The Viennese journalist who founded modern political Zionism. Watching a mob jeer as Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of his rank in 1895 confirmed what Herzl had begun to fear: legal equality would never protect Jews from European hatred. Within two years he published Der Judenstaat, convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and founded the World Zionist Organization. He died in 1904, at forty-four, after largely unsuccessful diplomacy and decades before the state his movement was building. Israelis revere him as their visionary founder; Palestinians fault him for writings that paid almost no attention to the Arab population already living in the land he had in mind.
In January 1895 a Viennese journalist watched a French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, stripped of his rank before a jeering crowd. The journalist was Theodor Herzl, an assimilated, secular man who had believed that Jews could simply become loyal citizens of the countries they lived in. The mob's cries against Jews, in one of the first nations to grant them full citizenship, confirmed and sharpened fears he had already begun to form. Within two years he wrote a slim pamphlet arguing that the Jews were a people who needed a state of their own. He would spend the rest of his short life building a movement around that idea, and he would die long before anyone could know whether it would bring rescue, or a new injustice, or both at once.