Theodor Herzl (1860–1904)

We are one people. . . . We are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State.

Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Budapest, Hungary, the second child and only son of a rich merchant. He received his preliminary education in a technical school and high school in Budapest. When he was eighteen, the family moved to Vienna after his sister’s death from typhoid. Herzl enrolled in the University of Vienna’s law school. After gaining his doctorate in 1884, Herzl practiced for a year as a minor civil servant but soon gave up the law to devote himself to writing. With relative ease he won regard as a feuilletonist, a familiar essayist, the favorite form of central European journalism, and as a writer of light, fashionable plays. In 1892 he was appointed to the staff of the Neue Freie Presse, the most important Viennese newspaper. Later that year Herzl arrived in Paris as its resident correspondent.

On the surface of his consciousness Herzl shared the conventional view of the westernized Jewish intellectual in the late nineteenth century—progress was on the march and complete assimilation was desirable and inevitable. Nonetheless, the emotional explosion that was soon to take place in his life and result in his Zionism had its roots in his earlier life. His Jewish education had been skimpy, but his grandfather, Simon Loeb, a congregant of the proto-Zionist rabbi Yehudah Alkalai, visited Budapest regularly. While still at the university Herzl encountered antisemitism in its new, theoretical, pseudoscientific form as racism in the writings of Eugen Dühring. He withdrew from his fraternity because it had participated in a memorial meeting for the German nationalist composer Richard Wagner that had degenerated into an antisemitic rally.

When he arrived in Paris, Herzl confronted antisemitism again, as a rising phenomenon of French life. He wrote a long account of it for his paper, suggesting that hatred of the Jew was serving as a lightning rod to draw the masses’ revolutionary life away from society’s real woes.

The Jewish problem was now in the forefront of his attention. The result of two years of pondering, of intellectual and emotional zigzagging, was his 1893 play, The New Ghetto. Its hero, Dr. Jacob Samuel, is Herzl. Samuel ultimately dies in a duel, crying out that he wants to get “out of the ghetto.” Herzl demonstrated that even the most assimilated Jews are in an invisible ghetto in a gentile world.

In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain on duty with the French general staff, was accused of spying for Germany. Herzl provided his Vienna paper with regular accounts of the Dreyfus trial and its effect on French public life. He was present at the Ecole Militaire when Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulets and drummed out the gate in disgrace. For Herzl this moment was a hammer blow. The howling of the mob outside the gates of the parade ground, shouting “A bas les Juifs”—“down with the Jews”—fully transformed him into a Zionist.

In the early days of May 1895 Herzl requested an interview with Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the founder of Jewish colonization in Argentina, to pitch his idea of a Jewish national state. Baron de Hirsch was not receptive. Herzl soon hoped that perhaps the Rothschilds would listen to him. In five days of feverish writing he poured into his diary a sixty-five-page pamphlet—essentially outlining his Jewish state—which he entitled “Address to the Rothschilds.” “I have the solution to the Jewish question,” he wrote. “I know it sounds mad; and at the beginning I shall be called mad more than once—until the truth of what I am saying is recognized in all its shattering force.” Finally, after much reworking and some difficulty in finding a publisher, his “Jewish State” appeared in February 1896.

While Herzl continued to work as literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse to support his family, he spent the last eight years of his life in feverish, superhuman Zionist activity. In August 1897, more than two hundred delegates from all over the Jewish world answered his call to come to Basel, Switzerland, to found the World Zionist Organization. Here, its purpose was proclaimed: “Zionism seeks to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured, home in Palestine.” The delegates on August 30, 1897, endorsed what became “The Basel Program,” emphasizing the push for a “home in Palestine” and the broader mission of revitalizing the Jewish people. Succeeding congresses, six in Herzl’s lifetime, finalized the movement’s organizational infrastructure—and culture.

In 1902 Herzl finished his utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land). This European fantasy showcased Herzl’s idealism, romanticism, and liberalism. His Jewish state was Western but Jewish. Demonstrating this global vision, one character proclaimed, following “the restoration of the Jews, I should like to pave the way for the restoration of the Negroes. . . .” The character, expressing Herzl’s commitment to social justice, then explained how national pride engenders world peace: “All human beings ought to have a home. Then they will be kinder to one another. Then they will understand and love one another more.”

For Herzl, the most important aspect of his work was diplomacy—he negotiated with the sultan of Turkey, Kaiser Wilhelm, the king of Italy, and Pope Pius X. Ironically, his one great success in the international arena almost wrecked the Zionist movement. In 1903 the British government offered him a large tract of land in Uganda, East Africa, for a Jewish self-governing settlement. That year, Herzl proposed to the World Zionist Congress that the offer be accepted as a “temporary haven,” one that seemed urgently needed after the brutal pogrom in Kishinev, Russia. Yet the Zionists of Russia, led by the young Chaim Weizmann, among others, blocked him.

A Jewish state in Uganda was not meant to be in any case; the British government withdrew the offer a year or so later. The scenes of high drama that attended the discussion are, however, of crucial importance in the history of Zionism, for the seal was set on its devotion to a territorial state in Zion, and only in Zion.

Worn out by his exertions, Herzl died not far from Vienna on July 3, 1904. Forty-five years later, on August 17, 1949, an airplane flying the blue-white flag of the new State of Israel brought his remains to the country of which he was the principal architect.

The Jewish State (1896)

The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is an ancient one: It is the restoration of the Jewish State.

The world denounces the Jews resoundingly, thus reawakening this once-dormant idea. . . .

The decisive factor is our propelling force. And what is that force? The plight of the Jews. . . . The world needs the Jewish State; therefore it will come to be. . . .

The Jewish Question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. . . .

I think the Jewish Question is more than a social or religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question which can only be resolved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.

We are a people—one people.

We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves into the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow-citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still denounced as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already started suffering. . . .

No human being is wealthy or powerful enough to transplant a nation from one habitat to another. An idea alone can achieve that and this idea of a state may have the requisite power to do so. The Jews have dreamt this kingly dream all through the long nights of their history. “Next year in Jerusalem” is our old phrase. It is now a question of showing that the dream can be converted into a living reality. . . .

Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase: “Juden Raus” (Out with the Jews!)

I shall now put the question in the briefest possible form: Are we to “get out” now and where to?

Or, may we yet remain? And, how long? . . . 

We are one people—our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a state, and, indeed, a model state. We possess all human and material resources necessary for the purpose. . . .

Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.

The creation of a new state is neither ridiculous nor impossible. We have in our day witnessed the process in connection with nations which were not largely members of the middle class, but poorer, less educated, and consequently weaker than ourselves. The governments of all countries blighted by antisemitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want. . . .

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. . . .

Here it is, fellow Jews! Neither fable nor deception! . . . 

Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again.

Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who wish for a state will have it. We shall live at last as free people on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.

The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness.

And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.

From the Diaries of Theodor Herzl (Begun in Paris, around Pentecost, 1895)

When did I actually begin to concern myself with the Jewish Question? Probably ever since it arose; certainly from the time that I read [Eugen] Dühring’s [antisemitic] book, [The Parties and the Jewish Question (1881)]. . . . As the years went on, the Jewish Question bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me, and made me very miserable. In fact, I kept coming back to it whenever my own personal experiences—joys and sorrows—permitted me to rise to broader considerations. . . .

At first, the Jewish Question grieved me bitterly. There might have been a time when I would have liked to get away from it—into the Christian fold, anywhere. But in any case, these were only vague desires born of youthful weakness. For I can say to myself with the honesty inherent in this diary—which would be completely worthless if I played the hypocrite with myself—that I never seriously thought of becoming baptized or changing my name. This latter point is even attested to by an incident. When as a green young writer I took a manuscript to the Vienna Deutsche Wochenschrift, Dr. Friedjung advised me to adopt a pen-name less Jewish than my own. I flatly refused, saying that I wanted to continue to bear the name of my father and I offered to withdraw the manuscript. Friedjung accepted it anyway.

I then became a writer of sorts, with little ambition and petty vanities. . . .

In Paris I was in the midst of politics—at least as an observer. I saw how the world is run. I also stood amazed at the phenomenon of the crowd—for a long time without comprehending it.

Here too I reached a higher, more disinterested view of antisemitism, from which at least I did not have to suffer directly. In Austria or in Germany I must constantly fear that someone will shout “Hep, hep!” after me. But here I pass through the crowd unrecognized.

In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward antisemitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for.

Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat antisemitism.” Declamations made in writing or in closed circles do no good whatever; they even have a comical effect. It is true that in addition to careerists and simpletons there may be very stalwart people serving on such “relief committees.” These resemble the “relief committees” formed after—and before—floods, and they accomplish about as much. . . .

Antisemitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.

Third Letter to Baron Hirsch (Paris, June 3, 1895)

I spoke of an army, and you already interrupted me when I began to speak of the (moral) training necessary for its march. . . . I know all the things it involves: money, money, and more money; means of transportation; the provisioning of great multitudes (which does not mean just food and drink, as in the simple days of Moses); the maintenance of manly discipline; the organization of departments; emigration treaties with the heads of some states, transit treaties with others, formal guarantees from all of them; the construction of new, splendid dwelling places. Beforehand, tremendous propaganda, the popularization of the idea through newspapers, books, pamphlets, talks by travelling lecturers, pictures, songs. Everything directed from one center with sureness of purpose and with vision.

But I would have had to tell you eventually what flag I will unfurl and how. And then you would have asked mockingly: A flag, what is that? A stick with a rag on it?—No, sir, a flag is more than that. With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants to, even into the Promised Land.

For a flag men will live and die; it is indeed the only thing for which they are ready to die in masses, if one trains them for it; believe me, the policy of an entire people—particularly when it is scattered all over the earth—can be carried out only with imponderables that float in thin air. Do you know what went into the making of the German Empire? Dreams, songs, fantasies, and black-red-and-gold ribbons—and in short order. Bismarck merely shook the tree which the visionaries had planted.

What? You do not understand the imponderable? And what is religion? Consider, if you will, what the Jews have endured for the sake of this vision over a period of two thousand years. Yes, visions alone grip the souls of men. . . .