The proposal, which sought to create a temporary refuge for the Jews in British East Africa following the Kishinev pogrom, was met with strong opposition and ultimately rejected.

[12][13] In his youth, Herzl aspired to follow the footsteps of Ferdinand de Lesseps,[14] builder of the Suez Canal, but did not succeed in the sciences and instead developed a growing enthusiasm for poetry and humanities.

[17] Herzl believed that through Bildung Hungarian Jews such as himself could shake off their "shameful Jewish characteristics" caused by long centuries of impoverishment and oppression, and become civilized Central Europeans, a true Kulturvolk along the German lines.

As a young law student, Herzl became a member of the German nationalist Burschenschaft (fraternity) Albia, which had the motto Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland ("Honor, Freedom, Fatherland").

[19] After a brief legal career in the University of Vienna and Salzburg,[20] he devoted himself to journalism and literature, working as a journalist for a Viennese newspaper and a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, in Paris, occasionally making special trips to London and Istanbul.

However, some modern scholars now believe that – due to little mention of the Dreyfus affair in Herzl's earlier accounts and a seemingly contrary reference he made in them to shouts of "Death to the traitor!"

[33] Supporters of existing Zionist movements, such as the Hovevei Zion, immediately allied themselves with him, but he also encountered bitter opposition from members of the Orthodox community and those seeking to integrate in non-Jewish society.

He proposed that in exchange for Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Zionist movement could work to improve Abdul Hamid II's reputation and shore up the empire's finances.

"[41] Returning from Istanbul, Herzl traveled to London to report back to the Maccabeans, a proto-Zionist group of established English Jews led by Colonel Albert Goldsmid.

In London's East End, a community of primarily Yiddish-speaking recent Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Herzl addressed a mass rally of thousands on 12 July 1896 and was received with acclaim.

[46] He failed to obtain an audience but did succeed in visiting a number of highly placed individuals, including the Grand Vizier, who received him as a journalist representing the Neue Freie Presse.

Herzl presented his proposal to the Grand Vizier: the Jews would pay the Turkish foreign debt and help Turkey regain its financial footing in return for Palestine as a Jewish homeland.

On 1 March 1899 Yousef Al-Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem, sent a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, with the intention to reach Herzl and ask Zionists to leave the area of Palestine in peace.

[49] According to scholars Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Scholch and Dominique Perrin, Al-Khalidi was prescient in predicting that, regardless of Jewish historic rights, given the geopolitical context, Zionism could stir an awakening of Arab nationalism uniting Christians and Muslims.

"[c] Rashid Khalidi notes that this sentiment was penned 4 years after Herzl had confided to his diary the idea of spiriting away the population of whatever country was chosen for a future Jewish state to make way for Jews:[49]We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us.

"The idea that I have developed is a very old one; it is the restoration of the Jewish State"[56] was a follow-up of Pinsker's early weaker version Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem nassichen Juden.

[64] Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val ordained that the Church's policy was explained non possumus on such matters, decreeing that as long as the Jews denied the divinity of Christ, the Catholics could not make a declaration in their favour.

At 5 p.m. 3 July 1904, in Edlach, a village inside Reichenau an der Rax, Lower Austria, Theodor Herzl, having been diagnosed with a heart issue earlier in the year, died of cardiac sclerosis.

"[70] His will stipulated that he should have the poorest-class funeral without speeches or flowers and he added, "I wish to be buried in the vault beside my father, and to lie there till the Jewish people shall take my remains to Israel.

In Zimony (Zemlin), his grandfather Simon Loeb Herzl "had his hands on" one of the first copies of Judah Alkalai's 1857 work prescribing the "return of the Jews to the Holy Land and renewed glory of Jerusalem."

[81] Herzl imagined himself as a great statesman creating a dynasty for his family in Palestine once a Jewish state was established, where his father would be its foundational senator, and his son a doge.

H. Rosenblum, the editor of Haboker, a Tel Aviv daily that later became Yediot Aharonot, noted in late 1945 that Chaim Weizmann deeply resented the sudden intrusion and reception of Norman when he arrived in Britain.

But the very inauguration is enough to inspire in them a high pride and the joy of an inner liberation of their existence ..." "The plan would seem mad enough if a single individual were to undertake it; but if many Jews simultaneously agree on it, it is entirely reasonable, and its achievement presents no difficulties worth mentioning.

In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country ..." "Oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us.

The keynotes of the story are love of Zion and insistence upon the fact that the suggested changes in life are not utopian but to be brought about simply by grouping all the best efforts and ideals of every race and nation.

[109] Herzl also envisioned the future Jewish state to be a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, with a developed welfare program and public ownership of the main natural resources.

Along with many other progressive Jews of the day, such as Emma Lazarus, Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, and Franz Oppenheimer, Herzl desired to enact the land reforms proposed by the American political economist Henry George.

[113] When he was still thinking of Argentina as a possible venue for massive Jewish immigration, he wrote in his diary: "When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us.

And what a marvellous spectacle it would be if the Jews, so gifted, were once again reconstituted as an independent nation, respected, happy, able to render services to poor humanity in the moral domain as in the past!

The universal peace which all men of good will ardently hope for will have its symbol in a brotherly union in the Holy Places.You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine.