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5 Iyar 5759 - April 21, 1999 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Herzl's Vision

by N. Ze'evi

Yossi Beilin, one of the senior members of the Israeli Labor Party has determined that Herzl's real and original vision was that of assimilation among the non-Jews. For him, Judaism was an albatross, and were he alive today, says Beilin, he would certainly prefer life in the assimilated Jewish communities of America than in Israel.

Yossi Beilin's book, The Death of the Uncle from America, deals primarily with the relationships between the State of Israel and the Diaspora. But within the framework of Beilin's soul-searching, between the lines of the book, he touches upon the sensitive nerves of the Zionist movement and its leaders. Thus, in a side remark in the first chapter of the book, "A Hundred Years of Zionism--an Interim Balance," Beilin notes that "had the gates of America been open in the 1920s, and had emigration to there been free, the Zionist revolution might have remained a passing episode."

In that same chapter, Beilin tries to solve the enigma of Theodor Herzel (Theodor, and not Binyomin Zeev). "We like to call him Binyomin Zeev. But had anyone called him by that name on the street, he probably wouldn't have turned his head."

Beilin notes that it would have much more suited the first Zionist to have become the last Jew. "The diligent Paris reporter of the Neue Frei Presse, who was born in 1860 to assimilated parents, despised Jewish studies so much that when he was 10, his parents were forced to transfer him to a regular state school. He himself volunteered to say that if things had been dependent on him, he would have been born to a Prussian noblemen, and indeed he conducted his life as if he were such a nobleman himself. "He internalized antisemitic principles, admired the music of Wagner, saw Bismark as an exemplary leader, and identified with the strengthening German nation. When his own son was born, he did not circumcise him."

Beilin also describes the ugly and repugnant sides in Herzl's personal life, and notes the sad end of his family.

"After he died, at the age of 44 from heart calcification, he left behind a broken family that did not leave any traces in the world. His wife died in 1907, at the age of 39, in a mentally deranged state. His son Hans converted to Christianity, and in 1930 committed suicide. His sister Paulina, also committed suicide that year, when she was a drug addict. His third daughter, Truda, who had been in a mental hospital for many years, was brought to a German concentration camp, and was killed in 1943. Three years later, her only son, Peter Theodor committed suicide."

Herzl so rejected Judaism, writes Beilin, that at a certain point he proposed to head a procession to convert all of the Jews of Europe to Christianity. He thought that it would be possible to live in the modern world as an assimilated Jew alongside the Christians, and began to search for an alternate solution only after he was convinced that assimilation would not offer Jews a normal way of life, and that the Christian world was not prepared to open its arms to people like him.

Only the disappointment from the emancipation and the difficulty of being absorbed by a non-Jewish society, are what motivated him to formulate the idea of "a Jewish State."

It is clear then, says Beilin, that Herzl "did not search for a means of preserving the great spiritual treasures of the Jewish Nation. He did not dream of a spiritual center of a Chosen Nation. He was not the least bit concerned about the question of the continuation of the Jewish Nation, nor about Judaism. Only the problem of Jews as human being interested him. If the world would only accept Jews as human beings, and if as a result, the Jews would forego their faith, there would have been no one happier than he."

Therefore, determines Beilin, if Herzl were alive today, and there was yet no Jewish State, he could not have founded it. In a world in which the non-Jewish society enables Jews to assimilate quite easily, Herzl never would have dreamed of proposing that the Jews gather in their own state, and he wouldn't have written The Jewish State. According to Beilin, Herzl did not exchange German nationalism for Jewish nationalism. His considerations were totally pragmatic. "Herzl's only basis was negative. All began and ended with antisemitism. On the one hand he gloated over other Jews and internalized antisemitic sentiments. On the other hand, he feared antisemitism."

Beilin figured that Herzl had no illusions, because from Herzl's writings it seems that he would have known then of the possibility of emigration to the United States as it developed later, he would have encouraged it, and would not have spent the remainder of his days in efforts to receive a permit from the great powers to transfer the Jews to a state of their own.

However, he wasn't familiar with the United States, or with the trends which developed during that period. With daring and candor, Beilin writes: "Herzl's true dream was the American dream, that of enabling the Jews to live like human beings and to assimilate due to an abundance of good and prosperity. From many aspects, his prescience of contemporary Jewish life in America was greater than his vision of the State of Israel."

Beilin proposes a provocative but realistic scenario, What would Theodore Herzl have done if he were alive today? "Despite the problematic aspect of the guessing game, I think that it isn't too risky to say that were Herzl a contemporary secular Jew, a senior journalist in one of the capitols of Europe, who was finding it hard to assimilate in his non- Jewish surroundings, and wanted to emigrate to another country, he would emigrate to America and would not make aliyah to Israel."

Beilin's logical and persuasive reasons are: "Because all that Herzl wanted was to assimilate with his surroundings and to live like a human being, he would have discerned that the members of the largest Jewish community in the world lead peaceful secure lives, are not limited in any area, and are allowed to live their lives as they please, as he and Dreyfus and many others wanted to live.

"He wouldn't make aliyah not only because he had no circumcised his son, and in that manner would find it difficult to raise him in Israeli society, but because he wouldn't regard Israel as a safe haven for the Jews. The European island in the heart of the Middle East, which is supposed to promise the Jews peace and tranquillity and development without antisemites did not arise. A place where the existential problem is top on its daily agenda, could not attract Herzl. Obligatory military duty for three years would seem to one who explicitly spoke only about a professional army, as too heavy a burden for his children, and the risk of wars and terrorism certainly wouldn't attract him."

The limited link which the citizens of Israel nonetheless have for religion would disturb him. The last thing he would do, writes Beilin, would be to move to a place where one is obligated to observe religious marital laws and is limited on Shabbos. Actually, even the Hebrew language which is spoken in Israel might deter Herzl, because in The Jewish State, he wrote: "We can't speak Hebrew with each other. Who knows enough Hebrew to buy a train ticket? Everyone will speak his own language, the language of the native land he cherishes. Switzerland is a perfect example of the maintenance of linguistic federalism. In Israel we will remain what we are now, just as we will never stop loving and longing for the homelands from which we were banished."

Beilin concludes that Herzl was a broken-hearted man, who felt that being Jewish was a burden to him, and who saw the transfer to the Jewish state as "expulsion from the European Garden of Eden," and not the realization of the age-old prophecy.

"A startling and sad historical paradox took place here. Central European assimilated intellectuals such as Herzl and Nordau devised political Zionism out of despair, without ever thinking of making aliyah to Israel themselves."

Beilin does not suffice with a description of the non-Jewish aspect of the leaders of the Zionist movement, or their personalities. He proposes solutions too, which on our part are not far from the original "vision."

Thus, for example in the chapter, What to Do, he suggests abolishing all of the religious marital laws in the state, so that the members of all faiths can register for marriage with a non-religious registrar. He also seeks to "broaden the definition of the concept Jew."

On this matter, he points to the routine sham of many so- called "Orthodox conversions". He claims that all know that "we are referring to a premeditated lie. Most of the converts do so in order to marry their Jewish mates. They have to persuade the rabbis that they want to keep the mitzvos," while in essence most of the converts know that this is a sham.

No one disputes this point, and the Yated Neeman has often warned about this trend in its articles. But while the mitzvah observant community seeks to call this a "premeditated lie," and to determine that all conversions must be conducted only by permanent and authorized conversion courts, and by prominent dayonim who demand that the converts desire to observe the mitzvos be sincere and genuine, Beilin proposes an alternate solution: "broadening the definition of the concept Jew."

He says that the time has come to conduct "secular conversions," in Israel. Without realizing it, he is closing the circle he opened, because in that manner Herzl's original vision regarding massive assimilation will materialize, even in the Jewish State.


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