Political Philosophy PDF EPUB

The Jewish State

Downloads: 120
First published: 1896
Pages: 139

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About this book

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.

About the author

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.

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