Herzl’s “The Old New Land”, an antidote to hatred and a source of hope

Now that the British Green Party has decided to emulate the UN, which in 1975 – with Kurt Waldheim, the persecutor of the Jews of Thessaloniki, as Secretary-General – approved the resolution equating Zionism with racism, a resolution that was only repealed in 1991; now that in Italy, from nursery school to university, prayers are recited from the river to the sea and surreal ‘shrouds of Gaza’ are displayed, and that the anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli obsession seems to outdo itself every day, we suggest, as an antidote, reading the novel published in 1902 by Theodor Herzl, who six years earlier, with "Lo Stato degli ebrei" (recently retranslated by Daniele Scalise for SeferOttobre), had provided political Zionism with its manifesto.

Herzl’s novel, Altneuland, is being published in Italian for the first time under the title “Altneuland”, translated for Castelvecchi by the Germanist Roberta Ascarelli, who has also written a comprehensive afterword. It is a description, in the finest detail, of the society that Herzl envisaged the Jews establishing in the land from which they originated, finally sheltered from the ravages of anti-Semitism that were increasingly plaguing Europe and which had disillusioned even those who, like him, had believed in the full assimilation of the Israelites into the societies in which they had lived for centuries. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, which Herzl was covering for his Viennese newspaper, the Parisian demonstrations chanting ‘mort aux Juifs’ had convinced him that, if even France—which had been the first to emancipate the Jews—harboured such hatred towards them, not to mention the pogroms that were decimating them in Russia, a safe haven had to be found at any cost.

Herzl’s tireless efforts to secure resources and forge alliances – to which he devoted all his time until 1904, when his death cut short his life at the age of forty-four – yielded few results. Not only did his proposal fail to secure sufficient funding, but he also had to contend with the scepticism and even hostility of influential figures within cultural Zionism. These setbacks led Herzl to bring his dream to life, at least in literary form. He, who considered himself first and foremost a writer, was not driven solely by a desire for self-consolation. His novel is intended to be a detailed demonstration of the potential and practicality of his vision.

The ‘old new land’ refers to the ancient homelands of the Jewish people. In what, at the time of the book’s publication, was the still-distant year of 1923, we see two characters arrive in Haifa after twenty years of total isolation in a remote district. They are the Jew Friedrich Löwenberg and the fabulously wealthy Prussian misanthrope Königshoff, who goes by the name of Kingscourt. The two travellers are astonished – and so are we – by a society that is extraordinarily progressive, free and technologically advanced. A welcoming land for all, where everyone can speak their own language and practise their own religion, where the value placed on work (seven hours a day, represented on the new state’s flag by seven gold stars on a white background) and an effective welfare system ensure prosperous and humane living conditions for all. It is a land where Arabs welcome Jews arriving from Europe with friendship and solidarity, because they bring prosperity and freedom (this is the part of the novel that has remained most utopian. Herzl had not reckoned with Hitler’s friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem).

One of the key figures, the pioneer David Littwack – who as a child used to beg on the streets of Vienna and whom Löwenberg had rescued from poverty – explains to his former benefactor that “the true founders of this ancient yet new land were the hydraulic engineers. The drainage of the marshes, the irrigation of once-arid land and, furthermore, the network of power stations. Everything we have achieved is the result of their work”.

In that land, women have the right to vote, to study and to work, and they can live as they please; ‘the individual is neither crushed by the cogs of capitalism nor beheaded by socialist egalitarianism’. A piece of Europe, of the West, in the most human and positive sense of the term. The Jews, Herzl seems to be saying as he describes the transport systems and the organisation of trade in the old new land, have helped to build what Europe is from a cultural, social and scientific perspective. They will not accept being made to forget or being deprived of all that this entails. Indeed, it is the Jews, schooled by suffering, who possess the strength and ideas to build a more humane society, for themselves and for everyone. Herzl envisages their land as wholly Western, and this is the aspect that has come to fruition in the State of Israel, even though, in his day, it was precisely this that earned him the hostility of the proponents of cultural Zionism, who saw it as erasing any distinctively Jewish character.

Herzl did not live to see the birth of Israel; many of his detractors, on the other hand, witnessed the outbreak of persecution in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading "Vecchia terra nuova" today inspires admiration for the sheer force of will, foresight and hope it conveys – even for that element of utopia, the harmonious coexistence with the Arabs, which reality is increasingly proving false. Herzl would not have been discouraged, however. Nor shall we be, not even in what a keen scholar such as the historian Manuela Consonni describes as the new “anti-Semitic moment”.