Episode 1: The Untold Story of Herzl's Journey to Zionism

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s hard for a modern Jew to grasp the depth of marginalization and ostracism that even the most assimilated of Austrian Jews experienced in the 1890s. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, began his journey as a passionate assimilationist, a deep believer in European modernity and Germanic culture. It was only when these hopes were dashed that he turned, as a drowning man to a life raft, to political Zionism.

Here is the untold story of how Herzl found Zionism. (Spoiler: It wasn’t the Dreyfus Affair.)

Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode one of Ask Khalediv Anything.
0:11.2	Our first question is a fascinating one about one of my heroes, Theodore Herzl.
0:19.1	The most important single founder of modern political Zionism, the man who
0:25.1	set the movement on political footing, the man who built out the institutions that would go on
0:31.5	50 years later or so to become the state of Israel.
0:34.9	We're going to ask a really fundamental question that we have an easy
0:39.5	answer to and so we fall back on it, but in fact, I'm going to suggest to you, I'm going to try and
0:43.6	prove to you that that easy answer is incorrect. What made Herzl a Zionist? Something transforms him
0:50.7	between about 1892 and 1895, and he talks about it as this ray of light, this shining
0:57.2	vision, this thing that suddenly transcendently just changed everything, changed everything for him,
1:03.8	and then changed everything for the rest of the Jews. What was that thing? Now, those of you who
1:09.8	are listening to this, who were raised in Jewish education, went to Jewish day school or Jewish Hebrew school,
1:15.0	have already yelled out the answer, surprising the people walking on the street next to you,
1:20.1	and the answer you yelled out was the Dreyfus affair.
1:23.8	This terrible trial, this miscarriage of justice against a French Jewish army captain,
1:28.3	artillery captain, Alfred Dreyfus, that begins in 1894, a saga the last 12 years of just horrible
1:34.9	injustice to the man, and that would divide French politics profoundly between the pro-dreyfus
1:40.0	and the anti-dreyfus. He was framed. Evidence against him was literally forged, and
1:44.7	anti-Semitic riots broke out throughout France over the course of this trial against
1:50.3	those intellectuals who sought, who knew he was framed and took the government and the army to task.
1:56.9	It was a huge moment, and the classic story goes that in 1895, in January of 1895, when the convicted Alfred Dreyfus is having his so-called degradation ceremony, that's the ceremony in which he is in the Ecole Militaire, the military school, across from the Eiffel Tower in central Paris.
2:17.4	He is walking in a circle around a group of
	...

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