of Rights Man, Reasons of State: Emile Zola and Theodor Herzl in Historical Perspective
Max Likin
riting in the same city and wrestling with the same late nineteenth-century issues of nationalism and antisemitism, Emile Zola and Theodor Herzl provide examples of some of the most important public interventions in the European political scene at the dawn of the twentieth century. The work of both authors set into motion deep cultural and political reconfigurations in their respective French and Jewish constituencies.1 Although the two figures emerged from different cultural backgrounds and intellectual traditions and belong today to two distinct national historiographies, they shared strikingly parallel trajectories, in their own lifetimes and posthumously. In the early stages of their careers, both men endorsed stock-in-trade antisemitic prejudices about Jewish physiognomy and morality, before reversing themselves in similar gestures of atonement. In later writings that artfully juxtaposed reality and fiction, Zola and Herzl presented themselves as the lonely tools of Progress, proclaiming an end to antisemitism, in the form of an imminent fusion of political equality, rule of law, and national prosperity. Both articulated powerfully the principles of government, asserting the intrinsic connection between the respect for laws and uncompromised happiness.2 In the midst of nascent universal high culture, itself the product of an increasingly competitive environment, with growing restlessness in millions of urban readers, both authors fully exploited the newly established
W
power of mass-circulation broadsheets to their own ends.3 In their frontal attacks on nineteenth-century particularisms, both sought to rehabilitate the eighteenth-century notion of inalienable rights as a model of morality by integrating it with the twentieth-century promise of national technological fulfillment. Each man gave the better part of himself to his cause clbre. Both died untimely deathsZola in the fall of 1902 and Herzl in the summer of 1904bequeathing to future generations unfinished victories against modern racism and age-old xenophobia.
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Zola and Herzl in History and Memory A century after their sublime gesturesfusing authority, disinterestedness, courage, and effectiveness and leading to struggle or renewed struggleZola and Herzl form an integral part of imagined communities in France and Israel.4 As focal points of national commemoration, they have each in their turn been honored by mass funerals, by street signs and school names, by postcards and stamps, by exhibitions and ritual debates.5 The tensions and contradictions of commemoration and historical interpretation have, in the case of each figure, been marked by unique national cultural dynamics. As much as Zola and Herzl have been invoked to inspire the youthful enthusiasms of school children, the two have also served as controversial figureheads in the academic environments of France and Israel.6 To most French high school students, discovering his emblematic text JAccuse in the Lagarde et Michard textbook, Zola is offered simply as the creator of a unique piece of writing, a presentation that avoids the complexities taken into account by Zola specialists who unfailingly place JAccuse into the much wider intertextual web of cumulative writings on the Dreyfus Affair while situating Zola himself within an intricate network of artistic, intellectual, and political associations what French historical sociologists refer to as lieux-milieux-rseaux (sets, circles, networks).7 Having provided what is perhaps the most important model for twentieth-century intellectuel engags, these oftencharged representations of Zola figure frequently in axiomatic debates at French universities over the role of intellectuals in society.8 In Israel and the United States, Herzl has been situated within a pantheon of leading Zionist thinkers, many whose work Herzl was unfamiliar with when composing his own radical solution to the Jewish Question.9 As a controversial father figure, Herzl has been at times the object of both fierce attacks and moving eulogies from Ahad
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Ha-am, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion.10 In the case of Ben-Gurion, for instance, the iconographic portrait Prophet of the Jewish State appeared within another unforgettable image: Herzls photograph hanging above the first Israeli prime minister reading Israels declaration of independence in May 1948.11 A central figure in the history of Zionism, Herzl life and thought has been central to debates in Israel on assimilation, political Zionism, and diplomatic expedients and in the soul-searching reflections on nationalism that have followed the Yom Kippur War. The second half of the 1970s marks the beginning of a more critical attitude during which the quasi-hagiographic works characteristic of the early writings on Herzl were no longer published.
France as Humanitys Best Hope in Zola and Herzl My purpose in this article is not to discuss two massive and layered historiographies and their place in the constitution of French and Israeli national memory and identity. By making use of a comparative analysis of Zolas position in the Dreyfus Affair and Herzls burgeoning Zionism, my current purpose is to discover what use, if any, Herzl made of the French political concepts highlighted by the polemics of the Dreyfus Affair to legitimize the national will of the Jewish people and to suspend its internal, contradictory dynamics. This comparison is not made in an attempt to understand how much the Zionist project discovered itself or stylized itself on the Dreyfus trial, but rather to grasp Herzls train of thought and the genealogy of his ideas while in Paris during this period. Beginning with Herzls arrival in Paris in 1891 and concluding with Zolas JAccuse in 1898this article is divided into two parts. It first interrogates Zolas internal monologue about Jews and attempts to delineate his own response to antisemitism at the time of the affair by analyzing his rhetorically strategic attempts to gain the assent of his readers and defeat the opposition. The second part of the article looks at Herzls interpretation of antisemitism while in Paris before experiencing his own conversion to Zionism, and his ultimate conviction in Jewish sovereignty.12 Highlighting the tremendous opposition faced by Zola and Herzl at a time when perhaps 95 percent of Frenchmen stood by the army and when the same proportion of Jews took a return to Zion to be a distant dream, the comparison hopes to highlight similar overriding goals in Zola and Herzlnamely, a reversal of the burden of truth. I will investigate how, in their efforts to reinstate habeas corpus and to reclaim
the presumption of innocence for their constituencies, Zola and Herzl proceeded from quite different assumptions. Zolas humanitarian socialism assumed social solidarity, whereas Herzl took heterogeneous values as a given. Zolas belief in a parity of interests forced him to zoom in on concrete individuals, writing a direct letter to the president to obliterate hierarchies. Herzls assumption of heterogeneous values made it an impossibility to praise one representative individualthere being no typical Jewish citizenleading him to praise sovereign institutions and contractual arrangements reached by parties on an equal footing, regardless of their background ( Jew, gentile, Muslim). With such differing political philosophies, we might surmise that it is unlikely that Jean Jaurs and Herzl would have made a good pair. Conversely, Zolas humanitarian bombast, his belief in the unity of mankind, his implied arguments that the Dreyfus case amounted to a calumny against the people might have struck Max Nordau as something between romantic hyperbole and cardboard trompe loeil. It is important to note here that the analysis of Herzls rhetorical devices in part two of this article does not seek to gauge his reaction to the Dreyfus Affair or test his claim that the affair converted him to Zionisma claim he made in early September 1899 in a state of despondency when a second guilty verdict at the Rennes Trial seemed almost certain. These issues have been treated adequately in other works, and it seems clear that the claim that Dreyfuss case inspired his conversion cannot be taken at face value.13 Since the appearance of Henry J. Cohns article Theodore Herzls Conversion to Zionism, it is now widely acknowledged that his statement was at best an economical rendering of the truth, a dramatic compression of the facts, and a convenient political myth.14
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Herzl and The Vienna Thesis With only 11 fleeting mentions of the affair in over 1,600 pages of his diaries, the emphasis on understanding Herzls mysterious realization has since shifted to antisemitism in Vienna, which injected urgency into the development of Herzls thoughts on the Jewish problem.15 On the same page, Cohn asserts that if Vienna was the cradle of modern political anti-Semitism, in many respects it was also the cradle of modern political Zionism. Cohns conclusion reinforces the earlier view of Carl Schorskes Austrian Triptych, which argued that Herzl, while still dwelling on the Dreyfus Affair, changed his mind in May 1895 when the city council of Vienna chose Karl Lger as its mayor. It was
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this decision that led Herzl to discover the key to mass politics by combining archaic and futuristic elements in the same way as Schnerer and Lger.16 At the center of seminal Jewish intellectual revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century (in music, architecture, painting, philosophy, and psychoanalysis), Vienna no doubt played an important role in Herzls intellectual development. The temptation to believe that the city held the key for Herzls conversion by some kind of geographical and intellectual mimesisis almost impossible to resist.17 The shortcoming of such accounts is that they fail to help us to grasp the originality and appeal of Herzls solution and the integrity of his convictions. We should note, as Stefan Zweig does, that Herzl spoke sometimes very bitterly about Vienna.18 He made his fame as a political thinker away from Vienna, and his ideas never drew a large following in his own country except for a mere 19 followers including his parents but not his wife.19 The danger inherent in dwelling on Herzls Austrian roots is that it risks swelling the debate about Herzls long apprenticeship at the expense of his conceptual novelty. Most psychological studies of the founder of political Zionism have in fact continued a Theodor Viennensis line of inquiry by explaining Herzls charisma as already present in nascent form in the ambitious Viennese writer. Herzls status as an empowered member of a marginalized minority, a dreamy dandy, a Luftmensch fond of aristocrats and theatricality, encouraged traits in his personality that would arguably serve him well in the future.20 Most Vienna portraits seek to define Herzls disappointments with liberalism but are unable to integrate the French conceptual heritage, to judge from the long shadow cast by the Dreyfus Affair. Far from attempting to play up the role of the affair, or to restore the French faade of a civiling mission, I want nonetheless to shift the picture back to Paris to explain the crucial and irresistible influence of French political ideals on Herzls solution to the Jewish question.21 In theory, the Dreyfus proceedings were supposed to be guided by rational arguments based on a circumspect evaluation of judicial evidence, but in practice they were shaped by the charged political atmosphere of fin de sicle France, a volatile environment in which the affair was not so much a cause but a symptom of wider polarities.22 The trial merged the nineteenth-century battle over the paramount rights of the individual with the twentieth-century totalitarian trend of sacrificing the individual to the collective demands of a national community.23 Dreyfus ignited a European-wide debate about modernity, a capacious word that describes an endless quest for the true origin of
laws in dynamic modern society, a quest touching on issues of urban civilization, rural depopulation, imperialism in crisis, scientific rationality, discontinuous time, intellectuals, mass media, and simulated realities.24 In principle, the discourse of the affair occurred on two levels: one dealing with fundamental political realities, the other corresponding to operetta romanticism with its identifiable villains, a faithful wife waiting at home, and . . . the knights of truth.25 For well over a decadefrom the occasion of the captains public degradation on January 5, 1895, to June 4, 1908, when two bullets fired by a journalist wounded Dreyfuss arm during the transfer of Zolas ashes to the Panthonthousands of newspapers across Europe relayed a torrent of news (and abuse) about the trial. In 1897, there were 2,401 periodicals in Paris alone, with almost the entire popular press coming out against Dreyfus and against the Jews. Parisian papers such as Le Petit Journal (with a circulation of more than one million copies), Le Petit Parisien (700,000 copies) and Le Journal (450,000 copies) spread opinions and commentary in front-page articles, copying them from one another as though they were hard facts.26 Ultimately, it would require a literary talent on the scale of Emile Zola to tie up the complicated chain of events into one irreplaceable, single story and to secure intense world coverage of forgotten or seemingly unrelated but parallel chronologies. Whereas Zola wrote to established generals and the president of the French Republic, Herzl managed to do the same unifying feat by proclaiming an imminent if not instant solution if only kings and emperors would recognize that they were unable to protect their Jewish populations. Uncannily, both men managed to reverse the burden of truth on the higher ups to the great delectation of their readers. No longer were the Jews attempting to proclaim their innocence but, instead, were publicly accusing gentiles of harmful secrecy and other unmodern misdemeanors. In France, this process of open questioning set the stage for new and at times combative expressions of Jewish specificityfrom Bernard Lazare, Andr Spire, and Edmond Fleg to Raymond Aron, Benny Levy, and Alain Finkielkrautcontinuing a complex dialogue with French culture, politics, the media, and memory.27
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Zolas Internal Monologue When the press announced the arrest of a French captain accused of spying on October 31, 1894, Zola was in Italy conducting research for his future novel Rome. Returning to France on December 16, six days
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before the unanimous, behind-closed-doors condemnation of Dreyfus, Zola had no reason to suspect any judicial wrongdoing. On the day of the military degradation, he was having dinner at the home of the writer Alphonse Daudet with Maurice Barrs, who had been present in the courtyard earlier that day, narrating the events. Zola, who naturally believed Dreyfus had confessed, was nonetheless struck by the attending crowds ferocity. His first reaction was a desire to use the awful all-against-one scene in a future novel.28 In Zolas own novels, the mob was emblematic of the problems associated with rapid industrialization and urbanization; most of Zolas accounts of crowds in the Rougon-Macquart reflected his fear of surging throngs on sale days, on boulevards, in tumultuous strikes, or at the horse races at Longchamps. Ultimately, it was just such literary interest that drew Zola to the affair, as Bernard Lazare has argued so convincingly in his account.29 Indeed, the first of Zolas three Dreyfusard articles in Le Figaro, published on November 25, 1897, entitled M. Scheurer-Kestner, begins with an assessment of the affairs dramatic interest:
What a poignant drama, and what superb characters! Life has brought these documents to our attention, and they are of such tragic beauty that, as a novelist, my heart leaps with admiration and excitement. I know of nothing that is of loftier psychological interest.30
In an attempt to balance such statements with his political convictions, the sources of Zolas public stance have somewhat contradictorily been perceived as the product of fantasy and the reflection of a constant preoccupation with justice and truth. These motives are quite difficult to disentangle, because inner conviction, fantasy, aesthetic judgment, and ethical stances can take innumerable forms in a self-absorbed man of letters, the leader of the naturalist school of fiction, one also irresistibly drawn to politics. It has sometimes been argued that Zolas intervention in the affair came rather late, though one has to keep in mind that the case really exploded with Zolas very own intervention: the gradual development of the Affair passed him by, as [it] did most of the public.31 Probably for a long time Zola assumed that Dreyfus was somehow guilty because, in effect, no one could prove or disprove the secret file. Indeed, for almost two years an overwhelming majority in France shared this feeling. The very notion that Dreyfus might be innocent only gained some ground after July 14, 1897, when Scheurer-Kestner announced to his fellow senators that he intended to campaign for a revision of the Dreyfus trial. But aside from Scheurer-Kestner and a few others who
had sworn an oath to secrecy, no one knew the real author of the bordereau. Zolas first intervention in the Dreyfus Affair with the Scheurer-Kestner article had been preceded 18 months before by a Plea for the Jews, published in Le Figaro on May 16, 1896.32 The article was clearly a response to rising antisemitism, seen both as a medieval scapegoat practice and as a quite recent phenomenon: For several years, with growing surprise and disgust I have been following the campaign that people in France are trying to mount against the Jews. Without mentioning the famous Jew-baiter Edouard Drumont, Zola next tried to dissect the reasons for the increased hostility. He stated that if truth be told, hostility of one race towards anotheris not sufficient. The main cause of this wave of antisemitism, he thought, was essentially a social matter, the accusations usually centering on the fact that they had become the masters of capital. To Zola, such Jewish tendencies were in fact entirely the result of antisemitism, which is treated in his article as nothing more than a pathological case of social envy, the doings of a lying, hypocritical socialism which must be denounced and treated with withering scorn. 33 Thus, If they are still Jews today, it is your fault. They would have disappeared, would have blended into the rest of the population if they had not been compelled to defend themselves.34 Zolas apology for the Jews greed and his proposal for a resolution of the problem of antisemitism was clearly colored by contemporar y theories of social Darwinism. In the same article, he wrote: If they had centuries in which to love money and learn how to make it, [then you should] learn to take on their own qualities and fight them with their own weapons. Stop insulting them pointlessly, for heavens sake! Defeat them by being superior to them. Nothing could be simpler. It is the basic law in life. Much influenced by Balzac, whom he greatly admired, Zola had previously used physical and moral stereotypes in his novels, not infrequently based on animal imagery.35 In his capital work LArgent, he describes three Jews in as many clichs. Kolbs nose resembles the beak of an eagle, coming out of a big beard; the predatory Busch is likened to a hyena; and the banker Gundermann is contrasted to Saccard, the hero, a non-Jewish hedonist. In the naturalist school of literature, visual introductions played a paramount role. Here is how Gundermann is first presented to the reader:
But at this moment there was a strong emotion. Gundermann had just come in, the banker king, the master of the Bourse and of the world, a
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man about 60 years old, whose enormous bald head and thick nose, . . . expressed an immense obstinacy and fatigue. Never did he go to the Bourse, not even feigning to send an official representative there; never too did he eat in a public place. . . . Suffering for the past 20 years from a stomach illness, he nourished himself only with milk.36
Gundermann, who rises every morning at five and lives in one house with 30 other members of his family, is not just hard working and obsessively thrifty but also a cunning and ruthless businessman. Armed with insider information, he is hell-bent on ruining his opponent Saccard, whose Banque Universelle (that is, Catholic interests) he coldly destroys.37 To what extent Zola believed in such Jewish stereotypes is difficult to fathom within a polemical style aimed at two types of readers: those who are on ones side, and those who need to be turned around and convinced. From within this polemical context, Zola might tactically surrender some arguments to the other side. By enticing the unsuspecting antisemitic reader with such stereotypes, Zola was better able to convert him or her to the novels final argument. For instance, to balance his antisemitic rendering of Gundermann, Zola revealed that behind his austere demeanor is a quite endearing grandfather who loves his grandchildren and treats them with great kindness. Rather than despising him, Saccard finds that he admires the man who has destroyed him. Competition and struggle are simply unavoidable facts. Zola withdrew his blame from the villain and, in the end, gave no solution to the unavoidable opposition of forces in his novels.38 An analysis of Zolas personal associations gives no clearer indication of his stand on antisemitism, which remained undetermined until the publication of JAccuse. Zola could, at one time or another, count among his friends men who were unabashedly antisemitic figures, such as Alphonse Daudet, Edmond Goncourt, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. His association depended more on similar literary and aesthetic sensibilities than on feelings toward Jews. For instance, in 1897 Zola served alongside Drumont as pallbearers at the funeral of Alphonse Daudet. Although Zola praised the deceased in emotional and admiring tones at the Pre Lachaise cemetery,39 he remained bitter enemies with Daudets son Lon, who was famous for his loud antisemitic posturing. If indeed we are dealing with, as Alan Schom claims, an anti-semite volu [bright antisemite],40 how do we begin to reconcile this ambivalent label with his uncompromising position in the affair on behalf of Dreyfus, a position that exposed him to great physical, professional, and legal risk?
Reversing the Dreyfus Cover-Up After the Scheurer-Kestner article defending the vice president of the Senate, which ended with the famous line The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it, Zola continued with his campaign of articles in Le Figaro.41 In The Syndicate (December 1, 1897), he attacked the rumor that Jews had pooled money to enlist the help of accomplices. In The Minutes (December 5), he attacked the Chamber of Deputies for affirming the Dreyfus Affair res judicata. In Letter to the Young People (December 14) and in Letter to France (January 7, 1898), Zola professed his patriotism, appealed to Frances youth, and communicated deep personal anguish mixed with an unshakable optimism: At heart I do not fear for you [France]; they will try to undermine your sanity and your health, but in vain. You are the future. You will always reawaken, you will always triumph amid truth and justice.42 Between early December 1897 and mid-January 1898, things went from bad to worse for the Dreyfus camp. Suffering from falling subscriptions, Le Figaro decided to stop publishing Zolas articles. In late December, a weary Scheurer-Kestner, ill from cancer, decided to retire from the Dreyfus fight. On January 11, Major Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted in his conseil de guerre (court-martial), and Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart was arrested. Esterhazy was in fact a spy working for the German embassy in Paris. Over a year earlier, a juxtaposition of a photograph of the bordereau and his letters had revealed Esterhazy as the author of the incriminating document. Indeed, it was revealed that, perennially short of money, Esterhazy had offered his services to the German attach Schwarzkoppen, but Dreyfus had already been sent to Devils Island, and the French chief of staff refused to reopen his case. Following successive aborted enquiries and restless public opinion on behalf of Esterhazy, he had finally been put on trial and acquitted by a panel of officers deliberating for fewer than five minutes. From a legal point of view, nothing could be done to reverse Dreyfuss situation. Amid this despair, Zolas JAccuse (a polemical text in the form of a letter to President Flix Faure) appeared in LAurore, the bold title being Georges Clemenceaus idea, the newspapers combative political editor. In a few hours after its release, LAurore had sold over 200,000 copies, much more than the 30,000 per day average. Anticipating the outcome, Zola had begun writing the article even before the acquittal of Esterhazy. In his public denunciation, the author first and foremost gives the impression of genuinely wanting to logically reconstruct and summarize the cryptic facts of the case. Open[135]
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ing with the supreme insult of Esterhazys acquittal, Zola systematically recounts the chronology of important events in the case, turning almost immediately afterward to attack the main culprit in his eyes, the One wicked man [who] had led it all, done it all: Lt. Col du Paty de Clam. . . . He is the entire Dreyfus case. . . . [I]t was du Paty de Clam who invented Dreyfus. The affair became his affair. Zola then implicates several highly placed figures in the War Office: General Mercier, whose intelligence seems to be on a mediocre level; and General de Boisdeffre, who appears to have been swayed by his intense clericalism. Contrasting their behavior with the exiled Picquart, who had done his duty as a decent man, Zola further involved General Gonse and General Billot, who dare not let Dreyfuss innocence be acknowledged lest the War Office collapse as the public heaps scorn on it. Addressing the president directly again, and pausing for a moment to explain somewhat disingenuously that he was simplifying, for by and large this is only a summary of the story, Zola in the next line attacked General Pellieux and Major Ravary for conduct[ing] a villainous investigation from which the scoundrels emerged transfigured. Finally, he accused Billot of having planted certain ideas in the judges minds. Zola then proceeded to the most often quoted section of his article, in which he reiterated his eight inflammatory points, introducing each with the phrase Jaccuse. Within these ad hominem paragraphs, Zola attacked the three handwriting experts . . . having submitted fraudulent and deceitful reports and the War Offices abominable campaign, and, finally, on a more abstract note, he accused the first court martial of having committed the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man. Having at this point crossed the Rubicon, Zola then attempted to show that he was not writing out of personal malice: I do not know them; I have never seen them; I feel no rancor or hatred towards them. However, this rhetorical retreat became simply another occasion to charge again in the next sentence: To me they are mere entities, mere embodiments of social malfeasance. And the action here is merely a revolutionary means to hasten the revelation of truth and justice.43 Zolas JAccuse has been the subject of countless close readings, which can never quite manage to reproduce the blinding effect of aesthetics, politics, and ethics artfully juxtaposed at one moment in time. The French socialist leader Jean Jaurs (who had been slow to join the fight) called it, with some envy, the centurys most revolutionary act.44 The article completely turned Dreyfuss situation around, and it truly began a civil war of the verb. As Henri Mitterand aptly writes, a breach had been fixed, now an abyss opened.45 Written for LAurore,
the article came out in a new, more aggressive political forum, the paper representing as it did the radical opposition. JAccuse marked the abandonment of Bernard Lazares cautious, defensive tone. It was arguably a deliberate provocation of the General Staff and, by extension, of the entire French Army. From a tactical point of view, the letter forced the three complicit anti-Dreyfusard powers into the open: the president; unimpeachable generals; and public opinion. Zolas caveat, in the last lines modestly admitting a lack of knowledge, produced an uncanny suspenseful effect that seized the attention of the entire nation. Finally, the article could not but be read as a direct appeal from one man to another:
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I have but one goal: that light be shed, in the name of mankind which has suffered so much and has the right to happiness. My ardent protest is merely a cry from my very soul. Let them dare to summon me before a court of law! Let the enquiry be held in broad daylight! I am waiting. M. Le Prsident, I beg you to accept the assurance of my most profound respect.46
Lon Blum called JAccuse a text of imperishable beauty, a masterpiece that came at a moment when he, like all Dreyfusards, were depressed because the call for revision in the case had seemingly been suffocated for good. JAccuse was a complete apparatus, coherent in the demonstration of the Dreyfusard case.47 But despite the ensuing praise from Dreyfusards, in Blums eyes, not everything had been said in praise of the writer: Zolas greatest achievement was to risk a successful 40-year literar y career, something that very few men in his stage of life venture to do. His intervention virtually ruined him, though he wouldironically enoughbe attacked later as someone who saw an immense and colossal advertisement in the affair.48 As Blum recalled, on the day of the publication in LAurore, Zola was less a hero than an unexpected and inestimable ally.49 JAccuse belonged to Zola only for a very brief moment, because the next day, January 14, LAurore published a protest signed by intellectuals calling for the revision of the trial. A second protest followed two days later and opened one of the first myths of the affair: the birth of the intellectuel engag. JAccuse had immediately given rise to a stampede and become public domain, the joint property of all Frenchmen.
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On February 7, Zola was put on trial for libel at the Assize Court of the Seine, and he was given the maximum sentence: a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs. The verdict was overturned on appeal, but a second trial opened toward the end of May and, on July 18, condemned Zola once again, forcing him to flee to England that same night. Meanwhile, the resonance of Zolas odyssey had grown immense in the European press, reflecting internal and foreign tensions. In Germany, for instance, because of the accusations that German diplomats were involved in espionage, most of the press questioned the secrecy and later supported Scheurer-Kestners unimpeachable credentials.50 However, the Berlin antisemitic Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Breslau Schlesische Zeitung, and the even more rabid Munich Das Bayerische Vaterland all reprinted Drumonts innuendoes hinting at millions of francs from the Dreyfus clique. In Russia, Zola remained a puzzle for the antisemites because he was a man of means, was not Jewish, and was not a politician, so had no obvious need for bribes from the mythical Syndicate of treason.51 There, antisemites equated Jews with capitalism, which was in the hands of Jewish plutocrats and socialists welded together into a potent if fantastic xenophobic argument. For the most part French Jewry preferred, as Daniel Halvy has noted, not to think or speak about the affairexcluded, through a ver y curious, all-silent agreement of these Parisian conversations that exclude nothing. 52 French Jewry was less concerned about the fate of Dreyfus, who was suspected of treachery, than about the exploitation of the affair by skilled antisemitic polemicists. Despite a threat of exclusion, French Jews continued to emphasize their genuine devotion to France. After a long and strenuous legal battle, the Dreyfus Affair ended in a victory for the forces of secularism and liberalism. 53 As such, the outcome reinforced a preexisting and, for some, quite unshakable assimilationist stance among French Jews, who continued to be promoted to the highest functions of the state.54 Conversely, the Dreyfus Affair marked a caesura, a point of no return in the history of Zionism and the future identity of Israel. In Herzls eyes and to millions of impoverished Jews, embattled Yishuv immigrants, and not a few postWorld War II historians, the drawn-out affairset against a deceptive Enlightenment background and reversible Emancipation processreinforced the notion of insuperable troubles ahead.55 Today, the Dreyfus Affair remains a potent metaphor, a lens through which life in exile can still be seen as inherently regressive and repressive.
Enter Herzl Like Zola, the path that led Herzl to formulate his defense of European Jews began with his own ambiguously antisemitic prejudices. This point of departure becomes crucial to understanding precisely how he managed to turn the tables on antisemites by elevating the Jewish people to his urgent cause. The common assertion is that Herzl set up the Zionist political machinery because he ultimately believed that Jews were, for so many reasons, unassimilable. He transformed what had hitherto been a philanthropic operation into a political force. These origins are not treated here because they ultimately do not help to explain the conceptual success of Herzls solutionthat is, his capacity to sustain both the attention of prominent gentile figureheads and the interest of the markedly diverse Jewish peoples implicated in his project. In effect, Herzls conversion experience, exhilarating his sense of freedom, his charisma, his extraordinary persuasiveness, could not all have been the result of a self-immolating ressentiment.56 How did a Viennese liberal who despaired of liberalism manage to ignite a new phase of Zionism by engaging the support of geographically dispersed, socially polarized, and religiously estranged Jews across the European spectrum? Herzl arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1891 as correspondent for Die Neue Freie Presse with weighty responsibilities. He was forced to adapt to the rigorous schedule of journalistic writing. His assignment in Paris involved getting up early to send telegrams to Vienna, making daily visits to the Palais Bourbon, and often working until past midnight. In the French capital, Herzl became at once an unrecognized Jew and an exceptional Jew on the strength of his access to elite circles. Here he observed the fruits of emancipation firsthand, dining once a month at Alphonse Daudets home and progressively distancing himself from his Austrian heritage.57 For the next two years, however, Herzl would remain the prey of the Habsburg obsession with Ehre (honor), his mental confusion tied to a chivalric response to the Jewish question to reintegrate a mystical Volkstaat (nation-state). His response for a long time was tied to the notion of beau geste, whether in the form of aristocratic duels at dawn or mass conversions at noon.58 There shall be no furtiveness and no shame-facedness, as hitherto; it shall be done proudly and with a gesture of dignity.59 In 1892, Herzl was struck by a series of personal and public events, and he set out to unify and resolve them. In January of that year, his dear friend Oswald Boxer, who had gone to Brazil to investigate the possibilities of immigration for Russian Jews, died in Rio de Janeiro of [139]
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yellow fever. Boxer had lacked a master plan, but Herzl quoted from his friends final letter in Die Neue Freie Presse, conveying his superior sense of mission and responsibility to the reader. In the same month in Paris, a clerk named Laurent was put on trial for crooked dealings on the stock market. The incident provoked the following comment from Herzl: Monsieur Laurent will have to do a lot of cursing against the Jews to cover up his misdemeanors.60 In February and March, Herzl published more on the Jewish Question in Die Neue Freie Presse, this time to describe isolated and clumsy attempts of Jews to settle on the northwest coast of Arabia. The articles highlighted the quarrels that divided the organizers of the settlement project and provided detailed reports on the critical condition of Jewish colonies under the aegis of Baron de Hirsch. Again, settlement attempts suffered from the lack of a master plan. On June 24, Captain Armand Mayer died in a tragic duel at the hands the antisemite the Marquis de Mors. Mayers efforts to defend his honor were courageous, if hopeless; crippled by a withered arm, he could hardly lift his weapon to defend himself. What was especially remarkable here was the enormous response of sympathy of the Parisian population: over 50,000 people followed the funeral procession to the cemetery. On August 31, 1892, Herzl wrote a long report for his paper entitled French antisemitism, in which, with Heineesque irony, he argued that the French people were cool and uncomprehending toward antisemitism, yet he praised the love of objective truth he had encountered in works like Les Anti-Semites en France by Mermeix (alias of Gabriel Terrail).61 Herzls path to a solution to the Jewish question began with his pointed reaction to Karl Eugen Dhrings Die Judenfrage in which he noticed the displacement of medieval antisemitism by modern racism, yet what was most hurtful to him was the attack on the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle.62 Perhaps the most intriguing part of Herzls journey toward a cathartic solution necessitated a progressive weaning of racial antisemitism or ethnic antisemitism so prevalent in German-speaking countries and, for Jews romantically attached to Kultur, quite difficult to overcome.63 For some time, Herzl toyed with the idea that a healthy Darwinian struggle might improve the Jews alien-looking [and] despised physiognomy.64 The status of race in French antisemitism as a determining factor is difficult to weigh. If in Germany it was already developed as a dangerously effective weapon against assimilation, in France the mysterious and often confusing term invoked a kind of fascination, especially among writers, whose response to the idea of race should not necessarily be taken as an indication of a conviction of its intrinsic
validity. Race in France could mean physiognomy, cerebral faculties, physical exercise or lack thereof, Darwinian struggle, adaptive faculties, ethical choices, or, in the case of Marcel Proust, a category that transcended personal memory. Far from being interpreted as cranial measurements, to French Jews it could mean a pride in unjust sufferings of ones forebears and was thus frequently used in reference to the power of history and to vague emotional ties to ancestors. As Michael Marrus noted, in the last years of the nineteenth century race was losing ground in high circles in France because learned opinion was moving, by the 1890s, towards rejecting the concept of a Jewish race.65 Even Ernest Renan had reversed himself and taken the position that there was no such thing as a clearly demarcated Jewish race. In 1891, Salomon Reinach, the archeologist and famed classical scholar, gave a series of lectures at the Ecole du Louvre attacking fashionable notions of Aryan superiority. And, in his Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, Bernard Lazare attacked the doctrine of the inequality of races as a fiction, concluding that if the Jews are not a race, they have been, until our own days, a nation.66
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Max Likin
A Nation Within a Nation Even if racially based antisemitism existed in France in superficial forms, it did not have roots deep in French civic culture. Herzl himself was welcomed into elite non-Jewish circles as invisible and exceptional. In France, antisemitism was much more part of a sophisticated and fast evolving debate between the left and the right.67 Left antisemitism included Charles Fourier, Alphonse Toussenel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Blanqui, and Jules Guesde warning of the dangers of mobile capital and financial feudality, with German-accented Jews denounced as foreigners, traffickers, parasites, and corrupters of French wealth.68 On the right, French antisemitism produced a complex synthesis in the person of Drumont, the author of the two-volume La France Juive. Published in 1886, the runaway best-seller exceeded 200 printings by 1914, each printing consisting of between 1,000 and 5,000 copies.69 Drumont, however, used the amalgam of race forcefully only in the opening chapter of his book. The latter part of the work is preoccupied with exalting the love of mystical French harmony and repeated attacks on the Rothschilds.70 In Drumonts views, the diverse racesthe Celts, Gaulois, Gallo-Romans, Germans, Franks, and Normandshad fused harmoniously in France, except for the Jews, who were unable to blend into the amalgam.71 Drumonts key argu-
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ment was that the Jews were a nation within a nation, that there was a perpetual equivoque as to where the errant Jew belonged. In the early stages of his Judenstaat, Herzl jotted down a cryptic remark, thanking Drumont for the totality of his views to the Zionist solution.
Herzls Conversion and the Strategic Locus of Accusation A week after the conviction of Dreyfus, in December 1894, it could be argued that Herzl was quite convinced that the French was still the political model to follow, the great vessel of political innovation in which political innovations bubble up and, despite the odds, humanitys best hopes of overcoming prejudice.72 On January 5, 1895, Herzl witnessed the degradation of Dreyfus with the shouts of the crowd Death to the Traitor!73 The following May, at the Hotel de Castille, he began writing Der Judenstaat in the form of an address to the Rothschilds, which, after several revisions, was finally published in February 1896. In his preamble, Herzl stated that the world resounds with clamor against Jews, and that arouses this concept out of his sleep of the establishment of a Jews state; Kings and Emperors cannot protect us, even if they wished to treat us equally.74 Herzl thus proposed a radical plan: Sovereignty over a piece of the earths surface is the only salvation of the Jews.75 The first part of his syllogism lends a sense of the universal urgency of his programthe threat of worldwide antisemitism. The second part turns to the inability of the state, in the form of kings and emperors, to protect Jews. In his rhetoric, Herzl thus manages a gigantic reversal of the burden of proof in his accusation against the state. It was not so much that Jews had to justify their existence as aliens in a hostile territory, but that the state, in its inability to protect Jews, had to admit to their diminishing sovereignty over their subjects and yield finally to the Jews own effort to seek freedom from wrongdoing. Thus Herzls logic opens the way for mutually beneficial negotiations by concluding with the necessity of Jewish sovereignty to both parties. Herzls blueprint received a lukewarm response in Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild had rejected the plan in Paris. In October 1896, Herzl admitted I am demoralized. From no side help, from all sides attacks.76 Although the blueprint, the final product, seemed clear enough, Herzl could not see how to reunite physically dispersed and culturally heterogeneous people. In Das Neue Ghetto he had disparaged materialistic Jews. With Der Judenstaat he still yearned for the goodwill of Jewish magnates as a way to finance his
solution. In his theory, Herzl transforms a Volk into a Nation and a Nation into a Staat, in essence saying that the political project could propel itself forward on the principle of political representation alone. A political body made sovereignty inescapable. It implied consent and purposive action. It meant continuity and heralded progress. In turnof-the-century Europe, an assembly of Jews conducting business in an orderly manner amid impressive columns could not but strike the imagination. What is remarkable in Herzls efforts to achieve consensus is his avoidance of the major questions regarding the form his proposed society would take in terms of its economic and political systems. Instead, he plunges into a series of solid but unsubstantial details that obfuscate or suspend major political issuesnot least, the complicated matter of the transition from Society to State. His genius was to displace the problem and insist that political institutions yet to be created would take care of future difficulties, that sovereignty alone could overcome any likely obstacle. His interest, however, in the minutest details of various organizational schemes (as shown in his diaries of June 1895) show him to be a true liberal, believing in the power of intermediate associations. After the establishment of the World Zionist Organization, Herzls two main pillarsthe Society of Jews and the Jewish Companyblossomed into a number of impressive mid-level, liberal institutions, nourished by the genuinely civic ambitions of their members and leaders. The Society of Jews emerged as the Greater and Inner Actions Committees, which in due time made their imprint on the preference shown to the Knesset, whereas the Jewish Company turned into several important institutions: the Jewish Colonial Trust and its subsidiary, the Anglo-Palestine Trust; the Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund); and the Keren Keyemeth ( Jewish National Fund).77 Herzl was quite disappointed by the endless wrangles at the Palais Bourbon, which perhaps he puffed up to the delight of his Viennese readers. Yet he was also very much part of what Philippe Nord has called The Republican Moment, attempting to gain or regain a huge swath of institutional terrain in favor of his minority.78 In the first half of 1897 and the following years, Herzl poured all his energies in setting up the newspaper Die Welt to enter public consciousness. In willful, autocratic fashion, he tirelessly promoted the yearly Zionist Congress, as much a timetable as an institution. Die Welts fundamental goals were personal liberty of the Jews, pushing into new spaces, and stirring civic activism in European Jewry.
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Conclusion [144] Jewish Social Studies Herzls thoughts on the Jewish Question predated Zolas by over a decade, but it would take Herzl longer than Zola to claim Dreyfuss innocence, let alone fight on his behalf. Before Zolas intervention, Herzl was no doubt depressed by the affair, and the idea of a Promised Land somehow emerged in his mind as a soothing antidote. On Shavuot 1895: It has the appearance of a gigantic dream. But for days and weeks it has filled me, saturated even my subconsciousness, it accompanies me wherever I go, broods above my ordinary daily converse, looks over my shoulder and at my petty, comical journalistic work, disturbs me and intoxicates me.79 In the period between 1895 and 1897, Herzls attitudes toward the Dreyfus Affair seemed not dissimilar to Zolas. Dreyfus is kept at the margin of his diaries and letters between 1895 and 1897, and, like Zola, Herzl probably paid attention to the case only when re-trial issues surfaced in newspapers. In his articles for Die Neue Freie Presse, Herzl managed to cast doubt on the prosecution by conveying to his readers all the wildest rumors gripping Paris.80 The overall impression his readers received was one of French men in uniform, accompanied by their ladies, bathing in a grim opera buffa atmosphere. What influence, if any, did Zola have on Herzl, apart from the Dreyfus Affair in general? It seems that Herzl was much struck by Zolas Letter to France and Letter to the Young People. In the former article, Zola begins: We are going through a frightful time of moral confusion; the publics conscience appears to be clouding over. At this time, France, it is to you that I must speak, to the nation, to the mother country. . . . France, I beg of you, come to your senses, be yourself again, be that great country France. In the last line of Letter to the Young People, Zola wrote in elegiac terms about youth, seeking to demarcate a new constituency: You are the future. You will always reawaken, you will always triumph amid truth and Justice!81 Herzls own article in Die Welt of December 24, entitled French Circumstances, is closely modeled on Zolas outpourings: The People of France, that courageous and magnanimous [grossmtig] people enamored of Justice, the people of the Rights of Man, that revises all trials, that doesnt ever judge a case as closedwill not accept that one questions the guilt of the Jewish captain. Zolas Letter to the Young People asks: Where are you going, you young men, you bands of students. . . . Are you going to right some social wrong, to place your proteststhe vibrant protest of youthson the uneven scales where the fates of the fortunate and the unfortunate
of the world are so unfairly weighted?82 In mid-1896, Herzl went with Lazare to the club rooms of the Russian Jewish Students in Paris, concluding his speech there with the following words, I do not say to you as yet, Forward March: I only say, Youth to your feet!83 Herzl managed to shift Zolas exhortation of youthful energy to the Jewish people, thereby relinquishing his emotional bonds to Jewish magnates and unleashing tremendous energies in himself and in others. Herzl managed, however, to channel that energy. His peculiar contribution was to begin with and believe in the political power of representative institutions. As a result, he invented (or, rather, showed) the imperious need for a Jewish Congress to put together the Jewish nation, and to give it means of expression, in the liberal sense of the word.84 By focusing on institutions, Herzl forced Jews to momentarily suspend all divisive ideological issues: I consider the issue of the Jews neither in social nor religious terms, even though these things do come into it.85 Both Herzl and Zola write in a style of inexhaustible exhilaration, something both misty and mystic. As Gideon Shimoni writes, Herzls aim was less to provide an accurate blueprint for the Jewish state than to infuse as wide a readership as possible with optimism and enthusiasm by showing what great prospects modern technology could provide for practical realization of a great moral and progressive vision.86 Herzl and Zola shared a fiery brand of total existential engagement. Zola had always been attracted to politics and somewhat envied Barrs and Garibaldi, but he could never rid himself of his habits as homme de lettres (a literary man). Herzl, in contrast, eventually gave his literary concerns a secondary place in order to devote himself mainly to his political vision. Both Zola and Herzl managed to turn the tables on their antisemitic foes by reversing the burden of truth: the former by insisting on an end to secrecy and on the responsibility of higher ups; the latter by insisting that the gentile state prove its ability to protect Jews from the harm inflicted on them by its subjects, a challenge that logically opened the way for Jews to open negotiations with the higher ups. The two men invested themselves in the public sphere through a paradoxical combination of impartiality, showmanship, and dogged determination in order to sustain the attention of rich, poor, and powerful alike. Both practiced a potent combination of Gesinnungsethik (ethic of conviction) and Verantwortungsethik (ethic of responsibility). Both were obsessive in their conviction in the principle of Law, paradoxically, regardless of the personal consequences. Both were political men concerned only with outcomes.87 And both framed their argu-
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ments around immemorial, inalienable, universal rights and invoked the well-being of mankind in order to inspire, in the case of Zola, civil disobedience and, in the case of Herzl, an end to the trend of craven assimilation within modern European societies. By simply clinging to Truth and Justice, and holding in balance the is and the ought to be (i.e., facts and values), both managed to avoid divisive contemporary concerns about the shape of the future. If their arguments approached from several angles the same issue of antisemitism, it should be clear that, conversely, both sought solutions to the same major problem of social reform, that of consensus. Herzl, for his part, hoped to recreate a closely knit community based on the French civic model secured internally by public law and externally by international law but nonetheless open in theory to all comers.88 As he wrote in Altneuland, a book that has been called half political fantasy, half early science fiction la Jules Verne:89
It would be unethical for us to deny a share in our commonwealth to any man, wherever he might come from, whatever his race or creed. For we stand on the shoulders of other civilized peoples. If a man joins usif he accepts our institutions and assumes the duties of our commonwealth he should be entitled to enjoy all our rights. . . . Our slogan must be, now and alwaysMan, thou art my brother.90
For his part, Zolas courageous stand in the Dreyfus Affair has all too often been hailed as a victory for Republican values and hence for the society that had given birth to the great modern concept of droits inalinables. He held an unshakable belief in equality under the law and the abstract citizen unmarked by racial or class difference from the point of view of the law, with all men united in the communion of universal solidarity.91 Both Zola and Herzl employed the same language of quiet determination and moral energy to move others. Both would die within years of utter exhaustion, a common end that might find some explanation in their contradictory efforts to inspire nationalistic fervor in its most pristine outpouring while endorsing the unstoppable march of universal truth. Fulfillment of national destiny and ethereal immanent forces coexisted paradoxically in both spirits.
Notes
1 On antisemitism in France, see, especially, Robert Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France: The Prologue to the Dreyfus Affair (New Brunswick, N.J., 1950); Michel Winock, N...