The Founding Fathers of Zionism by Netanyahu Benzion

Author:Netanyahu, Benzion [Netanyahu, Benzion]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: zionism
ISBN: 9781933267159
Publisher: Balfour Books
Published: 2012-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

IV. Warning

Bernard Shaw describes the extraordinary result of Nordau’s blow. He wrote that for several years “Nordau was master of the field, and the newspaper champions of Modern Literature and Art were on their knees before him, weeping and protesting their innocence.” Moreover, even the majority of the worshipers of the idols were entirely overwhelmed, and, as Shaw further tells us, “counsel on the other side mostly threw up their briefs in consternation, and began to protest that they entirely agreed with Dr. Nordau, and that though they had perhaps dallied a little with Rossetti, Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and the rest of the degenerates before their true character had been exposed, yet they had never really approved of them.” But “counsel on the other side” were really too hasty in their surrender. Several years later they repented. What had happened was clear. The tremendous knowledge, skill and eloquence, the incontradictable logic of the author subdued them momentarily. They did not and could not understand the book altogether. They considered it the work of a great critic, a formidable and dangerous adversary with all the resources of science at his command. They considered it the work of a physician or psychologist, a disciple of Charcot and Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso, his diagnosis difficult to trifle with. They certainly did not see the Socratic champion who foresaw a great catastrophe arising from the teachings of the Sophists. How could they, indeed? The prophecy was for coming generations. Today, we begin to understand it.

This, too, was a cruel book, cruel chiefly for those who were publicly analyzed, and therefore, much more annoying and disturbing than any of Nordau’s other books. It was a fierce, ruthless attack which by the most drastic means sought to annihilate the influence exercised by the leading personages of the age. The attack was made because Nordau was certain of his unerring judgment, or, better, of his vision; because he was sure of the great danger to humanity the ideas of Nietzsche and Wagner and Tolstoy and all the rest. He could not be merciful. Too much was at stake.

Some critics assumed that Nordau was wrong when he used the operating knife of the surgeon in an attempt to analyze the mental constitution of geniuses. No doubt he was wrong. The secrets of the soul, especially of a soul endowed with powerful talents, cannot be easily revealed; surely not by means of its artistic expressions alone, nor through the general biography of the artist. But, although the method may be criticized, much of the content and the major aims, were, and remain, above criticism.

The hallmark of the 1890s, during which Degeneration appeared, was the “revaluation of all values.” It was, however, a subterranean process; implicit in the age, but unnoticed by it. Nordau alone saw “one epoch of history unmistakably in its decline, and another announcing its approach.” He heard “a sound of rending in every tradition,” and he knew what it meant. It meant “a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, theoretically still in force.

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