Their feet will become fins again

A Zionist movement that transplanted Jews to a new land, according to Theodor Herzl, would instigate physical and psychological transformations in Jews once they adapted to their new environment.  Herzl’s faith in Darwin’s description of the effects of the environment on organisms was a central feature of his confidence in Zionism: Jews would undergo positive adaptations in a Jewish state and in the environment of Israel, where Jews would enjoy political autonomy, cultural development, and the cultivation of physicality. A diary entry by Herzl points to his early interest in Darwinian processes and how they relate to the Jews.  The 1895 entry reports on a conversation he had with his colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, Ludwig Speidel, a theater and music critic, in which Herzl spelled out his idea of how evolutionary laws act on the Jews in the Diaspora – by encouraging a “false” assimilation – and how these same laws would reveal the true biology of Jews once they arrive in a Jewish state:

Ich halte [den Antisemitismus] für eine dem Judencharakter nützliche Bewegung.  […]  Erzogen wird man durch Härte.  Die Juden werden sich anpassen.  Sie sind wie Seehunde, die der Weltzufall ins Wasser warf.  Sie nehmen Gestalt und Eigenschaften von Fischen an, was sie doch nicht sind.  Kommen sie nun wieder auf festes Land und dürfen da ein paar Generationen leben, so werden sie wieder aus ihren Flossen Füsse machen.[1]

In the above passage, which was adapted from a section of Darwin’s Origin in which he discusses the pitfalls of evolutionary classification, Herzl exposes the difference in nature between real affinities and analogical resemblance and transfers the idea to Jewish existence.[2]  Real affinities occur when organisms display similarities that can be reliably used to group them into species categories, while mere resemblances result in an evolutionary misreading: even though two organisms have similar features because of environmental conditions, this superficial similarity covers up an essential difference between them.  The fin-shaped limbs of the porpoise thus appear to betray an affinity to fish, while covering up the fact that the former is actually a mammal.  Herzl suggests that the same holds true for assimilated Jews: their similarity to Europeans is not constitutive, but rather superficial. Put Jews in a new land, Herzl seems to say, we will find the same principles at work as Darwin found in animal mimicry: “such resemblances will not reveal – but rather tend to conceal their blood-relationship.” [3]

As the above passage on the porpoise shows, Herzl’s Zionism is Darwinian theory in action, where evolution is speeded up so that transformations and “true affinities” become visible.  Herzl gained notoriety for his practical attempts to act on his evolutionary experiment to transplant the Jews into a new environment and observe the modifications in Jewish psychology and physiognomy as they unfolded.  Yet throughout his career, Herzl repeatedly turned to fiction and drama to explore the outcomes of this new, Jewish evolutionary strategy. But fiction and political reality came together in Herzl’s practical Zionism and together they offered the possibility for a new laboratory for evolutionary ideas. As the geneticist Raphael Falk has shown, many turn-of-the-century evolutionary scientists believed that Zionism would “[provide] a unique opportunity to examine at least some universal popular genetic and Darwinian evolutionary principles in humans.”[4]