Max Nordau

Max Nordau was one of the founder of the modern Zionist movement. He was born in Hungary. From his rabbi, he learned Hebrew and Ladino from his father and received the Hanoch Masari, and studied medicine at the University of Budapest. At the age of eighteen, Nordau began publishing articles in newspapers, mainly in German, and later became a prolific writer and author of novels, plays, criticism books, biographies, and children’s fairy tales. His books that criticize society and its institutions, including “Conventional Lies of our Civilization,” “The Malady of the Century,” and “Paradoxes,” were very successful.

Nordau and Zionism

Nordau, who was far from Judaism, became interested in the Jewish problem when hatred of Jews (anti-Semitism) increased in Europe in the late 19th century. During the Dreyfus trial, he worked as a clerk in Paris, and like his friend Herzl, he saw anti-Semitism in its rampant form. Nordau was also among the first to read the manuscript of Herzl’s “The Jewish State.” Nordau was enthusiastic about Herzl’s ideas and devoted himself to the service of the Zionist movement. He drafted the “Basel Plan” at the First Zionist Congress (1897), and from then until his death was one of the central figures of the Zionist movement. He sided with political Zionism and demanded full political rights over the Land of Israel for the Jewish people. However, in 1903 he supported the Uganda Plan, which Herzl had put forward. After Herzl’s death, Nordau did not agree to succeed him as president of the Zionist movement (partly because he was married to a Christian woman) and supported the position of David Wolfson. Nordau served as Wolfson’s political advisor, just as he had been Herzl’s advisor.

After World War I, Ḥaim Weizmann (then serving as president of the World Zionist Organization) invited Nordau to come to London and serve as his political advisor. However, after a while, Nordau left this position because he opposed the official position of the Zionist leadership. He demanded that half a million Jews be immediately brought to Israel, to settle them on the land and integrate them into the economy of the country (which was already under British Mandate rule), and thus “to conquer Israel for the people of Israel.” In this way, he hoped to advance the great danger that, in his opinion, hung over the Jews in Europe. However, the Zionist leadership saw Nordau’s plan as an unfulfilled dream and his position was undermined. He died in Paris, and according to his will, his remains were transferred to the old cemetery in Tel Aviv, on Trumpeldor Street. Towns, institutions and streets in Israel bear his name.

Quotes

• Few,... both among the Gentiles and the Jews themselves, have a perfectly clear notion of the aims and ways of Zionism; the Gentiles, because they do not care sufficiently...; the Jews, because they are intentionally led astray by the enemies of Zionism, by lies and calumnies, or because even among the fervent Zionists there are not many who have probed the whole Zionist idea to the bottom, and are willing or able to present it in a clear and comprehensible fashion, without exaggeration and polemical heat.
• Zionism is a new word for a very old object, in so far as it merely expresses the yearning of the Jewish people for Zion.
• What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish to deprive Anti-Semitism—which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts—of its victim. They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hands a country (land) that is to-day a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been.
  • Co-Founder of Zionism Max Nordau in ZIONISM

• A great people cannot live without an ideal.
  • Max Nordau in a 1915 address delivered in Madrid, Spain. Quoted in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, p. 194.

• A day will come when Zionism will be needed by you, proud Germans [German Jews], as much as by those wretched Ostjuden. ... A day will come when you will beg for asylum in the land you now scorn.
  • Speech, Berlin, Jan. 23, 1899. Quoted in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, p. 141.

• Judaism is Zionism, and Zionism is Judaism.
  • Address, II Zionist Congress, Aug. 28, 1898. Quoted in The North American Review, p. 626.

• Judaism will be Zionist, or Judaism will not be.
  • Address, Amsterdam, April 1899. Quoted in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, p. 565.

• Our people had a Herzl, but Herzl never had a people.
  • In the seventh Zionist congress