Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/33
charges finally found qualified spokesmen. In the Hapsburg realm these spokesmen were two authors and journalists who both happened to be on the staff of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. This, was a journal which by its boundless anti-Slav and particularly anti-Czech agitation, by its lack of morality and by its support of German and Magyar nationalistic imperialism incurred great responsibility for the fall of the Danube Monarchy of which it had claimed to be the greatest supporter.
Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau, both authors of wide reputation, became the creators of central European Zionism. Both were born in Budapest, Nordau in 1849, Herzl in 1860; at that time Budapest was still very largely a German city. Both these men were thus by education and sentiment Germans and became Jewish nationalists only after German racial anti-semitism in Austria grow violent and excommunicated from German fellowship all those who could not produce baptismal certificate or were willing to swear to the divine mission of the pagan-Aryan race. Nordau through journalism, Herzl more through poems, gave expression to the pain which thousands of hearts of their German-Jewish fellows felt. Herzl depicted this bitterness in a drama “Das neue Ghetto”, and his Zionistic plan he brought out in an essay “Der Judenstaat” in 1896, in which he sees the only solution of the Jewish question in the establishment of a separate Jewish state in Palestine. In his novel “Alt-Neuland” written in 1902 he describes the visionary Jewish state, as it splendidly flourishes twenty years after its foundation.
Of course it is an Utopia. But what Utopia would not at this time find its believers and apostles. Zionism was thus launched in Austria and found adherents principally in German and Polish districts. With the Czech-Jewish assimilation movement it came early into conflict, but it did not affect its strength.
Then came the world war. The entire population of the civilized world was thereby astounded, but it may be safely said that of the Hapsburg subjects the Jews were most completely without bearings. They who through age-long traditions of the Ghetto developed such strong sensitiveness to happenings in the world of intellect, specially in the sphere of political economy and art, were veritable illiterates in politics. The average Jew is known to be an industrious and thorough reader of newspapers, but only of his own papers. He will believe everything his own journal tells him, because he found it very reliable in business matters; surely it could not be fallible in politics.
His journal preached every day that the rulers of the Central Powers wished nothing except to secure to humanity perpetual peace, but that there was danger from the decadent French, the insatiable British and the barbarous Russia which is in alliance with them. Woe to humanity, should these states win, and with them their small allies; woe to the Jews, should the white czar with his Cossacks invade the soil of Austria. Russian pogroms would be insignificant in comparison with pogroms which the Cossacks and other Russian savages were preparing against the Jews who live under the double-headed Hapsburg eagle.
This consternation fell even upon a large part of Czech Jews. With their German daily which they had read for its carefully compiled financial section they ran now from neighbor to neighbor, looking forward to the future with anxiety. Suppose the Germans and Magyars are defeated; no need to regret that, for they have been parasites on the labor of the Czechoslovaks. But will not the czar then come with his Cossacks and slaughter the Jews?
Their German fellow-believers sized up the situation much more simply; they were German nationalists, in fact they wanted to prove that they were good Germans by being super-German fanatics. And Zionists, too, forgot German-Aryan superiority; they welcomed every official report announcing victory, for to them defeat of the Entente meant primarily defeat of Russia, liberation of five million Jews from czarist barbarism and the establishment of the Palestinian state under the protection of the two German dynasties. They could seenothing for the Jews except open adherence to the German side; why, out of 14 million Jews about ten use the Yiddish which is substantially German dialect.
Today German Zionist literature written during the war is kept carefully hidden as much as possible. It would not be wise to recall unpleasant memories at a time, when the victorious Entente is building in Paris if not an independent Jewish state, at