What do Stephen Fry, David Baddiel and Theodor Herzl have in common?

Anyone who has ever driven up Israel’s coastal road from Tel Aviv, heading north, will be familiar with the water tower featuring a cut-out metal sculpture of Theodor Herzl, whose looming figure stands at the entrance to the city named in his honour, Herzliyah.

But beside the numerous Herzl Streets and Herzl Boulevards which are familiar throughout the country, Herzl himself is a somewhat unknown figure, whose role in the founding of the Jewish state has become more opaque with the passage of time.

One man, however, has been determined that Herzl should not remain obscure. Taking as his mantra Herzl’s much-quoted slogan, “If you will it, it is no dream”, Sir Bernard Zissman, now a scarcely believable 90 years old, first wrote a well-received book, Herzl’s Journey.

Now Sir Bernard, a former Lord Mayor of his home city of Birmingham, has spent 17 long years in bringing Herzl’s story to the screen, and a remarkable documentary — Theodor Herzl, The Man Behind Israel — was given an exclusive showing at Bafta earlier this month.

Giving a voice to Herzl with excerpts from his copious writing was Sir Stephen Fry, infusing his words with just the right level of barely suppressed passion and frustration. The directors are Dominic Howlett and James Dann.

But the undoubted star of the event was perhaps an improbable choice to front the documentary — the writer and presenter David Baddiel, whose uncompromising choice of social media description — “Jew” — tells you much about him and also, one suspects, would have entertained Herzl himself.

Baddiel, of course, has made no secret of his feeling that as a British Jew, he has little or no relationship with Israel. Despite that, the author of Jews Don’t Count confessed to curiosity about Theodor Herzl. Pre-screening, he told the film-makers, Window Zebra Media: “As a British Jew, I’ve grown up with a complex relationship to Israel — one shaped by politics, identity and history.

“But Herzl’s story is something different. It’s about the raw idea of safety — of home — for a people who had neither. As it is cited in the documentary, ‘this man changed the world’ and I wanted to help tell that story, not to take sides, but to understand the man at its centre.”

Plagued by ill-health, Herzl died tragically young in 1904, aged only 44, and thus never lived to see the establishment of the Jewish state. If he exists at all in popular memory, it is for that symbolic picture of him leaning over the balcony of the Three Kings Hotel in Basel, Switzerland, said to have been taken during one of the Zionist Congresses which he convened. It is a pose frequently re-created by people such as President Isaac Herzog, the Eurovision contestant Yuval Raphael and, most recently, David Baddiel.

The difficulty with making a film about Herzl is that photographic material relating to him and his family is rare. So the documentary is a pleasing mixture of live action — Baddiel visiting places across Europe where Herzl lived or made a mark — and rather charming animation.

Additionally the film draws on a series of talking heads, who round out the previously two-dimensional idea of Herzl so that he gradually, in the course of the one-hour film, becomes someone we have got to know. He is not just a man with a vision who is the cornerstone of the Zionist dream, but a fully-fledged and occasionally deeply irritating person, dashing manically around the world, putting his case for a Jewish homeland to the Rothschilds, the Pope, the German Kaiser — even a British prime minister.

Among those telling Baddiel what Herzl seems to have been like are historian Derek Penslar and the American professor of modern Jewish history at UCL, Michael Berkowitz, plus a brief snapshot from the famed former Prisoner of Zion, Natan Sharansky.

But also giving their take — perhaps surprisingly — are the fiercely controversial Israeli professor Avi Shlaim, a harsh critic of Israel, and the Palestinian campaigner Ghada Kharmi, whose verdict is that Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state was disastrous for the Palestinians.

As Baddiel explains in the film, timing was everything: for Jewish emancipation, or enlightenment, had arrived in 19th century Hungary, Herzl’s birthplace, in time for him to benefit. “A lot of doors that were previously shut had suddenly opened,” he tells us.

After the death of his adored sister Paulina in 1878, Herzl and his family moved to Vienna. The young Herzl became a student of law at Vienna University and had his first encounter with antisemitism when he joined a strange far right-wing fraternity, Albia. This group demanded an initiation qualification — a duelling scar. Herzl duly acquired this and wore his scar as a badge of honour, says Baddiel.

But he broke with the group after its members expressed shocking antisemitic views at an 1883 memorial service for the composer Richard Wagner. He picked up his desultory law studies, but soon swapped them for writing “frothy comedy” plays — something we don’t usually link with the father of the Zionist movement.

He married Julie Naschauer but the marriage was a disaster. The couple had three children, each more tragically disturbed than the next. Hans “was circumcised after his mother’s death (in 1907), moved to England… and converted to Christianity”. Although Hans returned to Liberal Judaism, he committed suicide in 1930. His sister Pauline died from drug addiction in the same year. The third child, Trudi, was declared insane and was deported to Theresienstadt with her husband in 1942. Her son became a British diplomat, but he, too, committed suicide in 1946.

Mainly, the film tells us, Herzl became so consumed with the idea of a state for the Jews to protect them from burgeoning antisemitism that he spent as much time as he could running away from his wife and children. Securing a post as the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse, of which he became editor in 1895, Herzl was profoundly affected by the Dreyfus Affair, in which the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of treason and made a scapegoat for corruption in the French army.

“A sense of existential threat began to overwhelm Herzl about the condition of being Jewish”, says Baddiel. “He started to think that no amount of assimilation would ever resolve the Jewish problem”. As we know, Herzl considered a series of now derided solutions — including a mass conversion of Jews in Vienna and the possibility of accepting a British offer to resettle world Jewry in Uganda. Finally, however, he hit on Palestine, which he visited just once in 1898.

For the next six years, Herzl’s life was a frantic series of visits to people whom he believed would support his vision — and the convening of the first Zionist Congresses. Men whom we know in the 21st century only as street names, such as his friend Max Nordau, helped make Herzl’s dream come true after his death.

The film has succeeded in making Sir Bernard Zissman’s dream come true, as well — that of telling the story about a man who changed the world.

Theodor Herzl, The Man Behind Israel will be shown at the UK Jewish Film Festival in November