The Jewish State

In February 1896 a thirty-six-year-old Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl, shaken by the Dreyfus affair he had covered as a Paris correspondent, published an eighty-six-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat. Within twenty months he had convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel. Within fifty-two years the program he had outlined had become the State of Israel.

Der Judenstaat is a carefully argued political proposal — drawing on legal, economic, and administrative arguments rather than on biblical or messianic ones — for what Herzl called 'the modern solution of the Jewish question.'

This edition reproduces the standard English translation in full, with Louis Lipsky's 1946 American Zionist Emergency Council Introduction, a condensed biographical essay by Alex Bein, and Herzl's own Preface and six body sections.