Herzl - The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Ed. Raphael Patai (1960)

Theodor Herzl is the founder of the Zionist movement, the founder of a number of organs of this movement, some of which are still working, and the first president of the World Zionist Organization and the first six World Zionist Congresses, and thus, the spiritual "Father of the State of Israel" as many Zionists like to call him.

 

The man was born in Budapest (the current capital of Hungary) in the year 1860, and studied in Vinh (the capital of Austria today) between 1878 and 1884. He worked in writing, literature and politics, 1885-1891, without joining a specific institution. In 1891 he was appointed as a correspondent for the "New Free newspaper", which was published in Vienne, in Paris. He remained in this position until 1895. During that time, he accompanied the uproar that arose in France at the time over the case of the Jewish officer Dreyfus accused of treason, and gradually, since 1894, he renounced his previous views of the necessity of assimilation of Jews with the peoples among which they resided, and at the same time he began to call , to the establishment of an independent state for the Jews. When he returned to Vinh, and was appointed literary editor of the "New Free Gazette" in 1896, he began contacting other Jews to organize a call to fight integration and the establishment of the Jewish state, a call that he published in his pamphlet entitled "The Jewish State" in 1896. He succeeded in August (August ) 1897 with the convening of the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, from which the Charter of the Zionist Movement and the World Zionist Organization emerged.

 

Herzl wrote a number of writings that expressed his ideas, including dozens of stories, plays and novels, and hundreds of articles and memoirs. But the most important one is, without a doubt, his diary. He had been recording his diaries since May 195. He continued to do so until the same month in the year 1904. These diaries covered the most important things that happened to him and the most important things he thought, wrote, or advocated for, the last nine years of his life - in fact The most important years of his life, during which he laid the foundation of the Zionist movement.

 

The diary was first published, in its original language, in the early twentieth century. But it was incomplete in many respects. Its Jewish Zionist publishers at the time deliberately withheld a lot of information and Herzl's views of people, countries, and movements, for fear of provoking resentment against the Zionist movement. Although more than one translation into the English language appeared in the period of a third of a century from that date, none of them were complete or even nearly complete. Rather, it was not among them translated a third of the article. The translators were keen to obscure many of the facts contained in the book in the original. It was only in 1960 that the first complete edition of the diary appeared, in any language at all - English. The translation, from the German, was done by the American-Jewish university professor Harry Zohn, and the editing was done by his colleague Raphael Patai. The translation was published in five parts, totaling 1961 pages (including four parts in 1621 pages for the original material and the fifth part for footnotes and notes) for the Herzl and Thomas Yoslov Press, in the United States. Its full title is "The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl".

 

For this full English translation of the diary, certain passages of the diary have been translated into Arabic. It is the first Arabic translation of it