Joseph Marco Baruch

Born in Istanbul to a middle-class family, Joseph Marco (Marcou) was educated in Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) schools in France before studying in Bern. In 1893 he moved to Algiers for a year; there he taught at an AIU school and established the nationalist anti-French and proto-Jewish nationalist newspaper Le Juge. From 1894 to 1895, Baruch traveled around Central Europe, meeting with Teodor Zlocisti, Nathan Birnbaum, and other Zionist leaders and organizations, who helped him articulate his own brand of Zionism with features from Western, Central, and East European Zionisms. In 1895 he settled in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and established Carmel, another short-lived French-language newspaper, which served as his new Zionist platform. Through Carmel, Baruch chastised AIU and Jewish communal leadership for not supporting Zionism; this resulted in his informal censorship. He left in 1896 for Cairo, where he cofounded the Bar Kokhba Society, a Zionist organization. In 1897 Baruch joined an Italian regiment to fight against the Ottomans in the Greco-Turkish War, an experience he described in a series of vignettes in Italian Jewish periodicals, written while he traveled through Europe agitating for Zionism. He died by suicide in Florence.