Theodor Herzl’s essay “A Solution to the Jewish Question,” which appeared in a London weekly newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, in 1896, argued that the world’s Jews needed a homeland and that the homeland should be Palestine—an ancient region on the eastern Mediterranean that encompasses the modern- day nation of Israel. At the time that Herzl wrote “A Solution to the Jewish Question,” Israel did not exist. Indeed, the Jewish population in what is today Israel numbered less than one hundred thousand people, who lived among their Muslim and Christian Arab neighbors as part of the Ottoman Empire. This state of affairs would abruptly change in the twentieth century, primarily because of the activities of European Jewish intellectuals and activists, including Herzl. While Herzl was not the only actor in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, he contributed significantly to the effort through a number of publications, including “A Solution to the Jewish Question.”