nationalist Hebrew literature, providing national and universal education for
young people, actively opposing the Halukah system, in addition to reviving
Hebrew as a spoken language.
The practical Zionists convened conferences in 1882 and 1884, the first in
Focs ̧ani and the second in Kattowitz. The first was significant in that the
local traditional rabbi presided; despite its secular aims, Zionism had not yet
alienated the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe. At Kattowitz, repre-
sentatives of local settlement chapters, while discussing their goals, agreed
that they needed western European leadership to enhance their prestige
and improve their political connections. Ideally they hoped to attract the
leadership of a Rothschild or Moses Montefiore. Instead, they found their
leadership at the end of the 1890s in Theodore Herzl.
Theodore Herzl’s arrival on the Zionist scene in 1897 is often regarded as
the conventional birth of Zionism, despite nearly two decades of Russian
Zionist activity. His leadership is a textbook case of “leadership from the
periphery.” Born in Budapest, Herzl was raised in a bilingual, bicultural
environment speaking German and Hungarian, and embraced Viennese and
Magyar culture. It is useful in this regard to compare Herzl with the early
Prague Zionists. Like Herzl, the Prague Zionists lived between two cul-
tures and languages: German and Czech. Each gravitated away from the
dominant culture, Herzl toward Viennese and the Prague Zionists toward
Czech culture.
Herzl was largely assimilated. He had a bar mitzvah but had to have the
blessings transliterated into Latin characters. He considered himself Viennese
first and Hungarian second; his Jewish identity came a distant third. Until
the age of 17, he lived in Budapest at a time when the city was largely
devoid of anti-Semitism. He then moved with his family to Vienna, where he
had his first anti-Semitic encounters. He was called “Sau-Jud” (Jew-pig) by a
passerby. More importantly, when he entered university he was denied entry
into a fraternity on the grounds that Jews lacked honor, precluding him from
participating in the central fraternity activity: dueling.
His alleged lack of honor spurred him to overcome the limits imposed by
his Jewishness by helping all Jews achieve honor. Eventually, his search for
honor would lead him to Zionism. Prior to Zionism, though, he contem-
plated the mass conversion of the Jews of Vienna in a dramatic, public
midday ceremony in front of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral. He then proposed
having a dozen Jews challenge and best a dozen Christians in a series of
duels. After discarding these ideas, he noted that the distinguishing feature
between honorable and non-honorable peoples was having a national home-
land, and concluded that the acquisition of a homeland would restore honor
to the Jews.
His anti-Semitic encounters, moreover, were galvanized by witnessing the
Dreyfus Affair, which convinced him that anti-Semitism and the Jewish
Question were endemic to Jewish life in the diaspora. “The Jewish question,”
190 Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914