France’s Defense Ministry has posted online hundreds of documents from the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish soldier whose wrongful espionage conviction was a determinant in the genesis of political Zionism.
Most people think that Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State (1896) was the first major book about Zionism. However, twenty years earlier, the novel Daniel Deronda appeared, featuring a protagonist rediscovering his lost Jewish heritage and a character named Mordecai with a dream to rally the Jewish people to return to Palestine. Perhaps most remarkably, the novel sprung from […]
