Theodore Herzl, the man credited with being the founder of modern Zionism.

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Theodore Herzl, the man credited with being the founder of modern Zionism, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1860.  Herzl was educated in the spirit of German-Jewish ‘Enlightenment.’ And whilst his parents were Jewish, Herzl had no religious sentiment.  In 1902 Herzl adapted his creative and writing skills in a novel called Altneuland, (Old-New Land).  The book was a nineteenth century “utopian blueprint for a modern state of Israel.” Although there were already Jewish settlers in Palestine and Zionist ideals had existed in Eastern Europe previously, Herzl made Zionism into a cultural and political movement that was to be accepted by Western governments and intellectuals.

Herzl, along with other Jewish European leaders formed the World Zionist Organization, which aimed at promoting Jewish migration to and settlement in Palestine.

Theodore Herzl studied law at the University of Vienna, and later became the Paris correspondent for the ‘Vienna Free Press.’ It is was in France, the home of the French Revolution, where Herzl first encountered the anti- Semitism that would shape his life, his writings and more importantly the fate of the Jews in the Twentieth Century.

In 1984, due to the prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere in France, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans.  He was unjustly charged with treason and sent to exile in the infamous penal colony on ‘Devil’s Island’.  Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the Jews!” and resolved that the only solution for the Jewish people, was mass exodus from their present environment, to a resettlement, establishing a territory of their own – a Jewish national state.  The Dreyfus Case became one of the key catalysts in the genesis of Political Zionism.

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The central goal of Herzl’s Zionist movement was to advocate mass migration of European Jewry to Palestine. In an attempt to achieve this, Herzl aims at instilling national pride back into the secularised and pain stricken Jewish people. Altneuland aims at promoting the idea of ‘National Self Determination.’- the creation of national governmental institutions by a group of people who view themselves as a distinct nation. 

In an attempt to instill national pride back into the Jewish people, Herzl promotes nationalism as the “the desire to preserve or enhance a people’s national or cultural identity when that ...

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