He was a fop, a boulevard dandy. He was said to have adored Wagnerian opera, fancy dress, cafe gossip, parading down the avenue. He was everything a fin de siècle gentleman should be, sporting a full but perfectly trimmed beard, writing fashionable plays, moody travel pieces, and feuilletons, enjoying the idle pleasures of a young man in peacetime Vienna. However, while reporting in the early 1890s as the Paris correspondent of a leading Viennese newspaper, he was transformed by the vicious anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair.
More than a decade of creative and commercial writing culminated in 1896 with feverish work on a pamphlet proclaiming the necessity of a Jewish state. Though others before him had urged a return to Zion, it was Theodor Herzl’s visionary article and political devotion in organizing a Zionist movement that led fifty years later to the creation of the State of Israel. Herzl’s zeal also led to a debilitating heart condition, which ended his life abruptly at age forty-four, leaving his ailing young widow alone with three small children.Although Herzl is identified with Vienna, he was born and raised in Budapest.
The Hungarian capital was at the edge of the Austrian empire, a border town rising during the 1800s into a great city. His father won and lost most of his fortune in business, alienating son Theodor from commercial pursuits and turning him to literary goals. His mother, devoted to German language, literature, and culture, exposed Herzl to the influences, which marked his lifelong outlook and expectations.After the death of his nineteen-year-old sister from typhoid fever, Herzl and his parents relocated in Vienna. At the urging of his parents, he began law studies at the university. He rapidly became more Viennese than the Viennese.
Vienna was then fertile ground for the many young Jews who came to live and work in the city. Not far from the Herzls lived Arthur Schnitzler, the great novella writer, and Gustav Mahler, soon to become a leading conductor and one of the most important composers of the turn of the century. Although Herzl was at first militantly pro-German (as Freud, Schnitzler, and Mahler had also been), his experiences with anti-Semites in university clubs and with Jews who despised being Jewish (seeking to hide in German Kultur) began to affect him. For beneath the sweet veneer of Viennese Gemütlìchkeit, or congeniality, sinister forces lay ready to leap out.
These forces burst forth in the election of the popular Karl Lüger as mayor of Vienna. Lüger, a charismatic anti-Semite, inspired a young house painter named Hitler whose hand-to-mouth existence a few years later in Vienna would shape his passion for power and hatred of Jews. (Sigmund Freud recognized the power of these dark forces in man’s subconscious, and his discoveries led to the establishment of modern psychoanalytic therapy.)After working as a law clerk for a short, unhappy period, Herzl, supported by his father, devoted himself to writing. Gradually his short, melancholy travel pieces and plays became fashionable. After a major success at the most prominent Viennese theater, Herzl felt emboldened to marry a young Jewish woman of considerable fortune.
He learned soon thereafter, however, that during their courtship she had masked a deepening psychosis. Despite the births of his three beloved children (one of whom would die in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp), his wife’s illness and Herzl’s temperament contributed to a desperate and unhappy marriage.Herzl was hired by the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s most famous newspaper, first as a freelance travel writer and later as a foreign correspondent. Separated from (and later reconciled with) his wife and family, Herzl began in 1891 his Parisian assignment. It was the era of the époque époque, the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy, Baudelaire, and Bernhardt. At first, Herzl was enthralled by the French capital.
However, soon his adoration was quelled by the anti-Semitic Drumont and Mayer incidents culminating in that international scandal, the Dreyfus affair.A notorious anti-Semite, Edouard Drumont, accused a prominent politician of being manipulated by the Jews. A series of duels between anti-Semites and Jewish military men followed, as officers’ patriotism (and affiliation with the hated Germans!) was tested. Herzl reported in great detail on the Drumont trial as well as the well-attended funeral of the Jewish army officer Captain Armand Mayer, who had died in a duel brought on by a French chauvinism poisoned with hate.The playwright Herzl began imagining grandiose plans to save world Jewry from these irrational forces.
First, he would fight a duel with some prominent anti-Semite, like Lüger. Rather, he would make a grand alliance with the Pope to convert all the Jews in Christendom to Christianity.In 1894, reality in the form of the Dreyfus affair brought Herzl to a clearer vision. Herzl, in fact, was present on the military ground when Dreyfus was shorn of his rank and sword in an infamous tableau of degradation and injustice.Spurred to action by the Dreyfus affair, Herzl sought out the help of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest Jews in the world and a supporter of Jewish settlement in the New World. In an embarrassing interview with Hirsch, the nervous Herzl failed to set forth clearly his still unformed plans for the rescue of European Jewry by exodus to a new Zion.
Commentators have since remarked that Herzl’s failure with Hirsch was a great tragedy as the rich man had the desire and the means to implement the visions Herzl would later state so clearly.Unfazed by his failure with Hirsch, Herzl went on to develop an exodus scheme partaking of Wagnerian pageantry. As he revealed his plan to learned colleagues, Herzl was greeted with shock, dismay, and fears for his sanity. Toning down the literary bent of his initial draft, Herzl reworked his plan into what would become a celebrated pamphlet, “The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question.” Jewry would request that the world provide a land large enough to house a nation. It did not matter where Zion would be. The Jewish people would approve the location offered if it met certain reasonable requirements.
The state would be modern and progressive, incorporating all the latest and best ideas of civilized society. Herzl did not envision that Hebrew would be the nation’s language. Rather, the first Jewish settlers would communicate in all of their languages until a national dialect emerged from the most practical tongue.The pamphlet was initially printed in five hundred copies by a small Viennese bookseller. Within months the pamphlet had received worldwide attention and controversy, aided by virulent attacks by anti-Semitic politicians and press.With the help of a merchant named David Wolffsohn, who after Herzl’s death became the president of the Zionist movement, Herzl began to organize (a Zionist political organization), propagandize (by writing, editing, and publishing a Zionist weekly), and politick (meeting quixotically and unsuccessfully with important political leaders such as the grand vizier of Turkey and Kaiser Wilhelm).
Baron de Hirsch died just as the movement began to gain momentum.Herzl used the remaining years of his life in the service of his cause. He founded and wrote a weekly newspaper in German as the official organ of the movement. His ability to entrance his listeners with visions of Zion gained him many followers despite the opposition of some rabbis and their flocks. To show the world the serious nature of what was being discussed at each annual Zionist congress, Herzl insisted that formal dress be worn. Failing to secure the Turkish ruler’s grant of Palestine as an autonomous Jewish region, Herzl began to gain the attention of British authorities. In 1903, he was offered a charter by Great Britain for Jewish settlement in Uganda. Herzl was willing to accept Africa as the site of the new homeland, but met violent opposition at the Zionist congress.
The conflict over this issue rapidly became bitter and led to Herzl’s death of a heart attack in 1904 near Vienna.His funeral was attended by countless thousands who descended on Vienna from all over Europe. The Viennese were shocked by the depth of Jewish reaction to Herzl’s death. They remembered him only as a literary type who had some fanciful nationalist ideals. The anti-Semitic press, however, did not resist the opportunity to publish nasty rhymes, which sought to dance on Herzl’s grave.In remote parts of Europe, however, old rabbis and young people felt the meaning of Herzl’s message. Both Chaim Weizmann, later architect of the Balfour Declaration and first president of the State of Israel, and David Ben-Gurion, later to be its first prime minister and then growing up in a small town in Poland, responded in their individual ways with deep grief.
Inspired by Herzl’s visions, they were ready to lead the first pioneers to the soil of Palestine. Herzl predicted in 1897 that he had founded the Jewish state; his prediction came true just fifty years later.Herzl’s Zionism also in a way gave rise to a parallel Arab nationalism, which has also sought a homeland grounded in history and myth. Herzl had foreseen conflict with the Arabs but asserted that Jews and Arabs could build together a greater society based on their best qualities. Herzl’s influence on world history is still unfolding.His remains were moved in 1949 to a hill just west of Jerusalem. On Mount Herzl he lies with his compatriot David Wolffsohn. A large military cemetery containing fallen heroes of Israel’s tragic wars and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, are nearby. Like Moses, Herzl was driven by dreams of Zion. It would be left to others to lead the remnants of the faithful home.