Treasure Trove: ‘The Promise’ Medal and the Second Verse of Ezekiel’s Prophecy

This medal is considered to be one of the most important Jewish medals ever struck. “The Promise” is a commemorative bronze medal designed by Samuel Friedrich Beer and minted in Paris for the Second Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1898.

Beer (1846-1912) was born in Prostejov (then in Moravia, now in the Czech Republic). He was a prominent Jewish artist and sculptor who studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and also lived in Rome, Paris and Florence.

In 1894, while in Paris, Beer befriended Theodor Herzl (the visionary of the State of Israel) who posed for a bust. The discussion between the two men led Herzl to a troubling insight: “It does a Jew no good to become an artist and free himself from the taint of money. The curse still clings. We cannot get out of the ghetto.”

This insight inspired Herzl to write the play The New Ghetto (which his neighbour Sigmund Freud saw and referred to in his book The Interpretation of Dreams). The thesis of the play is that even after Jews are emancipated, they are excluded from secular society, and that exclusion is the new ghetto.

It was Herzl’s worries about Jewish life in Europe, which were heightened after he covered the Dreyfus trial which commenced shortly after The New Ghetto was written, which led him to propose his solution to antisemitism: a Jewish state. He then went to work to make it happen.

Herzl convened six Zionist Congresses during his lifetime (the 39th Congress took place last October). It was for the second Congress that this medal was created. The obverse depicts an allegorical figure pointing to a new dawn and horizon for the Jewish people, and the reverse features a biblical quotation in stylized Hebrew from the Book of Ezekiel (37:21): “Behold and I take the sons of Israel from among the nations and I have brought them to their land.”

This passage expressed the purpose of the Zionist movement circa 1898: to bring the Jewish people back home. This was a preposterous dream at the time, but it happened.

It is noteworthy that the next verse in Ezekiel’s prophecy states: “I will make them one nation in the land,” adding that they will never again be two nations or divided into two kingdoms. This should be the purpose of the Jewish people now: to ignore the various perspectives that divide us, and unite behind all that we share. This too is a preposterous dream. Can it happen?

Herzl teaches us that it can.

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For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which has appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove

Treasure Trove is a program of The Herzl Project.