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PARTISAN REVIEW
prominent critic Max Nordau, in his notorious book of 1892,
Entartung
(Degeneration), which analyzed and diagnosed the ills of the century. He
has an opening chapter in that work appropriately called "Fin de siecle."
Of course, this is a French term and France was in many ways the
locus clas–
sicus
for this pervasive sense of corruption, decay, restlessness, decadence,
deterioration of morals, alcoholism, crime, demographic decline, and irra–
tionalist currents in art and culture. The phenomenon was found
throughout Europe, but in France it was felt more acutely. Nordau, who
in
Entartung
focused particularly on art, culture and literature, pronounced
a pretty devastating verdict on the pathologies of the European culture of
his day. To some extent Herzl may have shared this view, though he never
expressed himself in such harsh terms about the culture of which he him–
self was such a stylish product. There is an interesting paradox in the
attitude of the Zionists of that generation towards Europe, because many
might have agreed with at least part of Nordau's assessment, and yet their
version of Zionism was a very European one. They fully shared the liber–
al enlightenment form of Europeanism. They sought to salvage the best of
European culture and to transplant it to the eastern Mediterranean, to a
Jewish state. From the outset there is an interesting mix of optimism and
pessimism in the Zionist view of the fin de siecle and of Europe itself. The
pessimism derived from the awareness that that culture had produced the
specter of an irrational anti-Semitism that was probably incurable and
ineradicable. This deeply pessimistic vision was all-too graphically con–
firmed by the Holocaust forty years later. The optimistic aspect lay in the
belief that Europe, even in its fin de siecle condition, represented a supe–
rior civilization. This was after al l the heyday of European imperialism and
colonization, and modern Zionism wi th its idea of transplanting the Jewish
people back to Zion emerged in that context. European colonialism, we
should remember, was considered quite progressive at the time. Of course,
Zion itself, or Palestine, was then controlled by the Ottoman Empire. In
1900 it contained only fifty thousand Jews. Just think of that for a moment
if you want to grasp the scale of the transformation that the Jewish world
has undergone in one hundred years . Fifty thousand Jews represents a mere
0.5 percent of world Jewry at that time and little more than ten percent of
the population of Palestine as a whole. Since demography is rather impor–
tant in any assessment of what has happened in the last century, let me just
give you a few figures that may illustrate the the scale of the quantative
changes that have occurred since then. In 1900 there were 10.34 million
Jews in the world. More importantly, the Jews were an overwhelmingly
European
people. Eight and a half million Jews lived on the European con–
tinent, in which I include Russia. Eighty-two percent of world Jewry lived
in Europe, of whom seventy to seventy-five percent lived in Russia and
eastern Europe. Russian Jewry alone accounted for fifty percent of world
