Who was Theodor Herzl?

   Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was an Austrian journalist and playwright who founded the Zionist movement. The aim of this movement was to set up a Jewish national home in Palestine. Herzl was born in Budapest, Hungary, and studied law at the University of Vienna.
   The growing problem of anti-Jewish feeling in Europe, increased by the Dreyfus case in France, attracted Herzl's attention. He saw that European Jews had failed to gain social equality even when they had become politically free. So Herzl got the idea of gathering the scattered Jews into a country and a nation of their own. His motives were economic and social, rather than religious. Herzl's Jewish State, pub­lished in 1896, attracted many persons to this cause.
   Max Nordau and Israel Zangwill were among them. Herzl kept up contact with the leaders of many nations. In 1897, he presided over the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland. In 1901, Great Britain offered the Jewish people land in British East Africa. Worry about the dispute over this offer injured Herzl's health and hastened his death.