Why Theodor Herzl wanted to establish a sovereign Jewish state

Theodor Herzl, known as “the spiritual father of the Jewish State”, was born on May 2, 1860. He was the progenitor of the modern Zionist movement who put Jews on the path to self-determination.

On his 164th birth anniversary, a brief history.

Herzl’s early belief in Jewish assimilation

Herzl was born to a well-to-do Jewish banker family in Budapest, Hungary. From a young age, he encountered anti-semitism around him, notably having to switch schools in 1875 due to it. His family moved to Vienna, Austria in 1878, where he joined the University of Vienna to study law.

Despite facing continued discrimination, at the time, Herzl believed that these religious and racial prejudices would simply disappear in an enlightened age. He believed that Jews could overcome anti-semitism by abandoning their distinctive ways and assimilating with the people they lived amongst.

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After completing his law degree, Herzl became a journalist with Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, which made him its Paris correspondent. It is here that Theodor Herzl’s views on countering anti-semitism underwent a radical change.

The Dreyfus Affair, and birth of political Zionism

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. He was falsely convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment based on some highly dubious evidence, in no small part due to prevailing anti-semitic sentiments in France, which the Dreyfus Affair further fanned.

Herzl watched with horror as mobs of Frenchman walked the street shouting “Death to the Jews”. For someone who had long believed that anti-semitism could be overcome simply through assimilation, and a faith in Englightenment principles, this was a turning point.

In 1896, Herzl published a highly influential pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). In it he argued that there was no escaping the persecution Jews faced in Europe. “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,” he wrote.

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And what was Herzl’s political solution? National self-determination. In his conclusion to Der Jundenstaat, he wrote: “The Jews who wish for a State will have it… We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.”

The Jews, among the oldest extant religious communities in the world, prior to the creation of Israel never had a state of their own, and lived dispersed across Europe and parts of Asia.

Seeking political support for his plan

Initially, Herzl proposed Argentina or Palestine as the location of the new Jewish state, although he preferred the latter as it was the “historical Jewish homeland” according to the Hebrew Bible. He spent the rest of his life travelling from country to country, meeting prime ministers, monarchs, and other influential men, to gather support for a Jewish state.

Historian James L Gelvin, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict (2021), in a 2023 interview to The Indian Express said: “Herzl believed that they needed diplomatic help in order to realise the dream of an autonomous Jewish state. So he spent most of his life shuttling from one prime minister to another, to emperors, sultans and more trying to get their support”.

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Also Read | How Jews first migrated to Palestine, and how Israel was born

At great personal expense, on August 29, 1897, Herzl convened the first World Jewish Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The conference saw the participation of 204 delegates, from 15 countries, including the United States, Algeria, Palestine, as well as countries from western and eastern Europe.

“We are here to lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish nation,” Herzl said in his speech at the conference. At the end of the conference, a new Zionist body was established with the aim of creating a Jewish homeland that was “openly recognised, [and] legally secured”. Herzl would go on to convene a total of six Zionist Conferences from 1897 to 1902.

Father of the Jewish State

Theodor Herzl died in 1904, much before his dream of an independent Jewish state became reality. In fact, during his lifetime, many Jews were fiercely opposed to the idea of a Jewish nation, which they believed fundamentally undermined their political and civil rights where they lived, and had lived, often for a millennia.

In Research | Zionism: How a movement opposed by most Jews spawned the idea of Israel

Moreover, he was also not the first to talk about a Jewish homeland, and definitely not the first to do anything about it. Since the mid-nineteenth century, waves of Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine took place, in the hope of eventually establishing a Jewish nation in the Holy Land.

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Nonetheless, Herzl remains the most important foundational figure for the state of Israel, and the only individual to be mentioned in the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948. This is because it was Herzl who formulated exactly why a Jewish nation-state was the only solution for anti-Semitism, and what one would look like. It was also his efforts which began the international political and diplomatic movement which eventually led to the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the creation of Israel in 1948.

Most importantly, Herzl’s writings and his efforts eventually created broader support for the movement for a Jewish nation state among the Jews of Europe. As he himself put it, “I gradually hounded them [Jews] into the mood for a state”.

Today, his remains are interred atop the eponymous Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, in West Jerusalem.