An July 5, 1895, Theodor Herzl noted in his diary: “By the way, if I wanted to be something, it would only be a Prussian nobleman.” But in Prussia at that time, Jews were not even allowed to be officers. In Vienna, where Herzl spent most of his life, he experienced the exclusion of “non-Aryans” from his fraternity. At that time he was reporting from Paris on the Dreyfus trial and its anti-Semitic side effects.
If the founder of the Zionist movement had really become a Prussian nobleman, who knows whether the State of Israel would exist today. If the anti-Semite Karl Lueger had not been elected mayor in Vienna, who knows what path the history of Zionism would have taken. Had Dreyfus been acquitted in the first instance, who knows, Herzl might never have convened the Zionist Congress. Well, and if Hitler and the Holocaust hadn’t come.
