The Road from Theodore Herzl: A Personal Story

by Sam Bluefarb (July 2014)

1860-1904

The case drew the attention of all Europe, but especially in France, its epicenter, and of Herzl, an assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew, whose connection to the Jewish community was at best, tenuous. But the case marked a turning point in Herzl’s career of journalist, man of letters, and bon vivant. For the first time, he became more aware of his own roots, but even more significantly, as an educated European and secular liberal, he was struck by the discrepancy between a France whose ideals were manifest in the watchwords liberty, equality, fraternity, and the sordid injustice and frame-up of a loyal and patriotic Frenchman. For Herzl, that was a bitter pill to swallow. If such an injustice could be perpetrated on a Jew in a free country like France, then Jews everywhere were not safe from similar persecution. Thus, Jews needed their own state. Thus Herzl found his niche in history and became the father of modern Zionism and spiritual and political founder of the state of Israel.

With the intervention of novelist Emile Zola into the case, and the dramatic effect of his fiery J’Accuse on it, after serving four years, Dreyfus was exonerated and finally released, and reinstated with a promotion in rank into the French Army. He served honorably with tours of duty at the front in the First World War (1914-1918). The real culprit of the affair, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissolute gambler, who gambled well beyond his military means, fled to England and was never caught or prosecuted.

By the 1930s, the Dreyfus Affair was history and a new and greater threat to Jews threatened. By then, in my teens, I was apprenticed to a commercial art studio whose main business was the supply and furnishing of posters, placard displays for movie theaters. I wanted to be an artist, and that would be a step in that direction.

I remember the pitched street battles between Blackshirt toughs and Jewish Youths when Mosely attempted to lead his Blackshirts on a march through the East End. Young Jews gave a good account of themselves and chased the fascists out of east London. Among these young men were a contingent of communists, perhaps the most active and militant to battle the Blackshirts, even though the defeat and outlawing of the German Communists and Social Democrats was still fresh in recent memory. The accompanying disillusionment with the German Communists, because of their rejection of the Social Democrats’ offer to form a united front against the Nazis, all led to the defeat of the Left in the elections of 1933 and the victory of the Nazi Party.

My parents immigrated to the United States in 1935, hardly the most happy time in that era of depression. It was the Second World War and the Holocaust that pulled me back into the vortex of self-appraisal and reappraisal. And I divested myself of my secular liberalism and remembered those dim years of boyhood when I had glimpsed Herzl’s portrait on the wall of our basement. That and the battle for Israel’s independence formed the crucible in which my consciousness as a Jew was formed. Just as the Dreyfus Case jolted many assimilated, secular Jews into a new awareness of Jew hatred, so the Holocaust would turn out to have an even more profound effect on Jews everywhere. Both were tipping points of consciousness for many of us. Periodically in Jewish history, it takes traumas such as these to awaken sleepers.

The Professor and the Fossil (1956)ⁱ. The book was Samuel’s response to Arnold Toynbee’s multi-volume Study of History (1947). Among his larger theories (the growth and decline of civilizations–pace Spengler) Toynbee concluded that Judaism was no longer a viable living faith, but a “fossil” left behind by its more vital Christian successor. Samuel responded by arguing that if Judaism was a fossil, then the fossil still seemed to have lots of life left in it. And he offered scores of examples from history, going back to early Christian times, to the golden age of Spanish Jewry, to the growth of the (revivalist) 18^th century Hassidic movement and the later Reform movement.

The cumulative effect of the war, the savagery of the Holocaust, Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War, which spared Jews a second Holocaust—all profoundly affected the direction my life would take, long after that portrait of Theodor Herzl had become a dim and distant memory, yet a memory that would someday reach beyond my boyhood, to lodge itself into an evolving consciousness of what it meant to be a Jew and to recover what had almost been lost.

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[ii] Quoted in Samuel, The Professor and the Fossil, 213.

[iii] Samuel, 213.

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Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.

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