Suchergebnisse

How did Theodor Herzl, an assimilated German nationalist in the 1880s, suddenly in the 1890s become the founder of Zionism? Jacques Kornberg offers a novel and provocative explanation in Herzl's struggle to resolve his own personal conflict over his Jewish identity. Kornberg charts Herzl's intellectual development against the background of Austrian political history from the late 1870s through 1896, the date of his revolutionary manifesto, The Jewish State. As a Viennese aesthete and writer in the 1880s, Herzl sought to shed the taint of Jewish materialism and to distance himself from less assimilated Jews. The rise to power of the anti-semitic Christian Social Party in the 1890s started Herzl on the road to a new self-transformative Jewish politics. Kornberg attributes particular significance to Herzl's 1894 play, The New Ghetto, as marking a definitive break with the idea of Austro-German assimilation. In Kornberg's view the play reveals for the first time Herzl's vision, later defined in The Jewish State, that the virtues he previously believed Jews were to gain through assimilation - independence, physical courage, idealism - were now to be realized by the founding of a secular Jewish state

How did Theodor Herzl, an assimilated German nationalist in the 1880s, suddenly in the 1890s become the founder of Zionism? Jacques Kornberg offers a novel and provocative explanation in Herzl's struggle to resolve his own personal conflict over his Jewish identity. Kornberg charts Herzl's intellectual development against the background of Austrian political history from the late 1870s through 1896, the date of his revolutionary manifesto, The Jewish State. As a Viennese aesthete and writer in the 1880s, Herzl sought to shed the taint of Jewish materialism and to distance himself from less assimilated Jews. The rise to power of the anti-semitic Christian Social Party in the 1890s started Herzl on the road to a new self-transformative Jewish politics. Kornberg attributes particular significance to Herzl's 1894 play, The New Ghetto, as marking a definitive break with the idea of Austro-German assimilation. In Kornberg's view the play reveals for the first time Herzl's vision, later defined in The Jewish State, that the virtues he previously believed Jews were to gain through assimilation - independence, physical courage, idealism - were now to be realized by the founding of a secular Jewish state.

Advocatesfor minority rights make stringent demands upon those they defend. The relationship between the persecuted and their defenders is often a minefield of conflicting agendas, made even worse by patronizing attitudes on the one side and wounded pride on the other. One example is the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (The Association for Defense Against Antisemitism), founded in Vienna in 1891 to combat the alarming rise of political antisemitism, unmistakable in the stunning electoral successes of the Christian Social Party led by Karl Lueger. Abwehrverein members came from Austria's elite of education and property (Bildung und Besitz): Liberal politicians, large-scale industrialists and merchants, members of the free professions, and artists. Most members were Austro-German liberals, and Liberal Reichsrat deputies sat on its board. Its founder and president was Baron Arthur Gunduccar von Suttner (1850–1902), a writer, and husband of Bertha von Suttner, recipient of the Noble Peace Prize in 1905. My intention is to explore the attitude of the Abwehrverein to Jewry, and to raise the question of whether it served Jewish interests well. But before that, a word or two must be said about the association.

Intellectual history has always been a bit embattled in the English-speaking world, especially the sort of intellectual history that deals with cosmic moods and ideas. There always been those who have tried to place the practitioners of this kind of intellectual history on the defensive. However, the great masters of this discipline— a Dilthey or a Burckhardt or a Lovejoy—continue to cast their spell over many of us. Even in this most utilitarian and political of decades, their achievement remains breathtaking. But it is no use pretending that the approach to history that focuses on "Geistesgeschichte" has no "blind spots." As with any human enterprise, it has its strengths and weaknessess, its keen insights, its narrowness of vision. This paper is an attempt to point to some of the sources of both the abiding greatness and the blind spots of this approach to history, and to explain why this sort of intellectual history still speaks to many of us.