Did the Dreyfus affair really make Theodor Herzl a Zionist?
Herzl said the crowds he heard in Paris during the Dreyfus trial converted him. Some historians now doubt it. His early accounts barely mention the case, he may at first have thought Dreyfus guilty, and the rise of an antisemitic mayor in Vienna in 1895 may have mattered more.
Herzl was born on 2 May 1860 on Tobacco Street in the Jewish quarter of Pest, next door to the great synagogue, into a prosperous, German-speaking, assimilated family. As a boy he dreamed of copying Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, but science was not his strength, and he turned instead to poetry and the humanities. He admired German culture intensely and believed that education in the great books could turn Hungarian Jews into model Central Europeans.
The family moved to Vienna in 1878, where he studied law and joined a German nationalist student fraternity, later quitting in protest at its antisemitism. After a short legal career he became a journalist, Paris correspondent and then literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, and wrote comedies for the Viennese stage. His early writing was light and descriptive, not political.
In Paris he covered the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain falsely convicted of spying for Germany. Herzl later claimed the chants of the mob turned him, a story long accepted. The scholar Jacques Kornberg calls it a myth Herzl saw no need to correct, and others point to the 1895 rise of Karl Lueger in Vienna as the sharper shock. Around then Herzl wrote the play The New Ghetto and concluded that fighting antisemitism was futile. His answer, the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, came out in February 1896, arguing that Jews formed a nation lacking only a state.
He moved fast. In 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel and was elected president of the new Zionist Organization, then sought backing from Kaiser Wilhelm II and Sultan Abdul Hamid II without success. In 1903 he put forward the British offer of a temporary refuge in East Africa, known as the Uganda Scheme, which met fierce resistance and was rejected. His methods drew sharp criticism, from Orthodox opponents and from Bernard Lazare among others. Herzl died of a heart ailment in 1904, aged 44.
Source: Theodor Herzl
