Theodore (Binyamin Ze'ev) Herzl was a Jewish journalist from Austro-Hungary. He is considered the father of the political Zionist movement.

While serving as a correspondent of the Viennese paper, the Neue Freie Presse in Paris, Herzl witnessed the Dreyfus trial in which a Jewish officer was unjustly accused of treason. Herzl was horrified to see the Parisian mobs shouting: "Death to the Jews!" This, as well as many other anti-Semitic occurrences, brought him to the conclusion that the Jews must have a state of their own. In 1896,  he published the revolutionary book, Der Judenastaat,  and from then on worked relentlessly to promote the idea of a Jewish National State.  Herzl died in 1904 and did not live to see his vision come to fruition.