Aaron Samuel Tamares

Born near Grodno, Russian Empire (today in Belarus), Aaron Samuel Tamares (Tamras, Tomers) received his early education in a heder. He attended yeshiva first in Kovno and later in Volozhin. By 1893, Tamares was serving as rabbi for the community of Milejczyce (today in Poland), a post he would hold for the remainder of his life. Following the establishment of the Zionist Organization in 1897, Tamares became an early Zionist advocate, countering religious opposition to the movement in the Hebrew journal Ha-Melits. However, after attending the Fourth Zionist Congress in London in 1900, Tamares began to grow alienated from the movement. For a while he aligned himself with the emerging Merkaz ruḥani (or Mizrahi) Orthodox faction within the Zionist Organization. Thereafter, Tamares spent the rest of his life articulating an idiosyncratic religious-pacifist anarchism in a series of books and articles in Hebrew and Yiddish. Arguing that principles analogous to pacifism and humanism were intrinsic to Judaism, he rejected Zionism’s political nationalism and any search for Jewish statehood as contradictory to Jewish precepts.