SOURCE: Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “Lingering Questions.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (22 January 1995): 4, 7.

In the following review, Wheatcroft compares This Year in Jerusalem with Glenn Frankel's Beyond the Promised Land, calling them both “complementary and absorbing” books.

Just 100 years ago, in late 1894, a French army officer of Jewish extraction was arrested, tried and falsely convicted of treason. The trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and his formal degradation on a barracks square in front of a mob that shouted “Death to the Jews!” was witnessed by the Paris correspondent of a Vienna newspaper. Months later, Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his clarion call for resolving the apparently irresolvable “Jewish problem”: the misery of the poor Jews living in Eastern Europe under the czar, but also the false and humiliating—and, as the Dreyfus Affair suggested, precarious—position of supposedly emancipated Jews in the West.

Did Herzl really believe it would...