Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism

The word "Mauschel" is an epithet which is formed from the verb mauscheln, "to speak German with a Yiddish accent."[1] One etymology derives it from the Yiddish Moyschele or "little Moses",[11] though the sound also evokes connotations of Maus (mouse). The German writer and theologian Johann Peter Hebel translated it as "Mauses", evoking the verminous creature orthographically and phonetically.[12][lower-alpha 3] Mauschel is attested from the 17th century as a word for a haggling Jewish trader, but the term's meaning was then extended to refer pejoratively to Judeo-Germans generally, regardless of the quality of their German. The connotative sense of both forms extends from hustling and swindling to insincerity and duplicitous or generally dishonourable behaviour.[1][8][lower-alpha 4]

Several factors exacerbated the resurgence of antisemitism in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century.

Large-scale pogroms swept through Russia from 1881 to 1884. These events coincided with a demographic boom, an agrarian crisis, and the inability of industrial growth (itself undermining traditional values)[14] to keep pace with and absorb the burgeoning influx of the displaced rural poor into cities.[15][16]

These factors combined to worsen the positions of Ostjuden, whose positions in the economy were being undermined. Emigration en masse from the traditional shtetl to become a "Weltvolk" on the move was facilitated by the more efficient transport technologies of steamships and railways.[15] Vienna in particular, where Herzl spent his adult years, was a crucial crossroads for these tensions.

The period was a critical one in Austrian history. Twenty-five years of a stable political order were coming to an end, and the antisemitic Christian Social Party had won the elections.[17][18] It was in this context that Herzl, a thoroughly assimilated, German nationalist Jew, with almost no knowledge of Hebrew, and little of Judaism (a prompter had to whisper to him the brokhe when he was asked to recite it in the Basel synagogue)[19][lower-alpha 5] and became a fierce proponent and theorist of Zionism.[20]

These waves of newcomers stirred xenophobic alarms in countries westwards, and in particular troubled the established Jewish middle class communities, who felt duty-bound to provide charitable assistance to, and find solutions, including repatriation,[lower-alpha 6][21] for the plight of their Eastern European religious brethren,[22] but who, at the same time, accepted many of the negative perceptions about traditional Jews current among the non-Jewish majorities.[lower-alpha 7]

Vienna's Jewish bourgeoisie generally strongly identified with its German milieu and now felt challenged by the recrudescence of powerful antisemitic forces increasingly hostile to Jews and their growing numbers[lower-alpha 8] due to the rapid influx of Jewish immigrants from the east.[23]

Wealthy western Jews often accentuated the aspect of Sephardic origin, thought to be culturally and physically superior,[24][lower-alpha 9] to mark their distance from the oriental Ashkenazim,[25] and Herzl himself made such a claim for his own family, though there was no evidence for it.[26]

Jewish elites in the West had assimilated the secular principles of the Enlightenment, were committed to their various nations, wary of displays of Jewishness and Jewish nationalism, knew little of the Ostjuden, and were prone to echo mainstream stereotypes[lower-alpha 10] about their poverty, dirtiness and superstitiousness.[27][28] In France in 1894, Bernard Lazare spoke of Ostjuden as "coarse and dirty, pillaging Tatars, who come to feed upon a country which does not belong to them."[29] (Lazare later became a Zionist, and briefly, a friend of Herzl's, and radically, reversed his views of Ostjuden.) Overwhelmingly, the concern that Herzl shows for Jews was, as with Max Nordau, for these Ostjuden.[lower-alpha 11]

Antisemitism for Herzl indeed had its uses, however painful. In his play The New Ghetto (1894)[lower-alpha 12] Herzl has the Rabbi Friedheimer remark: "Antisemitism isn't all bad. As the movement gains force, I observe a return to religion. Antisemitism is a warning to us to stand together, not to abandon the God of our fathers, as many have done.".[30][lower-alpha 13] While repudiating religion, Herzl's programme can be read as a secular redemption of traditional Jewish religious messianism.[31]

In his foundational Zionist text, Der Judenstaat (1896)[lower-alpha 14] Herzl indeed appealed to assimilated Jews to support Zionism out of self-interest. By ridding (Western) Europe of the "disquieting, incalculable, and unavoidable rivalry of a Jewish proletariat,"(die beunruhigende,unberechenbare, unvermeidliche Konkurrenz des jüdischen Proletariats) their own social position would be shored up against both Christian antisemitism and a new class of poor economic competitors.[32][33][34][lower-alpha 15]

Alan Levenson, commenting on the philosemitic[lower-alpha 16] Hermann Bahr's belief that Herzl was driven by a concern for Eastern Jews,[lower-alpha 17] writes: "To credit Herzl with having the Polish Jews ever in his heart is also a strange judgment considering his contempt for his 'army of schnorrers.' Herzl had also gone to the Jewish masses only after the plutocrats had shown him the door."[35][lower-alpha 18]

Jacques Kornberg calls Hertz's portrait of this putative "Jewish type" an "antisemite's dream"[36] Jay Geller considers it significant that Mauschel is used absolutely, without the expected definite or indefinite article. The lack of an article, Geller argues, indicates that Herzl is describing a particular type of Jew, one who embodies what antisemitic stereotypes say of Jews generally.[lower-alpha 19]

For Herzl, Mauschel means a "bad Jew" as opposed to a "virtuous Jew" and his characterization of both consists of stereotypes.[37] The (good) Jew is no better or worse than any other human being. The (bad) Jew or Mauschel type by contrast is a distortion (Verzerrung) of human character, something unspeakably repulsive.[38] From the outset, Herzl declares, "Mauschel is an anti-Zionist."[1][lower-alpha 20] Herzl proceeds to qualify what he specifically understands by this "Jewish" type:

Who is this Mauschel anyway? A type, my dear friends, a figure that keeps reappearing over the ages, the hideous companion (fürchterliche Begleiter) of the Jew and so inseparable from him that the two have always been confused with each other. A Jew is a human being like any other – no better and no worse, possibly intimidated and embittered by persecution, and very steadfast in suffering. Mauschel, on the other hand, is a distortion (Verzerrung) of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant.[39][40][lower-alpha 21]

The essential distinction between a "good" and a "bad" Jew is a lack of honour in the latter. It is the hallmark of the Mauschel that, when poor, he behaves as a "despicable schnorrer" (erbärmlicher Schnorrer), and if as a parvenu he comes into riches, he proves to be an even more detestable show-off (Protz),[8] a "crafty profit-seeker" engaged in "dirty deals," who cringes in adversity rather than bearing up stoically under persecution. Good Jews have always been aware of, and tolerated, even helped, this kind of "spineless repressed and shabby fellow" (verkrümmter, verdrückter und schäbiger Geselle) in their midst.[41][1][42] The Mauschel commits apostasy, unlike the real Jew.[43] With the emergence of Zionism, he continues, the Mauschel has done his fellow-Jews a praiseworthy favour by setting himself apart from them as an "anti-Zionist".[1] It is the Mauschel who has given currency to the catchphrase about Zionist Jews being antisemitic, thereby conniving with antisemites themselves.[44] The pulpits of synagogues should be cleansed of rabbis who protest about Zionism.[45] The opponents of Zionism should be treated as what they are, enemies: the "motley crew" of profit-seekers – Jewish financiers, with skeletons in their closets; blackmailing Jewish journalists who accept bribes to keep quiet about misdoings; Jewish lawyers who serve a clientale operating on the edges of the law, along with pinko politicians, pious hypocrites, shady businessmen and the like.[46] Elsewhere in his writings, Herzl described opponents of the Zionism he was proposing as "Jewish vermin" (Schädlinge).[lower-alpha 22]

If it puzzles Jews how they could have come to be confused with the Mauschel when the two types have always felt antipathy for each other, and if Jews are perplexed as to how this kind of Jew, whom Herzl and antisemites find repulsive, came to be part of Jewry, then perhaps, Herzl speculates, the explanation may be that sometime in the distant past the Jews suffered from racial contamination:

These irreconcilable, inexplicable antitheses make it seem as though at some dark moment in our history some inferior human material (eine niedrigere Volksmasse) got into our unfortunate people and blended with it.[43][lower-alpha 23][43][47][42]

This reflects contemporary antisemitic claims about Jews: a very similar prejudice is expressed in Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), one of the most influential antisemitic works of his time. Chamberlain wrote that the "Jewish race" had an "admixture of negro blood".[3][lower-alpha 24] Herzl closes his article with the following remark, which Daniel Boyarin takes[50] to be a threat against Jews who will not aid in the Zionist project:

Mauschel, watch out! Zionism could act as (Wilhelm) Tell did in the legend. When Tell prepared to shoot the apple from his son's head, he had a second arrow in readiness. If the first shot missed. The second was to serve for revenge. Friends, the second arrow of Zionism is meant for Mauschel's chest![lower-alpha 25]

Eastern Jews, 75% of Jewry at that time, figure frequently in early Zionist texts as an impoverished population that was both physically and morally "degenerate".[51] As early as 1882, Herzl himself had likened Jews to a deformed finger on the hand of mankind.[52] He eventually came round to considering antisemitism to be indelible, assimilation to be illusory, and that the problem could only be resolved by removing its cause.[53] According to Steve Beller, Herzl thought that it was precisely the legal emancipation of Jews, with its collateral effect of allowing Jews to compete, which lay at the root of modern antisemitism.[lower-alpha 26]

The movement Herzl founded, particularly among the Jewish intelligentsia in the German cultural sphere, concerned itself not only with the idea of transferring Jews out of Europe, but also with subjecting what they perceived to be "Jewish character" to a "purging". Herzl once punningly stated this aim as one of transforming Judenjungen ("Jewboys"/Kikes) into proud "young Jews" (junge Juden).[54][lower-alpha 27] In a move Levenson considers "baffling", Herzl even pressed the philosemitic Arthur von Suttner, president of the Austrian branch of The Society for the Defense Against Antisemitism, to disband the association, arguing that Jews unable to protected themselves from antisemitism should not be defended:

Jews [without backbone] should not be protected by the Verein zur Abwehr; its members are too good for that. But Jews who are upright want to defend themselves, and must do so; and even this will raise them but a little in the esteem of their adversaries. The Verein zur Abwehr can do us one more favor: It should disband.[57]

These Zionist portrayals of a putative Jewish type in the diaspora (Golusjude) reflected the influence of canards current in antisemitic caricatures of the Jews themselves.[58] Some antisemites indeed, Jacob Katz observed, considered their own views on Jews as very similar to what Zionists themselves were stating.[59][60] Beller notes that Herzl's own opinions in this regard were similar in some instances to the vehemently antisemitic views of the composer Richard Wagner.[lower-alpha 28]

Zionists were often criticized by fellow Jews for advocating what antisemites proposed. In his novel "The Road into the Open"(Der Weg ins Freie (1908)), Arthur Schnitzler has one character say: "I myself have only succeeded up to the present in making the acquaintance of one genuine anti-Semite. I'm afraid I'm bound to admit,..that it was a well-known Zionist leader".[61][lower-alpha 29] The anti-Zionists' perception was that the "evacuation" of Jews from Europe was essentially identical to what antisemites advocated, namely expulsion, the only difference being that Zionists were suggesting the exercise of choice over forced removal. Ezra Mendelsohn once argued that while Jewish scholarship traditionally considered post WW1 Poland to be almost unique in the extremity of its anti-Semitism, Polish nationalist leaders, antisemites and their Jewish counterparts appear to have shared "a common intellectual, conceptual and political universe" and identical assumptions about the putative "nature" of the Jews, in a milieu where Zionism flourished, giving the impression that Zionists and Polish antisemites were, in Scott Ury's interpretation, "strange bedfellows".[62][63][lower-alpha 30]

For Herzl and those persuaded by his proposal, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was not only the only rational response to pervasive antisemitism in Europe, but it was also one which, through dialogue, antisemites themselves would support and organize,[64] if only by exercising a "legitimate self-defense" against Jewish commercial competitiveness.[lower-alpha 31] Earlier proposals for the idea of a return of Jews to Palestine had aroused little hostility or focused curiosity among antisemites,[65][lower-alpha 32] notable exceptions in the latter regard being Édouard Drumont and Győző Istóczy. The latter, a lifelong antisemite, fervently embraced the idea of Jewish Expatriation,[66][lower-alpha 33] also as a means of reinvigorating the "enfeebled". The former's newspaper, La Libre Parole, responded exuberantly to the First Zionist Congress in 1897 by offering to raise a subscription to finance Jewish colonies abroad.[67] Herzl himself came round to the view that anti-Semitism itself could be turned to advantage since it served to exert pressure towards the reform of alleged flaws in Jewish character.[68]

Herzl at one point wrote:

We want to let respectable antisemites participate in our project, respecting their independence which is valuable to us as a sort of people's control authority.[69][lower-alpha 34]

Herzl perceived a common strategic aim shared by, and beneficial to, both Zionists and antisemites. The evacuation of Jews from Europe would benefit both in that Jews would be liberated from antisemitism while relieving Europeans of Jews and thereby "liberating them from us."[70][lower-alpha 35] To achieve this, one could even entrust the liquidation of Jewish assets in Europe to decent (anständige) antisemites:

It would be excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites (anständige und akkreditierte Antisemiten) as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies (Die Antisemiten werden unsere verläßlichsten Freunde, die antisemitischen Länder unsere Verbündeten.).[71][72][73]

Boyarin illustrates compatibility between Herzl's self-hatred and antisemitites' desire for expulsion, quoting German philosopher Gottlieb Fichte. A century earlier, Fichte said:

As to giving them [Jews] civil rights, I see no way other than that of some night cutting off their heads and attaching in their place others in which there is not a single Jewish idea. To protect ourselves from them I see no means other than to conquer for them their promised land and to pack them off there.[73][lower-alpha 36]

Jews, on the eve of their mass departure, could also use their expertise to help Europeans rid the world of the unrestrained power of money by nationalizing their stock exchanges and credit systems. For otherwise, in the absence of the expatriated Jews the probability would be, for Herzl, that Europeans themselves, left to their own resources, would in turn just judaise (verjuden) themselves.[70] In his address to the Rothschild family, he stated that were they to exempt themselves from Zionist expatriation, they would be excluded from the liquidation of Jewish assets in Europe for "Europe could not stand the additional shock of your liquidation."[74][lower-alpha 37] He reflected that the antisemitic campaigns feeding off speculations concerning the role of Jewish finance[lower-alpha 38] in the wake of the Panama scandals[lower-alpha 39] were not wholly harmful: they had in his view their advantages, one of which was that they might "smash the insolence of Jews proud of their fortune and the cynical ruthless character of Jewish financiers", and thereby contribute to the education of the Jews.[lower-alpha 40] According to his biography, Herzl both envied and despised wealthy Jews.[76] He once dismissed Albert Rothschild the head of the family's Austrian branch as a "Jewboy".[47][lower-alpha 41]

Herzl himself imagined the Promised Land as a place where stereotypical Jews with their hooked noses, red hair and bow-legs could live free of contempt.[6] In his subsequent novel Altneuland (1902) he described variously the Palestinian tradespeople prior to the advent of the reforming New Society to be established by Zionism. Without specifying their ethnicity, the narrator and his aristocratic Prussian interlocutor Kingscourt/Königshoff note streets filled with the sickly, mendicants, famished children, screaming women and strident merchants. Beggarly Jews at prayer at the Wall are "repulsive" (widerlich) Jaffa is peopled by an indolent, beggarly, hopeless assortment of poor Turks, dirty Arabs and timid Jews. Jay Geller comments that Herzl's descriptions here of "abject Palestinian life prior to the New Society" reproduce "Western Jewish representations of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires' internal colonized populations of Eastern Jews."[77] Zionists pressing for a Palestinian solution considered that only a peasant lifestyle rooted in farming a land could redeem many Jews given, in his view, to the "moral degeneracy" of behaving according to stereotype, with Herzl writing in his diary (24 August 1997) just prior to the first Zionist Congress, of the hucksters, peddlers, schnorrers and swindlers in his ranks.[78][79]

I am in command only of boys, beggars, and parasites (shmucks).[lower-alpha 42] Some of them exploit me. Others are already jealous or disloyal. The third kind drop off as soon as some little career opens up for them. Few of them are unselfish enthusiasts. Nevertheless, this army would be entirely sufficient if only success were in sight. Then it would quickly become a well-conditioned, regular army[80][79][lower-alpha 43]

Herzl confided to his diary in 1895 that he saw himself as a "man who makes aniline out of refuse."[79][lower-alpha 44] The idea is elaborated on in his story, The Aniline Inn where it may be read as a cypher for Herzl's own conversion to Zionism. An innkeeper tells a professor on the verge of suicide that what saved him from a similar despair was an encounter with a needy labourer, to whom he gave some money. The worker told him that that at his workplace, worthless refuse – coal tar – was transformed into aniline dyes with their "beautiful, radiant colours".[81] The clear implication is that to Herzl, Zionism would be manufacturing a useful product from human rubbish.[82]

In 1915, Pinhas Felix Rosenblüth, who rose to be Israel's first Justice Minister, wrote in a field report on Ostjuden published in Der Jüdische Student that the great lesson for young Jewish Zionists fighting on the eastern front, on experiencing delusions at what they observe of Jewish life there, was that Palestine was one large "institute for the fumigation of (all) Jewish vermin" (Große Entlausungsanstalt für alles jüdische Ungeziefer).[54][lower-alpha 45]

Zionism's proposal of Palestine clashed with the American option, namely mass emigration as exemplified by Baron Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association Zionists. In discussing this competitive plan, Zionists were stirred by fears that exposure of eastern Jews to modern capitalism would wean them from a return to the plough and the hammer in agricultural colonies in Palestine. America would threaten to seduce immigrant Ostjuden back into the hectic world of financial wheeling and dealing which, for Zionists, constituted traits in Jews they aspired to uproot.[lower-alpha 46][lower-alpha 47]

Herzl's Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus, a fellow Jew, journalist and writer, with a theatrical brio not dissimilar to Herzl's,[83] was also much given to the tactical exploitation of antisemitic barbs, to the point that he is widely described as an extreme case of Jewish self-hatred.[84][lower-alpha 48] Kraus wrote a withering critique of Zionism soon after Herzl made his proposal. The article he penned, A Crown for Zion (Eine Krone für Zion), was prompted by a request soliciting the donation of a crown towards the expenses of the Second Zionist Party Congress in Basel, 1898. The title puns on crown as a monetary unit, and crown as a headpiece symbolizing monarchical power. A contribution would signify his support for Herzl as the King of Zionism, which Kraus then goes on to characterize as intrinsically an antisemitic movement, and Zionists as Jewish antisemites because, like their 'Aryan', counterparts, they seek the expulsion of Jews from Europe.[91] The problem was to civilize Europe by having it fully assimilate its Jewish population: to pursue Jewish colonization of their own country was less utopian than a remedy that envisaged a mass exodus of Jews elsewhere.[92] Already by 1898 Kraus had equated Zionists with antisemites: what Zionists preached was itself a form of antisemitism, and the risk was that they converge or collude with real antisemites themselves.[92][lower-alpha 49] In a review of Herzl's New Ghetto, Kraus put his accusation in more pointed language. when antisemites' chanted: "Out with you Jews!" (Hinaus mit euch Juden!), Zionists could be understood in effect as cheerily chiming in: "Yes, out with us Jews!" (Jawohl, hinaus mit uns Juden!).[40]

Herzl's notion. Kraus further argued, played manipulatively on the hopes and sufferings of Ostjuden, serving them up with a kind of utopian mirage or opium for the oriental proletariat in places like Galicia.[93]

Jacques Kornberg, the author of a very influential rereading of Herzl's switch from assimilationism to expatriating Zionism, interprets Zionism as Herzl's way of resolving his own self-contempt in that it would create a new Jew.[47]

Daniel Boyarin maintains that Herzl, like Freud, was antisemitic and that Herzl's resolutive response to the antisemitism of his times was and remains deeply flawed.[94][lower-alpha 50] Herzl, having internalized the antisemitic view of Jews, had earlier imagined a number of dramatic ways to put an end to the problem. He once imagined guaranteeing the Pope that he could persuade all Jews to convert to Catholicism. In this scenario, he and a few other leaders alone would remain faithful, in defense of Jewish honour and dignity, a handful of courageous witnesses to their origins, in the face of an antisemitic world.[96]

Boyarin suggests that The "New Ghetto" (1894) anticipated Herzl's later Zionist view that it is antisemitism that ensured Jews would remain Jews.[97] The absence of a state and preparedness to defend it suggested for Herzl effeminized unmanliness.[98] The play suggests for Boyarin that Herzl was disturbed by what he saw as the "vulgarity" of the Jewish working class, and the manners of parvenu Jewish capitalists, both of which prevented their acceptance by gentile elites.[41] The heroic figure in the play's dénouement, doing his "Christian duty" (Christenpflicht)[lower-alpha 51] to defend the class interests of poor Jews and gentiles even at the risk of damaging capital interests, dies in a duel to defend Jewish honour.[lower-alpha 52] The redemption of Jewish honour via a mimesis of gentile masculinity,[lower-alpha 53] gaining acceptance among gentiles without succumbing to servility is, Boyarin insists, fundamental to Herzl's life.[99][lower-alpha 54] Zionism in this reading aspires to assimilate Jews to the model of German culture, a state of "German Protestantism with a Jewish alias"[102] while removing themselves from Europe.[lower-alpha 55]

For Ritchie Robertson, it is only a half-truth to say Zionism emerged as a response to the antisemitic scandal afforded by the Dreyfus trial, as Herzl later claimed.[103] Herzl wrote that antisemitism had its roots in envy of superior Jewish abilities.[lower-alpha 56] Herzl's Zionism arose paradoxically from his deep admiration for the Prussian military aristocracy and his profound contempt for ghetto Jews.[104] Like Walther Rathenau, Herzl's lifelong "hyper acculturation" to and admiration for Prussia led him to embrace a military mentality based on virility and honour. He confided in negotiations with German authorities, that a Jewish state, with strict patterns of discipline and perhaps as a German protectorate, would have a salutary effect on Jewish character.[26]

Derek Penslar, contextualizing Mauschel, sees Herzl as basically a "histrionic personality", whose life was obsessed and torn between a thirst for honour, a love of theatricality evident in what has been called his "staging of Zionism".[5][lower-alpha 57] and a loathing of hypocrisy. The political Zionism he developed aspired to create an "authentic Jewish selfhood" and had a performative function for a man who was neither comfortable nor well-informed about Judaism and its culture. He likens these complexities in Herzl's psychological makeup and attitude towards Jews to the ambivalence Herzl saw in the dual duplicity and performativity of the Bishari(/n), Sudanese "savages" who once opposed Western colonial powers and whose opportunistic "perfidy" in switching sides could quickly absorb aspects of the modern world, like bargaining and money, as when they were hired to perform in human zoos in Europe.[2]

Glenn Bowman, professor emeritus of anthropology at Kent University, argues that there is an ambiguity in Herzl's design for a Jewish state in Palestine. Herzl, he argues, vacillated between imagining a recreation of a vibrant cosmopolitan state in the Middle East, only nominally Jewish, which would enable Jews to become Europeans without the harassment of antisemitism, which insisted on their remaining Jews, and conceiving it as a "racially distinct entity".

Herzl in effect argued that as Jews were made "Jewish" by exclusion and Europeans could only see Jewishness when it saw Jews (henceforth insisting on maintaining the exclusionary policies that made Jews "Jewish"), Jews would have to leave Europe in order to stop being "Jewish" and reveal themselves as European.[105]

• Zionist antisemitism