[Leon Pinsker]. “Autoemancipation!” Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Juden [“A Warning Call of a Russian Jew to His Kinsmen.”]

Leon Pinsker (1821-91), hitherto an assimilationist, underwent a dramatic change in outlook following the government-instigated pogroms in Russia in 1881. The publication of this famous tract, with its dispassionate analysis of the psychological and social roots of anti-Semitism, provided the stimulus for the Chibath Zion Movement, the direct precursor to Herzlian political Zionism.