The Jewish State

On 14 February 1896 Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and playwright, published Der Judenstaat, subtitled "An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question". In under a hundred pages he argued that antisemitism would follow Jews wherever they went as a minority, and that the Jewish question was a national, political one. It could be solved only by a state of their own, recognized under international law. He proposed a "Society of Jews" to negotiate with the powers and a "Jewish Company" to organize the move, and he weighed Argentina against "our ever-memorable historic home".

The pamphlet was ridiculed by many and electrified others. Within eighteen months Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897, which founded the Zionist Organization. Herzl wrote in his diary that he had founded the Jewish State at Basel and that within fifty years everyone would know it; the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. Der Judenstaat remains the founding text of political Zionism.