Herzl’s Utopia
Altneuland.
by Theodor Herzl.
Translated from the original German by Lotta Levensohn. Preface by Emanuel Neumann. Block Publishing Company and Herzl Press. 296 pp. $3.75
Theodor Herzl’s Utopian novel, Altneuland, first addressed to the Diaspora in 1902, was recently reissued in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Herzl’s birth. As literature it has little virtue, but as a historical document it reveals the romantic utopianism that lay behind Herzl’s efforts to create a Jewish homeland.
Like many Utopias, Altneuland stands in the direct line of descent from the millennium of the Old Testament—the prophetic promise of a world where waters burst forth in the wilderness and the wolf and the lamb feed together. Altneuland renews these visions in a peculiarly 19th-century perspective blending socialism, mechanism, and Western European high culture. The state of Altneuland itself belongs to that imaginary world organization of nations—the Utopias of the 19th century—descriptions of which may be found in such novels as Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
The frame of Herzl’s Utopian novel is provided by a visit to a Jewish state twenty years in the future—that is, in 1923—by two misanthropes, one a German nobleman, the other an “educated, desperate” young Jew, a Matthew Arnold type who stands on Jaffa beach sighing, “Ah, but faith was dead now, youth was dead. . . .” In their disgust with society they have spent twenty years on an isolated Pacific island. When the two travelers had visited Palestine on their journey out in 1902, the cities had been ruins: “Everywhere misery in bright Oriental rags. . . . A peculiar tomblike odor of mold caught one’s breath.” The countryside, except for a few pioneer settlements, had been “a picture of desolation. The lowlands were mostly sand and swamp, the lean fields looked as if burnt over. . . .” One hope was held out by the German nobleman—that the Jews might create an experimental land for humanity, a New Commonwealth.
When the misanthropes return in “1923” they come upon a Palestine flourishing as a Jewish nation at the very center of the world:
Great ships . . . lay anchored in the road-stead between Acco and the foot of Carmel. . . . To the south . . . below the ancient, much tried city of Haifa on the curve of the shore, splendid things had grown up. Thousands of white villas gleamed out of luxuriant green gardens. . . . A magnificent city had been built beside the sapphire-blue Mediterranean.
The travelers find a nation populated by the best types of people doing the best possible job and enjoying the best possible success—a triumph of city planning and hydraulic engineering whose Master Architect is as revered as the President, and whose Engineer has a status equaled only by the Eucalyptus tree, which drains swamps naturally. Altneuland’s tangible assets include chemical industries, citrus groves, a Jewish Academy patterned after the French Academy, a Science Research Institute, opera houses, and a temple. It is the land of milk and honey, of oil and potash, a self-sufficient community at the crossroads of the world’s rail lines and shipping lanes, where Jews who formerly lived a life of misery and persecution in squalid ghettos now live in villas, and produce the fruits of the earth and the machine so that they may spend their leisure time singing “Schumann, Rubinstein, Wagner, Verdi, and Gounod.”
The New Society’s success is credited to its economic system. Mutualism—a mean between individualism and collectivism—allows for the coexistence of private enterprise and cooperative ventures, both regulated by the universal desire (enforced by the state), to make an honest profit, to share the wealth, and to encourage individual initiative. (Surprisingly, there are poor people but they have been “brought low by their own vices or lack of responsibility or misfortunes.”)
There are other less tangible benefits. Because of Altneuland’s existence, the world no longer contains anti-Semitism. In the New Society, avaricious, ostentatious Jews are recognized as avaricious, ostentatious people. In other nations the exodus of Jews to Altneuland has made those few who remained behind a valued minority; those who wish to assimilate can do so without guilt or resentment from others, for they are giving up an advantage rather than gaining one.
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All that altneuland lacks is Judaism. Of the two religious ceremonies that occur in the novel, one appropriately enough is the Passover seder, the other the Friday evening service welcoming the Sabbath. The seder—at which members of three faiths (Moslem, Christian, and Jewish) break matzoh together—is not the traditional family supper, but an excuse for presenting the new “Haggadah”—a phonograph recording which tells the story of the exodus to Altneuland. Similarly, the welcoming of the Sabbath, that “resounded with singing and the playing of lutes” in the rebuilt Temple, evokes in the Jewish tourist first memories of Heine and then a sense of national destiny. The Temple itself is a symbol of the free commonwealth, the ideal 19th-century European community. Herzl’s novel does not lack melodrama. There are lovers and there is a villain. The lovers are incidental to the book, and when they are brought together in the last pages, one can only wish them happiness. The villain, however, plays a significant part in the theme of the novel. He is “the Rabbi of Advantage,” and though he never makes an appearance, he represents a potential threat to the stability of the nation. The “Rabbi of Advantage” leads a chauvinistic political party which maintains that “a non-Jew must not be accepted by the New Society.” Opposing him are the leaders of the New Society whose counter platform is “we do not ask to what race or religion a man belongs. If he is a man, that is enough for us.” They acknowledge that Altneuland, however much it derives its initial strength from being a Jewish movement, still stands “on the shoulders of other civilized peoples.”
At a political gathering at the cooperative settlement of Neudorf, a leader of the New Society explains:
Neudorf was built not in Palestine, but elsewhere. It was built in England, in America, in France and in Germany. . . . A socialistic dream rose to answer every new machine invented during that peculiar nineteenth century, which has always seemed to me like a great factory where ingenious machinery was served by wretched human beings. . . . When the wishful human beings looked up, they no longer saw the heavens, but the factory born clouds of a Utopia.
The speaker then mentions Looking Backward and Freiland, the two most popular Utopian novels of the 19th century. They failed to inspire Utopian states, he says, because they were dreams based on the false premise of man’s maturity. But Altneuland succeeded because the Jews, compressed by the pressure of persecution and poverty, built up a fantastic power potential that was waiting to be released. It is the physical law of the conservation of energy applied to people: the Jews are like a gas under increasing pressure in a closed system. “We did only that,” the speaker concludes, “which under the given circumstances and at the given moment was an historical necessity.” It is a modest but fitting comment for a 19th-century Utopian, whose vision was molded by two central beliefs: that history was an inevitable process toward some great transforming event, and that the means to bring about such an event were now at hand through the revolutionary development of science and the organized use of power and machines.
This 19th-century viewpoint was provided with the one additional element it needed to be converted into Zionism as early as 1862, by Moses Hess, the one-time collaborator of Marx and Hegel. In his Rome and Jerusalem, Hess speaks of the coming of “the Sabbath of History”—in which world history would complete its tasks by “ushering in the messianic epoch.” The message of Hess begins with the assumption that “the civilized nations are at present preparing for a common exploitation of Nature . . . based on the discoveries of science,” and ends with his prediction that “the Jewish people will participate in the great historical movement of present-day humanity only when it will have its own fatherland.”
Between the call of Hess and the answer of Herzl, Zionism received its strongest articulation in Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation. To Pinsker, Zionism was necessitated by anti-Semitism—a reality that needed no intellectualizations, no messianic ideals. It was this same urgent reason that led Herzl to Zionism. In 1896, he published The Jewish State, his first plan for a homeland. In the fervent years that followed, the first Zionist Congress met in Basel and the Jewish Colonial Trust was established, but Herzl’s negotiations with the Kaiser, with the Sultan, with England’s Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs to establish somewhere, anywhere, a Jewish state failed to produce any tangible results. In 1902, six years after his leadership of Zionism began, he published Altneuland, drawing upon Looking Backward for its futuristic projection of Utopian technology and upon Hertzka’s Freiland for its Utopian economics that ties production to consumption, nationalizes credit, and harmonizes private and cooperative enterprise.
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In his introduction to this new edition of Altneuland, Emanuel Neumann says that Herzl’s novel became a “classic” which “helped to inspire two generations of Zionists and to encourage them on the long and tortuous road toward . . . nationhood and statehood.” This is claiming too much for the novel. While it was translated into several languages and reprinted numerous times, and while its Hebrew translation, Tel Aviv, provided the name for a model city, Altneuland is not even included on the standard lists of Utopian literature. This fact, along with the content of Altneuland, suggest that it was popular among Jews only because it was addressed to them, not because it differed from the utopianism of the day or because it mirrored or inspired any unique aspirations of Jews. Herzl’s biographer, Alex Bein, says as much: “Altneuland carried conviction to only a tiny number of Jews, or awakened in them the will to a new life.”
Bein goes on to comment on a more interesting aspect of the novel: “Even within the Zionist movement, the book did more harm than good. Many of those who stood closest to Herzl were disappointed that the novel should have been so thoroughly interpenetrated with the spirit of Western civilization.” Bein describes the controversy that flared up again between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am, who criticized the novel sharply for its derivativeness and its lack of cultural Judaism. As late as 1944, Martin Buber remarked that the novel was justly criticized for this lack.
That the novel is, in fact, the very antithesis of what Herzl himself once desired can be seen in a passage from his earlier book, The Jewish State.
An interesting book, Freiland, by Dr. Theodor Hertzka, which appeared a few years ago, may serve to illustrate the distinction I draw between my construction and a Utopia. His is the ingenious invention of a modern mind thoroughly schooled in the principles of political economy; it is as remote from actuality as the equatorial mountain on which his dream state lies. . . . Even if I were to see Freiland societies come into being, I should regard the whole thing as a joke.
Seven years later, Herzl, no longer scorning Utopian literature, produces it himself. Buber, in his Israel and Palestine, attributes the change to the ill fortunes of Herzl’s activities. When political Zionism was making progress there was no need for Altneuland; when political Zionism was being ignored by the Sultan of Turkey and the rulers of Europe, Herzl felt a personal need to write a Utopian novel. Altneuland is a testimony to Herzl’s own feelings of failure. Had his negotiations proved fruitful he could have exhibited the results rather than the dream.
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Yet, for all its similarities to other Utopian novels of the time, Altneuland is unique in that it possesses a reasonable facsimile of the utopia it envisioned. One can, of course, point to Israel and say that there is little of the millennium in that tautly stretched piece of land, surrounded as it is by a hostile Arab world, dependent on charity and reparations to make its economy balance, divided into a multiplicity of political parties between which there are real differences of philosophy, and split by religious and racial controversies. Yet, the significant fact remains that both Altneuland and Israel express a desire and an effort to bring about utopia.
Ben Gurion’s speech at the 25th World Zionist Congress, asking world Jewry to send Israel its youth, was based mainly on an allegiance to Zion; included in this allegiance was a devotion to “the Messianic vision of redemption for the Jewish people and all mankind.” Such a vision, he stressed, was not “the doctrine of extreme nationalism which considers only itself, its hopes and desires. It is rather the national Jewish mission integrated with a universal human mission; it is the supreme expression of the genius of the Hebrew prophecy and most of the books of the Bible.” Ben Gurion develops this theme throughout his speech, twisting it several ways to support other arguments but always tying Israel and “universal salvation” together. He recognizes that a supra-national idealism is now his best argument for attracting Western immigrants.
Altneuland depicts such an appeal early in Zionist history and remains the literary expression of the tie between Israel as it exists today, a Hebrew-speaking Jewish nation, and Israel as it existed in the Western mind of Theodor Herzl, a romantic utopia wedded to the economic dreams of 19th-century Europe, where men still believed they had the future in their hands if only they made the effort to grasp it.
It is a degree of aspiration that we in the West today have mostly forgotten. Our contemporary Utopian literature is not that of the Bellamys and the Herzls but rather that of the Huxleys and the Orwells, where the future is depicted not as cooperative communities happily producing wealth but as babies in test tubes or boots stepping on the faces of men.
Today, Herzl’s bearded portrait looks down upon a Jewish parliament legislating for a Jewish state. There is a world of difference between what he envisioned and what those seated beneath him are creating. And yet there is still enough in common between the two to justify the better dreams of the 19th-century Utopians which still survive the pessimism of the 20th century.
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