Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective

Convergence and Divergence

Jeffrey Herf, Jeffrey Herf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317983477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Israeli History, this book presents the reflections of historians from Israel, Europe, Canada and the United States concerning the similarities and differences between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism primarily in Europe and the Middle East.

Spanning the past century, the essays explore the continuum of critique from early challenges to Zionism and they offer criteria to ascertain when criticism with particular policies has and has not coalesced into an "ism" of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Including studies of England, France, Germany, Poland, the United States, Iran and Israel, the volume also examines the elements of continuity and break in European traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism when they diffused to the Arab and Islamic.

Essential course reading for students of religious history.

Anti-Semites on Zionism: From Indifference to Obsession

Derek J. Penslar

In his classic Zionist manifesto The Jewish State (1896), Theodor Herzl claimed that the “Jewish Question” was “neither a social nor religious one, even if it at times takes on these or other colorings. It is a national question, and in order to solve it, we must make it into an international political question, which will be managed through counsel with the civilized nations of the globe.”¹ Herzl believed that the anti-Semitism of his day contained certain elements of what he called “legitimate self-defense,” for emancipated Jews were particularly well-suited for commerce and the professions, thus creating “fierce competition” with bourgeois Gentiles. Economic issues, however, were, in Herzl’s view, epiphenomenal, for no matter how Jews earned their livelihood, no matter how greatly they contributed to the wealth and welfare of the lands in which they lived, they were decried as strangers and parasites. Thus for Herzl, as for millions of Jews from his time to our own, Zionism has appeared to be a rational response to an irrational and ineradicable form of prejudice.

Herzl believed that anti-Semites themselves would appreciate the desirability and feasibility of the Zionist project and would gladly help ensure a smooth transfer of unwanted Jews from Europe to Palestine. In fact, however, most anti-Semitic ideologues in fin-de-siècle Europe were indifferent to or dismissive of Zionism. Believing that Jews were incorrigibly dishonorable and work-shy, anti-Semites considered Zionism to be at best an impracticable fantasy, as Jews would not willingly leave the fleshpots of the West to take on the arduous task of rebuilding their ancient Oriental homeland. At worst, Zionism was thought to represent yet another tentacle in the vast Jewish conspiracy to extend financial and political control over the entire globe. Over the period 1880–1940, as anti-Semitism became a mobilizing, all-embracing ideology in much of Europe, the latter view gained prominence, although the process was gradual, uneven, and specific to certain countries.

Over the same period, the Arab world witnessed an eruption of anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment, often directed against the Zionist project. Whereas Zionism was peripheral to European anti-Semitism, it was central to Arab sensibilities about Judaism and Jews. In both environments anti-Semitism was a response to apparently inexplicable upheavals and an expression of virulent ressentiment, yet the function of Zionism in anti-Semitic discourse in Europe, compared to that in the Middle East, suggests the need to draw a distinction between systemic intolerance, aggravated by socio-economic crisis, and political strife, driven by discrete events and policies. To employ a medical metaphor—quite appropriate, since all forms of anti-Semitism are pathological—European anti-Semitism may be compared to a psychosomatic illness, whereas its Arab counterpart more closely resembles a toxic allergic reaction. The former originated in fantasy yet crippled the entire body politic; the latter has been a debilitating, even fatal, response to a genuine substance.

Whereas most of the literature on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism focuses on contemporary developments, there is much to be gained through a historical approach, through grasping underlying assumptions and visceral feelings about Zionism when they were first expressed, before they were affected by contingencies and rapidly changing events on the ground. Historical developments could either mitigate or intensify anti-Jewish feeling. An example of the former would be the temporary alliance between Zionism and Nazism in the guise of the Transfer (Ha’avarah) Agreement of the 1930s, which facilitated German-Jewish emigration to Palestine. The power of events to deepen anti-Semitic grooves is demonstrated in the Arab world, where Israel’s military victories in 1948, 1956 and 1967 generated a tidal wave of anger and compelled a search for explanations for the Arabs’ ignominious defeat in the arcane realms of anti-Semitic fantasy. In the early 1900s, however, and particularly after the proclamation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the rapid growth of the Jewish National Home thereafter, Zionism was a sufficiently powerful presence on the international scene and within Palestine itself to command attention without being so influential that it had to be accorded de facto acceptance or utterly demonized.

This article focuses primarily on Europe, and it does so for two reasons: I have some expertise in the area; and despite the vast literature on the history of European anti-Semitism, its conceptual stance vis-à-vis Zionism has, surprisingly, not been properly elucidated. The discussion of Arab anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is briefer and more synthetic, but it is placed within a comparative analytical framework whose novel features will, I hope, stimulate experts in the modern Middle East to further, fuller reflection on the subject.

Zionism in European Anti-Semitic Discourse

Classic, nineteenth-century anti-Semitism identified the Jew with modern capitalism and the rapid transformation of society and culture that came in its wake. Ancient and medieval tropes of Jewish avarice, murderous hatred of Gentiles, and black-magical practices mutated into the modern stereotype of an international Jewish conspiracy. Tellingly, the myth of a global Jewish financial cabal flourished among early socialist thinkers in France and Germany during the 1840s, a decade of economic turmoil due in part to the impact of industrialization on the peasants and artisans who constituted the bulk of the population. The metonymic association between Jew and capitalism, and by extension with modernity as such, was a driving force behind late-nineteenth-century political anti-Semitism, described appositely by the German socialist leader August Bebel as “the socialism of the stupid man.”

Intriguingly, the discourse on Jewish restoration to Palestine, a discourse that intensified with the writings of the former socialist Moses Hess in the 1860s and, of course, with the establishment of the Zionist movement in the 1880s, attracted little sustained attention from anti-Semitic ideologues. To be sure, one can find scattered statements in writings on the “Jewish Question,” dating back to the Enlightenment, about shipping Jews out of Europe and back to Palestine. Scholars have painstakingly accumulated such statements by the likes of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Heinrich von Treitschke and Adolph Stöcker, among others, but they have failed to note that these utterances were merely barbed quips or enraged outbursts, and rarely led to a sustained engagement with Zionism even after Theodor Herzl brought it onto the stage of public opinion.

One apparent exception was the Hungarian anti-Semitic activist Gyözö Istóczy, who is the subject of a recent biography by Andrew Handler, provocatively titled An Early Blueprint for Zionism. Handler draws the title from a speech of 1878 on “The Restoration of the Jewish State in Palestine,” delivered by Istóczy from the floor of the Hungarian Diet, of which he was an elected member. Reflecting an anti-Russian and pro-Turkish sentiment as much as an anti-Semitic worldview, Istóczy claimed that such a state would revive “the enfeebled and backward East” by introducing Jewish wealth and energy, “a vigorous, powerful and new element and an influential ingredient of civilization.”² Istóczy offered few specifics as to how this plan would be implemented, and subsequent to the speech Istóczy soon let the matter drop, as it encountered strong disapproval from his fellow parliamentarians. Thus this “early blueprint” for Zionism was, in fact, quite sketchy and faded quickly. For the next twenty years, Istóczy pursued the usual anti-Semitic agenda of attacking alleged Jewish domination in finance, commerce and journalism within Europe. It is true that in 1906 he began to speak in support of the now-established political Zionist movement, but by 1911 he had lost interest, largely due to the Young Turk government’s opposition to massive Jewish immigration to Palestine.³

By and large, anti-Semitic ideologues of the fin de siècle paid Zionism little heed, and when they did think about it, dismissed it as a trick, perpetrated by the agents of the international Jewish conspiracy. In the French journalist Edouard Drumont, perhaps the most successful anti-Semitic scribbler of the period, we have the interesting case of an anti-Semite whose interest in Zionism waxed and waned, fading away altogether when Drumont decided that Zionism did not stand a chance against its rivals, assimilationist and plutocratic Jews, who also happened to be, in Drumont’s view, the greatest threats to the world as a whole.

Drumont’s daily newspaper, La Libre Parole, greeted the First Zionist Congress of 1897 with great fanfare. Apparently confirming Herzl’s views that anti-Semites and Zionists would find a meeting of minds and form a productive collaboration, the newspaper wrote, in its customary sneering tone, “Not only does [La Libre Parole] offer, freely and enthusiastically, publicity for the [Zionist] colonists, but if it were ever—an inconceivable thing—a question of money that caused the Jews to hesitate, it takes upon itself the commitment to take up a subscription whose immense success is not in doubt.”⁴ Yet right from the start Drumont saw a snake in the Zionist garden, Jewish “haute-banque,” that cabal of powerful Jewish financiers whose economic interests depended on the maintenance of a vast global Jewish network and would thus be harmed by the mass movement of Jews to Palestine.⁵

A decade later, as the Zionist movement appeared to shake off the lethargy that had gripped the movement since Herzl’s death in 1904, Drumont devoted considerable energy to drumming up anti-Semitic support for Zionism. At the time of the Eighth Congress in 1907, Drumont wrote that Zionism represented the “future of the Jewish Question and, consequently, the future of humanity as a whole.” Were the Jews removed from Europe to Palestine, “this Jewish Question, which … dominates all human affairs, including the Social Question, would be resolved, at least for the time being, and the world would finally know a period of calm and relative security.” Drumont even expressed admiration for Zionists, whom he contrasted unfavorably with their opponents:

The Jew who aspires to reconstitute a homeland is worthy of esteem. The Jew who destroys the homeland of others is worthy of every kind of scorn. The Jew who wants to have a flag and a religion is a virtuous Jew, and we will never proffer against him any hurtful word. … We have therefore all sorts of reasons to prefer the Zionist Jews over those arrogant Hebrews who aspire not only to involve themselves in our affairs but also to impose their ideas and their will upon us, who treat us in our own homeland as representatives of an inferior race, as vanquished and pariahs.⁶

Drumont and his contributing journalists consistently praised Herzl, and especially Max Nordau, for his fiery and unapologetic Jewish nationalism, while they pilloried the principled assimilationism of French-Jewish notables such as Joseph Reinach and Emile Cahen, editor of Les Archives Israélites.

By 1913, however, Drumont had changed his tune. On the eve of the Eleventh Zionist Congress, Drumont warned darkly that “this conference will probably be the last, and this racket will have sounded Zionism’s death-knell.”⁷ Reproducing verbatim large sections from his 1907 articles on the subject, Drumont added a new twist: The “great Jews” Herzl and Nordau have been vanquished by the combined forces of assimilationists and Jewish high finance. Drumont accused the former of shifting the Zionist Organization’s focus away from international diplomacy, aimed at obtaining a Jewish homeland secured by public law, and enmeshing the movement in Gegenwartsarbeit, political and cultural activity in the diaspora. Even worse, according to Drumont, was the work of “the great Jews, the aristocrats of banking,” who, like Maurice de Hirsch, had always been hostile to Zionism, and who had now created Territorialism:

It is no longer a matter of reconstituting in Palestine or elsewhere a Jewish nation having its land, its flag and its religion, but only of creating Jewish colonies for the use of poor and miserable Jews who would go establish themselves in distant territories. During this time, the ambitious Jews, having pushed from view their shabby brethren, would enjoy, more than ever, the unquestioned authority and enormous power that they wield in the country where, as in France, they have become the masters and the rulers.

It matters little that Drumont was wrong on both points—both Gegenwartsarbeit and Territorialism developed from within the heart of the Zionist movement—rather, the key here is that Drumont placed the contest between Zionism and its enemies within sturdy and venerable anti-Semitic frameworks of conspiracy led by Jewish plutocrats and cultural domination by assimilated Jewish intellectuals. Drumont’s views on Zionism were not influenced by, nor did they influence, his general anti-Semitic worldview. Drumont was willing to endorse Zionism if it appeared to confirm his preexisting views that Jewish nationhood was ineradicable, but in the blink of an eye he was quite willing to disown it, especially since, on the eve of and during World War I, Zionist goals increasingly appeared to conflict with French imperial interests and the sensibilities of Roman Catholics in the Middle East.⁸

As we expand our chronological horizon into the twentieth century, it appears that in France, Zionism, although occasionally applauded or derided, was peripheral to the anti-Semitic imagination. Adulatory literature written in France about Drumont in the decades following his death—literat...