![]() He insists that the 197 delegates – including thirteen women – attend the Congress in formal eveningwear. Thanks to Herzl’s tortured journey and his still deeply inadequate, obviously scarred, sense of self, he makes one of his great moves. This whole endeavor “is one of the labors of Hercules,” he sighs. They include the eggs of the Neue Freie Presse, of the Orthodox, of the modernists, of Austrian patriotism, of Turkey and the Sultan, of the skeptical Edmond de Rothschild, of the rival Hovevei Zion, of the colonists in Palestine whose financial subsidies “must not be queered.” Herzl adds the “egg of the Russian government, against which nothing unpleasant may be said, although the deplorable situation of the Russian Jews will have to be mentioned” and the “egg of the Christian denominations, on account of the Holy Places,” along with the eggs of personal differences, envy, jealousy. On the train to Zurich in late August, he catalogs the invisible “eggs” he is juggling in this excruciating “egg-dance” threatening his dream. As the Congress approaches, Herzl’s agitation increases. But that, of course, solves only one of his many headaches. That is why Herzl shifts the Congress to Basel, Switzerland. Reform and Orthodox rabbis, who rarely agree on anything, agree on one thing: they do not want the Zionists in their city. ![]() And equally characteristically – for the Jewish people – the backlash is growing: from “Protest Rabbis” in London and Vienna, to refused invitations from the more culturally-oriented and settlement-focused Hovevei Zion rival group in England, to the refusal of the Munich Jewish community to host this first Zionist congress. Characteristically, Herzl has already established a Zionist newspaper, Die Welt. More Zionist circles are forming, expanding a network that started decades earlier, especially after the Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1884. I saw and heard my legend being born.”īy August 29, 1897, then, when Herzl convenes the First Zionist Congress, momentum has already been building for two years. Such adulation gave Herzl “strange sensations. Herzl was encouraged – the Jewish masses were awakening. When Herzl stopped in Sofia on his way home, hundreds of Jews cheered their new Messiah. Nevertheless, the Turks took Herzl seriously. Although he initially failed to secure an audience with the Sultan, who controlled Palestine through the Ottoman Empire, Herzl met with the Vizier and received the “Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Medjidie.” This man came with no formal organization, a stateless people, and only a popular pamphlet behind him. He visited Constantinople with his diplomatic agent Philipp Michael de Newlinski, an impoverished Polish aristocrat turned journalist. ![]() In mid-June 1896, Herzl had to note how far he had traveled in barely a year. With his manifesto “Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State,” the talk of the Jewish world, Herzl started thinking about how to give this Zionist movement forming around him official status and organizational shape. His diaries track the meetings he pursues and has, the articles he conceives and writes, the strategies he ponders and follows, the relationships he makes and leverages, and the ideas for this new Jewish state he keeps generating, refining, spreading. He felt enslaved to the newspaper but proud that he earned nothing from the movement. Herzl would spend the rest of his life as a full-time Zionist and a part-time journalist, just to keep some income streaming in. In July of that critical year of 1896, when he became “a sort of poor man’s lawyer for unfortunate Jews,” Theodor Herzl returned to Vienna, becoming the Neue Freie Presse’s feuilleton editor. Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” edited by Gil Troy, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress.
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