The Second Aliyah and the Founding of Tel Aviv

The Second Aliyah ran from 1904 to 1914: some thirty-five to forty thousand people, mostly young, from the Russian Empire. They were driven out by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the failure of the 1905 revolution, and drawn by an ideal — not to live on philanthropy or hired hands but to plough, build and guard themselves. This generation brought the slogan 'conquest of labour' and A. D. Gordon's teaching that physical work heals a people. In 1909 they founded Degania, the first kvutzah, and the self-defence organisation Hashomer. They also made Hebrew a spoken language: their children were the first in two thousand years to grow up with it as a mother tongue.

Jaffa was crowded, expensive and unsanitary, and in 1906 some sixty families formed the Ahuzat Bayit society to build a planned quarter outside it. On 11 April 1909, the 20th of Nisan, a lottery was held on the dunes north of Jaffa. Akiva Aryeh Weiss had prepared sixty-six white seashells bearing family names and sixty-six grey ones with plot numbers.

In 1910 the quarter was named Tel Aviv, from Nahum Sokolow's Hebrew rendering of Herzl's Altneuland: tel, an ancient mound, and aviv, spring — old and new together, the phrase itself taken from Ezekiel 3:15. Forty years later the State of Israel was proclaimed there.