"At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state."
So begins Ernst Pawel's remarkable study of Herzl. In The Labyrinth of Exile Pawel restores the vital link between the myth of the founding father of Zionism and the human being and demonstrates that the reality of Herzl's life is much more complicated and far more interesting. Legendary and all too human, Herzl remains one of the emblematic figures of modern times.
"At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state."
So begins Ernst Pawel's remarkable study of Herzl. In The Labyrinth of Exile Pawel restores the vital link between the myth of the founding father of Zionism and the human being and demonstrates that the reality of Herzl's life is much more complicated and far more interesting. Legendary and all too human, Herzl remains one of the emblematic figures of modern times.
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Overview
"At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state."
So begins Ernst Pawel's remarkable study of Herzl. In The Labyrinth of Exile Pawel restores the vital link between the myth of the founding father of Zionism and the human being and demonstrates that the reality of Herzl's life is much more complicated and far more interesting. Legendary and all too human, Herzl remains one of the emblematic figures of modern times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429933315 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 787 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
The Labyrinth of Exile
A Life of Theodor Herzl
By Ernst Pawel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1989 Ernst PawelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3331-5
CHAPTER 1
At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the Cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state.
It was a momentous achievement, but one which owed far less to the originality of his ideas than to the power of his personality. Zionism existed long before Herzl appeared on the scene; the dream of Zion is as old as the Diaspora. He brought to it leadership, organization, and a unique blend of fantasy and practical realism, but his most important contribution by far was the messianic image of himself, his stature in the eyes of the Jews and in the eyes of the world. The midlife metamorphosis of the dandified littérateur, the dramatic rise of the charismatic leader, and the apotheosis of the prophet mourned at his death as the uncrowned King of the Jews defy all plausibility and raise provocative questions. What turned this Budapest-born German patriot into a Jewish nationalist? How, within a scant two years and without the benefit of modern mass media, was he able to impose himself as the spokesman for the Jewish people? To what extent did his spirit shape the state he helped to found, and how much of it survives today, for better and for worse? What, ultimately, is his place in history?
The key to the answers must be sought in the man and in his life — a man of vast complexity, and a life tragic and turbulent, full of paradox and contradictions, and yet all of a piece; the inner consistency that links the truculent teenager to the messianic prophet far outweighs the apparent contrast. Who was he, and what made him who he was?
Herzl's life, especially in its later public phases, has been abundantly documented in often conflicting testimony that ranges from venomous vituperation to frank hagiography; he inspired strong emotions and left few people indifferent. Yet in the end, he himself remains the most important source and witness. Though barely forty-four years old at the time of his death, he left behind a truly staggering volume of writings which, in ways both deliberate and unwitting, provide vital clues to the enigma of his personality. The literary fame to which he aspired eluded him, but he was nonetheless a writer by vocation, avocation, and compulsion — playwright, journalist, essayist, novelist, pamphleteer, diarist, and indefatigable correspondent. The bulk of this prolific output has been lovingly preserved, a tribute to the politician rather than the artist, but an inexhaustible challenge to those trying to discover the human being encapsulated in the legend.
Like most of the avatars of Vienna's fin de siecle, Herzl was not a native Viennese. Born in Budapest on May 2, 1860, he spent the first eighteen years of his life in the Hungarian capital, a fact whose major significance to his emotional and intellectual development he consistently tended to minimize or deny. Yet the cultural diversity of his native environment, along with the identity problems it engendered, surfaced almost at birth; he was duly circumcised eight days later and given the Hebrew name of Zeev, along with the Hungarian Tivadar and the German Wolf Theodor. And since German was the language spoken in the Herzl home, he started out in life as Dori, little Theodor.
No childhood is ever quite as idyllic as it appears in retrospect, but little Theodor's early years appear to have been a tranquil enclave within one of the century's most turbulent decades, a time of high hope and despair, of heady new freedom and savage repression. The Habsburg Empire — with help from the Czar's Cossacks — had survived the nationalist insurrections of 1848, drowned them in blood, but failed to defeat the cause that inspired them. Its foundations were crumbling even while a revolution of an altogether different kind, bloodless but far more profound in its long-range effects than any confrontations on the barricades, doomed the archaic feudalism of the monarchy. Industrialization, long overdue and hence all the more disruptive, put an end to the old order; capitalism triumphant brought chaos, anarchy, and progress, created great wealth and even greater misery. It also opened the gates of the ghetto; in 1849 — a mere eleven years before Herzl's birth — the residence restrictions were removed, and the Jews of Austria-Hungary began a mass exodus from rural ghettos to the faceless urban centers of the realm.
Thanks to the affluence and solicitude of their parents, the Herzl children — Dori and his sister, Pauline, older by a year — were well protected from the icy winds of change. Their childhood Eden was a spacious apartment on Dohany-utca (Tabakgasse, or Tobacco Lane) in one of the choicest sections of town, within a few minutes' walk of the National Theater, the National Museum, and the magnificent shoreline promenade along the Danube. The house stood right next door to the fancy and fanciful new Dohany Street Synagogue, an extravagant monument to bad taste and rising affluence which — unlike the apartment house itself — survives to this day. Its eclectic mix of pseudo-Moorish architecture and nouveau riche pretentiousness, complete with two minarets topped by spiked globes, celebrated among other things the ascendance of the liberal, middle-class Reform wing in the Jewish community over traditional Orthodoxy. Consecrated just a year before Herzl's birth, it became an integral part of the landscape of his childhood; its contribution to his spiritual growth is much more problematical.
A formal studio portrait taken when he was about six years old shows a Hungarian Little Lord Fauntleroy standing at attention, a vision of conspicuous if pathetic elegance in his fancy suit, ruffled shirt, and high boots, toes turned out, right hand by his side, and the left placed with studied nonchalance on a heavy folio which, like the ornate armchair, testifies to the photographer's artistic pretensions.
A grotesque pose for any six-year-old, but struck here with remarkable aplomb; the boy seems totally at ease with the world and already somewhat disdainful of it. Or perhaps disdainful merely of the photographer, who for all his manifest limitations managed not only to freeze a moment in time but also to capture something of its spirit — a child of the mid-century bourgeoisie, well fed, well-bred, sheltered, and sure of himself, living in the best of all possible worlds.
The world of his parents.
The emancipation of the Jews in Austria-Hungary fizzled within two generations. Its initial promise enabled young men like Dori's father to break out of the ghetto; less than half a century later, the son was to pronounce the emancipation a dismal and calamitous failure.
Jakob Herzl, who rose from penniless apprentice in 1850 to president of the Hungaria Bank in 1870, was typical of the tough, ghetto-smart ex-peddlers and petty tradesmen who supplied the drive, the contacts, and the money for the mid-century boom that propelled the monarchy out of the Middle Ages. Born in 1835 in the border town of Semlin (the present Zemun), across the Sava River from the capital of Serbia, he grew up in an impoverished but strictly Orthodox family and, with barely four years of elementary schooling and some brief exposure to the traditional cheder, left home at seventeen to make his way in the outside world just opening up for the likes of him. By 1856, he had established himself as a "transport and commission agent" in Budapest, and two years later he married Jeanette (Johanna Nanette) Diamant, the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant.
It seemed an unlikely match; in background, breeding, and temperament the couple were a study in contrasts. The bride, at nineteen, was four years younger than the groom, but light-years ahead of him in self-assurance and what passed for sophistication. Raised in a wealthy home, accustomed to its comforts and conveniences, she had acquired all the fashionable social vices, including a trendy addiction to German belles lettres and to German — as opposed to Austrian — culture in general that was rampant at the time among the freshly minted Hungarian–Jewish bourgeoisie. Harmless enough, as addictions go, but probably responsible for some genetic damage to her son's taste in literature and the arts.
Her own parents, both born in Budapest, were totally assimilated and shared the prevailing pro-German bias, although in her father's case any such sentiments were inevitably tempered by a notoriously cynical wit. In fact, the textile tycoon Hermann (Hersh) Diamant made no attempt to disguise his enlightened skepticism about all aspects of religion and politics, an attitude which, by the same token, also made him scorn any formal conversion; unlike most of his relatives, he retained his ties to the Jewish community.
But he quite uncynically worshipped his bright and self-willed little daughter, the youngest of five children, and the shy but able upstart from the boondocks, fingered by some amateur or professional matchmaker as a solid marriage prospect, may well have struck him as just innocuous enough a rival for his daughter's affections. He turned out to be wrong. Methodical to the point of pedantry, enormously goodnatured in his fussy way, Jakob Herzl proved fully capable of taking Daddy's place. He was a good provider, he adored his wife, and he stood in awe of her culture and refinement. She, in turn, seems to have cared for him, but it hardly mattered — they had their children. And the children had their parents. A charmed circle, whose charm made escape all but impossible.
The model husband also became an affectionate father, the rare example of a hard-driving businessman who remained close to his children. In the early years he traveled a great deal, and five short notes he received from his then six-year-old son are the earliest known samples of Herzl's literary genius. Only the first is in German; in the later ones he switched to Hungarian, an indication that the outside world had begun to intrude, after all.
But the child's love for his "sweet darling Papa," which comes through in even these few simple lines, was to remain untroubled and unchanged throughout his lifetime. The oedipal turmoil of adolescence, the conflict between the generations, the dramatic and oftdramatized tensions between the uneducated Jewish "founding fathers" and their hyperintellectual offspring so characteristic of the period never seem to have arisen, or even so much as been noted in this particular family. In later years, with Jakob staunchly supporting what most of his friends and acquaintances derided as Theodor's madcap schemes, relations between them grew, if anything, even closer. This son never rebelled against the father, and the father never gave him reason to do so.
Yet for all the conventional deference paid the father as the nominal head of the family, the tone in the Herzl home was set by the mother. Jakob's lack of formal education was no handicap in the business world, where he trusted his instincts — more so, it turned out, than was warranted — and never doubted his competence. But in all other matters he cheerfully deferred to his wife's judgment and taste. He never ceased to be impressed by her moral rectitude and intellectual pretensions, and it was only natural for him to leave her in full charge of the children's upbringing.
She is reputed to have been a great beauty in her youth, but the early portraits merely show a statuesque young woman with a resolute expression and strong, masculine features bearing a marked resemblance to those of her son. Everything known about her suggests that she was highly intelligent, but her education in a society that treated the female brain as a troublesome and potentially malignant appendage was deliberately designed to stunt the intellect and avert any danger of independent thought. Jeanette's tastes in everything, from fashion to literature, were rigidly conventional, her opinions strictly Budapestbourgeois; yet her husband, family, and social circles would have been deeply shocked had they been anything more original. For a woman of Jeanette Herzl's brains, energy, and ambition, the emotional price of conformity came high; unfortunately, part of it was paid by her son.
She had a daughter as well, an appealing and affectionate child much beloved by everyone who knew her. The last photograph of Pauline, taken shortly before her sudden death at nineteen, captures the poignant beauty of the young woman, the look of melancholy resignation that seems almost tragically prescient. Relations between mother and daughter have been described as very close, and while piety is bound to color all such recollections, there is no reason to doubt them.
But Pauline was a girl, and as such fated and slated to repeat the cycle of marriage and motherhood; there was no way in which she could have satisfied her mother's thwarted ambitions. That burden fell upon the son.
Whatever the elemental nature of the ties between mother and son, the passion with which Jeanette involved herself in every aspect of his life derived much of its thrust from her broader frustrations as a human being. What locked a Jeanette Herzl into lifelong motherhood was not mere biology but a social order she accepted as given. Her boy, unlike the girl, had a chance to succeed in the real world; his success would in some measure validate her role as a mother and redeem her own dreams and ambitions. And so she smothered him with a relentless devotion that outlived him and in which love became hopelessly entangled with possessiveness.
The mix, though poisonous, is said to be the recipe for breeding heroes. Growing up in the smug certainty of being his mother's favorite, of having her unconditional love and acceptance, gave the child a self-confidence and sense of security that were never to leave him. And it probably goes a long way toward explaining the remarkable absence of friction between father and son. There was no conflict because there was no contest.
Jeanette's own family, the Diamants and the Abeleses, had settled in Hungary in the eighteenth century, their more distant origins lost in the chaotic history of Jewish migrations in the Middle Ages. But for the Herzl side of her son's ancestry she was able to contrive a more imaginative family tree, extending all the way back to King David.
The known facts are more prosaic. When Jakob Herzl left Semlin in 1852, he was making his escape from a brackish provincial backwater in which his family had stagnated for generations. In 1739, when Belgrade reverted to Turkish rule, some thirty Jewish families chose to cross the Sava River and settle on the Austrian shore. The Herzls may have been among them, but the first ancestor of record was one Moses Herzel, a glazier born in Semlin in 1751. (Herzel is a diminutive of Herz, German for "heart," the equivalent of the Hebrew Lev, or Loeble by analogy; the second e was later dropped.)
Herzl's Grandfather Simon was born in 1805. Two of his brothers converted to Christianity, changed their names, and skipped town (the grandson of one of them, Jenö Heltai, became a well-known novelist and secretary of the Hungarian PEN Club), but Simon stayed put, married the daughter of a Sephardic rabbi, and lived a life of genteel poverty increasingly devoted to the rigorous observance of Orthodox Jewish ritual. Unhappy though he may have been about the quasiapostasy of his son Jakob, who had drifted into the lukewarm liberalism of a Reform movement which in Simon's eyes hardly qualified as Jewish, the two nonetheless remained on good terms, and Grandfather Simon was for many years a frequent though perhaps not always comfortable guest in the Herzls' non-kosher Budapest home.
As it happened, in his day the small, close-knit community of Semlin Jews was led by a charismatic figure whose influence on Herzl's grandfather is a matter of conjecture but who, in word and deed, anticipated many of the ideas of his grandson Theodor by about half a century. Yehuda Alkalai, the Semlin rabbi since 1826, preached Jewish nationalism, called for the restoration of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, and actively promoted the revival of Hebrew as a language of daily discourse. In 1839, following a stay in Jerusalem, he published a Hebrew grammar (after persuading the Serbian government's printshop in Belgrade to acquire a Hebrew type font for the purpose). In 1841 he went to Constantinople, where, much like Herzl some fifty-five years later, he tried and failed to obtain Turkish territorial concessions for Jewish settlements. His Goral le-Adonai (A Lot for the Lord), published in Vienna in 1857, proposed the systematic acquisition of land parcels in the Holy Land, and in 1862 he founded a Society for the Colonization of Palestine in Jerusalem, where he settled permanently in 1874 and where he died four years later.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Labyrinth of Exile by Ernst Pawel. Copyright © 1989 Ernst Pawel. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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