Theodor Herzl: from assimilation to Zionism

In a couple of previous post we have carefully examined Wagner’s essay das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). In the last post, we took a particularly close look at the final paragraph of the essay, which is alleged to contain an incitation to genocide, and found none. Instead we found a call to assimilation ending with the cry “we shall be united and without difference” (so sind wir einig und ununterschieden). Today, I thought we should examine the historical background to the idea of Jewish assimilation as found in a wonderfully enlightening biography of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl by Jacques Kornberg called Theodor Herzl: from assimilation to Zionism.  I would go so far as to call this book mandatory reading for anyone interested in Wagner. It probably does more to illuminate Wagner than thousands of other books written on this subject.

Kornberg goes through the history of the concept of assimilation through the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. In 1781, Wilhelm Dohm wrote Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews. Kornberg summarises his views:

Dohm blended enlightened premises with inherited stereotypes. He believed that the Jewish character had been corrupted by centuries of Christian persecution, but emancipation and integration into civil society would improve Jews. The view that Jewish vices were the result of persecution formed the basis of the argument for ending the unequal legal status of the Jews. Dohm believed that policies that freed Jews of residence restrictions and special taxes, that made it possible for them to enter the gamut of occupations, to acquire a modern education, to serve in the army, to enter state service — in short to be full citizens of the state — would eventually normalize the Jewish character and eliminate Jewish vices. The philosophic basis for the expectation of Jewish improvement lay in the Enlightenment notion that human nature was malleable, a tabula rasa or blank slate, on which the environment imprints a definite character. In Dohm’s words: “Human nature is the same in all people”; cultural differences were only skin deep, and once faulty environments were eliminated, all peoples would display common traits.”  

Dohm’s account of Jewish vices included the usual eighteenth-century stereotypes. ... Restricted to commerce, granted no other scope for their talents, living out a precarious existence under the shadow of arbitrary power, hence never secure, is it any wonder, Dohm concluded, that Jews became grasping and unscrupulous materialists, since "love of profit" had become their "sole means of survival." . . . Dohm was no less convinced that these traits were chiefly the consequence of Christian oppression: "We were always the rulers, and therefore it would have been up to us to induce the Jew to feel humanely by proving that we have such feelings ourselves. In order to heal him of his prejudices against us we first have to get rid of our own." 

Not only was their religion distinctive, but by the fifteenth century they were the only non-Christian people in Europe. . . . The subsequent rise of the modern unitary centralized state entailed accepting Jews as co-citizens and compatriots. . . . The image of the Jew as a nomad, an oriental migrant into Europe's heartland, rootless and parasitic, bent on employing mercantile acumen to subdue honest Christians, shaped modern European sensibilities. At the same time, belief in progress, in the rule of law, in the modern state’s need for cultural homogeneity, in Europe’s superiority and assimilatory power, all contributed to the emancipationist notion that once Jews were integrated into the modern state they would shed their “Jewish” character and become worthy citizens.

Dohm’s view was not based merely on inherited stereotypes, but on current realities as well. For him Jewish moral corruption centered around commercial practices. Indeed, Jews in eighteenth-century Germany were for the most part desperately poor, managing in the interstices of a rural economy, engaged in Nothandel, or “the irregular or distressed trades”: peddling, pawnbroking, moneylending, buying and selling junk and old clothes. A life dedicated to exchange and hard bargaining rather than production seemed morally repugnant and harmful in a society still oriented to agriculture and a guild economy. 

In essence, this picture is really no different at all to that painted by Richard Wagner in his essay Judaism in Music. That is, that the so-called deterioration in the Jewish character was as a result of their oppression in the hands of their Germanic-Christian oppressors, who had treated them with, in Wagner's words, “predatory bestiality”. Wagner’s argument is that the tension between Christian and Jew dehumanised both sides: Christian was reduced to “predatory bestiality” and Jew reduced to becoming money hungry capitalist parasites. Wagner goes on to argue that both sides need to rediscover their lost humanity, in a dialectical historical development that would lead both sides to become “united and without difference”. Both sides would have to equally embrace transformation, if this situation were to be overcome.

We tend to be horrified at this sort of acceptance of Jewish character stereotypes, and assume that Wagner or Dohm could only possibly be proto-Nazis to even contemplate saying such things, when, in fact, these views were considered liberal and progressive relative to their time, because it left a conciliatory path open.  Even Theodor Herlz accepted them. Kornberg tells us:

In making the German heritage his own, Herzl also absorbed its view of Jewry. The starting point of these notions was the belief that Jews were beset with vices and deficiencies that could only be eliminated through their integration into Christian society. Such theories, seeking the improvement of the Jews, offered a diagnosis of Jewish pathology and a cure. The image of the Jew and the theme of Jewish improvement developed in these theories were to resonate in all of Herzl’s writings, pre- and post-Zionist. Herzl was ambivalent toward his Jewishness and sought Jewish improvement through assimilation. The basis for his ambivalence lay in the German program of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.

Accordingly, Dohm ascribed Jewish deterioration to their exclusion from citizenship and concluded that only full citizenship in the modern state would normalize Jews. Dohm's argument was buttressed by the notion of a Jewish golden age in the biblical period of Jewish statehood. Jews had once been virtuous peasants and warriors in a thriving state; they could be so again. When he became a Zionist, Herzl had only to push Dohm's argument one step further. The cure for Jewish decay was full citizenship in the state, but in a state of their own. It is not hard to account for Dohm’s view of Jews and Judaism. 

Indeed, this latter view of the need for a Jewish state is also accepted by Richard Wagner, who granted the need for ein jerusalemisches Reich. Relative to the cultural background of his times, Wagner's views belong firmly amongst the more liberal and enlightened.

Kornberg then goes on to explore the nineteenth century views on assimilation.  He discusses the German liberal emancipationist, Gustav Freytag:

Freytag, like Dohm, ascribed Jewish corruption to the Jews’ persecution and isolation. He condemned unequivocally the German treatment of Jews in the Middle Ages, branding it “a shame of the nation”. Freytag ascribed the lack of gentility and sense of honor among Jewish merchants to their insecure, inferior position in gentile society. An essay of 1869 evinced warm admiration for German-Jewish achievements in art and science, testifying to the Jewish potential once they were assimilated. In the 1890s, Freytag was to strongly condemn the antisemitic movement in Germany. The reason for his opposition was that antisemitism hindered the process of Jewish disappearance.

Once again, this sort of emancipationist thinking is a perfect summary of the sort of position that Richard Wagner takes in his essay Jews in Music. In fact, Wagner used far stronger words than Freytag to condemn the past treatment of the Jews:

the misery of the Jews through history and the predatory bestiality of the Christian-Germanic power-brokers [Gewalthaber] towards the Sons of Israel

das geschichtliche Elend der Juden und die räuberische Rohheit der christlich-germanischen Gewalthaber den Söhnen Israels

The Gewalt in Gewalthaber means more than power, but literally means violence, to emphasise the menacing abuse of power.

Kornberg reminds us once again that all of emancipationist views about Jews were shared by Herlz and Wagner alike:

Herzl shared these emancipationist images of the Jew. Ironically, Herzl’s furious response to a German antisemitic tract provides our first piece of evidence for his negative image of Jewry. In 1882 he read Eugen Dühring’s The Jewish Problem as a Problem of Racial Character and Its Danger to the Existence of Peoples, Morals and Culture. Dühring was a professor, and his learned arguments gave antisemitism intellectual respectability; the book was read and talked about by antisemitic students at the University of Vienna. . . . Herzl exploded in rage”. The source of this rage was Dühring's racism, for he was one of the first antisemites to define the Jewish question in terms of race. For Dühring, contrary to Dohm or Freytag, race was destiny, hence Jewish vices were ineradicable. . . . The Jewish leopard could not change its spots, and even Jewish conversion to Christianity was unwelcome to Dühring, for he considered it a ruse by Jews to better insinuate themselves into European society. Germany had to be protected from “Judaization” by repealing civic emancipation, restoring Jews to subject status, and barring them from key professions. Dühring had angered Herzl by demanding that Jews be prevented from assimilating and therefore prevented from disappearing into gentile Europe.

While agreeing with Dühring  that the Jewish character was “deformed”, Herzl disagreed about the cause. For Herzl, drawing on liberal emancipationist notions, these Jewish vices were the result of history, hence potentially eradicable. Forced into degrading occupations, squeezed for gold relentlessly by the powerful, Jews became “avaricious and eager for plunder” in order to survive. Environment, not racial determinism, had shaped the Jewish character. “Religious-legal arrangements” in the Middle Ages had pushed Jews into “tainted occupations” . . . Now that this oppression had been lifted, the Jewish character would be transformed.

If you read Wagner’s Judaism in Music correctly, it is clear that Wagner is firmly in favour of assimilation (“we will be united and without difference”). There is no suggestion that he has accepted Dühring’s racially based ideas. Indeed, there is the following correspondence between Richard Wagner and Angelo Neumann:

A strong anti-Semitic party in Berlin had loudly proclaimed Wagner as their chief apostle; which moved George Davidsohn (a well-known political writer and friend of Wagner) to write, calling my attention to the risk we ran in our Berlin enterprises if the rumour spread that Wagner was a member of this society. I wrote to Mme. Cosima asking if this were true, and received the following reply from Richard Wagner. Dear Friend and Benefactor :-

Nothing is further from my thoughts than this same “Anti-Semitic” movement;  see the Bayreuth papers for my article which will prove this so conclusively that people of sense will find it impossible to connect me with the cause.

Richard Wagner  

Bayreuth, February, 1881.

From Personal Recollections of Wagner by Angelo Neumann.

The trouble is that some authors are so hell bent on proving that Wagner can only possibly be the cause of the Holocaust and of WWII that they will rant that Wagner must be lying, since the only supreme authority on Wagner whose word can be taken as Gospel is that of Hitler’s: an authority higher than Wagner himself! They will also lay claim to all sorts of bizarre Nazi interpretations of his late works, also from around 1881, especially when it concerns his relationship to Gobineau.

Even in his other late Heldentum und Christentum also dating from 1881, Wagner's ideas have not in any fundamentally way changed from das Judentum in der Musik. As in the early essay, he accepts the position that due to historical conditions, certain races or ethnic groups have degenerated, such as Jews into usury etc — a position identical to that of Herzl. The position that Wagner takes is more precisely that humanity has become verfallen — fallen (in a previous post I argued that this idea was Gnostic in origin). Where Wagner strongly disagrees with Gobineau is with his pessimistic conclusion that degeneration was rigidly racially predetermined, therefore innate and unchangeable: the only solution then is that degenerate races be prevented from contaminating nobler ones. The reason why many of Wagner’s late writings are referred to as his regeneration scripts, is because Wagner believed that humanity could rise up from its fallenness through a spiritual regeneration to rediscover its Pure Humanity. His idea of regeneration is one intended to overcome Gobineau’s pessimism.

At the conclusion of Heldentum und Christentum Wagner writes:

we have to keep a hold of the fact that the efficiency of the noblest races’ domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified through naturalistic terms, has established a completely immoral world order . . .

[wir haben] das festzuhalten, daß, wie die Wirksamkeit der edlesten Race durch ihre, im natürlichen Sinne durchaus gerechtfertigte, Beherrschung und Ausbeutung der niedrigen Racen, eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung begründet hat . . .

Wagner then goes on (continuing the same sentence) to write of:

a possible sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . . 

eine mögliche Gleichheit aller, durch ihre Vermischung sich änhlich gewordener Racen uns gewiss zunächst nicht einer ästetischen Weltordnung zuführen würde, diese Gleichheit dagegen einzig aber uns dadurch denkbar ist, daß sie sich auf den Gewinn einer allgemeinen moralischen Übereinstimmung gründet, wie das wahrhaftige Christentum . . .

So in fact, Wagner here goes much further with his concept of assimilation than just to Jews, but broadens out its application to all peoples, religions, and ethnicities in a universal brotherhood of man. Moreover, Wagner remains true to his word to Angelo Neumann—he completely dissociates himself with the far right ideologies already emerging in his time.

With that you see that Wagner’s thinking on the overcoming of ethnic tensions in the world are extremely idealistic — much more so than was standard for his time. While it is inevitable that will be ideas in there too that, by modern standards, seem extremely backward (such as that of certain ethnicities being “degenerate”), they were in fact shared in their day by both liberal and conservative alike. Even Theodor Herzl accepted the the idea that the Jews had become degenerate as a result of their historical mistreatment. What matters most is that relative to their time, both Herzl and Wagner's ideas were extremely liberal and progressive.

What is further clear is why Wagner had so many Jewish friends and supporters — among them Theodor Herzl who had a lifelong love of Wagner’s music. These Jewish friends of Wagner are not the foolish turkeys suckered into wishing for Christmas that they — absolutely appallingly — are denigrated as being. They understood exactly where Wagner stood on this issue, and supported him for it.

There is definitely a book waiting to be written about the relationship between Theodor Herzl and Richard Wagner.

Bibliography

1. Jacques  Kornberg:

Theodor Herzl: from assimilation to Zionism

Hardcover: 240 pages

Publisher: Indiana University Press; 1st edition (November 22, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0253332036
ISBN-13: 978-0253332035http://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-Assimilation-Zionism-Literature/dp/0253332036

It can also be purchased inexpensively as an eBook from Google:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Theodor_Herzl.html?id=31LMY9S8IBIC

This is what I did, and am immensely grateful that I did.

2. Richard Wagner:
Heldentum und Christentum,
Bayreuther Blätter,
September 1881
http://www.archive.org/stream/bayreutherbltte00patrgoog#page/n291/mode/2up