Let us begin with the semantic question. Did Herzl intend, as has been frequently claimed, that the term Judenstaat in the title of his book be understood to mean a “state of the Jews”—and not a Jewish state?

Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat during the course of 1895, originally intending to deliver it in the form of an oral presentation to bankers and other powerful Jewish personalities in Western Europe, who he hoped would take the lead in negotiating with the imperial powers for the establishment of an independent Jewish state. In November of that year, Herzl brought his Judenstaat scheme before a group of influential English Jews called the Maccabean Society. As a result of this lecture, he was asked to submit an article for publication in English in the London Jewish Chronicle. Appearing on January 17, 1896 under the title “A Solution of the Jewish Question” this article was in fact the public debut of Herzl’s idea. It briefly summarized the main points of his pamphlet, and, significantly, used the term “Jewish state” to describe the independent state he wished to establish for the Jewish people.

On January 19, after the appearance of the English-language article, Herzl signed an agreement for the publication of the full-length version of the book, noting in his diary that he planned to replace its awkward title with the far simpler Der Judenstaat.¹¹ The German edition was published on February 14, 1896. At the same time, Herzl also brought out French and English editions, for which he paid from his own pocket.¹² For the title of his French edition, Herzl used L’État Juif (“The Jewish State”), while he gave his English edition the title A Jewish State.¹³

It can hardly be claimed that the titles Herzl chose in the latter two languages were an accident. Herzl’s French was fluent, and his English, although mediocre, was certainly good enough so that he could understand the meaning of the words “Jewish state.” Moreover, the English and French editions of the pamphlet were central to Herzl’s political aims. The leading Jews behind Jewish resettlement efforts in Palestine and other lands—whom Herzl fervently hoped to attract to his cause—were French-speakers, and their most important organization, the Jewish Colonization Association, was based in Paris. It was in England, on the other hand, that Herzl intended to base his own organization, and Der Judenstaat was explicitly written with the assumption that the English Jews would be the backbone of his project.¹⁴ Thus neither in the French nor in the English editions does it seem likely that Herzl would have been willing to misrepresent his political intentions by using a title that he considered ideologically problematic. Similarly, when Herzl approved the publication of a Yiddish edition in 1899, it too bore a title that as a speaker of German he was certainly capable of understanding: It was called Die Yudische Medineh (“The Jewish State”).¹⁵

Thus in every language with which Herzl was familiar, the title of his booklet was translated as The Jewish State, and not The State of the Jews.¹⁶ Moreover, Herzl remained consistent in his usage of the term “Jewish state” in the years that followed, not only in referring to his book, but also in describing the state he was seeking to found. This fact is particularly striking when one examines Herzl’s correspondence, which he generally wrote in German or French: When writing in German, he continued to use the word Judenstaat, yet in French-language letters written more or less concurrently, he always referred to the state he wanted to found as an état juif.¹⁷ From this it is evident that Herzl believed that the term “Jewish state” served quite well as a translation of the word Judenstaat. Indeed, it was as a result of Herzl’s consistent usage of the term “Jewish state” in English and French that this term became so remarkably successful. For over a hundred years after Herzl first used it, statesmen the world over continued to speak in favor of, or against, the idea of a “Jewish state”—including the 1937 British Royal Commission which for the first time recommended Jewish independence in Palestine, as well as the 1947 United Nations partition resolution which gave international sanction to this idea.

The claim of “state of the Jews” activists today is that all of this was a mistake. Those who use the term “Jewish state” in referring to Herzl’s Judenstaat, they argue, do not realize that the German prefix Juden- means “Jews,” whereas the word for “Jewish” in German is juedisch. Herzl’s real intention can be learned only from the German title of his book: It was a Judenstaat, not a juedischer Staat. If he had really been proposing a Jewish state, he would have given his book the title Der Juedische Staat.

This entire argument, however, is based on a misunderstanding of the way the prefix Juden- (“Jews”) was used in Herzl’s German. An examination of Herzl’s writings reveals that they are replete with words using this prefix, where the reference is clearly to something “Jewish.” Thus, for instance, Herzl writes Judenblatt in referring to a “Jewish paper” (or, rather, a “Jewish rag”), and Judenroman in speaking of a “Jewish novel” he hoped to write. Similarly, he writes Judenkinder for “Jewish children” and Judenkongress for “Jewish Congress.” One would hardly expect these words to be translated as “children of the Jews” or “congress of the Jews,” “rag of the Jews” or “novel of the Jews.” The clearest way of rendering such terms into English is to use the word “Jewish”: Jewish children, Jewish congress, Jewish rag, Jewish novel. Similarly, the term “Jewish state” (or état juif) is the best available translation of the word Judenstaat.

But even if “Jewish state” was a reasonable translation of the word Judenstaat into English, perhaps it is the German term that nevertheless reveals his true intentions? Perhaps Herzl chose to use the prefix Juden- (“Jews”) over the word juedisch (“Jewish”) because he felt that, in German at least, the second option had a distinct, and less desirable, meaning?

Yet this possibility, too, is refuted by the evidence. In fact, Herzl used the terms Juden- and juedisch more or less interchangeably. Thus, for example, when writing about the “Jewish question,” he would use both Judenfrage and juedische Frage; for “Jewish community,” he used both Judengemeinde and juedische Gemeinde; and for the “Jewish spirit,” he wrote both Judengeist and juedischer Geist. Similarly, the famous newspaper term Judenblatt (“Jewish rag”) also appears in Herzl’s diaries as a juedisches Blatt. Moreover, Herzl did not have any hesitation about using the word juedisch to describe organs of the Zionist movement; when he established a bank in London whose purpose was to provide financial services to back up his diplomatic activities, he named it the Juedische Colonialbank (“Jewish Colonial Bank”).The fact is that for Herzl, the German prefix Juden- was basically synonymous with the word juedisch. The terms Judenstaat and juedischer Staat were essentially synonyms.

Herzl did, of course, have to choose between these terms. One can only give a book one title, and he knew that whichever term he chose would become a slogan and a symbol that would be used for years or perhaps centuries. Thus just as he was always careful to use only the term “Jewish state” in English, he was just as careful to use only the term Judenstaat in German. If Judenstaat and juedischer Staat were for Herzl essentially synonyms, how did he come to choose the former over the latter?

Although it cannot be confirmed conclusively on the basis of his writings, it would appear that Herzl’s grounds for making these decisions were literary. One cannot ignore the fact that Judenstaat is the shorter and less cumbersome of the two German options—just as “Jewish state” and état juif are the shorter and less cumbersome options in English and French. Moreover, there is also a strong possibility that Herzl was attracted to the word Judenstaat because of its value as an ideologically loaded play on words. We can see such considerations operating in Herzl’s choice of a title for his subsequent novel Altneuland (“Old-New Land”), which painted a utopian portrait of a future Palestine. As is well known, the title of the novel is just such a pun, being a conscious reference to Prague’s famous synagogue, the Altneuschul (“Old-New Synagogue”).¹⁸ This title was intended to be amusing, but it also sought to make an important ideological point: The Jews of Central Europe had for six hundred years seen the Altneuschul as their spiritual center, and Herzl was gently calling on them to give up on their Old-New synagogue and replace it with something much more spectacular—their Old-New land, Palestine. It is precisely this playful pun and its deeper, deadly serious meaning that Herzl believed would make for a successful title for the book. In his diary, he wrote of the term Altneuland: “It will become a famous word.”¹⁹