These words were written at the very beginning of Herzl’s career as a Jewish public figure. In 1903, a year before his death, the Zionist leader returned to this subject in a letter in which he scored Jewish life in the Western countries as being blighted not because of anti-Semitism, but because the possibility of developing a unique character and contributing to the world as Jews had been eradicated. As he wrote:

  

As is evident from his writings, Herzl hoped for the “return” of Western Jews to their heritage, “first one candle then another,” until this revival became a “great radiance.” But unlike Ahad Ha’am, Herzl did not see himself as the man who would dictate the exact content of this Jewish revival. On the contrary, Herzl consistently emphasized that both “freethinkers” and the most traditional Orthodox Jews had a place within the Jewish national movement.⁴² In order to make this possible, he resisted every effort to determine precisely what the “Jewishness” of the Jewish state would look like. Such premature determinations, he argued, would only serve to alienate one segment of Jewry or another.

This is among the reasons that The Jewish State, which is so rich in detail on political and economic subjects, is starkly lacking in particulars concerning the way in which the return to the Jewish heritage would express itself once the state had been established. Even where Herzl had something important to say about the Jewish culture of the state, he speaks only in the vaguest terms so as to avoid unnecessary controversy. For example, when, in The Jewish State, he turns to the issue of establishing great Jewish religious centers to meet the “deep religious needs of our people,” he only mentions the crucial role of Mecca in the Islamic world, but is careful not to go further with the analogy. “I do not wish to offend anyone’s religious sensibilities with words that might be misinterpreted,” he writes.⁴³ Yet we know from his diaries that when Herzl later visited Jerusalem, he was still intent on making the city a powerful religious center that would be for the Jews what the city of Mecca was for Moslems.⁴⁴

But Herzl’s reticence in painting detailed pictures of what the Jewish culture of the state would look like did not prevent him from arguing for the Jewish particularism of the state in principle. Indeed, in The Jewish State, Herzl explicitly rejects Rousseau’s universally applicable citizens’ state (what is today referred to as a “state of its citizens”), arguing that no state actually receives its political mandate from a social contract among all its citizens of the type Rousseau envisioned. In fact, argued Herzl, the political guardianship of a people always comes into being when individuals motivated by “higher necessity” step forward to attempt to protect their people’s welfare.⁴⁵ In the case of the Jews, he proposed assembling a “Society of Jews,” to consist of influential Jewish leaders, which would undertake to negotiate with the European states for the creation of a new Jewish polity. In Herzl’s view, it was this Society of Jews that would itself become the sovereign Jewish state:

And this new sovereign state, the Jewish state, would not be a “neutral” regime such as that envisioned by Rousseau. On the contrary, the Jewish state would be established with a particular purpose:

Thus, Herzl’s new state was to be characterized by a specific and intrinsically Jewish mission: Serving as the guardian of the Jews. Of course, such a state could come to be characterized by various “Jewish” cultural attributes; for example, it might work to build up Jerusalem as a center of Jewish religious pilgrimage, as Herzl advocated. But such particularist characteristics were not the essence of what would make the state “Jewish.” They would merely be consequences of the one central principle—that the Jewish state was to serve as the guardian of the Jewish people.

For an example of how this principle of Jewish guardianship would work, one can look to Herzl’s formal testimony before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in London in July 1902. The commission was considering the imposition of restrictions on Russian-Jewish immigration—restrictions that Herzl believed would mean a resounding defeat for Jewish interests, signaling to the world that even a liberal country such as England could not tolerate more than a certain number of Jews.⁴⁸ He therefore testified that Britain could avoid the need to enact such anti-Jewish legislation by assisting in the creation of a self-governing Jewish colony, whose policies would make it “naturally” attractive to Jews, “for they would arrive there as citizens just because they are Jews, and not as aliens.”⁴⁹ Although the Zionist Organization, the real-life version of the “Society of Jews,” had not yet acquired a foothold in Palestine, Herzl was already acting as guardian of the interests of the Jewish people. By publicizing his desire to grant automatic citizenship for immigrant Jews, he was demonstrating how his embryonic Jewish state could do much more than serve as a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. It could also assist Jewry in Britain and other countries by reducing the pressure for radical anti-Jewish “solutions” by their respective governments; and at the same time, those Russian Jews who truly wished to go to England rather than to the Jewish state might be able to keep the right to do so. Herzl’s intercession with Britain thus served as an example of how the Jewish state would be able to pursue policies that would benefit Jews the world over, whether they chose to immigrate to this state or not.

The workings of the principle of Jewish guardianship were also evident in documents that Herzl and his colleagues prepared as the basis of negotiations with the imperial powers. Almost from the establishment of the Zionist Organization, Herzl was active in developing various versions of what was in those days called a “charter”—essentially a constitutional document describing the aims and powers of a government operating in a given territory with the sanction of Britain or one of the other European powers. On the basis of such a charter, Herzl expected to found a Jewish colony or settlement as a prelude to full Jewish independence. Since these drafts described the actual terms under which the Zionists hoped to establish a Jewish state, they are among the more compelling indicators that we have of the kind of state Herzl wanted to establish.

Of these, the most significant is the proposed charter submitted by Herzl to the British government on July 13, 1903, which led to the offer by the British Foreign Office to negotiate over the establishment of a Jewish colony in British East Africa. (The Zionists had been hoping to persuade the British to allow them to establish the settlement in the British-controlled Sinai Peninsula, but this option had fallen through two months earlier.) Prepared by the English Zionist leaders Leopold Greenberg, Joseph Cowen and Israel Zangwill, together with the British lawyer and parliamentarian David Lloyd George—later the prime minister who would actually establish Palestine as the Jewish national home—this draft charter provided that:

1. A “Jewish settlement” would be established which would permit “the settling of Jews under conditions favorable to their retention and encouragement of the Jewish national idea.”

2. The Jewish settlement would be “founded under laws and regulations adopted for the well-being of the Jewish people.”

3. The Jewish settlement would have a “popular government... which shall be Jewish in character and with a Jewish governor....”

4. It would follow English law except where the colony made “alteration and amendments therein based upon Jewish law.”

5. The settlement would have a Jewish name and a Jewish flag.⁵⁰