Divine Present

He wasn’t a religious man. Herzl didn’t even circumcise his son. He was assimilated in so many ways. But he produced a national Zionism - one that cannot be considered messianic, but still, there were some who saw in him a special charisma, and called it messianic. Including Herzl himself, of himself.

Subtle Impulse

Ben Gurion himself, without getting ahead of ourselves, wrote in his memoirs, exactly that messianic impression - and he was a child of 10 then, in a little town in Poland at the synagogue, when Herzl visited, in 1896! 

When Herzl visited Israel in 1898, he was received by some in the Jewish community as just that: a messianic leader. With his beard and all.

In Herzl’s novel, Altneuland, the characters mention a bit of messianic figures, the false messiah Shabbtai Zvi who got messianic false expectations going, when simply the Jews then and now have a deep expectation and longingness for messianic redemption. (This is another empirical indication that messianism was in the consciousness of Herzl.)

We also happen to know that he was friends with a Christian minister at the British Embassy in Vienna, named William Hechler, who encouraged Herzl in his Zionist work, that it is the beginning of the messianic redemption.

As mentioned previously, Herzl was probably influenced by his grandfather, a disciple of Yehuda Alkalai. It feels quite evident, when you look at Herzl’s ideas and the writings of Hess, Kalisher, and Alkalai - that there are ideas that are too close: Herzl is acting out the secular, practical ideas laid out by the harbingers. 

Living the Dream

But the most interesting element in the conspiracy theory of Theodore Herzl’s mysterious messianic self-consciousness, was the tale he told in 1903 to the biographer writer Reuben Brainin.

Herzl said he had a dream when he was 12 upon reading a book in German about the Messiah King of Israel, he felt sadness and longing, his imagination was inspired, and he thought to write a poem on the legendary figure.

Herzl reportedly recounted that the messianic legendary figure apparently continued to take root deep in his sub-conscious, in his heart, until one night he dreamt that he was approached by-

“the King Messiah, very old and full of majesty, took me in his arms and soared up on the wings of the wind. On that cloud I saw the image of Moses, his face was familiar to me from the sculptor by Michaelangelo.

The Messiah called to Moses and said “for this youth I have prayed”, and to me he said, “Go and say to all the Jews that soon I will come and do great miracles and deeds for them and for the whole world.””

Then Herzl told Brainin that he had not told anyone ever of this dream, and that later on in life he read of someone saying that electricity has in its power to bring people closer and turn hearts of sons to their fathers and that electricity is the King Messiah, and the young Herzl was then quite upset because the messianic legend is much more than that, more noble and fair, but still, he decided there and then that he would because of that go on to study electrical engineering.

Secret of the Heart

The mindset of Herzl as he presented Zionism did not include anything blatantly messianic, because he was pressed from both sides, (1) the religious camp was mostly against Zionism as messianism because of their deterministic conservative position and aversion to anything secular, while (2) the seculars were also against messianic Zionism because of the zealous and religious aspect of it.

[Even Mizrachi as religious Zionism was careful not to utilize messianic indicators, to play it safe, between the secular socialists and the religious and Haredi camp.]

So Herzl did not do direct Zionistic messianism but he did all sorts of little things, little things like present the new Jewish state as the manifestation of the potential of the nation with romantic and nostalgic descriptions, suggestions of utopian nature and self-redemption, and all sorts of little things that were previously typically part of the messianic Zionist traditional program.

And then he died…