Max Nordau

Max Nordau was born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in Pest in 1849, the son of a rabbi. He became a physician in Paris and a famous critic of European society with The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (1883) and Degeneration (1892). Shaken, like Herzl, by the antisemitism of the 1890s, he became Herzl's closest ally and co-founded the Zionist Organization at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, where he served as vice-president and helped draft the Basel Program, which called for a home for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel secured by public law. His speeches on the condition of the Jews opened many congresses, and in 1898 he called for a "Muskeljudentum", a Judaism of muscle.

In 1903 he defended the Uganda Scheme as a temporary night shelter, and a young opponent shot at him at a Hanukkah ball in Paris. After Herzl's death he declined the leadership of the movement. He died in Paris in 1923, and in 1926 his remains were reburied in the Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv.