C
by Douglas Reed
p. 202 203 204 205 206 207 208
He once wrote that at
Herzl, the Budapest-born Viennese journalist, began a triumphal tour of the great capitals; he was launched on a glittering flight, as from trapeze to trapeze, through the haut monde. Emperors, potentates and statesmen received him as the spokesman of all the Jews and the contrast between what they thought and what he must have known is impressive for, as his first lieutenant, Max Nordau, said after his death,: “Our people had a Herzl but Herzl never had a people”; the Talmudic rabbinate in the East, which scorned this false Messiah, stood between him and any mass following.
The world in which he moved seemed firm and well founded. The Widow at
Herzl's method was to exploit this general fear for his particular end, the Jewish State. He offered domestic peace if it were supported and revolution if it were not and he claimed to speak in the name of all the Jews. It is, of course, implicit in this that he knew the revolutionary leadership to be Jewish, and he thus confirmed, several decades later, what Disraeli and Bakunin had said. His belief in the method he used is expressed in his famous phrase, “When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat; when we rise there rises the terrible power of
our purse.”
Thus he told a Grand Duke of Baden that he would diminish revolutionary propaganda in
Then in
Next Herzl saw another potentate, the Sultan of Turkey. Nothing tangible came of all these journeys, but the great coup was at hand, for Herzl then transferred his activities to
Who enabled Dr. Herzl from
At this point the present narrative enters the most secret and jealously guarded field of all. The origins of the world-revolution, its aims and the Jewish assumption of its leadership may now be shown from the mass of documentary evidence which has accumulated; the existence of Disraeli's “network,” spreading over the superficies of the earth, is known to all; the nature of the “revolutionary proletarist” is clear. But there is also that second network, of influential men at the higher level where “the power of the purse” may be used to exert “irresistible pressure on the international politics of the present” through rulers and politicians. This network of men, working in all countries to a common end, is the one which must have enabled Herzl to penetrate, with his demands, to the highest places.
All experienced observers know of the existence of this force at the highest level
of international affairs. The Zionist propagandists pretend that Jewish opposition to Zionism came only from “Jewish notables,” “Jewish magnates” and “rich Jews” (these phrases repeatedly recur, for instance in Dr. Weizmann's book). In fact the division in Judaism was vertical, among rich and poor alike, and though the majority of Western Jews were at that time violently opposed to Zionism the minority contained rich and notable Jews. Only these can have enabled the spectre of Zionism, in the person of Dr. Herzl, to make its sudden, Nijinski-like leap into courts and cabinet-rooms, where he began to go in and out as if he were born to privilege. Those who helped him were plainly in alliance with the one compact, organized body of Zionists: the Talmudic communities in
Dr. Kastein says that the “executive” set up by the 197 men at
Of this international “network” of like-thinking men at the highest level, in Dr. Herzl's day, the student may only make a picture by carefully piecing together significant glimpses and fragments (its existence and concerted actions in our time are plainly demonstrable, as this book in its later chapters will show, from the growing mass of literature). For instance, Dr. Weizmann says he told Dr. Herzl that Sir Francis Montefiore (a leading Jew in
Baron de Hirsch, in the sequence to this introduction, became an intimate of the Prince of Wales, and private banker and financial adviser to the future King of England. He was also brother-in-law of a Mr. Bischoffsheim of the Jewish financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt in
In the sequence to this account Mr. Connell says: “The small international fraternity of which he” (Sir Ernest Cassel) “became perhaps the leading member
were all men with backgrounds similar to his own, people whom he approached in the course of his extensive travels. There was Max Warburg, head of the great private banking house in
“Ties of race and interest … web … network … intelligence at the highest level … move immense sums of money … influence political decisions …”; there can be no reasonable doubt that this was the “Jewish international” of which Dr. Kastein wrote and the mechanism which operated, across all national boundaries, to support Dr. Herzl. Nothing less could explain the action which the British Government took and if there was doubt earlier, about the concerted action of this force, above and distinct from nations, the events of our mid-century have removed it. With such a power behind him Dr. Herzl was in a position to make demands and utter menaces. The powerful men who formed this international directorate (the term is not too large) at that time may not, as individuals, have believed in Zionism, and may even have been privately opposed to it. In the present writer's belief even they were not powerful enough to oppose, or to deny support to, a policy laid down by the elders of Jewry.
While the consequences of Dr. Herzl's journeys were secretly taking shape, he continued his travels. He took an innocent pride in his sudden elevation and liked the elegance of society, the tailcoats and white gloves, the chandeliers and receptions. The Talmudic elders in Russia, who had grown up to the kaftan and earlocks and were preparing to overthrow him, disdained but made use of this typical figure of “Western emancipation.”
In 1903 he had astonishing experiences, resembling those of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666. He went to
If he believed that he was soon undeceived. He did something that shows him either to have been recklessly brave or else quite unaware of what truly went on around him (this happens sometimes with such men). Presumably in order to strengthen his case with von Plehve, with whom he must have used the “Zionism
or revolution” argument, he urged the Jews in
Thus he wrote his own political death warrant, and indeed he soon died. To the Talmudic elders this was heresy; he had entered the forbidden room. They had been working to prevent Jewish emancipation in
When he returned to address the Sixth Congress of his World Zionist Organization his fate rose to meet him in the form of a compact mass of Russian Jews no longer merely “humiliating” to him, but menacing. At this moment of his fiasco he thought he had the ace of trumps in his pocket and he produced it. As a result of those interviews in
If history records a stranger thing, I have not discovered it. Yet the trump card proved to be a deuce. 295 delegates voted to accept the offer, but 175 rejected it; clearly Dr. Herzl did not speak for “all Jews.” The great majority of the 175 Noes came from the Jews of Russia. The huddled Jewish throngs there had hailed Herzl as the Messiah; these 175 emissaries of the Eastern rabbinate imprecated him, for
If what he said and wrote was fully candid, Dr. Herzl never understood why the Jewish emissaries from
From the point of view of the Talmudic rabbinate in
Dr. Weizmann describes Dr. Herzl's final humiliation. After the vote Herzl
went to see the Jews from
It was also the last time. Within the year Dr. Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. No conclusion can be offered about his death. Judaist writers refer to it in cryptic terms. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says it was the result of what he endured and other authorities make similarly obscure, though significant, allusions. Those who during the centuries have been the object of anathema or excommunication by the ruling sect often have died soon and wretchedly. The student comes to feel that in this matter he approaches mysterious things, closed to all ordinary research.
The curious thing is that Herzl's intimate, right-hand man and leading orator saw the shape of things, at that time and to come, with complete clarity. He displayed a foreknowledge as great as that of Leon Pinsker when he depicted the series of events to which Pinsker's “irresistible pressure on international politics” would lead. At the very congress where Herzl suffered his humiliation Max Nordau (an alias or pseudonym; his name was Suedfeld) gave this exact prognosis:
“Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created” (1903). Here spoke the initiate, the illuminate, the man who knew the strength and purpose of “the international.” (Max Nordau helped the process, the course of which he foretold, by writing such best-sellers of the 1890's as Degeneration, in which he told the West that it was irredeemably corrupt). Even Max Nordau did not spell out his conclusion to its logical end. Another delegate did that, Dr. Nahum Sokoloff, who said: “
After Dr. Herzl died Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the later Zionist leader, led the attack on the
The story of the
groups of Jews: those of the West, those of
The Jews of the West at that time were strongly opposed to Zionism as such, whether it led to
This one community of original Jews was ardently in favour of removal to
“It was a degrading and distressing sight to see all these people who … had been the first to build up the Jewish Palestine of that day, publicly denying and repudiating their own past … The passion for Uganda became associated with a deadly hatred for Palestine … In the community centres of the first Jewish colonies young men educated in the Alliance Israelite schools denounced Palestine as ‘a land of corpses and graves,' a land of malaria and eye-diseases, a land which destroys its inhabitants. Nor was this the expression of a few individuals. Indeed, it was only a few individuals here and there … who remained loyal … The whole of
What the masses of people wanted, Jewish or Gentile, was from 1903 of no account. Acceptance or refusal made no difference; the offer had been made, and by it the West and its future were involved in an enterprise foreseeably disastrous. As Dr. Weizmann says, a British government by this act committed itself to recognize the Talmudists from
Out of that act of 1903 came the beginning of this century's tribulations. The story of |