Content area
Full Text
Research Article
Introduction
On September 15, 1930, forty-year-old Hans Herzl, son of Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, committed suicide in his Bordeaux hotel room. Hans had been in Bordeaux only briefly, for his older sister Pauline's funeral. After a lifetime of chronic depression, and the shock and disappointment of Pauline's drug-related death, Hans penned his last manuscript:
To my Jewish brothers I should like to say that if they go to the New Testament, they will find divinely revealed truth.... I think that Christianity can be allowed to develop within the synagogue.... The Jews are a nation among other nations of the world ... the Jews like the [Catholic] Church must have some outward token of sovereignty.... My life was badly lived, and it is taking a bad end. Still, I hope there may be someone who will say of me: he, too, had some kind of music in his soul.1
Hans's suicide in 1930 caused nearly the same stir in the Jewish press and World Zionist Organization as his conversion to Christianity in 1924. Many searched for explanations: Did Theodor and Julie Herzl's stormy marriage and early deaths portend tragedy for their three children? Was Hans in love with a non-Jew and converting for marriage? Or did the early Zionists' lack of consensus around Theodor Herzl's leadership, and the undue stress it caused him, embitter the Herzl family, and Hans in particular? Although some have tried to do so, determining the causes of Hans's conversion and suicide, if such an objective were possible, is not the focus of this paper.2Instead, I aim to analyze responses to Hans's conversion and suicide in order to gauge Zionists' expectations for the character and composition of an aspiring Jewish "homeland" or state. These responses reveal that Zionist leaders, particularly those of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), harbored latent and conflicting assumptions regarding the religious and ethnic boundaries of Jewish nationalism, both in the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as in future Israeli state policy.Of the many diasporic ills that Zionism addressed, conversion featured as a threat to Jewish continuity and vitality, as it had been an ongoing and disconcerting phenomenon throughout Europe in the post-Emancipation nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century Europe was not only punctuated with...