Herzl Before Herzl

On February 10, 1896, just days before The Jewish State was published, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary about another pamphlet he had recently discovered. He observed that it was very similar to his own book, and it was “a pity that I did not read this work before my own pamphlet was printed. On the other hand, it is a good thing that I didn’t know it—or perhaps I would have abandoned my own undertaking.” It is surprising that Herzl, a man who devoted his life to the Zionist cause, might have been so easily deterred from publishing The Jewish State and spearheading the Zionist movement.

The pamphlet, Autoemancipation!: A Call to His Brethren from a Russian Jew, was written by a physician named Leon Pinsker, after a wave of pogroms swept through southern Russia. Although Pinsker’s intended audience—well-to-do West European Jews with the resources and abilities to organize a national revival—barely noticed the book, it had an enormous impact on his fellow East Europeans. More than fifteen years before the First Zionist Congress, it would become a manifesto for the reconstitution of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. And it is every bit as essential to the story of the creation of a Jewish state as Herzl’s own work.

The history of Zionism typically begins with Herzl at the Dreyfus trial, which supposedly awakened him to the dangers of anti-Semitism, leading him to question his assimilationist assumptions and embrace the idea of a Jewish state. He then founded the Zionist Organization at the 1897 Basel conference, which would pave the way—after some hiccups and distractions—for the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and for Israel’s independence three decades later.