Background
Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Pest (now eastern part of Budapest, Hungary). His parents were of Central European Jewish stock, with a Spanish-Portuguese strain on his father's side.
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activist journalist politician playwright
Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Pest (now eastern part of Budapest, Hungary). His parents were of Central European Jewish stock, with a Spanish-Portuguese strain on his father's side.
In Theodor's early years, Herzl went to a Jewish school and at the age of ten was sent to a secondary school, where the emphasis was on the sciences, for which he had little taste. He soon transferred to the Lutheran High School, one of Hungary’s most eminent schools, where there were many other Jewish boys. In 1878 he was admitted as a law student to the University of Vienna, but after a year of legal studies he switched to journalism.
After graduation, Theodor joined the practice of a judge as an unpaid clerk. This took him to Salzburg, where he started writing plays. In 1885 the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung accepted his first feuilleton and, at the end of that year, he went to Berlin, where he had a job with the Berliner Tagblalt. In 1887 his first collection of humoristic pieces, DasBuch der Narrheit, was published in Leipzig and his play Seine Hoheit was presented in Berlin in 1888.
By the time he was 30 Theodor Herzl had turned out 17 plays (six of which were produced) and many articles, travel sketches, and tales, some of which were published in Neues von der Venus (1887; "News from Venus") and Das Buch der Narrheit (1888; "The Book of Folly"). From 1891 to 1895 Herzl was Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse ("New Free Press"), the leading liberal newspaper of Central Europe.
In June 1896, Herzl was received by the grand vizier in Constantinople and visited Bulgaria and England, where he was acclaimed by the Jews of Whitechapel. In view of the deteriorating situation of eastern European Jewry, Herzl considered other territorial solutions for the Jewish problem. Herzl went to London in an effort to organize the Jews there in support of his program. With the exception of Great Britain, the governments with which he negotiated were mostly antagonistic or dilatory and, even when friendly, were skeptical of the Zionists' financial resources and of the Jewish people's ability to settle a land and build a state.
Theodor devoted his great administrative talent to organizing the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August, 1897. By the time the first congress had convened. Herzl had gathered around himself a group of staunch supporters from both eastern and western Europe, and even from the United States. He launched the movement’s journal Die Welt, and laid down its organizational structure. The first congress approved the constitution and discussed the establishment of the organization’s financial instrument, the bank. After the second congress (August 1898), Herzl made his only journey to Eretz Israel and had a number of inconclusive meetings with the kaiser. The Jewish Colonial Trust was incorporated in London in 1899 as the financial arm of the World Zionist Organization and began to sell its shares.
Following a serious illness in 1900, he presided over the Fourth Zionist Congress in London. In May 1901 Herzl was received by the sultan of Turkey, Abdul-Hamid II. But this meeting too had no positive results, since Turkey was not willing to allow mass immigration without restrictions to Palestine. By May, Herzl was totally exhausted and in June went to take a rest at Edlach (Austria) where he died on July 3, 1904.
Theodor Herzl was the founder of the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland. His famous pamphlet The Jewish State proposed that the Jewish question was a political question to be settled by a world council of nations. He became first president of the World Zionist Organization, thus, he is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State". Although Herzl died more than 40 years before the establishment of the State of Israel, he was an indefatigable organizer, propagandist, and diplomat who had much to do with making Zionism into a political movement of worldwide significance.
(HardPress Classic Books Series)
Quotations:
In Der Judenstaat he writes:
"The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries - see, for instance, France - so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level."
Quotes from others about the person
According to Henry Wickham Steed, Herzl was initially "fanatically devoted to the propagation of Jewish-German 'Liberal' assimilationist doctrine".
Theodor married Julie Naschauer on June 25, 1889. The marriage was unhappy, although three children were born to it: Paulina, Hans and Margaritha (Trude). Herzl had a strong attachment to his mother, who was unable to get along with his wife.
She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman in Vienna.
Paulina suffered from mental illness and drug addiction. She died in 1930 at the age of 40 of a heroin overdose.
After Herzl's early death, Hans successively converted and became a Baptist, then a Catholic, and flirted with other Protestant denominations.
She married Richard Neumann, a man 17 years her elder.
