As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed
the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in
which a French Jewish army captain was falsely convicted of spying
for Germany. He witnessed mass rallies in Paris following the
Dreyfus trial where many chanted "Death to the Jews " Herzl came to
reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and
assimilation, and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves
from Europe and create their own state. In June, 1895, he wrote in
his diary: "In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude
toward anti-Semitism... Above all, I recognized the emptiness and
futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism." However, in recent
decades historians have downplayed the influence of the Dreyfus
Affair on Herzl, even terming it a myth. They have shown that,
while upset by anti-Semitism evident in French society, he, like
most contemporary observers, initially believed in Dreyfus's guilt
and only claimed to have been inspired by the affair years later
when it had become an international cause celebre. Rather, it was
the rise to power of the anti-Semitic demagogue Karl Lueger in
Vienna in 1895 that seems to have had a greater effect on Herzl,
before the pro-Dreyfus campaign had fully emerged. It was at this
time that he wrote his play "The New Ghetto," which shows the
ambivalence and lack of real security and equality of emancipated,
well-to-do Jews in Vienna. Around this time Herzl grew to believe
that anti-Semitism could not be defeated or cured, only avoided,
and that the only way to avoid it was the establishment of a Jewish
state. In Der Judenstaat he writes: " The Jewish question persists
wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not
exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are
naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and
our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case,
and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised
countries-see, for instance, France-so long as the Jewish question
is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now
carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already
introduced it into America. " From April, 1896, when the English
translation of his Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) appeared,
Herzl became the leading spokesman for Zionism, although Herzl
later on had confessed to his friend Max Bodenheimer, that he
"wrote what I had to say without knowing my predecessors, and it
can be assumed that I would not have written it, had I been
familiar with the literature." A sketch in Herzl's Diary of a
proposed flag for the Zionist movement. Herzl complemented his
writing with practical work to promote Zionism on the international
stage. He visited Constantinople in April, 1896, and was hailed at
Sofia, Bulgaria, by a Jewish delegation. In London, the Maccabees
group received him coldly, but he was granted the mandate of
leadership from the Zionists of the East End of London. Within six
months this mandate had been approved throughout Zionist Jewry, and
Herzl traveled constantly to draw attention to his cause. His
supporters, at first few in number, worked night and day, inspired
by Herzl's example. In June 1896, with the help of the sympathetic
Polish emigre aristocrat Count Philip Michael Nevlenski, he met for
the first time with Abdul Hamid II to put forward his proposal for
a Jewish state in Palestine. However the Sultan refused to cede
Palestine to Zionists, saying, "if one day the Islamic State falls
apart then you can have Palestine for free, but as long as I am
alive I would rather have my flesh be cut up than cut out Palestine
from the Muslim land."
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