THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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connection with the social radicalism of the prophets, with socialist mission and other so­called extravagances of Moses Hess; Zionism thus became acceptable to the
liberal Jewish bourgeoisie. Now Herzl found the model for a separate Jewish state in the manifold irredentist movement as which the Austro­Hungarian monarchy
masqueraded; like Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Rumanians, Serbs, and Italians, the Jews were also to return home to their own nation­state. Not even the ancient golden
sound of Jerusalem was heard at first; Herzl's utopia wavered initially, in search of the land of the future, between Argentina and Palestine. And the paths to Canaan
were political realist and diplomatic ones, cleverly taking into account existing shady deals and imperialist interests of several great powers: ‘The Jewish question is a
national question; in order to solve it, we must above all make it into a world question which will have to be solved in the council of civilized nations.’ Moses Hess, as
we have seen, also had international political aid in mind, that of France; but what was naivety or a kind of Romanticism in Hess, stemming from 1789, became
capitalist approval in Herzl. The only alternative for Judaism seemed extinction through intermarriage or national rebirth: Herzl preached the latter, but in the form of a
capitalist­democratic miniature state by the grace of England or even Germany; under sovereignty of the sultan. There thus appeared ‘The Jewish State’, 1896, worked
out as a scheme in considerable detail, co­operative private capitalism with land reform, the land is public property, and is only leased for fifty years at any one time.
The entire civilization of the turn of the century is transferred: ‘When we troop out of Egypt again, we will not forget the fleshpots.’ Thus ‘the fairytale will come true’, if
the Jews want it to, and a utopian novel ‘Old New Land’, 1900, further pictured the bourgeois land of progress, sitting in one's own tent, beneath one's own vine, at
home as before, so to speak, in Europe, but now by oneself. In keeping with the slight economic change in the model Jewish state, this utopia is set not far in the future:
it claims to be a report from the year 1920. Even in the ‘Jewish State’, critics like Achad Haam had found few Jewish elements, almost none, which would have
differed from the business of western civilization other than through the admittedly invaluable security with which this business was now to be continued on their own
soil, in their own cities. In modern Hebrew, certainly also with the hoped­for ‘de­complication’ through agriculture, dairy co­operatives and other kinds of return to the
land, which every bank manager finds a sound proposition. Herzl's Zion was thus a utopia of the immediately