Herzl's contact with anti-Semitism dated back to his student days,
when it had first taken on the form of a social political movement. He
had been aware of it as a writer, though the contact had never ripened
into a serious inner struggle or compelled him to give utterance to
it.

Now he read Drumont, as he had read Duehring. The impression was again
a profound one. What moved him most in the work was the totality of a
world picture based on a considered hostility to the Jews.

A ritual-murder trial was in progress in the town of Xanten, in the
Rhineland. On August 31, 1892, Herzl, dealing with this subject as
with all other subjects of public interest, summed up the general
situation in a long report entitled "French anti-Semitism."

By now Herzl was no longer content with a simple acceptance of the
facts; he was looking for the deeper significance of the universal
enmity directed against the Jews. For the world it is a lightning
conductor. But so far it was only a flash of insight which ended in
nothing more than a literary paradox. However, from now on it gave him
no peace.

At the turn of the year 1892-93 there came a sharp clarification in
his ideas. He had followed closely the evasive debates in the Austrian
Reichstag--debates which forever dodged the reality by turning the
question into one of religion. "It is no longer--and it has not been
for a long time--a theological matter. It has nothing whatsoever to do
with religion and conscience," declared Herzl. "What is more, everyone
knows it. The Jewish question is neither nationalistic nor religious.
It is a social question."

Then came the summer, 1894, and at its close Herzl took a much needed
vacation. He spent the month of September in Baden, near Vienna, in
the company of his fellow-feuilletonist on the _Neue Freie Presse_,
Ludwig Speidel. Herzl has left a record of their conversation. What he
gave Speidel was more or less what he had felt, many years before,
after his reading of Duehring. He admitted the substance of the
anti-Semitic accusation which linked the Jew with money; he defended
the Jew as the victim of a long historic process for which the Jew was
not responsible. "It is not our fault, not the fault of the Jews, that
we find ourselves forced into the role of alien bodies in the midst of
various nations. The ghetto, which was not of our making, bred in us
certain anti-social qualities.... Our original character cannot have
been other than ma