Max Nordau

Born in Budapest and brought up in a poor family, Max Nordau (b. Südfeld) received his primary education from his father, a rabbi who had moved to Budapest from Prussia. As an adolescent, Nordau rejected Judaism completely and oriented himself toward German culture; he remained distant from all forms of religious Judaism thereafter. Trained for a career in medicine, Nordau traveled widely across Europe after receiving his degree, eventually settling in Paris in 1880. Considering himself a student of the “heritable criminologist” Cesare Lombroso, Nordau gained fame and notoriety for his 1883 book Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization) and his even more controversial book, Entartung (Degeneration). Attacking those elements of modern liberal civilization that he regarded as rooted in abstraction rather than real “evolution,” Nordau indicted a wide range of cultural phenomena—including much of the art of the fin de siècle—as corrupt and corrupting. After meeting Theodor Herzl in 1892, and shocked by the Dreyfus Affair, Nordau became an ardent and prominent supporter of Zionism, cofounding the Zionist Organization with Herzl in 1897. His general fame as a critic and thinker lent weight to the movement. His own Zionist writings reflected his preexisting doubts about the strength of liberal ideas and protections for Europe’s Jewish minority coupled with a strong concern for Jewish—especially male Jewish—“regeneration” as a central goal of Zionism; encapsulated in his call for a “Jewry of muscles,” this was to be (male) bodily regeneration as well as social regeneration.