Conductor author

Pi philosopher

Pi ideological extremist

Co-founder of the Zionist Organization together with Theodor Herzl, and president or vice-president of several Zionist congresses

He was a fully assimilated and acculturated European Jew, and despite being raised religious, Nordau was an agnostic

Married a Christian woman of Danish origin

Despite his Hungarian background, he felt affiliated to German culture, writing in an autobiographical sketch "When I reached the age of fifteen, I left the Jewish way of life and the study of the Torah ... Judaism remained a mere memory and since then I have always felt as a German and as a German only"

Went on to play a major role in the World Zionist Organization; indeed Nordau's relative fame certainly helped bring attention to the Zionist movement

In December 1903 a 24-year-old Russian student attempted to assassinate him at a Parisian Hanukkah celebration, and the attacker shouted "Death to the East African" as he fired his gun

When World War I broke out, as a native of Hungary he was accused of German sympathies, and he denied the charge and afterward went to reside in Madrid

At the 1898 Zionist Congress, he coined the term "muscular Judaism" (Muskeljudentum) as a descriptor of a Jewish culture and religion which directed its adherents to reach for certain moral and corporeal ideals which, through discipline, agility and strength, would result in a stronger, more physically assured, Jew who would outshine the long-held stereotype of the weak, intellectually sustained, Jew

Central to the Zionist Congresses which played such a vital part in shaping what Zionism would become

His speeches to the World Zionist Congress re-examined the Jewish people, in particular stereotypes of the Jews

Fought against the tradition of seeing the Jews as merchants or business people, arguing that most modern financial innovations such as insurance had been invented by gentiles, and he saw the Jewish people as having a unique gift for politics, a calling which they were unable to fulfil without their own nation-state

Insisted the Congress have a democratic nature of some sort, calling for votes on key topics

At the Sixth Zionist Congress, he defended a Jewish state in the Holy Land, publicizing a support from the British Empire, the Kaiser, the Russian Empire and a possible support from the American government in a near future

His major work Entartung (Degeneration) is a moralistic attack on what he believed to be degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of a range of the rising social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and its perceived effects on the human body

Died in Paris, France in 1923