Category Archives: Writers & Thinkers

Jews in the Wonderful World of Literature, Thought, and Scholarship

Jews of the Week: Mohilever, Pinsker, and Lilienblum

Hovevei Zion, The “Lovers of Zion”

Moses Lilienblum

Shmuel Mohilever (1824-1898) was born in what is today Belarus to a deeply religious family. He studied at the famed Volozhin Yeshiva and became a rabbi. Violent pogroms against Jews in Russia in 1881, followed by the antisemitic May Laws of 1882, convinced Rabbi Mohilever that Jews would never be safe in the diaspora and must return to their ancestral home. In 1882, he took a trip to Paris to meet with Edmond James de Rothschild and convinced him to fund Jewish settlements in the Holy Land. While chief rabbi of the town of Bialystok, Rabbi Mohilever would inspire Jews in his community to make aliyah. In 1884, he joined a group of leaders in Katowice (then in Prussia, today in Poland) to formally establish Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion”, into an organized movement. At the meeting, he was elected president while Leon Yehuda Leib Pinsker (1821-1891) was elected secretary. Pinsker was born to a secular Russian-Jewish family in what is today Poland. He was one of the first Jews to attend Odessa University to study law. However, restrictions on Jews becoming lawyers made him switch to medicine and Pinsker became a physician. At first, Pinsker believed Jews must assimilate into European society and that this would end antisemitism. He soon saw that this was not working at all, and concluded that antisemitism is a misnomer; the proper term should be “Judeophobia”, since fear and hatred of Jews is irrational, deep-seated, and essentially incurable. He started writing articles to convince Jews to move to their homeland, since everywhere else they would inevitably be hated. He worked closely with Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843-1910) who, like Rabbi Mohilever, was born to a deeply religious Russian-Jewish family. Lilienblum was a noted Jewish scholar from a young age, and soon founded and headed a yeshiva in Vilnius. With time, however, he saw that poverty and persecution in exile was destroying his people. He became a committed Zionist, recognizing that the only solution for the Jewish people is to return to Israel and establish their own independent state. Lilienblum wrote a great deal of early Zionist literature. When Rabbi Mohilever distanced himself from Hovevei Zion because it was becoming too secular, Lilienblum took over as president. Hovevei Zion went on to convince countless Jews around the world to take up the Zionist call, and founded the cities of Rishon LeZion, Hadera, and Rehovot in Israel. Rabbi Mohilever, meanwhile, set the stage for the Mizrachi religious Zionist movement. He made sure that Jewish settlement in Israel conformed to Jewish law. The town and kibbutz of Gan Shmuel in Israel was founded in his honour in 1895.

Photo from the 1884 Katowice Conference, with Rabbi Mohilever and Leo Pinsker seated at centre.

Video: The Hidden History of Zionism

Words of the Week

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.
– Leon Pinsker

Jew of the Week: Yair Stern

Israel’s Freedom Fighter

Avraham Yair Stern (1907-1942) was born to a Russian-Jewish family in what is today Poland. The family fled during World War I, and Stern ended up living in a small village in Siberia. At 18, he made aliyah on his own to the Holy Land. Stern joined the Haganah defense organization and took up studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1932, he joined the more right-wing Irgun and trained to become an officer. Stern was also a passionate writer and poet. His lyrics were credited with inspiring and strengthening countless Jewish pioneers in Israel. The Hebrew University was so impressed that they sent him to Italy for doctoral studies. Meanwhile, he travelled around Eastern Europe to convince more Jews to make aliyah and join the Zionist movement. Stern quickly recognized the British as oppressors and foreign colonialists, and argued that as the indigenous people of the land Jews had to do whatever it took to reclaim their ancestral home. When the British released the infamous 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration (allowing only 75,000 Jews to enter over five years), Stern concluded that negotiations and diplomacy with the British was no longer possible, and armed resistance was necessary. At the outbreak of World War II, Stern was actually part of a training program with the Polish Army to train 40,000 Jews to liberate Israel from the British! The Nazi invasion of Poland put an end to that program. Stern eventually broke away from the Irgun and formed Lohamei Herut Israel, “Freedom Fighters of Israel”, abbreviated Lehi, in 1940. Some Lehi members sought to recruit local Arabs in their struggle against the British oppressor. But Stern, having lived through the terrible 1929 Hebron massacre and Arab riots (in which over 130 Jews were slaughtered and hundreds more injured and raped), foresaw that the Arabs would never share the land with the Jews in the long-term. Stern went on to organize attacks on British positions and assassinations of British authorities. His group was commonly referred to as “the Stern Gang”. Stern was shot to death by a British policeman in early 1942. Nonetheless, the Stern Gang continued its activities, and even assassinated the antisemitic Lord Moyne, the highest-ranking British official in the Middle East. These events finally convinced the British to abandon the Holy Land for good, allowing the State of Israel to be proclaimed. Immediately after, the new government of Israel disbanded Lehi. In January of 1949, they granted amnesty to past Lehi members, including future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Though he was only 34 years old when he was killed, Yair Stern is credited with playing an instrumental role in the formation of the State of Israel.

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Words of the Week

The current Palestinian political economy, influenced far too greatly by the BDS and anti-normalization campaigns, amounts to a corrupt, unsustainable, terror-supporting regime that is disinterested in the economic well-being of its own people and the development of a new state.
– Khaled Abu Toameh, Arab journalist and filmmaker 

Jew of the Week: Sholem Aleichem

The Jewish Mark Twain

Sholem Solomon Alexei Rabinovich (1859-1916) was born to a wealthy family near Kyiv in what was then the Russian Empire. He grew up in the Jewish shtetl of Voronkiv, receiving both a secular education and a traditional Jewish one. His father lost most of the family’s fortunes, and his mother died of cholera when he was just 13. Rabinovich started writing around this time, and already at age 15 wrote a Jewish version of Robinson Crusoe. He wrote stories in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. At 24, he took up the pen name “Sholem Aleichem”, the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew greeting meaning “peace be upon you”.  After completing his studies, he worked as a teacher and then as a “crown rabbi”, a representative of the Jewish community to the Russian government. He lost his own wealth in the stock market in 1890 and at one point struggled to make a living and feed his five children. By the end of the 1890s, Sholem Aleichem was the most popular Yiddish writer in the world, and inspired countless other young Jewish writers. He published Tevye the Milkman in 1894, which was later adapted to Fiddler on the Roof, becoming a major international hit (as well as a Broadway play—the first to run for more than 3000 performances—and a film). Rabinovich lived in Kyiv until 1905, when terrible pogroms raged across the Russian Empire and he witnessed the brutality firsthand. The family fled, splitting their time between New York City and Geneva, Switzerland. All in all, Sholem Aleichem wrote some 40 works in Yiddish, and many more in Hebrew and Russian. He was commonly referred to as “the Jewish Mark Twain”. (When Mark Twain himself heard about this, he said that he was actually “the American Sholem Aleichem”!) Rabinovich was a passionate Zionist, too, joining Hovevei Zion in 1888, and representing the American Jewish community at the Eighth Zionist Congress in 1907. There are streets, schools, and other public places named after him around the world, including in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. There is even a Sholem Aleichem Crater on the planet Mercury! Rabinovich’s funeral drew some 100,000 mourners, making it among the largest in New York’s history. He wrote in his will: “Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all.”

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Words of the Week

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
– Sholem Aleichem