The Origins of Zion:”….A similar circle of expatriate student Hovevei Zion had been founded in Paris. Their Chairman, Dr. Serge Voronoff, later attained great fame for his efforts to rejuvenate the individual by transplanting glands from primates, his effort to promote the rejuvenation of the Jewish people was less sustained. He and his colleagues were able to convince Pinsker to organize a meeting of Palestinophiles to convene in Paris 1884.”~by David Vital
Hovevei Zion (Wikipedia Link) (Hebrew: חובבי ציון), also known as Hibbat Zion (Hebrew: חיבת ציון, lit. [Those who are] Fond of Zion), refers to organizations that are considered the forerunners and foundations of the modern Zionist movement.
Some of the first Zionist groups were established in Eastern European countries in the early 1880s with the aim to promote Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, then a part of Ottoman Empire, and advance Jewish settlement there, particularly agricultural. Most of them stayed away from politics.
In 1882, a group of Hovevei Zion enthusiasts founded Rishon LeZion, the first Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel. They later were reinforced by Bilu pioneers who strengthened the settlement and enlarged it. For many years, textbooks gave Bilu the credit for the establishment of Rishon, but in the last decades — after a campaign by the veterans of Rishon and their descendants — Hovevei Zion were given the credit as the founders of the city.
In 1884, 36 delegates met in Kattowitz, Germany (today Katowice, Poland). Rabbi Samuel Mohilever was elected the president and Leon Pinsker the chairman of the organization they named Hovevei Zion. The group tried to secure financial help from Baron Edmond James de Rothschild and other philanthropists to aid Jewish settlements and to organize educational courses.
Leo Pinsker (wikilink)(1821-1891) was a physician, a Zionist pioneer and activist, and the founder and leader of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement.
POGROM: violent outbreak;to wreak havok, to demolish violently (Russian)
Home at Last by Moshe MaimonYekaterinaslav – 1905 Pogrom – children.
The trigger for these pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which some blamed “the Jews.”The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.Local economic conditions are thought to have contributed significantly to the rioting, especially with regard to the participation of the business competitors of local Jews and the participation of railroad workers, and it has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar. These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger, and they had a small kernel of truth: one of the close associates of the assassins, Gesya Gelfman, was indeed Jewish. The fact that the other assassins were all Christians had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumours.
A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903–1906, leaving thousands of Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The number of people of other nationalities killed or wounded in these pogroms is unclear. The 1905 pogrom of Jews in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.
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other recent discoveries:
Literary Immortality- Icons of Horror and Supernatural beings like the Wandering Jew. Serge Voronoff’s influence on popular literature in Robert Hitchins Dr. Artz; Bertram Gayton’s The Gland Stealers(1922), Thomas Le Breton’s Mr. Teedles, the Gland Old Man(1927); Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen(1923)
French Medicine in Russia: Crazy scientist or Pre-cursor of Genius? see page 8.
Cancer in Israel:….”Voronoff escaped the fate of French Jews in 1940 and returned from America in 1945..”(see page 5)
On Animal Sacrifice: I share these thoughts to frame an analysis of a contemporary controversy involving the death of nature in exchange for human life: the sacrifice of animals in the name of human longevity. Over the past century, such sacrifices have been conducted in the name of science. Around the time of the first world war, for instance, Serge Voronoff, a Russian emigrant to France, found that eunuchs aged faster than normal and concluded that the absence of a testicular hormone was responsible. The African domains of France, Britain, and Belgium were to be largely depleted of anthropoids to perform gland transplantation operations on his wealthy clientele. Cells from the flesh of unborn lambs were injected into the veins of such long-lived individuals as Pope Pius XII, Bernard Baruch, and Somerset Maugham.
