The Unlikely Moses
June 12 2021
I open with playing the Czech anthem The Molday ( Vlatava) by Smetana and then Hatikvah. I digress to a disccusion on who borrowed from whom- apparantly, both hail from an old Sephardi melody for the prayer for dew- see the source here:
"Hatikvah: The Real Story Behind Israel's National Anthem." Shlomo Meital
The Music: It is not true that the Hatikva melody came from Smetana’s 1874 piece, Die Moldau, played frequently on the radio and in concert halls. The Hatikvah melody has travelled the world for centuries, almost like the Diaspora Jewry.
Baltsan
discovered that the Hatikvah melody goes back 600 years to a Sefardi prayer for
dew, Birkat Ha'tal. After the Inquisition, as Jews scattered through Europe,
the melody found its way to Italy, where it became a popular love song, “Fugi,
Fugi, Amore Mio” (Flee, flee, my love!). It evolved into a Romanian gypsy folk
song, “Cart and Oxen;” then, a 17-year-old immigrant to Palestine from
Romania, Shmuel Cohen, used the “Cart and Oxen” tune for the poem, Hatikvah.
And it quickly caught on.
What is the connection with Die Moldau? 12-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart heard the original folk tune in Italy, where he had been sent to study,
and incorporated it into one of his compositions. Mozart took the music to
Vienna, then to Prague. There, Smetana picked it up.
*******************************************
Lecture notes from Wikipedia and other sources
Early Zionism before Zionism:
There is first the movement of
Jews to the Land of Israel-
First,a timid foray to move outside
the walls-
Sir Moses Montefiore- Sheriff of
London & Middlesex, Sir, 1st Baronet.- Misheknot Shaananim.1860.
Another unlikely would-be Moses:
Dizzy Disraeli-Earl of Beaconsfield
In 1851, correspondence
between Lord Stanley,
whose father became British Prime Minister the following year, and Benjamin
Disraeli, who became Chancellor
of the Exchequer alongside
him, records Disraeli's proto-Zionist views: "He then unfolded a plan of
restoring the nation to Palestine—said
the country was admirably suited for them—the financiers all over Europe might
help—the Porte is
weak—the Turks/holders of property could be bought out—this, he said, was the
object of his life..." Coningsby was merely a feeler ..my views were not
fully developed at that time—since then all I have written has been for one
purpose. The man who should restore the Hebrew race to their country would be
the Messiah—the real saviour of prophecy!" He did not add formally that he
aspired to play this part, but it was evidently implied. He thought very highly
of the capabilities of the country, and hinted that his chief object in
acquiring power here would be to promote the return".[22][23] 26 years later, Disraeli wrote in his
article entitled "The Jewish Question is the Oriental Quest" (1877)
that within fifty years, a nation of one million Jews would reside in Palestine
under the guidance of the British.!!!
Benjamin Disraeli by Cornelius Jabez Hughes, 1878 - Benjamin Disraeli - Wikipedia
The first modern movement of return:
BILU_ Beyt Yaakov
lechu v Neilchah- the first modern wave of migration to Israel from
Tsarist Russia. 1881. My great-great
grandfather, at age of 81, moved to Israel. Ofra’s great-great-grandfather
moved to Israel at the same time, from Yemen.There, the movement was called "A'aleh Betamar"- I will go up the date palm( Tamar- a play on the Hebrew date for 1882 and the date).New settlements in Rosh Pina and Zichron Yaakov. This was done despite Ottoman efforts to prevent Jewish migration.
The Two Paths to Peoplehood in
the land of Israel ( 1 nation in Israel- two positions)
Cultural Zionism
Asher
Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (18 August 1856 – 2 January
1927), primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen
name Ahad Ha'am (Hebrew: אחד העם, lit. 'one of the people', Genesis 26:10), was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost
pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder
of cultural
Zionism. He started on his program
shortly after the first Aliyah, which did not get very far.
Ahad Ha'am
recognized that the effort to achieve independence in the land of Israel would bring
Jews into conflict with the native Arab population, as well as with the
Ottomans and European colonial
powers then eying the country.
Instead, he proposed that the emphasis of the Zionist movement shift to efforts
to revive the Hebrew language and create a new culture, free from negative
diaspora influences, that would unite Jews and serve as a common denominator
between diverse Jewish communities. The main goal of Ahad Ha'am's cultural
Zionism was the establishment of a new spiritual center for the Jewish nation,
which did not necessarily require the establishment of a Jewish state, but did
require the establishment of a Jewish majority in its national home.
We might call him the forerunner of the theme”
Judaism as a Civilization”, which served as the basis for Mordecai Kaplan’s
Reconstructionism.
A few memorable quotes:
More than Israel has
kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel.
Achadd Haam and Schats 1911 - Ahad Ha'am - Wikipedia
Asher Ginsberg( Achad Ha’am) with Boris Schatz, founder of Betzalel Art
School, in background, the painting The Eternal Jew, by Natha Hischberg, which
plays on the anti-semitic theme of the Wandering Jew. That title” Eternal
Jew”-Ewige Jude-was the nameof a Yiddish play and then, undert Hitler, the name
of a propaganda film against Jews!
The Hebrew University in Jerusalem- was also the outcome of his vision-23rd(
out of 2000) highest ranking university in the world. https://cwur.org/2015.php There are
none in the neighboring Arab lands in the top 100, 200, or 300.This ranking
system was founded by Saudi Arabia & now headquartered in UAE!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_University_of_Jerusalem#/media/File:Hebrew_University_Cornerstone_laying_in_1918.jpg
Finally full blown
political Zionism- Theodore Herzl-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl#/media/File:Theodor_Herzl.jpg
Theodor Herzl, (born May 2, 1860,
Budapest, Hungary, Austrian Empire [now in Hungary]—died July 3, 1904, Edlach,
Austria--.He was the consummate product of German culture.Member of a German nationalist
fraternity.
Matti Friedman, summarizing Amos Elon’s biography of
Herzl
Theodor Herzl, is a writer, a
master of the German language, and a former member of a Teutonic college
fraternity. He is a Jew by birth, but he’s over it. His son isn’t circumcised,
and when a rabbi pays a visit to his home one December, the writer is just
lighting the Christmas tree. He’s a proud citizen of a great polyglot power,
the empire of the Habsburgs, where Jews are emancipated, fitting in
tentatively, moving up conclusively….
Yet, the
country is in decline, disintegrating into its constituent parts. … There are
Germans and Czechs and Hungarians and Poles, conservatives, socialists,
anarchists—and then there are Jews, or rather, the “Jewish problem,” which
suddenly becomes a burning preoccupation in Vienna and across Europe.
The
prosperous Jews of Vienna, who assumed that this problem was on its way to
being solved, are surprised to find themselves the focus for the anxieties of
the age. . .. “Jews were baffled and
shocked by this obsession,” Elon writes. “Should they react to the attacks or
ignore them? Was it something they had done? Many sensitive young Jews were
tormented by these questions. …”
… among
Jewish intellectuals, Herzl’s social circles, was to cringe at both rich and
poor, ... a very Viennese attitude of wry fatigue with the foibles of humanity.
The writer works for the Neue Freie Presse,
the New York Times of the empire, a newspaper of
careful Jews who are celebrated for their brilliance, hampered by their social
aspirations, and wrong, in retrospect, about everything. …. Herzl’s plays are
produced in Berlin and at the best theater in the city..
And yet
society becomes increasingly preoccupied with the “bad manners” of the Jews. …
Books appear seeking to
analyze the Jews’ warped character and physiognomy. … This is science. …Eugene
Duhring’s The Jewish Question as a Racial, Ethical, and
Cultural Question…. One of the most toxic tracts would eventually
be written by a Jew by the name of Otto Weininger.
[Note: In his discussion of Judaism, Weininger saw the
characteristics of the Jew as even worse than those of Woman. The Jew is a
force which exists within people, not just in individual Jews (it is found also
in non-Jews). The disadvantage of the Jew compared to Woman is that the latter
at least believes in the Male while the Jew believes in nothing. Hence the Jew
gravitates towards Communism, anarchism, materialism, empiricism,
and atheism. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/weininger-otto He had converted to Protestantism, and
shortly thereafter, at age 23, committed suicide]
“When a number of frightened Jewish scholars
publicly endorsed the new ‘scientific’ antisemitism and admitted the
‘biological’ inferiority of their race,” Elon writes, “other Jewish wits
replied that ‘antisemitism did not really succeed until the Jews began to
sponsor it.’”…
Viennese politicians begin
understanding how effective this hatred can be as a mobilizing tool. The dark
word “they” comes into use—everyone knows who “they” are.
The most adept of this breed is Karl Lueger, who rides Jew-hatred into power but has Jewish friends. “I decide,” he famously declares, “who is a Jew.
In this
atmosphere, Herzl works for Neue Freie Presse as, the paper’s Paris
correspondent. fall of 1891 and was shocked to find in the homeland of the French Revolution the same anti-Semitism …led him to the conviction that the answer to
anti-Semitism was not assimilation but organized counterefforts by the Jews.
The Dreyfus affair in France 1895 topped it off.
Alfred
Dreyfus -- graduated ninth in his class with honorable mention and was
immediately designated as a trainee in the French Army's General Staff
headquarters, where he would be the only Jewish officer. His father Raphaël
died on 13 December 1893.
The personal
assessments received by Dreyfus during 1893/94 acknowledged his high
intelligence, but were critical of aspects of his personality.[4]
Dreyfus,
arrested for treason On 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was
summarily convicted in a secret court martial, publicly stripped of his army rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. …. Dreyfus cried out: "I swear
that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Long live France!
Long live the Army!"[5]
Dreyfus still believed in the idea of the French Republic- but the
military and the French did not!
Lieutenant Colonel Georges
Picquart, reported to his superiors that he had found
evidence to the effect that the real traitor was the Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
Picquart was silenced by being transferred to the southern desert of Tunisia in November 1896. ….
Esterhazy was found not guilty by a secret court martial, before fleeing to
England. Dreyfus was given a second
trial in 1899 and again declared guilty of treason despite the evidence in
favor of his innocence.
Finally cleared and reinstated into army in
1906.
[This sentiment- that there are Jews in France,
rather than Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion, was true even for the great
DeGaulle, the hero of the French resistance to Germany. Lived in Israel in in the apartment above one
of Israel’s most famous physicians, who had founded the Ben Gurion University Medical School, Moshe Prywes. Durin WEWII, he
had been drafted in the Polsih army as a doctor, then captured by the soviets.
There were French officers and soldiers that were also caught behind Soviet
lines- many fell deathly ill- Dr Prywes saved their lives. For this, he was
awarded a Knight of the French Legion of Honor . He told me that De Gaulle was giving out the honors, and when he
came to place the honors on the Dr, he muttered, so it could be heard, that
couldn’t they find somebody other than a Jew to give the honor to?( And De Gaulle
was against anti-semitism) ]
Herzl cooks up his plan
1)Herzl’s first idea- march all Jews to the Cathedral in Vienna for
a mass conversion.
2)Next-with swords, to the death.His other idea-very popular at the
time, was for Jews to challenge anti-semites to personal duels,
A half-dozen duels,” wrote Theodor Herzl in 1893 to the Society for
Defense against Antisemitism, “would very much raise the social position of the
Jews.”1 In his diary, Herzl fantasized about what those duels might entail. He,
alone and unaided, would bravely challenge one of the three most influential
leaders of Austrian antisemitism. Perhaps he would die a martyr in the duel,
his death proof of Jewish honor. Or, if that failed, when brought to trial for
murder (and illegal dueling), Herzl, in an impassioned speech, would “[compel]
the court…to respect his nobility,” and, by implication, to understand the
horror of antisemitism.2
Finally , the only solution for the majority of Jews would be
organized emigration to a state of their own, which meant crating all the
machinery of a state-even before there were enough Jews present.
Baron de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest men of
his day, who financed many projects in the land of Israel ( and also in
Argentina) refused to hear him out. It
led to Herzl’s famous pamphlet The Jewish
State (Judenstat), published in February 1896 in Vienna.
“ No one can deny the gravity of the situation
of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less
persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become
practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high
positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And
attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from
Jews!"
…. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish
villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a
good beating occasionally; in Austria, Anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all
public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are
shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs….
..: Is it not true that, in countries where we
live in perceptible numbers, the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors,
technicians, teachers, and employees of all descriptions becomes daily more
intolerable? Is it not true, that the Jewish middle classes are seriously
threatened? Is it not true, that the passions of the mob are incited against
our wealthy people? Is it not true, that our poor endure greater sufferings
than any other proletariat? I think that this external pressure makes itself
felt everywhere. In our economically upper classes it causes discomfort, in our
middle classes continual and grave anxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair.
Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same
conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase:
"Juden Raus" (Out with the Jews !)
The Jewish question, he wrote, was not a
social or religious question but a national question that could be solved only
by making it “a political world question to be discussed and settled by the
civilized nations of the world in council.”
Some of Herzl’s friends thought it a mad
idea- his personal physician thought he needed treatment. So did the chief
Rabbi of Vienna.
The first convert to Zionism- a Christian
Minister:
The Christian chaplain ,William Hechler, the
British Embassy in Vienna- believed in Herzl- he was a Zionist before Herzl.
Already- 1884-called for Jewish return.
April 1896 Hechler arranged for meeting with
Grand Duke Frederich I
Two days later, on 25
April, Hechler brought a very nervous Theodor Herzl[6] to a private audience with the Grand Duke. It
was the first time that Herzl was able to share his vision of Political Zionism
and his solution to the "Jewish Problem" with German royalty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hechler#/media/File:Hechler's_Stone-2.jpg
Now, the 2nd
convert to Zionism is the German Grand Duke.
Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden was very taken with Hechler's eschatological
predictions and with Herzl's pragmatic solution to the Jewish problem through
restoration of the Jews to Palestine. The Grand Duke became a lifelong advocate
of Herzl and the Zionist cause. He used his office and his relationship with
his nephew, Kaiser
Wilhelm II to support Herzl
and Zionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hechler#/media/File:FrederikIB.jpg
So the third convert
to Zionism- the German Kaiser!
The Kaiser tried to
convince the Ottoman Sultan that he should let Jews have a settlement in
Palestine in exchange for Jews paying off Ottoman debts. Sultan refused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hechler#/media/File:Wilhelm_II,_German_Emperor,_by_Russell_&_Sons,_c1890.jpg
The pamphlet won favorable response from
eastern European Zionist societies, but not from assimilated central European
Jews.
The First Zionist
Congress
decided to organize a world congress of
Zionists in the hope of winning support from the masses of Jews in all
countries. Basel.end of August 1897, attended by about
200 delegates. They represented all social strata and every variety of Jewish
thought —from Orthodox Jews to atheists and from businessmen to students. the
Basel Program, declaring Zionism’s aspiration “to create a publicly guaranteed
homeland for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It also set up the Zionist
Organization with Herzl as president.
Later
accomplishments
. remained literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse in order to earn a living. He established a
Zionist newspaper, Die Welt,
published as a German-language weekly in Vienna. Wrote his novel , Altneuland,
a vision of a new Jewish state.
The sultan refused his request for a Jewish autonomous region in
Palestine. He then turned to Great Britain- 1st plan- a Jewish
settlement in British territory in the Sinai Peninsula.The British proposed
Uganda in East Africa. This offer, which he and some other Zionists were
willing to accept, aroused violent opposition at the Zionist congress of 1903,
particularly among the Russians. Herzl was unable to resolve the conflict. He
died of a heart ailment at Edlach, near Vienna, at the age of 44
Before died, though, he did
get the 5th and 6th , most valuable converts to Zionism,
David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the UK during WWI:
Before the location of that Jewish state was
declared as Palestine, Lloyd George worked as a legal advisor for Theodor
Herzl, to help convey British support
for Jewish autonomy in Uganda. George took great pride in his role to help
bring about the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Speech to English Zionist Federation: “I was
Prime Minister of this country when the idea of the Jewish National Home took
form as an act of State policy in the Balfour Declaration, and I presided over
the Councils of the Imperial Cabinet which gave expression to that policy and
secured for it the sanction of our Allies. I was the principal delegate of the
British Empire at San Remo where the Mandate for Palestine received its final
shape and was conferred upon Britain.”
The Prime Minister during WWII was
the other great British Zionist- Winston Churchill
Both George and Churchill were odd-men out in
the UK- George- a Welsh nationalist, Churchill, a half American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lloyd_George#/media/File:ChurchillGeorge0001.jpg
One more ( albeit after Herzl) convert to
Zionism: Hussein
bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and King of the Hejaz, until the
Saudi family took over. His son, the Emir Feisal, leader of the Arab revolt
against Ottomans in WWI ( Lawrence of Arabia fane). His other son, Abdullah,
founded Transjordan ( Jordan), the lion’s part of the mandate of Palestine.
According to Isaiah
Friedman, Hussein was not perturbed by the Balfour Declaration and on 23 March
1918, in Al Qibla, the daily newspaper of Mecca, attested that
Palestine was "a sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons",
the Jews; "the return of these exiles to their homeland will prove
materially and spiritually an experimental school for their [Arab]
brethren." He called on the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the
Jews as brethren and cooperate with them for the common welfare.[13
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein_bin_Ali,_Sharif_of_Mecca#/media/File:Sharif_Husayn.jpg
After the First Zionist Congress in Basel,
Herzl had written in his diary:
If I had to sum up the Basel Congress in one word—which I shall not
do openly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to
say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years,
perhaps, and certainly in 50, everyone will see it.
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