![]() ![]() ![]() He declared that the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a national anomaly. Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He mulled over the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and, despite ridicule from Jewish leaders, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve. Thus, the Dreyfus Case became one of the determinants in the genesis of Political Zionism. Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the Jews” in France, the home of the French Revolution, and resolved that there was only one solution: the mass immigration of Jews to a land that they could call their own. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was unjustly accused of treason, mainly because of the prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere. He hoped that The Ghetto would lead to debate and ultimately to a solution, based on mutual tolerance and respect between Christians and Jews. At the time, he regarded the Jewish problem as a social issue and wrote a drama, The Ghetto (1894), in which assimilation and conversion are rejected as solutions. Later, during his stay in Paris as a journalist, he was brought face-to-face with the problem. Herzl first encountered the anti-Semitism that would shape his life and the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century while studying at the University of Vienna (1882). The Paris correspondent of the influential liberal Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse was none other than Theodor Herzl. He became a writer, playwright and journalist. In 1878, the family moved to Vienna and, in 1884 Herzl was awarded a doctorate of law from the University of Vienna. He was educated in the spirit of the German-Jewish Enlightenment, and learned to appreciate secular culture. A giant in Jewish history, he stood just 5'5". Herzl was born in Budapest on May 2, 1860. Theodor (Binyamin Ze’ev) Herzl was the visionary behind modern Zionism and the reinstitution of a Jewish homeland. ![]()
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