Trudy Gold
Foundation Course: The Jews and the Crisis of Modernity, Part 2

Trudy Gold | Foundation Course: The Jews and the Crisis of Modernity, Part 2

- Well, good evening, everyone from London. And as I explained last week, because we are going through such a traumatic time in Jewish history, myself and my colleagues decided that it will be sensible to try and condense in four sessions an overview of the past 200 years. So obviously, I know many of you want much more detail, which, of course, we’re giving in other lectures, but what we decided to do was to bring out, as I said, the major themes. So last week, we looked at what I saw as the beginnings of the crisis of modernity, when the ideas of the enlightenment in western and Central Europe plunge the Jews into the modern world. And also important to remember that these people who had a huge tradition of learning, even if you yourself was not learned, that’s what you had. There is a wonderful quote actually of Heinrich Heine. He said, “A book is their fatherland, their possession, their ruler, their fortune and misfortune. From here, they cannot be driven out.” So you’ve got this restless, tiny percentage of the population who now with all that energy put into, if you like, the notion of becoming Jewishly literate, bearing in mind that at the time of the fall of the second temple, the Rabbi has expressly said, “Unless you have to, don’t fight.” And you can make the case that this is when the Jew becomes Ben Zakkai as opposed to Bar Kokhba And really Jewish history, certainly in the west, under Christendom was a story of a people fighting for survival. If they were useful to the secular rulers, great. If the church was triumphant, they have real problems.

And the other image that dogs them through 1800 years of history is the negative image of Christianity. I don’t want to overplay this, suffice to say when I was in Salzburg and in Munich. When one enter churches, and one sees the bleeding Jesus, you have this image of the sacrifice and who are the sacrifices? It’s the Jewish people. And we pointed out last week that the first positive image of a Jew anywhere was in the enlightenment with Lessing when he wrote the play, the Jews. And it fails because no one can imagine a Jew, a hero. It’s not until Moses Mendelssohn that you begin to see the possibility, and of course, Nathan the wise. So, of course, it was Napoleon who pushed forward Jewish emancipation breaking down the ghetto wars wherever he conquered. But the price was give up your notion of nationhood become French citizens, Italian citizens, German subjects, subjects of the Habsburg empire of the Jewish religion. The same was not true of Eastern Europe. And that’s something I’m going to talk about next week. So this tiny population, under 1% of the population in every country, they’re living in way under 1% in the main city dwellers, and then you have this extraordinary success story. Now, be careful. Not every Jew became rich and famous, but it was almost as though modernity was made for the Jew. What was the 19th century like, which the Jews so fell in love with? And I think here we always have to use our historic imagination. Imagine what it was like for Moses Mendelssohn from the ghetto of desal when he wandered the streets of Berlin, and when he was invited to the salons, when he begins to meet creatures of the Enlightenment.

And also don’t forget, under the charter of Frederick II, wealthy wives, wealthy daughters are now hosting glittering salons. In 1815, Napoleon is defeated, and many of the victorious princes, they want to push back the ideas of the revolution. So in many places, Jewish emancipation is over. However, you can’t hold back the tide. And, by 1878 Jews are emancipated everywhere in western and central Europe with the belief that if the state realises how useful they are, they can become accepted. And I think one of the problems was that Moses Mendelssohn, when he compared the Jews of Germany with the people he knew in the Enlightenment, it was a very, very uneven equation. And consequently, what you have is the dream of the , self-improvement. If we somehow raise ourselves up, then the gentile world was love is so against the backdrop of modernity, the extraordinary success story. But again, use your historic imagination. What was the 19th century like if you were born in the west? Can we see the first slide please, Anna? The wars of Italian unification. The breakup of the old order. Can we go on please? This is the Habsburg Empire. An empire ruled from Vienna from one by one family. And in fact, later on you’re going to see that Serbia, and that whole area is also going to be in the Habsburg Empire ruling over 16 different national groups, the Czech, the Hungarians, et cetera, et cetera. Now the question is, what is happening in the 19th century for Italian unification and to the Czech and the Hungarians, and other peoples living within the empire? In order to create a modern economy, you need a sound middle class. In order to create a sound middle class, you need to educate. Now the Habsburg Empire is a dictatorship brewed by one man. Let’s go on. Next map, please.

German territory. Prior to 1815, Germany comprised of over 360 separate city states. It’s fascinating if you want to know about German music. Every little court had its own cattle miser, but there were customed holes from city to city to city. The next slide please. The German confederation. After the defeat of Napoleon, it was tied it up. The two main powers are now Bavaria and Prussia. But gradually Prussia, the militaristic Prussia is going to come to the fore under its brilliant chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Can we see the next slide, please? There is the German Reich. Bismarck finally manages to unify Germany through war, through three wars. Wars with the Dames, wars with the Austrian, and finally wars with the French. So the old map of Europe is gradually changing. And what happens as a backdrop? I’ve already talked about the growth of nationalism because nationalities wanting their place in the sun, it ties up with education. Why should the Hungarians be ruled by the Habsburgs? Why should the Czech? What is the supreme culture within the Habsburg Empire? What about Germany? Late to the race for colonies not created until 1871, under its brilliant chancellor, what is going to be the future of Germany? And it grows with a huge nationalism. Now, what else is happening in the 19th century? Use your historic imagination. Imagine you were born in 1800, and you die in 1900. You can actually list for me the changes you would’ve seen in your lifetime.

Think about it. Think about travel. Where one of my daughters lives in Cornwall, before the advent of the train, it would’ve taken to go overland. It would’ve taken 18 days. The advent of the train, the advent of more and more means of travel. The railways were incredibly important in the development of Europe. So you think of all the inventions, this is technology on the march now. Now what else does it lead to? Huge industrialization. Can we see the next slide please? The growth of cities. London was the first. That’s a beautiful picture of Paris you see before you, but London was in fact the first city to reach in the modern world to reach a million people, why? Because people are coming to the cities for jobs. This is the growth of the modern world, the kind of world that we know today. This is where it really all begins condensed into cities moving from the countryside. Life is moving very, very fast. And the question, the next question, use your historic imagination. Does the majority of people like change? This is a very important question. Now my hunch is if you are Jewish because of the past, the restlessness of the past, it’s something that is almost in the Jewish DNA, but do the majority of people like it? The growth of cities. Look, you can see from these, you can see an industrialization. Industrialization was ugly. And the other point to make about industrialization that many, many people suffered dreadfully, the peasantry coming to the cities for work, the regiment of the countryside, and yet not meant not much advanced poor laws.

England is going to lead the way in that with a kind of liberal paternalism. But I’m leaving England out of the equation here because England is a separate case, but mainly in the various states within the Hapsburg empire, within Germany, within France. France is also going through a period of huge insecurity. France after the defeat of Napoleon, couldn’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a republic or a monarchy, and it keeps on changing sides. And that culminates in 1871 by this terrifying defeat at the hands of the Germans and the return of some French territory, think Alsace-Lorraine, to Germany. So consequently, you have a city, you have a country, you have a Europe where there’s a huge amount of change. Add to that new ideas, Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin with his Origin of the species. Charles Darwin, with his notion of natural selection. You begin to see pseudo scientists, pseudogeneticists take these ideas from the life sciences, and begin to apply them to various groups. Think Germany, think insecure nationalism. And yet my people once had a great, and glorious past. Pre-Roman, when was the might of Germany when they the defeated the Roman Empire, it was the Germanic tribes remember. Think back to, if you like the Legends of Wagner. Think back to the great legends. There’s a wonderful quote of Heinrich Heiners on Germany.

He was very ambiguous. He did say at one time, and I mentioned this last week, that those two ethical nations, the Jews, and the Germans could create a new Jerusalem, in Germany, but he also said, “If the talisman of the cross will ever fall in Germany, the hammer of thought will rise up. And the old berserker gods will wipe the dust of a thousand years from their eyes and engulf the world in a calamity which will make the French Revolution seem like a tea party.” What was he spotting? I want you to think now about thwarted nationalism. I want you to think about race theory. And these race theorists began to apply the notions of the life sciences survival of the fittest to different groups. It’s all spurious because I think if you’re going to talk about a pure race, you would probably have to geographically isolate them for at least a thousand years, and that is not the story of the European nations. However, I’m teaching you about spurious theory because this is theories that became very popular. Out of Germany, comes the notion of the Aryan, and who is the Aryan? The Aryan is the German, the Scandinavian or the Brits. A man called Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was actually an Englishman who went to live in Germany. He became involved in Wagner Circle, was a very close friend of Cosima Wagner. He said that basically the world is divided into races.

At the top you have the Aryan under the Romans, then the Slavs are the slaves of the the rest, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, you’re going to see in Russia the rise of Pan-Salvism, who’s saying, hold on a minute, what about us? And what about France? France deeply insecure. What about the French people? So, and on top of this, there’s a huge population explosion. So all these insecurities, people not necessarily coping with the inventions of modernity, if I may make a point, just as I don’t think they can cope with the inventions of the modern world today. So they couldn’t also cope with the inventions of the 19th century. It was too much to deal with. It was all moving far too fast. And remember, the Jews had been emancipated under the ideas of the enlightenment. Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason two years before Mendelssohn died. Mendelssohn never really understood it because the Enlightenment believed that if we worked hard enough to discover the universal truths that we would learn to apply reason, the romantic movement, it’s about emotion, it’s about feeling, it’s about power. And the other point was that liberalism, which was beginning to become an important factor, certainly in England, but in the Habsburg Empire, even in Germany. In 1873, the stock market crashed.

There was a terrible financial crisis for so many of the middle classes. And gradually those forces of liberalism are going to dissipate. Against all this swirling kind of emotion and ideas as people tried to find their way in the modern world. There was this people, this tiny people, city dwellers who in the main were beginning to, from their point of view, enrich the modern world. We mentioned last week how department stores were almost a Jewish invention. It was the Teach brothers who went to America saw what was happening in America. It began, of course, with the wild west, with the peddlers. When they had enough money, they set up the general stores where you have to sell everything. And then of course in the cities, they come back to Europe. It’s modern advertising. It’s modern self-service restaurants. Of course, in Hollywood it’s the movie industry, but that comes on a little later. Jews in law, Jews in private banking. You begin, and also the other point, many Jews who were kind of still on the edge in the west, they could perhaps look at the west with very acute eyes, and some of them a tiny minority, but important were attracted to socialist ideas, and who was the symbol of international capitalism in Europe at the House of Rothschild? Now let’s be careful. Jews never had any power. Some of them had influence, but the symbol of international change and disruption was of course, Karl Marx. The symbol of international capitalism was Rothschild. I’m going to read you a statement of Karl Marx’s on the Jews because Karl Marx, even though he had been born a Jew, in fact, he was the grandson of Rabbis on both sides.

This is what he wrote in 1844. The God of the Jews has become the God of the universe. The real God of the Jew is money. Their God is an illusory bill of exchange. I call that Jewish self hatred. We can’t go into it now, but it’s a fascinating tale, the story of Marx, but Marx is the symbol of revolt, and in fact, the man in Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle, who created the Social Democratic Party, AKA, Communist, was also a Jew. He’d left his Judaism behind. Anyone who got involved in fringe movements leaves it behind. But the point is, if you had something to maintain, you saw these people as dangerous. And if you were dispossessed, if you felt you hadn’t your place in the sun, even though real world, let’s look at Germany, real power and worth and wealth in Germany was with the junker class, the army, and the court. You had a few wealthy Jews who were visibly prominent. But it led to the notion that Jews are behind capitalism. Jews are behind these movements for change. Completely untrue. The reality was that the Jews in the Maine were trying terribly hard to be very, very loyal citizens. And many of them are going to be completely bewildered by what they are going to see.

Can we see the next slide please? Wilhelm Marr, now, Wilhelm Marr is in point important in the history of the Jewish people, why? Because he was in a German journalist and he invents the term anti-Semitism. Up until that period, hatred of Jews was hatred of Jews. It was a religious thing. Remember the quote of Jonathan Sachs that I gave you last week? First they hated our religion, then they hated our race. Now they hate our nation. Wilhelm Marr, he coins the term anti-Semitism. He has imbued all this race hatred, and as far as he is concerned, the Jews are a race. And no Jew can in fact be a German because he’s of separate blood. Any Jew converts can’t be German, and he didn’t invent the theory of race. But by creating the League of anti-Semites this idea spreads. And this is a quote from his pamphlet, jury’s control of society and politics as well as its practical domination of religion and theatrical thought is still in the prime of its development. Heading towards the realisation of Jehovah’s Promise, I will hand all the people’s over to the. Now, he writes this at this just after the Congress of Berlin, where the brilliant Otto von Bismarck had called together the heads of European powers to try and prevent a European war who represented Britain. But of course, the British Prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and those two brilliant statesmen actually settled the piece of Europe. What Wilhelm Marr says in his pamphlet is the Semite Disraeli holds in his vest pocket the key to peace and war in the orient. Disraeli is not really the British prime minister as far as he’s concerned. He is a Jew in league with every other Jew, and it’s fascinating at the end of the Congress, Bismarck’s words on Disraeli, and the two were very close actually.

It was Disraeli who begged Bismarck to introduce a more lenient programme towards the workers of Berlin to stop the unrest. They were very close, he said of Disraeli, Because Disraeli refused to ratify remaining independence until there was Jewish emancipation. So this get led to the belief that there was some sort of real power. Another important figure in the rise of racial anti-Semitism was a man called a very important economy called Karl Dohring, a Jewish question would still exist even if every Jew would turn his back on his religion. It is precisely the baptised Jews who infiltrate furthest. So what you begin to see is a from educated sorters, this is the point. You begin to see groups of people looking for the scapegoat. And they find it in this people who are trying so desperately to be German or French or citizens of the Habsburg Empire, which is even more complicated, but are in fact with the rise of race of literature, which spreads throughout Europe in the insecurities of Europe. What is a Jew? Now, don’t go away thinking everybody espoused anti-Semitism. Of course they didn’t. But the point is there, and it’s respectable and it gains a lot of currency from displaced intellectuals. Can we see the next slide, please? Here you see, this is Von Treitschke. He was professor of history at the great Humboldt University. The whole of the general staff visited him for his lectures. He was almost a cult figure, and he coined the phrase the Jews are our misfortune.

Later on, of course, this is going to be taken up by Adolf Hitler. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, meanwhile, living in Germany part of the Wagner Circle. Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite. When he died in 1883, students throughout Europe went on a march in his honour, and it became very anti-Semitic. But this is what Houston Stewart Chamberlain said, “We live in a Jewish age. The Jewish people remain an Asiatic people alien to our part of the world. They are everlastingly alien.” He also said, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, “That the Jew is just as clever as the Aryan, but it’s the anti-race. The Jew is not at the bottom of the racial pile. On the contrary, it is the only race that’s capable of destroying the Aryan.” So these ideas are being placed at a time of huge insecurity. There was also a court chaplain, a Protestant court chaplain in the court of the Kaiser, and he was violently anti-Jewish. So in fact, I’m going to try and find a quote. Oh yes, this is a letter from Leon Pinsker. I’ll talk about in a moment to an Austrian leader called Jellinek. If a nation is highly civilised, as the Germans can tolerate anti-Semitic scenes in the capital of the, if a Court Chaplain Stoecker agitates against them and a brilliant all powerful statesman Bismarck permits them to be reviled and stigmatised, why then shouldn’t the Russian press denounce Russian Jewry as aliens and intruders? He writes this in 1881 when I’m sure you all know, there were terrible pogroms in Russia, which I’ll deal with next week, because although Bismarck was not an anti-Semite, in fact the man who was probably closest to him than anyone, was the banker Bleichröder.

Yet he said, I’m prepared to use anti-Semitism because of its courageous stand against liberalism and socialism. So the point is, it becomes respectable. Can we see the next slide please? Now, this is Edouard Drumont. He is the leader of the anti-Semitic agitation over in France. He had a newspaper called La Libre Parole. Now, I’ve already mentioned that France keeps on undergoing these huge changes. It can’t make up its mind whether it’s going to be a republic or a monarchy. And then you have this terrible defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. Edouard Drumont, 1873, the stock market had crashed. He was already writing that the boss is the, you know, the boss is the Jewish synagogue. A disproportionate number of Jews did go into the stock market, no question of that. And actually the further east you go, the more there were. The more there’s a peasant society as, for example, in Hungary, 85% of the boss in Hungary were in fact Jewish, but that doesn’t mean they’re all plotting together. And of course the Dreyfus affair erupts. And it’s really the pressure of Edouard Drumont that when the mob are at the gates of the when Dreyfus is accused of treason, he’s found guilty. His epilapse are ripped off, he’s sawed is broken. The mob is not screaming death to Dreyfus, it’s screaming death to the Jews. So you’ve got this tradition in France as well. It took an Emile Zola, the great writer to stand up against it. But of course, Zola was probably murdered by anti-Dreyfus sides.

The chimney in which he was in his house was blocked and the majority of people think he was actually murdered. He is asphyxiated because of his stand in the Dreyfus affair. So don’t forget, there’s still a liberal body of opinion, but anti-Semitism is gaining currency. Can we go on please? Perhaps the Habsburg empire is the most complicated of all because you have a large Jewish community where in Vienna by 1900, 10% of the city is Jewish. It’s the city of Mala. It is the city of Karl Kras. It is the city of Sigmund Freud. It is the city of Theodore Herzl. So many of the Vienna circle were Jewish. And there’s a wonderful quote from Karl Kras, an experimental station on the way to the end of the world. It’s the dying embers of a great empire, just as in France fantasy echo Paris, fantasy echo Berlin, fantasy echo Vienna, fantasy echo Saint Petersburg, this world weariness and Karl Lueger is the mayor of Vienna, the populist mayor who against the wishes of Franz Joseph, is elected year after year after year on an anti-Semitic ticket. 10% of the city Jewish. But if you think about it, Freud, what did Freud do? Freud overturned conventional ideas.

And Freud who didn’t see him, he was not a religious Jew, but he did write a fascinating, in a fascinating letter, he said, “I did what I did because I didn’t belong to the compact majority.” But the majority of Jews in Vienna are bourgeoisie. They’re going along with their lives, they’re patronising the operas, the coffee houses. They want to be citizens of Vienna. But it’s very complicated in the Habsburg Empire because what is Habsburg identity and the Jews in the Maine, be they in Prague, be they in Budapest, or be they in Vienna, they tend to turn to German culture because they’d see German culture as the most creative culture which alienates both the Czech nationalists and the Hungarian nationalists. This is a quote from another great figure of Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler, the great writer Arthur Schnitzler, part of young Vienna, that incredible group of writers who are putting a bomb under conventional thought. Who created the liberal movement in Austria? The Jews. By whom were the Jews portrayed and abandoned? By the liberals. Who created the German national movement in Austria? This was a movement to say Austrian Germans should be united with the Fatherland after the unification of Germany, the Jews. Who left the Jews in the lurch worse yet who spat upon them like dogs?

The German nationalist. This is Arthur Schnitzel, also an alienated character. And this is a quote from Theodore Herzl, the Jews whose culture in Bohemia is German and whose formative years coincided with the time when liberal ideals predominated attach themselves to the German nation with all their hearts too closely, which would seem then all of a sudden they found themselves shaken off. All of a sudden they were told they were parasites, one jerk only. And they were no longer Germans, but not Jews. Another important figure in the rise of anti-Semitism in Vienna was Georg von Schonerer. He believed in paganism, he was called the Knight of Rosenau. He was very involved in very esoteric ideas. Remember this is fantasy echo Vienna. And he said,“Our anti-Semitism is not directed against the religion, but against the racial traits of the Jews, which have not changed through the freedom that now prevails.” And this is a quote from the one of the leading thinkers, Adolf Jellinek, who I’ve already mentioned. Anti-Semitism negates nationality and places race alone in the foreground. So some Jews are becoming very, very worried. But how are Jews coping with this tide of hatred. This is one of the important rabbis in Vienna. Judaism is a historic institution sanctified by divine revelation and firmly established and unified by ancestral tradition. It is a religion.

This is Rabbi Morris Goodman. I have always believed that we are not a nation or rather more than just a nation. I believe we had a historic mission to propagate universalism amongst the nations and therefore we were much more than a territorial nation. This is from Ludwig Borne, fascinating German character, because I was born without a fatherland my desire for a fatherland is more passionate than yours. Now this is Jellinek again. The Jews who are German by disposition language and outlook should remain so and prove themselves as bearers and guardians of German folks to peoplehood. German and Austria stands first amongst all nationalities in its education, manners, civilization, science, and its connection to Germany rejuvenated, awakened to liberty, to fraternise with fanatics of czeckdom, slavdom, magyadom means to succeed from bildung and couture. You see, this is what German Jews have fallen in love with. The bildung, that word that isn’t even translatable into English. Couture, it means cultivation, it means education, it means sensibility. Another from Jellinek, the Jews of Austria are Austrians first and last. They feel and think Austrian. They want a great and strong and mighty Austria. So what you obviously see happening here is that a sort of bewilderment, and in certain cases even leads to a kind of Jewish self-hatred. Because if we are not wanted, if we are not light, how on earth can we deal with it? The forgetting of the great and glorious tradition of being a Jew. The majority though put their faith in progress, and they believed that gradually as society became more regulated, as people had more of a say in affairs then people would come to their senses, that you have this kind of optimism.

But there were a few outsiders who thought differently. Now let me say very carefully. They are really on the edge characters. Let’s see the first of them. This is Moses Hess. Moses Hess was born in the Rhineland. He was part of that community that actually had been liberated by Napoleon. His father was a religious Jew. He didn’t choose the path of Karl Marx, his father. He moved back to the ghetto. Moses Hess brought up in a religious household, but he falls in love with the culture of Germany. He breaks away, he goes to the University of, I think it was Bonn, first. And where he falls under the sway of __, the great German philosophers, and he meets Karl Marx. He’s totally impressed with Karl Marx, and he works with Marx on the first draught of the communist manifesto. He becomes part of the underground socialist movement. His father finally gives up on him. He marries a poor seamstress because he wants to redress the social balance. Read the biography. There’s some very good biographies of Moses. He’s a fascinating character. He’s a real idealist. And then suddenly, like a book from the blue, he writes a pamphlet. It’s called Rome and Jerusalem. Rome is modern Rome. Jerusalem is modern Jerusalem. And he says the Germans hate the Jews, not because of their peculiar religion, but because of their peculiar noses. You will never straighten your curly hair.

You can never ever be as them. And he put forward the figure that what the Jews need to do is to regain Jerusalem. We will once a nation, won’t we. You see the real problem, as I said to you last week, how on earth do you define the word Jew? What on earth does it mean? And Hess is saying it’s all remember he’s out, he, in 1848, there was a price on his head because of all the revolutions, he was part of the underground socialist movement. He never deserted it, by the way, but he was actually buried in bomb. But in Cologne, I beg your pardon, he was buried in Cologne. And in 1962, he was buried in Kibbutz Kinneret where he lies alongside the founding fathers of Zionism. The word wasn’t invented till 1891 by Nathan Birnbaum But he’s saying there’s got to be a different solution to the Jews, whereas the majority of Jews in the west are saying things will get better. Nobody took him seriously. In fact, the leading German Jewish newspaper said he was a failed socialist, and he’s got hold of another idea and that will fail too. Meanwhile, can we see the next slides, please? This is Rabbi Judah Alkalai. And can we see the next slide? Rabbi Zvi Kalischer. Now, these are two rabbis who live in the borderlands of the empires. One lives in Posen and the other one in Semlin, Serbia.

And they realise all these national difficulties, et cetera, and they look to Judaism itself, and they set on, obviously, one of the great bars to the reclaiming of the land of Israel was only the messiah could lead the Jews back. You can make the case, you know, that after the fall of the second temple and the Tala and Talmud, that the rabbis deliberately created a kind of quietism in the Jewish experience because when they had revolted, what happened? So only the Messiah can lead the Jews back. And but what these rabbis pointed out was that things can happen to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, and they actually advocated Jews going out to Palestine, which at this time of course was just a district within the Turkish empire and to set up Jewish schools, they are forerunners. But what’s interesting about them is they are within the Jewish tradition. The majority of religious Jews are going to find these ideas completely horrific, why? Because only the Messiah. There were certain anomalies like misraki but in the main, the majority of religious Jews didn’t want to know, but then, of course, a man erupts on the scene, and let’s have a look at him. Leon Pinsker, he was fascinating. He was Russian. He comes to real maturity in the reign of Alexander II, and I’ll be talking about this next week. Alexander II was actually a fascinating character because his country had been seriously defeated in the Crimean war, why? Because he ruled over the largest, most primitive empire in the world. How could the greatest empire, the largest empire, be beaten by the British and the French?

He realised he needed to modernise, and as a result, he lifted some of the lid of autocracy. He was ruling over a hundred different national groups that’s Stalin’s figure when he was comisa for nationalities, including the Jews who, of course, were restricted to an area of land called the pale of settlement. More about that next week. But the point is Pinsker living under him. He had actually, he spent a lot of time in Odessa. He was involved in the creation of a society for the promotion of culture amongst the Jews of Russia. Odessa was by far the freest part of the empire because it was a seaport full of all sorts of different characters away from the centre of autocracy. And he believed that eventually Russia could open its arms to the Jews as it was doing in the west. And then came pogroms of 1881, 1882, which I believe brought many of you online. I’m sure that’s the period when so many of your ancestors came to either Britain, America, South Africa. But it with him, it was a bolt from the blue. And he wrote a pamphlet called Judo Phobia. He said the western world, remember, he had believed, he said, the western world suffers from judo phobia. It is a psychic aberration. It is a 2000 year old disease. It is incurable. And even those of you who will flee to America, it will follow you there. Now, when he sent it to Jellinek in Vienna, basically it was suggested that he go and visit a doctor. Nobody really wanted to hear it, except there were a few individuals at the University of Vienna, mainly from Eastern Europe.

And they came together to form the first Jewish students association called Kadima, who did believe that perhaps the Jews were a nation and should reconstitute themselves. Now, what is fascinating, it took though, it took a man of huge vision, who jumps on the scene, who only lives 44 years. Let’s see him. Next slide, and of course, it’s Theodore Herzl at the first Zionist Congress. Now, there are many, many books on Herzl. I have lectured on Herzl many times. You’ll get all this on the website. But the point about Theodore Herzl, he had been born in Budapest. He was an over loved child, tragically, his sister had died. The only child they come to live in Vienna. He goes to the university. He is a hail fellow, well met. He belongs to a student fraternity. He believes in assimilation. He’s aware of the anti-Semitism. His answer is assimilation. He was upset by 1883, and Wagner’s funeral procession, because many of the characters within his association led the anti-Semitic marches. He offered his resignation. It was taken. Meanwhile, though, he qualifies as a lawyer. He goes to Salzburg. He marries a very wealthy girl, but unstable, and he becomes a journalist. He goes to Paris where he is there for the Dreyfus affair. He’s actually in the press box when Dreyfus is dishonoured. And it makes him, and he writes in his, when he first arrived in Paris, he actually said, France is the centre of civilization. It will take the rest of the world a hundred years, and he sees it in France. And because he’s a man of action, and because he is a journalist and because he is driven, so consequently he decides to do something about it.

He has people who admire him. A man called Max Nordau, one of the most famous intellectuals in Europe. Also, an intellectual. He’s a doctor. Herzl goes to see him. His friends recommend, he needs to see a doctor. And Nardau actually says to Herzl, well, if you are mad, so am I. And what happens is he manages to call together. The first Zionist Congress in Basel, in Switzerland. Characters like the Disrale British writer, he’s there. He caused, but the majority of Jews are terrified of it. It was an absolute minority movement, but it lays it down. Nathan Birnbaum, meanwhile, who becomes the patron of Kadima, had created the term Zionism. And already some Eastern European Jews were settling in the land. I’ll talk about that next week. But Herzl creates it. When he wrote the Act, which first appeared in a bridge formed in the Jewish Chronicle in London, he didn’t know where the state should be. They shouldn’t be a monarch because that will lead us to ridicule because those days are over. What kind of country would it be? Could it be in Argentina where Barringer was already buying land for settling Russian Jews? Where should it be? Should it be in Palestine? Interesting. It was the Russian Jews who were suffering the most terrible pogroms, who said it could only be in Palestine. And actually, I suppose it was summed up by, the writer. He said, we lay down by the rivers of Babylon and we wept. We sat by the rivers of and we were weep, no more. Now Herzl only had another seven years left to him. But when he died, Zionism had become a world movement, but never a minority move, but never a majority movement in the Jewish world. The majority of Jews in the west were anti-Zionist because they are still trying to be citizens of the countries in which they live. And in the East, the Messiah. But the point is, he laid it down and it became famous.

There were more journalists at the first Zionist Congress than they were delegates. And he insisted it be terribly formal. All the delegates were top hats and frock coats. Let’s finish on that wonderful quotation. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. This of course, is Psalm 137. You see, the Jews of Eastern Europe knew it could only be in the ancient homeland, the nation in exile. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Okay, what I propose to do next week is to give you an overview of Russia. And then in the fourth session, I’m going to do something quite tricky. I’m going to bring together the tragic story post World War I, and then we will look at the horror that engulfed the Jewish people and then the creation of the state of Israel. Remember, I’m doing with broad brush strokes because I just wanted to bring out the major, I hope I’ve managed to do it, to bring out the major trends because the issue of Jewish identity is so pertinent today. And so many of these ideas from the 19th century, we are witnessing them today. Added to that, of course, is the horror of the show, and how that is being dealt with by anti-Semites today. Anyway, let me stop there. Anna, thank you so much. Let’s have a look at questions.

Q&A and Comments:

This is from Judith. My grandfather, and his brothers all own the Iron Cross for serving on the front line in the Austrian Caring Empire. He had works of Hein, Schnitzer, and Shakespeare in his library. He, like many others, was actives in old soldiers associations. He didn’t think the Nazis were a threat to him. The law in Austria, you see, this is the problem. Look in Germany alone, 35,000 Jews. There were a hundred thousand Jews volunteered for the German army in World War I, in fact. And there were 35,000 iron crosses awarded. The same thing happened in the Habsburg Empire. They were loyal. They were citizens of the countries in which they lived of the Jewish religion. It’s the ravages of the first World war that took these seedbeds, Judith. These ideas and of course led to the horror that became Nazism. But the Nazis didn’t invent anything. They rarified it, and, of course, they made it murderous, but the ideas were already there. Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism. It was part of ‘respectable’ inverted commas European thought.

Q: Denise, aren’t we seeing the same thing today that many liberal Jews are turning their backs on Israel? Other liberal Jews are becoming more conservative, thus creating.

A: Yes, of course, Denise. You see, this is one of the problems. We have a situation where Israel is number one item on the news country after country, after country. And certainly I think in Britain, it’s been very well proven that the BBC coverage, there was a very interesting article by Trevor in the Daily Telegraph that the bias, now I’m not, I don’t want to talk politics. We have some people far better qualified than me to discuss politics. Hagai Segal, for example, gives fascinating presentations and the organisation in America will always bring in experts. But one of the things that interests me is propaganda. And then, of course, you’ve got that statement of Howard Jacobson. He said, “They will never forgive us the Holocaust.” What I find fascinating is how Israel has become the pariah of the nations. Are we really saying that Israel has a worse human rights record than any other nation on the face of the world? Are we really saying that? Yes, unfortunately, liberals have swallowed that ideology. And Hillel Schenker tells, I’m proud to live on Moses, Moses Hess Street in Tel Aviv.

Yes, Hillel. I often think perhaps we should teach, of course, on the streets of Tel Aviv. There’s a very good book on that. How common was inter-marriage during the enlightenment? Asked Ronald. Was this accepted by both sides? Now a third of German Jewry converted between 1815 and 1871. Inter-marriage in Germany enlight. The figures for 1927 was 45%, which was by far the highest anywhere in Europe. And, of course, that meant intermarriage with liberals. Not all Germans were anti-Semites. Not all Austrians were anti-Semites, but the majority of people were bystanders. They all was are. Was this the beginning of reformed Judaism? Ronald, reformed Judaism did grow out of the ideas of the enlightenment. It was, if you like, to adapt. It wasn’t about theological differences at the beginning. It was to adapt Judaism to the modern world, to modernity that’s how it begins. And then, and certainly in England, there was a great fight over procedure. And what happened was the Orthodox refused to recognise reform conversions. And that led to the great split and yes, no reform Judaism was just about trying to accommodate to the modern world. There’d been many, many different divisions in Judaism. Think traditional, and traditional orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy was only invented because of reform. A Jew was a Jew, was a Jew. Kadima, thank you Maya.

David, in the early 1990s, we drove to Basel from Zurich. We saw the location of the first Zionist Congress and visited the hotel where Herzl stayed, it’s the three kings, isn’t it? And declared it is no dream, if you will. He actually said, you know, it’s interesting, he said, a __ I created the Jewish state. Maybe in five years, certainly in 50, it would be a reality it’s an irony of history because of course in 1947, which is 50 years later, the UN voted for the partition of Palestine to create a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. And believe me, the Palestinian, the majority of that Palestine was actually taken by Jordan and Egypt sealed off Gaza. So one of the problems with the Arab-Israeli conflict is very few people know the facts. And that is what I find absolutely shameful. He referred to Moses Hess as being in a fringe movement. Socialism was the mass movement of the working class force.

What about the influence of __? Haven’t got there yet. I’m talking about the- I’m going to talk about Buddhism next week when I talk about Russia. The Buddhism was not created till 1897 in the back of a blacksmith shop in Vilna. My name is Colin, sorry, can’t change the time.

Q: David also saw the Jewish museum in Basel. David, why haven’t I mentioned the church in the modern era?

A: Well, what I would suggest you, David, let me see David’s other comment in the modern era, look, I think one of the factors that led to the development of anti-Semitism was anti-Judaism. And unfortunately in the 19th century in the second half of the 19th century, you had a particularly conservative pope, Pius IX. He was the guy who came up with the immaculate conception that Mary herself was born without sin because he was fighting liberalism and socialism, and he was a violent anti-Semite because he associated Jews with change. Look, 2000 years, 1800 years, 1900 years, the negative image of the Jew it takes. So I took that as red, basically. Oh, this is Frank tells us he read, I mentioned Judah Alkalai. I wrote my master’s thesis on him some 50 years ago. Where did you write that, Frank? I’d be interested in knowing. Anyway, that seems to be all the questions. So Anna, thank you so much.

Or is that all the questions? Let me just, yes. So I’ll see you all next week. Thank you very much.