Theodor Herzl: The Birth of Political Zionism - Ep. 1: The Challenge of Establishing a Jewish State

hertzel where anyone in his shoes faced a triple challenge and when we think what he must have been like as a leader we have to recognize the gravity of that challenge and the relatively few resources he had available to meet it on May 14th 1948 David ben-gurion stood in a tel-aviv museum that would come to be known as Independence Hall and declared the establishment of the State of Israel you would see attitude Wow you read a carefully drafted text a text that earned the support of every faction of every Jewish community in the Land of Israel from secular socialists to Orthodox rabbis that Declaration of Independence referred to one man as the spiritual father of the Jewish state Theodor Herzl a portrait of Herzl was hung between two Israeli flags on the wall behind ben-gurion as he spoke what happened on that summer day in Herzl 's name and under his village the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel was of momentous consequence for the Jewish people and at that first moment of Independence in the first moments of modern Israeli history the founders of Israel felt it necessary to express their indebtedness to a Hungarian journalist and editor who died 44 years before i'm jonathan silver from the tikva fund and this course brings us to 19th century Europe to the life the writing the statesmanship and the legacy of Theodor Herzl as we'll see with little institutional support with virtually no resources or political leverage the sheer force of Herzl x' writing and will carried him to sit across the negotiating table from kings and emperors and to argue that an ancient people scattered across the face of the earth must again recover its national sovereignty in the land of their fathers Shalem college co-founder and executive vice president daniel Palliser leads the examination of Herzl Zionist statesmanship and helps us relive the arguments and dilemmas of early Zionist history in Theodore Herzl and the birth of political Zionism we will confront Herzl fateful moments of decision when the future of the Jewish state hung in the balance dr. Paulo stars we enter into this first lecture we're gonna get to meet some of the figures that will feature in the story some of the unique challenges that Herzl faced let's just begin who is Theodor Herzl Theodor Herzl is the founder of the Jewish state he's one of the three people about whom one can say without him there wouldn't be a Jewish state what's extraordinary about him is that whereas national movements usually have a few people who are the great thinkers and writers in American terms you talk about a Thomas Paine then they have other people who might be the great political leaders it's a Hamilton it's a Madison they have still others who are the great diplomats John Adams Thomas Jefferson and then they have that presiding great figure of a George Washington what makes Herzl so absolutely unique is he was all of those things wrapped into one he without there being of people already assembled in a land without there being a consensus that a state should exist without most of the normal basis for building a state he created one almost out of whole cloth and he played virtually every leading role himself so as a scholar and as a patriot of the state that Herzl brought into being how did you discover hurt souls writing and and develop this research interest in his career so a great deal of the credit here goes to other people first and foremost my longtime friend and colleague yarmulkes Oney became very interested in her soul and that too was through our longtime colleague afeared ivory and so yarn began working on a project that culminated in a book which he called the Jewish state in which Herzl really plays the leading starring role and also a series of essays both an azure and in other publications and in speaking to him and in reading drafts of what he was doing I started becoming more and more enamored of Herzl the next step also brought about was by my colleagues was through the Shalom Center which is where erm was a fair Avery was I was we began a lobbying effort to get Herzl who shockingly really was under-recognized underappreciated in the State of Israel that he had found it and so one of my colleagues he Shia at sneer director-general launched this movement to get the Knesset to pass Knesset being Israel's parliament to pass a Herzl law and to designate a Herzl day and at least one day a year there would be a national body making sure that people thought about Herzl just as in the United States you have Washington's day or at least in the old days you had Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's birthday and you know in Latin America in many places C Mon Bolivar is celebrated and so on and this lobbying effort was successful Herzl law was passed with wall-to-wall support within Israel's parliament and they were looking for somebody who was gonna head this council and thanks to the work of my colleagues since I was at the time the president of the Shalom Center I was chosen appointed by Israel's prime minister to head the Herzl Council so for three years I was the official Herzl guy for the Prime Minister's Office for the State of Israel and that carried serious responsibilities so then I began reading in earnest and interviewing on television and the radio and going around and speaking about Herzl and after a while you read one biography which was fascinating and then you read the next biography and you read the next one and then you read Herzl Diaries and you read and reread the Jewish state and you read his utopian novel Alf nylon and assert at a certain point people started asking me to lecture more academically and to teach about Herzl and given the sense of debt that I feel to him as an israeli for having built the country that is really the focus of my life and a wonderful home for my family figure the least that I can do is some teaching and speaking about her tone so for a young person who's just being introduced to Herzl in these lectures in this course any guidelines that or guidance that you wish to offer just as the big as they begin to learn about him I think the first guideline I would give is you have to unknown the things that you already know because if you sit today a young person you probably born around the time the State of Israel was 4550 years old you can't imagine a reality without the State of Israel and in fact your parents probably can't imagine a reality without the State of Israel and so since you don't know any other reality it's obvious the state was gonna be formed the only question is who's gonna do it how it's gonna happen what's the vote going to be in the United Nations turn the clock back to 1895 the least obvious thing in the world is the creation of a Jewish state the highest climb of the tallest mountain pushing up the heaviest Boulder is to credit is to try to create that state and so the first thing you have to do is to imagine that this is virtually impossible which was would almost everybody other than Herzl thought once you've got down that this is virtually impossible and you recognize the intellectual obstacles the political obstacles and the diplomatic obstacles then you can start to think what would you have done if you were Theodor Herzl once you're in that situation you can start appreciating what assets Herzl personally had and then you can watch hopefully fascinated captivated to see the way he overcomes each of these challenges using his own assets using the assets of the Jewish people using his allies many of whom were themselves Christians and saw a great meaning in the restoration of the Jews to their historic homeland you see if you can turn the clock back and see what he did then you can start learning lessons of leadership and I guess my second piece of advice would be don't look at this just as history even though it's compelling fascinating history look at this as if you yourself have to figure out from Herzl what are some of the lessons of leadership what do you do when you have a hand as weak as his well the first thing is you bring on board allies and you harness the power of ideas right we think of this as a slogan the power of ideas ideas have consequences the centrality of the ID but in point of fact at the very beginning that's all Herzl had he had the power of this compelling idea an idea that he saw as an age-old idea the idea of the Jewish state so really appreciate it revel in it try to understand what it's like just to rise to prominence through the power of ideas to bring about what he actually referred to sometimes as converts to the power of this idea and from there you can go on to appreciate what he did as a political leader that is somebody who built institutions that really were the enduring institutions of the Zionist movement that brought forth the Jewish state and then watch him play his cards as a diplomat whether in the Ottoman Empire or in the German Empire or negotiating with the arch enemies of the Jews the Russian leadership their dreaded interior minister just watch Herzl and be amazed watch Herzl and see what you can learn from our story begins on June 2nd 1895 when a fateful and fascinating meeting took place at a palatial home in Paris the host was Baron Maurice de Hirsch a banker and railway magnate who at the time was 63 and was one of Europe's richest men and one of the wealthiest Jews anywhere in the world he was also a leading philanthropist who was involved in founding the Jewish colonisation Association which purchased land in Argentina and helped poor Jews from Eastern Europe become farmers there his guest his visitor was Theodor Herzl at age 35 barely half of Hersh's age he was urbane bearded distinguished and was the Paris correspondent of the Vienna based Neue Freie oppressor which is one of the leading newspapers anywhere in Central Europe Herzl had surprised himself and even more so Hirsch by reaching out in a letter and asking to have a meeting to discuss the Jewish Question he had gotten turned down has often happened to people who requested such meetings but he persisted and he persisted and in the end he got his hour-long session when they began Herzl pulled out no less than 22 pages of densely written single spaced notes and he began shortly afterwards at least as he recalled the experience in his diary which he began keeping around that time he declared as follows I by no means set out deliberately to occupy myself with the Jewish Question u2 originally did not plan to become a patron of the Jews you are a banker and made big business deals you ended up devoting your time and your fortune to the cause of the Jews similarly at the beginning I was a writer and a journalist with no thought of the Jews but my experiences and observations the growing pressure of anti-semitism compelled me to interest myself in the problem Herzl went on there are two possible aims either we stay where we are where we emigrate somewhere else for either course we need certain identical measures for the education of our people for even if we emigrate it will take a long time before we arrive in the promised land it took Moses 40 years we may require 20 or 30 hertzel according to his own account was rather blunt saying years ago I heard that your attempts to settle Jews in Argentina had had poor results or none not content with that level of candor he went on to say your Argentinian Jews behaved in a disorderly fashion I am told one item rather shocked me the house built first was one of ill-repute Hirsch interjected not true and after some more back and forth said enough of criticism what is to be done Herzl was quite critical indeed of what he saw small-scale methods of subsidizing several thousand Eastern European Jews to become farmers so he said instead of buying up the Jews one by one you could offer huge prizes in the chief anti-semitic countries for striking deeds for deeds of great moral beauty for courage self-sacrifice ethical conduct great achievements in art and science for physicians during epidemics for military men for discoverers of remedies and inventors of other products contributing to the public welfare no matter what in short for anything great such prizes will accomplish two things the improvement of everyone in publicity but the first result is more important a general improvement the individual annual prize winners do not really matter I am more interested in all the others who try to outdo themselves in order to win a prize in this way the moral level will be raised no no no interrupted Hirsch I don't want to raise the general level at all all our misfortune comes from the fact that the Jews want to climb too high we have too many intellectuals my intention is to keep the Jews from pushing ahead they should not make such great strides all Jew hatred comes from this as for my plans in Argentina you were misinformed on that too of course it all depends upon the harvest after a few good years I could show the world that the Jews make good farmers after all as a result of this maybe they will be allowed to till the soil in Russia as well Herzl I didn't interrupt you although I hadn't finished I was interested to hear just what you have in mind but I realized that it would be pointless to go on presenting my ideas to you Hersh I do see that you are an intelligent man but you have such fantastic ideas and I'll note parenthetically he didn't mean fantastic the way we might mean it today as a compliment but rather in its original sense linked to fantasy something unrealistic Herzl well didn't I tell you that it would seem either too simple or too fantastic to you you don't know what the fantastic really is and that the great motives of men can be surveyed only from the heights Hirsch emigration would be the only solution there are lands enough for sale Herzl by his own admission almost shouting at this point said well who told you that I don't want to emigrate it is all there in these notes I shall go to the German Kaiser he will understand me for he has been brought up to be a judge of great things to the Kaiser I shall say let our people go we are strangers here we are not permitted to assimilate with the people nor are we able to do so let us go I will tell you the ways and the means which I want to use for our exodus shortly after the meeting ended the next day Herzl sat down and wrote a letter to Hearst that was even more impudent than what he had said in person the following excerpts convey i hope the general sense of that letter on returning home i found that i had stopped on page 6 and yet i had 22 pages due to your impatience you heard only the beginning where and how my idea begins to blossom you did not get to hear this pen is a power you will be convinced of it if i stay alive and healthy a reservation which you too must make with regard to your own activities you are the big jew of money I am the Jew of the spirit hence the diversions between our means and methods I spoke of an army and you already interrupted me when I began to speak of the moral training necessary for its march I let myself be interrupted but it would have had to tell you eventually what flag I will unfurl and how and then you would have asked mockingly a flag what is that a stick with a rag on it no sir a flag is more than that with a flag one can lead men where everyone wants to even into the promised land for a flag men will live and die it is indeed the only thing for which they are ready to die in mass as if one trains them for it believe me the policy of an entire people particularly when it is scattered all over the earth can be carried out only with imponderables that float in thin air do you know what went into the making of the German Empire dreams songs fantasies in black and gold ribbons and in short order Bismarck merely shook the tree which the visionaries had planted what you do not understand the imponderables and what is religion consider if you will what the Jews have endured for the sake of this vision for a period of 2,000 years yes visions alone gripped the souls of men and anyone who has no use for them maybe an excellent worthy sober minded person even a philanthropist on a large scale but he will not be a leader of men and no trace of him will remain the meeting was a failure and the follow-up attempts to enlist Hirsch in Herzl z' movement in the making also proved to be failures Hirsch himself died less than a year later and just as Herzl had predicted barely a trace of him remembered but remained in the historical record and what did was in large part due to this meeting and Herzl subsequent diary entries about baron Hirsch but Herzl on the other hand dates his activities as a Zionist leader to the day in which he held this meeting through the power of his vision and through the power of the imponderables that he conjured up and spoke about her - in fact became a leader of men with a flag he led the Jewish people where he wanted to setting their course towards a promise line where they hadn't had a state for two millennia in these seven lectures I want to try to appreciate Theodore hertzel 's greatness as a leader to do so though we need to begin with understanding the challenges that he faced as he left Hersh's home this is especially true for those of us today because we know how this story turned out we know that nearly seven decades ago the Jewish state was founded we know that it's a flourishing State so in retrospect it seems obvious that of course it could be created because it was created it was a big success story but any rational person with or without an appreciation of the fantastic at that time had to recognize that this was very much an uphill battle and so I'd like to look back at what Herzl did bearing in mind the eloquent words of the British historian CV Wedgwood who wrote about her craft the art of history as follows history has lived forwards but it is written in retrospect we know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only see if you want to appreciate Hamilton and Madison and the bringing about of an American Constitution you need to go back to that hot summer of 1787 and understand precisely what it was they were up against in trying to bring a federal Constitution to these states that very much hadn't wanted such a constitution and if you want to appreciate the greatness of Churchill as a leader and especially as a wartime leader you need to go back to what the world looked like from the European vantage point in May of 1940 to recognize the extraordinary odds that we're facing the British and their allies and so too with Herzl if you want to really understand who he was what he did and what qualities he had as a leader you need to go back and try to recapture as holy as you can what it what it meant to see the world through the eyes of somebody in june of 18 95 so I want to invite you on a journey back to that world of 1895 and this for the next half hour let's all imagine we don't know anything that happened after that date and we're just putting ourselves in those shoes of Theodor Herzl as he's walking back down the stairs and out of that fateful meeting with Barron Hirsch so we're gonna begin by looking at the world as it looked to Herzl a well-read well-traveled European next we're gonna look at the Jewish world as it existed and as it appeared at that time armed with the background from those two perspectives the International and the Jewish were then gonna look at three levels of challenges that Herzl was facing and indeed that anybody would have faced who was interested at that time in creating a Jewish state the first challenge was an intellectual one developing the ideas and persuading people of the merit of those ideas for creating a state at that seemingly improbable time second challenge was political building a movement with institutions that would be dedicated to meeting this extraordinary challenge of creating a Jewish state and the third challenge is diplomatic gaining support from one or more of the major world powers with the ability to turn this idea into reality last thing that we're going to do which actually is not going to take so long is to look at the assets the relatively few assets that Herzl or anyone else in his position had as he went about the task of founding the Jewish state so to begin our guided tour of the world of 1895 let's look at this map here map showing Europe and we're gonna give a tour as is appropriate for a story that that is about the Jewish people the tour is gonna run from right to left as the Hebrew language does and we're gonna bin we're gonna begin in the most obvious place the land of Israel or Palestine which is lower right in this on your map and it's a part of the Ottoman Empire the Ottoman Empire had controlled Palestine since the early 16th century around the same time as that same Empire conquered Mecca and Medina and in the process of conquering these and other great cities of the Muslim and Arab world the Ottoman Empire took upon itself the Caliphate the role as the successors to the Prophet Muhammad and this place them front and center within the Muslim world now those had been the glory days and indeed the ottoman empire was very much a european power its capital formerly Constantinople changed to Istanbul is in Europe and not in Asia and twice Ottoman armies had made it virtually to the gates of Vienna in Austria and yet at this point the the term that was regularly used for that Empire was the sick man of Europe and indeed during the course of the 19th century one part after another of this Ottoman Empire was lopped off so in the 1820s Greece with the aid of Western and European powers became independent Egypt fell away for all practical purposes in the 1860s and that was really locked in in 1869 when the British finished the Suez Canal Serbia Bulgaria and other countries and territories were stripped away from the sick man of Europe in the 1870s and having said all of that nonetheless the Ottoman Empire of 1895 was a huge swath of territory that included modern-day Turkey Iraq Syria Jordan Lebanon Israel parts of North Africa and more it was a corrupt dictatorship at the time and it was led by the Sultan Abdul Hameed who had been ruling for two decades now we're going to move up and we'll look at Russia and the first thing that you have to see even if you're not an experienced map viewer is this is one large chunk of territory and we're only looking at a part of Russia it continues east and East and east from here it was an enormous territory that had been ruled for three centuries by the Romanov family and they ruled it with an iron fist there was an exception to that a period of liberalisation from 1855 to 1881 under the tsar alexander ii but he was assassinated in 1881 by a revolutionary group that happened to contain within at a significant number of jews and this led to a dual reaction by his successor and by the russian orthodox church and by officialdom and by a very large segment of the people and this dual reaction on the one hand rolled back liberalism or at least the beginnings of liberalisation in the russian empire and it also struck out mightily against the jews so there was a wave of pogroms beginning in 1881 and running for the next few years at least until 1884 called in the hebrew super Negev or storms in the South southern part of Russia and that was part of this more general backlash which also radically changed for the worse the situation that the Jews were in and at that time Russia contained around 5 million Jews which was virtually which was close to half the Jewish population in the tire world and those Jews lived overwhelmingly in what was called The Pale of Settlement The Pale of Settlement in a sense was a historical accident from a Russian demographic point of view the Russian regime had a history of being anti-semitic in the simplest sense they didn't allow Jews in but they conquered lands Poland Lithuania Ukraine that had huge numbers of Jews they chose neither to expel them on the one hand nor to allow them to move east into what might be considered Russia proper on the other hand and as a result they created this area The Pale of Settlement the place where Jews were allowed to live on which more shortly because it plays a crucial role in Herzl zhh understanding of his task and in the way that Jews at that time viewed the potential for creating a Jewish state if we move a little bit west from Russia we'll find ourselves in austria-hungary unlike the Ottoman Empire and unlike Russia probably not one of the great powers relevant to the future of Palestine or the Land of Israel at that time but a place of enormous significance for Herzl was significant for Herzl because he was born in pest which later became part of Budapest which was the capital of the Hungarian portion of this Empire when he was 18 he moved with his family to Vienna which was the capital of the entire austro-hungarian Empire and in a cultural sense and in certain key areas in an intellectual sense it was also the capital of all of Europe and therefore all of the world now the Empire was a dual monarchy with an Austrian component in a Hungarian component and at this time in 1895 there was rising nationalism on both sides both German and magyar and there was also rising anti-semitism at this time and so this Empire and its key cities played a crucial role in how Herzl thought about the world and also in many of the currents of ideas that would proved to be significant down the road not only for him but for many others as well we move west to the real heartland of German nationalism the German Empire now as the 19th century began the map of Germany looked very different there were 39 separate german-speaking principalities and during the course of the SEM of the century led especially by Otto von Bismarck who was very much a hero of deeply admired by Herzl these principalities united under the force of prussia and became a single empire in 1870 that empire defeated the french in the franco-prussian war and that really catapulted germany into status as a great power militarily and not only in terms of industry and science as had been the case before it was a true power to be reckoned with very much a rising power at that time as well we continue our journey westward we come to France France was politically perhaps the most exciting country in the world at that time it ever since the French Revolution and the reaction to it there had been a back and forth with huge lurches in each direction driven by powerful ideas alongside powerful armies and powerful intrigues and the French went from being a republic to being a monarchy and at the time of 1891 to 1895 when Herzl was the correspondent there for the Neue Freie oppressor leading newspaper from that time France was a republic but a very corrupt Republic a very contentious Republic in which duels and assassinations were a seemingly routine part of politics it was here that Herzl gained his education it was here that many of the great ideas of politics were formed we have one last stop on this tour and that is England Great Britain and the phrase had been coined 3/4 of a century earlier that the Sun never sets on British Empire well in 1895 the Sun still never set on the British Empire it was without a doubt the leading military power in the world the leading financial power in the world it was the dominant country but in a world where there were other countries vying for that dominance it was also in many important respects a very biblical country it is a country that respected the Hebrew Bible and in part as a consequence of that had a significant movement of people who were themselves proto Zionists who believed that one ought to restore the Jews to having a state in their own land and that's a fair description of one of the great prime ministers of the 19th century himself descended from Jews Benjamin Disraeli it's also a fair description of one of the great works of literature from the from 19th century Britain of course George Eliot's Daniel Deronda so as Theodore Herzl surveyed that world he would look at it and I think he would see four leading powers whose help at least the help of one or more of them would be critical for establishing a Jewish state the most direct route would be persuading the Ottoman Empire that which was at that time controlling the Land of Israel that they should allow Jews to buy land there settle on the land there and ultimately establish their own state this was a little bit tricky because this was not only a Muslim country but a an empire that saw it saw itself as the Muslim representative on earth the successor of the the Prophet and of his and of the other caliphs who had conquered and built this Empire so the Sultan and those around him were not eager to take this Muslim land and turn it into a Jewish state they also were not eager to alienate the Arabs who were very much the majority at that time in the Arian were not interested in sharing their power with a potential usurping group of Jews coming from Europe from anywhere else so that the most direct route seemed largely closed second route was through the leading ally of the Ottomans and that was of course the German Empire and there are a host of reasons why the German Empire was the leading ally of the Ottomans but the simplest of those reasons was that the German Empire was the only power in the world that wasn't interested in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire some powers were interested in that disintegration sooner rather than later as Russia was later rather than sooner as the British Empire is largely considered to have been but the German Empire saw it as its own strategic interest to continue and strengthen the Ottoman Empire so the German Empire had tremendous clout in Istanbul but in order to exercise that clout they would need to persuade their Ottoman allies to do something with those which those allies saw as being very much not in their interests namely to lop off a small but historically and symbolically significant chunk of their territory and handed over to to a set of people coming largely from Europe so even though the Germans had clout with the Ottomans it was unlikely they would use it in this direction third option was through the Russians who historically had been the leading enemies of the Ottoman Empire and who had fought a war a successful war against the Ottoman Empire as recently as two decades earlier in 1877-1878 so the Russian Empire could in theory go to war against the Ottomans in order to force them to establish a Jewish state but they had no obvious reason for doing so and it's worth bearing in mind that the russian empire from the top levels down through the more common people were viscerally anti-semitic and therefore had no particular reason to try to do something that would help the the jews fourth and final contender for a jewish ally was the british empire it had certain reasons because of its love for the Bible in many circles to be supportive of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel but it had plenty of other interests that would cut in opposite directions it was widely at this point considered the leading contender to replace the Ottoman Empire in the historic Land of Israel in the event that the Ottoman Empire were to crumble but no one knew if that would happen no one knew when that would happen and at the moment this strategy of the British was to maintain the Ottoman Empire not to strengthen it not to allow for its resurgence but at least to prevent it from disintegrating and thus leading to a possible imbalance of power and instability which the British as a status quo power were very much against so there was this uphill battle to try to get any kind of a key diplomatic Ally for the Jews in establishing a state and the only chance of having any success in bringing about such an outcome was if you could get the Jews united behind that goal and that brings us then to the second area that we need to look out which is what did the Jewish world look like as of the late 19th century just tell us at the end of the 19th century when Herzl begins to write to be active as a diplomat on behalf of the Jewish people what did European Jewry look like so the first thing we have to understand is that European Jewry in a large sense was world jewelry but obviously they were Jews living in the Ottoman Empire and an Arab speaking countries and there was the beginnings of a significant migration to the United States but when you spoke about the Jewish people you were overwhelmingly speaking about European Jews they were something like 88 percent of world Jewry at the time and they split very much into two groups the mass of world Jewry lived in what was called The Pale of Settlement those are the areas modern-day Poland Ukraine Lithuania that the Russian Empire had conquered in the late 18th century and they were already filled with Jews a commodity that the Russian Empire had virtually none of because they wanted none of it and they conquered those territories were stuck with these Jews and decided not to force them out westward but not to allow them to move eastward into Russia so as of the late 19th century something like half of the Jewish population of the world around five million people lived in this Pale of Settlement according to at least one source 98% of them spoke Yiddish this was very much a traditional people they clung to their religion to their traditions to their leadership and to the ancient dream of restoring a Jewish state in Zion the starting point is to understand that at the time there were roughly 11 million Jews in in the world estimates vary but let's use that as the number four for today and of those nearly half were in the Pale of Settlement these as noted with the areas that had been conquered by the Russian Empire about a century earlier and the Jews had neither been forced to leave nor had they been allowed to settle in other parts of rusha and if you look at this map the areas that are in white have fewer than 1% of their population being Jewish and that covers obviously eastern Russia since Jews weren't allowed to settle there and big swaths of Central and especially Western Europe in the yellow areas it's 1 to 4 percent of the population is Jewish so already you're starting to get numbers that are worth counting but as you go from green 5 to 9 percent Jewish blue 10 to 14 percent purple 15 percent or more and then you have cities that are in these white large dots that have more than 25 percent Jewish population and then if you look more carefully you see lots of black dots and those are cities with Jewish populations of over 50% and you don't need to do a lot of sophisticated demography in order to understand that when you look at the Jewish world at that time its absolute core was in these areas of the the Russian Empire and that's particularly significant because of the characteristics of the people living in these areas it was these Jews more than anyone else who were traditionalists their texts were the classic texts their prayer book was the classic prayer book and they were wedded to that prayer book their links felt keenly inside were to Israel to a return to the promised land these were the Jews who in a sense had never lost faith but if you only looked at that you wouldn't have a really good picture of the Jewish world because everybody within the Jewish world whether from the east or the west looked westward to West European Jewry for the leadership because it was in the West that the big finance seers lived and at that time to a very large extent there was a correlation between being a substantial Jewish financier and having the potential to be a Jewish leader the wealth was there the political sophistication was there the contacts was there the influence was there all of those things were in the West and so it was broadly understood that the only way to build a movement that could establish a Jewish state if such a pipedream could even be imagined at all was by uniting on the one hand the numbers and the passion of East European Jewry with the power and clout and sophistication of a West European Jewish leadership so armed now with the background we have with that tour of the world by which I mean Europe and the Jewish world also predominantly in Europe we can now get a better appreciation of what it was like to be at the beginning what it was like to be a Theodor Herzl figuring out if and how to establish a Jewish state and I think we need to look at three separate challenges separate but strongly interconnected the first one which in many ways was the most difficult challenge was an intellectual challenge what Herzl had to do was to create or recreate or breathe new life into those ideas that could persuade Jews from different viewpoints that it was desirable to establish a Jewish state and practical to establish a Jewish state because at the time neither of those was the case neither in the West nor in Eastern Europe let's start with the belief that building a Jewish state was a bad idea that was the prevalent belief probably the overwhelming belief in the Jewish world and throughout the Jewish world in Western Europe the Jews were seen as a religion and not as a nation and the project of Western European Jewry from the late 19th from the late 18th century through the late 19th century was a project of emancipation the project of becoming equal citizens equal members of society able to function economically able to vote able to hold office able to be real players and that in turn was dependent on the ability of Western European Jews to persuade their fellow citizens whether in nations or empires that they were in fact good loyal citizens and people you would want to have for at least would tolerate having as neighbors viewed from that perspective there were few nightmares worse than a movement to establish a separate Jewish state right now finally after there had been strides made in France and strident smade in the austro-hungarian Empire and strides made in Germany and strides made elsewhere were a movement to come along and declare we are a people one people were separate and distinct from those in whose midst we live and we want to build our own country that had the potential to rekindle anti-semitism and to set back the entire emancipation 'us so most of the leaders thought and political and financial of Western Jewry were very much lined up against the idea of a Jewish state but lest you think that that idea was more popular in the East because of traditional Jews here there was a different source of objection to it and that source can be traced back among other places to the Talmudic tractate of to both very famous discussion there of the three O's in which the rabbi's say that the Jewish people had taken a series of oaths among which were not to force the end may be the end of days in the political return to Israel and not to come up with force and united against the non-jews in order to re-establish a Jewish state and whether particular individuals knew or didn't know that discussion within the Talmud the accepted view was it is our role to stay where we are until the Messiah comes and thus indicates that God is ready for us to move back to the Land of Israel this was not a minority view this was not a view of small group of people this was very much the mainstream view so if someone came along and said we're not waiting for the Messiah we're moving up now as a wall as a block hastening the end because that's the right thing to do it would naturally meet with the objections of traditional communities and their traditional rabbis just as more liberal communities and more liberal rabbis in the West would tend to be against the the idea of a Jewish state because of its impact on the efforts at Jewish emancipation so first of all intellectually Herzl or anyone else in his role would have to try to find a way to persuade Jews across the board that having a Jewish state is desirable but if that weren't enough it was also necessary to persuade these Jews that having a Jewish state was feasible because it was widely viewed as not being feasible for a whole bunch of very simple reasons number one if you looked at who is living in the land of Israel at that time at least according to one estimate from 1890 there were roughly five hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants of that area and perhaps forty three thousand of them well under ten percent were Jewish so the area that was most likely to become the Jewish state had an overwhelming non-jewish in this case Arab majority not only that but the Ottoman policy was to discourage Jews from buying land and working the land and moving into that area more generally so there didn't seem to be a lot of prospects for moving more Jews in but if that weren't enough it also was the case that there weren't a whole lot of Jews who wanted to go Western European Jews were largely content where they were while Eastern European Jews who were leaving in large numbers wanted to go off into the golden of Medina right to the to the United States a country that was considered quite prosperous and where you can remake yourself economically without having to combat all sorts of difficulties as would be the case where your to settle in Palestine so there weren't a lot of Jews the Ottomans didn't want to have more Jews there didn't seem to be a lot of Jews who could move there and if that weren't enough there also wasn't much money available to move Jews there so there was a movement called hibachi owned which formed after the beginning of the Russian pogroms in 1881 and it was dedicated largely to settling Jews in the Land of Israel a small minority of those Jews actually wanted to move to Israel a larger majority stayed behind and supported them from a distance but in terms of their financial power they were able to raise according to one estimate about fifty thousand french francs each year you needed 3000 to move a family so that meant they could move 16 families a year so if you do the math how many millennia would it take at the rate of 16 families a year to make a significant demographic impact on that Jewish state it becomes clear that this was not so feasible looking so the intellectual challenge that Herzl faced was to persuade people that creating a Jewish state was both desirable and feasible politically he had second challenge because even if he could get the Jews behind him in significant numbers he would first of all need to develop the credibility himself to become the leader of the Jews and that was not an obvious outcome he was a reasonably well known writer a household name in those intellectually sophisticated culturally value valuing german-speaking families around Europe but he was not an international rock star as we might term it he was not wealthy and most of the Jewish leaders were wealthy he was not a Jewish scholar and most of the other Jewish leaders were scholars he was not well-connected to Jews outside of Vienna so it was a long shot that Herzl would become a leader especially Barron bearing in mind that his particular ideological trend within the Jewish world those favoring a Jewish state were themselves very much an isolated minority so it didn't seem that Herzl had much of a shot but even if he did it would be necessary to create institutions that would be able to build a Jewish consensus would be able to show the world that the Jews could negotiate on behalf of their own people and having done those things would be able to survive the test of time because very few people thought and Herzl certainly not among them that within a month or a year or even a decade you could build a Jewish state which meant that it was going to require the efforts of large numbers of people scattered over large portions of territory over a relatively long period of time probably involving succession from one generation of leaders to the next so there was this political institutional challenge of building the kinds of organizations that could that could achieve all of these things and you have to bear in mind there wasn't a worldwide Jewish organization at that time and in fact in Eastern European countries there weren't national Jewish organizations for the simple reason that they were banned legally and this ban was enforced strictly one might even say gleefully by the omnipresent secret police of the czars so in the Eastern air in the areas of Eastern Europe you didn't have even the beginnings of a national basis whereas in Western Europe whatever national Jewish organizations existed were strongly dedicated to the emancipation and therefore against Zionism in any form that it might reasonably take so Herzl had to deal with a combination of a vacuum and whatever wasn't a vacuum was turned using its force against the ideas that he represented so on top of the intellectual challenge we see a political and institutional challenge the third challenge likewise potent is the one that we've already touched upon which is the diplomatic challenge it was necessary to turn the Jews who were a scattered group of 11 million people into something that would somehow look to the great leaders of the world like a power so that when you're sitting down in a negotiation table it would somehow seem reasonable to say we have Germany we have the Ottoman Empire we have the Russian Empire with the British Empire where's the Jewish representative when's he coming into the room right that's quite counterintuitive at that time but it was necessary both to make the Jews a player and having made them a player make at least one of the moves that we spoke about earlier persuading one of the four great powers to at least allow the Jews to settle and live in large numbers in Palestine as an initial step towards creating a homeland as a stepping stone towards creating a Jewish state so this was one tough triple challenge intellectual political and diplomatic now if we were to end here that would be too depressing so I want to talk at least a little bit about what assets Herzl had not Herzl as Herzl but Herzl as any Jewish figure at this time seeking to create a Jewish state and he did have a few assets in each of these areas so we'll begin intellectually yes there was opposition to the idea of a Jewish state but there also was a spark a spark that hadn't been extinguished over the course of two millennia whereby significant numbers of Jews still believed we are a nation and still believed that our rightful place is rekindling that nation in the land of Israel that sense was a huge asset for Herzl or for anybody else there was also the example from modern European history of ancient nations that had lost their sovereignty lost their unity somehow reconstituting themselves and it happened in Greece in the earlier part of the 19th century it happened in Italy in the middle of the 19th century and it happened in the in Germany from early in the 19th century through through the eighth decade of the 19th century so there was this sense this is a time when people's can come back together so I think that also gave people the sense that perhaps we can we can do this and finally there was the enormous advantage of rampant and perhaps growing anti-semitism now if you happen to be the victim of a pogrom you don't see as an advantage but if you're somebody who's trying to create a Jewish state anti-semitism can be a potential force because it shows the Jews they need to leave where they are and it shows the non-jews that they might be well served by helping to reduce the level of tensions by escorting the Jews outside of their country it also helps those do who themselves don't want to leave where they are let's say in Western Europe to understand that at least on behalf of their Eastern European brethren there's good reason for them to try to back a Jewish state so these were the intellectual assets as it were that Herzl had on his side politically not a whole lot going for him there was something of a tradition of creating Jewish organizations where the Council of four lands and Poland or greater Poland is probably the most famous example the hibachi owned movement which I mentioned earlier had established a few hundred chapters probably a few dozen of which were were active if not thriving so there were activists out there who had a decade and a half of Zionist work under their belts and also the very absence of a international Jewish organization was in some respects an advantage because it meant that there wasn't a well-oiled establishment against which Herzl was going to be declaring war or at least declaring itself to be an alternative to that establishment and so that very vacuum created an opportunity for Herzl so politically he had some assets but they weren't they weren't huge it's not what you want to have if you're going into a high-stakes poker game diplomatically there were some potential allies the Turks had very very significant debts internationally were having difficulty servicing them and therefore they were perhaps open to a deal with anyone including the Jewish people who might be able to refinance their debt and get them out of a very humiliating and debilitating situation there was sentiment within certain European countries Russia and the Russian Empire and the German Empire among them that it would be nice for the Jews from our countries to leave and given the interest in getting rid of the Jews although it wasn't always a concrete interest and wasn't shared by everybody but given that there was some interest that finding a place for them seemed like perhaps a reasonable enough price to pay and therefore there might be some support from certain empires for helping the Jews resettle themselves in the land of Israel not all of the sentiments were negative as noted earlier there were positive sentiments especially in Protestant countries like Britain and also to a certain extent like Germany for restoration ISM that is helping the Jews to resettle in their biblical lands and the final diplomatic asset potentially available to Herzl was Jewish wealth the Jewish finance seers who were among the wealthiest people anywhere in the world and they really did have the ability to do significant things and they were magnified at least in the perception of that ability by a certain strain of anti-semitism which tended to see the Jews as all-powerful all wealthy very well United and coordinated and although you might not like that stereotype there are times as Herzl would discover when that stereotype can really be an asset bottom line Herzl or anyone in his shoes faced a triple challenge and when we think what he must have been like as a leader we have to recognize the gravity of that challenge and the relatively few resources he had available to meet it what we are going to do over the next six sessions is understand precisely how he met that challenge so in lecture number two I'll be discussing the particular assets that Herzl not as a representative of his time but as a very specific person with a specific set of experiences skills and character traits what did he bring to the table that enabled him to face these challenges in lectures 3 & 4 were then going to tackle the intellectual challenge that he faced and we're going to look at how he overcame it both through his classic work the Jewish state and through they're writing and thinking that he did in the fifth lecture we're going to look at Herzl as the consummate builder of institutions in the sixth lecture we're gonna look at Herzl as a statesman navigating these difficult and treacherous international waters and finally in the seventh and last lecture we're gonna try to look at this in perspective comparing Herzl to other leaders and trying to understand what made him unique and what are some of the lessons that are available to us or to anyone else interested in learning what leadership is and how great people can accomplish things that truly are fantastic thanks dr. paula sorry you've articulated in this lecture that we've just seen three big challenges as a way to understand the matrix of Herzl x' career in this overview can you just elaborate on what each of them are one-by-one sure the first challenge that I think was the biggest challenge was the intellectual challenge in the realm of ideas developing the argument for why a Jewish state was not only a good idea in theory not only a good idea in the prayer-book but something that world Jewry in the late 19th century desperately needed and that could solve very real problems and above and beyond that was feasible because even the people who thought it would be nice didn't believe that it could happen at any time in the foreseeable future and the biggest thing that Herzl moved was not the souls of diplomats and not the building blocks he put in place of the Zionist movement in its institutions but the hearts and minds of Jews whether Eastern European traditionalists or Western European Jews whose big project had been the emancipation in the gaining of equality for the Jewish people so number one and deservedly number one is the intellectual challenge second challenge also quite daunting was to build a movement it was clear to Herzl and you see this in his writings consistently and in his conversations with people no man was powerful enough to build a Jewish state this was going to require not only the power of an idea but the power of a movement Jews around the world especially around Europe working together each one bringing different resources to this and doing so over the course of decades Herzl believed fairly consistently that this was a project that was going to take literally decades to bring about and he was pretty confident among other reasons because of his significant health challenges that he wasn't gonna see this project to the end he wouldn't be alive for the end so that meant you needed a movement and the movement would have a bank and the movement would have an annual conference and the movement would have its own legislature the movement would have everything that a movement would happen it would have offices and bigger committees and smaller committees and these things over time would endure and would generate and marshal the resources necessary for this state so the second challenge was to create that movement and worth noting was that if you were to do a who's who of world Jewry in 1895 and lists the 100 most likely candidates to lead such a movement Herzl wouldn't have been on this list so a not trivial part of his challenge was to position himself so that would people so that people would see him as a leader even though he was not a leading philanthropist was not a leading rabbi or a rabbi at all was not a Jewish organizational figure that was the political challenge the third challenge was diplomatic the Jews were a tiny tiny minority of the population of the land of Palestine the historic land of Israel and it would be necessary first to persuade the Ottoman Empire which control this territory along with much of the Middle East that it was in their interest or at least tolerable to them to allow the Jews to move there by land there settle there and begin building up the nucleus of a Jewish state in order to persuade the Ottomans you'd probably need to persuade one or more of the other three great powers the Russian Empire the German Empire and the British Empire that they should weigh in pretty heavily with the Ottomans to try to persuade them and realizing that in politics you often to hedge your bets no way to know whether you'll ever get the ottomans on board so you have to hope to persuade one of these other powers and the British were the best bet for this that they should at the right time replace the Ottomans at least in Palestine and create in the historic Land of Israel a Jewish state so any one of these three challenges on its own would look absolutely daunting and the project of a lifetime for one man part of Herzl x' greatness is that he managed to address each of the three challenges and if any one of them had failed the entire project could not have come to pass correct in a sense you needed to do them in that order first develop the ideas so that you have a Jewish following then with that Jewish following create a something that looks like a world jewish body clamoring to the nations of the world to the great powers especially to give them a jewish state to let our people go and armed with that you could then go on to the third pinnacle which is diplomacy and persuading the great powers but of course the real world doesn't work so neatly and one of the things that the jews are looking for as they're trying to decide how much risk to take personally to back this Jewish state is what's the Sultan saying and what's the Kaiser saying and does this have any traction in Britain so ultimately these three things ended up being a loop the more success on the ideas front the greater the institutions in the diplomacy the more you can show progress on the diplomatic front the more people are open to be persuaded that a Jewish state is feasible and that they should help build the institutions and the genius of Herzl was to view these sequentially but also to work on them simultaneously

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Length: 67min 12sec (4032 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018