On the Unspoken Principles of Herzlian Diplomacy and their Contemporary Relevance
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13537120802127630
ISSN1743-9086
Autores ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Mishnah, Avot, I, x. 2. Only in the rarest of cases will we ever know anything like the true answer. No moral balance sheet has ever been drawn up nor, one suspects, could be. But the dilemmas were real enough and often excruciating—notoriously so in regard to the forced recruiting of Jews for military service. The temptations of power even at its most feeble were always there to be grasped; and the mechanism, commonly, could not have been simpler. All of which is neatly illustrated in one of S.Y. Agnon's saddest of stories, ‘Ha-nidakh’. When the communal strong man (or parnas), R. Avigdor, hears that a certain R. Uriel, a Hassidic tsaddik whom he has long detested, is about to come to town—his town, as Avigdor sees it—he resolves immediately to apply to the ruling Polish magnate to have the old man thrown out. He prepares himself for his interview with the prince with care, dressing himself [as Agnon relates] in his Sabbath clothes, washing his hair, rinsing his peiyot in mead, ensuring that his hat is set at a proper angle, adjusting his coat, and checking the full result in a mirror—all of which is essential, he thinks, if a proper impression be made on the prince and the desired decision be handed down, as indeed, devil take, was to be. R. Avigdor's slanderous account of the old Hassid's doings was duly heard out; one of the prince's very own men (a stratiote, in Agnon's terminology—effectively a low-grade henchman) was sent to see R. Uriel out of town; and order, as Avigdor saw it, was restored. But not, we might note by Avigdor himself. For where the use, or even the mere threat of force was at issue, there it would have been unusual for a Polish magnate to leave it to one of his Jewish minions to operate on what might seem, however remotely, to be an autonomous basis. The application of force was a Polish privilege. As the magnate's contracting agent where the local Jews were concerned, R. Avigdor was owed support—notably so when it came so very cheaply as seeing to the expulsion of one Jew as a personal favour to another. Thus, R. Avigdor's authority within his own community was re-confirmed and broadcast. But so, implicitly, were its limits. See S.Y. Agnon's collected works, vol. ii, (Eilu ve-eilu”), Jerusalem, 1972, pp. 10ff. (Translation of the quoted passage by the author of this article.) 3. Entry for 3 September 1897, Diaries, New York, 1960, ii, p. 581; p. 585. It is fair to add that Herzl himself, as is well known, began—as almost anyone of his time and place would have done—by bringing his plans before the most affluent and therefore, presumably, the most influential of contemporary Jewish grandees. These, at the time, were of course the Rothschilds. It was when he got nowhere, no member of the family willing so much as to hear him out, that he thought again; and his mind turned to other possibilities. Whether it was that initial disappointment that moved him to think of a national assembly and go on, with hardly any delay, to call a congress into being, or that that early, summary rejection was all that was needed to fire a long nourished dislike of the grandees of Jewry one can no longer tell. What is certain is that having done so he was never to look back; and that, in the event, it greatly served his purpose not to do so. 4. A World Jewish Congress would be convened four decades later, but the best that the founders could bring themselves to agree upon in 1936 after three years of wrangling in a world that was plainly ever more threatening was a gathering of communal leaders chosen in each case by whatever mechanism happened to be acceptable to the parnassim of the community in question. 5. Two equally splendidly prototypical literary figures exemplify the oceanic difference between the determinedly honourable and the disabused and common-sensical. In Calderón de la Barca's seventeenth century classic drama, El Alcalde de Zalamea, the commoner Pedro Crespo, regardless of cost, breaks through the iron walls in which each of Spain's social classes were then encased to exact personal, socially impermissible, legally questionable revenge on the upper class army officer who had raped his daughter but refused to marry her in the aftermath. Shakespeare's fat Sir John Falstaff, in contrast, having weighed the prospect of wounds or worse were he to plunge into a looming Wars of the Roses battle as circumstances, loyalty, and honour all require of him, decides nonetheless to slink away. Calderón's hero responds to the formal charge preferred against him after the killing of the officer, bows to the threat of condign punishment, but declares roundly, that ‘My life and property I render / to the King; but honour is / the heritage of my soul, / and my soul belongs to God alone’. El Alcalde de Zalamea, I, xviii. As translated by Edwin Honig. But see Calderón de la Barca: Four Plays, New York, 1966, p. 165 for the inevitably more powerful original: ‘Al Rey la hacienda y la vida / Se ha de dar; pero el honor / Es patrimonio del alma, / Y el alma sólo es de Dios’. Falstaff, in glaring contrast, having turned the question of honour and its likely costs over in his mind, first asks then tells himself: ‘Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? air. … Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible, then? yea, to the dead. But will it live with the living? No. … Therefore I'll have none of it', Henry IV, Part One, V, i. 6. Greenberg to Herzl, 20 May 1903, Central Zionist Archives, H VIII/292. 7. And a promise kept in fact, though not because anyone had remembered Chamberlain making it, when Herbert Samuel was sent out to Palestine in 1920 as Britain's first High Commissioner. 8. On 7 October 1898, to take one example, Herzl held a meeting with the German Ambassador at Vienna, Count Philipp Eulenburg. He had good reason at the time to regard the occasion as likely to be of genuine importance—leading, if all went well, to the great political breakthrough in Constantinople he was hoping for. Eulenburg, an intimate of the Kaiser's and a very considerable Prussian grandee in his own right, had put himself forward as a key figure in the Zionist effort to induce the German government to press the Turks to be accommodating. When he proposed that the meeting be at his estate, Liebenberg, some 50 kilometres from Berlin, Herzl agreed, of course, and prepared himself with care. His diary account is typically self-observing and scrupulously accurate. The Count's dogcart was waiting for me [at the station]. The coachman surveyed me haughtily when I asked whether he was waiting for Dr Herzl. He had been told only: a tall gentleman with a black beard. I am probably the first Jew he has ever driven.… In a brief half-hour we were at Liebenberg.… Two footmen were waiting outside the gate. One of them announced me to the Count. In the hall, hunting weapons and trophies. The whole, in grand style. The Count came out at once. He was in hunting costume, and it seemed to me the first thing he did was to take stock of my clothes. I had in fact carefully considered what I should wear, and taken my grey frock coat and trousers, although under different circumstances the light-coloured lounge-suit would have been more appropriate, being … more informal. On the other hand, I did not want to give the impression that I considered myself a guest. I was coming on business, a shade less habillé than if it had been in the city—therefore, grey rather than black. I believe he found me suitably dressed. A long conversation on the political matter in hand was then held in the course of a stroll through the grounds of the estate. As it came to an end, a gamekeeper with two dogs straining at the leash came into view. The Count had been showing signs of impatience for some time now. I declined his invitation to eat a second breakfast, which had been set out especially for me, on the pretext that I was anxious to get back to Berlin.… [There followed] a waving of hats, and Liebenberg lay behind me. [The same coachman] drove the horses. But this time, I think, with greater respect, for he had seen the Count stand in the gateway until my departure. (R. Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl; English trans. Harry Zohn; ii, New York, 1960, pp. 687–692 (slightly amended)). 9. Ahad Ha-'Am to Y. Eisenstadt in Jaffa, 24 May 1903, Igrot Ahad Ha—'Am, iii, Tel Aviv, 1957, p. 250 (emphases original). 10. ‘Habet mishamayim u-re'eh ki hayinu la'ag ve-keles ka-tzon la-tevah yuval’. 11. See the reference to Shakespeare's Falstaff and Calderon's Crespo in note 5 above. 12. Arminius Vámbéry and Richard Gottheil, Herzl's most knowledgeable advisers on the affairs of the region had warned him that that was what Islamic hegemony implied. 13. Plehve's memorandum was published in the original French with a German translation almost immediately upon Herzl's return from Russia in the movement's chief organ, Die Welt on 25 August 1903, on the eve of the Zionists' Sixth Congress. The original is in the Central Zionist Archives, H VI/D4. 14. Proverbs, XIII, 12. (‘Tohelet memushekhet mahala lev’.) 15. Charles Péguy, ‘A Portrait of Bernard Lazare’, in Bernard Lazare, Job's Dungheap; Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution, New York, 1948, p. 18 (slightly amended). 16. Lazare to Herzl, 4 February 1899. CZA, H VIII 479/11. 17. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 18. Mohammed Harbi, Une vie debout: Mémoires politiques, vol. I: 1945–1962, Paris, 2001, p. 250. 19. ‘On ne fait rien de grand sans de grands hommes. Et ceux-ci le sont pour l'avoir voulu’, Le Fil de l'épée, 1932.
Referência(s)