Theodore Hertzl: Theodor Herzl And Anti-Semitism

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Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest. He received a law degree later in life, but chose to go on the path of writing. He was 31 years old in 1891, he moved to Paris as a writer for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. Coming across anti-Semitism, he assumed that the solution was for Jews to totally integrate. He believed that anti-Semitism happened because Jews looked and acted differently. Herzl was covering the Dreyfus trial as a writer when he witnessed the cruel anti-Semitism of the French. When he witnessed the embarrassment of Alfred Dreyfus and heard the mobs screaming about how much they hated the Jews, he was stunned. Dreyfus was a totally integrated Jew, high-ranking in the French army, a man of culture and French idealism. The French were one of the most cultured people in the world. Their anti-Semitic responses couldn't come from unfamiliarity. Herzl decided that the only solution for anti-Semitism was migration of Jews to their own land. Anti-Semitism would stop, he believed, only when Jews had their own country. Herzl founded the Zionist movement. Although he was not the first ...

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