At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha'am

10. Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl

CHAPTER 10 Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl JACQUES KORNBERG When he embarked upon his campaign for a Jewish state, Herzl assumed that West European Jewry would provide the diplomatic and financial resources whereas East European Jewry would offer up its petitions and its desperate need. It was only after his rejection by the Jewish notables in the West-after the disappointing interviews with Baron Maurice de Hirsch and Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1895 and 1896-that Herzl resorted, in November 1896, to convening a public congress of Jews in order to maintain his political momentum. The call for a public congress introduced a new element into the Zionist political equation, unanticipated by Herzl. For the congress to succeed, Russian Jewry-the only significant reservoir of organized Zionism-would have to participate in large numbers. The hub of the movement would have to shift to the East. At the first Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897, the Russian Hovevei Zion were very strongly represented and included some of the most influential participants among those assembled; even many from the West were actually Russian Jews attending Western European universities.1 The Russian members of Hibbat Zion entered upon their political alliance with Herzl skeptically, with serious reservations. His grand scheme for a massive rescue operation of Russian Jewry, his blunt politicization of the Jewish question, his impatience and acute sense of urgency, carried immense dangers both for the Jewish settlers already in Palestine and for the morale of the Zionist movement. Indeed, many decided to attend the Congress to help prevent the aims and priorities of the Hovevei Zion from being ignored.2 106 AHAD HA-AM AND HERZL Sharp differences emerged during the Second Congress in August 1898 on the desirability of fostering a Hebrew cultural revival, on the statutes of the Jewish Colonial Trust, and on promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine in advance of a state.3 These differences were inherent in the Zionist Organization from the very beginning, for they marked the distinct orientations of Hibbat Zion and Herzl's own brand of Zionism. Herzl believed that the quest for state power and sovereignty should be the sole aim of Zionism; colonization without sovereignty would only reproduce the Jewish condition in the Diaspora , a life lived on the sufferance of others. Pursuing a national cultural revival would engender conflict between orthodox and secular Zionists and threaten the movement's political unity. Moreover, Herzl's sights were not necessarily set on Palestine, though he acceded to a Palestine orientation in the Basel Program. Those from the Hovevei Zion were committed to a gradualist policy of settlement in Palestine and to the revival of Judaism either in its traditional or in modernist forms. In spite of these differences, only Ahad Ha-Am-of the leading figures in Hibbat Zion-rejected Herzl's leadership. At the Basel Congress, in his own trenchant description, Ahad Ha-Am had sat solitary among his friends, "like a mourner at a wedding feast." Herzl's political Zionism, he counseled, "can bring us only harm.'" Why did Ahad Ha-Am oppose Herzl, and why did he stand alone in this? II Jewish creativity, Ahad Ha-Am insisted, had always been linked to the nation's perception of itself as a spiritual people. Judaism's contemporary task was to absorb modem culture without "breaking the thread that unites us with the past" by creating a modem version of Jewish spirituality. Failing this, the value of Jewish particularity would no longer be self-evident to Jews. Their national culture would be absorbed into the dynamic cultures of modem Europe; only the pathetic residues of Jewish identity would remain. Herzl's political program, Ahad Ha-Am argued, was a threat to Jewish continuity. Political Zionism wished to consummate Jewish assimilation, balked in Europe by antisemitism, by endowing Jews with "a State arranged and organized exactly after the pattern of other States." Western Jews were psychologically enslaved, reactive beings, their self-esteem measured out in spoonfuls of non-Jewish acceptance. With a state, 107 JACQUES KORNBERG the modern touchstone of national dynamism, Jews like Herzl, their eyes forever "fixed on the non-Jewish world" would gain the acceptance and respect they craved from non-Jews. Because they were practised in modern politics, western Jews, like Herzl, would inevitably dominate a state established in the immediate future. Such a state would be Jewish only in name, a Herodian...