Herzl and Normalizing Jewish Power

In Working on the screenplay for our heroic/tragic biopic... 'Herzl', Phil Weiss writes:

These are very complex issues, but to pick off a couple of them: Herzl's anti-Semitism was expressed at a time of the modern rise of anti-Semitism. There was a Jewish problem. It involved the fact that Jews were doing so well in the European cities, and in the Russian countryside; the Russian peasantry felt "economically overborne" by the Jews, as the antisemitic minister to the Tsar, Plehve, told Herzl. And Herzl seemed to agree with him. "Our frightful financial power" is a key cause of anti-Semitism, he said. Herzl looked at real estate maps of Berlin and marveled at all the property Jews owned. 

We look at this through the lens of the Holocaust and say, Why did they even talk about this!!! My response is that intellectuals must talk about the Jewish rise and the Jewish gift for the modern age because they are real and important. It is why I insist on talking about Jews being the richest group by religion in the U.S. today; our bookish past has specially fitted us for this era of history. The trend was evident when Herzl had his vision. European cities were flooded by Jewish journalists, doctors, lawyers, etc. The awareness of Jewish exceptionalism in the modern city is all through the prose work of one of the greatest Jewish writers of any age, Franz Kafka, an insurance man who hated the anti-Semites but saw them as motivated by Jewish specialness. In Herzl's view, and the anti-Semites, this was the Jewish problem because Jews were not fully integrated into western society, they still made up a state within a state. So give me a state, Herzl said; we can't be assimilated. 

I chalk Herzl's anti-Semitism up to a real social issue that those societies had to deal with. 

Zionists would "relieve" the anti-Semites of The Jewish Question, Herzl said. Well the way they dealt with the issue was of course horrific. But Zionism is not the answer either.
Masculinity. Herzl wanted to cultivate the ideal of masculine honor in the Jews. He thought it was lacking in Jewish life. Indeed, Slezkine hints at this idea, as I remember, in the Jewish Century: that codes of honor were based in an agrarian, feudal order, and Jews of course didn't have that, they weren't "princes and peasants," but "merchants and priests." There was an effeteness to Jewish life in the Diaspora, which both Hitler and the Zionists would batten on to. The Israelis also hate this aspect of Jewish life in the galut, or exile. They say that Jews were passive and feminine. I confess this is an area where I admire the Israelis; they imagined different ways of being for Jews. They imagined Jewish plumbers and farmers and bus drivers, not just the "intellectual proletariat," as Herzl described the overeducated Jews of European cities. Without going near the issue of Israeli militarism, which you and I both abhor, I like the idea of more bandwidth in Jewish life. I like a physical life. At one point in his diaries, Herzl praises physical labor as spiritual. I'm with him all the way there. So when Herzl imagined a Jewish state where Jews could occupy many different roles, I see some beauty in that vision.

This analysis misses the critical point. In Herzl's Congress Zionism, there never was any intent to send Western and Central European Jews to Palestine. Central and Western European Jews were to run the Zionist project remotely while Russian Jews constituted the intended settler population even though the vast majority scorned Zionism and a significant fraction preferred

• to join revolutionary conspiracies for the overthrow of the Czarist state and
• to rule within (or as) the revolutionary leadership or at least
• to constitute the quintessential revolutionary class in the new revolutionary state.

While Herzl had no qualms about stealing Palestine and ethnically cleansing the native population, Herzl's Zionism was really meant to normalize or to conceal Jewish specialness in Western and Central Europe so that Jews could continue to cheat economically and to wield disproportionate political power. In other worlds Jewish political and economic power would become more dangerous through insidiousness.

With the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Zionist Holocaust religion in the USA, Herzl's fondest dream has been realized with the qualification that the center of Jewish political-economic power (and remote control over the Zionist colony) has moved from Central Europe to the USA.

Relevant articles:

• Jewish Financial Aggression, World Economic Nakba
• Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland or Judonia
• Makdisi Overlooks US Journalistic Nazification
• Jewish Peril 1933 Versus 2009
• In the Modern Period: Not only Anachronism But Also Exceptionalism and Omission
• Gladwell Supports Hegemonic Zionist Discourse
• Corrupt Jewish Social Networking Rules!
• Hub of the World (Zionist Conspiracy)
• Third Fraud: Longing for Zion
• Zionizing Jewish Culture and History
  

Sphere: Related Content