Zionist Restitution of the Ugly Jew’s Image: The Case of Theodor Herzl

Authors

• Artur Kamczycki

Keywords:

Zionism, Theodor Herzl

Abstract

Theodore Herzl (1860–1904), as the son of a respected banker, fully indulged himself in the privileges of the bourgeois life. He was a dandy or a snob, who held  great  disdain  for  those  Jews  whom  he  believed  to  be  old-fashioned  and looking “different”. His view reflects a wider socio-cultural phenomenon among Jews, called Selbsthass, which is characterized by open criticism of the Jewish culture by Jews who consider Jewish ethnic features to be “ugly and stigmatic”. Like many other Jews at that time, Herzl strived to completely adopt a lifestyle, custom, manner, and appearance that would make his Jewishness invisible.
However, during his stay in Paris he realised that emancipation could serve only as camouflage rather than a change in the perception of Jews in Europe. As a result, he revised his attitude towards the issue of ethnic visualisation which, from that time on, would constitute one of the focal points of Zionism’s attention.
This process of a visual restitution, which started at the turn of the nineteenth century, concerned many aspects of Jewish culture. Jewishness was no longer a matter of religion, but a question of racial representation, physiognomic differences, and pertinent aesthetic values, with the evolution of Herzl’s image being an accurate reflection of the process.