It cannot be denied that the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites. The Zionists were keenly aware of this problem but they were not deterred by it. The Jewish nationalist newspaper Serubabel⁶ even admitted that “the Jewish national idea may indeed coincide at some point with anti-Semitism.”

Moreover, some of the Zionist ideologues viewed the new anti-Semitism of the 1880s as a by-product of the nationalist movements in Europe: “Like Zionism, anti-Semitism is a consequence of the great nationalist movement that fills the vacuum of the end of our century.”⁷ This notion can be understood in light of the premise — then popular among the Zionists — that anti-Semitism was not directed against all the Jews.

It is at this point that the Zionist criticism converged with the liberal apologetics (which will be discussed later in these pages), though these two trends were moving in opposite directions. While the liberal apologetics pointed to the shnorrer, the yeshiva bocher, and the “Talmud Jew” as the ones to blame for hatred of the Jews, the Zionists believed that anti-Semitism was provoked primarily by the assimilationists and nouveau riche: “It is not against the jews who maintain their ancient customs… that anti-Semitism is directed but rather against those Jews who cover up their Jewishness with a veneer of German culture.[”]

However, this claim was true only of those German anti-Semites who rejected the Enlightenment’s premise that the Problem of the Jews stemmed from their cultural backwardness, and were frightened rather of their modernizing potency that eventually would disrupt the traditional fabric of German society. According to this outlook, the most dangerous Jews were indeed the assimilationists, who were also the main enemy of the Zionists.

[…]

Nathan Birnbaum […] was probably the most original Zionist ideologue of the pre-Herzl era, a dynamic young man who was among the founders of the first Jewish student society, Kadimah, and the editor of the first German-language Jewish-nationalist newspaper, Selbst-Emancipation. As early as 1885 in the initial issue of the paper, which he both edited and for the most part wrote, Birnbaum published an article entitled “Our Drawbacks” that read in part:

The base spirit of usury that has kept our hand from the labor of the plow and the hammer, the senseless deceit that eagerly anticipates the undoing of others, the brazen conceit and the luxury that is flaunted every summer at the resorts of Karlsbad and Nice, the pursuit of honor and wealth that stops at nothing, the cowardliness that drives us from the ranks of the fighters and rescues us from the manly duel, our ridiculous and alienating appearance — this list of merits and virtues derives from a single source: our Semitic stock.¹⁴

Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, pages 9–10:

The founder of the political Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, was aware of the philosophical common ground between Zionism and anti-Semitism when he wrote: “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty [that] we want.”¹ Herzl “frequently asserted, in all innocence, that anti-Semites would be the Jews’ best friends and anti-Semitic governments their best allies. But this faith in anti-Semites expressed very eloquently and even touchingly how close his own state of mind was to that of his hostile environment and how intimately he did belong to the ‘alien’ world…”

“Anti-Semitism was an overwhelming force and the Jews would have either to make use of it or be swallowed up by it. In his own words, anti-Semitism was the ‘propelling force’ responsible for all Jewish suffering since the destruction of the Temple and it would continue to make the Jews suffer until they learned how to use it for their own advantage. In expert hands this ‘propelling force’ would prove the most salutory factor in Jewish life; it would be used in the same way that boiling water is used to produce steam power.”²

Other than European Fascism, I can think of no other movement that has defended antisemitism as regularly as Zionism has, and I never see Herzlians discuss this sordid history. The best that they could say to this is ‘it was a different time back then’, an unconvincing excuse given that they have shown time and time again to have no more than an ephemeral concern in the antisemitism of Elon Musk, Azov, John Hagee, Donald Trump, and other widely respected xenophobes. That modern Zionists can constantly raise the alarm over antisemitism while glossing over the sentiments of Theodor Herzl and others… astonishes me.