Jacques Bahar

Born in Marseilles to an Algerian Jewish family, Jacques (Jacob, Ya‘akov) Bahar embraced Theodor Herzl’s Zionist idea amid the upsurge of antisemitism in France and French Algeria that attended the Dreyfus Affair. He attended the First Zionist Congress (1897) as a representative from Algeria. A year later, under the pen name Zabulon ben Bahar, he published “L’Antigoyisme à Sion,” a text which was both a Zionist utopia and a satirical attack on antisemitism and xenophobia, in the French newspaper Le Siécle (1898). In 1899, he coedited the Zionist paper Le Flambeau with Bernard Lazare, and thereafter continued to write on behalf of the Zionist cause.