Background
Leon Pinsker was born in Tomaszow, Poland on December 13, 1821.
Leon Pinsker was born in Tomaszow, Poland on December 13, 1821.
He inherited a strong sense of Jewish identity from his father, Simchah Pinsker, a Hebrew language writer, scholar and teacher. Leon 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.
The pogroms of 1881-1882 finally convinced Pinsker that his dreams of integration were illusory and his pamphlet, Autoemancipation: A Warning of a Russian Jew to his Brethren (1882), was a direct result of these new sentiments. Published anonymously. the pamphlet analyzed the psychological and social roots of anti-Semitism and suggested the foundation of a Jewish national homeland. He stated that a Jewish congress should decide whether this would be in Eretz Israel or in America. Having initially believed that anti-Semitism could be dispelled either by complete assimilation or by recognition of the Jewish people as a nation in theirown right, Pinsker now' realized that the former was impossible and campaigned for the latter: the declaration of Jewish nationhood.
Pinsker’s appeals struck home with many Jews and Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) societies all over eastern Europe received his ideas enthusiastically and made his work their manifesto. Pinsker himself joined the Hovevei Zion movement and became its leading spirit, now convinced that the Jewish home should be in Eretz Israel. In 1883 it was decided to establish a center for Jewish settlement in Palestine, and to convene a congress in conjunction with Hovevei Zion. A comittee organized at Pinsker’s home, with himself as chairman, contacted existing Hovevei Zion groups and encouraged them to establish new ones. The members of these groups aimed to promote the Jewish national ideal, to revive Jewish culture and to work toward Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel. In 1884 the Hovevei Zion held its national convention in Kattowitz, then a part of Germany, because Zionism was illegal in Russia. There Pinsker was elected president of the organization. Pinsker retained the position, despite his attempts, on several occasions, to resign because of frustration over worsening relations between religious and nonreligious elements, and his own declining health.
The first Jewish settlements were established in Eretz Israel, but Pinsker did hot live to see their eventual success. When the Turks curtailed immigration, the organization went into debt and numerous other problems arose. He lost hope in his dream of large-scale settlement in Eretz Israel and began to shift his hopes toward Maurice de Hirsch’s activities for settling Jews in Argentina, which he thought could take the masses of emigrants, with Eretz Israel serving only as a spiritual center for the Jewish people. In 1934 his remains were buried on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.
Pinsker died in Odessa in 1891. His remains were brought to Jerusalem in 1934 and reburied in Nicanor's Cave next to Mount Scopus. The moshav Nahalat Yehuda, now a neighborhood in Rishon LeZion, is named after him, as well as streets in several towns in Israel.
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He firmly believed in the assimilation of Jews into Russian culture and immersed himself in activities to that end, founding and working with various magazines and societies dedicated to acquainting the Jewish population With Russian culture.
Pinsker believed that the Jewish problem could be resolved if the Jews attained equal rights. In his early years, Pinsker favored the assimilation path and was one of the founders of a Russian language Jewish weekly (see also: Haskala).
