Max Nordau


Max Simon Nordau was a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic.
He was a co-founder of the Zionist Organization together with Theodor Herzl, and president or vice president of several Zionist congresses.
As a social critic, he wrote The Conventional Lies of Our Civilisation, Degeneration, and Paradoxes. Although not his most popular or successful work whilst alive, Degeneration is the book most often remembered and cited today.

Biography

Simon Maximilian Südfeld was born in Pest, Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Austrian Empire. His father, Gabriel Südfeld, was a rabbi, but earned his livelihood as a Hebrew tutor. As an Orthodox Jew, Nordau attended a Jewish elementary school and earned a medical degree from the University of Pest in 1872. He then traveled for six years, visiting the principal countries of Europe. He changed his name before going to Berlin in 1873. In 1878, he began the practice of medicine in Budapest. In 1880 he went to Paris. He worked in Paris as a correspondent for Die Neue Freie Presse, and it was in Paris that he spent most of his life.
Before entering the university, he had begun his literary career at Budapest as contributor and dramatic critic for Der Zwischenact. Subsequently, he was an editorial writer and correspondent for several other newspapers. His newspaper writings were collected and furnished the material for his earlier books. He was a disciple of Cesare Lombroso.
Nordau was an example of a fully assimilated and acculturated European Jew. Despite being raised religious, Nordau was an agnostic. He married a Christian woman of Danish origin. Despite his Hungarian background, he felt affiliated to German culture, writing in an autobiographical sketch, "When I reached the age of fifteen, I left the Jewish way of life and the study of the Torah... Judaism remained a mere memory and since then I have always felt as a German and as a German only." Max Nordau was the father of painter Maxa Nordau.
Nordau's conversion to Zionism was eventually triggered by the Dreyfus Affair. Many Jews, amongst them Theodor Herzl, saw in the Dreyfus Affair evidence of the universality of antisemitism.
Nordau went on to play a major role in the Zionist Organisation; indeed Nordau's relative fame certainly helped bring attention to the Zionist movement. He can be credited with giving the organisation a democratic character.
When World War I broke out he, a native of Hungary, was accused of German sympathies. He denied the charge and afterward went to reside in Madrid. An attempt to assassinate him was made in the latter part of 1903.

Zionism

Dreyfus affair

Nordau's conversion to Zionism is in many ways typical of the rise of Zionism amongst Western European Jewry. The Dreyfus affair was central to Theodor Herzl's conviction that Zionism was now necessary. Herzl's views were formed during his time in France where he recognised the universality of antisemitism; the Dreyfus Affair cemented his belief in the failure of assimilation. Nordau also witnessed the Paris mob outside the École Militaire crying "à morts les juifs!".
His role of friend and advisor to Herzl, who was working as the correspondent for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, began here in Paris. This trial went beyond a miscarriage of justice and in Herzl's words "contained the wish of the overwhelming majority in France, to damn a Jew, and in this one Jew, all Jews." Whether or not the antisemitism manifested in France during the Dreyfus Affair was indicative of the majority of the French or simply a very vocal minority is open to debate. However the very fact that such sentiment had manifested itself in France was particularly significant. This was the country often seen as the model of the modern enlightened age, that had given Europe the Great Revolution and beginnings of Jewish Emancipation.

Failure of emancipation

Nordau's work as a critic of European civilisation and where it was heading certainly contributed to his eventual role in Zionism. One of the central tenets of Nordau's beliefs was evolution, in all things, and he concluded that emancipation was not born out of evolution. French rationalism of the 18th century, based on pure logic, demanded that all men be treated equally. Nordau perceived Jewish Emancipation the result of 'a regular equation: Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings, consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man.' This Emancipation was written in the statute books of Europe, but contrasted with popular social consciousness. It was this which explained the apparent contradiction of equality before the law. Yet the existence of antisemitism, and in particular 'racial' antisemitism, was no longer based on old religious bigotry. Nordau cited England as an exception to this continental antisemitism that proved the rule. "In England, Emancipation is a truth…It had already been completed in the heart before legislation expressly confirmed it." Only if Emancipation came from changes within society, as opposed to abstract ideas imposed upon society, could it be a reality. Nordau's rejection of the accepted idea of Emancipation was not based entirely on the Dreyfus Affair. It had manifested itself much earlier in The Conventional Lies of Our Civilisation ', and in reviling 'degenerate' and 'lunatic' antisemitism in Degeneration '.

Muscular Judaism

Nordau also, at the 1898 Zionist Congress, coined the term "muscular Judaism" as a descriptor of a Jewish culture and religion which directed its adherents to reach for certain moral and corporeal ideals which, through discipline, agility and strength, would result in a stronger, more physically assured Jew who would outshine the long-held stereotype of the weak, intellectually sustained Jew. He would further explore the concept of the "muscle Jew" in a 1900 article of the Jewish Gymnastics Journal.

World Zionist Congress

Nordau was central to the Zionist Congresses which played such a vital part in shaping what Zionism would become. Herzl had favoured the idea of a Jewish newspaper and an elitist "Society of Jews" to spread the ideas of Zionism. It was Nordau, convinced that Zionism had to at least appear democratic, despite the impossibility of representing all Jewish groups, who persuaded Herzl of the need for an assembly. This appearance of democracy certainly helped counter accusations that the "Zionists represented no one but themselves." There would be eleven such Congresses in all. The first, which Nordau organised, was in Basle, 29–31 August 1897. His fame as an intellectual helped draw attention to the project. Indeed, the fact that Max Nordau, the trenchant essayist and journalist, was a Jew came as a revelation for many. Herzl obviously took centre stage, making the first speech at the Congress; Nordau followed him with an assessment of the Jewish condition in Europe. Nordau used statistics to paint a portrait of the dire straits of Eastern Jewry and also expressed his belief in the destiny of Jewish people as a democratic nation state, free of what he saw as the constraints of Emancipation.
Nordau's speeches to the World Zionist Congress reexamined the Jewish people, in particular stereotypes of the Jews. He fought against the tradition of seeing the Jews as merchants or business people, arguing that most modern financial innovations such as insurance had been invented by gentiles. He saw the Jewish people as having a unique gift for politics, a calling which they were unable to fulfil without their own nation-state. Whereas Herzl favoured the idea of an elite forming policy, Nordau insisted the Congress have a democratic nature of some sort, calling for votes on key topics. According to a 2004 article in the left-wing newspaper Haaretz, Nordau was at one time a staunch eugenicist.
Nordau died in Paris, France in 1923.

''Degeneration'' (1892)

Nordau's major work Entartung is a moralistic attack on what he believed to be degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of a range of the rising social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and its perceived effects on the human body.
In Réflexions sur la question gay, Didier Eribon refers to a whole section in Nordau's book targeting Oscar Wilde in aggressive terms: "Wilde loves immorality, sin, and crime".
According to Eribon, the two volumes of Degeneration are centred around a description of the artistic and literary currents of an "end-of-century" that was leading society to "ruin".
Nordau attacks symbolists, mystics, Pre-Raphaelites, Wagnerism, Aestheticism, Decadentism.
Huysmans and Zola are also targeted by him as "neurotics" and "the worst kind of enemies of society", against whom the latter had "a duty to defend itself". He sustained that society was "at the highest of a serious intellectual epidemic, some kind of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria, such that it is only natural to hear a generalized, anguished questioning: ‘What is going to happen?’"
Therefore, he called upon judges, teachers, politicians, all those who wished to protect civilization, to organize repression and censorship.
As for psychiatrists, their role would be predominant in such academia of "honest people" in charge of condemning "works that speculate on immorality". Any artist whom this small cluster of "the most qualified men of the people" might dislike would be doomed, because in such case "both the man and his work would be annihilated".
Nordau's Degeneration is cited by William James in his lecture on Neurology and Religion at the beginning of The Varieties of Religious Experience. James mocks the author for his "bulky book" on the grounds that he exemplifies the then-current school of medical materialism, stating that Nordau "has striven to the value of works of genius in a wholesale way by using medical arguments".

Commemoration

In 1926 Nordau's remains were moved to Tel Aviv's Trumpeldor Cemetery. A major Tel Aviv street is named :he:שדרות נורדאו|Nordau Boulevard.

Published works