Greater Israel—A Land with no People, For a People with no Land

(Part 1 of 5)

Greater Israel–A Land with no People, For a People with no Land

“Jerusalem stands for certain
cosmic insights and human values.
These values have spread throughout the
the planet and they now embrace, to
some degree, all who consciously
participate in the human adventure”

Lewis Mumford

A hundred and two years ago, an aspiring young critic sat down to write a review of an obscure utopian novel that had been written twenty years earlier in 1902 by a forty-two year-old mercurial litterateur and celebrated journalist of fin de siecle Vienna. 

The young 1923 reviewer was Lewis Mumford who would be recognized in the following decades as one of the great intellectual giants of the mid-20th century; a polymath and the author of magisterial works of erudition and synthesis, including the surpassing: “The City in History,” “Technics and Civilization” and “The Myth of the Machine” amongst others. As a public intellectual in the tumultuous 30s and 40s Mumford would stand alone with the exception of perhaps Edmund Wilson, or possibly Sidney Hook as a critic and commentator. Mumford’s lapidary column on architecture was a standard bearer and a go to feature in the New Yorker magazine for over thirty years–from the early 1930s to the early 1960s. Mumford was more than a critic or scholar, he was a man of great moral conscience, and a voice of reason amidst the madness, mayhem and impending mass murder of the 20th century.

The 1903 Utopian Novel was Altneuland, meaning “Old-New”, in German, the title was inspired by the 1380 “Altneuland” synagogue (or Schul) in the medieval city of Prague. The “Altneu” synagogue is the oldest Gothic structure in the so-called “Golden City”. It was referred to as the Old-New synagogue in that there had been an even earlier schul in Prague (demolished in 1850) and a new one so it became by default the “Old-New”.

The word Altneuland would be poetically translated, or better re-minted in fresh words, by the poet Nahum Sokolow, in the new (old) language of modern Hebrew as Tel Aviv– “Tel” for the word “old” as in the ancient “civilizational mounds’ that one sees in the Near East and the word “Aviv” meaning “spring” for the word “new”.  

And in 1909,  on an initial seventeen acres of drifting sandy dunes, bought at an exorbitant price from a local bedouin tribe, immediately north of the ancient walled town of Jaffa, the first modern city of a future Jewish State would be born and would adopt the name Tel Aviv, in memory of Altneuland’s author and his utopian vision of a great Zionist City on the Mediterranean, a city that would partake of both the “Old” and the “New”.  

The Author of Altneuland was the astonishing promethean figure of Theodor Herzl, who single handedly, with a small merry band of erstwhile adventurers set out in 1896 on the quixotic task of re-establishing a Jewish State in ancient Israel. Herzl’s unlikely crew of supporters are seemingly straight from Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino. Whereas Boudolino seeks to find the lost fabled Christian Kingdom of Prester John in the distant wastelands of Asia, Herzl seeks to reestablish Eretz Israel in the Holy Land. Herzl’s heroic Knights include an aging zion obsessed Anglican Minister, Father William Heckler whose every conscious moment is spent on the imagined streets of Jerusalem, Phillipp Michael Newlinski, an impecunious Polish Aristocrat of great dash and daring who founded the newspaper, Correspondence de l’Est, that wields tremendous diplomatic influence in the Near East, despite having (as posthumous audit would reveal) only a single paying subscriber (Herzl and The World Zionist organization). And the assimilated, intermarried, internationally renowned writer Max Nordau, whose book on “Degeneracy” (a word he coined) would become the cynosure and ‘go to’ reference for Fascists’ seeking to discriminate and dispose of “degenerate” art and culture. With little resources other than Herzl’s wife’s constantly diminishing dowry, his own family’s relatively modest wealth and generous contributions from some rich supporters, Herzl nevertheless over nine hectic years, would achieve the near impossible task of creating, ex-nihlo a worldwide Jewish movement that sought and finally succeeded in reestablishing a modern Jewish polity in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people. 

Not only did Herzl convene the first Zionist Conference with attendees from around the world, but he created the key institutions of the Zionist Movement, including the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Anglo Palestine Company (which would become Bank Leumi after 1948). Herzl’s whirlwind diplomatic campaign to the world’s great capitals is unparalleled. Representing no state or world power, or even an established constituency, and without the support of the great Jewish banking houses, Herzl nevertheless engaged in negotiations with the Turkish Sultan, the Tzar of Russia and the leaders of Germany, Austro-Hungary, France and Great Britain while also holding counsel with the Pope. 

Herzl’s tightrope political walk is one of the most remarkable high stunt acts of all time. It is an event that will forever be marvelled over, thought about, researched, examined and debated. The restoration of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland has implications that are vast and only dimly understood at this point. As Lewis Mumford opined, “I feel that in Jerusalem not merely the fate of Israel, but the destiny of the world in the centuries to come may actually be at stake”.

The year nineteen twenty-three provided a propitious conjunction of events and a particularly important point in time to reconsider Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland. The utopian final setting for Herzl’s novel was situated in the year 1923. Mumford realized that he had a special opportunity to review Alneuland’s claims and predictions in the novel’s culminating year of 1923. It would be the equivalent of reviewing Arthur C. Clark’s 1968 science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year 2001, or George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four novel in 1984.  

Herzl’s Altneuland narrative is built around a Viennese intellectual Frederick Lowenberg (aka Herzl) and his americanized aristocratic friend Kingscourt’s decision to go on a great adventure to a Pacific Island on the other side of the world. On their way to their destination in 1903 they stopped in the decaying Ottoman province of what is now Israel, where they took stock of the sorry and backward state of the ancient biblical heartland. Twenty years later, in 1923, they return on their way back to Europe, by way of the Holy Land, only to find to their utter astonishment a modern and futuristic state.

Lewis Mumford chose the 1923 intersection of these two timeframes deliberately of course. One of the intersecting lines is fictional and the other intersecting line is set in the hard geometry of the here and now of 1923. Lewis Mumford uses this conjunction to carefully reconsider Herzl’s utopian vision, not only to assess and take stock of Herzl’s prescience, by making a cursory inventory of inventions and modern innovations, but better to interrogate Herzl’s and Zionism’s underlying values, ethics and principals. Mumford intimates that not only do the Jewish People have a great, perhaps an even fateful stake in Herzl’s utopian vision, but that the entire world does as well. 

Altneuland as many people have opined is not a stylistic masterpiece, much of the dialogue, in fact, is very wooden and simplistic and the characters are mostly stock figures that function as mouthpieces and proxies for various ideas or political views. This would be expected in a quickly written novel, that is being tasked with specific and overriding political and ideological ends and purposes. 

It is not clear to anyone exactly why Herzl chose to write Altneuland. Apparently, it had its genesis in 1898, on Herzl’s return trip from the Holy Land, his one and only excursion to the Middle East.

Herzl and his compatriots were flabbergasted by what they found in the much dreamed about and romanticized “promised land.” The country they discovered was, however, a backward, crumbling, desolate, denuded and wasted landscape of Ottoman neglect and corruption; the cherished lands were a place of grinding poverty and misery. The country’s utter lack of roads, bridges, clean water, and even the most simple lodgings and the total lack of modern conveniences was such that Herzl thought it might be impossible for most European individuals to even conceive of a modern society taking root in this ‘old’ land. Herzl’s intention was to imaginatively jettison his readers to the future “new” Jewish State.

Herzl essentially decided to employ his literary genius to ‘see’ what was not there and to make this impression so strong that it would remain steadfast in the face of the present harsh and ‘inconvenient’ reality. Herzl just as importantly wanted to make clear the political and sociological basis of this “new” utopian state. The ambition was to meld the ancient (Alt) and the new (Neu) together in a compelling imaginative synthesis that would override any European fastidiousness and compunctions. 

Certainly, in terms of the ‘modern’ contours of the Jewish State that Herzl foresees in 1923 Palestine, there is nothing really quite like it in world literature. One could point possibly to Robert Owen’s much earlier (1813), A New View of Society or more contemporaneously H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905). These are very different genres however and they lack the national-religious particularity and the electric and motorized spark of industrialized Altneuland. 

*Dedicated in great grief and inconsolable sadness to 32-year-old Shiri Bibas and her two beautiful children 4-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir who were kidnapped from the Nir Oz Kibbutz and subsequently murdered. May they not be forgotten and may they somehow be reconstituted into this world. Let their memory live on and be a blessing.  

(Part 2 of 5 to follow)