Israel in Focus: Theodor Herzl and the Vision that Became Israel

Dear Friends,

Israel in Focus: This is our ongoing effort to share the stories behind the headlines, to give you a deeper understanding of the people, the history, and the faith that shape life here in Israel. This month, as we celebrate Sukkot, we want to introduce you to a man who never lived to see the State of Israel, yet whose name is written into its founding declaration: Theodor Herzl.

Who Was Theodor Herzl?

Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Pest, now part of Budapest, in a house beside the great Dohány Street Synagogue. His family was prosperous, German-speaking, and largely assimilated, and young Theodor grew up dreaming of engineering marvels like the Suez Canal before discovering that his gifts lay in words.

In 1878, after the death of his older sister Pauline, the family moved to Vienna. Herzl studied law at the University of Vienna and practiced briefly, but the courtroom could not hold him. He turned to journalism and the theater, writing more than a dozen plays, mostly light comedies. By the early 1890s he was the Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, one of the most respected newspapers in Europe.

Nothing about this life suggested a revolutionary. Like many Jews of his generation, young Herzl believed the answer to prejudice was assimilation. If Jews became fully European in culture and manners, he thought, the old hatreds would fade. He even joined a German nationalist student fraternity in Vienna, and later resigned in protest when it embraced antisemitism. That resignation was a small crack in a confident worldview. Over the next decade it would widen into a chasm.

Herzl and the Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, a French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and charged with spying for Germany. Dreyfus was Jewish. He was also innocent. But the case unfolded in a France gripped by antisemitism, and Dreyfus was convicted. The scandal would divide the country for more than a decade.

Herzl covered the case for his newspaper. He watched the crowds that gathered in Paris after the trial. Years later he would say that it was this affair that made him a Zionist, and that what pierced him most were the shouts he heard from the mob: "Death to the Jews!" If this could happen in France, the land that had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, then where in Europe could a Jew ever truly be safe?

Historians debate how much the Dreyfus trial alone shaped Herzl. Some point to the rise of Karl Lueger, an openly antisemitic politician who came to power in Vienna in 1895, as the deeper wound, because it was happening in his own city. Either way, the conclusion Herzl reached was the same. Antisemitism, he wrote in his diary in June 1895, could not be defeated or cured. It could only be escaped. And the only escape was a state of their own.

Why Herzl Matters in Jewish History

The longing to return to Zion is as old as the exile itself. For nearly two thousand years, the Jewish people had prayed "Next year in Jerusalem." What Herzl did was take that ancient prayer and turn it into a political program.

In February 1896 he published a slim pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat, "The Jewish State." Its argument was simple and startling. The Jews, he wrote, are a people, one people. They possessed a nationality; what they lacked was a nation and a state. He laid out a practical plan for an orderly mass return, and closed with words that would echo for generations: “If you desire, it is not a legend”, meaning, if the Jewish people desire to have a land of their own, they will achieve it.

The reaction was electric and divided. Wealthy Jewish bankers were cool. Many liberal Jews found the idea embarrassing, and many Orthodox Jews believed a return to the land of Israel must wait for the Messiah. But when Herzl addressed a rally of thousands in the Jewish East End of London in July 1896, he was received with something close to awe.

Some of his earliest and most important support, however, came from a Christian. In March 1896, an Anglican clergyman named William Hechler, chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, sought Herzl out. Hechler had read Der Judenstaat and became a devoted ally. He opened doors Herzl could never have opened alone, arranging an audience with the Grand Duke of Baden, uncle of the German Kaiser, and later helping bring Herzl face to face with Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. It is moving to remember that from the very beginning, Christians who took the Scriptures seriously stood beside the Jewish people in their return to the land of Israel.

In August 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. About two hundred delegates came from across the Jewish world. They established the Zionist Organization, declared their aim to be a legally secured home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and elected Herzl their president, a role he held until his death.

Herzl spent the last seven years of his life in relentless diplomacy. He met the Kaiser in Jerusalem in 1898, during his first visit to the city. He was received by the Ottoman Sultan in 1901. He gave evidence before a British Royal Commission, was received by the Pope in Rome, and founded a Zionist newspaper, Die Welt, at his own expense. In 1902 he published Altneuland, "Old New Land," a novel imagining a flourishing modern Jewish society in the land. Its Hebrew translator rendered the title as Tel Aviv, a name later given to the new city rising beside Jaffa.

The pace destroyed his health. Diagnosed with a heart condition early in 1904, Herzl died on July 3 of that year at the age of forty-four. The day before, he told his friend Hechler: "Greet Palestina for me. I gave my heart's blood for my people."

His will asked for the simplest possible funeral and for his remains to stay in Vienna until the Jewish people could carry them to Israel. Some six thousand people followed his coffin. And in 1949, a year after the birth of the state, the Jewish people did as he asked. Theodor Herzl was reburied on a hill in Jerusalem that now bears his name—Har Herzl, and has become a cemetery for soldiers and Israel’s prominent leaders.

What Herzl Could Not See

Herzl imagined a Jewish state, but he could not imagine the cost of keeping it. He never saw the reservists who leave their jobs and families to serve for months on end, the communities that run for shelter when sirens sound, or the Holocaust survivors who fled Europe exactly as Herzl said they should, and who now need care and companionship in their final years.

These are the people Vision for Israel serves. This is what willing the dream into reality looks like, one family at a time. Because of friends like you, we can deliver food and emergency aid to families in need, install safety shelters in communities under fire, support reserve soldiers and their families, and stand with survivors who have no one else.

Herzl wrote that the Jews who desire it, shall achieve their own State. We would add this: the friends who will it, shall help sustain it. As the new year begins, we invite you to be part of that story. Your gift today carries a century-old vision forward into the lives of real people who need it now.