A depiction of Theodor Herzl addressing the First ZIonist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, 1897.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part three of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
L'Affaire
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.
Illustration of Captain Dreyfus in front of the Council of War entitled "Le capitaine Dreyfus devant le conseil de guerre" by H. Meyer. Published Dec, 1894 in the Parisian newspaper "Le Petit Journal".
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.
The Correspondent
In Paris during the Dreyfus Affair was a young newspaper correspondent by the name of Theodore Herzl. 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. Herzl 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 three years later, Herzl 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 their Diaspora. A Jewish state in the Jewish homeland was the only solution for almost 2,000 years of dispersal and persecution. This realization was not new, but unlike the proto-Zionists before him, Herzl’s skills in writing and organization would have a greater mobilizing effect at just the right time, giving birth to a new movement at the dawn of the twentieth century.
A photograph of Theodore Herzl in Basel, Switzerland, 1901.
In 1896, Herzl 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. Herzl 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.”
Herzl 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. Herzl’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.
The Congress
Herzl’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 Basel, 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 Herzl as president.
A photograph of the Second Zionist World Congress in Basel, Switzerland, 1898.
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 organizational agency for Jewish return to the Land, and the academy for a future generation of Israeli political leaders. Although Herzl 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 met in Jerusalem in October, 2020 during the COVID-19 epidemic, gathering over 500 Jewish delegates together from around the world.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
Endnotes:
[1] The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire in modern-day Eastern Europe that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which the vast majority of the empire’s Jewish population was forced to live.