Word: herzl
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...HERZL by AMOSELON...
...contemporaries labeled him "a political Jules Verne." The term was pejorative; Verne, after all, was producing outlandish fictions about lunar voyages and undersea exploration. Theodor Herzl was even more absurd. He helped create Zionism and predicted the return of the Jews to their homeland. Yet the comparison with Verne was more than superficial. Both men began as romantic visionaries who sought careers in law, then in the theater, then in literature. Verne went on to science fiction; Herzl went on to Palestine. That bizarre journey has all the qualities of fin-de-siècle romance. It might have been...
...much of his life Herzl was strangely numb to evidences of antiSemitism. The Zionistic notion was merely an unworked plot until the Dreyfus trial. Then, as Paris correspondent for a Viennese paper, Herzl suddenly saw that the defendant was emblematic of his people. Captain Dreyfus might assume the insignia, the language, the official role, but in the end he would be betrayed and reviled. Dreyfusards marched in an honorable cause, wrote the young Herzl, but one "which-let us not delude ourselves-is a lost...
Feral Magnetism. As the Frenchman descended from hero to convict, the Hungarian rose from dilettante to provocateur. Herzl did not invent the idea of a Jewish state-the appeal of Return to Jerusalem is, after all, as ancient as the Diaspora. But Herzl alone took it from vision to plan to practicality. On the way he assumed the countenance and the stature of a prophet, sweeping all objections from his path. A feral magnetism began to animate his face and conversation. Philosopher Martin Buber was later to recall him as "a statue without error or mistake, a countenance lit with...
These were mere irritations to Herzl. "A light fog is mounting around me," he noted in his diary, "which could become the cloud in which I walk." Yet, if his head was in the stratosphere, his feet remained on the boulevard. Mixing altruism and chutzpah, he gathered votaries wherever he spoke, and he spoke everywhere. His message was always the same: Jews will never be safe until they have a homeland of their own. By 1902 he had pledges of 3 million francs. He grandly talked of purchasing territory in Cyprus, even Uganda. But Israel remained his true destination...