Davis Center: Messiah or "Simple Son"? Theodor Herzl and East European Jewry | Derek Penslar

Date: 

Wednesday, February 8, 2017, 4:15pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S250

 

This talk employs Theodor Herzl’s relationship with eastern European Jewry as a case study of the social construction of charisma and the legitimization of leadership. There was considerable tension between Theodor Herzl and the Eastern European Zionist activists who had founded the Lovers of Zion movement more than a decade before Herzl burst upon the scene. They viewed Herzl with a mixture of veneration, envy, suspicion, and derision. Yet it was Herzl, not they, who captured the attention of the masses, dazzled them with his very strangeness, and replenished their self-esteem. Herzl’s position as a secular, assimilated, western Jew, alien to the world of traditional Jewish practice and culture, enhanced his charismatic appeal to Eastern European Jews who would have been far less likely to accept one of their own.

Derek J. Penslar is the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto and the Stanley Lewis Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. He recently joined the Harvard History Department as a visiting professor and in 2018 will assume the William Lee Frost Chair in Jewish History. Penslar's research specialties are the history of modern European Jewry, Zionism, and the state of Israel. Penslar’s books include Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918 (1991), Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001); Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (2006), and Jews and the Military: A History (2013) and other. Penslar is currently writing a biography of Theodor Herzl for Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series.

Speaker(s): 

Derek Penslar, Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History; University of Toronto; Stanley Lewis Visiting Professor of Israel Studies, University of Oxford; Visiting Professor, Department of History, Harvard University

Sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

For more information, please call 617-495-4037.