Ḥoveve Tsiyon Odessa Committee

The Ḥoveve Tsiyon or Ḥibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion) movement was the first organized modern Jewish nationalist movement of substance. Emerging in the Russian Empire and Romania in the early 1880s at the confluence of ambient Jewish national revival ideas and shock and despair at the unexpected intensification of antisemitic ideas and violence in both Eastern and Western Europe, Ḥibat Tsiyon brought together a wide range of Jewish actors and perspectives under the umbrella of several broad ideas: that the Jews were a nation deserving collective rights, that the Jewish situation in Eastern Europe was untenable, that Jews were in need of a national “revival” that would take a broadly modern, secular, and Hebraic form, and that large-scale Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine—the land of Israel—would somehow serve as the essential core of all these endeavors. Its Odessa Committee, formally titled the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine, oversaw the movement’s work facilitating Jewish settlement in Palestine under founding figures of the movement like the radical enlightener-turned-Zionist Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Leon Pinsker, and Menachem Ussishkin. By the turn of the century, mass interest in Zionism and Hebraism among East European Jews was being channeled in new directions, particularly into the newly founded World Zionist Organization, and Ḥibat Tsiyon as a mass movement had largely ceased to exist. But the Odessa Committee persisted and continued to try to shape the emerging Jewish Yishuv in Palestine in accordance with Ḥibat Tsiyon ideals. Helping to build Jewish communities in Hadera, Rehovot, and Mishmar HaYarden, it also sponsored Jewish defense organizations, notably Hashomer, and supported Hebraist journals and educational endeavors. It was in this last context that an Odessa Committee meeting served as one of the many sites in the Hebraist and Zionist cultural sphere where “the Brenner Affair” was debated in 1911.