Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937)

Nathan Birnbaum was born to a Jewish family in Vienna. He studied law, philosophy and Near Eastern studies at the University of Vienna from 1882 to 1886. He lost his religious faith but grew to believe that the Jews were a distinct nation whose homeland should be Palestine. In 1883, at age 19, he co-founded Kadimah, an early Jewish nationalist society. Two years later, he launched Selbst-Emanzipation, a Jewish nationalist periodical in which he coined the term "Zionism." He married Rosa Korngut, with whom he had three sons. By 1897, when he was elected Secretary-General of the Zionist Organization (later to become the World Zionist Organization) at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Nathan Birnbaum had changed his mind and come to believe that Jewish nationhood should be based on cultural autonomy within the Diaspora. He began to lobby for the adoption of Yiddish as the Jews’ national language. He also joined the political struggle for Jewish rights within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1908, Birnbaum initiated and was the chief organizer of the famed Czernowitz Yiddish language conference attended by I.L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, and many other Yiddishists. However, in the years leading up to World War I, to the dismay of his colleagues, Birnbaum abandoned the cause of Yiddishism, and returned to strict Orthodox Judaism. He continued to be a prolific writer and editor. In 1933, to escape Nazi persecution, he and his wife fled Berlin, their home since 1911, for Scheveningen in The Hague.