Theodor Herzl
a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who is the father of modern political Zionism
1860 CE to 1904 CE
Theodor Herzl (also known in Hebrew as חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה, Chozeh HaMedinah, lit. "Visionary of the State"; May 2, 1860 – July 3,1904) is a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who is the father of modern political Zionism.
Herzl forma the Zionist Organization and promotes Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.
Though he dies before its establishment, he is known as the father of the State of Israel.
While Herzl is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State", i.e. the visionary who gave a concrete, practicable platform and framework to political Zionism, he is not the first Zionist theoretician or activist; scholars, many of them religious such as rabbis Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai, promoted a range of proto-Zionist ideas before him.
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Moses Hess declares the restoration of a Jewish state a necessity both for the Jews and for the rest of humanity in an important book in 1862, Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage (Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism).
Among Hess's many contentions in Rom und Jerusalem, the major one states that the Jews will always be a homeless people, never fully accepted by others, until they have their own country.
A friend and co-worker of Karl Marx, his book calls for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine, in line with the emerging national movements in Europe and as the only way to respond to antisemitism and assert Jewish identity in the modern world. (Although Hess's synthesis of socialism and Jewish nationalism is ignored at the time of publication—the prosperity of European Jewry lessens the appeal of his work—it will influence such later Zionist leaders as Ahad Ha'am and Theodor Herzl, and will later become an integral part of the Labor Zionist movement.)
Ahad Ha'am's deep mistrust of the gentile world informs the cultural Zionism he espouses.
He rejects Herzl's notion that the nations of the world will encourage Jews to move and establish a Jewish state.
He believes that only through Jewish self-reliance and careful preparation will the Zionist enterprise succeed.
Ahad Ha'am's concept of a vanguard cultural elite establishing a foothold in Palestine will prove quixotic, but his idea of piecemeal settlement in Palestine and the establishment of a Zionist infrastructure will become an integral part of the Zionist movement.
Dreyfus is convicted on December 22 and sentenced to life imprisonment on the infamous penal colony of Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
Herzl had become aware of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in French society while working as Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper.
He sees that emancipation, rather than dissipating anti-Semitism, has exacerbated popular animosity toward the Jews.
The tearing down of the ghetto walls places Jews in competition with non-Jews.
Moreover, the newly liberated Jew is blamed by much of non-Jewish French society for the socioeconomic upheaval caused by both emancipation and accelerated industrialization.
Herzl, born in Budapest on May 2, 1860, had grown up in an environment of assimilation.
He was educated in Vienna as a lawyer but instead became a journalist and playwright.
By the early 1890s, Herzl had achieved some recognition in Vienna and other major European cities, but is only identified peripherally with Jewish culture and politics.
He is unfamiliar with earlier Zionist writings (and he will later note in his diary that he would not have written his book had he known the contents of Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation).
To Theodor Herzl's shock and dismay, many members of the French intellectual, social, and political elites—precisely those elements of society into which the upwardly mobile emancipated Jews wish to be assimilated—are the most vitriolic in their anti-Jewish stance.
He believes that even if Jewish separateness in religion and social custom are to disappear, the Jews will continue to be treated as outsiders.
Thus, he argues, if Jews are forced by external pressure to form a nation, they can lead a normal existence only through concentration in one territory.
His pamphlet Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") proposes that the Jewish question is a political question to be settled by a world council of nations.
He calls for the establishment of a Jewish state in any available territory—citing Palestine and Argentina as possible destinations—to which the majority of European Jewry will immigrate.
The new state will be modeled after the post-emancipation European state.
Thus, it will be secular in nature, granting no special place to the Hebrew language, Judaism, or to the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Another important element contained in Herzl's concept of a Jewish state is the enlightenment faith that all men—including anti-Semites—are rational and will work for goals that they perceive to be in their best interest.
He is convinced, therefore, that the enlightened nations of Europe will support the Zionist cause to rid their domains of the problem-creating Jews.
Consequently, Herzl actively seeks international recognition and the cooperation of the Great Powers in creating a Jewish state.
Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jewish writer, organizes the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II initiates a policy of sending members of his own palace staff to govern the province of Jerusalem, in response to the First Zionist Congress convened in 1897 by Theodor Herzl in Basel, Switzerland.
Most Jews living in Palestine have been concentrated in four cities with religious significance: Tiberias, ...