Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
It would be as reasonable to ascribe a Walt Whitman chant to Emerson, or a Bernard Shaw satire to Jonathan Edwards, as to ascribe these crude, meandering pages to the crystalline intellect of Theodor Herzl.
It was no longer internal Jewish problem only, not a theme for discussion only at Zionist meetings, not a problem to heat the spirits of Jewish writers. The problem of Jewish exile now occupied a place on the agenda of international affairs. Herzl was not so distant from his people as many of the Russian Zionists at first surmised.
They all " "Yes, I know: I have written about that," I said. "And now there is another one, the Jewish. Have you read the plan for 'A Jewish State, by Dr. Herzl, of Vienna? No dreamer he, but wonderfully sane, despite his lofty conception of a moralised, rationalised, modern State. Too 'modern, indeed, this idea of Messiah as a joint-stock company! I predicted years ago we should come to that.
Only in "The Jewish State" will you find reference to a movement based upon Jews who endorse a "fixed program," and then become members under the "discipline" of leadership. When Herzl faced the First Congress, he saw that this conception of Zionism was foreign to the nature and character of the Jewish people. The shekel was the registry of a name.
The conversation turned to the Jewish question and to the growth of the anti-Semitic movement in Vienna, the hometown of both Herzl and Beer. It was useless for the Jew to turn artist and to dissociate himself from money, said Herzl. "The blot sticks. We can't break away from the ghetto."
Illumined thus in retrospect, the "curious excitement" which gripped Herzl on that occasion takes on a special significance. "Until that time most of us believed that the solution of the Jewish question was to be patiently waited for as part of the general development of mankind.
It became clear to Herzl that he would have to take an active part in the task he had set forth in "The Jewish State." He no longer felt that he stood alone. He was not inclined to appear on a public platform. He had the shyness of the man who had always written what he had to say. He also felt that it would do more harm than good if his ideas were to be obscured by his personal presence.
Herzl intended to use the influence of the Germans to affect the Sultan and make him more sympathetic to Zionist proposals. Herzl told the Grand Duke that he would like to have Zionism included within the cultural sphere of German interests. The Grand Duke said that the Kaiser seemed inclined to take Jewish migration under German protection.
At a number of Congresses, in his articles in Die Welt, Herzl showed how that idea had become an integral part of his life, although his first thoughts ran in quite another direction. But his analysis of anti-Semitism and how to approach the problem remains true today after Hitler, as it was true then after Dreyfus. This was the authentic revelation that in his last days was fixed in his mind.
Theodore Herzl was the first Jew who projected the Jewish question as an international problem. "The Jewish State," written fifty years ago, was the first public expression, in a modern language, by a modern Jew, of a dynamic conception of how the solution of the problem could be accelerated and the ancient Jewish hope, slumbering in Jewish memory for two thousand years, could be fulfilled.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking