by Dan Cohn Sherbok
By the last decades of the nineteenth century the European Jewish community had attained a high degree of emancipation. Nevertheless political conditions in Europe after 1870 brought about considerable disruption: several proud and independent nations emerged and fought against indigenous minority groups which threatened their homogeneity. Living in such conditions Jews were viewed as aliens and unassimilable. Symptomatic of such attitudes was the invention of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr in the 1870s. Previously Jewish persecution was based largely on religious grounds but Marr’s concept of anti-Semitism focused on biological descent. Anti-Semitism was thus a racial doctrine which significantly differed from previous dislike of Jews and Judaism. According to Marr, the Jews had corrupted all standards, banned idealism from society, dominated commerce, and ruled cultural life. In Marr’s opinion there is a continuous struggle in modern society between these Semitic aliens and native Teutonic stock.
Anti-Jewish attitudes intensified in the 1870s in Germany as a result of economic and cultural upheaval. The political liberalism of previous decades had enabled Jews to benefit from economic activities, and in reaction conservatives blamed the Jewish community for the ills besetting society. In 1878 Adolf Stoecker founded a Christian Social Party on the basis of an anti-Semitic platform. By accusing the press and the financial institutions of being controlled by Jewish interests, many artisans shopkeepers, clerks and professionals were attracted to his political movement.
Such allegations were also supported by German nationalists who emphasized that Jews would need to assimilate to German life before they could be accepted as Germans. Other nationalists adopted a more radical position; in 1881 for example Eugen Duhring argued that the Jewish type constitutes a biological threat to the German nation. In the same year anti-Semites presented a petition of 225,000 signatures to stop all Jewish immigration; this was followed in 1882 by an international anti-Semitic congress. In the next decade anti-Semitic parties elected sixteen deputies to the German Reichstag. At the end of the century anti-Semitism was utilized by Karl Lueger to foster the creation of the first political party in Europe which obtained power on the basis of anti-Jewish feeling.
During this period French anti-Semitism was also used by the monarchy and clergy who were unhappy with the liberal ideas of the French Revolution. Such anti-Semitism reached a climax with the Dreyfus Affair. Accused of treason, Alfred Dreyfus was banished from the army and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1894. Subsequently, however, it was discovered that forged evidence had been used to implicate Dreyfus and a scandal ensued which divided public opinion. Those opposed to Dreyfus believed that he was part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the military and discredit France; his supporters viewed the court martial of Dreyfus as an injustice which threatened the stability of French life. Eventually Dreyfus was pardoned, but for many Jews this episode illustrated that despite the forces of emancipation, anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in European society. In a tract written after the Dreyfus affair, Theodor Herzl (1860-1905) came to the conclusion that Jews would never be accepted in the countries where they lived. According to Herzl, even though Jews seek to integrate into those societies where they live, they will never be regarded as equals: the only solution to the Jewish problem is for Jews to have their own homeland
In Russia, anti-Semitism became an official policy of the state. After Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, a succession of pogroms against the Jewish population took place in the southern Ukraine. Jewish property was looted and destroyed, and in 1882 the minister of the interior decreed a series of laws which curtailed Jewish residence in the Pale of Settlement. In the latter 1880s quotas were imposed on the admittance of Jews to Russian schools, universities and professions. In addition more than 20,000 Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891-2. In 1903 a violent pogrom was unleashed on the Jews of Kishinev. In the next year Jews were accused of helping the enemy in the war against Japan and armed gangs attacked Jews in various towns and cities. Though these outbursts ceased in 1907 a right-wing political party, the Union of the Russian People, initiated a campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda. In 1911 Mendel Belies, a Jew from Kiev, was accused of ritual murder but was exonerated in 1913.
Such manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment were based on the belief that the Jewish people constitute a dangerous racial group. Ideologues argued that the Semitic mentality iso egoistic, materialistic, economic-minded, cowardly and culturally degenerate. In this context a number of writers propagated racist theories. In The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published at the turn of the century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain maintained that the antiquity and mobility of the Jewish nation illustrates that the confrontation between superior Aryans and parasitic Semites is the central theme of history. Earlier, in the 1880s, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were believed to be the minutes of a clandestine world government. In this document the elders were depicted as attempting to strengthen their hold over the European economy, the press, and the parties opposed to the Tsar as well as other autocratic regimes.
The pogroms of 1881-2 forced many Jews to emigrate; most went to the United States, but a sizeable number were drawn to Palestine. In the Pale of Settlement nationalist zealots organized Zionist groups (Lovers of Zion) which collected money and organized courses in Hebrew and Jewish history. In 1882 several thousand Jews left for Palestine where they worked as shopkeepers and artisans; other Jewish immigrants, known as Bilu (from the Hebrew ‘house of Jacob, let us go’) combined Marxist ideals with Jewish nationalist fervor and worked as farmers and laborers. During this period Leo Pinsker (1821-91), an eminent Russian physician published an influential tract, Autoemancipation, in which he argued that the liberation of Jewry could only be secured by the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Nations, he wrote, live side by side in a state of relative peace, which is based chiefly on fundamental equality between them. But it is different with the people of Israel. This people is not counted among the nations, because when it was exiled from its land it lost the essential attributes of nationality, by which one nation is distinguished from another.
In the 1890s the idea of Jewish nationalism had spread to other countries in Europe. Foremost among its proponents wass Theodor Herzl who made contact with the Lovers of Zion. In 1897 the first Zionist Congress took place in Basle which called for a national home for Jews based on international law. At this congress Herzl stated that emancipation of the Jews had been an illusion: Jews were everywhere objects of contempt and hatred. The only solution to the Jewish problem, he argued, was the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In the same year the Zionist Organization was created with branches in Europe and America. After establishing these basic institutions of the Zionist movement, Herzl embarked on diplomatic negotiations. In 1898 he met with Kaiser Wilhelm II who promised he would take up the matter with the Sultan. When nothing came of this, Herzl himself attempted to arrange an interview, and in 1901 a meeting with the Sultan took place. In return for a charter of Jewish settlement in Palestine, Herzl suggested that wealthy Jewish bankers might be wiling to pay off the Turkish debt. In the following year the Sultan agreed to approve a plan of Jewish settlement throughout the Ottoman empire, but not a corporate Jewish homeland in Palestine
Unwilling to abandon a diplomatic approach, Herzl sought to cultivate contact in England such as Lord Nathan Rothschild (1840-1915) who arranged an interview for him with Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs. During their conversation, Herzl suggested that El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula might be a feasible area of settlement. Though this plan was discussed a the highest political levels, it never reached fruition. In 1903 Herzl was summoned to London for a second talk with Chamberlain after his return from Africa. Chamberlain explained that he had seen a country which might be suitable: Uganda. Aware of increasing persecution in Russia, Herzl was uncertain whether to wait for Palestine and asked for time to consider the offer.
After a trip to the Pale of Settlement where he encountered poverty and deprivation, Herzl reluctantly agreed to Chamberlain’s proposal in August 1903 for a place of temporary asylum. At the next Zionist conference in Basle this plan was presented for ratification. When Chamberlain’s scheme was explained, it was emphasized that Uganda was not meant to serve as a permanent solution, but rather as a temporary residence. When the resolution was passed by a small margin, the delegates from Eastern Europe walked out of the auditorium. During the next few days the Zionist movement was threatened by schism; at the end of the proceedings the Russian Jews set off for Kharkov where they convened their own conference committing themselves to the idea of Palestine.
In England public opinion was opposed to the transference of Uganda to the Jews, and the offer was eventually withdrawn. In the following year Herzl died, and the Zionist movement was led by a new president, David Wolffsohn (1856-1914), who attempted to heal the rifts between competing factions. Under this leadership Orthodox Jews joined the Zionist Organization as members of the Mizrachi Party; socialist Jews also became members through the Labour Zionist Party. In the 1907 Congress during Wolffsohn’s presidency a resolution was passed which pledged the movement to the quest for a charter, the physical settlement of Palestine and the revival of the Hebrew language.
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Judaism: History, Belief and Practice, Routledge, 2003, pp. 273-280
with Author’s and publisher’s permission.