Herzl's Vision

Theodor Herzl had been a successful Viennese journalist and a less successful playwright with no political ambitions. That changed in 1896, when he published The Jewish State. The following year he convened a Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The Congress founded the Zionist Organization in order to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, recognized and guaranteed by public international law. As Herzl transformed himself in just a few years from writer and editor into the leader of an international political movement, he learned politics and diplomacy on the run--and to great effect. In his efforts to gain broad support for his vision, Herzl met with the Ottoman sultan; the German emperor; the king of Italy; the pope; British, Russian, and German ministers; as well as a great number of other government and public opinion leaders of many European countries. By the time of his early death in 1904 at the age of forty-four, Herzl had transformed Jewish public discourse and made the idea of a Return to Zion into a reality, albeit still a weak one, in international politics.