was completely absorbed by German
literary culture. This is all the more astonishing when we reflect
that anti-Semitism continued to increase steadily. As a grown man
Herzl could recall that one of his teachers, in defining the word
"heathen," had said, "such as idolators, Mohammedans and Jews."
Whether it was this incident,--as the memory of the grown man always
insisted--which enraged him beyond endurance, or the increasingly bad
school reports, or both circumstances together, the fact remains that
on February 4, 1875 Herzl left the Technical School.

At sixteen to eighteen in High School, he struggled to define the
basic principles of various literary art forms in order that he might
see more clearly what he himself wanted to say. He took an active and
eager part in the work of the "German Self-Education Society" created
by the students of his school. The Jewish world, whose inferior
position always wounded his pride, and whose obstinate separatism
seemed to him utterly meaningless, drifted further and further out of
his mind.

At eighteen, after the sudden death of his only sister, the family
moved to Vienna where Herzl entered the University as a law student.
Herzl, who accounted himself a liberal and an Austrian patriot,
plunged eagerly into the activities of a large student Cultural
Association, attended its discussions and directed its literary
evenings. He had occasion, there, to deride certain Jewish fellow
members who, in his view, displayed an excessive eagerness in their
loyalty to various movements.

This was the extent to which, in these days, he occupied himself with
the Jewish question--at least externally. He concerned himself little
or not at all with the official Jewish world which was seeking to
submerge itself in the surrounding world. He seldom visited the
synagogue.

He was an omnivorous reader. His extraordinary knowledge of books was
evident in his conversation, for he liked to adorn his speech with
quotations, which came readily to his memory. Herzl read Eugen
Duehring's book _The Jewish-Problem as a Problem of Race, Morals and
Culture_--the first and most important effort to find a "scientific,"
philosophic, biologic and historical basis for the anti-Semitism which
was sweeping through Europe in those days (1881). Duehring saw the
Jewish question as a purely racial question, and for him the Jewish
race was without any worth whatsoever. Those peoples which, out of a
false sentiment of h