C12| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
From now on, Mr. Penslar writes,
Zionism would nourish “his identity,
creative drive, and will to live.” Torn
between vision and Realpolitik, how-
ever, Herzl didn’t know whether to
convey his urgent message in the
form of a political program or a uto-
pian novel. Nor was he much clearer
on the question of exactly where to
establish a Jewish homeland, vari-
ously proposing Argentina, an area of
British East Africa near Lake Victoria,
and the northern coast of the Sinai
Peninsula. Only later, Mr. Penslar
observes, when Herzl had experienced
“a gradual but steady process of
intensified Judaic identity,” did he
arrive at “greater awareness of, and
attraction to, Palestine.”
Nor did Herzl know how to win
approval for his fantastic scheme. He
tried without success to enlist Jewish
magnates like the Rothschilds. He
then brought his cause into the courts
and chancelleries of the great Euro-
pean powers. He secured audiences
with the Ottoman sultan (Herzl would
visit Constantinople five times); the
British colonial secretary Joseph
Chamberlain (father of Neville); theRussian interior minister; King Victor
Emmanuel III of Italy; Pope Pius X;
and the German emperor, Wilhelm II.
It was at Kaiser Wilhelm’s invi-
tation that in 1898 Herzl made his
one fleeting visit to Palestine, where
he remarked on Jerusalem’s “musty
deposits of two-thousand years of
inhumanity, intolerance, and unclean-
liness.”
When his diplomatic endeavors
came to naught, Herzl called into
being a political mass movement by
sheer force of personality—and by
attunement to the Zeitgeist. With
theatrical flair, he crystallized Jew-
ish political will by convening an
annual congress. In his diary, Herzl
assesses the First Zionist Congress,
which gathered in Switzerland in
August 1897: “At Basel I founded the
Jewish State. If I said this out loud
today, I would be answered by uni-
versal laughter. Perhaps in five
years, and certainly in fifty, everyone
will know it.”
His literary efforts meanwhile
gained new force. He founded the
Zionist newspaper Die Welt and
staged a play called “The New Ghetto”(which caused Sigmund Freud, having
attended a performance, to worry
“about the future of one’s children to
whom one cannot give a country of
their own”). He wrote the epoch-
making manifesto “The Jewish State”
(1896), with its terse step-by-step
plan for a mass exodus to the home-
land. Most remarkably, he gave his
vision fictional form in the popular
and widely translated novel “Old-New
Land” (1902).
One can dislike what Mr. Penslar
calls the novel’s “contrived plot, flat
characters, and wooden dialogue.”
Even though there was no Arab
national movement at the time, one
can deplore with hindsight how
seldom native Arabs—and the like-
lihood of their antagonism—figure in
its narrative.
But looking past the kitsch, one
cannot fail to admire Herzl’s free play
of imagination in the service of a
national mission, one called to higher
values than a mere scramble for ter-
ritory. He maps not just a country of
modern technological marvels but
also a tolerant society that affords
its citizens both freedom and a senseTheodor Herzl:
The Charismatic Leader
By Derek Penslar
Yale, 239 pages, $26
of belonging, its laborers a seven-
hour workday and ample leisure,
its women and Arabs equal rights,
its retirees generous pensions, and its
children a free education. “If you will
it,” the novel’s motto advises, “it is
no dream.”
Mr. Penslar writes that admirers
venerated Herzl “as a latter-day
Moses, a prince raised in the court of
the Pharaoh who was called to return
to his people and lead them out of
bondage.” Like Moses, Herzl led a
fractious and often thankless tribe
of naysayers.
Many a detractor thought their
untiring prophet of self-determi-
nation misguided or mad. His wife
worried about his reputation as acrackpot. The Zionist ideologue
Nahum Sokolow called Herzl a “Vien-
nese feuilletonist who is playing
at diplomacy.” Orthodox pietists
regarded as blasphemous Herzl’s
attempt to hasten the divinely prom-
ised return to the Promised Land.
The high-minded Hebrew essayist
Ahad Ha’am, who saw cultural re-
newal as a far more pressing matter
than political machinations, faulted
Herzl as tone-deaf to the spiritual
distinctiveness of the Hebrew lan-
guage and its literature. In a caustic
attack on “Old-New Land,” he insisted
that there was nothing particu-
larly Jewish about Herzl’s Jewish
state. One Hebrew newspaper, though
ultimately praising him as a “peni-
tent,” lamented that Herzl was un-
educated in his own religion, “with
scarcely a sign of Jewish spirit, like
a dry bone.”
But even dry bones, as in the bib-
lical prophet Ezekiel’s vision, can
be restored to life. Indeed, a sense of
the miraculous informed how Herzl
saw himself. “Perhaps a fair-minded
historian,” he wrote, “will find that it
was something, after all, if an im-
pecunious Jewish journalist, in the
midst of the deepest degradation of
the Jewish people and at a time of
the most disgusting anti-Semitism,
made a flag out of a rag and a people
out of a decadent rabble, a people
that rallies erect around that flag.”
In bringing Herzl’s tragedies and
triumphs to life, Mr. Penslar is that
fair-minded historian. He renders
an engrossing account of a leader
who, by converting despair into
strength, gave an exiled people both
political purpose and the means to
attain it.Mr. Balint, a writer living in
Jerusalem, is the author most
recently of “Kafka’s Last Trial.”Prophet of Self-Determination
VISIONARYTheodor Herzl in Basel, Switzerland, during the first Zionist Congress in 1897.
GETTY IMAGESAdmirers thought him a
modern Moses. For others,
his dream of a Jewish
homeland was delusional,
even blasphemous.BOOKS
‘It is true that we aspire to our ancient land. But what we want in that ancient land is a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit.’—THEODOR HERZL
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With data from NPD BookScanO
N THEODOR HERZL’S
untimely death in Aus-
tria in 1904, a 17-year-
old in a Polish village
wrote: “The sun is
gone, but its light will shine again, the
seeds of renaissance which he sowed
in our hearts will not remain frozen
forever!” The teenager’s name was
David Ben-Gurion; 44 years later, he
would stand beneath Herzl’s portrait
and read out Israel’s declaration of
independence. Soon after, as prime
minister, he would reinter Herzl’s
remains atop one of Jerusalem’s hills.
As Derek Penslar observes in his
biography of the father of Zionism,
Herzl’s astonishing transformation
from journalist, obscure playwright
and political neophyte to visionary
statesman was no foregone fate. Mr.
Penslar, a professor of Jewish history
at Harvard, sets out to show “how
Herzl’s psychological anguish nour-
ished his political passion.” Drawing
from Herzl’s 6,000 letters and exten-
sive diaries, Mr. Penslar presents a
vivid portrait. But what sets this book
apart from the shelf of previous stud-
ies of Herzl is its emphasis on its sub-
ject’s psyche. “Herzl desperately
needed a project to fill his life with
meaning,” Mr. Penslar writes, “and
keep the blackness of depression at
bay.” Mr. Penslar portrays a man
capable of “electrifying charisma” and
“mesmerizing oratory” but also
“plagued by bursts of melancholy.”
As a young man in Vienna, the
Budapest-born Herzl studied law,
embarked on a miserable marriage
and penned lighthearted cultural
observations known asfeuilletons.
Only during his four years as Paris
correspondent for the prestigious
newspaper Neue Freie Presse did
Herzl acquire weightier concerns. He
covered the show trial and public
degradation of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus,
a French Jew wrongly convicted of
treason, and came to understand that,
despite Europe’s emancipation proj-
ect, Jews were still regarded as
strangers in countries in which they
had lived for centuries.
Catalyzed by the 1895 election of
Karl Lueger, an anti-Semitic dema-
gogue, as mayor of Vienna, and by the
virulence of new strains of Jew-
hatred in Germany, the highly assimi-
lated Herzl grasped that assimilation
could not stanch anti-Semitism. Over
the course of several frenzied weeks,
Herzl, then 35, experienced an epiph-
any: Resurgent anti-Semitism would
be stemmed only by ending the Jews’
homelessness and establishing a
sovereign state. “During these days
I have more than once been afraid I
was losing my mind,” he wrote. “This
is how tempestuously the trains of
thought have raced through my soul.”
BYBENJAMINBALINT