Thus the colony that Herzl envisioned as eventually gaining independence was not to be a neutral non-Jewish polity that happened to have a majority of Jews. On the contrary, it would have Jewish purposes—the advancement of the “Jewish national idea” and the “well-being of the Jewish people” as a whole. To this end it would have Jewish leaders, a governmental form Jewish in character, and the ability to adopt the provisions of Jewish law. And these Jewish characteristics would be represented by particularist symbols such as a Jewish flag. As Herzl wrote to Max Nordau a few days after this draft charter was submitted to the British government: “We colonize on a national basis, with a flag... and with self-government. The draft charter that we submit today on July 13 on Downing Street contains these demands... and the Jewish nation is there.”⁵¹ (Although the British government did not commit itself to the details of the plan, the Foreign Office responded favorably to the plan in principle, agreeing to entertain favorably proposals for a “Jewish colony or settlement” whose purpose would be to enable Jews “to observe their national customs.” A Jewish governor and Jewish legislation in “religious and purely domestic matters” were also accepted as reasonable.⁵² Due to opposition within the ZO to any negotiations with Britain over settlements outside of Palestine, these discussions with the British were suspended until 1914 when it became evident that Britain might invade Palestine.)

In sum, Herzl’s Jewish state was one whose purpose was to serve as the legal and political guardian of the interests of the Jewish people, and it was this purpose that made the theoretical state he envisioned a “Jewish” one. Nor did Herzl pursue a different course in practice: It was the principle of Jewish guardianship that dictated the policies of the Zionist Organization, the Jewish “government in exile”; and it was this principle that characterized the proposed charter the Zionists submitted to Britain, which envisioned a government that would be “Jewish in character” and that would promulgate “laws and regulations adopted for the well-being of the Jewish people.”

On the other hand, a “state of the Jews” that would have been “neutral”—which is to say, non-Jewish—with regard to the character of its government and the purposes of its policies, would not have served Herzl’s purposes at all. In fact, it is fair to say that it would have been worthless to him.

 

As evidence that Herzl was an advocate of a neutral “state of the Jews,” Israeli intellectuals invariably point to his argument in The Jewish State, to the effect that the Jews have no intention of establishing a theocracy. Through endless repetition, this passage has surely become the best known in Herzl’s writings, and it is constantly being pressed into service as proof that Herzl did not want a Jewish state; or else that he wanted to see a complete “separation” between the state and the Jewish religion; or that he was opposed to the involvement of rabbis in politics. But none of these claims have a basis in Herzl’s thought, and none of them can reasonably be read into the passage in question.

The famous “theocracy” passage reads as follows:

Herzl here compares the rabbinate to the officers of the military, arguing that both have “noble” functions within the state, but that neither should be permitted to extend their authority beyond its proper sphere. It does not take too much effort, however, to recognize that this passage in no way advocates a “separation of religion and state.” No state in Europe had attempted a separation of “military and state,” of course, and if the rabbinate were to have a place in the Jewish state similar to that of the military, then Herzl was in fact arguing for the opposite of such a separation: He was assuming a government such as that familiar from Britain, Germany and Austria of his own day, in which religion, like the military, was politically subordinated to the government of the state, but was nevertheless an integral part of it.⁵⁴ The actual meaning of this passage is that the sphere of state policy belongs to the elected authorities, and that those fulfilling other functions in the state—including generals and chief rabbis—should be firmly prevented from usurping the authority to make such policy.

What, then, did Herzl actually believe concerning the role of the Jewish religion and its representatives in the Jewish state?

One cannot answer this question without first recognizing the place of Judaism in Herzl’s understanding of the Jewish people. As presented in The Jewish State and elsewhere, Herzl’s theory of nationality was based on the belief that peoples appear within history as the result of adversity.⁵⁵ That is, it is the struggle against a common enemy that fuses a great mass of individuals into a people. This view has often been criticized as being exclusively “negative,” but it is really nothing of the sort. On the contrary, as is evident from his essay “The Menora,” Herzl believed that this adversity is to an important extent the catalyst for the creation of the positive content of civilizations—the struggle of the Maccabees and the Hanuka festival being an example of precisely this phenomenon.

An important concomitant of Herzl’s theory of nationality is that if peoples are created in the struggle against adversity, then there is no simple formula—neither land, nor language, nor race, nor even a combination of these—that will exhaustively describe the unifying characteristics of all peoples. That is, not every people would necessarily have the same kind of positive elements at the basis of its civilization. Indeed, a people such as the Germans might be divided religiously and geographically, and its essence might be best expressed in the German language. The Swiss, on the other hand, lacked a common language, but were nevertheless united by history and territory. And the centerpiece of the positive Jewish civilization that unites the Jewish people, according to Herzl, is not language or territory, but religion—”We recognize ourselves as a nation by our faith.”⁵⁶

This is not to say that Herzl opposed efforts to forge Jewish culture beyond the bounds of religion—the revival of the Hebrew language, Jewish art, Jewish literature and a Jewish academia. Herzl supported them all, and he wished to contribute to the Jewish cultural revival himself.⁵⁷ He hoped to write a biblical drama, to be entitled Moses,⁵⁸ and he spoke to his colleagues about his dream of establishing a “neo-Jewish” style in architecture in the Jewish state, even drawing sketches for them so that they could see what he had in mind.⁵⁹ But unlike Ahad Ha’am, who believed he could change the core content of the Jewish people by overthrowing the Jewish religion and replacing it with a “modernist” Jewish culture, Herzl adopted as a political principle the idea that Zionism must “hold tradition sacred.”⁶⁰ (Or, as he liked to say, “I am not planning anything harmful to religion, but just the opposite....”⁶¹) Every individual could make his own contribution to Jewish civilization, but it was not neo-Jewish architecture that was going to be at the heart of the Jewish national identity. It would be Judaism.

The significance of this idea could easily be seen after the founding of the Zionist Organization in 1897. Herzl established the ZO as a democratic movement with a mass membership and annual elections. The Zionist Organization granted women the vote—at a time when virtually no democratic state had yet done so⁶²—and Herzl’s support for other liberal principles, especially freedom of conscience, is well known. As he wrote in The Jewish State, individuals belonging to other peoples or faiths would find themselves welcome and well treated in his state: “Should it happen that men of other creeds and other nationalities come to live among us, we will accord them honorable protection and equality before the law.”⁶³

And yet despite this concern for the welfare of the stranger, Herzl was from his first steps as a Jewish nationalist unwilling to accommodate Jews who had converted to Christianity, whom he considered to have betrayed not only the Jewish faith, but the Jewish people.⁶⁴ Thus while he was adamant that the Zionist Organization and the Jewish state would be willing to take every Jew—”all beggars, all peddlers”⁶⁵—he was overtly hostile to Jews who had betrayed the faith of their fathers:

Nor was this just rhetoric. It was policy. The Zionist Organization would not accept baptized Jews as members.⁶⁷ Despite having been established on a democratic basis, it nonetheless retained this crucial element of the aristocratic republic that Herzl had wished to found: The ZO was the political guardian of the Jews, and would one day become the government of the Jewish state.⁶⁸ And a person could hardly be expected to serve as guardian of the Jews if he could not understand that in apostasy he had betrayed his people.