Theodor Herzl (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine, which, in the late 19th century was part of the Ottoman Empire, in an effort to form a Jewish state. Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah (חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה), lit. 'Visionary of the State'. He is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State".
Herzl was born in Pest, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, to a prosperous Neolog Jewish family. After a brief legal career in Vienna, he became the Paris correspondent for the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. Confronted with antisemitic events in Vienna, he reached the conclusion that anti-Jewish sentiment would make Jewish assimilation impossible, and that the only solution for Jews was the establishment of a Jewish state. In 1896, Herzl published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, in which he elaborated his visions of a Jewish homeland. His ideas attracted international attention, and rapidly established him as a major figure in the Jewish world.
In 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress at the Stadtcasino in Basel, Switzerland, and was elected president of the Zionist Organization. He began a series of diplomatic initiatives to build support for a Jewish state, appealing unsuccessfully to German emperor Wilhelm II and Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II. At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl presented the Uganda Scheme, endorsed by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain on behalf of the British government. The proposal, which sought to create a temporary refuge for the Jews in British East Africa following the Kishinev pogrom, was met with strong opposition and ultimately rejected. Herzl died of a heart ailment in 1904 at the age of 44, and was buried in Vienna. In 1949, his remains were taken to Israel and reinterred on Mount Herzl.
Theodor Herzl was born on Dohány utca, or Tobacco Street (also known as Tabakgasse in German), a street in the Jewish quarter of Pest (now the eastern part of Budapest), in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary (now Hungary), to a Neolog Jewish family. He was the second child of Jeanette (née Diamant) and Jakob Herzl, who were German-speaking, assimilated Jews. Herzl stated he was of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic lineage, predominantly through his paternal relations, and to a lesser extent through his maternal ones, but there is no evidence to support his claims of Sephardic ancestry or family origins. His father's family had migrated from Zimony (today Zemun, Serbia), to Bohemia in 1739, where they were required to Germanize their family name of Loebl (from the Hebrew word lev, or 'heart') to Herzl (meaning 'little heart', a diminutive form of the German word for 'heart', Herz).
Herzl's father Jakob was a highly successful businessman. He had a sister, Pauline, who was a year older than him, but she died of typhus on 7 February 1878. Theodor lived with his family in a house next to the Dohány Street Synagogue (formerly known as the Tabakgasse Synagogue) located in Belváros, the inner city of the historical old town of Pest, in the eastern section of Budapest.
In his youth, Herzl aspired to follow the footsteps of Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, but did not excel at science, and instead developed a growing enthusiasm for poetry and the humanities. This passion later developed into a successful career in journalism and a less-celebrated foray into playwrighting. According to Amos Elon, as a young man Herzl was an ardent Germanophile, viewing the Germans as the best Kulturvolk ('cultured people') in Central Europe; he embraced the German ideal of Bildung, whereby reading great works of literature by authors and playwrights such as Goethe and Shakespeare could allow one to appreciate the beautiful things in life, which in turn would result in the building and improvement of character, intellect and morality (the Bildung theory tended to equate beauty with goodness). Herzl believed that through Bildung, Hungarian Jews such as himself could shake off their "shameful Jewish characteristics", which were the result of long centuries of impoverishment and oppression, and become civilized Central Europeans, a true Kulturvolk established along the German lines.
In 1878, after Pauline's death, the Herzl family moved to Vienna, then serving as the other capital of Austria-Hungary, where they lived in the 9th district, known as Alsergrund. At the University of Vienna, Herzl studied law. As a young law student, Herzl became a member of the German nationalist Burschenschaft (fraternity) Albia, which had the motto Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland ("Honor, Freedom, Fatherland"). He later resigned in protest at the organisation's antisemitism.
After a brief legal career at the University of Vienna and in Salzburg, he devoted himself to journalism and literature, working as a journalist for a Viennese newspaper and a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, in Paris, occasionally making special trips to London and Istanbul. He later became literary editor of Neue Freie Presse, and wrote several comedies and dramas for the Viennese stage. His early work did not focus on Jewish life. It was of the feuilleton order, descriptive rather than political.
Zionist intellectual and activist
As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. It was a notorious antisemitic incident in France in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain, was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. Herzl was witness to mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial. There has been some controversy surrounding the impact that this event had on Herzl and his conversion to Zionism. Herzl himself stated that the Dreyfus case turned him into a Zionist and that he was particularly affected by chants of "Death to the Jews!" from the crowds. This had been the widely held belief for some time. However, some modern scholars now believe that – due to little mention of the Dreyfus affair in Herzl's earlier accounts and a seemingly contrary reference he made in them to shouts of "Death to the traitor!" – he may have exaggerated the influence it had on him in order to create further support for his goals.
Jacques Kornberg claims that the Dreyfus influence was a myth that Herzl did not feel necessary to deflate and that he also believed that Dreyfus was guilty. Another modern claim is that, while upset by antisemitism evident in French society, Herzl, like most contemporary observers, initially believed Dreyfus was guilty and only claimed to have been inspired by the affair years later when it had become an international cause célèbre. Rather, it was the rise to power of the antisemitic demagogue Karl Lueger in Vienna in 1895 that seems to have had a greater effect on Herzl, before the pro-Dreyfus campaign had fully emerged. It was at this time that Herzl wrote his play "The New Ghetto," which shows the ambivalence and lack of real security and equality of emancipated, well-to-do Jews in Vienna. The protagonist is an assimilated Jewish lawyer who tries unsuccessfully to break through the social ghetto enforced on Western Jews.
According to Henry Wickham Steed, Herzl was initially "fanatically devoted to the propagation of Jewish-German 'Liberal' assimilationist doctrine." However, Herzl came to reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and assimilation and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves from Europe. Herzl grew to believe that antisemitism could not be defeated or cured, only avoided, and that the only way to avoid it was the establishment of a Jewish state. In June 1895, he wrote in his diary: "In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-semitism ... Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-semitism." Herzl's editors at Neue Freie Presse refused any publication of his Zionist political activities. A mental clash gripped Herzl, between the craving for literary success and a desire to act as a public figure. Around this time, Herzl started writing pamphlets about A Jewish State. Herzl claimed that these pamphlets resulted in the establishment of the Zionist Movement, and they did play a large role in the movement's rise and success. His testimony before the British Royal Commission reflected his fundamental, romantic liberal view on life as the 'Problem of the Jews.'