Simon (Simcha) Maximilian Südfeld (later Max Nordau) was born in Pest, Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Austrian Empire.

[4] As an Orthodox Jew, Nordau attended a Jewish elementary school and earned a medical degree from the University of Pest in 1872.

Herzl's views were formed during his time in France where he recognized the universality of antisemitism; the Dreyfus Affair cemented his belief in the failure of assimilation.

Nordau also witnessed the Paris mob outside the École Militaire crying "à morts les juifs!"

His role of friend and advisor to Herzl, who was working as the correspondent for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, began here in Paris.

Whether or not the antisemitism manifested in France during the Dreyfus affair was indicative of the majority of the French or simply a very vocal minority is open to debate.

Nordau also, at the 1898 Zionist Congress, coined the term "muscular Judaism" (Muskeljudentum) as a descriptor of a Jewish culture and religion which directed its adherents to reach for certain moral and corporeal ideals which, through discipline, agility and strength, would result in a stronger, more physically assured, Jew who would outshine the long-held stereotype of the weak, intellectually sustained, Jew.

It was Nordau, convinced that Zionism had to at least appear democratic, despite the impossibility of representing all Jewish groups, who persuaded Herzl of the need for an assembly.

Nordau used statistics to paint a portrait of the dire straits of Eastern Jewry and also expressed his belief in the destiny of Jewish people as a democratic nation state, free of what he saw as the constraints of Emancipation.

He fought against the tradition of seeing the Jews as merchants or business people, arguing that most modern financial innovations such as insurance had been invented by gentiles.

Whereas Herzl favoured the idea of an elite forming policy, Nordau insisted the Congress have a democratic nature of some sort, calling for votes on key topics.

According to Eribon, the two volumes of Degeneration are centred on a description of the artistic and literary currents of an "end-of-century" that was leading society to "ruin".

He sustained that society was "at the highest of a serious intellectual epidemic, some kind of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria, such that it is only natural to hear a generalized, anguished questioning: 'What is going to happen?'"

As for psychiatrists, their role would be predominant in such academia of "honest people" in charge of condemning "works that speculate on immorality".

[13] Nordau's Degeneration is cited by William James in his lecture on Neurology and Religion at the beginning of The Varieties of Religious Experience.

James mocks the author for his "bulky book" on the grounds that he exemplifies the then-current school of medical materialism, stating that Nordau "has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments".