Note: The book was published several years after Herzl's (non-fiction) book "The Jewish State" (1896), and after his visit to Eretz Israel. The working title of "New Zion" was changed to "Altneuland", inspired by "Altneuschul" ("Old New School") – the name of a Prague synagogue. The book was published in Yiddish and Hebrew in the same year, and translated into six languages within a year. In Hebrew, the translator Nahum Sokolow titled it "Tel-aviv". This was later adopted as the name of the first Jewish city. Printed on the title page is the famous motto "Wenn Ihr wollt, Ist es kein Märchen": "If you will – it is no dream". The novel is credited as an inspiration for the Zionist movement to create the nation of Israel.

Synopsis: Utopian novel of a future Jewish state in Eretz Israel (the Biblical name for the early lands of Israel). Friedrich Löwenberg, a young Jewish Viennese intellectual, tired with European decadence, joins an Americanized Prussian aristocrat named Kingscourt as they retire to a remote Pacific island. Stopping in Jaffa on their way to the Pacific, they find Palestine a backward, destitute and sparsely populated land (as it appeared to Herzl in 1898). Löwenberg and Kingscourt spend the following twenty years on the island, cut off from civilization. As they pass through Palestine on their way back to Europe, they discover a land drastically transformed, showcasing a free, open and cosmopolitan modern society, and boasting a thriving cooperative industry based on state-of-the-art technology. In the two decades that have passed, European Jews have rediscovered and re-inhabited their "Altneuland" ("Old New Land"), reclaiming their own destiny in the Land of Israel. Here they see a modern, social-democratic pluralistic Jewish state in which Arabs and Jews have equal rights. The book describes detailed ideas about the future state's political structure, immigration, fund­ raising, diplomatic relations, social laws, and relations between religion and the state.