How Herzl’s Wardrobe Galvanized the Jews

Theodor Herzl’s imprint on history grows stronger with every new day in the life of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. If there were still divinely inspired writers among us, they would compose the Book of Herzl on a biblical scale. Given our limitations, we simply track and integrate his legacy.

When I began reading and thinking about Zionism, back in my teens (when I imagined I was smarter than everyone else), I thought Herzl was ridiculous for having convened in 1897 the first Zionist Congress in Western Europe—in the concert hall of the Stadtcasino in Basel. Since the heartland of Zionism was obviously among the millions of Jews in tsarist Russia and Galicia, where Lovers of Zion organizations had already sprouted and established colonies in the Land of Israel, why force those young people to come to you rather than go to them? I wondered what kind of snobbery impelled this German speaker to choose a German-speaking venue?

Herzl’s idea as I saw it then was to make Zionism salonfähig, acceptable in high society, the justification being that the movement needed the respect of the Gentile leaders whose help he was seeking; that he wanted to impress the reporters who would hopefully cover this event. Maybe he hoped to show up the Jews of Munich who had prevented the gathering from being held in their city and make them envious of the glamor he was creating at Basel. As part of his effort to dignify the Congress, Herzl decreed that everyone come in formal dress, what my friends and I called “monkey suits,” in order to signify our inverted contempt for anyone who wore one. I thought all this had been pretentious and even dumb.