Herzl by Shlomo Avineri, review Theodor Herzl has to be admired, if only for his audacity. Having won an audience with Baron de Hirsch, the richest man in the world, he subjected him to such remarks as, "You are the great Jew of money, I am the Jew of the spirit." Hirsch swiftly got fed up with him, and Herzl later complained that he only got through six of his 22 pages of prepared notes. In a similar vein, Herzl called on the Rothschilds to summon a family council to discuss his ideas, but received no reply. "A more realistic man would have given up," writes Shlomo Avineri in this readable account of the man who laid the ideological foundations for a national home for Jews. Herzl was a well-known Viennese journalist and not particularly noteworthy playwright when in 1896 he published The Jewish State. That made him if not the first, at least the most successful early Zionist. Shlomo Avineri, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has a direct approach to biography, and he bases much of this book on his subject's own writing, mainly his diary. He shows how slowly Herzl came to the conclusion that the Jew-hatred of the modern age was not a remnant of medieval belief but "a product of the Enlightenment itself," not built into Christianity but supposedly scientific, and made newly respectable by the biological and anthropological sciences. Intellectual anti-Semites like Eugen Dühring took old myths and modernised them. Jews were not now said to be stealing Christian children; rather, they were taking Christian capital (giving an idea of what mattered most in the 19th century). Herzl covered the Dreyfus case as a journalist in Paris; initially he believed that Dreyfus was guilty. His first-person accounts of Dreyfus's humiliation reported the crowd shouting "Death to the traitor!" Later he was to write in an essay that the cry was "Death to the Jews!" "Was he tweaking the event better to promote his cause?" asks Avineri. With admirable scepticism, Avineri stays aware of Herzl's "journalistic instincts for narrative embellishment and over-dramatisation." It was Austrian politics, not a French miscarriage of justice, which moved Herzl towards Jewish separatism, Avineri explains, with a rather more complex story than the one the professor tells us is taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Political liberalism had ended official anti-Jewish discrimination in Austria and widened the national franchise; but, to the horror of liberals like Herzl, anti-Semitic demagogues were elected. It seemed that the more democratic Austrian society was, the more anti-Semitic it became. At one point he considered the answer to the "Jewish question" to be mass baptism at a ceremony at St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Later his solution was a national home for the Jews, but what kind of home would that be? Avineri mines Herzl's diaries and discovers Narnia-like ideas on how a Jewish state should be constructed, with "symbolic motifs" for the nation and "almost childish imaginary games." He went into detail about such things as codes of duelling and the position of a crowned doge; Herzl felt the title should go to one of the Rothschilds, who would be protected by the ceremonial "Knights of Herzl." Fired by such fantasies, and with considerable nerve, Herzl negotiated with ministers as if he were a diplomat from another state. Anti-Semitism was not inimical to Zionism, as Herzl discovered when presenting his ideas to Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II's ministers: they wanted the Jews to go. On the other hand, Herzl's ideas were denounced by rabbis as a danger to Jews who wished to assimilate. This is a strictly political and diplomatic biography, so does not explore Herzl's difficult marriage or matters such as his infatuation with girls, or his relationship with his three children. The diary source is rich, however. It shows a state of mind which was not unequivocally devoted to the present location of the Jewish homeland. When settlement abroad was established as a solution, Argentina was as serious a contender as Palestine. Cyprus and Egypt were discussed with Britain's colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who himself suggested Uganda - still being considered when Herzl died in 1904, at the age of 44. In no case did Herzl consider the potential attitude of the locals who would be displaced by his new state, but such are dreamers. Herzl: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State Shlomo Avineri Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 274pp, Telegraph offer price: £18 plus £1.35 p&p (RRP £20).