Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer who founded modern political Zionism. He created the Zionist Organization and pushed for Jewish settlement in Palestine—then part of the Ottoman Empire—with the goal of establishing a Jewish state. In Hebrew, he is called Chozeh HaMedinah, meaning "Visionary of the State." The Israeli Declaration of Independence mentions him and officially names him "the spiritual father of the Jewish State."

Early life

Herzl was born in Pest, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, into a prosperous Neolog Jewish family. After a short legal career in Vienna, he became a Paris correspondent for the Viennese paper Neue Freie Presse.

Witnessing antisemitic events in Vienna, he decided that Jewish assimilation was impossible because of anti-Jewish hostility, and that the only answer was a Jewish state. In 1896, he published a pamphlet laying out his vision for a Jewish homeland. This brought him international notice and quickly made him a central figure in Jewish affairs.

In 1897, Herzl called the First Zionist Congress at the Stadtcasino in Basel, Switzerland, and was chosen as president of the Zionist Organization. He then launched diplomatic efforts to gain support for a Jewish state, but failed to win over German Emperor Wilhelm II or Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, he put forward the Uganda Scheme—backed by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain—which proposed a temporary Jewish refuge in British East Africa after the Kishinev pogrom.

Strong opposition killed the plan. Herzl died of a heart condition in 1904 at age 44 and was buried in Vienna. In 1949, his remains were moved to Israel and reburied on Mount Herzl.

Herzl grew up on Dohány utca (Tobacco Street) in the Jewish quarter of Pest, now part of Budapest, in a Neolog Jewish household. He was the second child of Jeanette (née Diamant) and Jakob Herzl, both German-speaking, assimilated Jews. Herzl claimed both Ashkenazi and Sephardic ancestry, mostly through his father’s side, but no evidence supports his Sephardic claims. His father’s family had moved from Zimony (today Zemun, Serbia) to Bohemia in 1739, where they were forced to Germanize their surname from Loebl (from the Hebrew lev, meaning "heart") to Herzl ("little heart").

Jakob Herzl was a very successful businessman. Theodor had an older sister, Pauline, who died of typhus on 7 February 1878. The family lived next to the Dohány Street Synagogue in Belváros, the inner city of old Pest.

As a youth, Herzl wanted to emulate Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, but he did poorly in science. Instead, he grew passionate about poetry and the humanities, which led to a successful journalism career and a less notable attempt at playwriting.

According to Amos Elon, young Herzl was a strong Germanophile who saw Germans as the best Kulturvolk in Central Europe. He embraced the German ideal of Bildung—the belief that reading great works by writers like Goethe and Shakespeare could build character and morality, equating beauty with goodness. He thought that through Bildung, Hungarian Jews like him could shed their "shameful Jewish characteristics," which he blamed on centuries of poverty and oppression, and become civilized Central Europeans in the German mold.

After Pauline’s death in 1878, the family moved to Vienna’s 9th district, Alsergrund. At the University of Vienna, Herzl studied law. As a student, he joined the German nationalist fraternity Albia, whose motto was Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland ("Honor, Freedom, Fatherland"). He quit in protest over the group’s antisemitism.

Following a brief legal career in Vienna and Salzburg, he turned to journalism and literature. He worked as a journalist for a Viennese paper and as a Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, with occasional trips to London and Istanbul. He later became literary editor of Neue Freie Presse and wrote comedies and dramas for Vienna’s stage. His early work was descriptive, not political, and did not focus on Jewish life.

Zionist intellectual and activist

While in Paris for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl covered the Dreyfus affair—a political scandal that split the French Third Republic from 1894 to 1906. It was a notorious antisemitic incident in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain, was wrongly convicted of spying for Germany.