The Pogroms of 1881, the First Aliyah and Hibbat Zion

On 1 March 1881 revolutionaries assassinated Alexander II. By April pogroms had begun in Yelizavetgrad, and within two years they had struck some two hundred towns across southern Russia — Kiev, Odessa, Balta, Warsaw. The authorities mostly stood aside, and in 1882 the government answered with 'Temporary Regulations' restricting rural residence and land purchase. These were not the first pogroms, but they were the first to convince a mass of educated, Russianised Jews that integration in Russia was impossible.

Two answers followed. The first was emigration: about two million people left the Russian Empire before 1914, mostly for the United States. The second was return. In 1882 students in Kharkov founded BILU — an acronym from 'House of Jacob, let us arise and go' (Isaiah 2:5) — and sailed for Palestine. So began the First Aliyah, which founded Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pina, Zichron Yaakov and Gedera. The colonies were rescued by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, 'the Known Benefactor'.

In Russia itself the Hibbat Zion movement took shape. Its manifesto was the Odessa physician Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation (1882): the Jews are a people without a home, and the cure is not petitions for equal rights but a country. In November 1884 the first Hovevei Zion conference met at Kattowitz under Pinsker's chairmanship, backed by rabbis such as R. Shmuel Mohilever.