Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) founded the Zionist Organization at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The establishment of this organization was pivotal in the formation of the political Jewish state, an entity that had not existed since ancient times. In fact, the Jews were not sovereigns over the land of Israel for two thousand years, despite a nearly continuous Jewish presence in the land through millennia of persecution and poverty. 
In his first pamphlet on Zionism, “Der Judenstaat” (the Jewish State), published in 1896, Herzl laid out the problems facing the Jews of Europe and proposed relocation to their ancient homeland as a solution to what he termed as “the Jewish question.” In his address to the Zionist Congress, he proclaimed that “Zionism is a return to Judaism, even before there is a return to the Jewish land,” in other words, that the emphasis on Jewish unity and our spiritual heritage needed to be the basis for return as a people to the Jewish homeland.
Six years after the publication of this pamphlet, Herzl wrote a German novel called “Altneuland” (Old New Land), providing a utopian vision of what a developed Jewish land would look like. In this story, a young Viennese intellectual travels to Palestine, a barren and useless wasteland, on his way to a 20-year seclusion on a remote Pacific Island. When he returns from this sojourn and stops in the now
established Jewish homeland, he is amazed at the verdant fields, scientific advances, and flourishing relations between Jews and Arabs. Herzl’s novel impacted Jews all the world over, with translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, French, English, and Russian. One can imagine that a work like this would have fully immersed the reader into a startling vision of what the Jewish homeland could offer – peace, prosperity, innovation. Herzl hoped to see Jews serving as a light onto the nations through their contributions to the developing world. 
While this legend seemed far-fetched to readers in 1902, Herzl’s motto, which appears here on the title page reads, “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen” (If you will it, it is no fairy tale).
While the Klau Library has several early editions of Altneuland in various languages, the copy pictured here is quite
rare. This item is the Russian translation, first published in Kiev in 1903. It has been recently cataloged as part of the library’s initiative to make our older holdings more accessible to the public by updating sparse information from our physical catalog cards – which are only available on-site, to include as much information as possible in our online catalog – available world-wide. Included below is a list of authors whose works are included in this initiative. We encourage visiting researchers to reach out to us with any questions about our holdings from late 19th and early 20th century authors, as this project will take several years to complete.
Contributed by Laura Gutmark, Technical Assistant for Hebrew Acquisition/Cataloging
| A selection of authors from our Post-1900 Freidus Collection | ||
|---|---|---|
 | Agnon, S. J. | Ka-Tzetnik 135633, 1909-2001 |
| Aguilar, Grace | Kishon, Ephraim | |
| Asch, Sholem 1880-1957 | Klausner, Margot | |
| Babel, Isaac | Korolenko, Vladimir G. | |
| Barash, Asher, 1889-1952 | Lagerlof, Selma | |
| Bashevis Singer, Isaac | Lasker Schuler, Else | |
| Bellow, Saul | Lazaros, Emma | |
| Berdichevsky, Micah Joseph, 1865-1921 | Lewisohn, Ludwig | |
| Bialik, Hayyim Nahman | Liebermann, Max | |
| Brod, Max | Malamud, Bernard | |
| Buber, Martin | Mann, Thomas | |
| Buck, Pearl | Marx, Karl | |
| Chagall, Marc | Maugham, W. Somerset | |
| Chatterton, Ruth, 1892-1961 | Meged, Aharon | |
| Chomsky, Noam | Mendele Mocher Sforim (Scholem Jaakew Abramowitsch) | |
| Clemenceau, Georges | Modigliani, Amedeo | |
| Cohen, Leonard | More, Thomas | |
| Delmont, Joseph | Mossinsohn, Yigal | |
| Dickens, Charles | Nordau, Max | |
| Disraeli, Benjamin | Oppenheimer, Franz | |
| Doblin, Alfred | Peretz, Y. L. | |
| Dosh | Proust, Marcel | |
| Ehrenburg, Ilya | Remarque, Erich Maria | |
| Ehrlich-Levinger, Elma | Roth, Joseph | |
| Einstein, Albert | Rupin, Arthur | |
| Eliot, George | Samuel, Herbert Louis | |
| Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895 | Schnitzler, Arthur | |
| Erikson, Erik H. | Scott, Walter, Bart. (Sir) | |
| Fast, Howard | Shamir, Moshe | |
| Feuchtwanger, Lion | Shaw, Irwin | |
| France, Anatole | Sheinkin,Menahem | |
| Frank, Bruno | Shilansky, Dov | |
| Frank, Waldo | Shneour, Zalman | |
| Franzos, Karl Emil | Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916 | |
| Freud, Sigmund | Sinclair, Lewis | |
| Fromm, Erich | Spinoza | |
| Glass, Montague | Stein, Gertrude | |
| Goldberg, Leah | Szyk, Arthur | |
| Golding, Louis | Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich, graf | |
| Gordon, Samuel, 1871-1927 | Tschernovitz Avidar, Yemima | |
| Handel, Yudit | Wassermann, Jakob | |
| Hazaz, Hayyim | Werfel, franz | |
| Hecht, Ben | Wiesel, Elie, 1928-2016 | |
| Heine, Heinrich | Wouk, Herman | |
| Hermann, Georg | Yung, C. G. | |
| Herzl, Theodor | Zangvil, Israel | |
| Hobson, Laura Z. | Zola, Emil | |
| Hurst, Fannie | Zweig, Stephan | |
| Jabotinsky, Vladimir Zeev | ||
| Kafka, Franz | ||
| Kaniuk, Yoram | ||