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

(ZIONISM).

W. Issleib (G. Schuhr)

Berlin

1882

The first modern call for a Jewish homeland. Following the government-led pogroms in Russia in 1881, Leon Pinsker (1821-91), hitherto an assimilationist, underwent a dramatic change in outlook. 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. Despite the derision the work received from some quarters, ultimately it was the direct precursor to Herzlian political Zionism. See EJ, Vol. XIII, cols. 545-8. “A people without a territory is like a man without a shadow: something unnatural, spectral.” For an excellent analysis of this classic Zionist tract, see D. Vital, The Origins of Zionism (1975) pp. 122-30.