Theodor Herzl: “A Solution to the Jewish Question”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Herzl's essay “A Solution to the Jewish Question” was a radical proposal that sought to ameliorate the oppression and persecution of Jews throughout Europe. In it, Herzl is appealing not only to his fellow Jews but also to the governments of Europe. His work was crucial for laying the foundations of the modern state of Israel but also detrimental, in that it led to the oppression of another group, the Palestinians—an unintended consequence that Herzl did not imagine and probably could not have conceived.

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What exactly was the Jewish question? The readers of the Jewish Chronicle knew what Herzl meant: How do Jews fit into any country's society and culture? What is their role? It is not a single question but a series of questions that all countries and cultures ask themselves when they receive or possess a large minority who are considered outsiders by virtue of race, culture, or custom. Herzl speaks both about the abominable pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire and other parts of eastern Europe and about the prejudice against Jews in western Europe. While the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment—the cultural shift coinciding with the eighteenth century in Europe, when reason replaced tradition as the source of authority—had alleviated most outright religious hostility, Jews remained a minority in a largely Christian, albeit secular, western Europe. Jews remained separate because they lived in communities apart from non-Jews, and this contributed to a fear of the unknown.

A contributing factor to Herzl's publication of “A Solution to the Jewish Question” is also revealed when he makes a specific reference to France: “France itself is no exception.” Herzl is referring to one of the major headlines of his day, the so-called Dreyfus affair. This incident concerned the trial of a Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted of treason by a military tribunal in 1894 on charges of spying for the Germans. Ultimately, the court reversed the conviction, and Dreyfus was proved innocent of all charges.

Nonetheless, the Dreyfus affair awakened anti-Semitism in French society—a society that since the French Revolution in 1789 had generally been regarded as a secular and tolerant country. At all levels of society, debates raged about the trial as well as the place of Jews in France: Could they be trusted? Did they owe their allegiance to France or to their religion? The trial immediately became a key event in the formation of Zionism, for Herzl covered the trial as a reporter. There he witnessed crowds chanting “Death to the Jews,” and the now open anti-Semitism did not dissipate after Dreyfus was proclaimed to be innocent.

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In Herzl's eyes, Jews had to view themselves as a single group—not Russian Jews or French Jews but a single nation of Jews. He also laments here that no matter how loyal Jews are to the countries they live in, they are still outsiders. Even though they have died in battle or sacrificed for their respective countries, they remain unaccepted. Again he turns to France, using the Huguenots to illustrate his point that ultimately people's differences outweigh their loyalty. The Huguenots were French Protestants who followed the teachings of John Calvin during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They suffered greatly in the religious wars that occurred throughout the Reformation, but eventually they achieved a degree of official tolerance by the French government with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. This toleration was fleeting, however, for King Louis XIV ignored the edict and then declared Protestantism illegal, despite Protestants' loyalty to France in time of war. Hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled to other European countries and the New World. “Yet,” Herzl concludes, “in spite of all, we are loyal subjects, loyal as the Huguenots, who were forced to emigrate.” In other words, the situation of France's Jews is analogous to that of the French Huguenots.

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Herzl then calls for the Jewish Diaspora—the term used to refer to Jews dispersed throughout the world—to unite together in the common goal of forming a state. In the fourth paragraph he asks for a nation to grant them territory and says that the Jewish community will manage the rest. Herzl may have been appealing to Great Britain. “The Solution to the Jewish Question” appeared in a British newspaper so it could gain the attention of the government, which did have some Jewish members. Furthermore, as the world's most powerful nation, the British were in a position to exert their influence overseas on behalf of a Jewish homeland.

This section also reveals that Herzl was not simply an idealist, although naive idealism is not absent. He understands that many Jews and non-Jews would not comprehend what he is proposing. He illustrates his point by noting that new states had appeared in Europe, and these states had been created largely from the wreckage of older empires. Nevertheless, the new nations were populated by people who were linguistically and culturally unified; examples include Italy in 1870 and Germany in 1871. Jews, however, were united only in religion. Hebrew was a dead language, spoken only by rabbis during religious services. Russian Jews had little in common with those in Great Britain and France. In many of these western European countries, the bulk of the population was poorly educated with fewer economic resources, whereas the Jewish population tended to be largely middle class and well educated. Herzl also argues that granting sovereignty to a Jewish homeland would be beneficial to the state through the transfer of property. At the same time, land within other countries, such as Great Britain, would be freed up by the exodus of the Jews.

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Here Herzl ponders where the Jews should make their new homeland—Argentina or Palestine. He points out that Argentina is a rich and vast land with a sparse population, so there would be room. Herzl notes that some anti-Semitism already exists there—probably as a result of immigration from Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many Europeans, including Jews, moved to Argentina to take advantage of Argentina's economic boom in the 1880s. Herzl's statement that Jews need to demonstrate “the intrinsic difference of our new movement” simply indicates that they hope to establish an independent state and not to be outsiders within an existing state. One might wonder how the Argentine government reacted to an offer by someone to take a portion of “unused” territory and create a new state.

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In the final paragraph Herzl turns to Palestine—the biblical Promised Land of the Jews. He notes that the ideal of a homeland there has tremendous appeal to the Jewish Diaspora. He also offers a proposal to the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II: In return for land, the Jews would manage the finances of the Turks. It is curious how at one point Herzl decries anti-Semitism based on stereotypes and yet, when it suits him, he plays it to his advantage. To be fair, the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century suffered from acute fiscal shortfalls, and thus Herzl assumed that the sultan would be eager to take whatever assistance was offered. Indeed, by making the offer that the World Zionist Congress would pay off the considerable Ottoman debt, Herzl demonstrates that he commanded extensive financial resources. Still, it is doubtful that Abdul Hamid would have been pleased with Herzl's remark that the Jewish presence would then serve as a rampart of civilization against the barbarism of Asia. Thus, while Herzl denigrates European anti-Semitism, he himself is not above adopting European airs of superiority over the non-Europeans. It is thus not surprising that not long after Herzl's publications and visit, the Ottomans forbade the sale of land to foreign Jews and decreed that Jewish immigrants could settle in Syria and Iraq but not Palestine.

Herzl also proposes that the Jewish state would be neutral, thus suggesting that in return for managing the fiscal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, he expected full independence for his new state. To allay the fears of the Europeans, he grants extraterritorial status to the sanctuaries of Christendom—in other words, they would be protected and not officially incorporated into the state. He obviously recognized that in order to procure the support of European powers for this project, any settlement in Palestine must include protection for Christian holy sites.

What is most interesting about this paragraph is that Herzl never mentions what would happen to the people already dwelling in Palestine or the portion of Argentina that he hoped to claim. One supposes that in Argentina, he envisioned the Pampas, the great plains of Argentina that were largely empty except for vast cattle ranches and a Native American presence. Meanwhile, already living in Palestine were tens of thousands of Arab Christians and Muslims. Indeed, it is not clear what Herzl thought—whether there was plenty of room or that only Jews should live there. Like many Europeans, he may have held a simplistic view that the area was devoid of people. Herzl must have later realized, though, that a large population did live in the area, as he visited the region two years after he wrote his “Solution.” Nonetheless, in the appeal for Palestine, this fact was often conveniently overlooked under the slogan that Zionists later adopted: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”