Herzl: Up Close and Personal
In Pursuit of the Zionist Vision
"...Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind."
-- Herzl, "The Jewish State" (1896)
Biography: Theodor Ze'ev Binyamin Herzl (1860-1904)
His life lasted a scant 44 years, and he dedicated only the last nine of them to the Zionist cause. But in this brief and extraordinary span of less than a decade he was able to mobilize the forces and craft the infrastructure that would revolutionize the Jewish world and bring about the realization of the Jewish people's age-old dream of returning to Zion.
Herzl was born on May 2, 1860 in Budapest, Hungary, where he was educated in the secular spirit of the German-Jewish Enlightenment. His views about the plight of the Jewish people changed forever when, as Paris correspondent for the influential liberal Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, he observed the trial and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Due to anti-Semitic prejudice, this Jewish officer in the French army was unjustly accused of treason and divested of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony. Hearing the mob's shouts of "Death to the Jews," Herzl became convinced that assimilation was not the answer to dispelling anti-Semitism. Rather, the only solution to the problems of the Jewish people was to create a Jewish homeland.
