The First Zionist Congress

Theodor Herzl had published Der Judenstaat in February 1896, arguing that antisemitism in Europe was ineradicable and that the only remedy was Jewish sovereignty in a territory of the Jews’ own. Eighteen months later he convened a congress at the concert hall of the Basel Municipal Casino — moved there after opposition from the Jewish community in Munich — which opened on 29 August 1897. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that the exact attendance is disputed, but puts the figure at approximately two hundred people from seventeen countries, of whom sixty-nine were delegates from Zionist societies and the remainder individual invitees. Ten non-Jews attended and were expected to abstain from voting. Seventeen women were present; they could not vote until the following year’s congress.

The congress founded the Zionist Organization, with Herzl as president, and adopted what became known as the Basel Programme. A draft put to the congress by a committee under Max Nordau had spoken of a home “secured by law”; delegates led by Leo Motzkin pressed for “by international law”, and Herzl’s compromise formula was the one adopted — “Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel secured under public law.” The means it listed were the promotion of the settlement of Jewish farmers, artisans and manufacturers; the organisation of world Jewry through local and international bodies; the strengthening of Jewish national feeling; and preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments. The financial instruments followed: the Jewish Colonial Trust in 1899, the Jewish National Fund in 1901, whose land, once acquired, was to be held inalienably for the Jewish people.

Herzl recorded in his diary what he thought had happened. “At Basel I founded the Jewish State,” he wrote on 3 September 1897, adding that if he said this out loud he would be answered by universal laughter — but that in five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone would know it. The entry is in the second volume of the Patai edition of his complete diaries.

The Ottoman districts in question were not empty. The population of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly Arab, Muslim and Christian, alongside a small Jewish minority much of it long-established and religious rather than nationalist. Estimates of the exact proportions in 1897 differ widely and none of them is settled; what is not in dispute is which community was the majority. Nothing in the Basel Programme addressed what would become of it. The gap between the programme’s confidence and the country’s demography is the origin of everything that followed: the political effort was directed at European chancelleries, and the consent that was sought was that of governments, not of the people who lived there.

Sources

• First Zionist Congress and the Basel Program (1897) — Jewish Virtual Library
• The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (Herzl Press / Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), vol. II, entry of 3 September 1897 — Internet Archive
• History of the Question of Palestine — United Nations (UNISPAL)