Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright, became the founder of modern political Zionism — the movement for a Jewish state — and is honoured in Israel as *Chozeh HaMedinah*, the Visionary of the State.

The Dreyfus affair A largely assimilated Viennese Jew, Herzl was covering the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris (1894) — a French Jewish officer falsely convicted of treason amid open antisemitic incitement — when he concluded that assimilation would not cure European antisemitism, and that the Jews needed a state of their own. (Historians debate how decisive the affair really was for him, but it became the symbol of his turn.)

Der Judenstaat and the Congress In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State"), arguing that the Jews are one people and must be gathered under their own sovereignty. In 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel and founded the World Zionist Organization; afterward he wrote in his diary, "At Basel I founded the Jewish State," predicting it would come within fifty years. His utopian novel *Altneuland* (1902) imagined a liberal, pluralist Jewish society — its motto, "If you will it, it is no dream."

Diplomacy and death Herzl spent his last years in tireless diplomacy — with the Ottoman Sultan, the German Kaiser, the British government, and the Pope — seeking a charter for Jewish settlement. The British Uganda proposal of 1903 split the movement; Herzl, exhausted, died in 1904 at only forty-four, before any of it was realized.

A contested vision, presented not adjudicated Zionism was, and remains, debated within Judaism itself. Many Orthodox authorities initially opposed a secular national movement (some on the theological ground that the ingathering awaits the Messiah); Reform Judaism was long anti-Zionist in principle before largely changing; secular, socialist, cultural, and religious Zionisms differed sharply on aims; and Jewish critics of Zionism, then and now, dissent. This page presents these as the positions Jews have held, without adjudicating them. Herzl's body was reinterred in Jerusalem in 1949, on the hill that bears his name, after the State of Israel — proclaimed in 1948 — came into being.