Antisemitism17

We are one people, one people. Everywhere we honestly tried to drown in the people community around us and only to keep the faith of our fathers. You don’t allow it. In vain are we loyal and in some places even exuberant patriots, in vain do we make the same sacrifices in goods and blood as our fellow citizens, in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our fatherlands in the arts and sciences, to increase their wealth through trade and commerce. In our fatherlands, where we have lived for centuries, we are shouted out as strangers; often by those whose families were not yet in the country when our fathers sighed. The majority can decide who the stranger is in the country; it is a question of power, like everything in international trade. I am not revealing anything of our obsessed good law when I say this as an individual who is already without a mandate. In the present state of the world and probably in the foreseeable future, power takes precedence over right. So, in vain, we are good patriots everywhere, like the Huguenots who were forced to migrate. If you leave us alone … But I think we will not be left alone.

Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, Leipzig / Vienna 1896, 12-22.

Hungary, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) Herzl is considered a central figure in modern Zionism. He was born in Pest, today's Budapest, in 1860 to an assimilated Jewish family. With his work Der Judenstaat, published in 1896.

Attempting to find a modern solution to the Jewish question, Herzl reacted to the apparently anti-Semitic trial against Artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus that had taken place in Paris just two years earlier. Within the Zionist movement, Herzl's writing advanced to become a pioneering vision of a Jewish state to be created in Palestine.

1896