While Yasser Arafat was being buried and mourned by the enemies of Israel, I retreated to my study with a copy of the diaries of Theodor Herzl. I wanted to remind myself of what kind of person founds a state. It’s hard enough to start a company, build a suspension bridge, or, for that matter, launch a newspaper. But what manner of man gets the idea of a state into his head and causes it to be created? What is the process like? I was not thinking of any equivalence between the idea of Israel and of Palestine or between Herzl and Arafat. I was just less in a mood to read of someone, like Arafat, who failed than one who, like Herzl, succeeded.

Herzl’s quest for the Jewish state began where Arafat’s quest ended, in Paris. The founder of political Zionism was at the time a simple foreign correspondent, albeit an exceptionally scintillating one, who wrote plays and novels and tried to start newspapers. He had been born in 1860, in Budapest. His religious education, such as he got, was decidedly liberal. He may have been exposed to Zionist ideas as a youngster. The histories are ambiguous on the point, but the Encyclopedia Judaica says that at the age of 10 he decided to become the builder of the Panama Canal.

The Viennese newspaper for which he was corresponding from Paris, the Neue Freie Presse, was a liberal sheet. He had already showed a good bit of gumption on Jewish matters, once quitting a German students’ society to protest its anti-Semitism. But when he fetched up with the assignment to cover the trial of Captain Dreyfus, he came up against something much greater. Herzl witnessed what the Judaica calls the “riotous behavior of the Parisian mob when the innocent Jewish officer was publicly humiliated in a ceremony stripping him of his military rank.”

Herzl walked out of the Dreyfus trial convinced that the Jews had to get out of Europe and set up a country of their own. His first visit, to the leading philanthropist of the day, Jacob de Hirsch, met with rebuff. This sent him into a frenzy of scribbling and note-taking that resulted in what must be one of the most important pamphlets ever issued, “Der Judenstaat.” From the beginning, Herzl kept his diaries, which run to five volumes and record how the idea of a Jewish state was brought to the world through diplomacy, organizing, pleading, fund-raising into an incorporated institution, and literary work. What a contrast with the way the Palestinian Arabs have sought to advance the idea of their statehood.

Not that the idea of a military effort was alien to Zionism, a point for which Vladmir Jabotinsky is celebrated. Nor was Herzl an un-complex character. The diaries veer between eloquence, megalomania, and self-satire. But they also illuminate the emergence of a leader of astonishing powers, a newspaperman who, in his 30s,became the vessel for the hopes of a disparate population of Jews the world over, from the Pale of Settlement in Russia, to London and America, South Africa, and beyond, all riven by idelogical and religious battles of their own. The diaries record his negotiations with the Turks and Germans, his writing for the intellectual classes, and his own literary and newspaper work, all conducted with earnestness, civility, and astounding determination.

Herzl was but 38 when he convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel, where, on the balcony of the Drei Koenig Hotel, the famous photo was taken of him gazing off 50 years into the future at the founding of the state he envisioned. I have been struck, reading biographies of Herzl over the years, at the extraordinarily high quality of the individuals close to him, of their idealism and seriousness of purpose, even when differences were apparent. There was a purity and honesty to Herzl and his followers. The kind of graft that grew up around Arafat is alien to Zionism and Israel.

It is no slight to Herzl to observe that he was wrong about many things. He failed to anticipate the astonishing rebirth of Hebrew. He wrote a novel, “Altneuland,” in which the Jews of Israel adopt the German language. “I shall stop anti-Semitism instantly all over the world,” he wrote at one point. Today anti-Semitism is waxing from the corridors of government in Norway and Paris to the halls of academe at Morningside Heights in the heart of the city with the largest Jewish population of any metropolis in the world. But in astonishing ways he saw a story that others missed.

“He had the gift of prevision,” Jacob de Haas wrote of his friend in a two-volume biography of Herzl, issued in 1926. De Haas wrote of his “ability to seize ideas, absorb them, and then transmute them to his purpose.” One of the incredible facts about Herzl is that he lived but seven years from the time the idea of the Jewish state came into his head and the time he died, at age 44, at Edlach, Austria. His was not a long and bitter slog. He was a flare that illuminated the possibilities of the future. He possessed what De Haas called a “divine spark” that has kept his name “bright, where the names of others greater in power and in wealth have been hurried into oblivion.”