Jess Olson

The Late Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum: The Herzl Controversy Reconsidered

Despite a distinguished life and a remarkable written and intellectual legacy, history has not been kind to Nathan Birnbaum. While alive, he was acknowledged not only as one of the founders of central European Zionism but also as a major figure in Jewish politics and thought. As a journalist and essayist, he contributed to and was read widely in a staggering number of Jewish periodicals in central Europe—several of which, such as the first Jewish nationalist periodical in the German language, Selbst-Emancipation—he founded and edited himself. Yet today, little of his legacy is known, and his massive literary and intellectual production has received surprisingly little attention from Jewish historians.