Theodore Herzl: from assimilation to Zionism

Jacques Kornberg offers a novel and provocative explanation in Herzl's struggle to resolve his own personal conflict over his Jewish identity. Kornberg charts Herzl's intellectual development against the background of Austrian political history from the late 1870s through 1896, the date of his revolutionary manifesto, The Jewish State. As a Viennese aesthete and writer in the 1880s, Herzl sought to shed the taint of Jewish materialism and to distance himself from less assimilated Jews. The rise to power of the anti-semitic Christian Social Party in the 1890s started Herzl on the road to a new self-transformative Jewish politics.