Microblog Memes

Herzl’s antisemitism was rooted first in a deep, intense classism. In order to understand this fully, we need some historical background. Herzl was a German speaking assimilated Jew from a wealthy merchant family. He did not experience any of the hardship which defined the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Europe. Rather, Herzl’s family willingly sold out their fellow Jews for money and status, using the poor Yiddish speaking Jews as a sort of human shield to protect themselves from the predictions of their German allies. When it came time to create his “Jewish” state, Herzl sought to portray himself and his handful of wealthy allies as “the good ones” while the rest of the Jews were little more than vermin to be exterminated.

The vast majority of the Europe’s Jewry were Yiddish speaking workers and peasants who were restricted by law from entering most professions to keep them poor and easily exploited. The Yiddish Jews had been expelled from all their previous homes in Europe and were eventually chased into the eastern part of what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but today is part of seven countries, mostly Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The commonwealth was much friendlier to Jews than most of its European counterparts, and so the region was quickly settled by Jews fleeing oppression elsewhere. After Poland was defeated and partitioned in 1791, most of this territory and the people living there came under the control of the violently antisemitic Russian Empire.

Tsarina Catherine’s regime had recently conquered former Ottoman territories in Crimea and the Black Sea region. These lands were combined with the recent acquisitions from Poland to form what became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews were allowed to settle and do business in this land, but nowhere else in the empire. All other Russian Jews were violently expelled from their homes and sent to settle the Pale. The plan was that the Jews would serve as a buffer against Ottoman expansion while keeping them away from the Orthodox heartland of the Russian Empire.

Their lives were not easy, as the Pale of Settlement was more of a trap than a gift. Jews were not allowed to own land inside the Pale, meaning that to live and do business they had to rent fromgentiles. They were also kept at first from the major urban centers of Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta, forcing them into agricultural work in rural areas. In practice, the system was slavery in all but name. Jews were often forced to buy or rent tools at usurious prices to work land that did not belong to them, thereby keeping them permanently bound in debt. This was the origin of the Kulak, a parasitic class of peasant landlords which emerged specifically to exploit Jews and siphon off their wealth into the coffers of the Tsar.

Despite all this, a strong Yiddish speaking Jewish culture existed in the Pale. They had a long, rich heritage, maintaining their own traditions and culture even in the face of centuries of violent repression. They refused to assimilate as Herzl’s family had, remaining proudly and defiantly Jewish. It was these people, the so-called “Ostjuden”, in whom Herzl saw all the lies of antisemites made flesh.

Herzl even borrowed their language. In 1897 he released an unhinged antisemitic rant entitled “Mauschel” (a German racial slur so vile I will not translate it), where he branded the long suffering Ostjuden with the same irons their tormentors had. To Herzl, the Mauschel was everything he was not. His type of Jew was the only real Jew, while the Mauschel was nothing more than vermin.

The Mauschel was simultaneously lazy and greedy. The (rich, assimilated) Jew was hard working and charitable. The Mauschel was stupid and backwards, while the Jew was educated and cultured. The Mauschel was “something unspeakably vile” while the Jew was upright and upstanding. Most importantly, the Mauschel was a weak and pathetic creature who had meekly gone to the slaughter, while Herzl’s Jew was a mighty warrior who would never submit.

The only problem is, Herzl’s new Jewish man was not real. The Ostjuden were, and at a population of around five million, they constituted 40% of the world’s Jews and around 80% of Europe’s. Therefore, to call for the extermination of the so-called Mauschel was to call for the extermination of the Jews. Herzl’s ideology assumes that everything antisemites said about Jews is true, and the only solution is their complete extermination. Just like the fascists that would come after him, he sought to create a new type of man, the so called “Israeli” from the ashes of the old.

Herzl particularly despised Yiddish, the diaspora language of the Ostjuden. At first, he favored its replacement with German, then the modern reconstructed Hebrew. Since Herzl was a classist first, he viewed Yiddish and its speakers as being inherently uncivilized and inferior, once again finding himself in alignment with his fellow antisemites.

Regardless of what antisemites believe, Yiddish was and is a vibrant, living language with a rich history tied intrinsically to the history of its many speakers. The history of Yiddish very much is the history of the Jews. For centuries, the Yiddish was the voice of the masses of Jews, rather than elites such as Herzl. It was in Yiddish, not Hebrew or German which the Jewish people recorded their hopes and dreams, reflected on their joy and sorrow and more importantly, resisted continued efforts from the European powers to break their culture via assimilation. Yiddish has a long history, a vast corpus of work and like the Jews themselves, it is no lesser for its roots.