What kind of a man was the founder of Zionism?
And why did he describe other Jews as “unspeakably low and repugnant”?
The final part of my recording about the history of Zionism covers:
Herzl’s characterisation of “Mauschel Jews” using the tropes of Jew-haters.
Why his son committed suicide.
Why SS officers visited Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1933 and 1937.
How Diaspora Jews are turning against Israel.
Listen to the original conversation here.
Read my series on traditional Jewish anti-Zionism here.
Transcript follows:
Theodor Herzl and the Roots of Zionism
So, what kind of Jew was Theodor Herzl? He was Hungarian, like my grandmother, but unlike her, he was an atheist, and he was also an assimilationist. He wanted to fit in with the intelligentsia of the time. He wrote reviews on operas and he dressed in a way that most sophisticated people dressed. And he had some pretty weird views on Jews, which we might consider quite antisemitic today. There were the good Jews and what he called the "Mauschels." This is what he says about Mauschel Jews: "What is this Mauschel anyway? A type, my dear friends, a figure that keeps reappearing over the ages, the hideous companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that the two have always been confused with each other. A Jew is a human being like any other, no better and no worse, possibly intimidated and embittered by persecution and very steadfast in suffering. Mauschel, on the other hand, is a distortion of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant."
And elsewhere in his writings and in his diaries, he's talking about how the Jews of his local synagogue have furtive and shifty eyes. He talks about their stunted jargons and their hideous customs and stuff like that. All of this was the kind of stuff that was said about Jews at the time, not really by Jews, but by their opponents, the kind of people who formed the Antisemite League. There was an Antisemite League of Germany that was the first one. It was founded, I think, in the 1870s by a guy called Wilhelm Marr. And that's the first example of the word "antisemitism." He coined the phrase to define what his group was, a group that was designed and founded in order to preserve the racial purity of the Germans against what he called this "degenerate race" of Jews.
This is very much in the context of racial theory, which was very popular at the time, despite the fact that there are and were and had been for thousands of years, or at least a thousand years, Jews that were white, like my forefathers; Jews that were Arabs, presumably the original ones; Jews that are Black; Jews that are Indian; Jews that are Chinese. These aren't new converts. These are people who've been pursuing Jewish customs and Jewish culture and keeping the laws and having their communities and synagogues and all the rest, but they don't look anything like those.
So this idea of the Jews being a race is already quite problematic, and even the idea of white people being a race. This comes from a very specific time in history when racial theory was popular. You might have seen those morphological figures of what the Negroid race looks like and what these different races look like, and you have a kind of progression from monkeys up to white folk. So that was the kind of thinking that was around at the time that influenced both Zionism and what became Nazism later. And you see it in Herzl's own writings as well. His idea was that what he considered the Jewish race would go to Palestine, would colonize it as a country, and he said this; he said it could be "a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism," which is what he saw in the East.
Herzl's Controversial Ideas and Legacy
Yeah, so this guy has some pretty problematic ideas. And of course, he's a man of his time, and we should forgive people of his time. He's a traumatized man as well. This guy suffered greatly; he was exposed to antisemitism. And this isn't the kind of antisemitism that people are facing today and certainly not the kind of stuff that was going on in the '80s and the '90s when I was growing up. This was, for example, acid attacks at a Jewish wedding in Paris by the French League of Antisemites. Now, the German League of Antisemites itself had disbanded within about 4 years, but the term survived. You mostly hear it being said by Jews these days, or by politicians who, maybe they want to protect the Jews, and they think this is the best way to do it.
But anyway, this idea of antisemitism carries within it this racial theory, which has been completely discredited. It comes from a time when people were putting pygmies in zoos and displaying them to the public as a kind of missing link between monkeys and developed people. It comes from a time when certain conditions, what they called "Mongoloid idiots," for example, led them to believe that the Mongoloid people (people from Mongolia) represented a stage of development in the human race which was previous to the pinnacle of the human race that we've got to now: the white people that Herzl is talking about can form a rampart of Europe against Asia. And he says that the way to do this is to "spirit the penniless population across the border by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
Now, this is the founder of Zionism. This is the guy mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, talking about his suggestions for what is to be done with the Palestinians who live in the country that he said the Jews would colonize. He says in his writings, "The Zionist idea is a colonial idea." This was his second solution to the "Jewish problem." What's the Jewish problem? The Jewish problem is how do you deal with a people that won't assimilate when a country is trying to define itself as a nation-state? So France—what's France after the French Revolution, after the rise of the Republic, when it defines itself? They're not Parisians and Bretons; they're all French now because they all speak French and they all do French things. They eat croissants. They don't eat schwarzbrod like the Germans with their black bread. And they don't do the stuff of the English people; they do French stuff. They're not gypsies, and they're not Jews. So you have this internal population who are not French, but now everyone's French, so what do you do about it? And it's the same going on post-Garibaldi Italy, post-Bismarck Germany. You've got the nation-state arises and seeks to define itself against the rest of the world and against the enemy within.
So this is a Jewish problem: what do you do with the people that refuses to assimilate? And Herzl's initial proposal was that they should be converted en masse to Catholicism in a cathedral on Sunday with pomp and music and celebration. He was going to persuade the Jews this was a good idea. He was going to persuade the Pope that this was a good idea. Maybe the Pope would have thought it's a good idea, I don't know, but it seems like a bit of a long shot because, basically, this man was completely delusional from my perspective. Only a few months before he published Der Judenstaat (which is The Jewish State, his manifesto, in 1896, I think it was), he gets visited by the chief rabbi of Vienna, who finds him putting up his Christmas tree in his house. The rabbi's like, "What the hell is this?" And he says, "Yeah, I'm just putting it up with my son." His son Hans has a very tragic story. Herzl refused to circumcise his son. This is obviously perhaps one of the barbaric customs of the degenerate ghetto Jews that he didn't like, but this didn't really help Hans out. Hans wrote in his diaries, "Religion is essential to me," and he later circumcised himself as an older person—imagine how painful that was. And he also had himself baptized into Catholicism. This guy didn't know what to do with himself. He had a religious impulse, as a lot of people do. You know, Jung says that we all have a religious impulse, but he didn't know what to do with it; he didn't know which one. He was tormented his whole life, and his life ended badly. In fact, he committed suicide in 1924, just days after his sister died of drug complications.
Right, so these are 2 of Herzl's 3 children. One died of drug complications, one died of suicide. A very unhappy man. His final diary entry was, "My life was badly lived, and it's coming to a bad end." I'm not saying this because I'm delighting in the fact that Herzl's son committed suicide. I'm saying this because this is a man whose impact on his family, of his own very twisted perspective on what he was and what Judaism was... but is that the kind of guy who you want to found a state? Is that the kind of fountain of a philosophy, a political philosophy, that the Jewish people want? Well, apparently it is, because he's the guy mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence as the inspiration behind Zionism. The other guy who's mentioned is Lord Balfour. Now, the Balfour Declaration was, I think it was, 1917. So who is Lord Balfour? Right, this was a guy who hated the Jews. He had already sponsored legislation to limit the number of Jews coming in from the European pogroms. Palestine had been promised to the Arabs, it had been promised to the French, and Lord Balfour also promised it to the Zionists, and he was a Jew hater; he hated them. And he's also mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Those are the only 2 names mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. So this is kind of strange, isn't it? You've got pro-Zionist antisemites, or let's call them Jew haters, because I bristle at this using a term for a Jew hater to describe Jew hating. It just feels off to me.
Pro-Zionist Antisemitism and Historical Context
There were quite a few antisemitic, Jew-hating pro-Zionists. One was Mussolini, for example. Another one was Stalin, Stalin, who removed the Jews from the Communist Party Bureau, although there were loads of Jews in it when he arrived. Winston Churchill didn't say very nice things about the Jews. And then there were the Nazis. For example, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, he was a vocal supporter of Zionism. The commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring, and the chief ideologue of the Nazi party, a guy called Alfred Rosenberg, said that Zionism should be vigorously supported. And this was put into practice. After Kristallnacht in 1938, which was when a whole load of opposition to Nazi parties and the Nazi movement was smashed, the Zionist Federation of Germany was the only party outside of the Nazis that was allowed to continue publishing its newspaper. In 1933, Zionism was a tiny, hated philosophy of assimilationists, people who didn't want to be Jews the way they'd been Jews before. And again, for good reason, there's lots of difficult stuff going on. But that was a particular response to it, and it was very unpopular amongst the Jewish community. There are writings of Zionist organizers saying, "We don't have to deal just with the indifference. We have to deal with the hatred of the Jewish community." When Hitler takes power, all these things change. Hitler wants to promote Zionism. He wants to promote a place for the Jews to go, 'cause Hitler wants the Jews out of his Reich. He didn't want to kill all the Jews at the beginning. That's why the Final Solution is called the Final Solution, and it refers to the Jewish question that we were talking about before. The initial solution was: get them out of here. Where are they gonna go? Well, there's a bunch of Zionists who want to go to Palestine. Very good. So what do they do? In 1933, right at the beginning of Hitler's rule, they made the Haavara Agreement between the Nazis (the German state at that point) and the authorities in Palestine. That meant that Jews were allowed to transfer their assets to Palestine, right? So if Jews wanted to flee because of all the oppression that they were facing to other countries, they couldn't take any of their assets away. They would arrive with what they had in their suitcases, if they were allowed to take suitcases. But if they went to Palestine, they could take a bunch of their money through. So 50,000 Jews went off to Palestine. That was a big boon for the Zionists, of course, you know.
There were all kinds of obstacles put in the way of Jews that wanted to help their fellow Jews in Europe. For example, there were Jews who wanted to collect money to send relief. They wanted to send aid packages to Romania and to Poland. And the officials of the World Zionist Organization said, "No, we shouldn't do this. We should vigorously resist this drive to raise money and take money away from our own ends, which are to settle Palestine." So, for example, the first immigration minister to Israel said famously, "One cow in Palestine is worth all the Jews in Poland." That's how valuable he thought those lives of those Jews were. And this, you can see what we're talking about here. He's thinking about Jews in the same way that Herzl was thinking about Jews, thinking about these 2 types of Jews: these kind of nasty Jews, which are degenerate, and ones like Herzl.
In 1933, Leopold von Mildenstein visited Zionist settlements in Palestine, right? This was a Nazi. He was an SS official, in fact. And this trip was documented in a series published in the Nazi press called A Nazi Visits Palestine, and there was a medal printed with a Jewish star and a swastika on it. That was one time that SS officials visited Palestine. Another time was 1937, when Adolf Eichmann went there. That was his first visit. Adolf Eichmann is the guy who put together the infrastructure to transport Jews to the concentration camps. The second time that Adolf Eichmann went to Palestine, he was going there to be tried and face the death penalty. So, talking about antisemitism: When my ancestor, the Rabbi Diskin, said that there was a great threat to Jewish people, he wasn't talking about antisemitism. Antisemitism had been with the Jews for thousands of years. He didn't see that as a threat; he saw the Zionists as a threat.
The antisemites, the Jew-haters, go back to well, the Romans didn't like the Jews. Why not? Because they refused to bow to Caesar. So this was a kind of a political matter in the Roman time. In the Christian period, it became a religious matter, and it was almost like a religious duty to hate the Jews. Popes ordered that the Talmud be burned, for example. The popes ordered that the Jews be confined to ghettos. They were not allowed to own property. There were all kinds of really nasty conspiracies about them, about how they were poisoning wells, about how they were responsible for the Black Death. There was the blood libel, saying that they used to eat the blood of Christian babies and put it into their matzo, into their unleavened bread. So the Jews had a really, really bad time, obviously. And it was much worse in Europe than it was in Palestine. There'd been a Jewish population in Palestine for the last 3,000 years, small but locally integrated, working with the locals: the Muslim Arabs, the Christian Arabs, and the other Jewish Arabs who lived in Palestine. They worked together. They sometimes worshipped at the same shrines. They looked after each other's children. They went to the same hospitals. This was a diverse community through the Middle Ages. And they fared much better there than they did in Europe, where they were facing all of this hatred and oppression and the kind of pogroms of Eastern Europe and mass expulsions and mass murders.
Post-Holocaust and Modern Israel
All that kind of stuff. After the Nazi project, when the concentration camps were liberated, when the Third Reich, which was meant to last a thousand years, barely made a decade, it wasn't cool to be a Jew hater. In fact, it was really uncool to be a Nazi at that point. Eugenics took a blow to its cred. And this was a time when, for example, the Catholic Church started taking the Jews out of their historical position as Christ killers. So, for example, there was a papal encyclical in 1943 saying that modern Jews were not responsible for Christ's death. Now, this might seem a bit strange to us, like no one really thinks that. Well, that's what the Catholic dogma was up until then. And in the 1940s and 1950s, the Catholics and the Episcopal Church removed antisemitic theology from their rituals. We're talking about perhaps the lowest level of antisemitism in the entire history of the world in the 1940s and 1950s, you know. And that's when Israel gets founded.
And now, what are we seeing? Yeah, we're seeing a spike in antisemitism. Of course, we are. Have you seen what Israel is doing? And kind of, this is really complicated because obviously it's my people. I know people there. I have family out there. But I can't, I feel very shy to talk about the abuses that are going on there because I know I'm going to be called a self-hating Jew, saying I'm sympathizing with terrorists. I am reticent to do that, right? So imagine there are people from outside the Jewish community looking in; they don't want to talk about it, you know. People are really nervous to talk about Israel because they're going to get labeled as antisemitism. And that is, in fact, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which says that anti-Zionism can be a form of antisemitism. Well, tell that to my grandfather's great uncle, who was one of the most important rabbis in Jerusalem and a massive anti-Zionist. And in fact, all of the rabbis at the time, nearly all of the rabbis at the time, were anti-Zionist. So what are they? Anti-Semites? Doesn't make any sense; doesn't fit together.
Let's think about the founding of the state of Israel. It was founded in 1948, and an important thing to look at is the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force. That was made up of 3 different militias. One of those was Haganah, who were involved in the torture and assassination of religious Jews. Irgun, they were the guys who bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 innocent people, including British journalists. And then you got Lehi, who sought treaties with Mussolini and Hitler, offering to fight against the British. These were what came together to form the IDF, and in 1980, Lehi operatives were awarded with honors and a special ribbon from the Israeli government. So it's not like we're looking, or they're looking, back at the history and saying, "Oh, that was a bit of a dodgy group to be involved with." They're still rewarded in the 1980s, given honors.
But things seem to be changing in the diaspora regarding Israel. There is a big shift away from supporting Israel amongst young and even middle-aged people in the diaspora. So these are polls from American Jews: How many of them in 2021 believe that Israel is committing genocide? Well, if you ask the over 64s, 15%. If you ask the 40 to 64s, 18%. If you ask those under 40, 32%. So that's a big shift; it's doubled, actually more than doubled. In a 2024 poll, Jews under 30 attributed more fault to Israel than to Hamas, which is kind of amazing if you think about all the propaganda about what kind of an organization Hamas is.
But one of the things that's interesting is the effect of all of this on the Israelis themselves. 44% of Israelis have either been involved in a terrorist attack or they have relatives who have been involved in a terrorist attack. So there's a very good reason for them to be paranoid. Obviously, they're living in a crazy place, traumatized by this situation. 9.4% of Israelis suffer from full-blown PTSD, and 55% of Israelis exhibit at least one symptom of PTSD. So Israel is not doing a great deal for the Jewish people.