Theodor Herzl
1860 – 1904 Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, founder of political Zionism
Viennese journalist who founded political Zionism, wrote Der Judenstaat, and convened the First Zionist Congress.
- Religion
- Jewish, largely secular
- Affiliations
- World Zionist Organization
Theodor Herzl was an assimilated Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright who became the father of political Zionism. Covering the Dreyfus Affair in France and watching antisemitism rise across Europe, he concluded that Jews would find no lasting safety through assimilation and needed a state of their own. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat, arguing for a sovereign Jewish homeland, and the next year he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel and founded the World Zionist Organization. He conducted diplomacy with the Ottoman sultan, the German kaiser, and British ministers, and briefly entertained a British offer of territory in East Africa. He died in 1904 at forty-four, long before the state he imagined came into being.
Connections
- associate of Chaim Weizmann — Took up the movement Herzl founded, while pressing a more gradual, settlement-focused strategy.
- associate of Chaim Weizmann — Younger contemporary who took up the Zionist cause Herzl launched, though the two differed over Herzl's diplomatic, top-down approach.
In the timeline
- 1894 – 1906 The Dreyfus Affair mentioned
- 1894 The Dreyfus affair the journalist who covered it and cited it as a spur to Zionism
- 1896 Herzl Publishes Der Judenstaat author
- 1897 First Zionist Congress convener and founder of the World Zionist Organization
- 1903 The Uganda Scheme the leader who put the British offer to the movement