Every Crossing is the Crossing of the Desert: Bernard Lazare and French Jewish Intellectual Responses to Theodor Herzl's Zionist Movement, 1890-1905 (2022)

Preface

   "Every Crossing is the Crossing of the Desert" is my history thesis, completed in mid-2022, part of the completion of my BA in History. I've been sitting on it for a while, having shared it with effectively nobody. It discusses Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), a French Jewish literary critic, and a man distinguished by the early seriousness and rigor with which he attempted to discuss antisemitism as a historical phenomenon.

   Jewish anti-Zionism is a woefully under-discussed phenomenon, for reasons that are likely highly obvious. The founding of Israel collapsed a wide range of attempts at resolving questions about Jewish identity and national belonging/affiliation into simple 'for' and 'against' camps, and many of these old reckonings with Jewish existence and assimilation have been left behind. This thesis was an attempt at diving deeper into one such buried branch.

   Learning more about Jewish anti-Zionism, its ties to anarchism and various socialist movements was very comforting to me, especially in those moments of initial discovery. Obviously I think anti-Zionism is the only correct position on basic moral grounds, but a sense of historicity is validating and invigorating alike.

   Also, I can't attach a footnote to the title like I could on the actual submission of my thesis, so I'd like to share with you how I arrived at it, and introduce my footnoting system in one.¹ Click through to navigate to the footnotes below.

   Some extremely minor error corrections have been made from the original, but nothing substantial. Without further ado, I present my thesis.

Introduction

   My least favorite question in the world is “What do you think of what’s happening with Israel and Palestine?” This is not owing to any uncertainty on my part, any contradiction or shame I feel over being a Jew who supports Palestinians, or even any difficulty answering the question. My ire comes from the fact that the question is always immediately preceded by the discovery that I am Jewish, and the presumption that my Jewishness would link me to Israel and turn me towards it in a sympathetic manner. This was further complicated for me by my own family’s practice of Judaism, which emphasized Jewish culture, with minimal importance being placed upon religious practice, and zero time being devoted to Israel, or even interest in Israeli politics. My Jewish self-identification, while perfectly sensible to me, was frequently received as idiosyncratic by people around me, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who saw Israel as looming larger in my life than I did.

   Recently, that annoyance and confusion has turned into a burning question – “why am I expected to be sympathetic to a state I have no ties to?” That brought me thinking about the early phases of Zionism, where I hoped I could discover how Judaism and the “Jewish state” became linked, or in the infancy of the territorial Zionist project, how people sought to keep Jewishness and a prospective Jewish state disentangled. If I was part of the Jewish people, why was it expected that my worldview be coterminous with a state?

Thesis and Road Map

   Zionism, though frequently discussed in the context of Theodor Herzl’s dream of establishing a Jewish state (“territorial Zionism”) was but one strand of conceptions of Jewish national belonging that existed among many others, all with distinct and competing visions of what defined the Jewish nation, and what the future of that Jewish nation was to be. Discussions of Zionism, as well as pre-Zionist though, go back centuries, but the founding of Israel seems to be a concrete end-point to the multitude of Zionisms in existence. With the objective of one strand of Zionism achieved, the question of Zionism ‘answered,’ debate about Jewish nationalism has fundamentally re-oriented itself around Israel, rather than being centered around the Jewish people and what it means to be a diasporic people.

   Ultimately, my argument is that, in the 1890s and early 1900s, Bernard Lazare posited a separate and incompatible vision of Zionism, built upon his anarchism and understanding of the evolving French landscape around him, which was magnified by his brief- and highly repelling- encounter with Herzl’s territorial Zionism. Furthermore, though some have claimed that the Dreyfus Affair created a brief moment of interest in territorial Zionism, I reject the idea that the Dreyfus Affair was highly influential on Herzl, or relevant to the accretion of the territorial Zionist movement in any meaningful capacity.

   Accordingly, this paper will trace a few key figures, events and debates. It will discuss France as it would have been seen through the eyes of Bernard Lazare (1865-1903) - who ran the gamut from symbolist to socialist to Zionist to anarchist- and Lazare’s own ideological trajectory. From there, the first two Zionist Congresses (1897/1898) will be discussed, as well as the debates and falling-outs they encapsulated, using other Jewish thinkers to corroborate and expand upon Lazare’s break from Herzl’s territorial Zionist movement. Indeed, this disillusionment with the Zionist project was hardly unique to Lazare, though, and is highly relevant to Ahad Ha’am, the other key individual in this essay. Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927, born Asher Zvi Hirsh Ginsberg) will serve primarily as a foil to Lazare, to offer a perspective that is no less Jewish, but radically different in its origin and priorities, to highlight not only disagreements with Herzl, but the multitude of viable competing expressions of Jewish nationalism.

   There are also two parallel relevant cases that bear mentioning, though they will be noted in separate sections to keep the argumentative timeline relatively clean; the main body of the paper will be chronological and I am simply separating two more minor threads for clarity. These two threads are of the impact of Lazare’s involvement in the pro-Armenian cause on his experiences with Herzl’s Zionist movement, and on how Herzl sought to invent the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of Zionist epiphany, when by all accounts Herzl’s Zionism was largely untouched by the Affair. Though Herzl repeatedly identify the Dreyfus Affair as a key event in his political evolution, and in his firm belief in the necessity of a Jewish state, Lazare, the esteemed Dreyfusard, would bitterly separate himself from Herzl in the five years between the closing of the Second Zionist Congress and Lazare’s death, an arc which is best emblematic of the argument I intend to trace.²

Existing Scholarship

   The reading and writing of Jewish history is highly complex, due to the cognitive magnetism and historical weight of two key events: the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. To some, this list could be expanded to three entries, including Jewish immigration to the United States. In any case, be it two or three, Jewish history has been drawn towards these events, with an emphasis on explaining the arrival at these key points, making for motivated, presumptuous, and teleological historiography.

   The spirit of my argument is derived from a now somewhat dated article in Jewish Social Studies, wherein author Robert S. Wistrich reflects on the notion that the ‘success’ of the territorial Zionist movement, looking at whether or not the establishment of Israel is in fact indicative of such a victory. Not so!, he argues, saying that the eventual success of territorial Zionism “does not necessarily prove that they were right or that they always had the best arguments,” or that they were even necessarily popular in their time.³ More directly, Shlomo Sand argues in The Invention of the Jewish People that Jewish history as we know it today is a relatively modern construct, inextricably linked to expressions of nationalism across the Jewish diaspora, and necessarily related to the Zionist movement by that romantic nationalist tendency. Shlomo Sand’s line of argument is not accepted as fact and is, rather, quite contentious. That said, I find it compelling in that it combats the teleological nature of much of the written history of Jews, which is the tendency of writing history with the intention of explaining known events, namely the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, and the arrival of Jews to the United States. Shifting away from those strictures, in my view, allows for a more interesting and honest discussion of the multitude of Jewish nationalisms, rather than just wondering how the Dreyfus affair ‘caused’ territorial Zionism, as some have done.

   I will be zeroing in on the Dreyfus Affair as the moment of focus for my argument, spanning from 1890 to 1905, which contains all but the last year of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), as well as the first two Zionist Congresses (1897, 1898 respectively). The Dreyfus Affair is notable in that scholarship on it is divided regarding its relationship with the Zionist movement. David Aberbach, for example, has argued that the Dreyfus Affair made Zionists of many Jews,⁴ and Shlomo Sand has likewise suggested that if the Dreyfus Affair had not panned out precisely as it did, “Zionism would have been born elsewhere and perhaps later.”⁵ These two works together paint the Dreyfus Affair as a flash of Zionist inspiration, wherein the Jews of Western and Central Europe at large suddenly woke up to the looming shadow of antisemitism and, recognizing the danger, mobilized behind the territorial Zionist movement. This leaves major, lingering questions, however: What are we to make of Theodor Herzl’s close proximity to the Dreyfus Affair,⁶ what of the fact that Israel would not be founded until over 50 years after the beginning of the Affair?

   As such, I find a different reading of the Dreyfus Affair by Gabriel Piterberg to be much more compelling. Rather than approaching the Affair as a paradigm shift within Western European Judaism, Piterberg views this framing of Affair-as-Zionist-moment as a construction driven by Herzl who, relatively deep into the Affair, “proceeded to… invent the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of Zionist epiphany.”⁷ It sufficiently explains, for example, the complete lack of invocation of the Dreyfus Affair at the First Zionist Congress, or in Herzl’s writings from the period of the Affair, which Herzl directly covered. Additionally, it helps contextualize Lazare’s absence at the first Zionist Congress; if Herzl’s Zionism was truly a Dreyfusard project, one would expect one of the most esteemed Dreyfusards to appear. In this paper, looking at this argument as scaffolding, I will examine the writings of Bernard Lazare and Ahad Ha’am to discuss why territorial Zionism did not find long-term purchase among Western and Central European Jewish intellectuals, even those who bore witness to the Dreyfus Affair.

   The trajectory of this essay will trace two distinct threads- that of the French-aligned socialist anarchist Jewishness and Bernard Lazare, and of the Eastern European-aligned exclusive and culturalist Jewishness of Ahad Ha’am- and draw them together over the course of the Dreyfus Affair and early Zionist Congresses, to reveal where these two landmark Jewish thinkers departed so profoundly from Herzl’s vision for a Jewish future and Jewish state. They crossed paths only once at the Second Zionist Congress, but the interactions between their texts, worldviews, and priorities underscore a diversity of opinion that I believe has been largely forgotten as the extant state of Israel has become the focal point of Zionist discourse.

The France of Bernard Lazare

   Bernard Lazare was born to an acculturated, secular Sephardic Jewish family in Languedoc, France.⁸ Broadly speaking, Sephardic Jews were both emancipated and acculturated,⁹ being regular participants in French society – even the moment of their legal emancipation in the 1790s, French Sephardim never lost their legal protections until the fall of France during the Second World War.¹⁰ Likewise, their integration, which preceded legal emancipation by centuries, was ongoing since the Inquisition pushed many Jews to France, where they slowly unmasked the Catholicism they performed for their own safety.¹¹ This is not to suggest that Jewish acculturation was a done deal however, as Ashkenazi Jews were much less integrated into French society, with some Sephardic representatives even taking care to “[separate] the status of Sephardim from that of Ashkenazim, predominant in Alsace and Lorraine… Unlike the Ashkenazim, [the Sephardim] were not a nation within a nation.”¹² The term ‘nation within a nation’ was frequently invoked in debates surrounding Jewish emancipation (and acculturation to a lesser extent), used to describe the specific political situation of French Jews, wherein they held legal rights and protections, and were highly autonomous, but not socially integrated; they were, in effect, a social island within France.

   While important for understanding the history of Jews in France, this ‘nation within a nation’ status would have been experiencing its twilight during Lazare’s youth, as emancipation brought with it some demands of acculturation, including the “introduction of vernacular languages and subjects in Jewish schools and worship,” alongside changes in “ritual, dress, and religious services.”¹³ At this time, laws that were used to belittle Jews- such as the ‘body tax,’ applied only to animals and Jews- were also being rescinded, showing the French government sinking back from antisemitism as an official policy pillar.¹⁴ While it would be inaccurate to say that French Jews- especially the less acculturated Ashkenazi- had reached parity with their countrymen,¹⁵ Lazare was growing up in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which were a period emblematic of very real progress and optimism.

   This is perhaps best summarized by Paula Hyman in The Jews of France, who wrote of the 1860s as a period where “most French Jews had adapted themselves and their public institutions to French bourgeois culture and had integrated into the general educational and civic institutions of France.”¹⁶ As we well know, the Dreyfus Affair is just beyond the horizon, but this period allowed for the existence of Lazare’s attachment to the ideal of the republic as a place of genuine equality, and this steady approach towards equality also allowed Alfred Dreyfus to ascend to captain-hood in the first place. So, this is our background: Bernard Lazare grew up during a period of broadening prospects for Jews- a process which had been ongoing for over 50 years now- and was born into the maturing era of Jewish emancipation to a family that was from the beginning poised to reap the benefits of this period better than many other Jews in France. As such, he was raised in a largely secular family, which privileged tradition and culture over religious practice.¹⁷

   Lazare slowly rose to prominence in French literary and artistic circles over the course of his education and travels within France. At the age of 21, “he went to Paris, traditionally the meeting place for gifted young Frenchmen from the southern provinces.”¹⁸ During this intellectual period, Lazare fell in with the Symbolists,¹⁹ and became a regular writer in their publications. It was also at this moment Lazare witnessed two formative events that likely rocked his faith in the stability of the Republic, and which may have shown cracks in the seemingly ascendant trajectory of the Jews. One of these events was Georges Boulanger nearly reaching presidency in 1889, as a man who styled himself as a conservative royalist and was widely feared as a possible dictator in the making.²⁰ The other was the Panama scandal (1892), where a French attempt at constructing a Panama canal went awry, resulting in massive financial losses and a protracted under-the-table cover-up. This spiraled into an antisemitic scapegoating incident, where Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper La France juive helped popularize and cement the idea of Jewish corporate conspiracy in the French public imagination.²¹

   The Panama scandal’s specter would haunt French politics until at least 1899, with “Panama!” remaining a nationalist rallying cry until then.²² These two led to an explosion of the popularity of the French Socialist party, and were arguably the beginning of Lazare’s movement towards Socialism, given they were emblematic of grave threats to the progress made in the decades before, especially with respect to the emancipation and acculturation of Jews. Bernard Lazare was not alone in this, and with the arrival of the Dreyfus Affair, Lazare would find himself among a small cohort of intellectuals who shared similar inclinations, including prominent politicians like Joseph Reinach and Georges Clemenceau.²³ Unique to Lazare, however, was his timing; he was distinguished by the early seriousness and academic rigor with which he addressed antisemitism,²⁴ leading to Lazare's eventual characterization as prophetic by Charles Péguy after his passing.²⁵

   Lazare, himself a fully secular Jew, was nevertheless concerned about what seemed to be a shifting of the tides in France. He wrote extensively about Jewish history, culminating in L'Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism, its history and its causes), published in 1894.²⁶ As a pre-Dreyfus Affair work, L'Antisémitisme is highly curious in that it places a large part of the blame for antisemitism on Jews for their exclusive behavior.²⁷ As an example, he wrote in L'Antisémitisme:

[The Jew] has kept his national pride, he always fancies himself a superior individuality, a different being from those surrounding him… he generally refuses to mix through marriage with the peoples surrounding him. Modern Judaism claims to be but a religious confession; but in reality it is an ethnos besides, for it believes it is that, for it has preserved its prejudices, egoism and vanity as a people a belief, prejudices, egoism and vanity which make it appear a stranger to the peoples in whose midst it exists, and here we touch upon one of the most profound causes of antisemitism.²⁸

L'Antisémitisme also reflects Lazare further shifting towards anarchism- and beginning to shy from acculturation, at least in a maximal sense- as he identified an ascendant class of rich Jews who had effectively abandoned their Judaism in an effort to become liberal, successful, and most damnably, capable of passing as secular Christians.²⁹ Lazare was not content to distance himself just from those above him, however, as he also condemned more religious, un-integrated, and heavily persecuted Eastern European Jews, who he heaped insult upon:

...Nor did [his commitment to social justice] reach to his less fortunate coreligionists. An assimilated and nonobservant Jew, Lazare condemned the invading “hordes” of Orthodox Jews, those “coarse and dirty, pillaging Tartars,” as he wrote in 1890, “who come to feed upon a country which does not belong to them.” Understanding the full acceptance of French Jews (whom he called israelites in contrast to foreign juifs) would only follow from their total disappearance into [the nation].³⁰

Lazare’s opinion would change with time, but in 1890, L'Antisémitisme was emblematic of a belief that antisemitism was driven by Jewish exclusiveness and economic strains, alongside effectively being a successor to “the anti-Judaism of the Middle Ages.”³¹ As such, antisemitism was a rational phenomenon which, if its causes were eliminated, would fade from existence.

   Lazare’s animosity- for wealthy integrated Jews, for Jewish exclusiveness, and for poor Eastern European Jews- changed markedly when the Dreyfus affair began.³² The Dreyfus Affair (1894), in which Alfred Dreyfus- a French Jewish military captain- was accused, tried, and convicted of passing French military secrets to the Germans, was a galvanizing moment with few equals in French politics. The Dreyfus Affair was unfortunate, but not intrinsically shocking – save for one thing. It was taking place in France, where Jews were emancipated;³³ in few other countries in Europe at the time could a Jew actually reach such a high rank in the military, and this contradiction between emancipation and rabid antisemitism was equal parts confounding and striking.³⁴ In Germany and Austria, Jews could reach similar statuses in the military but were not nearly as integrated; Hyman convincingly argues that the unique interaction between emancipation, rising public antisemitism, and the success of Jewish acculturation were what made the Dreyfus affair possible in France specifically.³⁵ From the outset, conservative, antisemitic, and pro-military authors campaigned fiercely to cement the idea of Dreyfus’s guilt in the public imagination, with Édouard Drumont’s newspaper La Libre Parole alleging “All Israel is in a state of agitation,” and claiming that absolute proof had been discovered.³⁶

   Notably, the use of “Israel” as a marker for Jewish people is unique to the French context, where “Israélite” became seen as far more neutral than “the older, often pejorative term ‘Juif.’”³⁷ Thus, to use “Israel” in this case would be to specifically suggest agitation among French Jews, who were a part of mainstream French society. Furthermore, La Libre Parole concluded their opening salvo on Dreyfus with the claim that it was “not a true Frenchman who committed such a crime,” referencing his Judaism in no uncertain terms.³⁸ Alfred Dreyfus was swiftly sentenced to life in exile, and the Dreyfus family protested his innocence, mounting a fierce publicity campaign to rally support for the exiled captain.³⁹ Defenses of Dreyfus were initially entirely removed from his Judaism, approaching the Affair as a moment of crisis for the French Republic, rather than as a crisis of Judaism. One prominent socialist and to-be leading Dreyfusard,⁴⁰ Jean Jaurès- himself not Jewish, or even initially interested in Dreyfus’s guilt- took interest in the Affair based on his suspicion that the military was orchestrating the Dreyfus trial to rehabilitate its image and manufacture renewed popularity.⁴¹

   Given what the Affair actually was, though, how did that transform Lazare’s orientation towards Judaism? Lazare himself was initially disinterested in the Affair, but his rapid ascendance in the literary world caught the eye of the Dreyfus family, who hired him as a publicist, in spite of significant reservations regarding his anarchist tendencies.⁴² His first significant work for the Dreyfus cause was “A Judicial Error” (1896) which opened without mention of Dreyfus’s Judaism. Rather, Lazare assaulted the indifferent general public, who failed to rise up to protect Dreyfus “even in the instinct of self-interest.”⁴³ The public, Lazare argued, should have taken the speed of the Dreyfus trial as a death knell for liberty, as it underscored a trial that was at best rushed and at worst deceitful – fundamentally illegitimate, in any case. Eventually, however, Dreyfus’s Judaism is brought to the fore. Enter, Lazare’s curveball in “A Judicial Error:”

Did I not say that Captain Dreyfus belonged to a class of pariahs? He is a soldier, but he is a Jew, and it is as a Jew that he was prosecuted. Because he was a Jew, he was arrested; because he was a Jew, he was tried; because he was a Jew, he was convicted; because he was a Jew, the voice of justice and truth could not be heard in his favor, and the responsibility for the condemnation of that innocent man falls entirely on those who provoked it by their vile excitations, lies, and slander.⁴⁴

This one snippet is perhaps a tell-all of the true implications of the Dreyfus Affair for Jews as Lazare saw- and experienced- it. Prior to the affair, Judaism was something experienced exclusively in the private, domestic sphere; Jews were French in the world and Jewish at home. In the immediate post-Revolution, this was as extreme as Jews being compelled to work during the Sabbath under threat of arrest, though this cooled substantially by the late 19th century.⁴⁵ Still, less extreme regulations governing the public expression of Judaism were long-lasting. Jews were, for example, encouraged to set aside their faith in times of military service, which was consistent with the broader decline of religious affiliation in the military.⁴⁶ A clear delineation was drawn – in service of the state and public, Jews were French. The Affair, however, drew Judaism out of the household, and Lazare responded in kind, by brazenly exposing the antisemitism contained in the Dreyfus Affair.

   This reorientation from public French-ness to public Judaism was also reflected in Lazare’s writing, where he pivoted rapidly both in his explanations of antisemitism and in his prescribed solutions (and who those solutions drew him to affiliate with). In 1897, Lazare penned “Jewish Nationalism,” which represents a complete about-face from his writings decrying rich and poor Jews alike as spiritually failed. “Have [the descendants of emancipated Jews] succeeded,” he asked, “in erasing from their minds their hearts what seventeen hundred years have imprinted thereon?”⁴⁷ This insistence on a common origin - and therefore a common fate - as a bonding point is a complete refutation of his past argumentation, and signals a shift towards what might be identified as Jewish nationalism. Not territorial Zionism, which was but one of many Jewish national ideologies, but Jewish nationalism nonetheless; stressing uniqueness, common experience, and shared suffering, which might be called culturalism, or cultural nationalism.⁴⁸

   It is impossible, of course, to separate attempts at defining Jewish nationalism from the threads of European nationalism at large; Jewish nationalism was equal parts adopting and responding to the changes in the European climate presented by romantic nationalism. In all forms of modern nationalism- to promote the view of a homogeneous collective- “it [is] necessary to provide, among other things, a long narrative suggesting a connection in time and space between the fathers and the ‘forefathers’ of all the members of the present society,” or where such a narrative does not exist, “to invent it.”⁴⁹ Bernard Lazare’s insistence on Jews recognizing themselves a descendants of long-suffering forefathers and diasporic survivors, then, is an essential component of constructing belief in a common Jewish nation.

   As Shlomo Sand argues in The Invention of the Jewish People, “every step in defining the outline of the nation and determining its cultural profile was taken deliberately… the national project was, therefore, a fully conscious one, and the national consciousness took shape as it progressed.”⁵⁰ When Lazare used shared experience and diaspora as defining traits of the Jewish nation, then, he also established its boundaries; history, tied to suffering rather than a place, defined the nation, so a coterminous nation and state were not requisite for the ‘success’ of a Jewish nationalist project. This framework of suffering-as-identifier was used, well before Lazare articulated it in 1897, by Charles Péguy, a close friend of Lazare’s and frequent patron of rising Jewish writers.⁵¹ Péguy, through his Catholic lens, looked at suffering as a forge, which would produce redemption and solidarity.⁵²

   Others, like Herzl, viewed territorialism as an absolute requirement, where the nation could not be without a state to both define it and separate it from the rest of the world. As Noam Pianko notes in Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, imagining nationalism that is simultaneously liberal and compatible with concepts of solidarity is extremely difficult, due in no small part to how nationalism is discussed in modern times.⁵³ So how did Bernard Lazare manage to accept Jewish nationalism without implicitly accepting territorialism? There is a hint of regret to be found in “Jewish Nationalism,” where Lazare recants his condemnation of those who failed to integrate and acculturate. He muses that, though he was lambasted for his “alliance with the antisemites”⁵⁴ in his description of antisemitism that blamed Jewish distinctiveness for antisemitism, he was right about Jewish distinctiveness.

   Rather than prescribing acculturation, Lazare suggested that there were not enough nations within the state, emphasizing uniqueness as a source of freedom, over territorialism and assimilation alike.⁵⁵ The nation, then, were a people that were defined and free, but not constrained to single state or allegiance. This is not to suggest that Lazare did not flirt with other expressions of Jewish nationalism, though this affinity for comfortable and peaceful difference would be by far the most enduring. Much of this flirtation, perhaps surprising, came in the form of Lazare’s cooperation with Herzl's territorial Zionist movement in its early years.

   Lazare’s work for the Dreyfus family brought him in close contact with Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian journalist covering the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl, who would soon rise to prominence for his particular articulation of Zionist thought, emphasized territorial exclusiveness as a solution to Jewish woes in Europe. Drawing on proto-Zionist writings like Leon Pinsker’s 1882 “Auto-Emancipation” which, reflecting on a particularly severe 1871 pogrom in Odessa, fundamentally questioned the ability of acculturation to guarantee the safety of Russia’s Jews. Pinsker’s conclusion was grim, settling on the belief that Jews were in stasis, always moving but incapable of settling, no matter how fiercely they tried to integrate; the world’s Jews were in a state of limbo, unable to live or die.⁵⁶ Herzl built upon this foundation, arguing in the late 1890s that territorialism was the logical outcome of emancipation, and a necessary one at that.⁵⁷

   Notions of intelligibility also come to the fore here. While Lazare and Ha’am operated in the abstract realms of Jewish shared history, culture, and diaspora, Herzl spoke the language of states and people. As argued by Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, one of the crowning achievements of Herzl was his success in “bringing ideas that had been germinating for a long time to the attention of world public opinion and into the general consciousness of the age.”⁵⁸ Herzl was not the first territorial Zionist, but he was cognizant of the power of his role as a publicist with more reach than “obscure Jewish publications [which] would not mobilize” the public, and of the fact that statehood was a language that Europeans would understand.⁵⁹

   We see here the beginning of a teleological retelling of recent history, wherein Herzl recontextualizes emancipation not as its own project, but as a mere stepping stone towards a Jewish state. Though Herzl was initially met with limited interest- even outright hostility- to his territorial Zionist proposals, especially among wealthy and integrated Jews,⁶⁰ Herzl eventually managed to convene the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, with the goal of defining and advancing a territorial Zionist project.

The Congresses

   Before proceeding further in discussing the Zionist Congresses, one thing must be made abundantly clear: Though they were indeed explicitly pursuing of some sort of territorial Zionism, the Congresses were not engineered as a means for Herzl- or anyone else, for that matter- to mine for consensus. The Congresses were, at least initially, the sites of very real, earnest, and consequential debates about the future of Jews in Europe and, if there was to be a Jewish state, what it would look like and how it would happen. Some debates were procedural, like deciding which board positions outranked which others, but others were substantive, like the debate that raged over how the Zionist Congress would relate itself to unaffiliated Jewish movements.⁶¹ One delegate, Joseph Ezekiel Massel, fiercely advocated for the merging of the Hovovei Zion, the Zionist Congress, and other colonization societies. Herzl, dissenting, rejected the notion that it was the duty of the Zionist Congress to absorb and unify colonial projects, while others disregarded these differences entirely, hyper-focusing instead on colonization as a goal regardless of affiliation.⁶² Likewise, they were also the site of groundbreaking defections from the movement, notably Bernard Lazare’s break with Herzl over Lazare’s belief that Herzl harbored latent anti-democratic tendencies.

   The First Zionist Congress, held from August 29th to August 31st of 1897 was opened by a handful of speeches, including one by Herzl, where he described the Congress as a “historic moment for world Jewry,” fixating on the achievement of a Jewish territory in Palestine, carved from Ottoman territory by European states.⁶³ Herzl plainly set out his ambition- and therefore, definition- for his strand of Jewish nationalism: it was to be “a returning home to Jewish identity before the return of the country of Jews;” Herzl worked to popularize his particular conception of a common Jewish identity and then assign it to a state, and render the two coterminous.⁶⁴

   While this does not implicate a rejection of acculturation and emancipation outright, it does reveal a belief- possibly genuine, possibly in service of his Zionist project- on Herzl’s part that acculturation and emancipation had been unsuccessful; it had not stemmed the rising tide of antisemitism. More generally, voices at the Congress were far less charitable to the idea of acculturation; many headlining speakers at the Congress went to great lengths to underscore assimilationists as “cowardly and deluded, but above all as naive,” even as the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, while under attack, held faith in the power of acculturation and assimilation.⁶⁵ Herzl additionally indicated the Congress itself as proof of a Jewish nation,⁶⁶ rather than doing as Lazare had done, by defining the Jews as a nation through a combination of shared experience and common culture.⁶⁷

   Beyond just defining the Jewish nation, the First Zionist Congress also set out several goals for the development of a Jewish state, all of which laid the groundwork for some future disagreement by Lazare, Ha’am, or both. These goals- or perhaps more accurately, prescribed solutions to the problems described on the first day of the Congress- were enshrined in the “Basel Plan,” which was the subject of fierce debate.⁶⁸ The language of the Basel Plan prescribed the acquisition of territory in Palestine, in plain language without any mentions of “return” or “homecoming” to an “ancestral homeland,” suggesting that the insistence on Palestine was more about moving with existing Jewish sentiment, rather than a religious bent among the Zionist planners themselves or belief in some unifying origin story.⁶⁹ The central priority of the Congress was discussing a plan for funding - for the acquisition of land, payments to the Ottomans, the production and distribution of propaganda, as well as travel expenses⁷⁰ - and the resulting prospective Jewish Colonial Fund (finalized during the Second Zionist Congress) would be a massive source of friction.

   There were two notable omissions from the First Zionist Congress, one being the exclusion of the Dreyfus Affair as a key topic, and the other being the absence of Bernard Lazare, both of which raise major questions about the Congress’s proceedings. The First Zionist Congress, despite taking place during what might be considered the most inflamed period of the Dreyfus Affair, also contained literally no mention of the Dreyfus Affair; not in reference to Lazare, not as a demonstration of the rising (or perhaps risen-but-ignored) tide of antisemitism in ‘enlightened’ Europe, nothing.⁷¹ Herzl had covered the affair by now, as “Account of the Dreyfus Degradation” was published in newspapers in January of 1895, and as reported in “Jubilee of the First Zionist Congress, 1897-1947” several other delegates from France were present at the First Congress⁷² - not to suggest that only the French could know of or weigh in on the Dreyfus Affair, rather, much of the First Congress was dedicated to discussing the present state of Jews in Europe, so an invocation of Dreyfus would seem pertinent, no?

   As Gabriel Piterberg notes in The Returns of Zionism, Herzl also made no mention of the Dreyfus Affair in any of his writings that began to formalize his conception of Zionism, and only covered the Affair in very matter-of-fact terms; the non-discussion of the Dreyfus Affair even at the Zionist Congress further highlights the notion that though Herzl made use of the Affair, he was not truly touched by it, nor were others present at the First Congress.⁷³ While Dreyfus was invoked during the Second Congress, such mentions were brief and sparse, used in reference to other topics, rather than being a topic in and of itself. It is abundantly clear that Dreyfus was largely out of the picture, except when relevant for narrative purposes. Though Herzl did claim that the Dreyfus Affair- which he did cover as a journalist- was what truly made him a Zionist,⁷⁴ and though some scholars have taken this as fact⁷⁵ and even gone so far as to apply it to Jews broadly,⁷⁶ it is a notion I would like to challenge.

   Herzl’s presence at the Dreyfus trial and degradation is unquestionable, but his description of the proceedings have been characterized as “indifferent and matter-of-fact,” which betrays the notion that the Dreyfus Affair was a moment of revelation.⁷⁷ Herzl explicitly noted the strange mood of the crowd, who were in a “curious state of agitation,” simultaneously inflamed by Dreyfus’s alleged crime and profoundly moved by the captain’s resolute nature.⁷⁸ Meanwhile, he had nothing to say of the effects of the affair on himself. The writings most relevant to Herzl’s descriptions of Zionism, such as The Jews’ State (1895), and key correspondences in this period, also make no mention of the Affair whatsoever.⁷⁹

   Evidently, Dreyfus was perhaps the least of Herzl’s concerns. His main struggle, throughout the entirety of his territorial Zionist project, was finding support among the general public. Many of Herzl’s attempts at convening territorialist sentiment were highly alienating to assimilated and Orthodox Jews simultaneously, on the grounds that his attempts at carving out a distinct Jewish whole were disturbing the comfortably separate and comfortably acculturated alike.⁸⁰European Jews, eastern and western alike, had high hopes in the power of emancipation and acculturation, so Herzl’s movements were an unwelcome intrusion.⁸¹ “Culturally inclusive nationalism,” Shlomo Sand argues, “was invigorated after the Dreyfus Affair,” and Dreyfus himself was, in time, “reattached” to the French nation.⁸² While it would be incorrect to say the French state was at peace- the Dreyfus Affair was indeed a tremendous cleavage in French society- the Dreyfus Affair was not cataclysmic enough to precipitate any sort of large scale exodus movement.

   As noted by social historian Paula Hyman, from the 1840s and beyond, though “Jewish victims of discrimination rarely found redress for their situation, the sense of belonging to a nation based upon law fueled the self-definition of those French Jews who spoke publicly for the community...”⁸³ Though this faith in the binding power of law in the French state was shaken briefly by the Dreyfus affair, such injury did not scar, and “most French Jews seem not to have been affected in the long term by their encounter with the open and virulent antisemitic prejudices that flourished briefly during the Affair.”⁸⁴ The French Republic held, as did belief in the republic as a place that could provide for its citizens. Given this timeline, and the continuity of French Jews’ faith in France, how did Herzl insert change where it did not exist?

   Given the lack of an audience who saw themselves as imminently in danger, Herzl’s Zionism struggled to stand on its own two feet in the climate of the 1890s. Linking the Dreyfus Affair to the creation of Zionism, then, helped lend credence to his Zionist cause; as argued by Gabriel Piterberg, it is highly likely that Herzl constructed the narrative of the Dreyfus Affair as a moment of “Zionist epiphany.”⁸⁵ This linking meant that Herzl’s Zionism was no longer just an idea, but one that was fundamentally connected with rebuttals to one of the most stunning outbursts of antisemitism in European history. As evidence of this inventing, Herzl claimed to have written Das neue Ghetto- a play reflecting on his Jewish experience- following the Dreyfus trial, but manuscripts and drafts of the play date to over a month before the trial’s opening day.⁸⁶ Similarly, Herzl made no mention of Dreyfus in The Jews’ State (1895) - one of the earliest of Herzl’s Zionist works. It is highly likely that Herzl was only made aware of Dreyfus’s innocence and significance during “his meeting with Lazare in July 1896, and [Lazare’s] pamphlet, published four months later.”⁸⁷

   Curiously, Lazare made no appearance at the First Zionist Congress. What transpired at the First Congress, however, was no doubt the groundwork for Lazare’s eventual departure from the territorial Zionist movement, as well as being a key moment of intersection for Jewish thought in general; Jews from Paris, Vienna, Odessa, and New York gathered in Basel, which was a truly remarkable conference. One key figure present was Ahad Ha’am, who for the purposes of this paper, will act as a foil both to Herzl and to Bernard Lazare, by offering his own original, radically different interpretation of Jewish nationalism. Like Lazare, Ha’am would break from Herzl quite rapidly, though he would not make a full exodus from the movement as Lazare did.

   Ahad Ha’am could not have been more different from Lazare, by any conceivable metric. Born in Kyiv to a Hasidic family, in a place he would describe as “one of the most benighted spots in the Hasidic sector of Russia,” Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am being his Hebrew name and pen name) found his attachment to Palestine-as-Zion in the Hasidic culture that surrounded him, which emphasized a warm, emotionally-driven connection to Palestine, and blossomed into the “foundations of the ‘Lovers of Zion’ movement… that arose in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.”⁸⁸ He developed a deep, consuming belief in the value of the Jewish religion and culture, but still conflicted with the Orthodox norms that surrounded him. Nevertheless, Ha’am remained deeply entrenched in Jewish culture and practice.⁸⁹ In the twilight of the 19th century, he wrote extensively on what it meant to be Jewish, and to be a diasporic people. In 1891, he visited Jewish settlements in Palestine, and was deeply disillusioned at what he beheld, between agricultural failures, reliance on external finances, and incipit conflict with the local Palestinian population.⁹⁰

   Ginsberg, similar to Lazare, was briefly affiliated with Herzl’s Zionist movement, but likewise fell away due to ideological concerns about the trajectory of the project, especially regarding his conviction that Herzl’s Zionism was laughably non-Jewish. He worried profusely that Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state being an escape from antisemitism would lead to it being little more than a refugee camp, related only to Jewish suffering, but not to Jewishness. Ha’am obsessed with Palestine as a place of spiritual healing, and therefore rejected Herzl’s plans as being little more than secular statecraft, with nothing anchoring them Judaism.⁹¹

   Despite his fundamental disagreements with Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state, he was a life-long member of the Zionist Congresses. Indeed, Ha’am remained long after Herzl’s death, becoming one of the primary directors of the territorial Zionist project.⁹² When Herzl died of pneumonia in July of 1904, the Zionist Congress lost its director, main voice, and most notable publicist. Additionally, Herzl was a major secularizing force in the Congresses, keeping the proceedings focused on material challenges.⁹³ With Herzl’s death, Ahad Ha’am and other cultural Zionists rose to the uppermost positions of the World Zionist Organization, and focused on Palestine as a Jewish home and, breaking from Herzl’s secular vision and directly pursuing Ha’am’s goal of Palestine as a polestar for Jewish spiritual revival.⁹⁴

   By 1897, Ha’am was well-known within the Zionist Congress, but notable for one thing above all else: unlike many other Congress members, he had already been to Palestine in 1891. Jewish settlement was not a concept or an aspiration to Ha’am, rather, it was a reality, and he was not at all pleased with what he had seen. Ha’am was adamant that Palestine was promising as a site of settlement, but remained concerned about agricultural prospects, the possibility of angering Palestinians⁹⁵ in the region, and above all else, feared that any settlement project in Palestine might just be the blind leading the blind; “let anyone actually arise and act [regarding Jewish political prospects],” he mused, “even if improperly and on the wrong basis, and he at once has numerous pupils who follow his lead and blindly imitate his actions.”⁹⁶ The prospect of a Jewish state, while perhaps exciting- as evidenced by the assembly of the Congress- was not proof of its own viability, and Ha’am harbored profound concerns about the stability of such a project.

   In his 1891 reflection on his travels to Palestine, “Truth From Eretz Yisrael,” Ha’am laid bare his most profound concern of all regarding settlement in Palestine: “with no system and no order and no unity in any of our actions, where every intellectual (and, often, true lunatic) sees himself as a miniature Messiah and jumps in front to redeem Israel – now it is impossible to overstate the damage this trait causes.”⁹⁷ Though not expressly written with reference to Herzl, he inevitably comes to mind as the described ‘miniature messiah.’ Fundamentally, Ha’am accepted diaspora as the natural state of Jewish being.⁹⁸ Within that lens, attempts at true territorial unification were less like linking arms and more akin to being fit into a trash compactor. Though Ha’am would never fully break from the Zionist movement as Lazare did, given these overriding concerns about attempts at ‘leading’ the Jews, and first-hand experience with the suffering and endemic risk in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, it is perhaps no surprise his objections to Herzl’s plan ran deep and, ultimately, only faded from view with Herzl’s death.

   Despite having such pertinent experience, Ahad Ha’am appears to have said precisely nothing during the entire course of the First Zionist Congress; not a word has been attributed to him.⁹⁹ We can, however, look to his writings up to 1897 to trace his ideological trajectory, and where he stood at the time of the Congress - and to clarify that while he rejected Herzl’s brand of territorial Zionism, Ha’am had no qualms about the establishment of a Jewish state in and of itself. In “Truth From Eretz Yisrael,” Ha’am’s 1891 reflections on his journey to Palestine, he was adamant that the land of Palestine was ready to “return to life” for the Jews, as its “fields and vineyards [bore] their fruit despite the indolence of the Arabs.”¹⁰⁰ Ha’am held obvious disdain for the non-Jewish occupants of Palestine, but remained adamant that the land itself would always be ready to receive a Jewish ‘return.’

   It was the Jewish people who were ill-prepared to mount a return, he wrote. This was a long-held belief, as at the 1884 Katowitz Convention, he rejected attempts at colonizing Palestine that focused on humanitarianism, favoring an explicitly exclusive national aim.¹⁰¹ In 1893, Ha’am wrote “Imitation and Assimilation,” attempting to answer the question of how to balance Jewish integration and nationalism. While he wrote off assimilation as a threat to the Jewish people, he warned that the Jewish people being further subdivided posed an existential risk,¹⁰² the solution to which was “through the agency of a local centre, which will possess a strong attraction for all of them.” This belief in the spiritual attraction of some sort of cultural and linguistic center was a hallmark of Ha’am’s form of Zionism, which has been termed ‘cultural Zionism,’ to contrast with Herzl’s territorial Zionism.¹⁰³

   This ‘local centre,’ however, was not local in the sense that we know it. Rather, the Jewish state in Palestine was to be the ‘local’ home of cultural reinvigoration that Jews worldwide would turn to. “And so all those who desire to see the nation reunited,” he wrote, “will be compelled, in spite of themselves, to bow before historical necessity, and turn eastwards, to the land which was our centre and our pattern in the ancient days.”¹⁰⁴ Just as the seat of the British empire acted as a point of magnetism for the British colonists abroad, the prophesized Jewish state would function as a similar national home away from home; Ha’am’s vision was spiritual and cultural where Herzl’s was secular, but it was colonial all the same.¹⁰⁵ A Jewish state was still required, similar to Herzl’s territorial Zionism, but it would act as a beacon of Jewish culture and faith, rather than functioning directly as a state for Jewish people. These stances, while perhaps seemingly minimally separate on paper, were arrived at via radically different lived experiences, and led to radically different notions of what a Jewish state would need to do and be.

   The Second Zionist Congress would arrive exactly a year later, running from August 28th to August 30th of 1898, again in Basel. It was largely a fairly linear extension of the first, including another round of recaps of the status of Jews in various areas. Of note, however, was the finalization of the Jewish Colonial Trust project (which would be fully established in 1899); the Jewish Colonial Fund was established in Britain, and helped magnify British attention on the Zionist project, especially with respect to its potential as a boon for British expansion in the Middle East.¹⁰⁶ The Second Congress also included a series of updates on the state of affairs in Palestine, ranging from the assessments of the landscape and agriculture (perhaps responding to Ahad Ha’am’s conviction that the land, while arable, had been terribly mismanaged) to reports on the status of different Jewish settlements in the region.¹⁰⁷ Reporters were adamant that, among Jewish settlements, all was well, with particular emphasis given to how completely Jewish settlements outclassed local Palestinian developments in their vivacity and success.¹⁰⁸

   Bernard Lazare was in attendance at this Congress, and this Congress only, which renders it quite distinct. Although he would soon bitterly depart from Herzl’s Zionist sphere, Lazare was received with a degree of admiration that far surpassed the warmth any other individual delegate was given, owing to his status as the hero-Dreyfusard, and one of the highest profile people in attendance.¹⁰⁹ Though it was expected that Lazare would decline,¹¹⁰ he was nominated to the Zionist Action Committee and, to the shock of the crowd, accepted.¹¹¹ By all accounts, he said very little, but did raise his voice when it came to procedural matters. Relatively late in the Congress, he spoke up to express his concern about the speed of the proceedings, and the fact that by just the Second Congress, the Zionists were already operating as a small, decision-making elite without consulting the broader Jewish population they ostensibly represented.¹¹² Herzl responded with perhaps the worst thing possible to say to a Dreyfusard and anarchist, chiding Lazare and telling him that “If we wanted to ask all the people first, we would never get anything done,” establishing expedience and uniformity of opinion as priorities above democracy.¹¹³

   Lazare’s concerns were swept aside, and never touched on; Herzl proceeded right into the vote Lazare was objecting to. Though but a small moment, this speaks to the sentiment that would boil over in the following years, and lead to an intractable rift between Lazare and Herzl. Though Herzl would go on to claim the Dreyfus Affair as a formative moment in his turning towards territorial Zionism, Lazare, the esteemed Dreyfusard, would excise Herzl from his political sphere over the course of the next years.¹¹⁴

The Rift

   Lazare emerged from the Second Zionist Congress hardened, and immediately upon his return home, launched back into his circuit of lecturing, writing, and speaking. He brought with him a simultaneous rejection of acculturation and of Herzl’s Zionism, inextricably linked to the Second Congress as a point of inflection.

   Lazare did not pivot back away from Zionism towards acculturation, rather, he maintained in an 1899 lecture (which became “Nationalism and Jewish Emancipation”) that assimilation was a “bastard doctrine… [which] consists in saying: ‘Do not distinguish yourself in anything from those among whom you dwell...’”¹¹⁵ More notable, however, was Lazare’s revision of his understanding of antisemitism, owed both to lengthy reflections on the Dreyfus affair and his attendance of the Second Zionist Congress. In the past, he had adopted an understanding of antisemitism that at least partially hinged on the assumption that Jews engaged in exclusive, isolated behavior.

   By this time, he entirely abandoned that model of antisemitism, and leaned further into his anarchist tendencies, using class and conflict as his new lenses for putting antisemitism under a microscope. He rebuked the idea that antisemitism was a passing phase, and characterized it as an immutable characteristic of Christendom, a “religious pathology.”¹¹⁶ “In vain,” he wrote, “the Jew will metamorphose himself” to escape antisemitism and earn his place among the European states. In Lazare’s mind, Jews were absolved of inviting the antisemitism that had been rained upon them for centuries, for the Sisyphean endeavor of adapting was little more than self-erosion.

   The other rejection Lazare wielded was of Herzl’s Zionism, and this separation was acrimonious and, thankfully, well-preserved. Given Lazare’s anti-statist tendencies, this split was inevitable, barring some inexplicable fundamental ideological reversal on Lazare’s part. In writings following the Second Congress, Lazare characterized Herzl’s Zionism as “bureaucratic… capitalist and antidemocratic,”¹¹⁷ and colonial at heart. Lazare was adamant in his belief that “it is the duty of every human to resist oppression,” leaning on his anarchism to push back on Herzl’s notion of settling on occupied land, deftly balancing his anarchist and Jewish worldviews to answer with a comprehensive and cutting critique of Herzl’s plans.¹¹⁸

   Indeed, though Lazare identified the Jews as a people without a land, he refused to complete the “theological-colonial myth,” by actively refusing to suggest that the Jews needed one territory for their nation.¹¹⁹ In the ideological struggle between Lazare’s anarchism and interest in a Jewish state, his anarchism won out; Herzl’s Zionist project had come to resemble simply the establishment of a new European autocracy in Palestine, and Lazare wanted no part. In 1899 Lazare penned his ultimate letter to Herzl, containing his resignation from the Zionist Action Committee and withdrawal from the Zionist Congresses entirely:

You are bourgeois in your thought, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas and bourgeois in your conception of society. As such, you want to guide the people, our people, who are poor, unhappy, working class… You act outside of them and above them: you’d like to have them follow you like a herd of sheep. Like all governments, you want to disguise the truth… you want to be a proper government whose principal obligation is not exposing the national shame.¹²⁰

   Lazare, on the other hand, demanded to see “poor Job on his dungheap, scraping his sores,”¹²¹ a harsh and brilliant metaphor for his enduring desire to candidly discuss the problems facing both Jews and Jewish nationalism. We also see here a centering of class as a central component of Lazare’s Jewish nationalism. Before, as in L'Antisémitisme, Lazare discussed antisemitism as caused in part by economic factors, namely that as Jews accrued wealth and status along the processes of emancipation and acculturation, they ran against the incumbent elite, who saw them as encroachers and threats. Notably, Lazare also pinned some of the blame on wealthy Jews for showing themselves off “with ostentation,” inviting attacks from Christians.¹²² To Lazare, Jewish assertions of status were naive and, though intended to rally against the “centuries of humiliation” that they had endured, only succeeded in “[weakening] the voice of conscience within” the Jewish people. To engage with public displays of wealth was simultaneously emboldening to antisemites and degrading to Jews themselves.

   After the Second Congress, his focus shifted to discussing Jews as a primarily working-class body, put off by the elitist nature of Herzl and his circle, and he closed “Nationalism and Jewish Emancipation” with a declaration that “We have labored enough upon the fields of others; let us now till our own.”¹²³ This, ultimately, was the final evolution of Lazare’s Jewish nationalism: the ability of the Jewish people to labor for themselves, as for too long they had been either scapegoated or mined for labor in hostile states. As argued by Piterberg, this re-focusing on nationalism-as-freedom underpins a continuity that was only briefly modulated by the Second Zionist Congress, wherein “the Enlightenment and the [French] Revolution as he understood them continued to underpin Lazare’s politics throughout his life.”¹²⁴

   Zionism did not just exist within the world of ideas, however. The Zionist Congresses effected real change, as with the establishment of the Jewish Colonial Trust. Accordingly, Lazare’s rejection of Herzl’s worldview did not just hinge on ideas and style; Herzl had adopted means of advancing territorial Zionism that Lazare found profoundly objectionable. Fully cognizant of the need for an actual place to locate the Jewish state, Herzl sought to collaborate with Ottoman authorities to build friend rapport, which he hoped would lead to the acquisition of land in Palestine – or at the very least, the willingness of the Ottomans to turn a blind eye to Jewish movements to Palestine. In 1896, a representative of Abdülhamid II suggested to Herzl that “Jewish power” be leveraged “on the sultan’s behalf, especially in the Armenian matter.”¹²⁵

   This would prove rather difficult, as sympathy for Armenians was at an all-time high, especially in western Europe; Herzl then undertook the task of softening the image of the Ottomans in the eyes of the general public, with full knowledge that Abdülhamid II had just orchestrated a series of attacks on Armenians “between 1894 and 1896, now referred to as the Hamadian massacres.”¹²⁶ Eventually, a tentative agreement was reached between Herzl and Abdülhamid: if Herzl could successfully mount a newspaper campaign to rehabilitate the image of the Ottomans, and assist the Ottomans in acquiring the acquiescence- or at least silence- of the Armenian diaspora, he would be granted an audience with the Ottoman government.¹²⁷ In June of 1896, Herzl’s collaboration with the Ottomans was nearly made public during an interview with the Daily Graphic, where Herzl was questioned about rumors of Abdülhamid’s seeking of “Jewish support against the Armenians in return for benevolence towards Herzl’s plans” in the region, which Herzl fervently denied.¹²⁸ Though the exact depths of Herzl’s collaboration with the Ottomans was not well-known, Ottoman discrimination against Armenians was well-documented. Additionally, given Lazare’s high-profile work as a writer and publicist, it is hard to imagine that he did not at least catch wind of this.

   Some academics, such as Yair Auron in Banality of Indifference, without denying that some Jews indeed showed earnest concern for the Armenians, argue that interest in the plight of the Armenians was largely driven by self-interest and fear that the fate of the Armenians might be extended to the Jews,¹²⁹ but I find this claim to be highly disagreeable, at least as it pertains to the internationally minded. Bernard Lazare in particular was not content to let this malicious collaboration simmer unnoticed, nor was he inexperienced with what was happening in Armenia. In “Jewish Nationalism,” penned in 1897, Lazare made a vague, cynical allusion to these same massacres Herzl- managing the First Zionist Congress that very year- overlooked.

   He sarcastically wrote that, since Christianity was a primary source of antisemitism, perhaps wiping out the Christians was the solution; “I am well aware,” he spat, “that for the Christian peoples, an Armenian solution is available, but their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that.”¹³⁰ The ‘Armenian solution,’ of course, was murder, which was evidently well-known across Europe to be used as a euphemism. Herzl’s continued closeness with the Ottomans, particularly Abdülhamid, never ceased to be a major source of friction, and Lazare vocally objected until the day he died; in 1902, Lazare participated in a pro-Armenian congress in Brussels and, the following year, “chastised the Zionist Congress for paying public tribute to Abdülhamid II, calling him ‘the worst of assassins.’”¹³¹

   With territorialism, acculturation, and Herzl’s very methods rejected, that inevitably begs the question - if not accepting of endless diaspora, how did Lazare reconcile the twin impossibilities of an acculturated life in Europe and a moral life in Palestine? Pulling from Ahad Ha’am’s writings on the Jewish diaspora, Lazare came to accept diaspora as an enduring factor of Jewish existence, formulating his own vision of Jewish nationalism that rejected Ha’am’s insistence upon Palestine as a cultural beacon, but embracing the idea of a unified identity still being able to encompass a diasporic people.¹³² In some sense, this meant Lazare’s ambitions for Jewish nationalism were simple, but universal: he asked for nothing but freedom for a nation that existed in constellation, to shift away from conceptions of the Jewish nation that were defined by tragedy, suffering, or the need for escape.

   This also contained Lazare’s final rejection of Herzlian Zionism, where in an unpublished note written after 1902 (shortly before his death in 1903), Lazare turned away from territorialism altogether: “You want to send us to Zion? We do not want to go… We do not want to go there to vegetate like a dormant little tribe. Our action and our spirit lie in this wider world; it is where we want to stay without abdicating or losing anything.”¹³³ This embrasure of diaspora, not as a state of stasis or purgatory, but as a simple mode of being, where Jews could both be themselves and belong to the broader world, was the culmination of Lazare’s argument about Jewish nationalism.

   The finality of Lazare’s position, however, did not mean he had concluded his assaults on Herzl’s position. Possibly the last written work Lazare produced before his untimely death, “Job’s Dungheap” (likely penned in 1903, perhaps late 1902) is raw, scathing, and final, owing to its lightly edited nature. As noted by the editor, “Job’s Dungheap” was composed of “fragments and aphorisms, notes jotted down, were all that was left when he died.”¹³⁴ In a sub-section entitled “The Jews of Today,” Lazare raged against the servility of Jews, who were spiritually immature, and celebrated the opulence of their leaders, becoming like Christians in their worship of gold.¹³⁵ He rejoiced, however, in his observation that there seemed to be an awakening among the Jewish working class, who were becoming more and more inclined to reject solidarity with the rich Jews who had always rejected the poor and downtrodden Jews of their own country and eastern Europe.¹³⁶

   To the anarchist Lazare, this sense of horizontal solidarity among Jews was the way towards successful Jewish nationalism, rather than attempts at vertical association with the elite, who wanted nothing to do with the poor. Lazare continues: “From his long enslavement, the Jew has retained an extreme distrustfulness. And yet his ever precarious state leads him to show enthusiasm for all those who tell him that they will lead him into the Promised Land.”¹³⁷ It is impossible to ignore the subtext here, accusing Herzl of mining poorer Jews- hopeful, and looking for an end to the torment of antisemitism- for support for his movement. More broadly, as well, it encapsulates his anarchist approach to the notion of Jewish nationalism. This anarchism embraced pluralism, a multitude of nations within nations and states within states, all of which would be free, rather than Herzl’s nationalist definition that sought to render the Jewish nation coterminous with a single state.¹³⁸

   Just as Lazare’s anarchism cannot be set aside, it is similarly impossible to ignore Lazare’s attachment to the Armenian cause as a highly important driver for his political conclusions. Ultimately, I believe this enduring dedication to the Armenian cause is essential for understanding the true nature of Lazare’s objection to territorial Zionism. By 1903 a long-time anarchist, Lazare’s perception of Herzl’s latent autocratic tendencies were not just vague red flags, rather, they pointed to a very specific end – if there was to be a Jewish state on occupied land, it would necessitate the clearing of that land, just as the Ottomans sought to obliterate the Armenian presence on their land. Though the term genocide would not exist for decades, Lazare clearly perceived an inextricable link between formal statist institutions and violence, which he refused to partake in.

   Furthermore, Lazare clearly identified strong similarities between the Armenian and Jewish struggles for identity and autonomy, and declared in the Armenian journal Pro Armenia that those who collaborated with the Ottomans were “inundated by mud, curses, and venom,” blasting the Zionists for refusing to own the error of their ways in collaborating with the Abdülhamid, as the Ottoman crimes became more and more obvious by the dawn of the 20th century. Lazare had been conscious and supportive of the Armenian struggle for liberation since at least the mid-1890s, perhaps longer, and he saw in Herzl the same illiberalism he saw in the Sultan; a tyrant in the making rather than a tyrant at present.

   The diasporic Jewish nation, as Lazare saw it, would have no state, no individual leaders, no councils, and certainly no Zionist Action Committee, who would sway the working class masses according to politics and their own greed. A Jewish nation, without structures above them, would be emancipated from mismanagement, which was essential for emancipation as a nation.

   Ahad Ha’am similarly rejected Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state, but essentially on inverted grounds; rather than Herzl’s project being too statist, it was not nearly Jewish enough. In “A New Savior,” written in 1901, Ha’am mocked those who sought to ‘save’ eastern European Jews by delivering to them Western European ideas, such as those that had guided the emancipation of Jews in France.¹³⁹ Herzl, Ha’am thought, sought not only to colonize Palestine- which Ha’am did not object to- but also to colonize the Eastern European Jewry, as an interloper without comprehension. The Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), founded in 1860, was emblematic of this.¹⁴⁰ Founded in France as an organization centered on the principles of Jewish solidarity and defense, the AIU tackled these issues with a uniquely French angle, focusing on ‘civilizing’ the “backwards” Jews in Ottoman territory, North Africa, and Eastern Europe.¹⁴¹

   Ha’am takes a moment to invite laughter- “One is inclined to smile at the simplicity of this learned scholar” – before pausing, noting that “it is men of this kind who stand at the head of powerful organizations, whose yea or nay determines the fate of measures of the highest importance in our national life.”¹⁴² Though this criticism is not based in anarchism like Lazare’s similar complaint about Herzl’s autocratic nature, Ha’am clearly harbored a parallel worry that Herzl’s Zionist project was little more than groping in the dark by powerful men who over-estimated their understanding of the condition of the world’s Jews. Ha’am went on to remark that “men of this kind, themselves without any vestige of true Jewish feeling” cannot be brought to understand the conditions of downtrodden and observant Jews.¹⁴³

   This lack of comprehension disproportionately affected eastern European Jews, who western Jewish Zionists frequently saw themselves as the caretakers of. Herzl, for example, never quite shook the realization that he had become a man of the poor, as western Jews like Lazare, alongside wealthy acculturated Jews like Baron Edmund de Rotshchild, harbored less interest in territorial Zionism than he expected.¹⁴⁴ Ha’am shot back at the French Jews, who he charged with having accepted “slavery in freedom:” the chief failure of French Jews in Ha’am’s eyes was not their complicity in colonialism via the AIU, but rather, their collective complicity in the French state itself, where they had surrendered their uniqueness in exchange for belonging. “Slaves that you are,” he challenged, “emancipate yourselves first!”¹⁴⁵

   The western European- particularly French- Jews, he thought, had invested themselves too much in appealing to the secular world around them, and had accordingly been drained of Jewish feeling, which both damaged their attempts at realizing territorial sovereignty, and blinded them to the substantial plight of Jews elsewhere in the world. Ha’am closes “A New Savior” (1901) by vowing to ‘refill’ the Jewish inclination of the Western European Jews, swearing that it would “change [their] tune” about slavery and emancipation, and push them to realize the necessity of some sort of Jewish cultural beacon, rather than subservience to a culture that, as far as Ha’am thought, was still hostile, though most French people felt otherwise.¹⁴⁶

   In 1902, Ahad Ha’am went on to speak in front of a Russian Zionist conference in Minsk, which was then transcribed into “The Spiritual Revival,” published the same year. He lambasted the Basle Congresses for fixating on the Jewish people- as with their stated goal of founding “in Palestine a safe refuge for the Jewish People”- rather than on the Jewish nationality.¹⁴⁷ This framing, he argued, set aside the cultural work that he felt needed to be done, failing to deliver on “work for the revival of the national spirit and the development of its products,” which was necessary to save Zionism from what Ha’am saw as radioactive secularization.¹⁴⁸ In essence, Ha’am feared that Herzl’s Zionism would deliver a state, without any affinity for the nation; it would be a refugee camp, if even that.

   As if to spit on Herzl’s ideas, Ha’am published an extremely late review of Herzl’s “The Jewish State” (1896) in 1902, effectively demanding to know exactly what would be Jewish about this state Herzl promised to deliver.¹⁴⁹ It must be made abundantly clear that Ha’am’s program was heavily flawed as well. The idea of a theocratic and exclusive state was highly problematic for secular Jews, who were, at least in France, integrated citizens who bounced back quickly from the struggles of the Dreyfus Affair; Dreyfus himself remained loyal to France until his death.¹⁵⁰ Additionally, French Jews were generally viewed neutrally or better by their countrymen; abandonment of a generally successful project of emancipation and acculturation for a theocratic pipe dream was, bluntly, political suicide.¹⁵¹

   This conflict was magnified at the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress (unlike Lazare, Ha’am kept attending Zionist Congresses as a dissenting voice), where Herzl was “prepared to consider a British proposal for an autonomous Jewish entity in East Africa,” while the eastern European Zionists and cultural Zionists wholeheartedly rejected the maneuver, which they saw as an attempt to pry the Jews from their ancestral homeland; a fate worse than death.

   On death, it is impossible to ignore the role of death in the shaping of the Zionist project as we know it today. Lazare died tragically young at 38 years old in September 1903. The fact that many of Lazare’s extant writings are transcribed from lectures, paired with the adoring tone used in Charles Péguy's brief biography-eulogy,¹⁵² paints a picture of a man full of fire and revered for his ideological spark, gone far too soon. His unique articulation of Jewish nationalism was not only a valuable counter-balance to Herzl’s, but also remarkable in its optimism. Herzl died soon after of pneumonia in July of 1904 at the age of 44, and so within a year, two instrumental and radically different articulators of Jewish nationalism had died.

   From there, Ahad Ha’am and several other more culturally-minded Zionists took the reins of the World Zionist Organization, and reestablished land in Palestine as an absolute necessity; there would be no Jewish state without the land they called home.¹⁵³ Herzl became naught but a spectre, and his seeking of a refuge for Jews was replaced by Ha’am’s vision of a Jewish cultural center. Palestine was re-centered as the key Zionist Congress objective.

Conclusion

   The topic of death has been unexpectedly pertinent to this essay. The likening of Jewish diaspora to a form of deathless life by Leon Pinsker, the untimely death of Bernard Lazare halting one of the intellectual greats of his time, and the death of Theodor Herzl indirectly emboldening Ahad Ha’am’s dogged pursuit of Palestine as the site of a Jewish cultural beacon. Perhaps there is yet another, which persistently hangs over the topic of pre-Israel Jewish national identification, while also going unnamed: the founding of Israel as a great dying-off of ideological diversity. This essay is but a tiny slice of the field, but even still, looking at Lazare’s writings and how they evolve with French political happenings and parallel ideological developments- as with Herzl and Ha’am’s conceptions of Jewish nationalism and national belonging- it is impossible to breadth and, in my eye, beauty of ideology present.

   With the founding of Israel, though, this has all condensed remarkably. Whether aligned with it or against it, Israel has become something of an ideological black hole; anything less massive has been swallowed, and what remains is forever altered by its gravity. Lazare and Ha’am, while doubtlessly influential, are seldom invoked today, other than in the corners of academia or street names in Israel; they were swallowed. Herzl’s vision, meanwhile, ‘won’ by being realized in the world around us. The same happened with the establishment of the Soviet Union, where a previously extant constellation of beliefs, ranging from anarchist strains to trade unionism to the Jewish Bund, was dissolved and reoriented into simple camps for or against Soviet Communism.

   I find Bernard Lazare to be a magnetic figure, whose articulations of Jewish being have been equal parts touching and vindicating. Though quite short-lived, over his life he ran the gamut from Dreyfusard to Zionist affiliate to proud diasporic anarchist, and that development can only be properly understood by tracing his interactions with France as he saw it, the Dreyfus Affair, and the young territorial Zionist movement.

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Lazare, Bernard. Job’s Dungheap. Translated by Harry Lorin Binsse. (New York: Schocken Library, 1948, originally posthumously published in 1928).

Pinsker, Leon. “Auto-Emancipation.” October 17, 1882.
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Footnotes