Herzl may very well have had the same thing in mind in coining the term Judenstaat. The Jews in a given city often lived in a particular district, which was sometimes referred to as the Judenstadt (“Jew Town”). Indeed, the Altneuschul itself was situated in Prague’s Judenstadt. By calling his book Der Judenstaat, Herzl thus employed another pun to get across precisely the same central ideological point that he made later with the title of his novel. Jews were called upon to leave their town, their Jewish district, and exchange it for something that sounded similar, but which was in reality far greater: The Jewish state.

In sum, the claim that Herzl intended the word Judenstaat to mean “the state of the Jews,” and not “Jewish state,” is simply mistaken. Herzl was himself the inventor of the term “Jewish state,” and he was perfectly comfortable and consistent in using this term throughout the years that he led the Zionist movement.

There remains, of course, the problem of the Hebrew edition of Herzl’s book, which has been called Medinat Hayehudim (“The State of the Jews”) since it was first translated in 1896 at the initiative of the Tushia publishing house in Warsaw. It is this Hebrew-language title which has, of course, been the single greatest factor in persuading Israelis that Herzl was opposed to the term “Jewish state.” But in light of the fact that Herzl himself saw no difficulty in using the term “Jewish state,” it seems unlikely that the choice of the Hebrew title was actually of real significance. Much more plausible is that Herzl—who knew almost no Hebrew—did not delve too deeply into the matter of the Hebrew title; or that he simply asked his translator, the Viennese Hebraist Michael Berkowicz, which option sounded better.

Moreover, one need only read Berkowicz’s edition in order to realize that the translator did not feel the need to be too consistent about using the expression medinat hayehudim (“state of the Jews”) as the “correct” translation of the German word Judenstaat. On the contrary, Berkowicz’s translation used a number of different expressions to render this word into Hebrew—one of which was the term medina yehudit (“Jewish state”).²⁰


 

To this point, I have considered the semantic evidence that Herzl believed the expression “Jewish state” to be the best available translation of the word Judenstaat. But this does not answer the substantive argument that has been advanced concerning Herzl’s intention in publishing his book. For even if Herzl did prefer the term “Jewish state,” as I have suggested, it is still theoretically possible that what he meant by this term was what is today being referred to as the “state of the Jews”: An essentially neutral state much like the one envisioned in Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, which, although it would have a majority of Jews, would otherwise not be constituted as a Jewish state in any way. An even more extreme possibility—which is likewise popular among Israeli intellectuals—is that even the Jews themselves, once they were living in Herzl’s “state of the Jews,” were not intended to remain distinctively Jewish in a significant cultural sense, but would merely be assimilated Jews (or former Jews), living free of anti-Semitism in a new and more comfortable location. It goes without saying that if this were the case, and the Jews of the Jewish state were to lose their unique Jewish character and ideals, it would not be long before the state would cease to be Jewish in any way as well.

It is therefore worth turning first to the argument that the Jews of Herzl’s Judenstaat were not themselves intended to be distinctively Jewish. Thereafter, I will return to the issue of the intrinsically Jewish character of their state.

The idea that Herzl was a proponent of creating a “non-Jewish” state comprised of thoroughly assimilated Jews is almost as old as the Zionist movement itself, going all the way back to Ahad Ha’am’s blistering attacks on Herzl and his lieutenant Max Nordau, whom he accused of wanting to establish a “state of Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race.”²¹ And similar claims continue to be made down to our own day. Consider, for example, the description of Herzl by Amnon Rubinstein in his book The Zionist Dream Revisited: From Herzl to Gush Emunim and Back. According to Rubinstein, Herzl was a “cosmopolitan,” whose dedication to the idea of a Jewish state “was neither motivated, nor accompanied, by a return to Judaism.” What Herzl really wanted was a state where the Jews would be free to be “Europeans”:

Or, as Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin wrote recently concerning Herzl:

Nor is this kind of reading of Herzl limited to Rubinstein and Beilin. Similar views are expressed frequently by Israeli cultural figures.²⁴

Yet it is important to recognize that the claim that Herzl wished to found a “state of Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race” did not originate with Herzl. He himself never made statements to this effect. To find such a description of his aims, one must go to the writings of his most unrelenting political rival, Ahad Ha’am, whose purpose in making such claims was to discredit Herzl among the traditional Russian Jews who were the largest constituency in Herzl’s Zionist Organization.²⁵ This does not mean that those who repeat this argument today do so out of improper motives. But since Ahad Ha’am outlived Herzl by twenty-three years—eventually moving to Palestine when it came under British rule—it is nevertheless true that much of what is said today about Herzl’s Jewishness is based on what was originally a politically motivated and not necessarily fair rendering of him. To take just one glaring example, no one who knew Herzl’s thought reasonably well could have accused him of desiring a state comprised of members of the “Jewish race”—for the simple reason that Herzl consistently rejected the idea that the Jews were a race.²⁶ Instead, he believed that Jews were united only by a common heritage and culture, and it was this Jewish cultural identity that he saw as the cornerstone of Jewish nationalism.

To understand Herzl’s views on this subject, one must begin with what he himself referred to as his own “return to Judaism.”²⁷ As everyone knows, Herzl began his Zionist career as a thoroughly assimilated Jew. Nonetheless, this characterization is often used to imply, incorrectly, that he had no Jewish roots. In fact, Herzl went to a Jewish elementary school, and his father took him to Friday night services as a child. His grandfather, from whom Herzl may have absorbed the idea of the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient independence, was an observant Jew, and a follower of R. Yehuda Alkalai, one of the leading Jewish nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century. But it is nonetheless clear from Herzl’s diaries and other sources that, before his embrace of Jewish nationalism at the age of thirty-five, he had become extremely distanced from almost anything distinctively “Jewish.” It suffices to recall that on Christmas Eve 1895—after Herzl had spent months badgering Vienna’s chief rabbi Moritz Guedemann about the idea of establishing a Jewish state—the rabbi walked into Herzl’s living room to discover him lighting a Christmas tree. As Herzl writes in his diary: