The Jewish Story: One of the People

it is a fundamental characteristic of the Jews says a Haddam that they do not readily compromise and have no love for half-measures when once they've recognized the truth of particular conception they give themselves wholly to it now I'd like to believe that I'm a little bit stubborn myself and I'm wholly given to telling you this story because I'm Roth my fire and this is the Jewish story episode 22 one of the people want you to picture a ballroom in the late 19th century parquet floors painted walls high ceilings chandeliers of crystal strung from one end to the other I mean they don't call it the age of decadence for nothing gentlemen and ladies fill the room the man in top coats entails women wearing the finest evening gowns now we're in Basel Switzerland but the truth is at first glance there's nothing unique about this gathering we could be anywhere that the cosmopolitan elite of Europe might gather there's laughter and mingling political talk flirtation in multiple languages but our pretty picture falls apart when the beginning of the festivities a signal a hush falls over the crowd but there's no band that strikes a waltz to announce the dancing and it's not a poet or literary info hairy blue that takes the podium instead it's a tall man with a thick sculpted beard and he stands there looking out of the Assembly with burning eyes and announces that today they have gathered together to lay the cornerstone of the edifice which is to one day house the Jewish nation and the audience listened spellbound as Herzl went on with his opening speech sketching out for them his dream of the political rebirth of their people one of the delegates Mort I've been I mean afterwards describe the reaction of the crowd at the end of this opening address for a few moments the whole shook from the shouts of joy says the applause the cheers and the feet stomping it felt as if the great dream of our nation of 2000 years was now solved and in front of us stood Messiah Ben David the Messiah himself these were the opening moments of the first Zionist Congress held in Basel Switzerland on Sunday August 29 1897 it was in Basel incidentally and not Munich the much more impressive capital has been originally planned because of the overwhelming opposition of German Jewry to what they considered hurtles mad a scheme and as he himself noted the very power of Zionism was evident in its ability to unite the secular and the Orthodox whether it was in sport of or opposition to and you know the truth is he was correct if you had looked around that room the Congress consisted of every type of European Jew Orthodox and reformed assimilationist nationalist east and west almost 200 delegates representing 17 countries nearly half had come on behalf of some pre-existing Zionist Society and the remainder were individual enthusiasts who'd come in answer to hurt Souls call there were 26 members of the press and attendants to ensure that the whole world would be well informed of the proceedings and proceedings there were we're talking about three days of keynotes committee meetings passionate debate documents and discussion the acculturated Jews of Germany and France discussed Hebrew literature with the muskie leme from The Pale of Settlement can you imagine it Orthodox Jews preach to atheists about Redemption and nationalists spoke two Cosmopolitan's about the virtues of pride the Basel conference was three days three days that well did the popular movement of Zionism into an organization and one by the way that still exists today president a committee a council there was a National Bank on the way practical diplomatic proposals were discussed now me what amazes me is trying to imagine getting such a diverse group of Jews to agree on anything her so himself described at one point is trying to play 32 games of chess all at once but he succeeded and what emerged from the efforts of Herzl and his closest allies that help them organize this entire conference in the first place is known as the Basel platform Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine they have to remember that since the Romans that's been the name of the Land of Israel and the Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end number one the promotion by appropriate means of the settlement in Eretz Israel of Jewish farmers artisans and manufacturers number two the organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions local and in national in accordance with the laws of each country number three the strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness and number four preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments where necessary in order to reach the goals of Zionism it's an incredibly bold platform and also incredibly broad which is not a surprise from such a diverse group of delegates but as broad as you might want to make your platform since there's only so much time in the day so many activists to go around in so many ways you can splice the pie of money most of the coming episode is actually devoted to the tension between the last two points as practical goals will the Jews reaches ioan by fostering national consciousness will the focus on a political strategy for obtaining the consent of governments be the best way to hurt so the answer was clear and he spent the remaining seven years of his life pursuing that consent because the Basel Conference in the annual Congress's that followed were the first very large step toward creating the Society of Jews that he'd envisioned in their Luden's not in his work at the Jewish state published only about a year and a half before right this was the new voice of the Jewish nation on the political stage and he had suddenly been rocketed into a position of international standing and it's incredible but almost overnight Percel found himself engaged in what we today call a shuttle diplomacy he stood before the Kaiser of Germany he spoke with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire he began to negotiate with the Russian Foreign Minister and eventually ended up training offers back and forth with British colonial officers and everywhere he went Herzl projected a princely persona even his detractors had to admit that he'd look at the part of the king of the Jews and the crazy thing is he was received as their leader now there are whole books devoted to analyzing the question of how on earth Herzl went from being a mildly popular viana journalist to the international representative of the Jewish nation and the answer is range from messianic to psychoanalytic to downright cynical but that's not my issue right now matters for our story is that Herzl succeeded in awakening the imagination of the Jewish people and we saw this from the simultaneous incredible support that poured out for him and the massive opposition and though he was painted by many in his day as a charlatan dreamer or downright madman his belief in his own vision drove him to accomplishments that astounded the entire Jewish world and as he himself wrote in his journal only a few days after the Basel Congress were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word it would be this at Basel I founded the Jewish state if I say this out loud today I would be answered by Universal laughter perhaps in five years certainly in 50 everyone will know it and of course 50 years after he wrote those words the modern State of Israel was born now Israel's angwa was a delegate at Basel the British author leading advocate of what would soon be labeled cultural Zionism he had his owning journey eventually turned his back on the idea of the Land of Israel as a necessary component but for now he was overwhelmed with enthusiasm and reflecting on the atmosphere of the first Congress he remarked on the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion on the river of Basel we now sit and resolve we will weep no more and he was not alone in his desire to celebrate by all accounts the conference ended with an after-party that shook the roof the delegates danced into the night celebrating the pledge they'd all taken that morning in Mecca a huge a lime tikka you meanie if I forget the O Jerusalem let my right hand forget its skill but in the midst of this Universal rejoicing there was one voice that struck a discordant note and for three days he'd been in his own words like a mourner at a wedding feast because in this person's eyes political Zionism focus on physical salvation was a failed venture from the word go and Herzl was a false messiah who'd managed to enchant the Jews with his fake vision just ashab Heights we had done only 200 years ago listen to his words in his essay the Jewish state and the Jewish written in the wake of the visual conference only a fantasy bordering on madness can believe that so soon as the Jewish state is established millions of Jews will flock to it and the land will for them adequate sustenance but it wasn't just a practical challenge that drove this voice in his eyes land acquisition was a distraction a National Bank was financial pettiness the consent of the nations was irrelevant in his eyes tangible goals were not what built a nation and throwing stones at the ideas of others was not a new posture for a HOD homme leading Hebrew author profound national thinker and founder only a year before of the Hebrew monthly Haj Aloha a periodical that would go on to become the leading Hebrew literary journal of the 20th century a Haram had an entirely different vision of what it took to build a nation than the one which Herzl expressed at Basel and as he was after all the self-styled iconoclast of the jewish national awaking he saw that even in its infancy political Zionism was entitled ripe for the breaking Roger speakership Ginsberg was born in 1856 in a small town near Kiev the parents who were pious and well-to-do trusted him and in a story that should at this point sound quite familiar the boy was a precocious genius and though he attended hater until age 12 he branched out quickly from the classic religious texts already at age 8 he taught himself to read Russian and his father of course could afford to provide him with private tutors and they helped him master French English and German as well all of which opened him the doors of 19th century thought what followed in its wake is also a well-known pattern he lost faith in the traditional Hasidic perspective and lifestyle while he was still an adolescent and he declared his allegiance the Haskalah the Jewish enlightenment that was then thriving in Russian Jewish life in his early 30s Ginsberg caught the nationalist bug he moved to a design and became deeply involved in the growing he boxy own movement the lovers of Zion if you recall in the early 1880s Leon Pinsker written a pamphlet called Auto emancipation we diagnosed the causes of Judaea phobia and that pamphlet threw him to the head of this scattered movement of the hibachi owned in 1884 he called a conference of all of its members in Katowice Poland after C Ginsberg went to that conference but he didn't go as a starry-eyed follower Pintrest notion that the solution to the Jewish problem was territorial because this young author to be already had his own ideas about the proper way to love Zion and the idea that the solutions of the Jewish Question depended on some piece of the planet no matter how sacred seems completely insufficient to young hearts be he didn't believe that the Jews could be saved piecemeal through immigration or even wholesale by mass Connell is a ssin even if it was of their ancient homeland in Israel and by the way Pinsker himself favored the Midwest as he makes clear in his writing here if right now you're somewhere between the Ohio and I don't know Colorado Rockies listening to me drop me a line please and tell me what you think would have been like if Israel had been founded somewhere along the banks of Mississippi now RSV was a true he bought the co Holden C own true lover of Zion and he may have left the tradition of his father's behind but his Hasidic heart knew that the solution to the Jewish Question didn't lie in America or even in the agricultural colonization of Ottoman Palestine so long as the love of Zion sought its outlets in agriculture or building refuges from hatred and destruction it would never be able to provide an answer to the Jewish Question and Ginsberg believed that the focus of the hibakusya movement should therefore be first and foremost on preparing the hearts of the people for its own nationality and not on getting a piece of the geographic pie now what the Jewish nation needed was a cultural awakening he said the national spirit had to be stirred to a hebrew renaissance as he calls it before the national body could even dream of renewing its ancient kingdom and so at this cato is conference actress fie began a battle against political Zion that he would wait until his dying day but he wasn't yet officially a honhom one of the people and that means Ginsberg continued to work with the Shabbat Zeon movement pushing his vision of a cultural return design in meetings and recruiting of course like-minded Souls and by 1888 he had gathered a small group of loyal supporters who though few in number felt themselves powerful enough to serve as a new ideological foundation for the Jewish people and so they established with in hibachi owned the secret order of the name will share the sons of Moshe now I know it might seem crazy that a handful of young Russian Jews would start meeting in secret in order to propagate their vision of national spiritual awakening among the masses and think that they would bring Redemption secular though it might be but just listen for a moment to some of the leading names of the 19th century Jewish literature in life or at those meetings I'm not gonna be aleck yo sure reznitsky Hine Weitzman mayor Dizon golf and today almost every one of them has a street name for them in the modern state who's crazy now so the Bnei Noach as a movement was kind of short and unsuccessful it could have been the victim of its success actually the goal of national cultural and spiritual awakening attracted everyone muskie Lima themed beatnik team and the movement might have just been overwhelmed by ideological diversity or occur in some scholars it just fell prey to the personal intrigues and politics that plagued any secret society but it doesn't matter because the principles which the Binet Moshe espouse were given their first public forum by its leader in 1889 in an essay entitled this is not the way and that was the work that transformed author sweet Ginsberg enlightened son of a Hasidic estate manager into a honhom one of the people master of the Hebrew pen and founding father of spiritual or cultural Zionism now Haram despite his name as one of the people was an elite thinker posing as the voice of the people and the answer focuses on the flaw in Yahtzee Owens goal of Palestine as a destination for the Jewish masses for many centuries he says the Jewish people sunk in poverty and degradation has been sustained by faith and hope in the divine mercy the present generation has seen the birth of a new and far-reaching idea which promises to bring down our faith and hope from heaven and transform both in the living and active forces making our land the goal of hope and our people the anchor of faith now mom was not opposed to the idea of a national home in Eretz Israel God forbid he was just worried about the kind frame and what such a vision in the immediacy required he claimed that in their haste to catch the wave of immigrants now fleeing Europe for America the lovers of Zion were selling a false dream in the place of a national rebirth they were offering basically a colonial dream of profitable homesteads lucrative business opportunities thriving Jewish villages and not only was this dream unrealistic in the eyes of a Kadam and he would make two fact-finding trips to Palestine himself over the next four years to gather proof for its hasty foolishness it wasn't just the unrealism of it it was an essentially flawed ideal because it was appealing to an individual well-being as a motivation for building what was ultimately destined to be a national home because he knew that until the Jews awoke to themselves as a nation their individual efforts would accomplish nothing of lasting worth as he says all the laws and ordinances all the blessings and curses of the law of Moses have but one unvarying object the well-being of the nation as a whole in the land of its inheritance the happiness of the individual is not regarded the individual Israelite is treated as standing to the people of Israel in the relation of a single limb to the whole body the actions of the individual have the reward in the good of the community so the way ahead Tejada is not immediate cultivation of the soil in the Land of Israel but rather a cultivation of the national within the people of Israel we aren't had made it our first object he says to bring about a revival to inspire men with a deeper attachment to the national life in a more ardent desire for the national well-being like these means we should have aroused the necessary determination and we should have obtained devoted adherence and at the end of the essay a harm threw down the gauntlet and declared the entire practical program of the FIBA seoane and by implication the coming Zionist movement a big mistake this then he says is the wrong way the heart of the people that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated and the people is broken into fragments and he closes with a quote I shall see it but not now I shall behold it but not nigh lan below ha ha ah Xiu reimu below curve it's from numbers from the meat bar 2417 i want you to hear that last line is a desperate call for patience I'll see it but not now hold it but not nigh ah ha Dom knew that you can't rush an evolutionary process and a visceral level it seems to me that this is what triggered his opposition to both pin scores visions and hurt CIL's when it came but don't miss the second half of this verse he's quoting because his was also a messianic vision the rest of the verse is a star has gone forth from Jacob and a staff will arise from Israel and what evolution in messianism share is the weight of an inevitable process they're both a promise in their own way that not only must but will be fulfilled or at least mechanism and social Darwinism Kadam and read and absorb the social Darwinist theories of his day and this notion of culture developing in an inexorable evolutionary process is the hallmark of herbert spencer's thought in particular Spencer saw human societies as type of organism the product of slow mostly unconscious development through which their component parts grow more complex and mutually well adapted provided they struggle to serve envy the fittest now every society in his eyes is an interlocking system of these parts none of which could be altered without affecting all the others as is true in most biological systems and therefore each of which offer a lever for shifting the society as a whole remember a lot of the social reformers of the late 19th century were social Darwinists but in a Heine arms mind the keystone component of culture is language no matter how heterogeneous a society if they share a language then they share a commonality of concepts and values that can draw them together as one he wrote that language functions by processing experience on an unconscious level and making it available on a conscious one and then that this happens on the personal and on the national scale he wrote the individual mind has no choice but to submit to the linguistic usages of its times so that even if idiosyncratically strays from the norm it will be called back to it and that's just another way of saying that if you make up your own language people are going to force you to explain your meaning in a shared terminology body continues the mind of a people though similarly governed by inherited rules is not so bound by them that it cannot develop new ones people can give birth to new words fresh ways of speaking that express undiscovered potential and changes in language a new word altered grammatical form are comparable to biological mutation in evolution and therefore the present form of any language is the sum total of successful mutations furthermore because a hadam believed in the essential nature of a nation that found expression through this evolutionary process every language becomes not only a record of its development in the past but it's a repository an expression of its national spirit and a people that ceases to use its language for an everyday collective engagement of the world doesn't necessarily lose its literature I mean the classics can always be translated in his understanding what it loses is the living nerve cells of its memory that unique ability to connect the past with the present in a way that can give voice to a vision of the future as his disciple the national poet of Israel Haim Nachman Bialik would write in his 1913 essay language pains a truly living language is produced by life and life's literature it does not detain its offspring in the womb rather it is fruitful and multiplied zkn stantly and of itself releasing creative power in his due season a truly dead language has nothing but the writing on the tombstones work done by the stonecutter at a time of dire need not so our language a pseudo living language that gives birth to very little and leaves much tucked in her womb and it is our role to induce the birth so as I said her AAM's vision was an awakening the National Jewish spirit my means are reviving its culture only then when a national home be a desirable or even viable aspiration and that fundamental difference in goal is an essential distinction between cultural and political Zionism and it's important to note that beneath that difference between culture and politics lays an even deeper difference in how they define the Jewish question to begin with remember I asserted that the political Zionists saw the Jewish question is posed by anti-semitism what are we going to do with the Jews the physical safety is the most pressing issue in their mind and therefore the primary answer that they offered was a physical refuge but to Hahnemann the Cultural Zionists that was not the issue they were less moved by the question of what to do about the Jews and by the question of what to do about Jewishness in their eyes the primary threat to the Jewish people wasn't anti-semitism it was actually assimilation and remember assimilation is always at its most severe where anti-semitism is at its weakest and in an increasingly secular age they saw Judaism losing its hold on the Jews with nothing to replace it now Haram nuwell the life of the Jews of Eastern Europe among whom he lived who suffered under civil restrictions religious persecution and terrible programs to come of the medieval sort that we'll talk about but he really despised the life of the assimilated Western Jews who seemed have been emancipated as he wrote in his 1891 essay slavery in freedom today while I am still alive I tried to give my weary eyes a rest from the scene of ignorance degradation and unutterable poverty that confronts me here in Russia and find comfort by looking the under across the border where there are Jewish professors Jewish members of academies Jewish officers and the army Jewish civil servants and when I see their behind the glory and the grandeur of it all a two-fold spiritual slavery moral slavery and intellectual slavery and I ask myself do I envy these fellow Jews of mine their emancipation I answer in all truth and sincerity no a thousand times no the privileges are not worth the price I may not be emancipated but at least I have not sold my soul for emancipation I at least can proclaim from the real housetops that my kith and kin are dear to me wherever they are and to hadam remember assimilation included the reduction of peoplehood into religion of the Jews into Frenchmen of the mosaic persuasion no matter how Orthodox they might be what was needed was a Hebrew renaissance one that could counteract what he called heat pollute the fragmentation of the Jewish people into Jewish Frenchmen Jewish Germans or Americans a physical ingathering of the Jews and land was not an answer unto itself kaput Sakal Europian gathering exiles might be a messianic ideal but it was not a practical project the way ahead was to shape a common language one that would become a medium for the articulation of a national spirit and so considering that it should come as no surprise that the primary tool he envisioned for awakening the national spirit was the revival of the Hebrew language I want you to try and imagine for a moment the pain of a mute and illiterate poet now try to picture a whole generation of them the modern revival of the Hebrew language has been a long time in coming and the growth of its literature might be traced all the way back to Moses Mendelssohn's failed periodical qohelet Musa or the very least we could say with the door Hanna esteem that generation of Hebrew intellectuals that gathered around it's a Oracles groundbreaking publication Hamas safe go back to episode 15 in this season to hear the story and there have certainly been works for journalism poetry and prose all along the way but the language is treading water and it's poets are chafing at their limitations just hear this cry from shallow Eterna coughs key foundational Hebrew poet who strived to meld Jewish and world culture in his art and I a mute person will stand and listen what is for me who is for me a foreigner a stranger in their world a foreigner only narrowly plotting my path he's a foreigner with a narrow path available not only because of the anti-semitic realities of life that hand him in but because he lacks a rich natural language through which to claim the world and as his own now making a mistake the early Hebrew poets were the inheritors of a rich national heritage but the Hebrew with which they developed the ornate Malita style this sort of um baroque language of the early masculine could describe a complex in Balaji and it could detail the sacred architecture of the temple in ancient Jerusalem but it had no words for the trees that surrounded Cherenkov ski in the Russian forests or the mushrooms he saw sprouting at his feet or for the national and philosophical ideas moving a ham ham so as a tool of national revival the reawakening of the Hebrew language as the speech of everyday life will have unparalleled power later on we'll see the role that it plays in the overarching Zionist project of creating a new Jew but um the more radical approaches that emerge among the first political Zionists who wanted to make a total break with their past by definition the new Jewish is shaped by the modern Hebrew literature will be in conversation with the past even if it's a conversation filled with a lot of shouting and criticism listen to this once again from Haim Nachman Bialik should an angel ask from dead letters songs of life gush forth shocking the famous dead upon the shelves for they were different songs of small bright clouds of golden beams of Sun and shining tears and if we're gonna speak about the resurrection of the modern Hebrew language then we have to give credit where credit is due and to start with its most famous architect Eliezer Yakup Roman aka Eliezer ben-yehuda so Eliezer was born in 1858 in Belarus to a Hasidic family much like ours to the Greensburg his international education was heavily in the world of tradition he absorbed torah Mishnah and Talmud in the Heder a small town but unlike Ginsberg he whence then sent after a shiva in polotsk and it was here in another familiar pattern that held true really for most of the leading lights of the Russian Haskalah he first encountered the thought of the Enlightenment in fact his Rosh Yeshiva was a secret Moscow and he was the one who first introduced young Eliezer to the pleasure and power of secular studies he quickly found a young woman to teach him Russian and soon he'd not only married his tutor but had mastered her lessons so well that he could enter a Russian High School from which he graduated in 1877 now this was a time of tremendous upheaval in the Russian Empire the russo-turkish war had just broken out largely triggered by the rise of nationalist movements in the Balkans nationalism was of the intoxicating philosophy of its day offering romantic young intellectuals like Eleazar Perlman the dream of a life of purpose agency and self-realization in addition to his secular studies Eleazar quickly became an avid reader of the emerging Hebrew literature of his day now not long before graduated high school in 1868 the first edition of Hashanah the dawn had appeared in Vienna he was a Hebrew periodical founded and edited by parrots melon skin and it's expression was to broadcast the message that the Jews are a nation in that as a nation they're worthy of national independence now note the date of 1868 this is well before Pinsker Herzl or ekkada am most Hess's Rome and Jerusalem had been written but it was a lonely crying in the wilderness at this point but more than Smolensk ins message nationalism which had already excited young Eliezer it was his medium that moved him the Hebrew language and in the preface to his great life work the first modern Hebrew dictionary that action was published after his death by the Academy of people language which he helped found there Ben Eliezer describes an experience triggered by reading Hashanah it's a type of experience that we saw in Herzl and one which repeat itself over and over amongst the first generation of Zionists I'd call it somewhere between a conversion and a revelation It was as if he says the heavens had suddenly opened and a clear incandescent light flashed before my eyes and a mighty inner voice sounded in my ears the Renaissance of Israel on its ancestral soil the more the nationalist concept grew in me the more I realized what a common language is to a nation so the young Moscow became a linguistic nationalist overnight resolved in his heart to move to the Land of Israel therefore he immediately moved to Paris to study medicine as a means of supporting himself in the Holy Land and it was in Paris in 1879 that young Eliezer Pearlman wrote his first article one that in tick you later his vision of national rebirth the original title wasn't the burning question but the editor parrots plants can softened it a bit by renaming it the wavy question before publishing it in Hacha car but no matter what the title the question was that of the times in the middle of the last century of political science gave birth to a new child which was destined to change the form of many governments and the fates of various people's with the power of life and death at its command that child is the concept of nationalism and the rest of the essay is a patter description of the natural and desirable role of nationalism as a liberator in the world and it deals with the tension between the national and cosmopolitan ideals that we've been speaking of and unsurprisingly comes down on the side of a world made up of a polity of nations not citizens of the world now language isn't the central focus of the essay but the role in which it's presented is key to understanding where young Eliezer was headed he conceives of language as both the means of bringing about national revival we Hebrews he says indeed have an advantage and that we possess a language in which even now we can write anything we care to and which is also in our power to speak if we only wish and if many of us spurn Hebrew if many of our people cannot even read Hebrew who is to blame in vain he continues will be all the effort of our writers to revive the language if the entire people remain scattered in different lands among nations speaking different tongues if the means but also the end goal as he says the Land of Israel will become the center for the entire people and even those who live in the Diaspora will know that there are people Wells in its land that its language and its literature are there herein lies our people's salvation and our nation's happiness and that last quote makes Eliezer Perlman the true originator of the concept of the Land of Israel as a cultural spiritual center an idea which became central to a Halle Homs program of cultural Zionism and only two years later in 1881 Eliezer Perlman decided to put his ideals into action and immigrated to Ottoman Palestine at a time by the way when that such a thing was crushingly difficult and once he set foot in the Land of Israel he changed his name to Eliezer ben-yehuda moved to the holy city of Jerusalem and swore together with his wife never to speak anything other than Hebrew in their home you know their son Ben C on Ben Yehuda grew up in what we could call the first modern Hebrew speaking home which makes him the first modern Hebrew speaking child not so simple either because ben yehuda was consumed by his vision he grew out his beard and payout not because it was religious but in order to blend in with the ultra-orthodox who were the majority of Jews in Jerusalem and in an attempt to croute them to the nationalist cause people saw quickly through his disguise and at one point a ban of excommunication was even declared against this underground enlightener but nevertheless he became a Jerusalem phenomenon and he could be seen running from Beit Midrash to synagogue gathering Hebrew words asking rabbis scholars and man on the street his home was his only laboratory at the beginning for the Hebrew experiment so he tried prevent his son from playing with other children even he didn't want him to hear other languages spoken once so goes the story even yelled at his wife for seeing a Russian lullaby to a baby like I said he became a Druce impersonality a well-known madman who worked 18 hours a day seeking out lost terminology and developing new words and writing articles by 1910 Ben Yehuda had begun publication of his dictionary but the full 17 volume set of the complete dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew wouldn't be completed until well after his death in the mean time where the end of his life he co-founded Nevada holo shown the language Council which eventually became the Academy of the Hebrew language that adopted Ben Yehuda's rules and took upon itself his life's work that you know that kateri still today sits at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and continues to approve new Hebrew words to meet the needs of present-day Israeli society now Eliezer ben-yehuda didn't live to see the creation of the State of Israel he died at the end of 1922 only one month after the British authorities declared Hebrew to be the official language of the Jews of Palestine and will talk at some point in the future about how it was the British gained the authority to do such a thing but for now we have to mark with all the success of Venu who does nationalist dream he said about so who will show no Israel in its land and in its language it's a missed statement to say that before Ben Yehuda it was dead as he himself testified already it was the discovery that Jewish communities from different countries were already using Hebrew to communicate with one another that first awoke his national vision but Ben Yehuda was the first to draw a connection between the return of the Jews to their land and the transformation of a language of international Jewish discourse into one of daily speech scientific inquiry and literary production as one professional later remarked it's fortunate for Hebrew that Vanunu was not a linguist because only an amateur would be foolhardy or oblivious enough to launch into such an adventure but fortunately he may have been an amateur but he was no fool he was a dreamer a dreamer who knew that if you willed it it is no dream and in pursuing his passion for the national rebirth he helped found the Republic of Hebrew culture of which a haughty Homme had dreamed in the third paragraph of his keynote speech at the Basel Congress Herzl declared we have returned home as it were Zionism is a return to Jewishness even before there's a return to the Jewish land you know there were many who were surprised that data's words and remained so down to this day as we discussed in last episode Herzl persona as an assimilated Viennese Jew as a European so cosmopolitan his culture he was unashamed of his love for the opera's of Richard Wagner that notorious anti-semite that persona is critical to a certain vision of what the State of Israel is meant to be meaning a state of the Jews in India of Jews from all around the world in order to form a secular civil nation-state one which will allow the Jews to finally become a nation just like any other except since the Jews are just like everyone else only more so our state will be the most cosmopolitan of them all now some saw her CIL's declaration of a need to return to Jewishness simply as cold political calculus aimed at reassuring the Orthodox and traditional delegates that made up the bulk of Eastern European Jewry that not to judge him by his looks others were just cynical when they looked at hurtles our cosmopolitan style and compared them with his words such was a honam's attitude in his essay the Jewish state and the Jewish problem dr. Herzl he says it is true said in his speech that Zionism demands a return to Judaism before the return to the Jewish state but these nice sounding words are so much at variance with his deeds that were forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they're nothing but a well-turned phrase now there were more Zionist congress's to come after bezel one every year but a Haddam did not attend any of them his followers however did and they created an informal opposition to hurt so that became known as the democratic faction one of its leaders was the young Haim Weitzman future first president of Israel and will speak more about the incipient split in the political organization in a later episode when we addressed what's called the Uganda crisis and we learned about the life of Zev Jabotinsky but for now the democratic faction pushed a hotter arms vision from within the Zionist Congress advocating that to the Land of Israel would come first Jewishness and then Jews until in the words of a harem after several generations it will achieve its goal the creation of the Land of Israel of a national spiritual center for Jewishness that is loved by the entire Jewish people and binds it together a center of knowledge of Torah study of the Hebrew language and it's literature of the purest of bodies and souls a true miniature of the Jewish people as it should be Herzl declaration of a return to Jewishness that preceded return to land should have resonated with the cultural Zionists but they mistrusted him they saw him as a utopian messiness and suspected at the same time there was really just a cosmopolitan European in Jews clothing and then in 1902 Herzl published his novel Alton Island the old new land is a title that borrows from the famous synagogue of Prague the old Noyes shul the old new shul this was the Jewish novel that had been brewing in Herzl subconscious since way back in 1894 when he wrote his despairing play the new ghetto but now the despairing end had been place by a belief in redemption oh no island is a literary portrait of the vision of Zionism achieved and though he poured his heart into such a vision Herzl knew it would not be well-received in the epilogue he dresses the book itself with these parting words now to your book after three years of labor we must part and your sufferings will begin you'll have to make your way through enmity and misrepresentation as through a dark forest when however you come along friendly folk give them greeting from your father perhaps Herzl feared for its reception because it first glanced the picture which alt Nolan presented was that of an ideal European society transplanted to the Middle East it's culturally wore white gloves to the Opera they spoke German and French and prided themselves on their technological and socially progressive society at the same time the rebuilt temple sits at the center of this society the Jubilee year is the basis for its economy and its characters in the narratives celebrate the Passover Seder in impressive detail now aha Thomas certainly belong to the camp of critics the cat is out of the bag he wrote in his review of Alton Island in hachi Laura the Zionist leader has finally revealed his conception of the messianic age that is around the corner in his eyes Herzl Jewish Autopia had nothing Jewish about it any seemingly Jewish content was nothing more than window dressing men to conceal the truth that the new Zion was simply a replica of Europe at its best in a new location - AHA - um hers was aping the culture of his oppressors that had become his emancipator's as he characterized Western European Jews as a whole Tejada um Herzl was a mental and spiritual slave I'll leave it to you to read out no land and decide for yourself whether it's talking about a Jewish state or just a state of the Jews but I'll tell you this Herzl was deeply wounded by ha Tom's criticism it seems to me from his point of view he'd made no small effort to stress all new lands Jewish character and if the literary lion of M Israel thought his words and window-dressing he didn't understand why and that itself might begin to answer our question is it simply that Herzl made the book is Jewish as he possibly could but that he employed the concept in cultural forms that were available to him which i hada arm saw as intrinsically false either way fearing the damage that such a review in Sherlock might inflict on a young Zionist movement but reluctant to be dragged into an undignified literary fistfight Herzl turned to his earliest Zionist convert and close confidant max Nord oh and asked him to answer for him now I'll tell you Nordau story in full in a time to come but for now you just need to know that like Herzl himself he was a deeply acculturated german-speaking jew but he had achieved a literary Fame far above Herzl 's Norda was known throughout europe as a cultural critic with a sharp tongue a sharp pen and a conservative frame of mind and nor that was happy to comply with Herzl requests he liked nothing better than a literary brawl he began with a point-by-point rebuttal of a columns review published in the Zionist weekly dive eltz in March 1903 and then he really let loose a haram feared Herzl is cosmopolitan vision because he was unable to shake off the chains of the ghetto he saw Herzl as a mental slave because the only freedom Ahom knew was that of the ghetto finally a Haram was a nationalist fanatic he thought toleration of non-jews was unbecoming for a Jewish state he mocked Herzl for taking up houses and white gloves from Europe because all he himself wished to take was the Inquisition in short Haram was quote no Zionist he is the opposite of one it's a cheap trick to attack political Zionism as if there were some other mysterious kind of Zionism his own to believe in Zionism must be political Zionism that isn't political and doesn't strive to create a homeland for that part of the Jewish people that won't or can't but just a life in the diaspora is not Zionism at all and as a final damning conclusion he said that though a haram thought Zionism should proceed slowly there was nothing slow about the spread of anti-semitism and what it would ultimately to if Jews did nothing about it any fool can guess well now the floodgates open a common supported rally to his side but Nora had just as many defenders his article is an assault on freedom of thought Haram was a habitual fault finder who face to face with Achilles would see only his heel there was an element in this of a clash between East and Western European Jewry in their fight how much Western insolence there is in noir taoist lies wrote one defender of a Kadam insolence toward the jews of the east an insolence toward Hebrew literature its authors and readers alike now this is more than just a tempest in a teacup as we'll see within a few years the competing Zionist visions of hers Ilana Kadam would come close to splitting the Zionist movement as a whole in the ideologies of cultural and political Zionism as embodied by their advocates would play out the nationalist cosmopolitan struggle for another two generations in screens in complex ways you know how do I manage followers despise the ghetto from which they emerged and the parochialism of traditional Jewish society that embodied but despite their claims to a desire for Universalist vision they actually longed for a particular less Jewish identity meanwhile Herzl Norton Jabotinsky all grew up in the cosmopolitan European society but they rejected the universal in which it espouse they wanted nationalism Jewishness but one that was defined by the cosmopolitan values and taste with which they had grown up and the battle rages on today read in the news is this a Jewish state or a state of the Jews and even if you advocate for a Jewish state how exactly do you find what Jewish is and to the inheritance of political and cultural Zionism the high ground to be seized in this battle is the memory of Herzl everyone wants to claim to be the legitimate interpreter of his vision but instead of weighing in on what I think Herzl really meant I'm going to give a hada on the last word or words from his essay Moses no historical great man has not had his spiritual portrait painted by his people's imagination differently from reality and it is this imaginary composition the work of a folk pursuing it to needs and propensity x' rather than some actual person whose brief life was not at all what it was taken to be by others that constitutes the true great man who has continued to make himself felt sometimes for thousands of years you know nearing the end of the season I want to invite you to send me some questions you write me whatever you want to think about in the past present or future Rob Mike Feuer at gmail.com or you can send them to my facebook page Rob Mike flare at Facebook I always want to thank a few people on to thank all the folks that give their hard-earned money to make this 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