Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State)

Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, by Theodor Herzl, published in 1896, is Herzl's own foundational political pamphlet proposing a sovereign Jewish state and is widely regarded as the founding document of modern political Zionism. As Herzl's own primary text, it is the direct and authoritative source for what he himself actually proposed and argued. Its limit is that it is a political tract making an argument for a specific course of action, not a neutral historical account of the Jewish national movements that both preceded and grew out of it, which a dedicated history of Zionism addresses on its own terms.