Theodor Herzl in case you didn't know him was an active Jewish journalist who founded the Zionism movement and WZO (World Zionist Organization) He was himself an Anti-Semitic as he was working for the comfort of Rich Jews and anti Semites in Western Europe to prevent the poor Jews immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe.
It has been estimated that some 2.7 million Jews migrated west from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914. Many were seeking work or a better standard of living. Others sought to avoid compulsory military service or persecution. The assassination of the Russian czar in 1881 was followed by a series of campaigns (pogroms) against Jews in the Russian empire: Jews were forbidden from settling on or owning land outside towns or moving between villages, and restrictions were placed on their entering higher education or the professions.
Theodor Herzl
Immigration into Britain
With increasing numbers of immigrants, especially Russian, Austrian and Polish Jews, arriving in Britain, immigration had come to be seen as a serious political issue by 1901. Some politicians and publicists were quick to denounce it as a threat, and even as an 'alien invasion'. The British Brothers' League - a forerunner of the National Front and the British National Party - was founded in the East End of London in 1901.
At this period, before the introduction of formal passport controls, there was little to prevent anyone settling in Britain, although if they became destitute, they might be pressurized to move on or even effectively deported. The anti-immigration climate of the time, however, led to the setting up in 1902 of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration
At that time Herzl was active among the political environment and he was writing against this massive Jewish immigration to Western Europe in order to save his Zionist Movement's success ... he said in one of his infamous quotes about the immigrant Jews and Jews who opposed antisemitism which was taking part in huge part of Europe.
This picture, entitled 'Aliens arriving at Irongate Stairs', was published in 1901. 'Alien' was the official term for someone from outside Britain and the empire
'They seek protection from the Socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order… Truly they are not Jews anymore. To be sure, they are no Frenchmen either. They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism.'5 Herzl's first opportunity to develop his own pragmatic strategy of. [3] non-resistance to anti-Semitism, coupled with emigration of a portion of the Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making, came with Karl Lueger's success in Vienna. The demagogue's victory there was the first major triumph of the new wave of specifically anti-Semitic parties in Europe, but the Habsburgs strenuously opposed the new mayor-elect. Some 8 per cent of their generals were Jews. Jews were conspicuous as regime loyalists amidst the sea of irredentist nationalities tearing the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart. Anti-Semitism could only cause problems for the already weak dynasty. Twice the Emperor refused to confirm Lueger in office.
Herzl was one of the few Jews in Vienna who favoured confirmation. Rather than attempting to organise opposition to the Christian Social demagogue, he met the Prime Minister, Count Casimir Badeni, on 3 November 1895 and told him 'boldly' to
accommodate Lueger:
I think that Lueger's election as Mayor must be accepted. If you fail to do it the irst time, then you will not be able to confirm on any subsequent occasion, and if you fail to accede the third time - the dragoons will have to ride. The Count smiled:
'So!'—with a goguenard [scoffing]expression.6
It was poverty in the Habsburgs' Galicia, as well as discrimination in Russia, that was driving Jews into Vienna and further into Western Europe and America.
They brought anti-Semitism with them in their luggage. The new immigrants became a 'problem' to the rulers of the host societies, and to the already established local Jewries, who feared the rise of native anti-Semitism. Herzl had a ready-made answer to the immigrant wave that he thought would please both the upper class of the indigenous Jews and the ruling class of Western capitalism: he would oblige them by taking the poor Jews off their hands. He wrote to Badeni: 'What I propose is… not in any sense the emigration of all the Jews… Through the door which I am trying to push open for the poor masses of Jews a Christian statesman who rightly seizes the idea, will step forward into world-history.'7 His first efforts at diverting the wind of opposition to Jewish immigration into Zionism's sails utterly failed, but that did not prevent him from trying again. In 1902 the British Parliament debated an Aliens Exclusion Bill aimed at the migrants, and Herzl travelled to London to testify on the Bill. Rather than pass it, he argued, the British government should support Zionism. He met Lord Rothschild but, in Spite of all his public talk about the rejuvenation of Jewry, he dispensed [4] with such cant in private conversation, telling Rothschild that he 'would incidentally be one of those wicked persons to whom English Jews might well erect a monument because I saved them from an influx of East European Jews, and also perhaps from anti-Semitism'.8 In his autobiography, Trial and Error, written in 1949, Chaim Weizmann—then the first President of the new Israeli state—looked back at the controversy over the Aliens Bill. An immigrant to Britain himself, the brilliant young chemist was already, in 1902, one of the leading intellectuals of the new Zionist movement. He had met Sir William Evans Gordon, author of the anti-Jewish legislation; even with hindsight, with the Holocaust fresh in his mind, the then President of Israel still insisted that:
Our people were rather hard on him [Evans Gordon] . The Aliens Bill in England, and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomena…
Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them… The fact that the actual number of Jews in England, and even their proportion to the total population, was smaller than in other countries was irrelevant; the determining factor in this matter is not the solubility of the Jews, but the solvent power of the country… this cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration, and we cannot shake it off… though my views on immigration naturally were in sharp conflict with his, we discussed these problems in a quite objective and even friendly way.9
For all his talk about sharp conflict with Evans Gordon, there is no sign that
Weizmann ever tried to mobilise the public against him. What did Weizmann say to
him in their 'friendly' discussion? Neither chose to tell us, but we can legitimately
surmise: as with the master Herzl, so with his disciple Weizmann. We can reasonably
conjecture that the avowed devotee of pragmatic accommodation asked the anti-
Semite for his support of Zionism. Never once, then or in the future, did Weizmann
ever try to rally the Jewish masses against anti-Semitism.
'Taking the Jews away from the Revolutionary Parties'
Herzl had originally hoped to convince the Sultan of Turkey to grant [5] him Palestine as an autonomous statelet in return for the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) taking up the Turkish Empire's foreign debts. It soon became quite apparent that his hopes were unreal. Abdul Hamid knew well enough that autonomy always led to independence, and he was determined to hold on to the
rest of his empire. The WZO had no army, it could never seize the country on its own. Its only chance lay in getting a European power to pressure the Sultan on Zionism's behalf. A Zionist colony would then be under the power's protection and the Zionists would be its agents within the decomposing Ottoman realm. For the rest of his life Herzl worked towards this goal, and he turned, first, to Germany. Of course, the Kaiser was far from a Nazi; he never dreamt of killing Jews, and he
permitted them complete economic freedom, but nevertheless he froze them totally out of the officer corps and foreign office and there was severe discrimination throughout the civil service. By the end of the 1890s Kaiser Wilhelm became seriously concerned about the ever growing socialist movement, and Zionism attracted him as he was convinced the Jews were behind his enemies. He naively believed that 'the Social Democratic elements will stream into Palestine’.10 He gave
Herzl an audience in Constantinople on 19 October 1898. At this meeting the Zionist leader asked for his personal intervention with the Sultan and the formation
9 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, pp. 90-1.
10 David Yisraeli, 'Germany and Zionism'' Germany and the Middle East, 1835-1939 (Tel Aviv University,
1975), p. 142.
of a chartered company under German protection. A sphere of influence in
Palestine had attractions enough, but Herzl had grasped that he had another bait
that he could dangle before potential right-wing patrons: 'I explained that we were
taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.’11 In spite of the Kaiser's deep interest in getting rid of the Jews, nothing could be done through Berlin. His diplomats always knew the Sultan would never agree to the scheme. In addition, the German Foreign Minister was not as foolish as his
master. He knew Germany's Jews would never voluntarily leave their homeland.
Herzl looked elsewhere, even turning to the tsarist regime for support. In Russia Zionism had first been tolerated; emigration was what was wanted. For a time Sergei Zubatov, chief of the Moscow detective bureau, had developed a strategy of secretly dividing the Tsar's opponents Because of their double oppression, the Jewish workers had produced Russia's first mass socialist organisation, the General Jewish Workers League, the Bund. Zubatov instructed his Jewish agents to mobilise
groups of the new Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) to oppose the revolutionaries 12
(Zionism is not a monolithic movement, and almost from the beginning the WZO
has been divided into officially recognised [6] factions. For a list of the Zionist and Jewish organisations found herein, see pp. ix-xii). But when elements within the Zionist ranks responded to the pressures of the repressive regime and the rising discontent, and began to concern themselves about Jewish rights in Russia, the Zionist bank—the Jewish Colonial Trust—was banned.
This brought Herzl to St Petersburg for meetings with Count Sergei Witte, the Finance Minister, and Vyacheslav von Plevhe, the Minister of the Interior. It was von Plevhe who had organised the first pogrom in twenty years, at Kishenev in Bessarabia on Easter 1903. Forty-five people died and over a thousand were injured; Kishenev produced dread and rage among Jews.
Herzl's parley with the murderous von Plevhe was opposed even by most Zionists. He went to Petersburg to get the Colonial Trust reopened, to ask that Jewish taxes be used to subsidise emigration and for intercession with the Turks. As a sweetener for his Jewish critics, he pleaded, not for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, the western provinces where the Jews were confined, but for its
enlargement 'to demonstrate clearly the humane character of these steps', he suggested.13 'This would,, he urged, 'put an end to certain agitation.’114Von Plevhe met him on 8 August and again on 13 August. The events are known from Herzl’s Diary. Von Plevhe explained his concern about the new direction he saw Zionism taking:
Lately the situation has grown even worse because the Jews have been joining
the revolutionary parties. We used to be sympathetic to your Zionist movement, as
long as it worked toward emigration. You do not have to justify the movement to
me. Vous prêchez a un converti [You are preaching to a convert] . But ever since the Minsk conference we have noticed un changement des gros bonnets [ a change of
big-wigs]. There is less talk now of Palestinian Zionism than there is about culture,
organisation and Jewish nationalism. This does not suit us.15
Herzl did get the Colonial Trust reopened and a letter of endorsement for
Zionism from von Plevhe, but the support was given solely on the proviso that the
movement confine itself to emigration and avoid taking up national rights inside
Russia. In return Herzl sent von Plevhe a copy of a letter to Lord Rothschild
suggesting that: 'It would substantially contribute to the further improvement of the
situation if the pro-Jewish papers stopped using such an odious tone toward Russia.
We ought to try to work toward that end in the near future.’16
[7] Herzl then spoke publicly, in Russia, against attempts to organise socialist
groupings within Russian Zionism:
In Palestine… our land, such a party would vitalise our political life—and then I
shall determine my own attitude toward it. You do me an injustice if you say that I am
opposed to progressive social ideas. But, now, in our present condition, it is too soon
to deal with such matters. They are extraneous. Zionism demands complete, not
partial involvement.17
Back in the West, Herzl went even further in his collaboration with tsarism.
That summer, during the World Zionist Congress in Basle, he had a secret meeting
with Chaim Zhitlovsky, then a leading figure in the Social Revolutionary Party.
(World Zionist Congresses are held every two years, in odd years; the 1903 Congress
was the sixth.) Later Zhitlovsky wrote of this extraordinary conversation. The Zionist
told him that:
I have just come from Plevhe. I have his positive, binding promise that in 15
years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied
to one condition: the Jewish revolutionaries shall cease their struggle against the
Russian government. If in 15 years from the time of the agreement Plevhe does not
effectuate the charter, they become free again to do what they consider necessary.18
Naturally Zhitlovsky scornfully rejected the proposition. The Jewish
revolutionaries were not about to call off the struggle for elementary human rights
in return for a vague promise of a Zionist state in the distant future. The Russian
naturally had a few choice words to say about the founder of the WZO:
[He] was, in general, too 'loyal, to the ruling authorities—as is proper for a
diplomat who has to deal with the powers-that-be—for him ever to be interested in
revolutionists and involve them in his calculations… He made the journey, of course,
not in order to intercede for the people of Israel and to awaken compassion for us in
Plevhe's heart. He traveled as a politician who does not concern himself with sentiments, but interests… Herzl's 'politics' is built on pure diplomacy, which seriously believes that the political history of humanity is made by a few people, a few leaders, and that what they arrange among themselves becomes the content of political history.19 [8]
11 . Patai, Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. III, p. 729.
12 George Gapon, The Story of My Life, p. 94.
13 Patai, Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. IV, p. 15 21.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 1525.
16 Ibid., p. 1538.
17 Amos Elon, Herzl, pp. 381-2.
18 Samuel Portnoy (ed.), Vladimir Medem - The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist , pp. 295-8.
to be continued
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