Anglomania (31 page)

These may sound like odd thoughts for a man who, despite his belief in the Church of England, remained self-consciously a Jew. His views matched those of European anti-Semites all too well. Yet there was a twisted logic there, entirely concocted by himself. Disraeli hated the notion of Jews as a “people of stockbrokers” as much as Herzl did. But he lacked Karl Marx’s desire to annihilate his own or anybody else’s Jewishness. So he reinvented the idea of Jews, at the same time reinventing the idea of the English. The Jews would find their place in the hierarchy of English society as the ur-aristocrats and as the guardians, or indeed inventors, of Anglo-Saxon traditions.

The English, in Disraeli’s view, had been protected against European upheavals by their insular position. After the terrible disorders of 1789 and 1848, only the English had been able to conserve a government “by traditionary influences.” That is, the English had held on to an ancien régime that governed by consent, not force. This popular consent was due to irrational but vital forces, such as obedience to
ancient customs, deference to noble families, and faith in a national church. Such a view was of course radically opposed to Voltaire’s Enlightenment Anglophilia. It was far more in tune with Herder’s ideas. The national community had to be defended at all costs against rootless cosmopolitans, shallow rationalists, and grasping businessmen, who would tear it apart in their selfish greed. Normally, of course, these are coded phrases used by anti-Semites for Jews. Disraeli simply stood the stereotype on its head.

“The Jews,” he wrote in
Lord George Bentinck
, “are the trustees of tradition, and the conservators of the religious element. They are a living and the most striking element of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man.” He had already pointed out in
Coningsby
and other novels that the Jews “are the most ancient, if not the only, unmixed blood that dwells in cities.” Proud of this fact, the Jews were by nature against the doctrine of the equality of man. Besides, they were blessed with the gift of accumulating wealth. That is why the Jews were natural conservatives. “Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy.” So not only were Jews natural conservatives, they were natural English Conservatives. Indeed, the Saxons and the Celts should “daily acknowledge on their knees, with reverent gratitude” that the Hebrews were the fathers of the Christian faith, and it should never be forgotten that it was “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon” that “won the boasted liberties of England.”

This was certainly one way of tackling the problem of Jewish emancipation, or indeed assimilation. It also served as a clever justification for Disraeli’s leadership of the Tory party. His propaganda for property and noble privilege perfectly suited the toffs and squires whose interests he sought to represent. But all his talk of race had unforeseen consequences. Not only did Disraeli’s racial views blend in with European anti-Semitism, but they were thrown back in his own face. That he was regarded by some members of his own party as a Jewish charlatan, who cloaked the interests of his own “race” in the Union Jack, was malicious and certainly unjust. But Disraeli had contributed at least as much as Charles Maurras, and other stirrers of that poisonous European brew, to the racial rather than constitutional definition of nationhood.

Disraeli’s view of the Jews as proto-Christians, and of Christianity as “completed Judaism,” also fell on fertile ground in England. Since
the sixteenth century, Protestants had taken up the idea of England as the nation chosen by God to purify the faith from popery. They read the Old Testament, adopted Hebrew names, looked for Lost Tribes, prayed for Christ’s Second Coming, and petitioned (in 1649) for the return to Britain of the people of Israel. William Hechler, the eccentric vicar who introduced Herzl to the grand duke of Baden, was a man of this kind. There were many like him. Upper-class British Protestants were much more sympathetic to Herzl’s cause than upper-class British Jews. When he was told about a British bishop who prayed for God’s assistance in the Zionist project, Herzl concluded that “these simple Christian souls are much better than our Jewish clerics, who only think of their wedding fees from rich Jews.”

B
Y THE TIME
of his visit in 1901, Herzl had become something of a celebrity in London society. “I am awfully dinnered,” he noted in English in his diary. Society, he wrote on June 15, “is curious about me. I am now a curiosity, a dish on the dinner table, one comes to meet Dr. Herzl.” He mentions such glittering names as Princess Löwenstein, Lady Jane Taylor (useful for an introduction to the king), and Gilbert Fargher, “both a Lord and an actor.” He ends this entry with a sigh, however: “Only the Jews of the Upper Tens have no interest in me at all.”

The Protestant romance with Zion confirmed all manner of anti-Semitic paranoia on the Continent, especially in French anti-Dreyfusard circles. The title of one particularly unpleasant tract, published in Paris in 1895, sums it up nicely:
Is the Englishman a Jew?
(
L’Anglais est-il un Juif?
). The question mark is actually superfluous, for the author, Louis Martin, believes that the Englishman is Jewish by nature, as are the Huguenots, the Americans, and the Freemasons. Martin can see only one distinction between the Englishman and the Jew: “The Jews are excellent musicians; the English are terrible musicians.” For the rest, they are the same: treacherous, parasitic, greedy, mercantile, devilishly clever at getting other people to fight for Anglo/Jewish interests, and bent on taking over the world.

The book would not be worth quoting if it weren’t for the remarkably Disraelian echoes in some of Martin’s conclusions. The earl of
Beaconsfield expressed himself with more polish and wit, and his ideas, though strange enough, were not quite as demented as Martin’s. Disraeli would surely have been surprised to hear that Jews and Englishmen were plotting to establish a United States of Europe in order to break up ancient nations, such as France, and rule the Continent. He might also have quibbled with Martin’s proposal that Jews slipped into the British Isles in ancient times disguised as Anglo-Saxons. After all, says Martin, isn’t “Saxon” really a corruption of “Isaacson”? But the idea of Jews and Anglo-Saxon Protestants having a common destiny was shared by Disraeli. So was the notion of England’s God-given task to run much of the world. America “is intensely Semitic, and has prospered accordingly.” Disraeli said that, not Martin, and he wasn’t referring to Jewish immigrants.

Herzl, however, would never have said such a thing. Whatever he might have had in common with Disraeli, he had no time for race theories. The first person he saw in London in the winter of 1895 was a writer named Israel Zangwill, whose stories about poor Jewish immigrants were well received in England. They appealed to the English love of the picturesque. He was in fact an important member of the Jewish community. But Zangwill was not the kind of man who naturally appealed to Herzl. Nor was his dingy house in Kilburn to Herzl’s taste. And they could communicate only in French, which Zangwill spoke badly. Herzl describes Zangwill as an ill-dressed figure, sitting by the fireplace of a messy room full of books: “a long-nosed Negroid type with very woolly black hair parted in the middle.” But Zangwill was all in favor of territorial independence for the Jews, and that was the main thing. When he stated his racial views, however, Herzl had to take issue. Zangwill talked about the Jews as a race. Herzl noted that you only needed to look at Zangwill’s Negroid face, and then at his own sallow but nonetheless patrician features, to see how wrong this was. The Jews were “a historical unit,” he said, “but a nation of anthropological diversity. That will suffice for the Jewish state too. No state has racial unity.”

Nor would the future state be based on one religion. Herzl hardly mentions religion in his Zionist diary notes made after that night of
Tannhäuser
in Paris. His only suggestions are to make the Wonder Rabbi of Sadagora (a Hasidic rabbi who worked miracles) into a provincial “archbishop” and to dress high priests up in splendid robes.
There are no references to biblical lands, let alone a divine right to their ownership. It was not so very difficult for him, therefore, to take seriously Joseph Chamberlain’s offer of Uganda (actually a part of Kenya) as a Jewish homeland. It wasn’t hard for the ultra-Orthodox either, by the way. Zion to them was not a place in this world.

The first person to suggest Uganda as an option was not the British colonial secretary, but Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild, in 1902. After bragging about the high distinctions he had won from the Austrian and Prussian courts, Rothschild enraged Herzl with the remark that Palestine sounded “too Jewish.” He feared it would put people off. Rothschild thought Uganda might be more suitable. Herzl rejected the idea out of hand. Then Chamberlain visited Uganda in 1903 and thought it might suit Herzl’s plans very well. In fact, Herzl preferred Palestine as the final destination. But after a particularly nasty pogrom in Bessarabia, Herzl began to see the attraction of Uganda as at least a temporary refuge—“a night shelter”—for desperate eastern Jews. It was those same eastern Jews, however, desperate as they were, who called Herzl a traitor for even suggesting such a thing. So the plan was dropped.

The Ugandan episode showed the peculiar nature of Herzl’s enterprise. Most of his followers, and many of his British supporters, took a romantic and biblical view of nationhood. Palestine should once again be the Jewish homeland, not only because Jews of the diaspora were oppressed but because of ancient ties to the soil. Daniel Deronda, the Anglo-Jewish hero in George Eliot’s novel of that title, feels bound to return to Palestine because it is his ancestral land. Yet Herzl himself was much less interested in ancestral ties than in rescuing Jews from persecution and turning the “people of stockbrokers” into a
Kulturvolk
. As an Anglophile, Herzl admired historical continuity, tradition, nobility, and all that. But as a Zionist he was a nation builder, a Utopian architect of a New Society. He was fascinated by the idea of, as it were, building Jerusalem from scratch. Creating the Jewish Utopia would not be an act of ancestor worship, but of will. It was meant, after all, to be a refuge from the Old World.

In 1898, Herzl traveled to England through Holland, to catch a steamer from Vlissingen to Queenborough. Gazing at the redbrick houses and churches erected on the flat Dutch earth, he saw proof that cities were constructed by human will. He noted, in a flash of imaginative
hubris: “When I point my finger at a spot and say, here we will have a city, then a city will emerge. The whole of Holland proves what man can pull from the most thankless soil.” Herzl, then, unlike Disraeli, was a rationalist in this respect. He would plant Voltaire’s coconut trees in the desert of Palestine.

Disraeli had used his romantic imagination to fit the world’s most “ancient aristocracy,” the Jews, into an organic English nation. Herzl would create the world’s newest aristocracy, based not on history, or birth, or “heritage,” but merit. The New Society would not be burdened by the past in any way. To avoid unequal opportunity, there would be no private education. Because all land would belong to the state, there would be no landowning class. There would be complete religious freedom, and the Jewish state would be open to all people, Jews and gentiles. Mosques and synagogues and churches would stand side by side. Industry would be organized in huge cooperatives. There would be welfare for all who needed it.

Parts of
Altneuland
read like a mixture of Jules Verne and communist propaganda: a nineteenth-century dream of Progress. The descriptions of thundering hydroelectric turbines, driving the power of half a million horses through the Dead Sea, could have come straight from
China Reconstructs
. Herzl’s new Jerusalem, with its elevated electric tram, wide boulevards, science institutes, department stores, and its gigantic Peace Palace, the center for all the peace-loving people of the world, is a modernist Utopia. The most telling details of Herzl’s vision are not about skyscrapers or electric power, however, but about social pride, which brings us straight back to Herzl’s preoccupation with the English upper class.

In 1891, traveling in Spain, Herzl asked a Viennese friend for an introduction to the Austrian embassy in Madrid. He wrote that he wanted to be “well received, and that is not so simple when one is not a
Herr von
. Were I an English gentleman, the mere mention of my name would suffice. This is quite humiliating for us all, but one bears what one cannot change.” In Altneuland, such humiliations no longer existed. In the New Society every Jew could be just like an English gentleman. A key scene in the novel takes place in the Jerusalem studio of the master painter Isaacs. When Friedrich Löwenberg and his wife Mirjam (who can sing Wagner beautifully) visit the painter, he is
working on a portrait of Lady Lillian, wife of Lord Sudbury. Friedrich, who started life, as did Herzl, as an anguished Viennese intellectual, notes how Isaacs talks to the English lord and his wife with such assurance, such lightness, indeed quite as an equal. “And yet,” Friedrich thinks to himself, Isaacs too “was once a poor Jewboy, whose talent alone elevated him to his high worldly status.” This is not the end of this touching scene, however. Lady Lillian whispers something to Mirjam. Observing them standing side by side, Friedrich is filled with pride: “Mirjam, dark-haired, dressed simply and somewhat smaller in build, really did not look at all bad in comparison with the towering, English blonde …”

This, then, is the crucial difference between Herzl and Disraeli. The Viennese intellectual did not invent an ancient ancestry so Jews could talk to lords and ladies as equals: he invented a Jewish state. This explains his resentful attitude to Anglo-Jewish grandees. Herzl understood the sweet pull of assimilation. As he said, he would have been a jingo too. But he knew it was not an option. He was not born in England. Nor were most other Jews. And few of them had enough
Bildung
anyway. So when Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild told him he didn’t believe in Zionism because he wanted to be an Englishman, Herzl reacted with scorn. That was all very well for a rich British lord to say, but what about the millions of oppressed Jews in the east? The best thing, in Herzl’s opinion, was to found a Jewish colony on British territory.