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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jews would continue to be caught in a deadly ethnic crossfire in Central
and Eastern Europe. The Dreyfus Affair in France and the pogroms in
Tsarist Russia further reinforced Herzl's sense of urgency. The rescue of
Jews, he insisted, could not be accomplished by fighting anti-Semitism
or transforming society through revolutionary socialist means but only
by their territorial concentration outside Europe-in their ancient
homeland of Zion. "Modern Zionism was born in Austria, in Vienna,"
wrote the novelist Joseph Roth.
"It
was established by an Austrian jour–
nalist.
It
could not have been established by anyone else."
This verdict is all the more interesting since in Roth's masterly nos–
talgic novel
Radetzkymarsch
(1932), Jews are depicted as great sup–
porters of the Monarchy and of the Austrian idea-the ultimate
Austrian patriots, perhaps the only true Central Europeans. Yet the
logic of Roth's remark is obvious to anyone familiar with the history of
nineteenth-century national movements and the slow decline of the last
great supra-national state in Europe. The "struggle for liberation" of
Germans and Italians-many of them formerly under Habsburg rule–
had been completed by I870-by which time Herzl was ten years old.
In 1867 the Magyars had achieved virtual political independence in his
native Hungary while staying in the Habsburg Empire. The struggle of
Czechs, Poles, and other Slav peoples for national independence would
remain part of everyday politics in the world where Herzl grew up as a
young man with liberal Pan-German ideas. Moreover, in 1897, the year
of the First Zionist Congress, Karl Lueger had come to power as mayor
of Vienna at the head of the first anti-Semitic movement to be democ–
ratically elected to such a commanding position anywhere in the world.
In the very same year, national strife between Germans and Czechs
reached new heights in Austria with constant filibusters and inkpots
being thrown at one another by deputies in the
Reichsrat.
In Prague in
December 1897, anti-German demonstrations rapidly turned into anti–
Jewish riots with Czech as well as German Jews being attacked-soon
to be followed by the Hilsner blood libel, Austria's Dreyfus Affair. Herzl
observed and wrote with perspicacity about these important events. But
he was not merely another Austrian journalist; he could read the writ–
ing on the wall-which is surely one definition of a prophet.
On September 3, 1897, Herzl was to make one of the most remark–
ably accurate predictions of modern history, which he confided to his
diary: "At Basle I founded the Jewish State.
If
I said this aloud today I
would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and cer–
tainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it."
