Theodor Herzl

(1860 - 1904)

Theodor Herzl attributed his conversion to Zionism to the prevalence of French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, which he encountered while serving as the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. He helped organize the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, writing in his diary, “At Basel I founded the Jewish state…Perhaps in five years and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”