Theodor
Herzl was born 2nd May 1860 in Budapest, Hungary, part of the old
Austrian empire. He died 3rd July 1904, Edlach, Austria at only 44
years of age.
Herzl
was born of well-to-do middle-class parents. His first taste of school life
brought him considerable trauma due to violent anti-semitism. Therefore in 1875
his parents transferred him to a school where most of the students were Jews.
In 1878 the family moved from Budapest to Vienna, where Theodor entered the
University of Vienna to study law. Although he received his doctorate and a
licence to practise law in 1884, he chose to devote himself to literature, and
for a number of years was a journalist and a moderately successful playwright.
In 1889 he married Julie Naschauer, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish
businessman in Vienna. The marriage was not a happy one, mainly because of his
mother’s antagonism towards his wife. Theodor had a great attachment to his mother,
and this didn’t help the marriage to work. However, they had three children.
In
1891 Herzl was transferred to Paris by his newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, as
their Paris correspondent. He arrived with his wife in the autumn of that year,
and was shocked to find that anti-semitism was as strong there as in the
Austria of his homeland. This attitude problem had caused him numerous
headaches in the course of his life, causing him to read widely on the subject.
At one stage he even wondered whether the solution to the problem would be the
wholesale conversion of Jews to Christianity, thereby ending the unwarranted,
mischievous, and gratuitous hatred of Germanic and French people towards the
Jews. His voluminous diaries show how he toyed with several such ideas. But
conversion was eventually ruled out as a betrayal of the Jewish heritage.
One
of his assignments as Paris correspondent was to attend the trial of Alfred
Dreyfus in 1894. The blatant anti-semitism displayed in this case caused Herzl
deep shock, and made him re-think all
his previous considerations on behalf of the Jews, and as a result he became a
convinced Zionist, a word that was coined to describe the new militant
attitude that favoured Jews being restored to their native land.
He
turned to one of the world’s wealthiest Jews, Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831 –
1896) the railroad magnate and philanthropist, with a proposal for mass
immigration. He visited him in Paris, but the Baron’s non-committal reply,
refusing even to hear him out, caused
Herzl to “go it alone”, and to write a pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) published in
Vienna in 1896 for general distribution amongst world Jewry. He used his
journalistic skills to offer a vivid description of his envisioned Jewish state
and a convincing account of the means by which it was to be achieved. Zionism
for Herzl represented an act of will that could transcend everyday reality and
create a new world.
One
cannot help being struck by the rational, democratic, and progressive quality
of the nation-building institutions that Herzl founded. The World Zionist
Organisation (WZO) was embodied in its annual (later biennial) Congress, an
assembly elected by all who paid a token annual fee. From 1898, women were
allowed to vote for the congress, at a time when New Zealand was the only
country with national female suffrage. The executive was fully responsible to
the Congress, so also was the WZO’s bank, the Jewish Colonial Trust, and the
Jewish National Fund, which was dedicated to land purchase in Palestine.
Herzl’s writings and speeches called for a liberal utopia, with economic
justice, free education, and an advanced welfare system. Political leadership
would be exercised by an elite selected by merit alone. The state would have no
demagogy, no chauvinism, and no war.
All
this began out of Herzl’s revulsion in witnessing the blatant national
anti-Semitism at the Dreyfus trial. He said in later years, “Were it not for
the Dreyfus case, I might never have become a Zionist.” It is strange how
certain people, with certain ideas, suddenly become watersheds in history.
Herzl was by no means the first to suggest a return to Palestine for the Jewish
people. It is recorded that Napoleon suggested it in 1799; Benjamin Disraeli,
the Jewish prime minister, had written about it in his novel Tancred; Moses
Hess, friend of Karl Marx, had published an important book, Rom und
Jerusalem in 1862, in which he declared the establishment of a Jewish
National State a world necessity. But it was this hitherto unknown Austrian
journalist who rose to fame and fanned the flames of Zionism in Europe. Out of
his pamphlet there arose a swelling, a yearning, a deep-seated desire amongst
Jewry for a return to their land.
The
first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland, at the end of August
1897, and about 200 delegates attended, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe
and Russia, but with a few from Western Europe and even the United States. They
represented every stratum of society and thought, from Orthodox Jews to
atheists, from businessmen to students. There were also hundreds of onlookers,
including some sympathetic Christians, and of course reporters from the world’s
press. When Herzl’s imposing figure appeared on the podium he was greeted with
tumultuous applause. “We want to lay the foundation stone,” he declared, “for
the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation. Zionism is the
return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel.”
The
outcome of this three-day congress was the establishment of the Zionist
Organisation, with Herzl as President, and the slogan, “Zionism aspires to
create a publicly guaranteed homeland for the Jewish people in the land of
Israel.” In the next chapter we shall see what some of the world’s journals and
newspapers thought of the Congress, and of Herzl himself.