Alfred dreyfus father of zionist12/5/2023 ![]() "Judas! Traitor! Death! Death to Jews," roared the mob. ![]() In 1895 he was a spectator of the humiliation and degradation of the Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of espionage and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment with hard labor. Herzl’s key experience was the Dreyfus affair in France. "That didn’t work, either, because anti-Semitism was already racist-motivated." "At first he suggested that they could get themselves baptized, a mass baptism of all Jews," Brenner said. He wasn’t, and was acutely aware that other Jews weren’t, either. As an assimilated Jew he wanted to be recognized as an Austrian citizen and be accepted as German by his surroundings. Two years before the pamphlet came out, Herzl was no more than the successful Paris correspondent of a Vienna newspaper. According to a fixed plan they would build roads, bridges and railways, erect telegraphs, regulate streams and build their homes. First the poor would go, he wrote, and make the land cultivatable. He was quite down to earth and pragmatic. In his pamphlet, Herzl addressed primarily the political and technical issues of his plan to start a Jewish state. He met with the powerful of his day – in Germany, France, Britain and Turkey – to persuade them of the urgency of his cause - in vein at first. What made Herzl stand out was that he wasn’t just a theoretical thinker, and tried to put into practice immediately the program he had designed," said Michael Brenner, a professor of Jewish history and culture in Munich. It was a breakthrough success for the then 36-year-old journalist from Vienna, born into a well-to-do family. The Zionist Organization formed there declared the aim of founding a homeland for the Jewish nation in Palestine. A year later the first Zionist congress convened in Basle, Switzerland. Give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth’s surface adequate to our people’s needs and we’ll take care of everything else ourselves, he wrote in 1896. It’s “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State.” Herzl wrote in it that in its basic form the plan was infinitely simple, and had to be for everyone to understand it. ![]() Nothing could shatter his faith in the project succeeding.Ī pamphlet that charted the way has only 86 pages. “It looks like a mighty dream,” he admitted. He was calling on them to found a state of their own. "If you will, it is no legend," Herzl entreated his people, the European Jews.
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