Theodor Mommsen was infatuated.
Julius Caesar, wrote a future Nobel laureate in The History of Rome, was “a statesman genius,” one so “perfect” that such a figure emerged only “once in a thousand years,” like the “consummate beauty” that even the most gifted painter “can only be silent” in its face.
Written in 1856, it was the kind of partiality that historians are expected to avoid, reflecting a German nationalist’s thirst for a charismatic leader who would unite his politically splintered people. That great leader would be far wiser, bolder, and more visionary than ordinary people. Charisma, the gift of natural leadership, would make that superhero deliver what no one else could achieve.
A similar attitude inspired Zionist historian Joseph Klausner’s depiction of the Messiah as “Judaism’s Ubermensch,” a superhero “far greater and stronger than the multitude, a personality to which all willingly submit.”
Inspired by Mommsen’s portrait of Caesar, Klausner painted Hasmonean King Alexander Janneus not as the Judean despot that rabbinical memory recalled, but as “a great king… dedicated to his country’s expansion and the spread of its faith.”
WWII produced fascist nightmares that tainted the charismatic leader
Such thinking was legitimate, even common, among German-educated intellectuals for generations – until World War II. The fascist nightmare produced a new breed of historians who realized that charisma is not necessarily a gift, and in fact can become a curse.
Writing in his acclaimed Caesar: A Biography, historian Christian Meier shrank Mommsen’s superhero into an opportunistic politician who had no coherent vision of Rome’s future, and thus did not shape the great events in which he played a central role. Instead, Caesar was now portrayed as a shrewd tactician who responded to events that were shaped by forces larger than himself.
For Jewish graduates of the 20th century, suspicion of charisma goes without saying, even though charisma also did us good, most memorably when David Ben-Gurion used it to win war, and when Menachem Begin used it to deliver peace. Now, however, the Jewish state is in the process of shifting from an era of charisma to an era of anti-charisma.
How long this transition will last is anyone’s guess, but for an Israel crushed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s overbearing charisma, the post-charismatic era’s emergence will not be one day too early.
Israel has already had two post-charismatic eras, and their results were surprisingly good.
The current age of charisma began in 1996, when Netanyahu first became prime minister. Though there were other prime ministers during the subsequent decades, Netanyahu shaped the era. And Netanyahu, even his rivals agree, led by charisma.
Netanyahu was more handsome, eloquent, and brash than any of his opponents. None could work a crowd, manage a press interview, phrase a political slogan, engineer a journalistic photo, or deliver a televised speech more effectively than he could.
In turn for all of this, and as has so often happened with charisma, these merits came coupled with a soloist’s failure to consult, or even just tolerate the presence of, other able people. The charismatic leader thus gradually became not merely the government’s leader, but the government itself.
How will Israel fill Netanyahu's big shoes?
That is why people now wonder, after surveying his potential successors: how will they get into his big shoes? It is the same question people asked in 1963, when David Ben-Gurion stepped down after leading Israel’s creation, and that is what people asked in 1983, when Menachem Begin stepped down six years after unseating Ben-Gurion’s successors.
In both cases, the question was even harsher than it is now, not only because Ben-Gurion and Begin were so much larger than Netanyahu, but because their successors were even less charismatic than the men who may soon replace Netanyahu at the State of Israel’s helm.
Levi Eshkol was an unassuming, bespectacled, balding, and grandfatherly man who loved to tell Yiddish jokes and looked like a tailor who had just emerged from a Lower East Side sweatshop. Whether in his intellectual curiosity, literary diet, historical insight, political vision, or rhetorical ability – he was no David Ben-Gurion.
Similarly, Yitzhak Shamir was no Menachem Begin. Begin spent decades in the public limelight, delivering fiery, eloquent, and unwritten speeches in mass rallies, and heading the opposition for nearly 30 years. Shamir spent most of the same years in the opaque labyrinths of the Mossad. Short, stocky, bushy-eyebrowed, introverted, and ineloquent, he was charisma’s antithesis.
Even so, this pair of antiheroes did incredible things.
Eshkol built the army that struck the greatest military victory in Jewish history. Before that, as finance minister in the 1950s, he built an economy that was the fastest-growing in the world, alongside Korea and Japan. And as prime minister, he inspired national reconciliation, first by ordering an official funeral for his party’s historic nemesis, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; then by canceling Israel’s military rule over its Arab towns; and finally, by bringing Menachem Begin into the government that won the 1967 Six-Day War.
Similarly, the uncharismatic Shamir led four million Israelis’ successful absorption of one million immigrants from the fallen Soviet Union. While at it, he airlifted Ethiopian Jewry. In the interim, he managed, with great poise, Israel’s precarious situation during the First Gulf War. And before all that, he and his arch-rival, Labor’s Shimon Peres, jointly saved a hyper-inflationary economy from collapse.
Shamir and Eshkol registered all these achievements not despite, but because of their lack of charisma. Their grayness only made them positively humble, focusing on the issues rather than on themselves, harnessing rather than fearing talent, and inspiring business-minded teamwork instead of spending their days thinking of the next photo op, soundbite or speech.
Now, as the post-Netanyahu era steadily approaches, this is what Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett offer, and what a traumatized Israel demands.
www.MiddleIsrael.net The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.