Drang nach Osten

HERZL by AMOSELON

448 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$15.

His contemporaries labeled him "a political Jules Verne." The term was pejorative; Verne, after all, was producing outlandish fictions about lunar voyages and undersea exploration. Theodor Herzl was even more absurd. He helped create Zionism and predicted the return of the Jews to their homeland. Yet the comparison with Verne was more than superficial. Both men began as romantic visionaries who sought careers in law, then in the theater, then in literature. Verne went on to science fiction; Herzl went on to Palestine. That bizarre journey has all the qualities of fin-de-siecle romance. It might have been told as a novel, a pageant--even as psychohistory. Instead, Israeli Journalist Amos Elon has chosen a method of slow accretion, scrupulously piling up dates and incidents, scarcely daring to speculate or interpret. The style is out of keeping with its subject. But Herzl is too powerful, too messianic to be quelled by mere facts. On the manuscript, the man is his own illumination.

The easy correspondence between stage and life was never better illustrated than in this failed Hungarian playwright who dreamed of moving characters around on an international stage. Pushed by adoring and wealthy parents, he first affected the manner of an elegant, contributing feuilletons to the European press and plays to the Viennese public. Vienna circa 1890 was his home, at a time when that capital seemed the confluence of all that was worldly and intoxicating. It was also, according to Elon, a Versuchsstation des Weltuntergaenges (proving ground of world destruction).

For much of his life Herzl was strangely numb to evidences of antiSemitism. The Zionistic notion was merely an unworked plot until the Dreyfus trial. Then, as Paris correspondent for a Viennese paper, Herzl suddenly saw that the defendant was emblematic of his people. Captain Dreyfus might assume the insignia, the language, the official role, but in the end he would be betrayed and reviled. Dreyfusards marched in an honorable cause, wrote the young Herzl, but one "which--let us not delude ourselves--is a lost one."

Feral Magnetism. As the Frenchman descended from hero to convict, the Hungarian rose from dilettante to provocateur. Herzl did not invent the idea of a Jewish state--the appeal of Return to Jerusalem is, after all, as ancient as the Diaspora. But Herzl alone took it from vision to plan to practicality. On the way he assumed the countenance and the stature of a prophet, sweeping all objections from his path. A feral magnetism began to animate his face and conversation. Philosopher Martin Buber was later to recall him as "a statue without error or mistake, a countenance lit with the glance of the Messiah." Freud claimed that he had seen Herzl in a dream before they met. Others were less impressed. The Emperor Franz Josef, proud of his nation's liberal airs, fumed: "What would have become of this ungrateful Herzl had there not been equality of rights for Jews?" Bismarck considered Zionism no more than "melancholy reveries." Even the Rothschilds saw Herzl as a crank and refused him funds.

These were mere irritations to Herzl. "A light fog is mounting around me," he noted in his diary, "which could become the cloud in which I walk." Yet, if his head was in the stratosphere, his feet remained on the boulevard. Mixing altruism and chutzpah, he gathered votaries wherever he spoke, and he spoke everywhere. His message was always the same: Jews will never be safe until they have a homeland of their own. By 1902 he had pledges of 3 million francs. He grandly talked of purchasing territory in Cyprus, even Uganda. But Israel remained his true destination. It was an idea more than a place. Elon's index includes the category "Arab situation (Palestine), Herzl's ignorance of." Yet his instincts were empathetic. When a great Arab landowner offered to sell a huge tract, Herzl was reluctant to buy. "We cannot displace these poor fellahin, "he explained.

Burned Out. In Herzl, the central figure moves through Europe and the Middle East like a Jewish Napoleon, rallying the poor, converting the rich, negotiating with sultans, papal nuncios and Cabinet ministers. Yet the great adventure, in the book as in life, ends before the goal is reached. Herzl died in 1904, burned out by the age of 44. It was literally in the middle of the journey. He had aroused the Jews of Eastern Europe--including a ten-year-old named David Ben-Gurion. Slowly they began the trek to Ottoman-controlled Palestine. The new Exodus was under way. Still, Britain's Balfour Declaration, promising land to the Jews, was 14 years away; Israel would not be founded for another 44 years.

The volatile, self-inflated character remains as elusive on the last page as on the first. Terminal questions linger: Did conditions create the man, or did he create events? Was he a gifted charlatan, or Moses redivivus? It is only certain that he appeared and disappeared as if on celestial cue, leaving his work to more stable founders and builders. Unhappily, as this biography reluctantly demonstrates, the man was all too human--a naif, a hack and a monomaniac. Probably a touch of madness ran in his blood: two of his three children were suicides; so was his only grandchild. But he did have the inexplicable gift of prophecy. In the operetta that was old Europe, he looked through the gilt backdrop and saw the flames of the Holocaust. In life and in history, his fearful vision has been repeatedly vindicated by the behavior of others. If that remains the best that can be said of Herzl, what worse can be said Of the world? qed Stefan Kanfer

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