political Zionism

…was the founder of the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland. His pamphlet The Jewish State (1896) proposed that the Jewish question was a political question to be settled by a world council of nations. He organized a world congress of Zionists that met in…

Political Zionism came a decade later, when the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl began advocating a Jewish state as the political solution for both antisemitism (he had covered the sensational Dreyfus affair in France) and a Jewish secular identity. Herzl’s brief and dramatic bid for international…

A political turn was given to Zionism by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who regarded assimilation as most desirable but, in view of antisemitism, impossible to realize. Thus, he argued, if Jews were forced by external pressure to form a nation, they could lead a normal…