Quotes About Herzl

It had all been predicted in Herzl's 1902 novel, Old New Land, in which he imagines visiting the new Jewish state in 1923 and finding the Jews not only exploiting the Dead Sea's mineral wealth but making the desert green through irrigation and living in farm collectives that exported produce to Europe. However, he also predicted that Israel would be a German-speaking nation and that Arabs would eagerly welcome Jews for the economic development they would bring to the region.

Herzl had said that attracting the Jewish diaspora would be a slow process, but after a half century as a nation, according to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, only 17 percent of American Jews have ever visited Israel.

The British offered Herzl a territory in Uganda, to be under the sovereignty of the British crown, into which a million Jews could immigrate and settle. The territory would be administered by the Jews and have a Jewish governor. When Nordau protested that Uganda was not Palestine, Herzl replied that, like Moses, he was leading the people to their goal via an apparent detour.

We spoke often of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who argued that the future of the Jewish people depended on the existence of a Jewish state, one bonded together not just by religion but by language and nationality. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people. Then we will do the rest.

Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests "will wear impressive robes"; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem.

It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat—"The Jewish State." "The Jews who will it," it began, "shall have a state of their own.

Herzl promised the readers of Altneuland not only a Jewish safe haven, but a Jewish state that would be a source of progress and continuous growth. That dream, too, has been fulfilled.

Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century's most notorious anti-Semites.