ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS
1
ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM PRIOR TO THE
HOLOCAUST
From the French Revolution to the unification of Germany and Italy it
appeared that the future foretold the continuing emancipation of Jewry in the wake
of the further development of capitalism and its liberal and modernist values. Even
the Russian pogroms of the 1880s could be seen as the last gasp of a dying feudal
past, rather than a harbinger of things to come. Yet by 1896, when Theodor Herzl
published his Jewish State, such an optimistic scenario could no longer be
realistically envisioned. In 1895 he personally had seen the Parisian mob howling
for the death of Dreyfus. That same year he heard the wild cheers of middle-class
Vienna as they greeted the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger after he had swept the election
for burgomeister.
Born amidst a wave of defeats for the Jews, not only in backward Russia, but in
the very centres of industrial Europe, modern Zionism's pretensions were the
noblest conceivable: the redemption of the downtrodden Jewish people in their own
land. But from the very beginning the movement represented the conviction of a
portion of the Jewish middle class that the future belonged to the Jew-haters, that
anti-Semitism was inevitable, and natural. Firmly convinced that anti-Semitism
could not be beaten, the new World Zionist Organisation never fought it.
Accommodation to anti-Semitism—and pragmatic utilisation of it for the purpose of
obtaining a Jewish state—became the central stratagems of the movement, and it
remained loyal to its earliest conceptions down to and through the Holocaust. In
June l895, in his very first entry in his new Zionist Diary, Herzl laid down this fixed
axiom of Zionism:
In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which
I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the
emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism. 1
In the severest sense, Herzl was a man of his time and class; a monarchist who
believed the best ruler 'un bon tyran'. 2 His Jewish State baldly proclaimed: 'Nor are
1 . Marvin Lowenthal (ed.), The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 6.
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