Word: herzl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much of his life Herzl was strangely numb to evidences of antiSemitism. The Zionistic notion was merely an unworked plot until the Dreyfus trial. Then, as Paris correspondent for a Viennese paper, Herzl suddenly saw that the defendant was emblematic of his people. Captain Dreyfus might assume the insignia, the language, the official role, but in the end he would be betrayed and reviled. Dreyfusards marched in an honorable cause, wrote the young Herzl, but one "which-let us not delude ourselves-is a lost...
Feral Magnetism. As the Frenchman descended from hero to convict, the Hungarian rose from dilettante to provocateur. Herzl did not invent the idea of a Jewish state-the appeal of Return to Jerusalem is, after all, as ancient as the Diaspora. But Herzl alone took it from vision to plan to practicality. On the way he assumed the countenance and the stature of a prophet, sweeping all objections from his path. A feral magnetism began to animate his face and conversation. Philosopher Martin Buber was later to recall him as "a statue without error or mistake, a countenance lit with...
These were mere irritations to Herzl. "A light fog is mounting around me," he noted in his diary, "which could become the cloud in which I walk." Yet, if his head was in the stratosphere, his feet remained on the boulevard. Mixing altruism and chutzpah, he gathered votaries wherever he spoke, and he spoke everywhere. His message was always the same: Jews will never be safe until they have a homeland of their own. By 1902 he had pledges of 3 million francs. He grandly talked of purchasing territory in Cyprus, even Uganda. But Israel remained his true destination...
Burned Out. In Herzl, the central figure moves through Europe and the Middle East like a Jewish Napoleon, rallying the poor, converting the rich, negotiating with sultans, papal nuncios and Cabinet ministers. Yet the great adventure, in the book as in life, ends before the goal is reached. Herzl died in 1904, burned out by the age of 44. It was literally in the middle of the journey. He had aroused the Jews of Eastern Europe-including a ten-year-old named David Ben-Gurion. Slowly they began the trek to Ottoman-controlled Palestine. The new Exodus was under...
...prophecy. In the operetta that was old Europe, he looked through the gilt backdrop and saw the flames of the Holocaust. In life and in history, his fearful vision has been repeatedly vindicated by the behavior of others. If that remains the best that can be said of Herzl, what worse can be said Of the world? ∎ Stefan Kanfer