Author(s): Shlomo Avineri

Biography & Memoir

Born in Budapest in 1860, Theodor Herzl was a daydreamer who aspired to follow the footsteps of De Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. He did not succeed in the sciences and developed a successful career in journalism. As the Paris correspondent for NEUE FREIE PRESSE, Herzl followed the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in which a French Jewish army captain was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. Herzl came to reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves from Europe and create their own state. In 1896, he published DER JUDENSTAAT (The Jewish State) to immediate acclaim, attracting international attention. As a result, he met Kaiser Wilhelm II on several occasions, once in Jerusalem; attempted and failed to obtain support for a Jewish homeland from Pope Pius X; secured an offer from the British government to facilitate a large Jewish settlement in East Africa (modern Uganda); and visited St Petersburg to confront the Russian threat to the Zionist movement.
Herzl died suddenly in 1904, too early to see the rejection of the Uganda plan a year later, and over 40 years before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, yet he is its undisputed visionary: 'if you will it, it is no dream'.