Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 259
Jews. Born Simon Maximilian—Meir Simha—Südfeld (south field), he changed
his "lowly Jewish" name for a proud European one, Nordau (north pasture). Like
the Hungarian-born Herzl, he was from Budapest and, like him also, sought to
identify himself as a German in every sense. The ugly anti-Semitism of the 1880s
and 1890s halted the integration of this Eastern European Jew into the German
nation. Like other Jews who found personal assimilation problematic, he opted
for collective integration into the modern world—namely, Zionism. This was
not, of course, the way Nordau himself thought of it. As he saw it, although
anti-Jewish hate created nothing, it awakened the dormant consciousness of an
existing race and revived its sense of its own distinction. The failure of "Germanization"
led him to adopt a position of Jewish exclusivity, with the pessimistic
conclusion that a race cannot be exchanged but only improved.
This Zionist leader, convinced that the Jews shared a homogeneous
biological origin, wrote about the "blood ties that exist in the Israelite family." 6
But he wondered whether the Jews had always been physically small or had
been made shorter by the conditions of their lives, which caused them to be
weak and degenerate. Zionism opened exciting vistas for the improvement
of the race by means of agricultural labor, accompanied by gymnastics and
bodybuilding in the open air of the ancestral homeland. His famous speech
at the second Zionist Congress, in which he first spoke of the lost "muscular
Jewry," expressed a passionate longing for a brawny nation-race. 7 "In no other
race or people can gymnastics fulfill such an important educational function,
as it must do among us Jews," he wrote. "It is needed to straighten our backs,
in body and character alike." 8 For the ancient blood to be revived, the Jews
needed a soil, and only Zionism could give them that.
If Nordau failed to become an "authentic" German, he did succeed in
becoming an original Zionist Volkist. The essentialist romanticism fostered in
various channels of German culture was blended into the ideological project
that began to guide the new national ideology.
Nordau was in some ways a hesitant Volkist. By contrast, Martin Buber, who
was for several years the editor in chief of Die Welt ("The World"), the Zionist
movement's main organ, was a bold and consistent Volkist. The philosopher
of religious existentialism, who would later become a man of peace and strive to
bring about a Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, began his nationalist career as one of the
6 Max Nordau, "History of Israel's Children," in Zionist Writings, vol. 2, Jerusalem:
The Zionist Library, [1901] 1960 (in Hebrew), 47.
7 Max Nordau, "Address to the Second Congress," in Zionist Writings, vol. 2, 117. This
speech was preceded by music from Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser,
8 Ibid., 187.