Readers of Thedor Herzl’s draft of” Der Judenstaat” vowed to destroy it at the eleventh hour. Alexander Scharf met with Herzl and begged him to stop his treatise before it hit bookshelves in a week. Well, not many bookshelves. The publisher Breitenstein, Herzl noted in his diary, “wants to have a first printing of only 3000 copies. He has no faith as yet in its selling power.”

Scharf argued Herzl “would do the Jews grievous harm,” and said quite darkly that “if I did not know that you can’t be bought … I would offer you five million to suppress the pamphlet. Or I would assassinate you. For you will do the Jews a frightful injury.”

Theodor’s colleague, Moriz Benedikt, angrily confronted him, contending that Herzl was “endangering so many interests” and that “we shall not yet have the Jewish state.” “There was, besides,” Benedkit threatened, “a personal danger for [you]” if Herzl did not “desist from publication.”

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