ion which was unfolding in Theodore Herzl.

He belongs utterly to the Jews; it is for them that he fights, and,
dying, he still sees himself as the fighter for their future. What
future Jacob Samuel foresaw for the Jews in his dying moments remained
unclear. It would appear that Herzl himself still believed that a
deepening of mutual understanding between Jews and non-Jews might
bring the solution.

But Herzl had travelled so much further by this time that he could not
have in mind the "reconciliation" which would come by the capitulation
of baptism. Indeed, the play emphasizes as a first prerequisite in
human relations the element of self-respect. "If you become untrue to
yourself," says the clever mother to the son, in the play, "you musn't
complain if others become untrue to you." It was like a fresh wind
blowing suddenly through the choking atmosphere of a lightless room.
It was a new attitude: decent pride!

It called for a frightful effort to descend from the intoxicating
heights of creativity to the ordinary round of work. For weeks now his
regular employment had filled Herzl with revulsion. The first reports
of the Dreyfus trial, which appeared while he was working on his _New
Ghetto_, therefore made no particular impression on him. It looked
like a sordid espionage affair in which a foreign power--before long
it was revealed that the foreign power was Germany, acting through
Major von Schwartzkoppen--had been buying up through its agent secret
documents of the French general staff. An officer by the name of
Alfred Dreyfus was named as the culprit, and no one had reason to
doubt that he was guilty, even though Drumont's _Libre Parole_ was
exploiting the fact that the man was a Jew.

But, after the degradation of Dreyfus, Herzl became more and more
convinced of his innocence. "A Jew who, as an officer on the general
staff, has before him an honorable career, cannot commit such a
crime.... The Jews, who have so long been condemned to a state of
civic dishonor, have, as a result, developed an almost pathological
hunger for honor, and a Jewish officer is in this respect specifically
Jewish."

"The Dreyfus case," he wrote in 1899, "embodies more than a judicial
error; it embodies the desire of the vast majority of the French to
condemn a Jew, and to condemn all Jews in this one Jew. Death to the
Jews! howled the mob, as the decorations were being ripped from the
captain's coat.... Where? In France. In republica