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JEW ISH BOOK ANNUAL
tu rn ed me back to the Jewishness which I had forgo tten .”3 Such
was one Jew’s reb irth th rough Zionism, a conversion closely p a r
allel to Herzl’s awakening following the Dreyfus Affair which
dem onstrated to both tha t Jewish assimilation in Europe was a
hopeless illusion. Reading Herzl’s
DerJudenstaat (TheJewish State)
in 1895 prior to its publication, an emotional Nordau embraced
its au tho r, proclaiming, “I f you are insane, we are insane
toge ther. Count on me!”4
In a new preface to the German edition o f
Conventional Lies
(1909) marking the book’s twenty-fifth year o f publication,
N o rdau expressed satisfaction with his success while lamenting
tha t his “proclamation o f tru th and the liberating word o f reason”
did not cause the “worm-eaten institutions” to d isappear over
nigh t as he had envisioned in 1883. He could, however, po in t to
g rea ter self-realization stemming from w idespread diffusion o f
learn ing and science, with the old monarchies now being replaced
by parliamentary democracies and a separation o f church and
state in France. An o lder and wiser N o rdau reflected tha t “the
most vulgar er ro rs” are still to be found because in the final
analysis, man is ru led by feelings, not reason, hence the persist
ence o f so many closed minds. Happily, the situation o f thirty
years ago when Alfred W erner
(The Reconstructionist
,Jan . 9, 1953)
could not find any o f N o rdau ’s books in his search o f “scores o f
bookshops on th ree continents” no longer holds, thanks to the
availability o f rep r in t editions today.
T he repu ta tion o f the once world-famous au tho r o f
Conven
tional Lies
and
Degeneration
has greatly dim inished in the literary
world, his influence as a social critic and litte ra teu r having waned
already du r ing his lifetime though his name was certainly kept
alive in Jewish circles as an awesome Zionist orator . According to
Zvi Woyslavski, the Hebrew critic, N o rdau ’s views “were not taken
3 Autobiographical letter from Nordau to Reuben Brainin, June 16, 1896,
The
New Palestine,
Jan. 26, 1923.
4 Anna and Maxa Nordau,
Max Nordau, a Biography
(New York, 1943), p. 120.
Nordau’s contribution to the Zionist cause is challenged by Chaim Weizmann,
Trial and Error
(New York, 1949), p. 46, who observes, “The passionate devo
tion o f selflessness which commanded respect in Herzl was lacking in Nordau,
whom we found artificial, as well as inclined to arrogance.. . . he was an ardent
Zionist only during the sessions o f the [Zionist] Congresses. During the other
three hundred and fifty odd days o f the year we heard only occasionally o f him
within the movement; for then he attended to his business, which was that of
writer.”