Max Nordau

Max Nordau was a Hungarian-born physician who co-founded the World Zionist Organization with Theodor Herzl and presided over its early congresses. He is better known for Degeneration, a furious 1892 attack on Wagner, Ibsen and the whole of modern art as symptoms of disease — a book that made him famous across Europe and whose vocabulary the Nazis later borrowed against artists, and against Jews like Nordau himself. His novels put the same diagnosis into fiction.