Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl was a Viennese journalist and playwright who, in the last nine years of his short life, turned the scattered idea of a Jewish return to Palestine into an organised international political movement. His 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State and the Zionist Congress he convened in 1897 laid the foundations of modern political Zionism, and Israel officially honours him as the spiritual father of the Jewish state.

Herzl was born on 2 May 1860 in Pest, now part of Budapest, in Hungary, into a prosperous, German-speaking and largely assimilated Jewish family; the family home stood next to the great synagogue on Dohány Street. As a young man he admired German culture and believed that educated Jews could blend fully into Central European society. In 1878, after the death of his sister, the family moved to Vienna, capital of Austria-Hungary. He studied law at the university there and joined a German nationalist student fraternity, but left it in protest at its antisemitism. After a short legal career he turned to writing, producing comedies and dramas for the Viennese stage and becoming Paris correspondent of the leading liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse.

In Paris Herzl reported on the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason. Herzl later said that crowds chanting against the Jews had made him a Zionist, but some modern historians think he overstated the affair's effect and that the rise of the antisemitic politician Karl Lueger in Vienna in 1895 weighed more heavily with him. By mid-1895 he had concluded that antisemitism could not be overcome by assimilation and that Jews needed a state of their own.

Published in February 1896, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) argued that the Jews were a nation lacking only territory, and that a state, preferably in Palestine, would end their persecution. It won quick support from existing Zionist groups such as Hovevei Zion and from crowds of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in London, but bitter opposition from many Orthodox Jews and from those who sought integration.

In 1897 Herzl brought together the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which founded the Zionist Organization and elected him president, a post he held until his death. He also founded, at his own expense, the newspaper Die Welt. Herzl believed the movement needed the backing of great powers. Through the Anglican clergyman William Hechler he reached the German emperor Wilhelm II, whom he met publicly in Palestine in 1898. He sought a charter from the Ottoman Empire, offering Jewish help with its debts, and met Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1901, without result. His readiness to help the sultan's image after the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s drew sharp criticism from some Jewish contemporaries.

Herzl gave little public weight to the Arab population of Palestine. When the mayor of Jerusalem, Yousef al-Khalidi, urged in 1899 that the Zionists leave the land in peace, Herzl replied that its inhabitants would benefit from Jewish immigration; historians such as Rashid Khalidi contrast this with an earlier diary passage about moving the poor of a future Jewish territory across the border.

After talks over a settlement at El Arish in Sinai failed, the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered land in British East Africa. Following the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Herzl put this "Uganda" scheme to the Sixth Zionist Congress as a temporary refuge. A majority voted to investigate it, but the Russian delegates walked out, and the movement was deeply divided. He also met Russian ministers in 1903 and Pope Pius X in January 1904.

Weakened by heart disease, Herzl died at Edlach, near Reichenau an der Rax in Austria, on 3 July 1904, aged 44, and was buried in Vienna. The Seventh Zionist Congress rejected the East African offer in 1905. In 1949 his remains were moved to the new state of Israel and reburied on the Jerusalem hill now called Mount Herzl.

Our 1900 map shows Austria-Hungary, where he lived and wrote, and the Ottoman-ruled Palestine he hoped would become a Jewish homeland.