Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Munson: The best Herzl biography remains Amos Elon’s Herzl (1975). Elon mentions that Herzl initially thought Dreyfus was guilty, but he also notes that when Herzl heard the Parisian mob’s shouts of “Down with the Jews,” he “sensed a kind of evil-smelling fog rise from the massed crowd” (p. 127). Elon states that Herzl’s editors at the Neue Freie Presse changed his account of the Parisian mob’s chant of “Death to the Jews” after Dreyfus’s conviction to “Death to the traitors” to avoid exacerbating anti-Semitism in Vienna (pp. 128-29).

Sarid, A man of action, Haaretz, November 11, 2007

We have been taught that the Dreyfus Affair, in 1894, planted the seed of Zionism in Herzl; that the humiliating public ceremony, by which the French captain was stripped of his rank in the French army, left the Austrian journalist shocked, pained and angry, and suddenly removed the scales from his eyes; that through the hatred directed at Dreyfus, Herzl came to understand the meaning of the situation of European Jews in general.

Now Avineri comes along and changes the picture: It turns out that initially, Herzl was convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt: “It is now clear that Captain Dreyfus sold his country’s defensive secrets to the Germans,” the correspondent calmly reported to his journal, without even noting his subject’s Jewish identity. In a later dispatch, he reports, without qualification, the comment of the French war minister, General Mercier, that “the guilt of Captain Dreyfus is indisputable.” Even in his piece describing the cashiering ceremony, and the breaking of his sword, there is no clear echo of the cries of “Death to the Jews” that we all read about in our textbooks.

Herzl heard the crowd, which watched the ceremony from outside the gates, shout “Death to the traitor,” and he also reported hearing Dreyfus called “Traitor Judas.” That’s what he heard, and that’s what he reported before he and others who also were there decided to rewrite history, and the cry of “Death to the Jews” took on a canonical status. On December 30, 1894, a day before the rejection of Dreyfus’ appeal of his conviction, Herzl published a long and detailed article in the Neue Freie Presse summing up the major events of the preceding year in France: The Dreyfus trial is not even mentioned in it. Herzl left Paris the following summer. When he returned to Vienna, the Dreyfus trial was still an unremarkable event, which hadn’t yet turned into an “affair” that rang of anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus affair came to its conclusion only a decade later, in 1906, two years after Herzl’s death. Emile Zola’s “J’accuse,” in January 1898, a half year after the convening of the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, by which time Herzl’s attention was fully focused on his movement.

Hence, it was not the Dreyfus Affair, as an event in and of itself, that wakened in Herzl the impulse to go along the ways of Zion that mourn, which he tried to pave the way anew after a period of two millennia of neglect, having become finally convinced that all roads must lead to the Land of Israel, and not to Argentina or El-Arish, nor to Uganda, that there’s no point looking for shortcuts. Herzl adopted that road map after trials and errors that almost succeeded in derailing him, and leaving him in the margins of history.