resume their progress along the path of enlightened modernity.
Migration had long been an option for persecuted Jews. Banned from England, France, and Spain during the Middle Ages, Jews had mostly gone east toward Poland and Russia. Faced with the antisemitic revivals of the 1880s and 1890s, European Jews were once again on the move. Hundreds of thousands came to the Americas, mostly to the United States but also to Canada, Argentina, and elsewhere. Jewish settlements were also springing up in Palestine, where one of the French Rothschilds subsidized Jewish settlement.
But conventional migration, Herzl warned, could not solve the problems of the Jews of his time. The sheer number of desperate migrant Jews was leading some countries, like Britain, to consider restricting migration; even the United States, long hungry for workers and the most important destination for Europeans looking for a fresh start, was beginning to discuss limits and quotas. Ultimately, Herzl predicted, the doors to immigration (open practically everywhere when Herzl wrote in 1896) would shut, leaving millions of Jews trapped in a Europe that would turn increasingly murderous in its Jew-hatred.
Sadly, he turned out to be right.
Herzl’s pamphlet was an attack on the core political project and even on the identity of the assimilated, successful western Jews among whom he lived and whose culture and aspirations he basically shared. The assimilated upper-middle-class and upper-class Jews of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin believed that they were the vanguard of the Jewish masses, that the path of adaptation, assimilation, and conformity that led them to success was open to the Jewish masses of the East.
Not true, said Herzl. Not only was the road of assimilation closed to the Jewish masses, ultimately it would close to all. Successful assimilated Jews were already beginning to experience the blowback as gentiles reacted to Jewish success with greater hatred; not even the most assimilated and powerful Jews would be safe when the gentile reaction reached its peak. Zionism, Herzl believed, could change that because it offered a program for a Jewish future that gentiles who hated Jews or were indifferent to their fate could and would support. Antisemites would rejoice at the opportunity to get rid of their Jews; those who cared nothing for the Jews one way or the other might see business and political opportunities in the establishment of a prosperous Jewish state in what was then the backward and impoverished Ottoman Empire.
Herzl expected an unfavorable response to his pamphlet, and the Jews of Vienna did not disappoint him. A few weeks after publication, Herzl noted in his diary that “the Jews of the upper-class, educated circles…are horrified by me.”[22] It was not just that the idea of a Jewish “return” to a homeland where no Jewish state had existed for almost two thousand years struck most sensible Jews as a fantasy rather than as a serious political proposal; it was that most western Jews had long ago renounced the idea that Jews were a nation. One could think of Jews as a race of people sharing a common descent, or as a religious community. But the world’s Jews, who lived in many different countries, spoke many different languages, followed a wide variety of religious customs, ate different foods, and, at least in Western Europe and the Atlantic world, were finally beginning to enjoy the blessings of full citizenship in their respective home countries, were not a nation and were certainly not pining for a blighted, disease-ridden homeland that few had ever seen.
From the beginning, Herzl understood that winning Jewish support would be Zionism’s hardest test. While he expected that some Jews would spontaneously support the idea of returning to their ancient homeland out of a mix of religious and Jewish nationalist sentiments, Herzl knew very well that the Zionist program would strike most western Jews as eccentric and impractical at best, dangerous at worst. A Jewish national movement raised uncomfortable questions about loyalty and patriotism that assimilated European Jews wanted to avoid. Could a British, German, or French government trust Jewish citizens who were helping to organize the rise of a foreign power? Assimilationist Jews spent enormous amounts of time convincing their gentile associates that they were as French, as German, or as British as everyone else. Now here came Herr Herzl with his nonsensical talk of a Jewish state, and for the sake of this impossible dream he would put at risk all the acceptance, all the trust that Jews across Europe had labored so long and so hard to win.
Herzl published his pamphlet, the Jewish world for the most part laughed at or ignored it, and here, it appeared, the matter would rest.
Then on March 10 came a knock at Herzl’s door. The man calling was Rev. Mr. William Hechler, an Anglo-German cleric of the Church of England who served as chaplain to the British embassy in Vienna. Hechler had read a copy of Herzl’s pamphlet and he wanted to meet the author.[23] The clergyman, unbeknownst to Herzl, came from a long tradition of pro-Jewish and proto-Zionist thinkers and writers in German and British Protestantism, and his father had served as a missionary in an 1840s Anglo-German attempt to establish a missionary diocese intended among other things to advance the cause of a Jewish return to the lands of the Bible.[24]
On the British side, the primary moving force behind this attempt had been Lord Ashley, later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, nephew to one British prime minister and stepson-in-law to another. The earl worked for decades to make support for a Jewish state in Palestine British policy. Although he died with his dream unrealized, his work laid the foundation for the Balfour Declaration of 1917.[25]
On the German side, King Frederick William IV of Prussia gave his backing to the proposal for an Anglo-German diocese in Jerusalem. This was partly for religious and partly for diplomatic reasons. From a religious standpoint, missions to the Jews combined with friendship toward the Jewish people (however incongruous such an agenda might sound to most Jews then and now) was a key tenet of Pietism, a movement of personal and social religious renewal that played an immense role in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant Germany—and, through its influence on the Wesley brothers and other American religious leaders, would become one of the most important influences on American evangelical religion. For political as well as religious reasons the Hohenzollern dynasty had long supported Pietism.[26] The Hohenzollerns, a Calvinist dynasty ruling a predominantly Lutheran Prussia at a time when theological differences could be politically explosive, welcomed the Pietist movement, which downplayed the importance of doctrinal differences among Protestants and taught its followers the duty of obedience to ruling princes.[27] Philipp Spener, the founder of the movement, had been named pastor of one of Berlin’s most important churches; the network of Pietist institutions in Halle, including an early German school for the teaching of “oriental” languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, benefited from Hohenzollern generosity and patronage.[28]
Diplomatically, Frederick William believed that extending Prussian protection to the Jews and the Protestants of the Ottoman Empire would bring important political and economic benefits to his kingdom, including a closer relationship with Great Britain. By the 1840s, the decline of Ottoman power was creating both dangers and opportunities in what we now call the Balkans and the Middle East. Both Russia and France had established themselves as the protectors of Ottoman religious minorities, with Russia claiming a right to protect Orthodox Christians in the Muslim empire, and France claiming similar rights over Roman Catholics. The two countries used this position to good effect, establishing networks of economic and political influence through the sprawling Ottoman territories. At the same time, both the French and the Russian governments reaped political rewards at home among religious people for nobly protecting the rights of believers abroad. Prussia and Britain, the two great Protestant powers of the day, sought their own set of clients in the increasingly ramshackle empire; there were not enough Protestants to make a respectable group, but there was no shortage of Jews, and they were in enough need of protection at a time when anti-Jewish feeling was rising in the Ottoman world, that both London and Berlin saw advantages in taking up their cause.[29]
The Anglo-German missionary diocese was established, but did not succeed in converting many Jews or in persuading many to return to the Holy Land to take up agriculture as in biblical times, but the ideas and the networks survived. Hechler, who had once hoped to be appointed bishop in Jerusalem, still had access to exalted circles in both Germany and Britain.[30] In the 1890s Restorationism (the idea of “restoring” the Jewish people to their ancestral home in Palestine) was slowly declining as a force in British Christianity, but from Arthur Balfour to David Lloyd George many members of the political establishment still felt its force. Hechler struck more advanced contemporaries in the 1890s as old-fashioned and even embarrassing with his enthusiasm for biblical prophecy and a Jewish state, but he persevered, studying the prophetic literature and writing on the ways that, in his view, the Hebrew scriptures pointed to the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland sometime around the end of the nineteenth century.
Herzl knew very little about this earlier history, and he knew and cared less about the religious sentiment that brought Hechler to his doors. What electrified him was what Hechler told him about his connections. As Herzl’s diary puts it, “He [Hechler] wants to have my work sent to a few German princes. He was tutor in the Grand Duke of Baden’s house, knows the German Kaiser, and believes he can get me an audience.”[31]
On the Sunday following their first meeting, March 16, Herzl returned Hechler’s call, visiting the chaplain in his fourth-floor walk-up apartment overlooking Vienna’s Schillerplatz. As Herzl describes the meeting in his diary, it was one of the strangest—and also most consequential—meetings in the long history of the Jewish people.
“Even while I was going up the stairs,” wrote Herzl, “I heard the sound of an organ. The room which I entered was lined with books on every side, floor to ceiling.
“Nothing but Bibles….
“Mr. Hechler showed me his Biblical treasures. Then he spread out before me his chart of comparative history, and finally a map of Palestine. It is a large military staff map in four sheets which, when laid out, covered the entire floor….
“At this point we were interrupted by the visit of two English ladies to whom he also showed his Bibles, souvenirs, maps, etc. After the boring interruption he sang and played for me on the organ a Zionist song of his composition.”
One can only imagine the feelings of Herzl, a convinced religious skeptic and a sophisticated connoisseur of Wagner and Debussy, as he watched this enthusiast sing what he imagined a song of Jewish religious rejoicing would be while pounding the keys of his house organ.
Herzl got to the point, telling Hechler that powerful gentile support was the key to making Jewish Zionism effective: “I told him: I have got to establish a direct contact, a contact that is discernible on the outside…with a minister of state or a prince. Then the Jews will believe in me, then they will follow me.”[32]
When Hechler said that he thought he could arrange audiences with the grand duke and possibly the Kaiser, Herzl wondered whether this eccentric priest was simply trying to scrounge travel funds from him, but agreed to provide Hechler the money for travel, first to Berlin to meet with members of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s entourage, and then to Karlsruhe, where the Kaiser was visiting Prince Frederick, the Grand Duke of Baden.
By April 14 Hechler reported that he had met with several members of the Kaiser’s entourage and that they had been fascinated by the idea of a Jewish homeland. On April 23, two months after Der Judenstaat was published, Herzl, accompanied by Hechler, was en route to Karlsruhe to meet the Grand Duke.
Prince Frederick, married to a daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I and therefore the uncle of Wilhelm’s grandson Wilhelm II, occupied a strategic position in the political structure of the German Empire. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the duke was a close and trusted Prussian ally, and was the first of the ruling German princes to endorse the proclamation of a united German Empire in 1871. His association with the old Kaiser, the liberal reputation of the grand ducal family, and his personal reputation for integrity and dignity made him a trusted figure in German politics, and his support for his great-nephew Wilhelm II at critical points of the reign was much appreciated in Berlin. Having supported Wilhelm II at the time when his dismissal of Bismarck led many to doubt the wisdom of their new ruler, Frederick was seen as one of the few elder statesmen the young Kaiser respected, and the cliques around Wilhelm were careful to maintain good relationships with the grand ducal court in Karlsruhe.
Herzl was so overawed in the august surroundings of the grand ducal palace in Karlsruhe that he tried to calm himself by focusing on the details of the decor. At first he found it difficult to speak clearly and naturally with the grand duke. But, sensing a sympathetic audience, he quickly warmed to his work.
After listening with intense interest, Frederick expressed a worry: wouldn’t endorsing Herzl’s idea expose him to charges of antisemitism? This seems an odd worry today—that a gentile would worry that support for Zionism might mark him out for criticism as an antisemite, but in the context of late-nineteenth-century Germany the question was a shrewd one. Jews and their allies were arguing at that time that German Jews should be regarded as fully integrated, and as having just as much right as all other Germans to a place in the empire. Zionism, from this perspective, could be seen as a step away from civil equality and full participation. Wouldn’t a German prince who endorsed a program founded on the separation of the Jews from Germany be playing into antisemitic hands? Would Frederick’s support for Herzl’s plan be seen as an invitation to the Jews of Baden to depart?
Frederick suggested to Herzl that it would be easier for him to endorse the proposal after it had received significant Jewish support. That posed a problem. Herzl knew very well that no body of respectable Jewish opinion in either Germany or Austria was anywhere close to endorsing what most of them regarded as a ridiculous proposal that ran directly counter to their goal of full acceptance and citizenship in the land of their birth. Herzl’s idea had, at this point, no significant support from any organized body of Jews, and was very far from receiving it.
Herzl responded to the Grand Duke by hitting the ball back into the court of the gentiles: as he summarized his presentation in his diary, “Some princes should manifest their favorable disposition: this would enable the Society of Jews [Herzl’s name for his proposed central committee of leadership for his still hypothetical Zionist movement] to act with more authority from the outset. And authority was necessary if such a big movement was to be carried out in an orderly way. For even during the migration the Jews would stand in need of education and discipline.” After a discussion of the foreign policy implications of the idea—whether the project could revive the Anglo-German cooperation then beginning to fade, what the impact would be on the geopolitics of the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal—the grand duke endorsed the Zionist idea: “I should like to see it happen. I believe it would be a blessing for many people.”
Herzl had achieved his first goal: endorsement of his Zionist program by a significant European prince. Better still, Frederick promised to discuss the idea with his great-nephew the Kaiser. At this point Herzl’s pamphlet had only been published for two months, but was about to land in the in-basket of one of the most powerful rulers on earth.[33]
Meanwhile, Herzl’s reception among the Jews he most wanted to reach continued to be disappointing. Jewish reviewers across the German-speaking world competed to pan the work—where it wasn’t ignored. Friends in Vienna reported that Herzl was becoming a laughingstock thanks to his bizarre proposal. Leading Jews continued to reject the Zionist idea. When Herzl’s supporter Max Nordau (an internationally famous author and the only Jewish convert to Zionism other than Herzl himself with a serious reputation at the time) met with the French banker Edmond de Rothschild on May 18, 1896, three months after publication of Der Judenstaat and three weeks after Herzl’s meeting with the grand duke, Rothschild brusquely and comprehensively rejected Nordau and the Zionist idea. They met, Nordau reported to Herzl, for sixty-three minutes. Rothschild spoke for fifty-three of them; Nordau, “with difficulty and rudeness,” spoke for ten. Rothschild told Nordau that the proposal was “dangerous” because it would create suspicions of dual loyalty against Jewish citizens of European countries, and that it would be harmful to the colonies Rothschild was supporting in Palestine.[34]
Gentile elites, on the other hand, continued to show interest in the idea. On July 26, Herzl was in Karlovy Vary. As he sat down to his hotel breakfast, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria and his entourage took a table nearby. Herzl watched as the group pointed Herzl out to the prince. Invited to join the royal party, Herzl quickly sketched out the outline of his proposal. “A magnificent idea,” said Ferdinand. “Nobody has ever spoken to me about the Jewish question in this fashion before.”[35] At times, Herzl must have felt somewhat like another Jewish writer dazzled by a vision, Paul, who found gentiles more receptive to the message. But Herzl, like Paul, hoped that ultimately his reception among the gentiles would provoke a new interest among Jews. In Herzl’s case, over time the strategy worked. The Grand Duke of Baden was as good as his word, and wrote to Wilhelm about the impressive Jewish journalist with the crazy but interesting idea. Wilhelm was intrigued, but he wanted another opinion before agreeing to look more deeply into the matter. His ambassador to Vienna, a close friend and confidential advisor, was the natural choice, and Wilhelm forwarded Frederick’s letters and notes to Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, one of the most antisemitic men in Germany at the time.[36]
Eulenburg was an ally of Richard Wagner; when the Bavarian government balked at paying the costs of the Bayreuth Festival, Eulenburg persuaded Wilhelm to propose paying for them himself—a move that ensured the Bavarians would fund Bayreuth after all.[37] Eulenburg was also a close friend, and perhaps lover, of Arthur de Gobineau, the man whose massive treatise On the Inequality of the Human Races first put forward the idea of the Aryan “master race” and was a landmark in the construction of the new, modern antisemitism of nineteenth-century Europe.[38] As Wilhelm II’s ambassador in Vienna, Eulenburg also befriended Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British antisemite whose work on race powerfully influenced both Wagner and Hitler. Eulenburg’s own antisemitism was visceral as well as ideological; after his duties as ambassador required him to attend a charity ball near Vienna organized by the local Jewish community, he described the attendees as having, among other equally charming characteristics, “noses like tapirs,” “eye teeth like a walrus’s,” and “gaping jaws with hollow teeth.”[39] This was the man to whom Kaiser Wilhelm ultimately referred the letters and documents that Prince Frederick of Baden sent him concerning Herzl’s proposal. Eulenburg who considered himself a master geopolitician as well as a great artist, responded with enthusiasm, and agreed to meet Herzl at his castle north of Berlin.
Herzl’s meeting with Eulenburg came two years after publication of The Jewish State. The Kaiser was looking to increase German influence in the Middle East, and had come to believe that the promotion of a Jewish national home in Palestine under German protection would strengthen Germany’s hand. As part of his diplomatic offensive, the Kaiser was about to undertake what was advertised as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The (feeble) hope was that by describing the visit as a personal religious pilgrimage there would be fewer alarms about Germany’s Middle Eastern ambitions set off in other European capitals.
The meeting went well. Herzl in his best suit and kid gloves and Eulenburg in hunting costume strolled around the grounds of the old manor that Eulenburg hoped to build into a residence suitable for his new princely rank. Eulenburg told Herzl that he also supported the Zionist idea, was keeping it before the Kaiser, and had persuaded the influential foreign minister Bernhard von Bülow to support it as well.[40] As Herzl thanked him, Eulenburg stared hard at Herzl. “Perhaps there will come a time when I shall ask favors of you,” he said.
For Herzl, this was the beginning of the most dramatic episode in his career. In the next few weeks, he would meet face-to-face with Kaiser Wilhelm in Constantinople, travel for the first and only time in his life to Palestine, and have two further encounters with the Kaiser: on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem and then again in Jerusalem when Herzl, at the head of a small Zionist delegation, formally presented the proposal to create a Jewish state under German protection to the Kaiser.
Herzl would not just see the Kaiser, he would persuade him. For the first time, the head of state of a major European power would not only approve of the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine in principle, but would take concrete steps to bring it about. The initiative, like many of Wilhelm’s diplomatic enthusiasms, was poorly thought through and it quickly failed. Nevertheless, Herzl had succeeded in raising the idea of a Jewish state to the highest levels of international diplomacy.
Following his meeting with Eulenburg, Herzl met the chancellor and foreign minister in Berlin. They seemed anything but enthusiastic;[41] in fact these experienced officials considered the idea utterly impractical and wanted nothing to do with it. They knew, however, that overt opposition would only intensify the Kaiser’s determination, and like the seasoned and effective bureaucratic infighters they were, they quietly worked to undermine the proposal while seeming to support it.
The idea, as Wilhelm summed it up in a letter to the Grand Duke explaining his reasons for supporting the proposal, was as follows:
I am convinced that the settlement of the Holy Land by the financially strong and diligent people of Israel will soon bring undreamt-of prosperity and blessing to the land, something that may with further expansion grow into a significant resuscitation and development of Asia Minor. But that in turn means millions into Turkish money-bags—including those of the great lords, the effendis—and consequently a gradual curing of the so-called “Sick Man,” which would quite imperceptibly avert the troublesome “Eastern Question” at least from the Mediterranean and gradually solve it.
The Kaiser’s point was that the long decline and apparently impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire had destabilized Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In particular, the decline of Ottoman power in the Balkans had increased the tension between Germany’s current ally, the Habsburg monarchy, and its former ally, Russia. From a German point of view, anything that supported Ottoman power would curb Russian ambitions in the Balkans and reduce the chance of war between Russia and Austria. If the Jews were willing to pay millions to the Turks for Palestine, the Ottoman Empire would stabilize, improving Germany’s security situation.
But there was more. In this case, the Kaiser continued, “Then the Turks won’t be sick anymore; they will build their roads and railroads themselves, without foreign companies, and it won’t be so easy to partition Turkey then.” Here the Kaiser alluded to the problems caused when the floundering Ottoman government borrowed money from foreign (mostly British and French) banks, and when the Turks defaulted on their loans western governments were able to use these loans to pressure Constantinople for various concessions, including the cession of lands inhabited by rebellious Christians. If the Turks could pay off their existing loans to British and French banks, Turkey would be free to support ambitious projects like the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad that the Kaiser hoped would extend German power throughout the Middle East.
And there was another advantage to the Zionist idea that appealed to Wilhelm II: “the energy, creative power and productivity of the tribe of Shem [a reference to the biblical account that traces the Jewish people to the descendants of Noah’s son by that name] would be directed to worthier goals than to exploitation of Christians, and many a Semite who incites the opposition and adheres to the Social Democrats will move off to the East where there is more rewarding work and the end is not, as in the above case, the penitentiary.” (At the time, the German socialist party, the Social Democrats, was illegal, and many members served prison terms.)
Finally, the Kaiser saw one more reason to support the idea. “We must not disregard the fact that, considering the tremendous power represented by international Jewish financial capital in all its dangerousness, it would surely be a tremendous achievement for Germany if the Hebrew world looked up to our country with gratitude.”[42]
To geopolitical amateurs like Herzl, and the Kaiser, this all looked very straightforward. Persuading the sultan to accept the diminishment of his empire seemed to be the least difficult part of the problem.
Since the glorious days of the seventeenth century when the Ottoman Empire was the mightiest state in Europe, a long period of decline had set in. Bit by bit, pieces of the empire had been torn away. The Russians had conquered Crimea and pushed down through the Caucasus. With the help of Christian European powers, Greeks, Bulgars, Croats, Slovenes, Romanians, and Serbs all managed to throw off the Ottoman yoke. Egypt and the North African states, though still acknowledging the formal primacy of the sultan, had, for all practical purposes, become largely independent. Abdulhamid II, the canny and ruthless sultan who spent his long reign ceding territory to foreigners as slowly as possible while crushing all attempts at domestic reform, was clearly in the habit of making territorial concessions. Surely, a small additional concession in exchange for vast sums of Jewish gold was a reasonable thing to expect?
As for the sultan’s pride, Herzl was willing to make the face-saving compromise that had been followed in other breakaway Ottoman provinces. Egypt, for example, for all practical purposes was ruled by its khedives after 1805, but nominally the sultan remained sovereign. Surely, with enough money, some arrangement could be found for Palestine.
This concept, at the core of Herzl’s diplomatic strategy, was completely impractical. Sultans had, under duress, ceded territory in the past, but only after military defeats. And the territory that they had ceded was largely in Europe. To sell territory rather than losing it in battle, especially territory in the heartland of the Muslim world that contained one of the three holiest Islamic sites, would strike at the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire among its Muslim subjects, a group who, after the progressive losses of mostly Christian territories in Europe, were increasingly powerful in what remained of the empire.
There was, of course, another problem with Herzl’s proposal. Suppose the sultan agreed that for such and such a sum he would lease Palestine to the Jews under German protection. Where would Herzl get the money? By 1898, Herzl had succeeded in building a small and fractious Zionist movement, but its membership was largely composed of poor Russian Jews who could barely feed themselves. The Kaiser could dream of rich Jewish moneylenders and their overflowing vaults, but Herzl had no money, and no way to raise it.
Fortunately for Herzl, negotiations never reached this point. What the Kaiser did not realize, but what his chancellor and foreign minister did, was that Herzl’s Palestine proposal was completely incompatible with Germany’s overall diplomatic strategy.
During much of the nineteenth century, Great Britain had been the European power most concerned with propping up the declining Ottoman Empire, not out of any love of an empire most British people believed was both backward and cruel, but out of a desire to keep Russia, as generations of tsars dreamed, from taking Constantinople and making itself a great Mediterranean and Middle Eastern power. Nobody yet had any idea about the vast oil reserves of the Middle East that would have so much impact on the politics of the twentieth century, but Britain did not want Russia pressing on the Suez Canal, the vital lifeline between Britain and its vast imperial possessions in India and beyond. In the 1850s, Britain and France had fought the Crimean War to block Russia’s ambitions to control the waterway linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; as recently as the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Britain had forced the Russians to disgorge most of their gains in the 1877 war that saw Russian forces reach the walls of Constantinople itself.
Since then, the Germans were gradually replacing Britain as the Ottoman Empire’s patron and protector. British public opinion turned sharply against the pro-Turkey policy as communal massacres, especially of Christians, spread across an empire increasingly threatened by nationalism and religious discord. Tens of thousands of Armenians, Bulgarians, and others perished in violence that the sultan seemed to allow and perhaps to approve. From a geopolitical point of view, Britain was also losing some of its sensitivity to Russian expansionism in the Middle East. By 1898, Britain had consolidated its hold on the Suez Canal. Egypt had essentially been reduced to a British possession, and once the British gained control of Cyprus in 1878, their concerns about Russian power in the Mediterranean grew less acute. Meanwhile, the rapidly increasing power of imperial Germany meant that Germany was displacing Russia as Britain’s greatest geopolitical concern. The Russian Empire, for all its giant size and population, seemed backward at a time when industrial development was increasingly the standard of international power; Germany, on the other hand, was beginning to challenge Britain across a wide range of technologies.
As the British worried less about Russia in the Mediterranean—and the Balkans—Germany worried more. Germany’s one reliable ally, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, was in direct competition with Russia in the Balkans, and every retreat of Turkish power opened the prospect of more conflict between Austria and Russia. In any confrontation between the two, Germany would have to stand by Austria or see its ally collapse, but a confrontation with Russia would likely land Germany in a European conflict in which France, bitterly determined to seek revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine following its defeat in 1871, would look to side against Germany.
Additionally, German strategic thinkers saw a great opportunity in the Ottoman Empire. In a world in which Britain and France had already divided the great bulk of the world’s colonial territories between them, Germany was looking for ways to develop clients and allies beyond Europe’s boundaries. Even in its reduced state, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. The imperial authorities in Constantinople wanted to extend the European rail network across Ottoman territory, and competition among European banks and engineering firms to build the new railways was stiff. German firms had the inside track, and Berlin applauded the Ottoman intention to build its railway lines far enough from the coast so that British naval power could not threaten them. The prospect of a “Berlin-to-Baghdad” railway that would help revive the Ottoman Empire by stimulating its commerce and growth, and that would tie the empire more closely to Berlin, was already gaining favor.
It was as part of this eastward-looking German policy that the Kaiser embarked on the journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem that included his encounters with Herzl. The visit was intended to highlight the deepening ties between Constantinople and Berlin, and to pave the way for further German commercial and strategic links in the region. The Kaiser, elated by the geopolitical implications of Herzl’s proposal, saw the Zionist idea as a marvelous scheme that would enlist Jewish money in the furtherance of German imperial projects. The money of the mythical Zionist Jewish bankers would allow the Ottomans to pay off their existing loans and to undertake large new development projects with, presumably, German partners. But from the Turkish point of view, the only reason to side with Germany was to protect the territorial integrity of the weak Ottoman state. The Kaiser foolishly believed that the sultan would consider an offer of Jewish gold for worthless desert land as a way to escape his financial difficulties for good. From the sultan’s point of view, there was no shortage of foreign powers looking to rip another province of his empire away; Germany interested him as a partner that might help him keep his empire, not as another bidder eager to profit from its decay.
Wilhelm however saw only the benefits, and when he met the sultan he urged him to accept the proposal. The sultan waved it away with vague phrases. Wilhelm returned to it; this was the solution to all of their difficulties, he said. Abdulhamid refused to budge. The dream of a Jewish revival under Ottoman sovereignty and German protection faded away.
Wilhelm clearly understood that the project had failed, and immediately backed away from it. Herzl, whom Wilhelm had greeted warmly and spoken with animatedly just the day before, was now an embarrassment. The ministers and counselors who had expected this all along knew what to do; Herzl was gently but firmly pushed to the margins of the Kaiser’s program. The planned public meeting in Jerusalem would still occur, but von Bülow insisted on receiving an advance text of Herzl’s proposed address—and crossed out everything but the blandest of remarks. Herzl was also forbidden to publicize his private meetings with the Kaiser and his senior advisors.[43]
Herzl traveled from Constantinople to Jaffa in Palestine and visited the small agricultural Jewish colonies that his nemesis Edmond de Rothschild sponsored. Torn between their fear of alienating their wealthy protector and their admiration for the prominent Zionist, the colonists did their best to prevent Herzl’s visit from attracting any negative publicity. Hearing that Wilhelm was due to ride on horseback up to Jerusalem, Herzl thrust himself into a group of Jewish colonists waiting to greet the Kaiser along the side of the Jerusalem road. Recognizing Herzl, the Kaiser reined his horse to an abrupt stop and the two men chatted for a few minutes about the potential to develop the dry farmland through extensive irrigation. Then the Kaiser rode off to Jerusalem as Herzl, faint with the heat and weak from a malarial attack, watched the dust of the imperial procession disperse in the wind.[44]
William Hechler, the clergyman whose enthusiasm launched Herzl’s career into the world of high politics, was in the Kaiser’s entourage. He and the Grand Duke of Baden would remain among the most steadfast supporters of the Zionist movement. Wilhelm II was on to other things.
Herzl’s first venture into diplomacy ended anticlimactically. He made his address to the Kaiser in Jerusalem, and made a public request for German help. “This is the land of our fathers…it cries out for people to build it up. We happen to have among our brethren a distressing proletariat. These people cry out for a land to cultivate. We wish to derive a new welfare from these two conditions of distress—of the land and of the people—by a carefully planned combination of both…we are requesting your Imperial Majesty’s exalted aid for the project.”[45]
The Kaiser’s reply was noncommittal, though he went as far as to remark that “your movement, with which I am well acquainted, contains a sound idea.”[46]
As Herzl, the Kaiser, and von Bülow conversed, the conversation turned again to the need for water to revivify the land. “We can bring the country water,” Herzl said. “It will cost billions but will yield billions.”
“Well, money is what you have plenty of!” the Kaiser replied. “More money than any of us!”[47]
Those were among the last words Herzl ever heard from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who died hoping that Adolf Hitler would restore the House of Hohenzollern to the German throne, and whose son August William joined the Nazi Party.
At the time, this was very deflating and many of Herzl’s fellow Zionists questioned his judgment over a very expensive and apparently fruitless trip. But while the approach to Wilhelm failed to deliver the Jewish state, it served as a proof of concept for Herzl’s Zionist strategy. The Zionist program could win an extraordinary, even shocking amount of cooperation from powerful gentiles who might otherwise never lift a finger to help the world’s Jews. Even a vicious and committed antisemite like Eulenburg was open to cooperating with Zionism on grounds that had nothing to do with sympathy for suffering Jews. One might object that the gentiles who aided the Zionists did so from a mix of motives, but Herzl would retort that that was the point. If the Jews only relied on gentiles who sympathized with their difficulties out of a common respect for the values of the Enlightenment, the Jews had no hope. It was only a program that could rally new allies to their side that could offer the Jews a way forward. After his first meeting with the Grand Duke, Herzl knew that Zionism could attract the non-Jewish support he required. The meetings with Wilhelm confirmed it.
William Hechler always thought of the idea in religious and biblical terms. As the heir of a long tradition of Protestant exegesis that believed that the biblical prophecies foretold the return of the Jews to the Holy Land as the Second Coming of Christ began to come closer, Hechler inevitably saw news of a spontaneous Jewish movement to return to Palestine as the fulfillment of his religious hopes and dreams. It was not only fundamentalists and literalists who responded to Zionism in this way. In an age when scholarship, and German scholarship especially, was beginning to question the historical and factual veracity of some biblical narratives, anything that suggested that the biblical prophecies were being fulfilled brought great comfort to believers. If 2,500-year-old prophecies foretold events that were actually coming to pass in the late nineteenth century, then Christian faith had little to fear from the textual critics and the modernist theologians. For Hechler, and for many other Christians in the twentieth century from many theological backgrounds, the skeptical and worldly Herzl was a miraculous figure; the more irreligious and secular Herzl was, the more convincingly his interest in Zionism demonstrated the power of the Bible.
The Grand Duke of Baden shared some of Hechler’s religious beliefs but understood that Zionism needed to make sense at the level of international politics if it was to become a practical force. The condition of the Ottoman Empire combined with its need for great power protection put the idea of the sale or lease of an Ottoman province into the realm of possibility. Knowing his great-nephew’s ambitions, he could see a match between the needs of the Jewish people—for which he seems to have felt some real sympathy—as expressed by Herzl and the ambitions of German foreign policy.
Neither Hechler nor Frederick seems to have been motivated either by the hope of Jewish gold or the fear of Jewish power. The third member of the group who ensured the meeting between Herzl and Wilhelm was a more complex case. Of Eulenburg’s antisemitism there is no doubt; he had no philanthropic motive in mind as he considered Herzl’s idea. For him, advocating Zionism made political sense. Eulenburg was one of the coterie around Wilhelm who increased their influence with the Kaiser by feeding his hunger for adoration and respect. Wilhelm needed uncritical admiration and he rewarded those who both fed his ego and enabled his quest to seize control of German policy from the bureaucrats and the professionals. Eulenburg, a diplomatic amateur whom Wilhelm had installed first as his ambassador to Bavaria and then, against the advice of the professionals in the foreign ministry, moved to the much more important post in Vienna, shared Wilhelm’s romantic approach to foreign policy and liked the idea of the spectacular, theatrical diplomatic coup that the establishment of a German protectorate in Palestine would have been. His instincts for power were strong enough (and his knowledge of Frederick’s influence was extensive enough) that he saw promoting Herzl’s idea as serving his own interest.[48] At the same time, as his heavy hint to Herzl made clear, Eulenburg saw the potential for vast riches in facilitating the Zionist program. As an antisemite, Eulenburg believed the stories of untold Jewish wealth; he also believed that “the Jews” acted collectively. The man who made the dreams of the Jews come true would be showered with gold; Eulenburg wanted to be that man.
This was a fantasy that Herzl was willing to indulge—especially at a moment when he had no Jewish gold to offer. But Herzl had no scruples about using both Zionist funds and his own private means to pay agents and officials for access to important heads of state. He was in many ways a political naïf as late as 1898, but he understood that to achieve a great aim it was necessary to work with whatever tools came to hand. Herzl was always an impresario; the sultan was not the last European dignitary before whom Herzl dangled the specter of Jewish gold that he did not possess. The later history of Zionism would show that the uncritical belief of many western gentiles in the wealth and hidden power of “the Jews” remained a potent weapon in the hands of Zionist activists. Philipp zu Eulenburg was not the last politician to be led by his own fantastic notions of Jewish power to support the Zionist cause in the hope of a phantom reward.
In 1898 Zionism was still a marginal, almost negligible movement among Jews. But the gentile public found the idea romantic and striking. The annual meetings of the Zionist Organization attracted press attention far in excess of the political importance of the delegates who attended. A movement that financially lived hand to mouth and struggled to carry out the most basic tasks basked in the attention of the civilized world.
Herzl’s ability to engage the attention, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes not, of the most exalted personages and powerful politicians in Europe helped win public attention for Zionism, and cemented his place at the head of the movement. Which other Zionist, which other Jew could get the German Kaiser to ask the Ottoman sultan to turn the Holy Land over to the Jews? The marginalized, desperate Russian Jews at the heart of the Zionist movement saw Herzl meeting with emperors and popes; this told them that Zionism was a serious movement and that Herzl was its natural leader.
Before his death in 1904 (at the age of forty-four!), Herzl would negotiate as an equal with the British, who offered him a colonial charter in modern Kenya and seriously contemplated establishing a Jewish home in Sinai. He never spoke for a majority of Jews; he never won the great Jewish financiers and industrial titans to his side; he never controlled the press or bought and sold politicians. The Zionism that Herzl built into an important historical force was not a movement of Jewish power, but a movement that linked the preferences and passions of the gentile world to the needs of the Jewish people, and it was the unique power of Zionism to enlist powerful gentile supporters that made Zionism a power among Jews.
Many things would change over the twentieth century, and the Zionist movement saw many ups and downs after Herzl’s death. Through it all, the secret weapon of the Zionists, the weapon that allowed them to dominate Jewish politics, was their ability to gather up the critical gentile support that other political currents in the Jewish world could never obtain.