Leon (Yehuda Leib) Pinsker יהודה לייב פינסקר

Tomaszów gave him birth—the year 5582—and Odessa gave him his youth: a city where a Jew could study, practise medicine, prosper and feel almost like everyone else. Pinsker became a physician, was decorated by the authorities for his work during a cholera epidemic, and for years wrote the same thing in the Russian-Jewish press: give the Jews education and rights and the hatred will pass of itself.

The break. The Odessa pogrom of 5631 shook him; the pogroms of 5641, after the killing of the tsar, broke him. He was sixty. He travelled through Europe looking for support from his western co-religionists and found none. Then he sat down, wrote a pamphlet of a few dozen pages in German, and published it in Berlin on 1 January 5642 without his name: "Auto-Emancipation: a Warning to his Kinsmen, by a Russian Jew".

What it says. Judophobia is not an opinion that can be argued down but something like an inherited fear: the nations see among them a people with no land, no language of power, no corner of its own—and they see a ghost. One does not reason with a ghost. Emancipation gave Jews rights as individuals but did not restore them to the standing of a people among peoples, and nobody respects rights received as alms. So liberation can come only by their own hand—hence the title. Pinsker did not insist on the Land of Israel: he needed a land of their own and was willing to discuss which. It was his readers who brought him to the Land of Israel.

Hovevei Zion. Those readers were in Russia: circles of "lovers of Zion" already sending people to Rishon LeZion and Zikhron Yaakov. In 5645 their first conference met at Kattowitz, and Pinsker—a man with no rabbinic standing, no money and no party—was chosen to head it. The conference was named for Montefiore so as not to alarm the authorities. Eight hard years followed: money that was never enough, settlements that could not feed themselves, and the quarrel between those for whom the commandments of the Land came first and those for whom the farm did. He died in Odessa in 5652, nine years before the First Congress; Herzl admitted that had he read Auto-Emancipation earlier he might never have written The Jewish State, since it was all there already. In 5694 his remains were brought to Jerusalem and laid in Nicanor's Cave on Mount Scopus.