Ben-Ami

Born near Mogilev (today Mahilyow, Belarus), Ḥayim Mordechai (Mark) Rabinovich (Ben-Ami) moved at age four to Bessarabia following his father’s death. When he was ten, he moved to Odessa with his mother and studied in a maskilic Talmud Torah before finishing his studies in a gymnasium. With the outset of pogroms in the spring of 1881, he became active in organizing Jewish self-defense groups. Following the pogroms, he moved to Paris and began contributing Russian articles to Voskhod under the pen name Reish-Galuta. Returning to Odessa in 1886, he became active in Ḥovevei Tsiyon and Zionist politics, taking the pen-name Ben-Ami (“A Son of My People,”) and strategizing with Ahad Ha-Am, Leon Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl, among others. Around the time of the 1905 Russian Revolution, he moved to Geneva, where he lived until immigrating to Palestine in 1924. Ben-Ami’s articles and memoirs about the Jewish question reflect the period of emergent and evolving Jewish nationalism in Russia.