Did Herzl Want A “Jewish” State?

By Yoram Hazony

Even after Herzl's deconstruction, the answer is still yes.

The desire not to be “pressured” by rabbis was characteristic of Herzl’s personal and political outlook. Yet at the same time, Herzl’s growing attachment to the traditions of the Jewish people rapidly outstripped his wariness of rabbis. “I am taking up once again the torn thread of the tradition of our people,” he noted in his diary,²⁹ and the more he pulled on this thread, the more sympathetic he became to Jewish custom. Indeed, two years after the incident with Guedemann, he published an essay entitled “The Menora,” in which he described the joy he felt at turning his back on Christmas, and for the first time lighting the traditional Hanuka candelabrum with his children. In this essay, Herzl described an unnamed German-Jewish intellectual—quite obviously Herzl—as someone who had “long since ceased to care about his Jewish origin or about the faith of his fathers.” Yet despite this distance, he wrote, he had always been “a man who deep in his soul felt the need to be a Jew.” And when he witnessed the rising tide of anti-Semitism around him, this need began to force its way to the surface. As he described the process of change in “The Menora”:

Gradually his soul became one bleeding wound. Now this secret psychic torment had the effect of steering him to its source, namely, his Jewishness, with the result that he experienced a change that might never have taken place in better days.... He began to love Judaism with a great fervor. At first he did not fully acknowledge this... but finally it grew so powerful... that there was only one way out... namely, to return to Judaism.³⁰

Herzl describes how he struggled with himself, in the end realizing that even though he was distant from things Jewish, he at least had the opportunity to give his children a Jewish education. And this education was to begin with Hanuka, the festival of the Maccabees:

In previous years, he had let the festival... pass unobserved. Now, however, he used it as an occasion to provide his children with a beautiful memory for the future.... A menora was acquired.... The very sound of the name, which he now pronounced in front of the children every evening, gave him pleasure. Its sound was especially lovely when it came from the mouth of a child.

The first candle was lit and the origin of the holiday was retold: The miracle of the little lamp... as well as the story of the return from the Babylonian exile, of the Second Temple, of the Maccabees. Our friend told his children all he knew. It was not much, but for them it was enough. When the second candle was lit, they repeated what he had told them, and although they had learned it all from him, it seemed to him quite new and beautiful. In the days that followed, he could hardly wait for the evenings, which became ever brighter....

There came the eighth day, on which the entire row of lights is kindled.... A great radiance shone forth from the menora. The eyes of the children sparkled. For our friend, the occasion became a parable for the kindling of a whole nation. First one candle... then another, and yet another.... When all the candles are ablaze, everyone must stop in amazement and rejoice at what has been wrought.³¹

This is not a tale told by a man who is opposed to the Jewish character of the Jews. On the contrary, the “return to Judaism” which was at the basis of Zionism was for Herzl a “great radiance,” and he was steadfast in his belief that “the greatest triumph of Zionism is having led a youth that already was lost to his people back to Judaism.”³²

Moreover, Herzl’s diaries show that this positive inclination towards the heritage of his people was by no means limited to the lighting of the Hanuka candelabrum. He similarly reports the respect—and sometimes the delight—with which he participated in other Jewish customs: Friday night services, being called up to read from the Tora, the traditional grace after meals, the Passover seder, his children’s recitation of a bedtime prayer in Hebrew.³³ He wrote sympathetically about the Jewish Sabbath, and emphatically about the symbolism of the Star of David.³⁴ He cited the Bible as the basis of the Jewish claim to Palestine.³⁵ His skepticism concerning the possibility of reviving Hebrew similarly gave way to enthusiasm, and he not only took lessons in Hebrew, but had his children tutored in the ancient language of the Jews.³⁶

Nor was Herzl an atheist—as is frequently claimed—and early on his diaries begin to reflect his struggles to explain why the idea of God should be retained, criticizing Spinoza’s deity as being too “inert”:

I want to bring up my children with what might be called the historical God.... I can conceive of an omnipresent will, for I see it at work in the physical world. I see it as I can see the functioning of a muscle. The world is the body and God is the functioning of it. The ultimate purpose I do not and need not know. For me it is enough that it is something higher....³⁷

Indeed, Herzl’s diaries, in which he scrupulously recorded his evolving feelings, often refer to God. And although these references are erratic, uncertain and generally embarrassed, they are sometimes also straightforward in the belief they express:

By means of our state, we can educate our people for tasks which still lie beyond our horizon. For God would not have preserved our people for so long if we did not have another destiny in the history of mankind.³⁸

Obviously, none of this means that Herzl became an Orthodox Jew, either in his observance or in his beliefs. Until his death at the age of forty-four, Herzl’s understanding of the Jewish faith remained fiercely independent of all movements. But his need to struggle with the Jewish tradition rather than to reject it outright rendered Herzl’s attitude to being a Jew so very different from the facile anti-Jewish views that are attributed to him. Certainly, he did not find Jewish customs and traditions and ideas easy to accept, but he was far from being an opponent of such traditions. On the contrary, he believed that his overexposure to non-Jewish culture had robbed him of the “spiritual counterpoise which our strong forefathers had possessed”—and this was an error he would not repeat with his own children. As he wrote in “The Menora”:

He had absorbed ineradicable elements from the cultures of the nations among which his intellectual pursuits had taken him.... This gave rise to many doubts.... Perhaps the generation that had grown up under the influence of other cultures was no longer capable of that return [to Judaism] which he had discovered as the solution. But the next generation, provided it were given the right guidance early enough, would be able to do so. He therefore tried to make sure that his own children, at least, would be shown the right way. He was going to give them a Jewish education from the very beginning.³⁹

A man who considers it important that his children be “shown the right way” by receiving the Jewish education he himself had not received may be many things, but he is not a man attempting to bring up a family of “Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race.” No, Herzl believed that his children must be raised as Jews, so that they would not suffer the distress that comes of an over-rootedness in “non-Jewish customs.”

And far from seeing this as a personal matter for his family, Herzl understood that the raising of a nation of Jewish children, who would develop a unique Jewish character, was one of the essential reasons for founding a Jewish state. As he wrote in an essay called “Judaism,” which he published not long after the appearance of The Jewish State, the only path to the development of such a unique Jewish character was to regain the inner security possessed by past generations of Jews:

The atrocities of the Middle Ages were unprecedented, and the people who withstood those tortures must have had some great strength, an inner unity which we have lost. A generation which has grown apart from Judaism does not have this unity. It can neither rely upon our past nor look to our future. That is why we shall once more retreat into Judaism and never again permit ourselves to be thrown out of this fortress.... We shall thereby regain our lost inner wholeness and along with it a little character—our own character. Not a Marrano-like, borrowed, untruthful character, but our own.⁴⁰

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