The Birth of the Zionist Movement
A depiction of Theodore Hertzl addressing the First ZIonist Congress in Basil, Switzerland, 1897.
Alfred Dreyfus was a promising young officer in the French military. After completing his time in France’s famed engineering academy, he was commissioned into the French army, and within seven years, he had risen to the rank of captain and was assigned to the War Ministry in Paris. But despite his successes, Alfred’s Jewish heritage would become the most consequential aspect of his life. Nationalism, militarism and suspicion were on the rise across Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the growing rift between France and Germany. In 1894, it became clear that someone in the War Ministry was passing military secrets to Germany regarding French artillery guns. Dreyfus was the captain of a French artillery company, and the only recently-commissioned Jewish officer in the French army, leading the military establishment by means of crude deduction to conclude that he was in fact the traitor.
Dreyfus was arrested in October, 1894 and placed on trial for treason. Despite a lack of witnesses and evidence, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on the dreaded Devil’s Island penal colony. The trial exposed a dark undercurrent of anti-Semitism still flowing through a modern, enlightened French society, which questioned the loyalty of French Jews and assumed their greedy motives. It would be twelve years before the French government was willing to admit that it had imprisoned the wrong man. Dreyfus was released in 1906, a decade after evidence had been widely published proving Dreyfus’ innocence, and after “The Affair,” as it was known, had deeply polarized the French public.
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In Paris during the Dreyfus Affair was a young newspaper correspondent by the name of Theodore Hertzl. The son of a middle class Jewish family from Budapest, Hungary, Theodore’s parents had moved him away from his homeland at a young age to Vienna, Austria, in order to escape the growing anti-Semitism of the 1870’s in Eastern Europe. There he finished secondary studies among fellow Jews before enrolling in law school. Hertzl was a gifted writer and sketch artist, and his talents were utilized by a Vienna newspaper who sent him on assignment to Paris in 1891. As the trial of Alfred Dreyfus embroiled the French Republic in controversy only 3 years later, Hertzl experienced an awakening that so many Jewish voices before him had also experienced: No matter how much the Jewish people attempted to assimilate into their host societies, and no matter how productive, loyal and useful they proved themselves to be, they would always be eyed with suspicion and disdain in the nations of Diaspora. A Jewish state in the Jewish homeland was the only solution for almost 2,000 years of dispersal and persecution. But unlike the voices for return to the Land before him, Hertzl’s skills in writing and organization would be massively effective, and would give birth to a new movement at the dawn of the twentieth century.
In 1896, Hertzl published a pamphlet named Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State.” It was not the first treatise arguing for Jewish autonomy in the Land of Promise. But Herzl’s thesis was revolutionary in its call for a Jewish political movement to drive the establishment of a sovereign Jewish polity in Eretz Yisrael. The previous aliyah of the 1880’s and 90’s was a largely privatized affair; with waves of Jewish emigres into the Land, spurred by pogroms and funded by wealthy philanthropists such as the Rothschilds. Hertzl proposed a nationalized Jewish movement, united under a national Jewish flag, and organized into a national Jewish body.. The pamphlet was clear, concise and very persuasive, ending with the the famous visionary statement, “Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again. Let me repeat once more my opening words: 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 world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.”
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Hertzl did not coin the word “Zionism,” which had been first used in a more obscure Jewish publication several years before. However, Der Judenstaat introduced the concept of Zionism into the lexicon of European society. Hertzl’s pamphlet achieved wide circulation, and although most of the well-heeled Jewish socialites in Britain and Germany frowned upon his movement, concerned it would stoke anti-Semitism, it nonetheless grew in popularity among the Jewish communities throughout Europe.
Hertzl’s imposing figure and dynamic speeches, coupled with his plain and persuasive writing, made him an international phenom. In August, 1897, two-hundred Jewish delegates from all over the Diaspora convened in Basil, Switzerland for the First World Zionist Congress. A great cross-section of Jewish life was represented, from secularists and socialists to the piously orthodox. Herzl delivered an impassioned address to thunderous applause, in which he encapsulated the mission of the Zionist movement. “We want to lay the foundation stone,” he declared, “for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation. Zionism is the return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel.” The congress ratified a program to “create a publicly guaranteed homeland for the Jewish people” and established the Jewish Organization to that end, with Hertzl as president.
The World Zionist Congress continued to convene every year until 1901, after which it convened every-other-year, interrupted only by two world wars. It became the foundational entity for Jewish self-government, the diving agency for Jewish return to the Land, and the academy for a future generation of Israeli political leaders. Although Hertzl did not live to see it, and it did not quite come to pass as he had hoped, his vision for a generation of Jewish compatriots who would establish themselves in their ancestral homeland was realized in the twentieth century as he predicated.
The Zionist Congress has continued to meet every four years since 1948. Its 38th session is scheduled for October, 20-22, 2020 in Jerusalem. 500 delegates are expected to be in attendance.
