1. Max Nordau was a co-founder of the Zionist Organization together with Theodor Herzl, and president or vice-president of several Zionist congresses.
25 Facts About Max Nordau
1. 2.
Max Nordau's father, Gabriel Sudfeld, was a rabbi, but earned his livelihood as a Hebrew tutor.
3.
Max Nordau then traveled for six years, visiting the principal countries of Europe.
4.
Max Nordau changed his name before going to Berlin in 1873.
5.
Max Nordau worked in Paris as a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, and it was in Paris that he spent most of his life.
6.
Max Nordau was an example of a fully assimilated and acculturated European Jew.
7.
Max Nordau went on to play a major role in the World Zionist Organization; indeed Max Nordau's relative fame certainly helped bring attention to the Zionist movement.
8.
Max Nordau can be credited with giving the organization a democratic character.
9.
Max Nordau denied the charge and afterward went to reside in Madrid.
10.
One of the central tenets of Max Nordau's beliefs was evolution, in all things, and he concluded that emancipation was not born out of evolution.
11.
Max Nordau cited England as an exception to this continental antisemitism that proved the rule.
12.
Max Nordau further explored the concept of the "muscle Jew" in a 1900 article of the Jewish Gymnastics Journal.
13.
Max Nordau was central to the Zionist Congresses which played such a vital part in shaping what Zionism would become.
14.
Indeed, the fact that Max Nordau, the trenchant essayist and journalist, was a Jew came as a revelation for many.
15.
Herzl obviously took centre stage, making the first speech at the Congress; Max Nordau followed him with an assessment of the Jewish condition in Europe.
16.
Max Nordau used statistics to paint a portrait of the dire straits of Eastern Jewry and expressed his belief in the destiny of Jewish people as a democratic nation state, free of what he saw as the constraints of Emancipation.
17.
Max Nordau 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.
18.
Max Nordau saw the Jewish people as having a unique gift for politics, a calling which they were unable to fulfil without their own nation-state.
19.
Whereas Herzl favoured the idea of an elite forming policy, Max Nordau insisted the Congress have a democratic nature of some sort, calling for votes on key topics.
20.
At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Max Nordau defended a Jewish state in the Holy Land, publicizing a support from the British Empire, the Kaiser, the Russian Empire and a possible support from the American government in a near future.
21.
Max 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.
22.
In Reflexions sur la question gay, Didier Eribon refers to a whole section in Max Nordau's book targeting Oscar Wilde in aggressive terms: "Wilde loves immorality, sin, and crime".
23.
Max Nordau's Degeneration is cited by William James in his lecture on Neurology and Religion at the beginning of The Varieties of Religious Experience.
24.
James mocks the author for his "bulky book" on the grounds that he exemplifies the then-current school of medical materialism, stating that Max Nordau "has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way by using medical arguments".
25.
In 1926 Max Nordau's remains were moved to Tel Aviv's Trumpeldor Cemetery.