Hotel de Castille

This is the building where Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, wrote his famous piece, The Jewish State. The spark was the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish member of the French military, who was wrongly accused of spying.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, resided at the Hotel Castille in Paris in early 1895 while serving as a foreign correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. It was during this period that he became increasingly focused on the "Jewish question" and developed the ideas that would lead to his influential work, "The Jewish State". Some sources describe him as having virtually barricaded himself in his hotel room there while working on these ideas.
While Herzl was born in Budapest, Hungary, and later moved to Vienna, the Hotel Castille is where he lived during the period of his significant period of ideological development.
Theordore Herzl stayed in a hotel in Paris that is now known as Castille Paris, where he wrote sections of his diaries and formulated some of his ideas.
While Herzl is a significant figure in Zionist history, this particular hotel's primary historical connection is to his time in Paris.



Theodor Herzl, as the Paris correspondent for the influential Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse from 1891 to 1895, experienced events in Paris that profoundly shaped his Zionist ideas. While already familiar with antisemitism from his time at the University of Vienna, the Dreyfus Affair in France brought the problem into sharp focus.
The Dreyfus Affair involved the false accusation of treason against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army. Despite evidence of his innocence, he was unjustly convicted and subjected to public humiliation, fueling a wave of antisemitism across France. Herzl witnessed this outpouring of hatred firsthand, including shouts of "Death to the Jews" at public rallies. This experience was a major turning point for him.
The Dreyfus Affair shattered Herzl's belief that assimilation could protect Jews from antisemitism. He concluded that so long as antisemitism existed, assimilation was impossible and that the only solution for a significant portion of Jews was organized emigration to a land they could call their own. This experience strengthened his conviction that a Jewish state was essential to provide a safe haven and a dignified existence for the Jewish people.
While Herzl was not the first to conceive of a Jewish state, the Dreyfus Affair and his time in Paris were instrumental in shifting his focus from seeing the "Jewish problem" as a social issue to a national one requiring a political solution. This shift culminated in the publication of his seminal work, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), and the convening of the First Zionist Congress.
The Hotel Castille was once part of the Ritz and is now a five-star hotel.