Must Know
A politician, journalist and author, visionary and founding father of modern, nationalist Zionism. Born in Budapest, he studied law at the University of Vienna and completed his PhD in 1884. Initially, Herzl thought that the solution to anti-Semitism was the complete assimilation of the Jews. After covering the Dreyfus affair, he abandoned that idea and embraced national Zionism. In 1897, he assembled the first Zionist Congress in Basel, which founded the World Zionist Organization. He garnered the great powers’ recognition of Jewish settlements in Israel or elsewhere. In his writings, “Altneuland” and “The Jewish State,“ he depicted his vision of the establishment of the Jewish state and its character.
