Max Nordau

German literary critic and writer

• Born: July 29, 1849
• Birthplace: Pest (now Budapest), Hungary
• Died: January 22, 1923
• Place of death: Paris, France

Nordau analyzed negative tendencies in late nineteenth century industrial society and its culture in terms understandable to the popular readers of his day. He also seconded Theodor Herzl in developing the World Zionist Organization, preparing international opinion for the rebirth of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Early Life

Max Nordau (NOHR-dow) was born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in the Pest division of Budapest. He was registered in the synagogue as Simcha Meir and known in his family as Simi. His father, Gabriel Südfeld, was a private tutor and had been a rabbi in Posen, Prussia. A widower with four children, he married Rosalie Sarah, née Nelkin, of Riga, who became the mother of Max and his sister Charlotte. Raised in poverty, young Max enrolled in the Pest German-language Jewish elementary school in 1854, the Roman Catholic gymnasium (secondary school) in 1859, and the Calvinist gymnasium in 1863. In addition, he was instructed by his father in religion and in Greek, Hebrew, and Ladino.

In 1867, Nordau enrolled in the University of Pest premedical program. He did his military service as an army physician at Vienna in 1873, at the same time adopting Max Nordau as his legal name. He received his medical diploma at Pest in January of 1876 and proceeded to the University of Paris to study gynecology. Nordau’s first practice in Pest in 1878 did not satisfy his career plans. In 1880 he moved with his mother and sister to Paris, where he opened an office as a gynecologist and obstetrician in 1882.

Nordau’s medical studies were financed by his journalism. He began writing as a boy for school newspapers and at age eighteen was a regular contributor to Pester Lloyd. His specialty was news sidelights written to be both informative and entertaining. In 1873, Pester Lloyd sent him to cover the Vienna World Exposition and followed this with a travel assignment that took Nordau to Russia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, England, Iceland, France, and Spain. His travel articles made him well known and provided material for two books, Aus dem Wahren Milliardenlande (1878; Paris Sketches, 1884) and Vom Kreml zur Alhambra (1879; from the Kremlin to the Alhambra). Paris unter der Dritten Republik (Paris under the Third Republic) followed in 1880. By 1881, he was a Paris correspondent for the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung and the leading Berlin liberal paper, Vossische Zeitung, as well as Pester Lloyd. He also published short stories, plays, novels, and various articles, in addition to his growing medical practice. As Nordau’s scientific and rationalistic outlook came to supersede many of his earlier religious beliefs, his friendships grew across lines of both religion and nationality. Short statured, he cultivated a full beard that whitened prematurely and gave him a patriarchal appearance. Athletic, his hobbies included swimming and fencing. As Nordau was a bachelor for many years, his mother and sister both religiously observant managed his Paris household.

Life’s Work

Nordau gained a worldwide reputation with the 1883 publication of Die Conventionellen Luegen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization , 1887) which went through seven printings in seven weeks. He attacked religious promises of individual immortality as improbable, monarchism and aristocracy as relics of a dead past, democratic politics as a deceit, economics as a swindle, and marriage as materialistic. The pope denounced the book, Russia and Austria-Hungary banned it, and U.S. publishers put “prohibited in Europe” on the book’s cover. Paradoxe (1885; Paradoxes , 1885) examined the counterplay of optimism and pessimism, the social problem of love, and the baneful influence of prejudice. Nordau followed this with a few novels and plays before his next major success, Entartung (1893; Degeneration , 1895), in which he argued that art during the classical era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment was natural and healthy, and played a positive role in society, while late nineteenth century culture was dominated by negative attitudes and pathological tendencies that reflected the nervous exhaustion of industrialized society. The Romantic movement had opened the door to mysticism, egomania, and other forms of individual escapism. Among the examples he analyzed were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Richard Wagner, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nordau maintained that in varying ways and degrees, all of these individuals had a negative, twisted, or unnatural view of humankind and society.

Degeneration, translated into many languages, was widely read and discussed, and not always calmly. Historian Brooks Adams “enormously admired” the book, and New York Sun literary editor Mayo Hazeltine found it “brilliant.” However, Columbia University’s Nicholas Murray Butler called Nordau “a pathological type,” and psychologist and philosopher William James diagnosed Nordau as “a victim of insane delusions.” Certainly, Degeneration was a stimulating cultural analysis suited to popular readers rather than to academic specialists. Of course, the book did nothing to arrest modernism. Indeed, it brought popular attention to some of the previously obscure Decadent writers, and Nordau’s assertion that “the aberrations of art have no future” was an inaccurate forecast for the twentieth century.

Nordau long claimed to regard himself as “only German,” but ties of family and friendship clearly connected him to the Jewish community, and he was quick to notice and denounce instances of anti-Semitism. He also took a constructive interest in a plan for a Jewish colony in Argentina. In the summer of 1893, while vacationing at Borkum, he received anonymous and threatening anti-Jewish letters on a daily basis. He was deeply disturbed by this experience, and, once back in Paris, he found himself reporting on the 1894 trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, Nordau was also impressed by the breadth and depth of anti-Semitic feeling that the case evoked in France and Europe. His friendship with another Hungarian-German-Jewish correspondent in Paris, Theodor Herzl, took a significant turn in November, 1895, when Herzl described his ideas for creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Nordau agreed to support him in this project and henceforth felt that Zionism gave his life “purpose and content.”

Nordau’s Zionist writings analyzed nineteenth century Jewish legal “emancipation” as hollow and “assimilation” as destructive of Judaism. He urged physical fitness clubs to develop “muscle Jews” capable of rebuilding Zion in Palestine. When Herzl summoned a Zionist Conference of delegates to meet in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, Nordau gave an eloquent “state of the Jews” keynote speech, wrote most of the statement of goals, and became vice president of Herzl’s new World Zionist Organization.

However, while Zionism was almost an integral part of Judaism during the diaspora, it was far from uniform or organized. Spiritual Zionists such as Ahad Ha՚am saw political Zionism as potentially irreligious. The Russo-Polish Zionists of Leo Pinsker had already held their first conference in Cattowitz, Poland, in 1884, represented the congregations most likely to emigrate, and were doubtful about Western “diploma chasers” such as Herzl and Nordau. Herzl spent eight years contacting world leaders, but the best he could manage was a tentative offer of Uganda as a Jewish colony under British rule. Nordau reluctantly supported Herzl’s recommendation to investigate the possibilities of Uganda, but the hostile reaction of the 1903 conference in fact killed the plan, and shortly thereafter an agitated young Zionist in Paris shot at Nordau in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

On Herzl’s premature death in 1904, Nordau was offered the leadership of the World Zionist Organization, but he felt compelled to decline. In 1898 he had married Anna Dons-Kaufman, a Danish Protestant widow. With their daughter, Maxa Nordau, he now had increased family obligations in addition to his medical practice, journalism contracts, and Zionist writings, which of course took time away from preparing his more popular social criticism publications. Further, Chaim Weizmann and the practical Zionists were already challenging Nordau’s direction of policy. Weizmann later complained that Nordau was “a heldentenor, a prima donna. . . . Spade work was not his line.” However, this seems a little ungenerous in view of Weizmann’s consistent opposition to Nordau’s leadership. In fact, Nordau continued to contribute articles to the Zionist cause and continued to keynote conferences as late as 1911. Thereafter, as the practical Zionists dominated meetings, he ceased to attend and by then had resumed his cultural criticism.

Nordau’s Der Sinn der Geschichte (1909; The Interpretation of History , 1910) examined the role and psychology of historians who collect fragmentary evidence, arrange it according to their own personal views, and believe they write objective history when, in fact, they describe their own imaginary versions of the past without any relation to the real world. Nordau suggested that most who write history are unsuited to make history because the historian’s fact-collecting cast of mind tends to inhibit his (or her) capacity to act. He may have had himself in mind. In Die Biologie der Ethik (1920; Morals and Evolution of Man , 1922), Nordau examined the conflict between the egoistic instinct to survive and succeed, and rational social conscience. World War I, he felt, was proof that the courage and self-sacrifice of the soldiers was a moral force that needed to be put to constructive purposes. Nordau’s last and unfinished book, Esencia de la Civilization (1932; the meaning of civilization), dealt with the relationship between personal morality and community ethics.

During World War I, the French interned Nordau as an enemy alien, confiscated his property and savings, and deported him to Spain. He was thus in reduced circumstances while Weizmann of the practical Zionists obtained Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Invited to attend a Zionist conference at London in 1920, Nordau called for recruitment of 500,000 Jews from among Europe’s refugees to form the controlling majority in Palestine. Weizmann knew this was more than the British would concede or the Jews could accomplish in 1920. Nordau’s arguments for the necessity of a Jewish majority in Palestine would become more relevant to Israel after 1948. After the London conference, Nordau’s health declined, curtailing his Zionist activities and forcing cancellation of a planned lecture tour of the United States. He died in Paris on January 22, 1923, and was reburied in Tel Aviv in 1926.

Significance

To a great extent, Nordau was a self-made man of the nineteenth century trained in medicine, gynecology, and obstetrics but also abreast of developments in neurology and psychiatry. At the same time, he was one of Europe’s leading newspaper columnists and a prolific author of short stories, novels, and plays. In addition, he was world famous as a readable critic of nineteenth century life and culture and an advocate of “a philosophy of human solidarity.” Finally, there was “the other Nordau,” cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, chief author of the Basel Program, compelling orator, and prolific writer on Jewry, anti-Semitism, and the aims and tactics of Zionism.

In such a wide field of activity and achievement, there were bound to be imperfections. The chief posthumous charge appears to be that in The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Degeneration he wrote as a liberal antinationalist but then endorsed a nationalistic Zionism. This view overlooks the conservative morality of Nordau’s criticism and misunderstands his concept of Jewish nationalism. In Nordau’s words, “My ideal is to see a Jewish people in the land of the fathers, ennobled by its two-thousand-year-old fortitude of character, respected for its honest and fruitful cultural endeavors, an instrument of wise progress, and a champion of justice, proclaiming and practicing brotherly love.”

Bibliography

Averini, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Includes a chapter on Nordau.

Baldwin, P. M. “Liberalism, Nationalism, and Degeneration: The Case of Max Nordau.” Central European History 131 (June, 1980): 99-120. An analysis of Nordau’s ideas that finds an irreconcilable contradiction between Nordau’s liberalism and his Zionism.

Ben-Horin, Meir. Common Faith, Uncommon People. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1970. Includes a chapter on Nordau’s human solidarity as related to Zionism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Max Nordau, Philosopher of Human Solidarity. New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1956. Views Nordau’s positive message human solidarity as essentially consistent in his general and Zionist writings. Also provides useful biographical information.

Mosse, George L. “Max Nordau, Liberalism, and the New Jew.” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (October, 1992): 565-581. Mosse calls Nordau “a child of his times” and contends that “his Zionism did not run counter to his liberalism.”

Nordau, Anna Dons, and Maxa Nordau. Max Nordau. New York: Nordau Committee, 1943. An affectionate and admiring biography by Nordau’s widow and daughter. An intimate picture of his life, but not a systematic account of his career.

Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin-de-Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Describes how and why Nordau and other European intellectuals were attracted to Zionism and how they shaped Zionism to fit their cosmopolitanism.