Herzl, the towering Zionist who has permeated my life

But that’s not all. Only in the last years was he aware he was Jewish. He was assimilated, he was emancipated. Of course, he knew he was Jewish, but he had no feeling for the Jewish people.

As an undergraduate, a member of a very feudal, elegant student corps, he had experienced antisemitism because, at the age of 23, in 1883, two waves of antisemitism swept through Austria, a plebeian and a patrician one.

The plebeian one was run by the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, the first of the modern antisemitic politicians, who mobilised the lower middle-classes and had a strong antisemitic background.

The patrician one was more the haut bourgeoisie than the aristocracy, and they were pan-German. They despised the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, they wanted the Anschluss, they were antisemitic.

So when he was an undergraduate, Herzl had the awful experience of being asked to resign from his corps because the Albia, this very feudal student corps, decided that Jews had to resign.

They formed a cartel of student corps, known as the Weithoffen Kartell named after a small village near Vienna where they said the Jew is not a gentleman and they must get out.

But Herzl’s reaction was very odd. He didn’t immediately think he was going to be a Zionist; on the contrary, he thought of mass conversion, let’s all be baptised and find some way of disappearing. And then he forgot about it and things calmed down in Austria.

Much later, when he was in his mid-thirties — and remember he died at the age of 44 — his newspaper (he was one of the great journalists and playwrights and even the imperial theatre performed his plays) sent him to Paris to cover the Dreyfuss trial.

That was a decisive event. After a day in court, he suddenly realised that there in the land of the free — liberté, egalité, fraternité — a Jewish officer of the upper middle-class was accused of being a traitor, selling his country to the enemy. There he experienced a form of antisemitism that was really hurting.

And one day as he walked across a bridge over the Seine to his hotel, always impeccably dressed, top coat, long beard — he looked like an Assyrian prince — he walked back to his hotel and on the way two street urchins ran after him and said “sale juif, sale juif” [“dirty Jew”].

He was so shattered that he locked himself up for three days, asked the porter to bring up food and wrote a science-fiction political pamphlet called The Jewish State — political Zionism, the Jews must have a state in Palestine.

When that pamphlet was published — and by the way an English version appeared in the Jewish Chronicle at the time — when it was published, the reaction was terrible. The wealthy Jews, the liberal public said: “What is this extraordinary thing? He suggests mass exodus of Jews in Austria. This is terrible, this will lead to more antisemitism.”

But the Jews in the eastern provinces of Austria-Hungary, in today’s Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, read it and were absolutely fascinated. And he got letters and was asked to give lectures. He took three weeks off and went on a lecture tour. As his train left the Austrian heartland and went through the eastern provinces, at every station there were red carpets, hundreds — in some cases thousands — of Jews, waving a transparency of his photograph with the inscription “Long live Herzl, king of the Jews”.

That was the beginning of the world Zionist movement.

And then extraordinary things happened. In a ridiculously short time he created a movement. An unbelievable situation. Previous examples were very few and even those were quite different and paled in comparison. Alexander the Great died at the age of 33 and commanded armies at 19, but he was the son of a great warrior king with an army. Mozart and Shubert had died young. But they were Wunderkinder. They produced classics when they were toddlers.

But Herzl had only realised there was a Jewish problem a few years before he died. And he created in a feverish way this world Zionist movement.

So for me he is three things. He is the last of the Hebrew prophets, he is the great deliverer, the redeemer because so much that he prophesised became truths — some of it even while he was alive, but most of it in the years after his death. And thirdly, for me he is the apostle to the gentiles.

To understand what it all meant and how quickly he succeeded, let me take you on a flight of fancy — between reality and fancy.

I am going to be 96 in a few months time. I was born in 1919. Assume for a moment I had been born in 1877 and I would have been 20 years old as a student and gone to the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzl would have said to me and to others, hire yourself a dress suit, hire yourself a silver-topped cane and come and join this congress.

He hired a band for the congress, and what did the band play? A potpourri of Richard Wagner, 12 years after Wagner’s publication of his antisemitic essay “Juden in der Musik”, [The Jews in Music]. Don’t ask me to explain it, these are the mysteries of zeitgeist. (There is an explanation but that is for another lecture.)

So what would have happened? I would have been at the congress. Twenty years later at the time of the Balfour Declaration, Herzl was already dead. His successors did it for him. And I would probably then have been able to stand outside 10 Downing Street, jubilant that the Jews now had the Balfour Declaration.

Thirty years after that I would still be a ripe age; and then comes the real fact that I was actually there when the state of Israel was proclaimed at the United Nations.

Twenty years after that came the Six-Day War, when I spent the fourth and fifth day of the war as the guest of General Herzog, later President Herzog.

We had two nights of unforgettable experiences. It was the fourth and the fifth nights and among the guests were journalists like Randolph Churchill and his son Winston junior, and Lady Pamela Berry — the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph — and some very distinguished military critics, some of them former generals in the army.

We were discussing the war. Randolph Churchill turned to Moshe Dayan, who passed by the dinner party, and said: “General Dayan, tell me, I studied what you did in the south, the Egyptian campaign, when your tanks — and you didn’t have too many tanks — recklessly drove into the infantry of the enemy without infantry backing on your side.”

And Dayan, quietly, in his deadpan way of talking, said: “But Mr Churchill, we had infantry, we had wonderful regiments, I could give you the names — Belsen, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Auschwitz. That was our infantry. Can there be better regiments than that?”

On the fifth night we were having dinner and an orderly came and whispered something into the ear of General Herzog. He got up, choking with emotion, and said: “Gentlemen, we have scaled the Golan Heights. I might say the war is over.”
I tell this story for the following reason. I could have still been there for a few years. In other words — within one lifetime, through Herzl, prophecy turned into victory, independence and recognition. Because the week after the Six-Day War, a man like Liddell Hart, the great military critic, wrote that the new Israeli army was the finest fighting force in the world.

That was Theodor Herzl’s legacy.

Now I want to talk about Herzl not only as the redeemer, the redeemer who redeemed so many of these promises, but also as the apostle to the gentiles.

Because he was not just a tribal figure; he worked on the world stage and he wished to make friends with non-Jews. He went to the Tsarist ministry of the interior responsible for pogroms, he went to see the Pope, who wasn’t particularly friendly in those days. He saw the French, he saw the British, he saw some American politicians. And he made friends.
Now the first Zionist of Christian persuasion was an English clergyman called Reverend Hechler. He was the first non-Jew who saw the point and he became the court preacher of the Grand Duke of Baden, who in turn was the uncle of the Kaiser.
He said to the Grand Duke: “You must meet Dr Herzl.” And the Grand Duke met him and was very impressed and offered his help. He said to him: “I will introduce you to the Kaiser.”

And the Kaiser, in a famous tableau meeting outside the ramparts of Jerusalem — where the Kaiser was visiting Palestine as the guest of the Sultan, his ally — received on horseback Dr Herzl and four or five other Zionist delegates and promised to look at the memorandum and see what he could do to help the Sultan to give the Jews a charter in Palestine.
At the same time, in England sat a brilliant young biochemist with the name of Chaim Weizmann who did the same thing — made friends with people like Balfour and Lloyd George and lobbied to get support.

Later, long after (Herzl had died already by then) in the years before and during the First World War, he too did some very successful lobbying.

World Jewry was split. German Jewry was pleased with the attitude of the Kaiser and people like the Grand Duke who were friendly. And they had one great quality: they were on the other side from the Russian Tsar. To the Jews at the time the Tsar was almost a Hitler. The pogroms were carried out by the Cossacks, ordered by the Tsar. Thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees in the East Side of New York were refugees from the Tsar.

In other words, German Jews could say: “We fight with the German army against the Tsar.”

On the other hand, British Jews were on the side of Russia, but had their own ideas and were very patriotic British Jews. They had good reason to be patriotic because the Jews had a very good time in England.

Then came that period which is so well described in The Sleepwalkers [by historian Christopher Clark], preparing for World War One, when both sides were fighting this rivalry about how to get the Americans into the war or keep them out of it — the Germans on the one side, and the British.

The Germans used an appeal to their Jewish friends in America — don’t forget that the original great Jewish families in America were pro-German, the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Rosenwalds of Sears, Roebuck — they sent their children to Berlin and Göttingen and Heidelberg rather than to Oxford and Cambridge. And they were of course interested in helping their side.

So it was a completely confused situation. On the German side was a brilliant young Zionist called Dr Nahum Goldmann who later in life founded the World Jewish Congress. And he was employed by Hindenberg and Ludendorff to write pamphlets in Yiddish for the German army to drop by their hundreds of thousands in Poland and in Ukraine, to say, “Jewish brothers and sisters, help us to fight the Tsar, the man who killed your kith and kin.”

This was the confused situation, and in this race for getting America into the war, the British won. And Weizmann won too because he made friends with Lloyd George, made friends with Balfour and in 1917 got the Balfour Declaration.

And this is the extraordinary thing: nowhere in the copious, voluminous correspondence published by Theodor Herzl, nowhere in his two great novels, is there any critical word, let alone hostile words, about Arabs and Palestinians.
On the contrary, the romantic Theodor Herzl hoped that they would be neighbours working together. He thought that the mighty Arab nation under the Ottoman yoke would become free, would turn into a multitude of sovereign countries — monarchies and republics — and there would still be room for a Jewish state next to an Arab state.

And he hoped that this “semitic brotherhood”, as he put it — “cousinhood” as he put it also — would come to pass.
I want to end up with my hope that this will happen and that this last and most important part of Theodor Herzl’s prophecy may one day soon become reality.

This is an edited transcript of a speech given by Lord Weidenfeld on the award of the Theodor Herzl Prize by the World Jewish Congress