I hope this book has demonstrated not only the terrible errors of fact and interpretation in the traditional historiographic representations of Herzl, Nordau, and Jabotinsky, but, more important, the profundity of the truth it all but conceals: the extent to which these three men, along with Ephraim Moses Lilien, came to Zionism not so much from outside the Jewish world - East, West, or in between - but, rather, in sharp and conscious opposition to that Jewish world (or rather those Jewish worlds, which they detested and rejected). They came to Zionism on the basis of their parallel engagements not with "Europe" or with a "virile instinctive" notion of nationalism but from a particular and fascinating moment in European history, culture, and thought - the fin de siecle. Despite the nearly universal repetition of the claim that they were liberals, either before and after they became Zionists, I hope I have demonstrated that this was not the case, and that Nordau and Jabotinsky can only be understood against the backdrop of Social Darwinism in the West and the peculiar variation on positivism embraced by Russian radicals as well as the fundamental aesthetic and philosophical stances of Symbolism, Decadence, and art nouveau in the fin de siecle, which also defined the development of the Zionist art of Ephraim Moses Lilien.

[…] in the past half century, the Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky (and to some extent that of Max Nordau, if and when it is remembered at all) has been ineluctably transformed, cleansed of its embeddedness in cosmopolitan European culture, and - as it were - re-Judaized, denuded (both Jabotinsky and Nordau would say emasculated) of its intriguing complexity, its fundamental cultural and intellectual values, its rejection of both sentimentality and religion, not to speak of the self-doubts Jabotinsky himself revealed in his novels and plays. Schechtman's embrace of the Trinity metaphor in his evaluation of Herzl, Nordau, and Jabotinsky ["a direct line leading from Herzl through Nordau to Jabotinsky"] would seem not only heretical to the vast majority of current followers of Nordau and Jabotinsky, but, even more profoundly, incomprehensible - both literally and symbolically.

This is true not only in the real world of politics, but in the realm of history writing as well. In the past few years, the history of the State of Israel since I948 has been subjected to a wrenching process of reinterpretation and debate as the so-called New Historians have attacked every premise of traditional Israeli historiography and collective memory. It is fascinating to note, from the sidelines, that both these historical revisionists as well as the traditionalists often invoke the name and memory of Vladimir Jabotinsky as a combatant in their debates; but the Jabotinsky they invoke, either as friend or most often as foe, is the mythologized Jabitinsky of post.1948 Zionist polemics […].

(Stanislawski 2001, S. 246-48)