Leon Pinsker
Leon Pinsker | |
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Лев (Леон) Семёнович / Йехуда Лейб Пинскер לעאָן פינסקער | |
Hovevei Zion (Zionism ) |
Leon Pinsker (
Earlier in life he had originally supported the cultural assimilation of Jews in the
Pinsker was a supporter of equal rights under the law for Jews, but his optimism was curtailed after the
Political disagreements between religious and secular factions of the Odessa Committee, and Ottoman restriction on Jewish emigration, prevented Pinsker from resettling, and he died in Odessa in 1891. His remains were later brought to Jerusalem in 1934.
Biography
Leon (Yehudah Leib) Pinsker inherited a strong sense of
Jewish and Zionist activism
Pinsker believed that the Jewish problem could be resolved if the Jews attained equal rights. In his early years, Pinsker favored the
The
His visit to Western Europe led to his famous pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, subtitled Mahnruf a seine Stammgenossen, von einem russischen Juden (Warning to His Fellow People, from a Russian Jew), which he published anonymously in German on 1 January 1882, and in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.[3] The book raised strong responses, both for and against.
As a professional physician, Pinsker preferred the medical term "Judeophobia" to the recently introduced "antisemitism". Pinsker knew that a combination of mutually exclusive assertions is a characteristic of a psychological disorder and was 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 led him to call for the establishment of a
Zionist agricultural settlement
In 1890, the Russian authorities approved the establishment of the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine,[4] dedicated to the practical aspects of establishing Jewish agricultural colonies there. Pinsker headed 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 caused Pinsker to doubt whether Eretz Israel would ever become the solution.
Death and legacy
Pinsker died in Odessa in 1891. His remains were brought to Jerusalem in 1934 and reburied in Nicanor's Cave next to Mount Scopus. Moshav Nahalat Yehuda, now a neighborhood in Rishon LeZion, is named after him, as well as a street in Tel Aviv and several other locales in Israel.
References
- ^ The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, Alex Bein
- ^ Battenberg, Friedrich (2000). Das europäischen Zeitalter der Juden. Bd.2: Von 1650 bis 1945. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt.
- ISBN 9783856168476.)
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ The Hovevei Zion in Russia-The Odessa committee 1889-1890