In Europe

remained the cordial Viennese who enjoyed sitting around the table with the same Jewish capitalists he hounded in the city council. ‘I decide who's a Jew and who isn't.’ That was Lüger.
    In 1922, a decade after Lüger's death, the Viennese journalist Hugo Bettauer published
Die Stadt ohne Juden: ein Roman von übermorgen
(The City Without Jews: a Novel for the Day After Tomorrow), a satire of antiSemitism. Bettauer described a Vienna from which the Jews had suddenly disappeared. There would be no more bankers to advise non-Jews on their speculations, non-Jewish women would lose all interest in fashion because they no longer needed to compete with Jewish women, prostitutes with drunken pimps could no longer be comforted with presents from their soft-hearted Jewish admirers. Three years later, Bettauer, a friend of Karl Kraus, was shot and killed by a student, then forgotten.
    The response to all this – Zionism – was, predictably enough, invented in Vienna as well. Why should the Jews continue to refuse national status? Would they not be much better off actually pursuing such a status? This was the theory developed by the liberal Jewish leader Theodor Herzl around the turn of the century: the time had come to set up a new Jewish state. At the same time, Herzl hoped this would be the salvation of liberalism: his new Jewish state would be, above all, a liberal one.
    Herzl came from a wealthy, enlightened family in which religion amounted to little more than a ‘pious family memory’. In his younger years he considered himself a citizen of Vienna like any other, and during his student days even joined an outspokenly nationalistic
Burschenschaft
. When his fraternity club began gravitating towards anti-Semitism, he offered his resignation on the basis of his Jewish background, and his ‘love of freedom’. But he was deeply offended when his ‘brothers’ dropped him with no further ado. As a correspondent for the
Neue Freie Presse
in Paris, where he reported on the Dreyfus affair, he heard the modern, cultured French shouting ‘
À mort! À mort les juifs!
’, and realised that assimilation itself could not safeguard Jewish dignity. Herzl decided to turn things around. In the past, the Jews had always sought solutions in the outside world. Now they had to understand that the promised land was
in them
, in their own minds, their own wills. ‘The promised land lies there where we will bear it,’ he wrote. ‘The Jews who desire it will have their own state, and will deserve it as well.’
    In 1896 he wrote his most important piece of work,
Der Judenstaat
–
An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question
. Support began pouring in from such major Jewish philanthropists as the German baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschilds, while his speeches also drew an unparalleled enthusiastic response from the Jews in the ghettos. ‘This is no longer the elegant Dr Herzl from Vienna, this is a royal heir to King David, risen from the grave,’ crowed the writer Ben Ami after the first Zionist congress in 1897.
    But what did Theodor Herzl really want? In the National Library I ploughed my way through a yellowed copy of
Der Judenstaat
, and several of his other writings. What strikes one is the way in which Herzl tried again and again to make this dream state attractive to poor Eastern European Jews as well. Just as Schönerer, through his stories about German tribes and rites, had used history to drum up a nation, just as Lüger had harkened back to the medieval Catholic order, so too Herzl repeatedly referred to the mighty Israel of King David. And, like his foes, he also linked that past to the modern age. The International Socialists dreamed of an eight hour working day, so Herzl's Jewish state would have a seven hour working day, reflected in the white national flag with its seven golden stars. ‘Humane, well lighted and healthy schools’ would be built everywhere. Much of the work would be done by ‘workers’ brigades’ of young people. Hebrew would not be the main language, for there would be a great many languages. The rabbinate would be respected, but also expected to keep to the temples, as the army to its barracks. Although he recognised their propaganda value, Palestine and Jerusalem were not Herzl's first choice.
    The conclusion I arrived at was strange, but almost inevitable: the Promised Land of which Israel's pioneers dreamed was, in its deepest sense, not so much a Jewish Palestine as a