First Edition of Herzl's Historic Plan for a Jewish State

Leipzig und Wien: M. Breitenstein, 1896. First edition. 8vo. 86 pp. Quarter brown morocco over marbled paper-covered boards; all edges trimmed; marbled endpapers; title-page moderately toned; scattered soiling to text; extensive contemporary marginalia. Printing and the Mind of Man, 381

Rare first edition of Theodor Herzl's proposal for a Jewish state, a widely influential work that laid the foundations of political Zionism. Written in the spring of 1895 through the winter of 1896, when he was working as a journalist in Vienna, Herzl was deeply affected by the ongoing Dreyfus affair in Paris and the rampant pogroms in Russia during the 1880s. Appalled at this anti-Semitism, Herzl concluded that the answer to the "Jewish question," and their protection from violence, was not a social or religious one, but a national one that could only be solved by organizing the Jewish people into a worldwide political force. "It was Herzl's book which really crystallized the idea of a national home for the Jews...By his work he transformed the Jewish people from a passive community into a positive political force." (PMM). Herzl's work was originally planned as a speech to be given to the influential Jewish Rothschild family but was rejected by Baron Edmond de Rothschild who disagreed with Herzl's ideas. Following early difficulties in obtaining a publisher, he and the small Viennese publisher M. Breitenstein published this slim volume in an edition of 3,000 copies in early February, 1896. That same year translations into English and French appeared, paid out of pocket by Herzl. "That a Jewish State was created in Palestine within fifty years of his death was due to the vision and practical methods of Herzl, expressed in his manifesto of 1896" (PMM).