On this day in 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, “The Jewish State.” The unjustified arrest and conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a French general of Jewish decent accused of being a German spy, in 1894 served as the catalyst that ultimately compelled Herzl to ponder a long-term solution for ending antisemitism. In the same year it was initially published, Der Judenstaat was translated into Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, and French. Herzl rose to prominence, and the world Jewish community supported his audacious plan for a Jewish homeland. The idea that antisemitism would be eradicated through the creation of a Jewish state by Jewish people was revolutionary.Herzl published “The New Ghetto” in 1894, a play written to address the pervasive antisemitism that forced Jews into a new, invisible ghetto, built as an outcome of social and economic exclusion. In 1895, he approached Jewish physician and nationalist Dr. Max Nordau with his idea for a Jewish state. With Nordau’s support, Herzl compiled his thoughts into an organized narrative, stating his goal as “the restoration of the Jewish State.”The Jewish State quickly made its way around the Jewish world as it proposed a Jewish return to Palestine within a political framework. As Herzl wrote, “But a State is formed, not by pieces of land, but rather by a number of men united under sovereign rule. Man is the human, land the objective groundwork of a State”.Though the Jewish State was forceful in its belief in a Jewish homeland, Herzl was torn between the two territories that could be considered: Ottoman-occupied Palestine or Argentina, a land that was rich in resources but sparsely populated in the new world. It was in his second book, Altneuland (“The Old Land”), published in 1902, that he set his sights on Palestine as the Jewish state because of the Jewish connection to the land. Weeks after the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl was approached with the idea of a Zionist Congress, which he quickly latched onto. The First Zionist Congress, founded in 1897, expanded upon The Jewish State and its proposed ideas of Jewish nationalism and liberation. The publication and dispersion of The Jewish State laid the groundwork for Zionism, and Herzl intended for the Zionist Congress to signify the commencement of the political Zionist movement.