Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl
Dr. jur. Herzl in 1897
Born	2 May 1860 Pest, Hungary, Austrian Empire
Died	3 July 1904 (aged 44) Edlach an der Rach, Austria-Hungary
Citizenship	Austrian-Hungarian
Known for	Father of modern political Zionism
Occupation	Lawyer, journalist, playwright, writer
Spouse	∞ 1889 Julie Naschauer

Theodor Herzl (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jew who is considered the father of modern political Zionism. His book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State or The State of the Jews) was published in 1896. He was the first notable Zionist to specifically refer to and discuss the "Jewish question" and the "final solution of the Jewish question". In 1949, one year after the founding of the state of Israel, Herzl's remains were transferred to Israel and buried on the mountain named after him west of Jerusalem. In Vienna, the Theodor-Herzl-Hof in Leopoldstadt and the Theodor-Herzl-Staircase in the inner city were named in his honour.

Life

The Jewish Chronicle (17 January 1896) promoting Theodor Herzl's zionist Judenstaat (a Jewish State) as "a 'solution of the Jewish question.'"

When Herzl, son of respectable merchant Jacob Herzl, was 10, he attended the Realschule. In the 7th grade, he now attended the Evangelisches Gymnasium. During his last school year, his only sister died. In the spring of 1878, the family moved to Vienna. Herzl, who had studied law since 1878, was awarded a doctorate on 16 May 1884. Theodor Herzl, who is generally considered the founder of political Zionism, was originally a German nationalist (deutschnational) fraternity member (Wiener akademische Burschenschaft Albia). Only after he cancelled membership in his association in 1883, because more and more Jews were excluded from contesting matters of honor, that is, from duels; they were generally considered incapable of satisfaction (verified through the Waidhofen Resolution in 1896) did he begin to stand up for the Jewish nation and vehemently demand the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel.

After receiving his doctorate, he traveled via Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden, Strasbourg and Nancy the first time to Paris. From August 1884 to August 1885 he completed court practice in Vienna and Salzburg. After his decision to give up law, Herzl goes traveling again. This time it leads into his route Munich, Heidelberg, Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Ostend, Antwerp, Leyden, (The) Hague. The Heidelberg station in particular influenced him: he admired the Heidelberg fraternities and remembered his fraternity membership at Albia in Vienna. He perceived himself as German-Austrian. After his return to Vienna he gave up his Hungarian citizenship and became a citizen of the Austrian half of the empire.

After his return and after completing the play he had begun in Salzburg, Herzl travels to Berlin in November 1885, primarily to make contact with the theater scene. He met Franz Wallner and Fritz Mauthner. As a person he was universal popular, but his plays were rejected. From Berlin he wrote for the Viennese humorous weekly Der Floh and the daily newspaper Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung. Because he ended up not achieving the desired success with the plays he had brought with him, his stay in Berlin was soon over. On his return journey via Prague he visited the director of the Prague Theater, Angelo Neumann, for the first time. But during his time in Berlin he received news of success: his comedy Tabarin was enthusiastically received in New York. In the first half of 1886, he met his future wife, Julia Nachauer, the daughter of a rich Viennese industrialist, whom he married on 25 July 1889.

In 1888, Herzl's comedy His Highness (Seine Hoheit) was performed at the Wallner Theater in Berlin and in Prague. In 1890, his Viennese operetta The Devil's Wife (Des Teufels Weib), set to music by Adolf Müller junior, was premiered in the midst of the polarization of Viennese theater life led by Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn. From October 1891 to July 1895, Herzl was a correspondent for the Viennese daily Neue Freie Presse in Paris, where political and social problems as well as parliamentary business aroused his interest.

Herzl was born of well-to-do middle-class parents. He first studied in a scientific secondary school, but, to escape from its anti-Semitic atmosphere, he transferred in 1875 to a school where most of the students were Jews. In 1878, the family moved from Budapest to Vienna, where he entered the University of Vienna to study law. He received his license to practice law in 1884 but chose to devote himself to literature. For a number of years he was a journalist and a moderately successful playwright. In 1889 he married Julie Naschauer, daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman in Vienna. The marriage was unhappy, although three children were born to it. Herzl had a strong attachment to his mother, who was unable to get along with his wife. These difficulties were increased by the political activities of his later years, in which his wife took little interest. A profound change began in Herzl’s life soon after a sketch he had published in the leading Viennese newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, led to his appointment as the paper’s Paris correspondent. He arrived in Paris with his wife in the fall of 1891 and was shocked to find in the homeland of the French Revolution the same anti-Semitism with which he had become so familiar in Austria. Hitherto he had regarded anti-Semitism as a social problem that the Jews could overcome only by abandoning their distinctive ways and assimilating to the people among whom they lived. At the same time, his work as a newspaperman heightened his interest in, and knowledge of, social and political affairs and led him to the conviction that the answer to anti-Semitism was not assimilation but organized counter-efforts by the Jews. The Dreyfus affair in France also helped crystallize this belief. French military documents had been given to German agents, and a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely charged with the crime. The ensuing political controversy produced an outburst of anti-Semitism among the French public. Herzl said in later years that it was the Dreyfus affair that had made a Zionist out of him. So long as anti-Semitism existed, assimilation would be impossible, and the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organized emigration to a state of their own.

Around 1892/1893, Herzl wrote to Moritz Benedikt that he had no inhibitions about converting to Christianity pro forma. This would allow him to advance professionally more quickly and save his children from discrimination. In 1893, he developed a plan for a mass conversion of Austrian Jews to Catholicism. Robert Wistrich wrote about Herzl's plans that they made it clear that "his own assimilation course was by no means just superficial." Herzl later changed his views regarding conversion to Christianity. With his drama The Ghetto (later renamed The New Ghetto), which he wrote in the fall of 1894, Herzl hoped to contribute to mutual tolerance between Christians and Jews and to stimulate a public discussion about the Jewish question, which had previously only been discussed in private conversations was. In his play, Herzl opposes assimilation and conversion as possible solutions to the problem. He reported on the Dreyfus affair at the same time and was also present at the public degradation of Dreyfus on 5 January 1895. Herzl was an honorary member of the Viennese Zionist student associations Kadimah, Ivria and Unitas.

Political Zionism

In 1890, the writer Nathan Birnbaum, who lived in Herzl's neighborhood, first spoke of the idea of ​​"Zionism" in his magazine Selbst-Emancipation. As a Gymnasium student he had already considered emigration to Palestine and propagated it in his school newspaper, but never put it into practice. He expressed his conviction that Jews were a separate nation by founding national groups. In 1884, he formulated his demands in an admonishing pamphlet, “The Assimilation Addiction.” In a psychological way, Birnbaum criticizes the adaptation to the non-Jewish environment and calls on his fellow believers to see themselves again as a nation that should fight for its own fatherland with Hebrew as the national language.

Even earlier, Rabbi Judah Alkalai called on him to return to Palestine. He, who grew up in Jerusalem and later worked in Semlin, Serbia, was involved in journalism and (association) politics in the spirit of Zionism since the 1940s. Unlike Herzl, he combined the acquisition of land with the demand for a revival of the Hebrew language and the founding of an army. Alkalai tried with great passion in Semlin, Paris and Jerusalem to lay the foundation for the rebirth of Israel. Shortly before the end of his life in 1878, he moved to Palestine with his wife and was buried on the Mount of Olives after his death.

A comrade of Alkalai's views was the Rabbi Zwi Hirsch Kalischer, who worked in Thorn, East Prussia. In 1862, he called for the colonization of Palestine in his publication “Drischat Zion” (Search for Zion). Like Alkalai, he saw the goal as compatible with the Jewish faith in the Messiah, and like Alkalai, he imagined being able to win the country through land purchase, agriculture, and military defense. Unlike Alkalai, who wanted to finance colonization by introducing a tax (tithe), Kalischer relied on donations.

Two other pioneers of Zionism were closer to Herzl's ideas: Moses Hess and Leon Pinsker. Hess, who grew up in an Orthodox family, was an early companion of Karl Marx and initially addressed the public with early socialist writings. In 1862, he surprised his like-minded people with the Zionist text “Rome and Jerusalem”. Like socialism, he saw Zionism as a way out of an oppressive, anti-Semitic society. Apart from this writing, which received little public attention, Hess was hardly active in the interests of the settlement of Palestine. Pinsker, a doctor from Odessa, responded to the pogroms that raged in the Tsarist Empire in 1882 with his work “Autoemancipation!” In it he declared emancipation to have failed and called for the Jews to be recognized as a nation and settled outside of Europe, but was initially not committed to Palestine. While Birnbaum was inspired by Pinsker's “Autoemancipation,” Herzl was unfamiliar with the writings of his predecessors.

In retrospect, Herzl's contribution to the rise of Zionism is seen in particular in the fact that he managed to bring the various currents together in a first congress and agree on a few principles. The delegates founded the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and elected the initiator and conference leader Herzl as the first president. In addition, they decided on a program that set the goal of "creating a homeland in Palestine that is protected by public law for the Jewish people." Herzl managed to create a celebratory atmosphere that put the project, which initially seemed absurd, in a better light. He staged the Basel Congress as the first national assembly of the Jewish people, where not only was the conference room, the Basel City Casino, festively decorated, but there was also a corresponding dress code.

In his diary Herzl describes submitting his draft proposals to the Rothschild Family Council, noting:

"I bring to the Rothschilds and the big Jews their historical mission. I shall welcome all men of goodwill – we must be united – and crush all those of bad."

He read his manuscript "Addressed to the Rothschilds" to a friend, Meyer-Cohn, who said, "Up till now I have believed that we are not a nation – but more than a nation. I believed that we have the historic mission of being the exponents of universalism among the nations and therefore were more than a people identified with a specific land." Herzl replied:

"Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfill this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despite us. If, in our present circumstances, we wanted to bring about the unity of mankind independent of national boundaries, we would have to combat the ideal of patriotism. The latter, however, will prove stronger than we for innumerable years to come."

Zionism and the Third Reich

Zionism, wrote Herzl, offered the world a welcome “final solution of the Jewish question.”

Quotes

• "The Jewish question exists. It would be foolish to deny it... The Jewish problem exists wherever Jews live in noticeable numbers. Where it does not exist, it is introduced by Jews who move in... I believe I can understand anti-semitism, which is in many ways a complicated movement. I look on this movement from the standpoint of a Jew – but without hatred or fear. I believe I recognize in anti-semitism what is crude humor, ordinary economic envy, inherited prejudice, religious intolerance – but also what is deemed to be self defense. [...] Anti-semitism grows daily, hourly, among the peoples, and must continue to grow since its causes continue to exist, and cannot be alienated. [...] The causa remota is the loss, in the Middle Ages, of the ability to assimilate; the cause proxima is our overproduction of middling intelligences, that can neither be drained off, nor rise higher-hence, no healthy draining off, and no healthy rising to a higher level. Downward, we are being proletarianized into revolutionaries; we are the subalterns of every revolutionary party, while at the same time our terrible financial might grows upward." – From Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State).

• It may be that Turkey will refuse or be unable to understand us. This will not discourage us. We will seek other means to accomplish our end. The Orient question is now the question of the day. Sooner or later it will bring about a conflict among the nations. A European war is imminent. The great European War must come. With my watch in hand do I await this terrible moment. After the great European war is ended the Peace Conference will assemble. We must be ready for that time. We will assuredly be called to this great conference of the nations and we must prove to them the urgent importance of a Zionist solution to the Jewish Question. We must prove to them that the problem of the Orient and Palestine is one with the problem of the Jews – both must be solved together. We must prove to them that the Jewish problem is a world problem and that a world problem must be solved by the world. And the solution must be the return of Palestine to the Jewish people. – Stated in conversation with a delegate at the First Congress, Litman Rosenthal. American Jewish News, 7 March 1919

Writings and plays

• Tabarin, 1884
• Muttersöhnchen, Vienna 1885
• Seine Hoheit, 1885
• Der Judenstaat – Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage, Leipzig & Wien 1896 (Faksimile)
  • The Jewish State, 2008
• Neues von der Venus, 1887
• Wilddiebe (tpgether with H. Wittmann), 1888
• Das Buch der Narrheit, 1888
• Prinzen aus Genieland, 1892
• Die Glosse, 1895
• Das Palais Bourbon (essay collection), 1895
• Unser Käthchen, 1898
• Gretel, 1899
• Philosophische Erzählungen, Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel, Berlin 1900 (Faksimile)
• Altneuland (novel), Hermann Seemann Nachf., Berlin & Leipzig 1902
• Feuilletons, 2 Volumes, 1903
• Salon in Lydien, 1904
• Zionistische Schriften, Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1920
• Theodor Herzls Tagebücher – 1895–1904 – Drei Bände, Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 1922
• Gesammelte zionistische Werke, 5 Volumes, 1934/35
• Briefe und Tagebücher, 7 Volumes, Propyläen, Frankfurt am Main & Berlin 1983–1996

See also

• Balfour Declaration‎
• Dreyfus affair - Stated important influence on Herzl.
• Rothschild family
• Jewish question
• Meanings and translations of German words and Holocaust revisionism: The "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
  • On Herzl using the phrase "final solution of the Jewish question" as referring to Zionism rather than to the Holocaust

External links

• Behind the Balfour Declaration: Britain's Great War Pledge To Lord Rothschild. The Meaning for Us - The section "Herzl on the Jewish Problem"
• Zionism and Anti-Semitism: A Strange Alliance Through History - The section "Theodor Herzl"