Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (review)

Book Reviews 115 century belief in progress and for its ambivalent attitude towards traditional Judaism, which it aspired to revolutionize while continuing to use its myths and symbols, seems well suited to call into question the assumption that Zionism was more or less a predetermined phenomenon which could be taken for granted in Jewish life. By pointing to the fabrication of modern Zionist culture instead, he underscores the character of Zionism as a deliberate design to reshape the Jewish destiny. Stephan Wendehorst St John's College Oxford University Theodor Henl: From Assimilation to Zionism, by Jacques Kornberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 240 pp. $24.95. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, is generally taken at his word about how he came to be a Zionist. Up until now all his biographers have done so. I-Ierzl claimed that his exposure to French antisemitism in the years 1891-95, when he was the Paris correspondent of the leading Viennese daily, the Neue Freie Presse, particularly his reaction to the excesses of the Dreyfus affair, opened his eyes to the realization that, no matter how assimilated they might be, the Jews would never be accepted as full members of Western society. Hence, they had no choice but to try to build a life for themselves in a state of their own. Kornberg, a Belgian-born, U.S.-educated intellectual historian now teaching in Canada, decided to take a closer look at this assertion. Beginning with Herzl's schoolboy years, he attempts to reconstruct the man's intellectual development. Let it be said at once that Kornberg makes extensive use of psycho-analytical historical interpretation. Those who bristle at the very mention of the concept should be forewarned. But he is anything but a slave to his method, and his application of it is subtle and incisive rather than heavy-handed and pontifical. The picture that emerges is the follOWing: Her.d, the scion of a prosperous Hungarianl.Jewish family, reasonably assimilated but nevertheless comfortable in its Jewishness, rebelled against his roots as so many young men have done and still do. This stock generation crisis was exacerbated by the death of the young man's beloved sister and a family move from Budapest to Vienna. With more than a touch of Jewish selfhatred , the young man, whose classical education had taught him that Hellenism represented the acme of human achievement, adopted the 116 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 opinion of philosophers of the enlightenment, shared by the more extreme wing of the Jewish Haskalah. This was that the Jews themselves, by insisting on their separateness and on retaining their antiquated, religiondominated outlook, were responsible for the dislike in which they were held. All of the above while Herzl was still a Gymnasium student. While at the university he became enamored ofGermanic culture, which at the time was commonly held to be the legitimate successor of the Greek. He joined the Akademische Lesehalle, a society devoted to the propagation of Germanic culture, and actually managed to be accepted by Albia, a German-nationalist dueling fraternity. He happily accepted its premise that Germanic values represented the summum bonum of the human experience, with the unstated but inescapable sub-premise that Jews, if they wished to be thought of as fully human, had better sublimate all of their Jewish characteristics and transform themselves into two hundred percent Germans. At .some point, however, this assimilationist idyll began to turn sour. Herzl was unable to turn a blind eye to the tide of antisemitism which was beginning to engulf Vienna and which did not stop short at the gates of the university. Deeply unhappy, he resigned from his beloved Albia. His initial reaction to this disillusionment, however, was anything but a rejection of his hyper-assimilationist position. Instead, he succeeded only in convincing himself that the Jewish problem would be solved if all Jews, at least those in Austria, underwent a mass conversion to Catholicism. Somewhat later, he flirted with the notion that socialism, dedicated to the disappearance ofclass differences, would, were it to triumph, eliminate the Jewish problem as well. Finally, when the essential sterility and unlikelihood of implementation of notions depending...