Handwritten Letter by State Visionary Binyamin Ze'ev Herzl. Vienna, 1901

Handwritten Letter by State Visionary Binyamin Ze'ev Herzl. Vienna, 1901
Handwritten and signed letter by the visionary of the Jewish state, Binyamin Ze'ev (Theodor) Herzl on official stationery of his newspaper, Neue Freie Presse. The letter was sent from Altaussee, Austria, where he was apparently recuperating over the summer. Herzl writes, among other things, that he intends to stay for a while longer in the town, so he is forwarding the complaint to Vienna. Altaussee, 1901.
1901, when this letter was written, was one of the most important and busy years of Herzl's life. He met with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the year, when he detailed his secret revolutionary idea: Jews would buy Ottoman bonds from all the exchanges in Europe, thus saving Turkey from bankruptcy. The Sultan would compensate them by opening the gates of the Empire to Jews escaping countries where they are persecuted. Herzl wrote in his diary that year: "Once the Jewish state is established, everything will be seen as insignificant and self-evident. But perhaps there will be an honest historian, who will nevertheless see something in that a poor Jewish journalist, in the deepest state of the humiliation of the Jewish people, during the era most polluted with antisemitism, turned a rag into a flag, and a lowly mob into a people who uprightly defend this flag." On June 5th that year, while hiking in the Boulogne forest, Herzl suffered a stroke and lost consciousness for a few moments. This is possibly the reason he was in the resort town Altaussee. About two months after writing this letter, on November 8th, 1901, he wrote to Wolfson: "Time and again I am overcome with a premonition that my days are numbered." The famous picture of him looking out from the Les Trois Rois Hotel in Basel, Switzerland, during the fifth Zionist Congress, was photographed that year.
[1] official stationery blank. 22x14 cm. Very fine condition, fold marks.