Leon Pinsker

A pogrom in Odessa in 1871 shakes but does not destroy the beliefs of Leo Pinsker, who has maintained a deep interest in Jewish community affairs  while conducting a medical practice in Odessa.

The Russian-Polish physician hadjoined the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia, an assimilationist organization founded in 1863 by Joseph and Horace Günzburg, wealthy Russian Jews who have contributed much to the industrialization of nineteenth-century Russia and who have successfully fought some of the discriminatory measures against Jews in Russia.

Pinsker is an advocate of secular education for Jews and the translation of the Bible and Hebrew prayer books into Russian.

The severe pogrom that broke out in Odessa in 1881 had not only been ignored but also even abetted by the government and defended by the press.

Leon Pinsker, his assimilationist beliefs shattered, turns to Jewish nationalism, no longer believing that mere humanism and enlightenment would defeat anti-Jewish sentiments.

His visit to Western Europe leads to his famous pamphlet Auto-Emanzipation, subtitled Mahnruf an seine Stammgenossen, von einem russischen Juden (Warning to His Fellow People, from a Russian Jew), which he publishes anonymously in German on January 1, 1882, and in which he urges the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.

The book raises strong responses, both for and against.

An incisive, embittered, and impassioned pamphlet, Auto-Emanzipation provokes strong reactions, both critical and commendatory, from Jewish leaders.

In the pamphlet, he contends that Judeophobia is a modern phenomenon, beyond the reach of any future triumphs of” humanity and enlightenment,” and that the only restorative for Jewish dignity and spiritual health lies in a Jewish homeland, not necessarily in their ancestral home in the Holy Land.

As a professional physician, Pinsker prefers the medical term "Judeophobia" to the recently introduced misnomer "antisemitism".

Pinsker knows that a combination of mutually exclusive assertions is a characteristic of a psychological disorder and is convinced that pathological, irrational phobia may explain this millennia-old hatred: "... to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival."

His analysis of the roots of this ancient hatred lead him to call for the establishment of a Jewish National Homeland, either in Palestine or elsewhere.

Eventually Pinsker will come to agree with Moses Lilienblum that hatred of Jews is rooted in the fact that they are foreigners everywhere except their original homeland, the Land of Israel, or Eretz Israel.

Leon Pinsker had inherited a strong sense of Jewish identity from his father, Simchah Pinsker, a Hebrew language writer, scholar and teacher.

Leon had attended his father's private school in Odessa and was one of the first Jews to attend Odessa University, where he studied law.

Later he realized that, being a Jew, he had no chance of becoming a lawyer due to strict quotas on Jewish professionals and chose the career of a physician.

Pinsker believes that the Jewish problem could be resolved if the Jews could attain equal rights.

In his early years, Pinsker had favored the assimilation path and had been one of the founders of a Russian language Jewish weekly.

The Odessa pogrom of 1871 had moved Pinsker to become an active public figure.

In 1881, a bigger wave of anti-Jewish hostilities, some allegedly state-sponsored, had swept southern Russia; the pogroms will continue until 1884.

Leon Pinsker's authorship is soon discovered, and the newly formed Zionist group Hibbat Ziyyon (”Love of Zion”), ignoring Pinsker's indifference toward the Holy Land and taking up his call for a territorial solution to the Jewish problem, makes him one of its leaders.

Pinsker organizes an international conference in 1884 in Katowice (Upper Silesia, part of the Kingdom of Prussia).

Leon Pinsker convenes the Kattowitz Conference (Katowice, Poland) of the Hovevei Zion society, which establishes a permanent committee with headquarters in Odessa in 1884.

One of the visions of the Zionist movement is the establishment of a Jewish university in the Land of Israel; this is first proposed at the Kattowitz Conference.

Hibbat Ziyyon (later Hovevei Ziyyon [”Lovers of Zion”]) has been crippled by lack of funds, but with the backing of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild it had eventually established a few colonies in Palestine and in 1890, founds the Society for the Support of Jewish Agriculturists and Handicraftsmen in Syria and Palestine.

Leon Pinsker, as one of the founders and a chairman of the Hovevei Zion movement, heads this charity organization, known as the Odessa Committee.

Disagreements between various Jewish religious and secular factions, an internal movement crisis and the ban by the Ottoman Empire on Jewish immigration in the 1890s will cause Pinsker to doubt whether Eretz Israel will ever become the solution.

Warsaw Jews establish Rehovot (Hebrew: broad places, or room, from the biblical allusion in Genesis 26:22) a city on the coastal plain south-southwest of Jaffa, in the center of Palestine's's most productive citrus belt, in 1899.

Rehovot will soon become economically self-sufficient, owing to its prosperous citrus groves, and will absorb many immigrant agricultural laborers.

Leo Pinsker, who has become leader of the movement to settle a Jewish homeland, obtains funds from the wealthy French-Jewish banker and philanthropist Baron Benjamin (Edmond James) de Rothschild—who is not a Zionist—to support Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine at Rishon LeZiyyon, south of Tel Aviv, and ...

...Zikhron Yaaqov, south of Haifa.

Although the numbers are meager—only ten thousand settlers by 1891—especially when compared to the large number of Jews who emigrate to the United States, the First Aliyah (1882-1903), or immigration, is important because it establishes a Jewish bridgehead in Palestine espousing political objectives.