29. Self-Hatred

Lachrymosity

In 1881–1882, a year after the Antisemitenpetition began to be circulated across Germany, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out in the Pale Settlement of Russia, which were pointed to by the Zionists as yet another example of the persecution that was a persistent aspect of the Jews’ long and painful history, and which could only be resolved through the creation of their own state in the Promised Land. Salo Wittmayer Baron, considered the “the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century,” criticized the tendency of the Jewish community to view their history through the lens of persecution, suffering, and anti-Semitism, what he referred to as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Baron repeatedly urged his readers and students to focus instead on the achievements of Jewish society and culture. Baron conceded that, “modern anti-Semitic movements” employed “racial anti-Semitism” to validate “the permanence and immutability of the Jewish group by virtue of blood and descent regardless of individual religious beliefs and observances.” At the same time however, Baron expressed concern about those Jewish groups, including representatives of both Reform Judaism and Zionism, who embraced an “exaggerated historical picture” characterized by “extreme wretchedness.” With regards to Zionism in particular, these efforts were part of larger scheme, “to reject the Diaspora in toto, on the grounds that a ‘normal life’ could not be led by Jewry elsewhere than on its own soil.”[1]

An important impetus to the Zionist movement was the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. It was a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in which Alfred Dreyfus (1859 – 1935), a Jewish French army captain, was falsely convicted in 1894 of spying for Germany. Known as the Dreyfus affair, it became one of the most controversial and polarizing political dramas in modern French history and throughout Europe. It ultimately ended with Dreyfus’ complete exoneration. Herzl claimed that the Dreyfus case turned him into a Zionist and that he was particularly affected by chants from the crowds of “Death to the Jews!”

As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed the Dreyfus affair. However, some modern historians now consider that, due to few mentions of the Dreyfus affair in Herzl’s earlier accounts, and an apparently contrary reference he made in them to shouts of “Death to the traitor!” that he may have exaggerated its influence on him in order to create further support for his cause.[2] Kornberg claims that the influence Dreyfus was a myth that Herzl did not feel it necessary to refute and that he also believed that Dreyfus was guilty.[3]

In light of the pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus Affair in France, Herzl, a thoroughly assimilated, German nationalist Jew, with almost no knowledge of Hebrew, or the Jewish religion, argued that assimilation had failed, and his answer to the Jewish Question was that the best way to avoid anti-Semitism in Europe was to create an independent Jewish state. Beginning in late 1895, Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”), published 1896 to immediate acclaim and controversy, which argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe for Palestine, as their only opportunity to avoid anti-Semitism, express their culture freely and practice their religion without hindrance.

Herzl’s ambitions were reflected in a similar conclusion drawn by Moses Hess, who had taught communism to Karl Marx, and who is considered one of the first important leaders of the Zionist cause, in Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism (1862), which called for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Hess asserted that for Jews, as well as non-Jews, race and racial segregation should be fundamental in all political considerations, and on this basis called for a separate national home for the Jewish people in Palestine:

The present international situation should encourage the immediate founding of Jewish colonies on the Suez Canal and on the banks of the Jordan. Stress will be laid on the heretofore neglected proposition that behind the problem of nationalism and freedom, there remains the profound question of race. This question, which is as old as history, must first be solved before a definite solution to the political and social problems can be worked out. Social institutions, like spiritual outlooks, are racial creations. All past history was concerned with the struggle of races and classes. Race struggle is primary; class struggle is secondary. When racial antagonism ceases, class struggle also ceases. Equality of all social classes follows on the heels of equality of all races and finally remains merely a question of sociology.[4]

It was in 1882, the second year of the Russian pogroms, that Herzl was inspired to see settlement of Palestine as the only durable answer to the Jewish Question, from his reading of the book by the same name, by Eugen Dühring (1833 – 1921), published the previous year. In 1878, Dühring, attacked “the Jew Marx,” over his “racial conflict in the International,” which he attributed to “Bakunin’s revulsion against the Jewish blood of Marx.” Marx, who was then busy writing Das Kapital, left it to Engels to write Anti-Dühring. In 1879, Dühring was given a leadership role in the publication of Wagner’s Bayreuther Blätter.[5] The Bayreuther Blätter edited by Hans von Wolzogen until his death in 1938. Wolzogen’s mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs, who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[6]

A professor of philosophy and economics at the Berlin University, Dühring was dismissed from his post due to his aggressive character, and blamed the Jews for the outcome. By way of revenge, he wrote The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question (1881), which claimed that it was a mistake to dismiss the errors of the Jews to their religion, and that the problems of the Jews were race-based.[7] Blaming the deviousness of assimilated Zionists, or those who are willing to don the guise of another religion to advance their objectives, as a fault to be found among all Jews, Dühring concludes:

A Jewish question will exist even if all Jews turn their back on their religion and were converted to one of the ruling churches among us, or if all religion were already destroyed… It has always been precisely the baptized Jews who have penetrated without hindrance most widely into all the channels of society and of the life of the community. They have, as it were, provided themselves with a passport and pushed their tribe forward to where the religious Jews could not follow them.[8]

Dühring, who was “deeply” inspired by Schopenhauer, influenced later anti-Semites and such as Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Georg von Schönerer.[9] Dühring described the “Jewish question” similarly to Wilhelm Marr, as an expression of an inevitable racial antagonism, and he believed that only “terror and brute force” were adequate means to deal with these “foreign parasites,” and ultimately, that “the murder of races” was “the higher law of history.”[10] In the chapter entitled “Toward a solution,” three times Dühring used the term Judenstaat (“Jewish State”), defining it as “a Palestine newly populated with Jews,” though he rejected the idea as preposterous.[11]

Despite Wagner’s known writings against Jews, Herzl was an avid admirer of Wagner’s music. Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), Herzl’s fraternity brother in Albia, asserted, “Every young person was a Wagnerian then. He was one before he had ever heard a single bar of his music.” Mahler, who was born in Bohemia to Jewish parents of humble origins, was devoted to Wagner and his music, and at aged fifteen he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna. Herzl revealed the inspirational role that the music of Wagner—despite his known anti-Semitism—played in the writing of Der Judenstaat:

Heine tells us that he heard the flapping of an eagle’s wings above his head when he wrote certain verses. I, too, believe that I heard such a fluttering of wings while I wrote that book. I worked on it every day to the point of utter exhaustion. My only recreation was listening to Wagner’s music in the evening, particularly to “Tannhäuser,” an opera which I attended as often as it was produced. Only on the evenings when there was no opera did I have any doubts as to the truth of my ideas.[12]

 

Herzl knowingly entered Albia with the intent of shedding his Jewishness and embracing German nationality. Many of Albia’s members looked forward to the full assimilation of Jews into the German nation. Both Karl Becke and Dietrick Herzog spoke positively about the Jewish brethren who “felt German” and were genuinely devoted to Albia.[13] At the time, Herzl believed that Jews were plagued by vices and corruption and that Judaism was backwards, the result of centuries of persecution and forced isolation in Christian lands. The solution was the full assimilation of the Jews into European societies. Much of what he wrote in his reviews of anti-Semitic authors like Dühring’s The Jewish Question and Wilhelm Jensen’s The Jews of Cologne, reflected ideas that would have been prevalent in Albia, that Jewish morality was corrupted by commercial greed, that the Jews were an oriental people alien to Europe, that Judaism was narrow-minded and superstitious and that Jewish physical features were deformed. According to Kornberg, “Equally, his solution was the disappearance of Jewry, or in his formula, cross-breeding on the basis of a common state-religion.”[14]

However, when Albia held a memorial ceremony for Wagner in March 1883, at which fiercely anti-Semitic speeches were made, Herzl asked to be discharged from the association on honorable terms. At the onset of the ceremonies, the orchestra played Wagner’s music and the audience sang “Deutschland über alles.” A speaker extolled German nationalism and the Reich, and another declared “there can be only one German Reich.”[15] When the police stepped forward to prevent any further treasonous utterances, Schönerer rushed to the platform and proclaimed, “Long Live Our Bismarck!”[16] Although, according to Kornberg, “Herzl was not protesting against anti-Jewishness, which was compatible with full assimilation, but against racial antisemitism, which sought to drive Jews back into the ghetto.”[17]

Nevertheless, as McGrath pointed out, “The probability that Herzl’s mature work was significantly influenced by his association with the German nationalist student movement is great indeed.”[18] Providing a clue to his veneration of German nationalism, Herzl wrote, “Do you know how the German empire was made? Out of dreams, songs, fantasies, and black-red-gold ribbons—and in a short time. Bismarck only shook down the fruit of the tree which the masters of fantasy had planted.”[19] Likewise, Heinrich Friedjung, a Jewish member of the Pernerstorfer Circle, advised, “If it is now the highest duty of the political writer to work on that obscure first principle of all national history, on the national character… then we must introduce into public life a powerful new force: national feeling.” It was the power of art which was to make this possible. Inspired by Wagner, Friedjung noted, “Orpheus dared to walk with his lyre among the powers of the underworld only because he knew there lives in the obscure masses a feeling, a dark presentiment that will be awakened to thundering emotion by a full tone.”[20] Thus, concludes McGrath, “The ideal of aesthetic, symbolic politics appealing both to the head and heart, the ideal which the members of the Pernerstorfer circle had propagated, was realized even more fully in Herzl’s Zionism than in the anti-semitic deutschnational movement of Georg von Schönerer, the Austrian politician who so favourably impressed the young Adolf Hitler.”[21]

Russian Pogroms of 1881–1882

Growing concerns over anti-Semitism had emerged after the pogroms of 1881–1884, which involved outbreaks of violence by non-Jewish street mobs in the Russian Empire from 1881–1884. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815, which were named “the Pale of Settlement.” Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia, including Finland, unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration was not restricted to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia. The “Pale of Settlement,” a name that first arose under Nicholas I, came into being under the rule of Catherine the Great in 1791, initially as a measure to speed colonization of territory on the Black Sea recently acquired from the Ottoman Empire.

The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881, for which some blamed “agents of foreign influence,” implying that Jews committed it.[22] One of the conspirators, Hesya Mirovna (1855 – 1882), was Jewish, and a member of a Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a revolutionary socialist political organization inspired by the “Propaganda of the Deed” articulated by Bakunin. In “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” (1870), Bakunin stated that “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.”[23] Narodnaya Volya emerged in 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Liberty”), associated in particular with the names of M.A. Natanson (1850 – 1919), a Lithuanian Jew, who also was one of the founders of the Circle of Tchaikovsky, and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

Russian officials, such as P.A. Cherevin—the commander of the Imperial Guard, a trusted friend of Tsar Alexander III (1845 – 1894)—and Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev urged governors-general of provinces to seek out the supposed kahal, the semi-autonomous Jewish government. Jacob Brafman, a Russian Jew from Minsk, had a falling out with agents of the local Kahal, and consequently turned against Judaism. He converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and authored polemics against the Talmud and the Kahal. Brafman claimed in his books The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) and The Book of the Kahal (1869), that the Kahal continued to exist in secret and that it was an international conspiratorial network, under the central control of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, then under the leadership of Adolphe Crémieux in Paris.[24]

Although an 1821 attack in Odessa, most historians cite 1881 incidents beginning in Elizavetgrad, in present-day Ukraine, as the beginning of the Russian pogroms. The Elizavetgrad violence spread rapidly throughout seven provinces in southern Russia and Ukraine, where peasant attacked and looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property. Pogroms also occurred in Kiev and Odessa among a hundred other locations. The first Jewish self-defense organizations, initiated by students at Novorossiysk University in Odessa, began to form at this time. At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.[25]

The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.[26] The Times in London was an early sponsor of the theory that as early as 1881 the Russian government knowingly used the Jews as a scape-goat for the expanding the revolutionary movement.[27] The Times editor was Thomas Chenery (1826 – 1884), a Hebrew scholar and Orientalist. Chenery had succeeded John Thadeus Delane (1817 – 1879), who was an admirer of Lord Palmerston.[28] Delane was an intimate friend of the family of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, 1st Baronet (1810 – 1876), the son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and brother of  Lionel de Rothschild.[29] Anthony’s wife was Louise Montefiore. Their daughter, Constance married Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea (1843 – 1907), who later became was involved in a homosexual scandal, but was granted immunity from prosecution by the Government of Arthur Balfour.[30] From 1850 to 1854, Jewish journalist Samuel Phillips (1814 – 1854), who was Chief Literary Editor, under Delane, had been helped by Moses Montefiore and the Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, and became baptized in order to be able to enter Sidney Sussex College.[31] The Duke of Sussex was the sixth son and ninth child of King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Among his godparents were Illuminati members Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Prince Charles of Hess-Kassel.[32] In 1817, the Duke of Sussex sent a letter to Carl Leopold Goldschmidt authorization the Frankfurt Judenlodge to operate as a Masonic lodge.[33]

In 1880, The Times took a response to criticism of the Jews by the Russian paper, Novoe vremia, which argued that the Jews were over-represented in the revolutionary movement, which it attributed to some innate characteristic of Judaism itself. The Times responded to the charge in four separate editorials, denying that Jews were in any way particularly inclined to revolutionary ideas, but rather that the phenomenon was a result of the limited rights afforded to them by the state. The Times apologized that the source of the oft-repeated Russian complaints about “Jewish exploitation,” are the result of their prevention from assimilation:

…It must be acknowledged that in Slavonic countries the Jew does not exhibit the characteristics of his race in an admirable form. He obtrudes his nationality as Jewish rather than Russian in dress and manners. He uses his larger acquaintance with human propensities and infirmities to impose a heavy pecuniary yoke upon his neighbors. Every one would rejoice could Jewish energies in Eastern Europe be diverted from the channel of money-lending to other vocations less provocative of dislike.[34]

The Times presented a lengthy, two-issue description of the pogroms, “compiled from the best available sources of information,” which in reality, though unnamed, included the Jewish World, a pro-Zionist publication founded in London in 1873. The articles spared no exaggeration in an attempt to horrify their audience:

“During the past eight months, a tract of country, equal in area to the British Isles and France combined, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, has been the scene of horrors that have hitherto only been perpetrated in medieval days during times of war. Men ruthlessly murdered, tender infants dashed to death, or roasted alive in their own homes, married women the prey of a brutal lust that has often caused their death; and young girls violated in the sight of the relatives by soldiers who should have been the guardians of their honour—these have been the deeds with which the population of Southern Russia has been stained since last April.”[35]

On May 24, 1881, a delegation from the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Jewish Board of Deputies met with the Foreign Secretary of Gladstone’s cabinet, Lord Granville. Public outrage culminated in a meeting at Manor House on February 1, 1882.  Numerous letters were printed on the subject, including one from the Earl of Shaftesbury. The Times reported that the Jews of England had presented a memorandum calling for the abolition of restrictive laws for Russian Jews to the Russian ambassador, who refused to transmit it to his government.

The Times was forced to backdown from its more far-fetched claims, with the publication of a Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1, 1882,” containing correspondence which the Foreign Office had received from the British embassies in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Taganrog, and Mykolaiv, which that The Times’s claims were often grossly exaggerated or outright fabrications.[36] According to Vice-Consul Wagstaff as Mykolaiv, “… this description is so incorrect and exaggerated, and the descriptions of what took place at some other of the places mentioned so far exceed in horrors the descriptions given to me by eye-witnesses at these places, that I think very little faith can be given to any part of it, more especially to these accounts of the violations of women.” Wagstaff then emphasizes: “I have taken pains to question Jews of all classes, and none know of such a case.”[37]

Wagstaff insists that the motivations were largely directed at the exploitive economic practices of Russian Jews. He points out that, whereas Jews in Western Europe or America are fully assimilated, they live quite apart in Russia. Those occupations constantly denounced by the public, include being dealers in spirits, keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and brothels, traders of stolen goods, illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. They have also succeeded in servicing the government as contractors, using their commercial skills to collude with corrupt officials in defrauding the State of vast sums of money. Wagstaff also notes that there are many well-educated, highly-respectable, and honorable Jews living in Russia, but that they are a minority, though they condemn the occupations of the lower-class Jews, and acknowledge their abuses and work to remedy the situation.[38]

Wagstaff dismisses claims that the outbreaks were organized and directed by the members of the Executive Committee of the Revolutionarily party, but he concedes that the Nihilists—meaning terrorists inspired by Bakunin and Alexander Herzen—incited the people to violence, as confirmed by depositions of some of the peasants which noted, “that they were ordered to plunder the Jews.”[39] According to Consul-General Stanley at Odessa:

Not a person I have spoken to but things that the recent outbreaks against the Jews throughout South Russia were fomented by these who used the Jews as a pretext, and who wished to cause general disturbance and disaffection, in the same manner as they previously fomented incendiarism, and, as there is reason to fear, will do so again. Among other results hoped for by them was the hostility which would be aroused against the Government by the quantity of innocent people who would certainly be arrested, as is always the case on any disturbance occurring in Russia.[40]

However, a lengthy report of the Russo-Jewish Committee, was submitted by Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812 – 1870), another son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, which gathered numerous testimonies from Russian Jews to not only to confirm the truth of The Times’s reports, but to show that they had been incomplete. The Russian government, however, replied, largely through the official Journal de St. Petersburg, which was reproduced in The Times:

The English journals, with The Times at their head, have published alleged details of the Russian “atrocities” in which the greatest fantasy and plainest malevolence are strikingly apparent. It is easy enough to pile up figures and statistics of people killed and goods lost, and say, “Refute that if you can.”[41]

Novoevremia, a Russian publication, perceived the Manor House meeting as part of an on-going campaign engineered by Jews, whose first tactic had been a demand for equal rights. When the Russian government was not compliant, it claimed, foreign Jews attacked Russian credit on the international stock exchange, a plot which nevertheless failed because Russia was not in need of a foreign loan. Rus, another Russian publication, from Ivan Aksakov (1823 – 1886), noted the role played in anti-Russian agitation by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and recommended that the Russian government block its further interference in Russian internal affairs. Aksakov was one of the founders at Moscow of a circle of Slavophiles, who, aiming to restore Russia to the position independence from West European civilization it had held in the days before Peter the Great, opposed to all the foreign elements of Russia-Germans, Poles, and, above all, Jews. Aksakov’s concern with the Alliance would reach its peak in 1883 when Rus reprinted from the French newspaper L’Antisemitique a purported “manifesto” of Adolphe Crémieux, detailing the Alliance as a secret organization of the whole Jewish world to obtain control of all governments.[42]

Ostjuden

Davis Trietsch (1870 – 1935), who had participated as an American delegate to the First Zionist Congress, founded the Jüdische Verlag, an important Zionist publisher in Berlin and Cologne, with a group that included Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann, and others, shortly before the fifth Zionist Congress in 1902. The aim of the publishing house was to publish the spiritual, cultural, literary, and artistic heritage of the Jewish people throughout history as a basis for the spiritual-cultural renaissance of the Jewish people. The idea had received Herzl’s warm support at the Fifth Zionist Congress (1901). That same year, with Leo Winz (1876 – 1952), Trietsch founded Ost und West (“East and West”), the first German-language cultural magazine dedicated only to Jewish topics. Between 1907 and 1914, some pages of the magazine were used by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to publish their communications. One of the main concerns was to introduce the culture of the new Eastern European Jewish immigrants, known as Ostjuden, to the assimilated German Jews, who perceived negatively, in conformity with the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes.

For those who retain the pseudo-scientific perception of Jews as a “race,” rather than a religious grouping, criticism of the actions, culture or behavior by some Jews has been characterized as “anti-Semitism.” Similarly, criticism by some Jews of other Jews—and more importantly, in some cases, criticism of Zionism by anti-Zionists—is characterized as “self-hatred.” The origins of terms such as “Jewish self-hatred” lie in the mid-nineteenth-century feuds between German Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary and Reform Jews. Both accused the other of betraying Jewish identity, the Orthodox Jews accused the Reform Jews of identifying more closely with German Protestantism and German nationalism than with Judaism.[43]

Jewish elites in the West, who had assimilated the secular principles of the Enlightenment, following from the influence of the Haskalah, were committed to their nations, and concerned with displays of Jewishness and Jewish nationalism, and were prone to echo mainstream stereotypes about the poverty, filthiness and superstitiousness of the Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews.[44] The large-scale pogroms swept through Russia from 1881 to 1884 coincided with burgeoning influx of the displaced rural poor into cities. The waves of immigration stirred xenophobic reactions in countries to the west, and they were looked down upon by the assimilated the Jewish middle-class for their backwardness.[45] The Ostjuden were described by Joseph Roth, in The Wandering Jews (1926–27), about the plight of the Jews refugees who fled to the West from Lithuania, Poland and Russia in the mid-1920s, wrote, “They sought shelter in cities and towns where most of them had never been and, unfortunately, where they were made despicably unwelcome.”[46]

Eastern Jews, who represented 75% of the Jewish population at that time, figure frequently described in early Zionist texts as an impoverished population that was both physically and morally “degenerate.”[47] The Ostjuden, explains Steven E. Aschheim, were “portrayed as immoral, culturally backward creatures of the ugly, anachronistic ghetto.”[48] As to why German Jews rejected their Ostjuden brethren, he adds:

Eastern ghettos became a symbolic construct by which emergent Jewry could distinguish itself from their less fortunate, unenlightened, and unemancipated East European brothers. Such an attitude was encouraged by the implicit dictates of assimilation. Integration was not merely the attempt to blend into new cultural and social surroundings. It was also a purposeful, even programmatic dissociation from traditional Jewish national and cultural moorings. In their eagerness to prove their worthiness for equal rights, it was first necessary for West European Jews to demonstrate “self-regeneration” and to establish the difference between themselves and the traditional Jews of the ghetto. The emergent stereotype of the “Ostjude” was therefore as much the dialectical product of Enlightenment thinking as the self-image of modern German Jew.[49]

According to Aschleim, throughout the nineteenth century, it was quite common to find surprisingly negative portrayals of “Polish” Jews by German Jews and non-Jews from. Typical were depictions of Galician Jewry by the newspaper Der Israelit as having fallen to the lowest cultural depths, living in horrible filth and poverty, and dominated by ignorance and superstition. Heinrich Graetz, although a proto-nationalist and committed Jew, chastised the Eastern Jews’ “Talmudic spirit,” and their love of “twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision.”[50] The novelist Jakob Wassermann (1873 – 1934) proposed an ontological distinction between a “Jewish” Jew and a German Jew: “Are those not two distinct species, almost two distinct races, or at least two distinct modes of life and thought?”[51]

The specific term “self-hating Jew” came into use developing from Herzl’s polemical use of the term “anti-Semite of Jewish origin,” in the context of his rejection of his project of political Zionism.[52] Herzl published an article entitled Mauschel (“Kike/Sheeny/Yid/Ikey”), in 1897, not long after the conclusion of the First Zionist Congress. It is often considered to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking within Zionism, and as a virulently anti-Semitic diatribe or screed.[53] Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews: Jiden (“Yids”) and Juden (“Jews”), and employed the term Mauschel as a label for any Jew who opposed his Zionist solution to the Jewish Question. According to Herzl, “no true Jew can be an anti-Zionist; only Mauschel is one.”[54] A Mauschel, Herzl explained, “is a distortion (Verzerrung) of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant.”[55] The pulpits of synagogues, he claimed, should be cleared of rabbis who are critical of Zionism. The opponents of Zionism should be treated as the enemies they are, the “motley crew” of profit-seekers, Jewish financiers, with skeletons in their closets, blackmailing Jewish journalists who accept bribes to coverup wrongdoings, Jewish lawyers who serve a shady clientele, along with corrupt politicians and businessmen.[56] Elsewhere in his writings, Herzl described opponents of the Zionism he was proposing as Schädlinge (“Jewish vermin”).

According to Annie Levin, “The writings of Herzl and his colleague, Max Nordau, are littered with descriptions of European Jews as parasites, social diseases, germs, aliens. They were frustrated and bewildered that most Jews wanted to assimilate and live in their countries of birth.”[57] As Levin explains, “Zionists accepted the 19th century view that anti-Semitism—in fact all racial difference—was a permanent feature of human nature. For this reason it was pointless to struggle against it. The solution for Jews was to form a state and convince the European world that Jews belonged to the class of the ‘superior’ colonizers, not to that of the colonized.”[58]

Herzl himself imagined the Promised Land as a place where stereotypical Jews with their hooked noses, red hair and bow-legs could live free from being despised.[59] In The State of the Jews, Herzl wrote:

 

The unthinking might, for example, imagine that this exodus would have to take its way from civilization into the desert. That is not so! It will be carried out entirely in the framework of civilization. We shall not revert to a lower stage, we shall rise to a higher one. We shall not dwell in mud huts; we shall build new, and more beautiful, more modern houses, and possess them in safety… We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism… [Europe] would have to guarantee our existence.[60]

Israeli historian Anita Shapira remarked, “Anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes did nourish, to some degree, the thought of Zionist public opinion makers.”[61] Karl Kraus, the Jewish anti-Zionist writer who broke from the Young Vienna circle around Theosophist Frederick Eckstein, regarded antisemitism as the “essence” of the Zionist movement and characterized Jewish supporters as “Jewish antisemites.”[62] In his 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie (“The Road into the Open”), Arthur Schnitzler, a member of the circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer, has one character say: “I myself have only succeeded up to the present in making the acquaintance of one genuine anti-Semite. I’m afraid I’m bound to admit,… that it was a well-known Zionist leader.” In 1915, Pinhas Felix Rosen (1887 – 1978), who rose to be Israel’s first Justice Minister, wrote in a field report on Ostjuden published in Der Jüdische Student that the great lesson for young Jewish Zionists fighting on the eastern front, on experiencing disillusionment at what they observe of Jewish life there, was that Palestine was one large “institute for the fumigation of (all) Jewish vermin.”[63] Always active in Zionist circles, working as chief of staff to Chaim Weizmann, Rosen was Chairman of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) from 1920 to 1923, and eventually migrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1926 where he practiced as a lawyer and helped create the Central European Immigrants Association.


[1] Scott Ury. “Strange Bedfellows? Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Fate of "the Jews’.” American Historical Review, 123, 4 (October 2018), p. 1157.

[2] Henry J. Cohn. “Theodor Herzl’s Conversion to Zionism.” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April, 1970), pp. 101-110.

[3] Kornberg. “Theodor Herzl: A Reevaluation.” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June, 1980), pp. 226–252.

[4] Moses Hess. Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, trans. Rabbi Maurice J. Bloom, pp. 9-10. Cited in Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 17.

[5] Christopher Nicholson. Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? (Gefen Publishing House, 2007), p. 154.

[6] L. Violinist. History of the Jews in Berlin, Volume 2, pp. 194–197.

[7] “Herzl – A Man of His Times.” Ruffle. Retrieved from http://www.herzl.org/english/Article.aspx?Item=515&Section=491

[8] Alexander Jacob. Eugen Duhring on the Jews (Brighton: Nineteen Eighty Four Press, 1997), p. 27.

[9] Frederick C. Beiser. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 87.

[10] Cited in Paul Lawrence Rose. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 39.

[11] Philip Earl Steele. “On Theodor Herzl’s encounters with Zionist thought and efforts prior to his conversion in the spring of 1895.” Polish, German, and Austrian Jews and the modern idea of Israel, Volume 1 (Centre for Historical Research in Berlin, Polish Academy of Sciences: 1900).

[12] Gabriel Piterberg. The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (Verso Books, 2020).

[13] Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 50.

[14] Ibid., p. 48.

[15] Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 50.

[16] Ibid., p. 51.

[17] Ibid., p. 51.

[18] McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 199.

[19] Cited in McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 199.

[20] McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 200.

[21] Ibid.

[22] The Jewish Chronicle (May 6, 1881). Cited in Benjamin Blech. Eyewitness to Jewish History (Wiley, 2004).

[23] Mikhail Bakunin. “Letter to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis.” (1870).

[24] Esther Webman. The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth (Routledge, 2012), p. 60.

[25] “Russian Jewish Horrors; A Nine-Months' Record of Rapine, Murder, and Outrage.” The New York Times (January 28, 1882).

[26] Stephen M Berk. Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Greenwood, 1985), pp. 54–55.

[27] John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 4.

[28] Hugh Chisholm (ed.). “Delane, John Thadeus.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 7, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 943.

[29] “Jewish Press - Control.” JR's Rare Books and Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/jewish_press-control.htm

[30] Peter Jordaan. A Secret Between Gentlemen: Lord Battersea’s hidden scandal and the lives it changed forever (Alchemie Books, 2022), p. 217.

[31] “Jewish Press - Control.” JR's Rare Books and Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/jewish_press-control.htm

[32] “Royal christenings.”  Yvonne’s Royalty Home Page. Retrieved rom https://web.archive.org/web/20110806125845/http://users.uniserve.com/~canyon/christenings.htm#Christenings

[33] Ibid., p. 69.

[34] John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 4.

[35] “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia.” The Times, No. 30, 401 (January 11, 1882). Cited in John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 7.

[36] “The Treatment of the Jews in Russia.” The Times, No. 30, 435 (February 20, 1882). Cited in John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 14.

[37] “The Treatment of the Jews in Russia.”

[38] Ibid..

[39] Ibid..

[40] Ibid..

[41] “Russia.” The Times, No. 30, 41 (January 23, 1882). Cited in John Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1984), p. 9.

[42] Klier. “The Times of London, The Russian Press, and the Pogrom of 1881–1881.”

[43] Antony Lerman. “Jewish Self-Hatred: Myth or Reality?” Jewish Quarterly (Summer 2008).

[44] David A. Brenner. “Promoting East European Jewry: Ost und West, Ethnic Identity, and the German Jewish Audience.” Prooftexts, 15:1 (January 1995), pp. 63–88., pp. 63–88, 63–64, 67.

[45] Joachim Doron. “Social concepts prevalent in German Zionism: 1883–1914.” Studies in Zionism, 3:1 (1982), pp. 1–3.

[46] Michael Hoffman. The Wandering Jews (2001). Preface, p. xiv,

[47] Joachim Doron. “Social concepts prevalent in German Zionism: 1883–1914.” Studies in Zionism, 3:1 (1982), p. 4.

[48] Steven E. Aschheim. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion: The ‘Eastern Jew’ in German-Jewish Culture.” Osteuropa, Vol. 58, No. 8/10, Impulses for Europe: Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry (August-October 2008), pp. 61.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., pp. 65.

[51] Ibid.), pp. 67.

[52] Paul Reitter. “Zionism and the Rhetoric of Jewish Self-Hatred.” The Germanic Review, 83, 4 (2008).

[53] Derek J. Penslar. Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale University Press, 2020).

[54] Penslar. Theodor Herzl, p. 114).

[55] Theodor Herzl. “Mauschel.” In Zohn, Harry (ed.). Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses. Vol. 1. (Herzl Press, (1973), pp. 163–164.

[56] Ibid., pp. 164, 168.

[57] Annie Levin. “The hidden history of Zionism.” International Socialist Review, 24 (July–August 2002). Retrieved from https://isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history/

[58] Ibid.

[59] Michael Burri. “Theodor Herzl and Richard von Schaukal: Self-Styled Nobility and the Sources of Bourgeois Belligerence in Prewar Vienna.” Austrian History Yearbook, XXVIII (1997), p. 241.

[60] Arthur Hertzberg. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997), p. 213 and p. 222.

[61] Noah Efron. Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox: The Struggle For Jewish Identity In Israel (Basic Books, 2003), p. 259.

[62] Paul Reitter. The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 79.

[63] Joachim Doron. “Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism: Parallels and Influences (1883-1914).” Studies in Zionism, 4:2 (1983), p. 169.

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