The Jewish State

Theodor Herzl began this pamphlet in Paris in 1895 and published it in Vienna and Leipzig the following February. His proposition was blunt: the hostility facing Jews was not a prejudice that assimilation could wear down but a political condition needing a political remedy. Jews constitute a nation, he argues, and should be granted sovereign territory by international agreement, with Argentina and Palestine both weighed as candidates. Herzl then does something unusual for a manifesto. He drafts the machinery: a Jewish Company to liquidate property and organize resettlement, a Society of Jews to act as negotiating and moral authority, and local groups to handle the move itself. Slim and plainly written, it made him the leader of a movement within eighteen months, when the First Zionist Congress met at Basel. It remains the founding text of political Zionism.