Herzl, Theodor, << HEHR tsuhl, TAY aw `dohr` >> (1860-1904), was an Austrian journalist and playwright and the chief leader of the Zionist movement. The movement’s aim was to set up a Jewish national home in Palestine (see Zionism ). Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Budapest, Hungary.
The growing problem of anti-Jewish feeling in Europe, increased by the Dreyfus case in France, attracted Herzl’s attention (see Dreyfus affair ). He saw that European Jews had failed to gain social equality even when they had become politically free. So Herzl got the idea of gathering the scattered Jews into a country and a nation of their own. His motives were economic and social, rather than religious. Herzl’s Jewish State, published in 1896, attracted many people to the Zionist cause, including Max Nordau and Israel Zangwill. In 1897, Herzl presided over the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland. In 1901, the United Kingdom offered the Jewish people land in British East Africa. Worry about the dispute over this offer injured Herzl’s health and hastened his death, which came on July 3, 1904.
