1. To date, four monographs have detailed Birnbaum's life. The latest is my own, a dissertation titled “Nation, Peoplehood and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum,” submitted to Stanford University. The second is an unpublished dissertation from Dusseldorf written by Michael Kühntopf-Gentz; the third a monograph on Birnbaum's Zionist thought published in Hebrew by Doron, Joachim, titled Ha-guto ha-tsiyonit shel natan birnbaum (Jerusalem: Ha-Sifriyah ha-Tsiyonit ḥal-yad ha-Histadrut ha-Tsiyonit ha-ḥolamit, 748 [1988])Google Scholar; and finally, a study of Birnbaum's use of language in the development of his ideology, Identity, Society, and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum by linguist Joshua A. Fishman (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1987). These, along with a few article-length pieces by Robert Wistrich, Barbara Galli, and Emmanuel Goldsmith, represent all of the academic work on Birnbaum. None of these works, with the exception of my own and Kühntof-Gentz's dissertation, are full-length biographies; each takes a methodological or temporal point of departure and emphasizes one aspect of interest in Birnbaum's career. Most significantly, however, none but my own makes extensive use of the most important repository of primary documents pertaining to Birnbaum, the Birnbaum family archive in Toronto. (The one exception to all of these is a short biographical piece written by Solomon Birnbaum, Nathan Birnbaum's oldest son and in whose home his papers are preserved.) The archive, maintained after Solomon Birnbaum's death by his son, David Birnbaum, is an exhaustive collection of Birnbaum's publications, manuscripts, correspondence, and secondary pieces about Birnbaum collected both during his life and after. In total, it houses documents numbering in the tens of thousands, perhaps the most complete known collection of papers of a major European Jewish intellectual maintained in private hands. Thanks to the hospitality and generosity of the Birnbaum family—including the archive's main curator, David Birnbaum and his wife Jytte, as well as David's brothers Eleazar and Jacob, who provided full access to the archives, as well as useful assistance and commentary on my work—I have been able to engage comprehensively with Birnbaum's intellectual legacy. In particular, the letters exchanged between Nathan Birnbaum and Theodor Herzl provide a fascinating and intimate window into the Jewish nationalist debate and negotiation leading up to the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel.

2. Birnbaum was a founder, principal editor, and contributor to no fewer than five periodicals, including the first Jewish nationalist periodical in German, Selbst-Emancipation; its successor, Jüdische Volkszeitung; Neue Zeitung; the Yiddish D”r birnboyms vokhenblat; Der Aufstieg; and Der Ruf. He was a major contributor to and editor of the Berlin Zionist organ Zion, the Jewish cultural periodical Freistatt, Ost und West, Martin Buber's Jude, and Die Welt, as well as to an innumerable number of other periodicals—Jewish and non-Jewish—published throughout Europe.

3. Stach, Rainier, Kafka: The Decisive Years (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 63Google Scholar. Stach describes Kafka's affinity for Birnbaum thus: “Nathan Birnbaum, who coined the term Zionism and was Herzl's challenger, offered a different interpretation [from Buber]. On January 18, 1912, at ‘folk song night’ at the Bar Kokhba in Prague, he declared, ‘The eastern Jews are a complete, joyous and vital people, with a strong and original humor.’ This preeminent (and now forgotten) cultural Zionist could not pass up the opportunity to see a performance of the actors in the Café Savoy. Kafka hung on every word of Birnbaum's lecture.” Stach asserts that Kafka did not mention Birnbaum in his famous diary; in fact, he did make the following entry on January 24, 1912: “Folksong evening. Dr. Nathan Birnbaum is the lecturer. Jewish habit of inserting ‘my dear ladies and gentlemen’ at every pause in his talk. Was repeated at the beginning of Birnbaum's talk to the point of being ridiculous. But from what I know of Löwy I think that these recurrent expressions, which are frequently found in ordinary Yiddish conversations too, such as ‘Weh ist mir!’ or ‘S'ist nicht’ or ‘S'ist viel zu reden,’ are not intended to cover up embarrassment but are rather intended, like ever-fresh springs, to stir up the sluggish stream of speech that is never fluent enough for the Jewish temperament.” See Kafka, Franz, Diaries 1910–1913, ed. Brod, Max, trans. Kresh, Joseph (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 223Google Scholar.

4. Letter from Franz Rosenzweig to Max Landau, February 1924, cited in Ascheim, Steven, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 114Google Scholar.

5. Feiwel, Berthold, “Ein Brief,” Von Sinn des Judentums: Ein Sammelbuch zu ehren Nathan Birnbaums (Frankfurt am Main: Hermon Verlag, 1924), 14–15Google Scholar.

6. The first use of the adjective zionistische occurs in the article “Um Ehre und Wohlfahrt unseres Volk,” Selbst-Emancipation I, no. 1 (April 1, 1890), and the noun Zionismus appears in “Die Siele der jüdische-nationalen Bestrebung, II” Selbst-Emancipation III, no. 4 (May 16, 1890).

7. As Ascheim details in Brothers and Strangers, Ost und West was part of a small but important German-Jewish avant-garde preoccupation with the eastern European Jewish aesthetic known as the Jüdische Rennaisance (the term was coined by Buber in the initial issue of Ost und West). For Buber, this period of intellectual development, documented in his essays in Ost und West, led directly to his 1908 turn to Hasidism, the foundation for much of his most important later thought. Birnbaum, however, served much more as senior guiding force to the Ost und West circle. In Ascheim's words, it was Birnbaum who “was a prime mediator, interpreter, and champion of Ostjudentum to West European Jewish intellectuals” (Brothers and Strangers, 114).

8. A photograph, preserved in the Buczacz yizkor book (as well as in the Birnbaum family archive) dramatically demonstrates Birnbaum's notoriety. It shows Birnbaum being greeted by a crowd of hundreds of well-wishers for his election (including a teenage S. Y. Agnon, who would write about the 1907 election). Birnbaum would go on to lose the election, although archival sources indicate a distinct pattern of electoral fraud perpetrated by the Polish political machine behind Polish nationalist candidate Stefan Moysa.

9. For an exhaustive study of the Czernowitz Yiddish-language conference, including essays by both Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky describing their respective roles in the conference, see Weinreich, Max, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents: barikhten, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908 (Vilna: YIVO Bibliotekh, 1931)Google Scholar.

10. See Rosenheim's contribution to the 1924 Festschrift written in honor of Birnbaum's sixtieth birthday, Von Sinn des Judentums. Additionally, Rosenheim's correspondence preserved in the Birnbaum family archive extensively details the relationship—sometimes fraught—between Birnbaum, Rosenheim, and the Agudah.

11. A fine illustration of the animosity held among Zionist biographers and historians toward Birnbaum is to be found in Ernst Pawel's biography of Herzl, Theodor, The Labyrinth of Exile (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)Google Scholar. He dispenses with Birnbaum in one short passage: “Nathan Birnbaum, one of [the] founders [of Austrian Zionism], is generally credited with having been the originator of the word ‘Zionism,’ the one solid achievement in a career full of bizarre convolutions…Within a little band of uncommonly contentious and opinionated individualists, the hot-tempered and hirsute Birnbaum probably qualified as the most volatile and aggressive” (271). However, as I demonstrate in my article “Nathan Birnbaum and Tuvia Horowitz: Friendship and the origins of an Orthodox ideologue,” Jewish History 17, no. 1 (2003): 1–29, there is good reason to take seriously Birnbaum's embrace of Orthodoxy as a viable and pragmatic intellectual choice, as well as an intellectually compelling one.

12. This quotation is taken from Zipperstein, Steven, Ahad Ha'am: Elusive Prophet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xviiGoogle Scholar.

13. This fact is born out by several articles Birnbaum wrote around 1902–3 during the so-called Ahad Ha'am affair, a particularly vitriolic Zionist family fight. After the 1902 publication of Herzl's novel Altneuland, Ahad Ha'am wrote a biting criticism of Herzl and his ideas about Zionism. Although Ahad Ha'am had long been a critic of Herzl, this particular instance prompted Max Nordau, possibly with the tacit approval of Herzl, to launch an excessively personal and bitter attack on Ahad Ha'am. This attack, against a man who was seen as an almost prophetic figure in Jewish nationalism, led, in turn, to a public outcry against Nordau and Herzl, including an open letter by Martin Buber and another by Birnbaum. Over the next several months, Birnbaum dedicated detailed thought to the meaning of Ahad Ha'am's Zionist legacy, and its harmonization with his own thought. See Achad Ha-am: Ein Denker und Kämpfer der jüdischen Renaissance (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1903); and “Die jüdische Bewegung,” Der Weg (August 20, 1903).

14. It is Robert Wistrich's chapter, “The Metamorphoses of Nathan Birnbaum,” more than any other secondary source, that charts the interplay between Birnbaum's ideology and his relationship with Herzl in his turn from Zionism. However perceptive this article is, however, it ascribes a great deal more to the “socialist” elements of Birnbaum's thought (Herzl's own not credible description of Birnbaum in his diary) in the early 1890s than is warranted; likewise, as with most other historiography on Birnbaum, it does not contain any reference to or account for the materials available in the Birnbaum archive, in particular the Herzl–Birnbaum correspondence.

15. See Moritz Schnirer's account of the founding of Kadimah in Festschrift zur Feier des 100 Semesters des akademischen Verbindung Kadimah (Vienna, 1933). He describes Birnbaum as an “exceptionally intelligent, earnest young man filled with a glowing love for Judaism” (15–18).

16. Nathan Birnbaum, “Gegen die Selbstverständlichkeit,” in Festschrift zur Feier des 100, 28–30.

17. This was aided in no small part by the confluence of personalities that Birnbaum encountered in his first months of matriculation to Vienna University. Both Bierer and Schnirer arrived in Vienna with respectable résumés of involvement with the Hovevei Zion. Schnirer, upon completing his medical education in Vienna, practiced medicine in Sophia, Bulgaria, and was a leading figure in the Hovevei Zion there.

18. See Nathan Birnbaum's review of the inaugural issue of Ha-shiloah in Zion, his contributions to its pages, and the translation of his article “Kulturkämpfe im alten Israel,” 1896.

19. See Kieval, Hillel, The Making of Czech Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 101Google Scholar, for a description of the role of Birnbaum and his early Zionist colleagues on the Prague Bar Kokhba. Both Hugo Bergmann and Martin Buber were more than casual acquaintances of Birnbaum's; both corresponded with him, with Buber's correspondence numbering several letters.

20. The influence of Pinsker on Birnbaum and the other Kadimah founders was profound, and indeed it was their adulation and propagation of the ideas in Pinsker's seminal Autoemancipation that formed the core of early Jewish nationalism in Vienna. Pinsker's influence on Birnbaum is hard to overemphasize. Although Birnbaum would point to a national consciousness that started during his days in the Gymnasium, it is clear that the appearance of Autoemancipation at almost precisely the moment when Birnbaum entered Vienna University had a major impact on his embrace of Jewish nationalism (see Nathan Birnbaum, “Gegen der Selbstverständlichkeit,” 28–29). Indeed, his first anonymously published essay, “Die Assimilationssucht,” is deeply indebted in tone and content to Pinsker's essay of a year earlier. And of course, the name of the official organ of Kadimah, Selbst-Emancipation, was an explicit homage to Pinsker.

21. Peretz Smolenskin was a catalyzing figure not only in Birnbaum's early nationalist awakening but also in the formation of the Kadimah movement itself. Both Birnbaum's and Schnirer's recollections of the founding meeting of Kadimah in 1883 record the presence of Smolenskin as an honored guest. Both also agree that it was Smolenskin who, after vigorous debate among the young nationalists, proposed the name “Kadimah” for the student group, which all accepted. See Nathan Birnbaum, “Gegen der Selbstverständlichkeit”; and Moritz Schnirer, “Gründung der Kadimah: Nach Mitteilungen des Ehrenburschen, Medizinalrates Dr. M. T. Schnirer, Wien,” in Festschrift zur Feier des 100.

22. Testimony to the commitment of Birnbaum and other members of Kadimah to master of Hebrew is a small grammar, compiled by Birnbaum and another member of Kadimah, to instruct other members of the society in the rudiments of the language. This document is preserved in the Birnbaum family archive.

23. Birnbaum's most comprehensive and organized single essay on these ideas is the lengthy 1893 pamphlet Die nationale Wiedergeburt des jüdischen Volkes in seinem Land, als Mittel zur Lösung der Judenfrage, which, like Leo Pinsker's Auto-emancipation, was a central reference point for early Zionists. It was also, interestingly, this pamphlet that Birnbaum enclosed with his first letter to Theodor Herzl in 1896. Interestingly, Birnbaum added a noteworthy caveat in the note to Herzl attached to the essay—that he no longer believed in a number of the principals it laid out. See the February 24, 1896, letter from Birnbaum to Herzl.

24. Nathan Birnbaum, “Was tun?” Jüdische Volkszeitung I–III (January–March 1894).

25. Nathan Birnbaum, “Eine jüdische Volkspartei,” Jüdische Volkszeitung VII (1894).

26. Though there is little direct evidence of statements publicly questioning Birnbaum's commitment to Zionism, Herzl's comment in the diary entry that followed their first meeting, that Birnbaum “had already left Zionism and gone over to Socialism,” implies that such rumors were circulating. See Herzl's diary entry for March 1, 1896.

27. Or at least not to mature on Birnbaum's watch. There is a great deal in common with the way in which Jews approached Zionism—particularly the “General Zionist” platform of Yitzkhok Grünbaum—in the elections of the interwar Polish Sejm. See Mendelsohn, Ezra, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 74–75Google Scholar.

28. The pseudonym “Mattias Acher,” Birnbaum's most famous pen name (as demonstrated by Berthold Feiwel's comments), was coined in 1895 in an article titled “Die jüngste politische Partei Galiciens” (Die Zeit, 1895). So popular was the persona that it became almost interchangeable within Jewish nationalist circles with Birnbaum's given name; in many instances, Birnbaum's lectures were announced under this name.

29. Die jüdische Moderne (Leipzig, 1896), 3, originally published in Zion II, nos. 7–10.

30. Ibid., 4.

31. See Birnbaum's discussion of his youthful intellectual development in his pamphlet Von Freigeist zum Gläubigen (Zurich: Verlag Artzenu, 1919).

32. Die jüdische Moderne, 10.

33. Ibid., 10.

34. Ibid., 10.

35. Ibid., 13.

36. See “Ueber Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” Die Welt (November 22 and 29, 1901); “Etwas über Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” Ost und West (December 1902); and “Weininger und das Judenthum,” Jüdische Volksblatt (January 27, February 24, and March 24, 1905).

37. Die jüdische Moderne, 13.

38. Ibid., 14.

39. Ibid., 15.

40. Ibid., 36.

41. Ibid., 36.

42. Ibid., 21.

43. Ibid., 23.

44. Ibid., 26.

45. Ibid., 26.

46. Ibid., 30.

47. Indeed, they even looked remarkably similar. This is underscored by a letter from much later in Birnbaum's life, sent to him by Tuvia Horowitz, a young hasid and member of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe's (R. Yisroel Hagar) household, with whom Birnbaum carried on a lengthy correspondence after his turn to Orthodoxy. In the letter, Horowitz describes his persecution by other hasidim in his community because of his suspicious correspondence with a “western doctor.” So serious were their charges, he writes, that he was forced to defend himself in front of his uncle and justify his errant act. His crime was twofold: He had corrupted the youth of the community by teaching women Hebrew grammar and Jewish history, and he “had a picture of a Jewish doctor who goes about bareheaded, which seems to be a picture of Dr. Herzl (he meant your picture).”

48. See particularly Wistrich, Robert, “The Clash of Ideologies in Jewish Vienna: The Strange Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 201–30, esp. 220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. For a particularly insightful situation of Herzl within the context of von Schönerer, Lueger, and nineteenth-century popular Viennese antisemitism, see Schorske, Carl E., “Politics in a New Key,” in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Although focusing exclusively on Herzl in the context of Viennese Jewish nationalism, much of his discussion of the tenor of nationalist politics sheds light on Birnbaum's political career as well.

50. Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 263–64.

51. Nahman Sokolow published the bitterly mocking headline “Wonderful rumors about the establishment of a Jewish State originating from the mind of a Dr. Herzl” in Ha-Tsefirah. Herzl's diary records the embarrassing obsessive protestations of Bacher and Benedikt, the editors of Neue Freie Presse and Herzl's employers. See Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 263, 273.

52. Nathan Birnbaum, “Dr. Theodor Herzl: Der Judenstaat,” Die Zeit (February 22, 1896).

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. Birnbaum to Herzl, February 24, 1896. All letters between Birnbaum and Herzl are contained in the Birnbaum family archive in Toronto.

56. Herzl to Birnbaum, February 25, 1896.

57. See Herzl's diary entry for March 1, 1896. All translations of Herzl's diaries are from Herzl, Theodor, Complete Diaries, ed. Patai, Raphael, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York: Herzl Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

58. In fact, many of Birnbaum's major statements on Zionism were written during this time, including Die nationale Wiedergeburt des jüdischen Volks in seinem Lande (1893); Die Zionistische Bewegung (1895); Der Zionismus (1896); his address to the Basel congress in 1897, “Zionism als Culturbewegung”; and Zwei Vorträge über Zionismus (1898). During this time, Birnbaum edited his own Zionist journal, Jüdische Volkszeitung (the final incarnation of Selbst-Emancipation) until its closing in 1896, as well as the Berlin journal Zion from 1896 to 1897, and he was a regular contributor, until very late, of materials to Herzl's own Zionist newspaper, Die Welt.

59. Birnbaum to Herzl, March 4, 1896.

60. Herzl, Diaries, March 4, 1896.

61. Birnbaum to Herzl, April 23, 1896.

62. Herzl to Birnbaum, April 26, 1896.

63. This arrangement did not come quickly enough for Birnbaum. Underscoring the disastrous state of his finances, Birnbaum sent an agitated letter, complaining that he had not yet heard from Wolfsohn, and then yet another letter on May 5, reiterating his financial situation and begging for an immediate loan. Birnbaum to Herzl, May 1, 1896; Birnbaum to Herzl, May 5, 1896.

64. For a description and analysis of Herzl's voyage to Constantinople and its impact, see Vital, David, Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 287–98Google Scholar.

65. Birnbaum to Herzl, October 15, 1896.

66. Herzl to Birnbaum, October 17, 1896.

67. Birnbaum to Herzl, November 5, 1896.

68. See Vital, Origins of Zionism, 298–353.

69. Herzl, Diaries, March 10, 1897.

70. Herzl, Diaries, January 29, 1897.

71. Herzl was most likely not mistaken in his assertions about a “Jewish People's Party”; however, he revealed his ignorance of Birnbaum's publications. As early as 1894, Birnbaum had put forth the idea of a “Jewish People's Party” (Jüdische Volkspartei), though he conceived of it as a Zionist entity.

72. Herzl, Diaries, April 24, 1897.

73. Nathan Birnbaum, “Zum Müncher Kongresse,” Zion (May 5, 1897).

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Herzl, Diaries, August 27, 1897.

77. Birnbaum to Herzl, September 7, 1897.

78. Herzl, Diaries, September 9, 1897.

79. Herzl, Diaries, September 24, 1897.

80. Ibid.

81. Herzl, Diaries, March 12, 1898.

82. Herzl, Diaries, April 11, 1898.

83. Herzl to Birnbaum, 1899; Birnbaum to Herzl, 1899.