Gil Troy
Jewish Journal, Aug. 18, 2022
“Sometimes, he is more playwright than architect, as when he plots out the Jews’ redemption in three acts from “Introduction” to “Elevation” to “Emigration.””
Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People edited by Gil Troy, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. This is first in a series.
Today, Theodor Herzl is best known for his beard, not his books, for an Aha-moment he never had, for being an anti-anti-Semite rather than an idealist, and for launching the Zionist movement in 1897 – eighteen months after he released his history-changing Zionist manifesto. Despite this confusion, he remains Israel’s iconic Founder, with George Washington’s mythic status, Thomas Jefferson’s ideological impact, and Winston Churchill’s memorable bon mots. One hundred and eighteen years after his tragic death at the age of forty-four, and 125 years after he convened the first Zionist Congress in August, 1897, Theodor Herzl remains influential. His outsized shadow – and the true, complicated, multi-dimensional person behind the myth – are precisely why it is so important to read his Zionist writings in this new edition, which, quite fittingly, is also inaugurating the Library of the Jewish People.
It was a perfect match: the People of the Book got themselves a bookish savior. Theodor Herzl wrote articles, plays, novels, poems, manifestos, editorials, diary entries, stylish literary essays – feuilletons – and hundreds of letters. These volumes recreate his last eleven years as a Zionist leader. On these pages, Herzl works out his ideas, works through his problems, works his contacts, and works himself to death, trying to hustle a Jewish state into being. These pages demonstrate that Herzl was not just another bookish Jew. As a proud Jewish nationalist seeking to revive the independence Jews celebrate at Hanukkah, he was also a Maccabean – a fighting Jew – a Jew with a spine and spunk, not just a Jew with a mind and soul.
The diaries’ rollicking, free-flowing nature make them among the most easily misquoted and misunderstood sources in the Zionist Canon. Anti-Zionists frequently rifle through Herzl’s writings, cherry-picking an entry here, a phrase there, to indict the entire Zionist enterprise as “ethno-nationalist,” “racist,” “imperialist,” “colonialist,” or in today’s popular phrase “settler-colonialist.” These volumes confirm that the often vain, petty, thin-skinned, imperious Herzl was not perfect and very much a turn-of-the-century European. Nevertheless, this historical scavenging tells us little about Herzl’s Zionism and much about Zionism’s enemies – who daily demonstrate Herzlian Zionism’s biggest failure: it did not end antisemitism.
The diaries record the cascade of feelings – and ideas – as Herzl’s Zionism evolves. He shifts from imagining a novel explaining his vision to drafting a manifesto charting out the Jewish future.
The diaries record the cascade of feelings – and ideas – as Herzl’s Zionism evolves. He shifts from imagining a novel explaining his vision to drafting a manifesto charting out the Jewish future to trying to make his dreams come true. It is a brainstorming book – which is why extracting one line here or there to define the man or the movement distorts the diaries’ freewheeling, free-associational character. Day by day, Herzl’s Jewish consciousness and self-importance grow, along with his doubts. His life has become a high-wire act, with big ideas, great thrills, and historic stakes. …Source