The Private Life of a Nation Builder
By Peter Loewenberg; Peter Loewenberg, who teaches European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of ''Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach.''
Published: December 31, 1989
THE LABYRINTH OF EXILE A Life of Theodor Herzl. By Ernst Pawel. Illustrated. 554 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
EACH age gets the Herzl it deserves. With ''The Labyrinth of Exile,'' Ernst Pawel gives us a Herzl biography for the 1990's, written against the grim intransigence of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The founding father of modern Zionism, the man who established the movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was one of the great nation builders of modern times. The saga of this playwright-editor turned political organizer, charismatic leader and creator of institutions is told by Mr. Pawel with subtle insight and low-keyed irony.
The author, a novelist who has also written a sensitive biography of Franz Kafka, gives us a Herzl embodying the Zionist tradition, its grandeur as well as its pettiness and blind spots. In Herzl's person we see greatness and limitations intertwined. Without his ardor or his narrowness of focus, he would not have had the moral determination to overcome all obstacles and build the institutions that made the Jewish state possible: the Zionist Congress, the newspaper Die Welt, the bank, the extensive diplomatic relationships (particularly in England) and the mass following among the Jews of Eastern Europe. With a terrible acuity of vision he saw that the Jewish people had no future in Europe, and that the realities of survival in the 20th century are political.
Few things challenge the biographer as highly as viewing a troubled marriage in perspective without judgmentally apportioning blame and responsibility. It is even more difficult to evaluate the consequences of marital unhappiness on politics. Mr. Pawel, who knows central European culture as a native, meets the test with flair, compassion and urbanity. His treatment of the social and familial contexts of Herzl's marriage and domestic arrangements is one of the strengths of this biography.
Herzl's own presentation of the misery of his marriage to Julie Naschauer - his descriptions of her hysterical fits that left him no peace, her undisciplined spending - has been the accepted version. But Mr. Pawel constructs an alternative case on Julie's behalf. Herzl, he says, was emotionally tied to his mother, whom he adored and favored over his wife. Herzl insisted the couple share a residence with his parents. At the same time, he freely spent the small fortune Julie brought to their marriage on his political cause.
Ultimately, Mr. Pawel strikes a balance: an immature, rich young woman married an equally immature playwright who remained ''an emotionally constipated adult, morbidly repressed and inhibited in the sexual sphere.'' Pathetically tied to his mother, he ''had never outgrown his infancy. He had made sure to find an apartment right around the corner from his parents just so he could run home to Momma at least once a day to feel loved.'' Herzl ''did not want, did not need, and in fact could not bear . . . emotional and sexual intimacy.'' When he planned to divorce Julie in 1891, he left on the pretext of a business trip ''at the peaceful side of my good golden Momma.'' Instead of a separation, Herzl settled for a pseudomarriage that promised bourgeois respectability, freedom to channel his life into his work and his cause, and avoidance of a messy divorce. Yet Herzl was vengeful toward Julie. The three wills he wrote arranged for the children to be taken away from their mother and turned over to his parents in the event of his death. (Under turn-of-the-century Austrian law he had the power to do this.) Mr. Pawel attributes such vengeance from beyond the grave to some way in which Julie ''made him doubt his manhood,'' although what the biographer has in mind is not clear.
Herzl felt an emotional bondage to Vienna's great liberal newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, and to its publishers, Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt. This lasted well after he was no longer dependent on the paper, either professionally or financially. When he anticipated confrontations with his bosses he suffered insomnia, palpitations and shortness of breath. Mr. Pawel suggests that Herzl experienced filial awe toward Bacher in particular, and believed he was bearding the lion in his den whenever he talked with him.
Yet with others, Herzl could be downright ugly, as when in frustration and rage he condemned the ''Yids,'' those rich Jews of the banking houses and stock exchange who gave him no support and placed obstacles in his path:
''The Jew is a human being like any other, no better and no worse. . . . The Yid, on the other hand, is a hideous distortion of the human character, something unspeakably low and repulsive. Where the Jew experiences pain or pride, the Yid feels only craven fear or twists his face into a sardonic grin. . . . The Yid is the curse of the Jews.''
This was certainly a diatribe worthy of Der Sturmer and the Jew-baiting gutter press. For Herzl it was a variety of Jewish self-hatred.
A somber feature of Zionist history is the blithe belief, contrary to the evidence of observation and reason, that Palestine was a demographic and cultural vacuum. Herzl's two misperceptions, which became doctrine, were that the Holy Land was virtually unpopulated and that whatever people lived there would be happy to receive the modernization brought by the Jews. These are reflected in his neglect of a report to the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 by Leo Motzkin, a brilliant young Russian mathematician sent by Herzl to survey conditions in Palestine. Motzkin's observation was prescient, with implications that were denied at the time:
''One must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs.''
When Herzl journeyed to Turkish Palestine in 1898 he traveled through at least a dozen Arab villages. In the port of Jaffa, where he landed, Jews constituted only 10 percent of the population. Yet not once did he seriously deal with the native residents in his diaries or letters. He did not see them because he did not wish to; the obstacle to a Jewish settlement would have been too great. As Mr. Pawel puts it: ''In overlooking, in refusing to acknowledge their presence - and hence their humanity - he both followed and reinforced a trend that was to have tragic consequences for Jews and Arabs alike.''
Herzl's innocent expectation that the Arabs would welcome the material progress brought by the Jews is revealed in a letter he wrote to a prominent Arab who represented Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament:
''You see another difficulty in the existence of a non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would want to expel them? Their well-being and individual prosperity will increase as we bring in our own. Do you think that an Arab who owns land or a house in Palestine worth three or four thousand francs will be unhappy about seeing the value of his property rise five- or ten-fold? This is bound to happen with the arrival of the Jews, and it is something the natives must be made to understand.'' WHEN, in 1902, Herzl dealt with the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and tried to persuade him to invite the Zionists to Cyprus as a temporary expedient until they could move to Palestine, he argued: ''The Muslims will leave, the Greeks will sell their land at good prices and move to Athens or Crete.'' Mr. Pawel appropriately comments: ''A self-serving delusion which all too many of his successors also indulged in.''
During the nine short years in which he built the Zionist movement, Herzl lived with the specter of his impending death. His letters and diaries frequently tell of fainting spells, loss of consciousness, blackouts, arrhythmias, shortness of breath. His self-imposed labor in the service of the Zionist cause acquires a heroic quality. He drove himself beyond any reserves of strength or resilience. Herzl died in 1904 at the age of only 44, his body exhausted, his heart worn out.
''The Labyrinth of Exile'' is a modern biography. It transcends the early hagiographies of Herzl. Mr. Pawel's Herzl has passion for his cause, but he is also immature in personal relations. He has tunnel vision where peripheral vision would have seen obstacles. Few biographers come away from their work still idolizing their subject. But despite clearly portraying all of Herzl's human shortcomings, Mr. Pawel admires the spirit of this proud nation builder, the force of his creative will and the hope that inspired first tens, then hundreds, finally thousands of followers to build a Jewish state.
photo of Theodor Herzl