Desmond Stewart’s perceptive biography notes: “… already in 1896 Austrian anti-semites were finding ammunition in Herzl’s arguments, as would the followers of Drumont …” Eduard Drumont was one of the most important anti-semitic ideologues of the 19th century. He wrote an influential book, La France juive (1886) and edited a daily paper, La Libre Parole, and was one of the leaders of the anti-Dreyfusards. Herzl was full of admiration for Drumont: “But I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist.” Herzl lobbied for Drumont to review his pamphlet in La Libre Parole, which he did on January 15 1897, and he was delighted with the result. Drumont “praises the Zionists of Herzl’s persuasion for not seeing in us fanatics … but citizens who exercise the right of self-defence.”
As Zionist historian Noah Lucas observed, “Zionism was the antagonist above all of the individual assimilation associated with emancipation.”
The Dreyfus Legend
It is often claimed that Herzl became a Zionist because of the 1894 Dreyfus affair – Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of espionage, stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil Island. This is unlikely.
Desmond Stewart confirms that it is unlikely that Herzl’s Zionism derived from Dreyfus. Likewise rabbi Elmer Berger:
“Where in all the world a century before would more than half a nation have come to the defence of a Jew? Had Herzl possessed a knowledge of history, he would have seen in the Dreyfus case a brilliant, heartening proof of the success of emancipation.”
Herzl himself wrote:
“In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-semitism.”
Antidote to socialism
Herzl’s strategy, which he was not to live to see fulfilled, was to appeal to the statesmen and rulers of Europe for an imperial alliance with the fledgling Zionist movement. In the course of his travels, he met with the German emperor, tsarist ministers counts Witte and von Plehve, the Ottoman sultan, Lord Cromer, Joseph Chamberlain, King Victor Emmanuel and even the pope! His message was always the same – help the Zionist movement and you are helping the Jewish opponents of socialism and revolution.
To the German kaiser Herzl wrote:
“Our movement, which is already widespread, has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret.”
And when he reiterated this theme to the grand duke of Baden, the latter replied, regarding the need to keep the Zionist societies legal in Russia: “Pobedonostev ought to hear that. You should tell it to him.” The grand duke had just one worry, according to Herzl:
“He took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-semitism.”
When Herzl met German foreign minister von Bulow, “The anti-socialist aspect of Zionism was gone into in the greatest detail.” And when he finally got to see the kaiser, he lost no time in explaining: “We were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.”
The climax of Herzl’s search for anti-semitic allies came with his visit in August 1903 to the tsar’s interior minister, von Plehve, who had organised the pogroms at Kishinev barely four months previously. As Herzl was explaining Zionism, Plehve interrupted him: “You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti” (You are preaching to a convert).
This meeting was crucial to Herzl’s plans. Alone amongst political movements, Zionism in Russia was to remain legal. Plehve wrote a letter pledging “moral and material assistance”, a letter which became “Herzl’s most cherished asset.” (It is difficult to overestimate the loathing with which the tsarist ministers were held in by Jews. The name of Plehve “had a resonance of evil later echoed later by that of Adolf Eichmann.”) As a result of Herzl’s lobbying “there was no prohibition on Zionist activities and an official permit was even given for the holding of the second conference of Russian Zionists at Minsk (September 1902).”
On February 17 1904, Plehve visited London, where he was interviewed by Lucien Wolfe for The Times. Plehve all but admitted that he had organised the pogroms “because Jewish youth were wholly giving themselves over to the revolutionary movements”. However, he “would not oppose the encouragement of Zionist ideas in Russia so far as they were calculated to favour emigration” and “he also thought that for non-emigrants they might be useful as an antidote to socialist doctrines.”
Years later Jabotinsky, leader of the revisionist Zionists, was to hold similar talks with the Ukrainian leader, Petlyura, whose fascist gangs murdered Jews between 1918 and 1921. As Lacquer admits, “The main culprit regarding the pogroms were the nationalist forces under Petliura.”
Herzl's anti-Semite friends
When Theodor Herzl served in Paris as a correspondent for a Vienna newspaper, he was in close contact with the leading anti-Semites of the day. In his biography of Herzl, The Labyrinth of Exile, Ernst Pawel reports that those who financed and edited La Libre Parole, a weekly dedicated "to the defense of Catholic France against atheists, republicans, Free Masons and Jews," invited Herzl to their homes on a regular basis.
Alluding to such conservatives and their publications, Pawel writes that Herzl "found himself captivated" by these men and their ideas:
"La France Juive [of Edouard Drumont] struck him as a brilliant performance and -- much like [Eugen] Dühring's notorious Jewish Question ten years later -- it aroused powerful and contradictory emotions ... On June 12, 1895, while in the midst of working on Der Judenstaat, [Herzl] noted in his diary, 'much of my current conceptual freedom I owe to Drumont, because he is an artist.' The compliment seems extravagant, but Drumont repaid it the following year with a glowing review of Herzl's book in La Parole Libre."
In the end, Pawel argues, "Paris changed Herzl, and French anti-Semites undermined the ironic complacency of the Jewish would-be non-Jew." In a private letter to Moritz Benedikt, written in the final days of 1892, he writes: "I do not consider the anti-Semitic movement altogether harmful. It will inhibit the ostentatious flaunting of conspicuous wealth, curb the unscrupulous behavior of Jewish financiers, and contribute in many ways to the education of the Jews ... In that respect we seem to be in agreement."
Herzl's book Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State"), was widely disparaged by the leading Jews of the day, who viewed themselves as French, German, English or Austrian citizens and Jews by religion -- with no interest in a separate Jewish state. Anti-Semites, on the other hand, eagerly greeted Herzl's work. Herzl's arguments, Pawel points out, were "all but indistinguishable from those used by the anti-Semites." One of the first reviews appeared in the Westungarischer Grenzbote, an anti-Semitic journal published in Bratislava by Ivan von Simonyi, a member of the Hungarian Diet. He praised both the book and Herzl, and was so carried away with his enthusiasm that he paid Herzl a personal visit. Herzl wrote in his diary:
"My weird follower, the Bratislava anti-Semite Ivan von Simonyi came to see me. A hypermercurial, hyperloquacious sexagenerian with an uncanny sympathy for the Jews. Swings back and forth between perfectly rational talk and utter nonsense, believes in the blood libel and at the same time comes up with the most sensible modern ideas. Loves me."
