The Dreyfus Affair, Herzl and the First Zionist Congress

In the autumn of 1894 French counter-intelligence accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew on the General Staff, of passing secrets to Germany. The evidence was worthless, the trial closed, the sentence life on Devil's Island. On 5 January 1895, in the courtyard of the École Militaire, he was publicly degraded — epaulettes torn off, sword broken — while the crowd outside chanted 'Death to the Jews!'

Among the reporters was Theodor Herzl, Paris correspondent of Vienna's Neue Freie Presse. Those shouts, in the first country to emancipate its Jews, convinced him that antisemitism was not a relic that education would dissolve but a constant, and that the answer had to be political. In February 1896 he published Der Judenstaat — not a dream but a business plan.

Rebuffed by governments and philanthropists, he turned to the people. From 29 to 31 August 1897 the First Zionist Congress met in Basel: some two hundred delegates from seventeen countries. It adopted the Basel Program — 'Zionism seeks to establish for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured under public law' — and founded the World Zionist Organisation.

Herzl wrote in his diary: 'At Basel I founded the Jewish State. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will see it.' Fifty years and three months later the UN voted for partition, and half a year after that the state was declared.