Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl (1860 to 1904) was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer who became the father of modern political Zionism. Born in Pest to a prosperous Neolog Jewish family, he practised briefly as a lawyer in Vienna and then became the Paris correspondent of the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. Confronted with antisemitism in Vienna, he published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat in 1896, setting out his vision of a Jewish homeland, and went on to form the Zionist Organization and promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Israeli Declaration of Independence names him, and he is officially called the spiritual father of the Jewish State.