The turning point in Theodor Herzl's thinking on the Jewish question occurs during the 1894 Paris trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, on charges of treason.

Dreyfus is convicted on December 22 and sentenced to life imprisonment on the infamous penal colony of Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana.

Herzl had become aware of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in French society while working as Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper.

He sees that emancipation, rather than dissipating anti-Semitism, has exacerbated popular animosity toward the Jews.

The tearing down of the ghetto walls places Jews in competition with non-Jews.

Moreover, the newly liberated Jew is blamed by much of non-Jewish French society for the socioeconomic upheaval caused by both emancipation and accelerated industrialization.

Herzl, born in Budapest on May 2, 1860, had grown up in an environment of assimilation.

He was educated in Vienna as a lawyer but instead became a journalist and playwright.

By the early 1890s, Herzl had achieved some recognition in Vienna and other major European cities, but is only identified peripherally with Jewish culture and politics.

He is unfamiliar with earlier Zionist writings (and he will later note in his diary that he would not have written his book had he known the contents of Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation).