Two photographs appear at the opening of Derek Penslar's biography of Theodor (Binyamin Zeev) Herzl. The first, on the cover, is the famous shot of Herzl the Leader in full splendor. The second, a much less familiar snapshot, is featured at the very beginning of the book, even before the title page: a view of his wife Julie, his mother Jeanette, and three associates and their wives. Here Herzl is seen sitting on the ground in a corner. This dyad of photos adroitly captures the nature and contents of Penslar's thorough and inspiring biography. It weaves together, much more tightly than one normally finds in biographies of historical celebrities, the complexity and vicissitudes of the protagonist's family life with his ideas, innovations, political demarches, and the charm that he diffused among his loyalists.

Penslar's book moves in three circles: Herzl's private life, his relations with Zionism, and his doings in the domains of journalism and statecraft. Penslar sees Herzl not as a great thinker, but as a great leader. Herzl's intellectual and psychological life, Penslar claims, was strewn with fears and demons of various kinds. These, however, leave unexplained how Herzl managed to appeal to the Jewish masses and transform the Jewish world. Zionists’ yearning for leadership that would bestir admiration was no less ardent than Herzl's aspiration to be their leader. It was the encounter of these two forces that generated the abundant charisma that Herzl projected and assured the permanence of his place in Jewish collective memory.

Herzl was a life-long member of the middle-to-high bourgeoisie among central European Jewry. The Germanic culture of Vienna influenced the shaping of his personality and thinking. The Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck was the hero of his youth, which reflected in the obsession for personal respect that typified Herzl's political comportment in later years. Had his appetite for playwriting and theatre been fully indulged, he would have faded to a historical footnote in the best case, as Penslar makes clear. Herzl believed in the power of words. For him, the diary, the newspaper, the letter, the speech, and the conversation were all working tools. He valued the freight of power and simplicity that the word carried. Mordant irony and a surfeit of sentimentality, occasionally mixed with melancholy, characterized his writing. Basing himself on this matrix of identity, character, and personality traits, Penslar arrives at the constitutive statement in his book: “However difficult it was for Herzl to define what it meant to be Jewish, he was consistent in believing it to center around ideas, feelings, and aspirations rather than material or biological factors” (81). Penslar astutely describes how Herzl applied the reality of his personal life to the Jewish condition at large. In Herzl's eyes, words and money, which he gained via his journalistic work and marital connections, were also two potential sources of power that Jews possessed, and with which they could aspire to the goal of a Jewish state.

From 1895 onward, Zionism was Herzl's central cause—the source of his self-identity, the motive behind his creativity, and the propulsive force of his life. Concurrently, however, he was and remained, according to Penslar, “an exquisitely anxious person” (108) foremost about his livelihood at the Neue freie Presse (central Europe's most prestigious newspaper) and, now and then, about his family. These anxieties seeped into his diplomatic activity, and Penslar describes with sensitivity how he comported himself as the self-appointed sole rescuer of a people that was facing what he regarded as its hour of danger and emergency, with no explicit mandate from anyone to pursue this calling. Fear of concluding his leadership with no political gain tormented him immensely. It was thus that Herzl suspended himself on the horns of a dilemma: assuming the burden of salvaging the Jewish people by means of behind-the-scenes diplomacy and positioning himself at the forefront of a movement that conducted its business, formally, by means of democratic order.

Like many European statesmen of his time, Herzl sought to reform the Ottoman Empire by influence and not by conquest and dismemberment. He was, Penslar explains, “a social reformer but hardly a radical” (164). Scientific and technological aid from the West, it seemed to him, was a welcome way to make Zionist inroads in the Middle East, at once serving the needs of two players: the Jews and the Muslim empire. His modernizing calculus, however, was spurned from the very outset by the Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Herzl's search for a resolution through the mechanism of a great power engendered the encounter of Zionism and Britain. Although this marriage eventually produced the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, in Herzl's lifetime it wound up with the fiasco of the Uganda Plan. Penslar wonders whether Herzl seriously meant to promote an African alternative for the Jewish state in the belief that this would give the Jews a provisional path to rescue, or whether it was, from his standpoint, just another bit of political theatre, the kind of sleight of hand of which he was fond. Even if Penslar notes correctly that in Herzl it is always hard to tell the two apart, one may assume with reasonable certainty that Herzl would not have found partners with enough resolve and idealism to make this political spectacle a sustainable reality. A year earlier, in 1902, Herzl published his novel Altneuland, which did not come to pass as Herzl envisioned it—the formation of a democratic cooperative commonwealth twenty years later. Penslar notes with much justice, however, that since the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionists have taken pride in this utopian novel, considering their state the fulfillment of the Herzlian vision of a tolerant and progressive society. Is this really the face of Israel in 2020? At the very least, one may say that Israel is too often pictured otherwise. As for whether this real-life Altneuland will again become the enchanted vision of the state of the Jews, time will tell.