Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, and the founder of modern political Zionism. Born in Budapest and trained in law at Vienna, he spent his most formative years as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, where he covered French politics and the degradation of Alfred Dreyfus. Herzl later credited that trial with turning him toward Zionism, though historians reading his diaries have questioned the story and traced his thinking to earlier years. He convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 and led the movement until his death at forty-four, more than four decades before Israel was founded.